Dogmatic Ecclesiology : Volume 1

The Priestly Catholicity of the Church

Greggs, Tom

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781493419722
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología sistemática y ética

Ecclesiology is a key issue for the present age of church history. This groundbreaking work by one of today's leading theologians offers a major Protestant ecclesiology for the church catholic. This volume, the first of three, considers the priesthood of the church in light of the priesthood of Christ. Tom Greggs shows the connection between Christ's work as high priest and the universal church's role in salvation. All together, the three volumes will offer a major statement on the doctrine of the church for Christians from a variety of backgrounds.

Abbreviated Chapter Theses for Volume 1

Chapter 1—The Spirit: The Lord of and the Giver of Life to the Church

Ecclesiology describes a salvific event of the act of the Spirit in the context of creation in its spatiotemporal contingency. The church exists as an event of the act of the lordship of the Holy Spirit, who gives life to the community of faith in space and time and creates the community of believers in the time between the times—that is, between the ascension of Christ and the eschaton. This work of the Holy Spirit fulfills the mediating work of God on the vertical and horizontal planes: Christ, who mediates God to humanity and humanity to God, is made present in the community of believers by an event of the Spirit’s act which frees the believer to participate in the divine ways of love and grace in order to know the benefits of salvation and to love the Father (vertically), and simultaneously, in that participation in God’s love and grace, to love other humans through interhuman as well as divine-human restorative participation in the givenness of the community (horizontal).

Chapter 2—The High Priesthood of Christ: The Essential Hierarchy of the Church (1)

The form which the church takes as it is created as an event of the act of the Holy Spirit of God is the form of Christ. Christ’s priesthood is a unique Urpriestertum and displays the particular modalities of priesthood: divine-human mediation; intercession; sacrifice; oblation; bearing iniquity; blessing; holiness; and horizontal mediation. The material content of all priesthood can only ever be a type of Christ’s priesthood since all Christian priesthood is derivative of His. To understand the church as a corporate priesthood, it is necessary first to describe the priesthood within which the church participates; and since the church’s priesthood is a participation in the priesthood of Christ, all accounts of priesthood in the church must follow from an account of Christ as priest.

Chapter 3—Participative Ontology and the Church’s Internal Priesthood: The Essential Hierarchy of the Church (2)

The church is the body of Christ as it is enabled to be such through the work of the Spirit in freeing the believer to participate in the humanity of Christ. In Christ’s humanity exists the primary and foundational identity of created humanity as a humanity ordered not towards itself but towards God and the other in creation: this humanity is the humanity after which prelapsarian Adam was modeled. In the Spirit’s work of incorporating the believer into Christ (de facto within the church), humanity participates—in being ordered towards God and the rest of humanity—in its fundamental created eschatological determination and therefore becomes a sign of created and redeemed humanity.

Chapter 4—The Priestly Ontology and the Church’s Life for the World: The Essential Hierarchy of the Church (3)

Traditional accounts of the essential hierarchy of the church are inwards-facing: the damned exist for the sake of the elect in order that the elect may know the grace of God; the elect look to their salvation in the reception of the efficacious sacraments of the church; the efficacy of the sacraments of the church is determined by the authenticity of the priest; the authenticity of the priest is grounded in appropriate ordination by the valid overseer; and the valid overseer’s authority is granted from the head of the church, who guarantees the catholicity (or even the salvation) of all beneath him. If, however, there is only one priest (Christ), and the church shares a corporate priesthood by participating in Him and the modality of His priesthood as His body through an event of the act of the Holy Spirit, the conceptualization of this essential hierarchy requires reexamining and reordering: the church as a priesthood mediates Christ by an event of the act of the Spirit to the rest of the world, and thereby the church exists for the sake of those outside the church.

Chapter 5—Baptism: Entry into the Priesthood of the Church

In baptism the believer receives in space-time her true identity as a member of the corporate priesthood of the church. In this rite is the signification of the believer’s death to self and new birth in Christ by the Spirit: in baptism the believer visibly shows the world and the community that she participates in the body of Christ and in this marks her membership in the community of Christ’s body. This rebirth is not only individual but also communal: baptism signifies not only the individual’s finding her fundamental identity ordered within the community and towards its other members, but also the fellowship (and worldwide communion) of the church promising to order itself towards this individual and to minister God to her in the service of ministry to the world.

Chapter 6—Holy Communion

In the giving and receiving of bread and wine, the fellowship of believers binds its members to each other. The dominical command to share in the Lord’s Supper makes present in time and space the past death and resurrection of Christ through the elements, and anticipates the coming of Christ and His kingdom. In eating the bread (which symbolizes the flesh) and drinking the wine (which symbolizes the blood of Christ), the church makes visible in its semiotic actions its participation in Christ, and all degree, status, and difference is removed by the unworthiness of each individual to receive the gracious gift of God’s salvation symbolized in eating together. Each member of the church is sustained equally in sharing together in this simple act and symbolic meal; and the church is bound to the world in symbols that are the most basic food provisions of life.

Chapter 7—The Communion of Saints

The church is an event rather than an institution; it is a spatial and temporal occurrence rather than an eternal reality. As an event of the Spirit, the church’s being rests not in itself or its structures but in the holiness of the Holy Spirit—that is, in God’s faithful and constant eternity and not the church’s own particular historical identity. The communion of saints acts as a reminder to the congregation in time of the provisionality and passing nature of different (religious) structural forms of the church, and of the existence of the church being found in the event of the Spirit, whose act creates it in the historically and geographically contingent form any given congregation and denomination takes at a given time.

Chapter 8—Intercessory Prayer

The church actively enacts its twofold priestly form (in relation to its members and in relation to the world) in prayer through intercession. In intercession the church actively becomes one, and its individual members are ordered to each other and to the church universal (internally). In prayer for others, the church participates in the priestly work of Christ, the Great Intercessor, in His death by according the other priority over the self in requests to God.

Chapter 9—Thanksgiving and Praise: Participating Graciously in Grace

The Christian participates within the life of the church in the priestly relationship of grace and gratitude in which the human creature responds to the superabundant merciful grace of God in oblation, but also in so doing participates in the merciful grace offered to the creature by God and vice versa. In other words, the response of gratitude is an event of the act of the Holy Spirit, who enables the believer actively to participate in the grace offered by God, and as such thanksgiving and praise are active recognitions of the ways of grace which flow from the divine life to creation. This relationship captures something of the priestly life of the church as it participates in the body of Christ: the church receives grace from God mediated to it in Christ by an event of the act of the Spirit, and the church also offers thanksgiving and praise in Christ’s life of oblation through the Spirit’s activity. This two-directional vertical relationality in Christ not only establishes the right relation with God but also frees the believer to give thanks for the other in the horizontal dimensions of creaturely reality—an other given by the grace of God.

Chapter 10—Congregation: Priestly Polity

The primary form of polity for the church is the gathered community brought together by divine socio-poiesis. The gathering of the community is important: it presents the believer with others whom she may not choose or desire, but who are to her a gift of God in their givenness, difference, and diversity. In this, the gathered community is different from all other human communities in the world: the gathered are bound together not by bonds of human agreement or political, ethnic, or social grouping but by the work of the Spirit, who makes those who were not a people now into a people.

Chapter 11—Sanctification

Sanctification is not an aspect of the Christian life which is to be thought of as principally interior, or singularly as a description of human life in relation to God. Instead, sanctification is the nonprioritization of the self (even in the quest for the holy life): in place of a life ordered towards the self comes a life ordered outwards towards God and the world. The community is essential for the sanctified life, as in the community one shares in the objective sanctification of humanity as a participant in the body of Christ (de jure) and is enabled simultaneously and actively to be ordered towards God and the rest of humanity in those many around her in the congregation and through the congregation to the rest of humanity on earth (de facto).

Chapter 12—Love

The concrete form that the sanctified human life takes in the realities of spatiotemporal existence is love. Love is made possible only by God, who is the source of all love. In love the believer participates as a human through Christ’s humanity in God’s own relations, which Scripture identifies as love. Love is the active expression of the priestly life since priesthood is by definition instrumental: there is no priest without God and other humans. So too the individual in Christ is instrumental for the purpose of the love which the individual mediates between God, those others around her in the life of the church, and the world. The church also is instrumental for the purpose of love, as the context in which members love each other simply on the basis of the love of Christ, in which (and in whom) they actively participate; and in Christ, participating corporately in His body, the church is freed to love the world around it.

Chapter 13—Priestly Catholicity

Catholicity is the means of determining the fringes and boundaries of the universal church. However, catholicity should be thought of as being most intensive not in the center of the church but at the fringes and boundaries, where the church fully enacts its priesthood in relation to the world. The church is most intensively priestly, and its priestliness is most meaningful and clear, at the bounds where the church meets the world. The world is not instrumental for the church, but the church for the world; in this the church’s priestly catholicity exists.

Chapter 14—Coda: The Church as One

The priestly catholicity of the church is one of three irreducible narratives of the church. It cannot be considered singularly foundational or fitting in and of itself. This irreducible narrative of the Spirit’s activity in the church must be held together with the prophetic apostolicity of the church and the kingly holiness of the church. The oneness of the church needs to be accounted for in relation to the oneness of the one God.

1
The Spirit

The Lord of and the Giver of Life to the Church

Ecclesiology, as a derivative doctrine of pneumatology, describes a salvific event of the act of the Spirit in the context of creation in its spatiotemporal contingency. The church exists as an event of the act of the lordship of the Holy Spirit, the giver of life, who gives life to the community of faith in space and time. Ecclesiology concerns the salvific work of the Holy Spirit in creating the community of believers in the time between the times (that is, between the ascension of Christ and the eschaton). This work of the Holy Spirit fulfills the mediating work of Christ on the vertical and horizontal planes of ongoing creaturely existence: Christ, who mediates God to humanity and humanity to God, is made present in the community of believers by an event of the Spirit’s act. This event frees the believer to participate in the divine ways of love and grace in order to know the benefits of salvation and to love the Father (vertically). But this event is simultaneously—in that participation in God’s love and grace—the freedom to love other humans through interhuman as well as divine-human restorative participation in grace within the givenness of the community (horizontal). The church’s existence rests in its fulfillment of the call of Christ to love God and to love others as Christ has loved us. The principal activity of ecclesiology is to describe this work of God the Holy Spirit. Ecclesiology concerns, therefore, simultaneously the hidden and the visible church, which can never be spoken of separately, since the church (as an object of faith) is (a) a creation of the Spirit ex nihilo (b) in the visibility of the space and time of history.

The Church as Creature of the Spirit: An Act of Divine Grace1

A theological account of the church begins with an account of the Theos by and through whom the church comes into being. The church is unlike every human community or society in one profound and fundamental way: the church is a community which is a creature of the event of the intensity of the Holy Spirit’s economy of grace in redeeming creation. Although the church shares in many—if not all—of the characteristics of other organizations, its primary existence is ultimately distinct from every other expression of human sociality. The church comes into being as an event of the act of the lordship of the Holy Spirit of God who gives the church life. This demarcation of the church from other societies and communities is primary to all theological accounts of the church. The demarcation does not mean that the church does not exist as a visible sociological entity in space-time (there is no church w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• How to Read This Book
• Preface
• Chart of Prospective Chapter Topics
• Abbreviated Chapter Theses for Volume 1
• 1. The Spirit
• 2. The High Priesthood of Christ
• 3. Participative Ontology and the Church’s Internal Priesthood
• 4. The Priestly Ontology and the Church’s Life for the World
• 5. Baptism
• 6. Holy Communion
• 7. The Communion of Saints
• 8. Intercessory Prayer
• 9. Thanksgiving and Praise
• 10. Congregation
• 11. Sanctification
• 12. Love
• 13. Priestly Catholicity
• 14. Coda
• Works Cited
• Index of Authors
• Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Sources
• Index of Subjects
• Cover Flaps
• Back Cover