…the ordained priest is called to reflect the priesthood of Christ and to serve the priesthood of the people of God, and to be one of the means of grace whereby God enables the Church to be the Church.
Michael Ramsey, The Christian Priest Today, (1972)

Over the course of twenty-two years as bishop and archbishop, before every ordination service he conducted in his various cathedral churches, Michael Ramsey gave a series of addresses to each cohort of ordination candidates. They listened to the Bishop (and later Archbishop) reflect on what it meant to be a Christian priest for their days and times. The talks were so illuminating, and so worthy of a wider audience, that they were collected and published under the obvious title, The Christian Priest Today¹. Ramsey made the purpose of his book clear in the rewritten introduction to the second edition, in which he adopted the words of a Congregationalist minister, P. T. Forsyth:

As a priest, the ministry offers to God the Church’s soul, as prophet it offers to it the salvation of God. In the minister’s one person the human spirit speaks to God, and the Holy Spirit speaks to men. No wonder he is often rent assunder. No wonder he snaps in such tension. It broke the heart of Christ. But it let out in the act the heart of God.²

The heart of Ramsey’s book is found in the second chapter, ‘Why the Priest?’; a compact and “immensely rich” (according to Rowan Williams), exploration of what it means to be a priest. Ramsey’s starting place was provided by the article in Theology we have already encountered by Alec Graham (then Chaplain at Worcester College, Oxford and later to be Bishop of Newcastle)³. Whereas Graham describes a possible model for priesthood in terms of experience and pragmatism (the priest fulfils a representative role by displaying a total response to Christ, by enabling the work of the Church to be done, and by involving the whole Church in his activity), Ramsey wishes to affirm the “old doctrine that the ascended Christ gives the gift of ordained priesthood and calls men to it.”⁴ Ramsey delineates this old doctrine in four parts and one whole.

First, the priest is to be a man of theology, a teacher and preacher, whose knowledge may not be wide, but certainly will be deep. Ramsey makes it clear that this teaching role is emphatically not ex cathedra; the priest is not to hand down on tablets of stone esoteric knowledge to which the laity will have no other access. Rather he tells us that Christian learning is a partnership, in which the distinction between “discens and docens” (that is, student and master) is meaningless: “the priest learns from the laity much about the contemporary world and about the meaning of divine truth in its human context.”⁵ There is an assumption, however, in this definition of partnership which implies that the laity have a knowledge which is otherwise inaccessible to the clergy: there are hints of the unworldly clergy being tutored in the ways of worldly Mammon.

Second, the priest is to be the minister of reconciliation, and through the exercise of reconciliation the priest links the Church with “the gospel of divine forgiveness upon which its common life depends.”⁶ In this way, the priest, while not denying the uses and insights of psychiatry, is able to provide the moral responsibility that a community, founded upon the reconciliation of Golgotha, is able to represent. Here the key text is 2 Corinthians 5:

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of [the] reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. (2 Cor 5:18f]

Third, then, the priest is to be the man of prayer. This is not to deny the prayers of the laity, rather it is to say that the priest as the man of theology should be connected directly to the proper subject of theology, that is, God Himself, through his participation in the prayer of the Church. In the priest “the Church’s prayer is expressed in strength, and it thereby becomes the stronger.”⁷

Fourth, and obviously, the priest should be the man of the Eucharist. In his role as celebrant the priest acts as “the focusing of the Eucharist in the givenness of the historic gospel and in the continuing life of the Church as rooted in that gospel.”⁸

Some people might think that Ramsey has missed a vital part of the priest’s vocation, that of a pastor. After all, shouldn’t a pastoral heart be the main qualification for being a priest today? And yet Ramsey does not include the priest as pastor as one of his four divisions for the simple and persuasive reason that “pastor describes the whole”⁹. The priest is pastor when he is a man of teaching and learning, and when he proclaims the Church’s task of reconciliation, and when he prays and when he presides at the Eucharist. To do all these things in a harmonious whole is to be a pastor.

Ramsey sums up the calling of the Christian priest thus:

… today the ordained priest is called to reflect the priesthood of Christ and to serve the priesthood of the people of God, and to be one of the means of grace whereby God enables the Church to be the Church.¹⁰

Words which the present Archbishop warmly endorses: it would be “hard to improve on [these] as a summary of what the Church asks of its priests”¹¹.

Michael Ramsey’s book has been immensely influential in the thirty five years since it was originally published. Still in print, still bought, and yet (to be honest) more flicked through than read, marked, learned, or inwardly digested. Even so, four generations of ordinands, of a particular churchmanship or of a particularly romantic cast of mind, have bought the book, hoping that it would provide some pathway through the thickets of discernment, interviews, selection conferences and training courses that line the path to ordination in the Church of England. The Christian Priest Today remains on the reading lists of diocesan vocations advisors and is still quoted in ordination charges. Ramsey’s book is as close to an expression of ministerial theology that the Church of England has.

Which is why, as part of its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebrations, my old theological college invited the present Archbishop of Canterbury to deliver a lecture on Ramsey’s book, title and themes. In the first full year of his Archiepiscopate, Rowan Williams delivered many such lectures, talks, and press releases. The secular media and the congregations of the Church of England were getting used to having an Archbishop who thinks (and clearly elucidates his thinking), and found the novelty disquieting. Even though the talk was later reproduced, as a chapter in a book reflecting on Ramsey’s life and writing¹², it is both disappointing, and not surprising, that the Archbishop’s insights have not had a wider circulation among the clergy of the Church of England, and those responsible for their selection, formation and continual training.

Williams begins by noting the Church’s perennial back-to-front approach on questions of ministry: reports are written on “what ordained ministry does the Church of England require?” (sometimes we even get reports on how we should make the best fist of the ministry we already have). This should not be the preferred starting point for considerations of the Christian priest today; the Church should really be asking “what ordained ministry does God require?”, or even “what Church of England does God require?”. However, Williams sees a virtue from proceeding in this practical way. First, it is true to the incorrigible Anglican trait to be pragmatically minded: a church which finds its genius in the Elizabeth Settlement will always prefer ‘what works’ over ‘what is systematic’, especially if ‘what works’ allows a latitude of opinion and practice. Second, beginning with needs rather than doctrine allows the possibility that God will speak to the Church through the circumstances in which He places us. There is a willingness to deal with givenness in the pragmatic approach, and Williams detects this in his predecessor’s method: “any reflection on the Christian priest today has to be a reflection not just on what we find helpful but on what has been provided for the Church”.

But, there is also a balancing danger in the pragmatic approach, a way of thinking all the more dangerous because it is so pervasive; that is, treating the church (and its ministry) as if it were a group of people who all believe the same thing, and would like to find a better way of sharing what they believe with those outside the group. The fact that this seems a reasonable (pragmatic?) description of the Church, shows exactly how widespread it is and yet how it is, in Williams’s words, “very seductive and very damaging”.

An example. There is a website which, bizarrely and for inadequately explained reasons, has taken Edward Gibbon’s monumental book Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and rearranged its constituent words into randomly produced phrases. So far, so very strange¹³. However, one day, whilst searching for an electronic version of Gibbon’s work to check a reference, Google returned this phrase to me: “A voluntary society of heaven was never predicted of the very essential church”. The idea isn’t in Gibbon’s original, but it exactly describes the way in which the Church has been treated by its adherents. We believe ourselves to be, according to Williams, members of “a human association dependent upon skill, agreement and goodwill”, in which the major task is handing out the jobs and perpetuating the structures. In this model of the Church, then ordained ministry becomes “an idea developed by us to make things run more smoothly”.

And yet this is exactly what the Church is not, and what ordained ministry can not be. Williams describes the reality, a reality that is both actual and aspirational, in these beautiful words:

… the Church is first of all a kind of space cleared by God through Jesus in which people may become what God made them to be (God’s sons and daughters), and that what we have to do about the Church is not first to organise it as a society but to inhabit it as a climate or a landscape. It is a place where we can see properly— God, God’s creation, ourselves. It is a place or dimension in the universe that is in some way growing towards being the universe itself in restored relation to God. It is a place we are invited to enter, the place occupied by Christ, who is himself the climate and atmosphere of a renewed universe.

This cosmic church is so far away from the day-to-day experience of the church (flower rotas, PCC meetings, Gift Days) that it can make one weep. It is akin to reading Bernard Cornwell’s series of novels about King Arthur¹⁴. Caught up in the page-turning, swash-buckling thrill of the read, you realise that Cornwell has also convincingly depicted the divine right of kings. Arthur, in his telling, was a man who could represent the nation, a man who could lead you into battle, a man for whom you could imagine yourself dying. As you think this (heroic Arthur and his heroic subjects!), unbidden the thought comes into your mind: “Prince Charles”. The Prince of Wales is a good and serious man, with thoughtful and constructive things to say about the nature of society and our relationship with the created order, but can you imagine following him into battle? The God-touched nature of the ancient kings has dwindled down into the present day philanthropist and amateur gardener. Likewise, the cosmic church, the “place where we can see God properly”, becomes another voluntary association in a society where all voluntary associations are failing to keep the show on the road. Some wise priest once said to me, about the mysteries of holy communion, “I have no problem in believing that the sacrament is the body and blood of Christ; it’s believing that it’s bread and wine is my trouble!” Similarly, I have no problem in believing in the Church Universal, the mystical body of the communion of saints, or in the Church Triumphant, those faithful saints in heaven; it is the Church Militant that causes me difficulty.

And yet this is the community in which we are called to see most clearly, in this life, the promise of Creation redeemed and renewed! The only explanation for the dissonance must be in the theological concept of a proleptic church. Very different from a prolapsed Church (one hopes), a proleptic church is one in which the perfect future state of the church is treated as if it is already seen in the imperfect present state: in other words, we behave as if the future has already happened. This is the form of the church community which we see in Paul’s letters, especially in 2 Corinthians, and Romans 12, a community in which the fruits of Christ’s victory leads us to live in complementary forms:

For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness. (Rom. 12:4–8)

This differentiation of actions is for the single purpose “that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Rom. 15:6). As the Archbishop puts it, “the energy for this searching for words and forms is created by the fact of God’s gift, not by any attempt to make a human community run better; it is an energy devoted to what will show the inner and prior fact.”

So, we have to deal with two given facts: the Church itself and a differentiated ministry within it (by whom these facts are given doesn’t concern us in this instance, let’s just accept the fact that this is where we start from today). Given these givens, within a proleptic church, what is the part that ordained ministry has to play? Here the Archbishop has three images to suggest, which I have adapted for the purpose of this book and my own ministry. His images are nuanced and subtle; my adaptation all begin with the same letter: that’s the difference between the Archbishop and me. I will explore these images in greater detail in later chapters, but it will be useful to have an overview of the three before we proceed.

The first image is the priest as Witness. The Archbishop makes it clear that the Church has to be a “responsible” community. By this he means that the Church, as it is now, as we are now, is obliged to respond to what went before us. “Responsible” here does not just mean moral accountability; Williams uses it to mean both ‘being obliged’ and ‘reacting’. In other words, the Church is not something that we have invented for ourselves: if we had, we probably wouldn’t have started from here! This sense of responsibility is built into the very nature of two fundamentals of the life of the Church: scripture and ordained ministry. Scripture is the record, agreed by the breadth and depth of the early Church, of the fullest revelation by God to his people. Ordained ministry is the means by which, through “a network and sequence of specific relationships”, the hearers of Scripture today are connected to those in whom the Word and the Spirit were first at work. The priest’s ministry as Witness is, at first, “to be simply witnesses of that community’s character… [The priest’s words] connect the hearers with Christ; they make Christ contemporary with all who hear the good news.” The Witness must again and again call his community back to its foundational character, the cosmic church, the climate of Christ. This is the reason why the Witness role is given to the person who leads the community in worship. It is in worship, with its dual focus on Word and Sacrament, that the Church can see its unworldly nature most clearly. It should be in worship that the Church is most unlike a voluntary society and should be most like heaven.

Which brings us to the second image: the priest as Watchman. In Habakkuk, the prophet is portrayed standing on fortress walls, looking out for signs of God’s action:

I will stand at my watch-post,
and station myself on the rampart;
I will keep watch to see what he will say to me,
and what he will answer concerning my complaint. (Hab. 2:1)

In Isaiah, the watch-tower is the place from which the downfall of Babylon will be seen:

Then the watcher called out:
‘Upon a watch-tower I stand, O Lord,
continually by day,
and at my post I am stationed
throughout the night.
Look, there they come, riders,
horsemen in pairs!’
Then he responded,
‘Fallen, fallen is Babylon;
and all the images of her gods
lie shattered on the ground.’ (Isaiah 21:8–9)

Christian priests today are called to take up a similar position, so that we may see the ‘lie of the terrain’ in which God has placed us. Like the Watchman on the tower, we look for riders approaching, with threat or good news: the priest “has to tell the Church what and where it is must be free to see what and where it is” (Williams again), which is often easier said than done (more on this anon).

Thirdly, the post-Herbertism parish priest knows that God isn’t at work just within the confines of the Church, however narrowly or widely we seek to define it. Part of the priest’s responsibilities is to be, therefore, a Weaver. Williams calls this an interpretative role, but it is not just “someone who interprets culture to and for the Church or interprets the Church’s teaching to the world outside”, but rather someone who has “the gift of helping people make sense to and of each other”. Part of the role is creative as well, bringing communities into existence: communities “in spite of the sentimental way we sometimes think of them, don’t just happen.”

Thinking unsentimentally about community leads to concrete and specific results, as Williams addressed in another speech¹⁵:

…one of the healthiest and most constructive things that any community can ever do is to put in place some structures by which connections can be made. So that instead of a map of little voluntary enterprises, all of them seeking to respond to this or that particular problem, there is a vivid sense of common calling and common vision.

Such connections are to do with the very nature of being human: they are to do with, or ought to do with, “an integral, integrated picture of human beings as they grow at every level”. This is an inclusive vision:

Making connections, keeping the overview. Seeing voluntary and community work as more than just what I called a series of enterprises in firefighting— this is what is positive about what we are celebrating this morning. This is what I would say every town, every city, deeply needs, in order to work as a genuine human community. A picture of human value, and human good. A sense that work for the needy must never be fragmented and competitive, but must always be co-operative, imaginative, comprehensive.

For voluntary associations this connecting, weaving overview will have its origins in a myriad of places and values: it does not require a belief in God to believe in humanity. However, for the Christian priest, the leader and servant of the Christian community, the origins of the weaving will begin in the priest’s role as the president of the worshipping community. Williams quotes approvingly the assertion by Dumitru Staniloae, that the priest’s role is to ‘assemble and concentrate’ the Christian people at prayer:

when Christians pray together in a way that places them in and with Christ, publicly and ritually, the one who animates and co-ordinates this is giving expression to the priestly essence of the Church; the very least we can say is that it is a coherent and intelligible sign of this fact if the president is, routinely, precisely the person who is charged with telling the Church where and what it is, in his or her daily and lifelong service.

Being a Christian priest today, therefore, begins and ends in worship. The priest is nothing and no one if not a person of prayer. This is certainly a vision to set against the corrupted busyness of Herbertism. We need to explore these images a little further.

1. Michael Ramsey, The Christian Priest Today, (London: S.P.C.K., 1972, 1985). [↩]
2. P. T. Forsyth, The Church and the Ministry, (1917) quoted in Ramsey, Christian Priest, (1985), p. 4. [↩]
3. A. A. K. Graham, ‘Should the ordained ministry now disappear?’, Theology, LXXI/576, June 1968, pp. 242–250. [↩]
4. Ramsey, Christian Priest, p. 7. [↩]
5. Ramsey, Christian Priest, p. 8. [↩]
6. Ramsey, Christian Priest, p. 8. [↩]
7. Ramsey, Christian Priest, p. 9. [↩]
8. Ramsey, Christian Priest, p. 10. [↩]
9. Ramsey, Christian Priest, p. 10. [↩]
10. Ramsey, Christian Priest, p. 111. [↩]
11. Rowan Williams, The Christian Priest Today, a talk given at Ripon College, Cuddesdon, 28 May 2004. The talk is available from the Archbishop’s website, here. All otherwise unattributed references in this chapter are to the text published on that website. [↩]
12. In Douglas Dales (ed.), Glory descending: Michael Ramsey and his writings, (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2005), pp. 163–175. [↩]
13. And also so very popular: 3.76 million visits and counting! [↩]
14. Bernard Cornwell, The Winter King (1995), Enemy of God (1996), Excalibur: A Novel of Arthur (1997), (The Warlord Chronicles; London: Penguin Books). [↩]
15. Rowan Williams, ‘Community Well-Being’ a speech given at Rose Street Methodist Centre, Wokingham, 30 July 2004. Available online here. Accessed 25 January 2008. [↩]