Charles Gore and the Theology of
Priesthood
Constitutive Elements of a Theology of Priesthood to be found within
the Theological Writings of Charles Gore
In One
Volume
By Robert Thomas Parker-McGee
July 2016
Contents
Declaration & Acknowledgements p.4
Introduction
a) An Outline of this Dissertation and its Aspirations p.5
b) A Biographical Sketch of Charles Gore p.11
c)
A Note on Charles Gore’s
Approach p.17
Chapter 1: The Incarnation
and Priesthood
a)
Introduction p.21
b)
The Necessity of the
Incarnation p.22
c)
The Incarnation; Natural and
Supernatural p.32
d)
Did Christ sin? p.43
e) The Resurrection and
Ascension; Drawing us back into Relationship with God p.48
f)
The Church an Extension of
the Incarnation p.57
g)
Concluding
Thoughts p.62
Chapter 2: The Evidence of
History
a)
Introduction p.63
b)
The Foundation of the Church p.65
c)
Common Unity of the Church p.70
d)
The Threefold Ministry:
Bishops, Priests and
Deacons p.78
e)
Concluding Thoughts p.96
Chapter 3: Sacramental
Principles
a)
Introduction and a Beginning
to Sacramental
Principles p.98
b)
The Church’s Nature and
Purpose p.102
c)
The Personal, the Corporate
and the Eternal p.110
d)
The Eucharist p.115
e) The Ordained Priesthood and the Priesthood of All Believers p.122
i. Baptism and the ‘Priesthood of All Believers’ p.124
ii.
The Ordained Priesthood p.128
f)
Sacraments – Social
Ceremonies p.131
g)
Sacraments and the Soul p.134
h)
Concluding Thoughts p.138
Conclusion
and Application to the Present Situation
a)
Gore’s
Theology of Priesthood as Discussed in this work p.140
b)
A General
State of Concern p.151
i.
Individualism
p.152
ii.
Task over
Office p.153
iii.
Experientialism p.156
Bibliography p.160
Declaration
The Copyright of this thesis rests
with the author. No quotation from it should be published without prior written
consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged.
Acknowledgements
My most sincere thanks go to Prof
Mike Higton for his attentiveness and help during moments of peril. It was not always an easy journey trying
to balance this research degree with having to run two parishes and being a
dutiful husband and father. I thank him for turning an armchair theologian into
one that, when prodded at least, might think a little more systematically. Thanks also go to Mr
Robert Wootton for proof reading this text prior to submission: I owe him a
huge debt of gratitude.
I also thank Sarah, Jasmine and
Thomas for their loving support and patience.
Charles Gore and the Theology of Priesthood
Introduction
a) An Outline of this Dissertation and its Aspirations.
The following dissertation is an
investigation into the constitutive elements of a theology of priesthood to be
found within the work of one of the most enduring authorities on the subject:
Charles Gore.
Charles Gore is commonly held to be
one of the most significant theological thinkers of the turn of the twentieth
century. He offers insights into all of the common themes of theological thought,
and in so doing shows a remarkable intellect and an impressive dedication to
the historical well of thinking from within the Christian tradition. According
to Peter Waddell, ‘Gore is a model of how to write theologically. His was a big
mind, ranging freely over all the central theological themes and with a
seamless vision of how theology, Christology, ecclesiology, sacraments,
Scripture, ethics and politics all flowed into each other. Christians should
read Gore today to see what a coherent vision looks like, and how being soaked
in the ancient traditions of the Church fits one to interpret and engage modern
society, culture and politics.’
This is some commendation and one I wholeheartedly support. From this
standpoint, this dissertation looks to focus most intently upon one aspect of
Gore’s theological thought, the theology of priesthood.
It is my opinion that any
investigation into incarnational theology, ecclesiology or theology of
priesthood will be far richer as a result of exploring what Gore has to offer
the discussion of these fields. Many theological investigations into Christology,
ecclesiology and theology of priesthood make note of Gore’s contributions to
these areas of theological thought.
There are also a number of investigations that offer a more precise focus upon
Gore’s life and the wide scope of his theology.
This research project will draw upon a wide selection of these works.
Nevertheless, it is my understanding
that there has not to date been any extended investigation that has aspired to
drawing a more complete theological understanding of Gore’s theology of
priesthood that has also included within it reflections on how that theology of
priesthood relates to other aspects of his theological thought, such as the
incarnation and the sacraments. Therefore, in the chapters that follow I am
going to explore Gore’s thought regarding the theology of priesthood, and I
will for the first time show how the theology of priesthood is tied in to his
whole theological vision, connecting to his accounts of the Church, the
sacraments and the incarnation. This dissertation provides an original exegesis
of Gore’s work from this perspective, illuminating both his theology of
priesthood and the other topics connected to it. This investigation will also
uncover fresh aspects to Gore’s understanding of the Church and its ministerial
orders. Looking at Gore’s thought over a whole range of theological areas, I
hope to further advance Gore’s theology of priesthood, developing Gore’s rich
theological legacy with fresh insight into what he suggests the ordained
priesthood may be called to be and do.
In order to convey Gore’s theology of
priesthood most completely, I will divide Gore’s thinking into three
significant chapters and a concluding chapter. The first chapter will focus
upon Gore’s work on the incarnation and will do so with a special focus towards
its consequent factors for a theology of priesthood. The second chapter will
move into exploring Gore’s own historical investigation into the scriptural and
theological grounding for the Church and its ministry. The third chapter will
then look at Gore’s sacramental and liturgical understanding of the Church and
reveal the importance he places upon a sacramental imperative being central to
a theology of ordained ministry. This dissertation will then conclude with a
systematic round-up of what has been discovered in each chapter, before then
moving into a brief reflection upon what Gore’s thinking may have to offer
three significant contemporary issues concerning the Church’s understanding of
ordained ministry today.
From this standpoint, we will explore
how Gore considers it a significant feature of Christ’s priestly nature that he
advances humanity towards perfect union through his sacrificial life and priesthood.
We will find Gore revealing how Christ offers a refreshed understanding of the
priestly life, grounded in service and grace, rather than law; and how this
priestly life ushers in a new era of moral justice based upon compassion and
forgiveness, where a new form of relationship with God is working within us through
the Spirit. Thus, we will see how Christ’s priestly credentials are important
in order for humanity to enter more readily into relationship with God,
enhancing our spiritual sight as he does so.
Furthermore, we will find Gore
describing how, as believers in the divine revelation, he believes us reworked
and healed by the life of Christ working in us through the Spirit as a result
of our inclusion in the Church body. We will then see how the Church’s ministerial orders look to the example of
Christ, promoting those attributes discernible through his priestly existence,
so that they may be used in God’s service to bring more people into the eternal
life only found in Christ. Finally, we will begin to grapple with Gore’s
concept of the Church as an ‘extension of the incarnation’,[5] embodying the principles of Christ and infusing the
lives of its members with his life.
In the third chapter we will explore
how Gore understands the Church, through its ordained ministry, to have a
responsibility for preserving what Christ instituted and passing it on to each
new generation, authenticity resting in the actions and instructions of Christ
himself. We will then explore why, to Gore, ordained ministry must follow the
example of Christ’s priesthood and be grounded in a sacramental imperative. It
is from here that we will ponder how Gore sees the Eucharist (and other
sacraments) as transcending the limits of time and space and what relation they
have to uniting the gathered body within Christ’s prophetic, priestly and
kingly action. Then, we will see how, sharing in Christ’s priesthood, the
ordained ministry helps the earthly church body participate in those eternal
realities.
As we move further into the third
chapter, we will investigate the two significant aspects Gore considers are
discernible in every sacrament: they all use material objects to communicate
spiritual grace and they are all communal by nature and thus social ceremonies.
This will lead us on to ponder the part that communal concern plays in Gore’s
theological vision and what consequences this has for his view of more
individualistic interpretations of faith.
From here, we will explore the
importance Gore places upon sacramental and social concerns for the identity of
the ordained priesthood. We will also consider whether or not Gore considers
the ordained priesthood to be an elite caste and what place the baptismal
priesthood plays in his overall theological vision of the Church.
Charles Gore was born in 1853 in
Wimbledon. He was born
into an Anglo-Irish family as the third son of the Honourable Charles Alexander
Gore and Augusta Lavinia Priscilla (née Ponsonby). He was privileged in his
upbringing and had a childhood of relative ease. His great-grandfather on his
father’s side was the Earl of Arran, whilst his great-grandfather on his
mother’s side was the Earl of Bessborough. His eldest brother, Phillip Gore became the fourth Earl of
Arran and another brother,
Spencer Gore, was to become
England's first National Tennis Champion.
From a young age, Charles Gore
showed a considerable independence of mind and spirit, party no doubt fed by
his aristocratic upbringing. As he grew this developed into a strong
self-confidence. Even at the age of nine or ten, Gore began questioning
elements of his inherited situation and was soon to find that the family Low
Church tradition failed to satisfy his religious and intellectual leanings. He
soon felt that a more sacramental religion was for him and later in his teenage
years began attending churches in London that offered a richer sacramental
ceremonial.
Gore attended Harrow School and it
was here that he became influenced by Brooke Foss Westcott. According to
Carpenter, Westcott especially impressed upon Gore the need for exact
scholarship, the insight to be gained from religious history, and the spiritual
benefits of simple living and loving the poor.
At Balliol College, Oxford, he
became a supporter of the trade-union movement and he took a First Class
Honours Degree in Classical Moderations and the Greats (philosophy). Whilst he
was there he encountered a much changed Oxford from that of a few decades
earlier. Opening up the university to those outside of the Church of England
had widened the parameters of enquiry. The Church was forced to immediately
take note of some of these advances and Gore played a big part in this
scholarly response from within.
He was elected a Fellow of Trinity
in 1875, where he lectured on Plato’s republic and tutored students in the
Greek New Testament. It was here that Gore became a part of a group of scholars
who were actively seeking to bring about a revolution in thinking within the
Church. Taking the title the Holy Party, this group consisted of Henry Scott
Holland, Edward S. Talbot, J. R. Illingworth, Frances Paget, Aubrey Moore, R.
L. Ottley, W. Lock, Arthur Lyttleton, R. C. Moberly and W. J. H. Champion. They
eventually produced the ground-breaking Lux Mundi, which sought to offer fresh
and new perspectives on theological themes associated with the incarnation.
Subsequently, this group contributed to one of the most productive eras of
Anglican theology to date.
Gore was ordained to the
priesthood in 1878 and in 1880 he became Vice-Principal of Cuddesdon
Theological College. In 1883, Gore became the first Principal of Pusey House,
Oxford.
In 1888, Gore wrote The Church
and the Ministry, reflecting upon the origins of the Christian Ministry and
its development in the first two centuries of Christianity. In the same year,
he wrote Roman Catholic Claims, a response to Roman Catholic claims that
the Anglican Church was not a valid successor of the New Testament Church. He
then helped to found the Christian Social Union in 1889 and his political views
began arousing some public protest.
He was to be at the centre of
further controversy in 1889 when Lux Mundi (meaning "Light of the
World"): A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation, was finally released. Gore was
its general editor, and provided a single essay within it. Overall, the book
was a response to the increasing call from many educated Christians for the
Church to begin taking account of Biblical and archaeological studies and
scientific discoveries, which they felt made it necessary for the Church to
re-examine and perhaps restate some of its traditional formulations. This
aroused a remarkable amount of interest and caused no little amount of
controversy. Many claimed that it went too far and instead of restating
traditional doctrines, it completely rewrote them. The book was widely read.
Soon cheap editions were available and its readership grew even further.
In 1887, Gore founded the Society
of the Resurrection, an association for priests looking to deepen the spiritual
life.
In Lent 1891.Gore was invited to
deliver the annual Bampton Lecture Series. This was his chance to clarify his
stance. The University Church of Oxford was full to bursting with people
filling pews, pulpit and standing in isles to hear him talk. A few months
later, the lectures were published as The Incarnation of the Son of God.
This book presents his most comprehensive thinking on the incarnation and sets
down all the common themes of his thinking that he would later revisit in
subsequent writings. It is in this book that Gore first associates the Church
as being ‘an extension of the incarnation’.
This later took up wide support in many circles.
In 1892, the Society of the
Resurrection became the Community of the Resurrection, with six priests looking
to live the religious life. It began life based at Pusey House and Gore became
the Community’s Senior.
In 1893, Gore left Pusey House to
become Vicar of Radley. Gore felt that Pusey House was not a suitable home for
the Community of the Resurrection and he encouraged a change of location. And
so the Community of the Resurrection moved to Radley. Alas, Gore never really
settled to life as a vicar in a small village and in 1894 Gore was made a canon
of Westminster Abbey. This also ended his personal relationship with the
Community of the Resurrection. Nonetheless, it probably began the most
fulfilling period of his ministry.
Whilst at Westminster, Gore’s
sermons and teaching was legendary and people would arrive hours in advance
just to ensure that they could get a seat. In addition to his Sunday sermons,
he also gave weekday lectures. Many of these were later published as books: The
Sermon on the Mount (1896), The Epistle to The Ephesians (1897), The
Epistle to the Romans (1898).
The Community of the Resurrection
subsequently began a separate journey that would eventually lead to it settling
in Mirfield, a small industrial town in West Yorkshire. The Community of the
Resurrection continued to grow throughout the early twentieth-century. Gore did
not accompany it on this second stage of its journey. Nonetheless, what had
begun as a small group of priests looking to deepen their piety became a
significant contributor to the holiness of the Church, later forming missional
communities in South Africa, Rhodesia,
Wales and the West Indies.
In 1901, Gore wrote one of his most significant books
called the Body of Christ, which dealt with the Eucharist. In it he asserted the doctrine that
Christ was present in the Sacrament and that the Eucharist was a sacrifice.
However, he also discounted certain late mediaeval practices such as
processions of the Sacrament, which he claimed was unknown to the Primitive
Church. True to form, this book was once again controversial and divided
opinion.
In 1901, Gore was appointed as
Bishop of Worcester. This came as a complete shock to him and angered his
opponents. Some were concerned at his apparent Anglo-Catholic views. Others
were alarmed at his dedication to rational thought and socialist sympathies.
Gore began overseeing the division of Worcester Diocese, which was an unwieldy
diocese and included the now vast and sprawling industrial area of Birmingham.
Gore recognised the need to carve out a separate diocese for Birmingham alone.
In 1905, Gore became the first bishop of this new bishopric. Gore proved to be
a brilliant bishop in this new diocese. Church attendance grew considerably,
new churches were built, and many priests were imported into the diocese to
serve the growing congregations.
In 1911, Gore was transferred to
become Bishop of Oxford. In this post, Gore especially proved himself well
suited to the role of bishop, performing good oversight and caring for his
clergy.
Over the next few years increasing
numbers of Anglican clergy began declaring that reasonably denying the virgin
birth and the physical Resurrection of Christ should not in any way affect them
remaining Anglican. Gore was so mortified that he suggested resigning his
bishopric in order to attend properly to the task of challenging their stance.
His friends convinced him that the best way to proceed was to continue as a
bishop, which he subsequently did.
After the First World War, Gore
resigned his bishopric and retired in 1919 at 66 years of age. Numerous posts
and accolades followed in religious and academic bodies. During his retirement
years he continued to write and publish prolifically on the whole span of his
theological thought.
c)
A Note on Charles Gore’s Approach
Gore often approaches his task with
apparent competing demands lurking in the background. He is in many ways
conservative in his thinking,
and yet in others undeniably liberal. He is adamant that the integrity of the
Christian tradition must be upheld and yet at the same time he is completely
committed to modern investigative techniques and academic thinking challenging
the Church’s traditional theological understandings. Gore is also steadfastly
committed to the Church maintaining its traditional structuring under the
threefold ministerial order and apostolic succession, and yet is convinced of
the need for local churches to be able to adapt according to cultural and
sociological variation. In short, as we advance this work we will note how Gore
refuses to take shortcuts either in his thinking or his attempts to arrive at
an answer that is intellectually acceptable to him. This does not always make
for a simplistic theological outcome to the issues that he perceives need addressing
and sometimes there are small contradictions in what he produces as a result.
There is something specific about
Gore’s historical situation that we also need to note. In the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, the idea developed (most prominently in Germany but
then also in England and elsewhere) that the world of scholarship was made up
of a number of interdependent disciplines, that those disciplines were
constantly advancing, and that their work was concerned with areas outside of
the service of theology. In response to this, Gore approaches his task with a
degree of faithfulness to the theological tradition whilst remaining open to
the advances of various scholarly disciplines. Gore believed that all
disciplines were interrelated because there was only one reality, one world,
one humanity which all disciplines were called to advance, expound and explore.
To Gore’s mind, theology would only be further enriched by taking account of
wider scholarly advance.
As we read biographical sketches of
Gore, we begin to see a well-educated, deep seated Anglican of high
intellectual capacity who was surrounded by notable academic figures.
These all had a great influence upon his thinking and his work. Gore was so
determined to embrace the new ideas and scholarly advances around him that he
found himself defending his beliefs on two fronts. He was determined to rise to
the challenge posed by these scholarly advances whilst being equally minded to
remain true to his theological integrity. He was convinced that all true,
measured and thoughtful intellectual advances would ultimately strengthen
inherited religion. In a statement calling for the same kind of intellectual
rigour to be applied to theology as to the field of science, Gore states: ‘we
must look as faithfully at the Christ of Christian tradition who is declared
the revelation of the Father, as we do look at the phenomenon of nature’.
This statement is suggestive of the much older idea of revelation being found
in two books – the book of scripture and the book of nature. As is his fashion,
Gore gives this more traditional way of thinking a thoroughly 19th
Century makeover. As we move through this project, we will see Gore applying
this kind of approach to a whole plethora of theological themes.
In this way, Gore’s work retains a
conservative interpretation of doctrine in general whilst emitting a certain
late-Victorian catholic liberalism in its use of techniques of enquiry, and
even on occasion in its promptings for how Christianity should approach the use
of these doctrinal truths in society. This leads Carpenter to claim that ‘there
is no getting round the fact that Gore used the term liberal Catholicism as the
most fitting description of his aim and approach in theology’.
The doctrine of the incarnation was no exception and this provides a
fundamental platform to Gore’s overall theological vision. Gore and a band of
other notable theologians, who come to be known as the Lux Mundi School,
understood the incarnation to be the key to Christian faith as they expended
much energy ensuring that the Church moved into the twentieth century with a
solid theological foundation to build on. It seems most natural therefore that
we begin our investigation from that standpoint. Thus we will now move into our
first chapter and explore Gore’s theology of the incarnation being especially
mindful towards elements of a theology of priesthood discernible within it.
Chapter 1: The Incarnation and Priesthood
a)
Introduction
Charles Gore’s theological outlook is
rooted in a deep theology of the incarnation. For Gore, the entire Christian
faith begins and ends in the person of Christ. In his opinion, the better one
comes to understand the intricacies of Jesus Christ and the consequences of his
being both man and God, the closer one may move to a more complete realisation
of God’s plan for the salvation of humankind. Gore considers the Church to be the ‘Body of Christ’. Following the incarnation, it
is the next step in the divine masterplan for salvation; ‘the extension and
perpetuation of the incarnation in the world’.
Bearing this bold statement in mind, this chapter will consider significant
aspects of Gore’s thought on the incarnation, and discern what elements may be
characteristic of Jesus’ priestly ministry. In so doing, it will consider
elements of Christ’s personality, nature and approach to realising God’s
salvific plan. Through Gore’s thinking, we will explore what implications this
has for the Church’s ministerial orders and why Christ’s example of priesthood
is so important as a blueprint for any ministry carried out in his name. By the
end of the chapter, we will have a clearer understanding of what Gore considers
Christ’s approach and example to be, and in like manner, attributes that are important
for authentic undertaking of Christian priesthood in Christ’s name.
b)
The Necessity of the Incarnation
Throughout Gore’s work, we see a
concern to uphold a certain amount of theological integrity concerning the incarnation.
As such, he is mindful of two competing demands: to help develop thinking
around the nature and importance of the incarnation in response to the
scientific advances of his day, whilst remaining true to the Church’s accepted inherited
tradition and theological understanding. He is concerned that what he develops
must stand up to intellectual scrutiny. Famously, it was Lux Mundi that set the ball rolling in 1889, as Gore joined other notable
scholars to
examine issues relating to the incarnation,
but it is in the Bampton lectures of 1891, entitled ‘The incarnation of the Son
of God’, that Gore produces his most expansive work on the subject.
It is Ramsey’s opinion that, ‘in this book we see Gore’s teaching throughout
his life, and we also see an opening up of a line of exposition of the incarnation
which was, in the main, to be followed in Anglican theology for many years to
come’.
This extensive work influenced much of Gore’s later thought, and it is
certainly true that the particular flavour of theology of the incarnation that
he develops remains an influence upon Christological thinking to this day.
As is so often true of Gore’s
investigations, in order to understand where he begins with his theological exploration
of Christ, we need to implant ourselves into patristic teaching; notably, in
this instance, the thought of Athanasius.
Athanasius considers humanity to have been created to be in relationship with
God, who is divine goodness. Drawing upon the Alexandrian cosmological vision,
where being requires drawing upon God’s goodness, Athanasius considers humanity
to be made from nothingness and so believes that without God humanity would
descend back into nothingness.
From this understanding, Athanasius sees evidence of a separation between God
and humankind beginning from the time of the Fall and increasing up until the incarnation
of Christ.
Gore seems to concur with Athanasius’
thinking, when he considers humanity to have been created in God’s image, but
to have turned away from God and thereby causing a separation from its true
nature. Gore considers God to be of the highest moral character, what he
describes as ‘perfect reality’.
We get a sense of Gore walking a kind of platonic, imaginative landscape, with
degrees of reality (or goodness) that increase as humanity approaches the
source (God). Therefore,
humanity’s turning away is a denial of the very moral laws that provide
humanity with life.
Gore sees evidence for his stance in the story of the Fall, which he considers
describes humanity’s helplessness and increasing alienation from the goodness
of God. Gore interprets humanity before the Fall as living in perfect relation
to God, but following the Fall that union is broken. Following the Fall
humanity continually chooses the path of rebellion (sin). To Gore, the Old
Testament is a narrative of God’s self-revelation: revealing himself little by
little, through his prophets and authors, in order to help repair the
brokenness. Humanity, on the other hand, seems to repeatedly turn in the
opposite direction, further entrenching the separation. Along with this
separation, humans’ disordered desires see them produce idols for themselves to
alleviate their longing for God’s goodness rather than return to it.
And so, confused and blinded by evil, humanity finds it harder to receive the
divine goodness because of the barriers they themselves have created. God,
having felt displeasure at the state of creation, offers restoration through
Christ who is able to reverse humanity’s course towards self-destruction.
Gore interprets the present human
condition as filled with depravity and correspondingly we begin to recognise
that Gore considers the human state to be in a very dark place were it not for
the salvific grace of God: humanity would face a completely hopeless future
were it not for God’s own compassionate and restorative action. ‘We have to
recognise…’, he says, ‘that human nature as we have had experience of it in
history, presents in great measure a sense of moral ruin’.
To Gore, humanity would be entirely lost were it not for God’s own intervention
in the person of Christ, who redeems humanity.
Gore is convinced that: ‘The divine method of
this redemption is, so to speak, from within the human race itself (Christ). It is a new creative act of God
restoring in human nature a moral creation which had been ruined’.
In short, Gore considers humanity’s
condition corrupted, a long way from the divine goodness. Demonic powers of
evil distort the human image and we are caught in a real battle over the
substance of creation. In the background, Gore seems continually to wrestle
with the question of whether creation will be pulled into evaporation or won
into goodness. To his mind, the former would surely be true were it not for
Christ’s redemptive, transformative and salvific credentials: Christ is the
miracle cure for a terminally ill world.
Gore believes that Christ in his
human form does not come to approve the messiness of fallen humanity, but to
reunite the flesh to spiritual purity, a purity similar to what it experienced
in Eden, so that humanity may once again experience holistic completeness through
its earthly pilgrimage. As we will discover later, this is why, for Gore,
Christ’s sinless nature is an important reality of Christ’s personhood. Christ
does not come to comfort humanity and implant it deeper into the sins of the
flesh, but to offer a challenge to the status quo, and with it a route out of its
destructive tendencies towards a purer state. Christ re-orientates our outlook
to bring about an objective change to our situation so that we may experience
unity with the Father. He does this by his very presence with us, and by his
example and teaching which leads us towards a higher spiritual and moral good
But how does Christ exact this? Why
should Christ’s presence and example prove so instrumental and unique?
Well, to Gore’s mind, only Christ
fulfils the necessary conditions to mend the broken relationship. As Gore
expounds, ‘Christ enters not merely to consummate an order but to restore it,
not to accomplish only but to redeem’.
Christ consummates it, restores it, perfects it, and makes it complete by
himself becoming flesh so that humanity may relate more readily to him. In so
doing, he offers reconciliation to the Father, restoring the once broken
relationship. Through his unique and perfect existence, Christ accomplishes
that which he designs by redeeming, saving, liberating humanity from its
perilous path towards self-destruction. And so the ‘development of God’s
revelation of himself comes to its climax in the Incarnation’ of Christ.
Be that as it may, Gore is careful to
maintain a juxtaposition in his thinking here. First, using strong revelatory
language, he sees this as a necessary process of revelation; fundamentally
stemming from a problem of knowledge: Christ offers the means to come to know
God better. Equally, however, Gore recognises a problem of relationship too,
with humanity requiring reconciliation with the Father through the Son, because
as he says: ‘the personal relation to himself is from first to last the essence
of the religion which he inaugurated’.
There is then the dual concern of repairing a broken relationship and reorienting
a disobedient order back towards God’s goodness. Both find their assurance in
Christ. The incarnation draws creation into the life of the Spirit. It shows us
what God is like, opening him up to creation so that it may know him more
fully, whilst also reconciling creation back to God by re-establishing the
means by which it may enter back into relationship with him.
Gore believes that Christ, by his presence,
points towards and reveals that highest spiritual and moral good that is God,
and infuses in us the divine life as seen through the Son. Reflecting on this,
Gore states: ‘Christ’s Flesh and Blood were not merely offered on my behalf,
but are also given to be my inward substance, my new life’.
By making God more fully known, Christ not only opens the way to improving
relations with him and shows how previous divisions caused by disobedience may
be reconciled, he also infuses our life with his. Like Athanasius, Gore seems
to picture something much deeper going on within us as a result of Christ’s
work. Gore says; ‘…when he (Christ) left the earth he promised to sustain them
from the unseen world by his continued personal presence and to communicate to
them his own life, and he assured them that at the last they would find
themselves face to face with him as their judge’.
Gore pictures us being reworked, even healed, by the life of Christ working in
us through the Spirit as a result of our inclusion in the Church body, through
which God the Creator is causing new life to grow and flourish.
Building on this, Gore considers that
Christ is the fulfilment of the Old Testament, and the second volume of the
divine revelation. All that God had revealed of himself in those earlier times
is brought into completion in the incarnation.
It is not that Christ rewrites what has gone before. Far from it; in Christ not
a single one of the earlier revelations of God’s person is altered, but all are
brought to completion in Him. This Gore describes as ‘the fuller exposition of
the divine character, the divine personality, the divine love’.
He believes that in Christ we see the ultimate and most complete revelation of
the attributes of God.
This is significant for our
exploration of priesthood. Whilst in the Old Testament we see revelations of
the unchangeable God, the Old Law and Levitical Priesthood prove incapable of bringing
about humanity’s reconciliation and union with God. Christ offers a refreshed understanding
of priestly life grounded in service and grace, rather than law. He ushers in a
new era of moral justice based upon compassion and forgiveness, where a new
form of relationship with God is working within us in the New Covenant through
the work of the Spirit. For this reason, Gore presents Christ as the
quintessence of the sacrificial life and priesthood. We see in him a crescendo
of moral authority, affording him the position of great and eternal high priest.
Gore considers this priestly life and example essential for the salvation of
humanity.
Gore understands the Levitical
examples of priesthood throughout the Old Testament as an attempt to bring
about reconciliation with God. They try to provide the means by which
reconciliation and reunion can take place. Prior to the Fall humanity was
already in satisfactory relationship with the divine, but following the Fall
the priesthood materialises over time as the order entrusted with the task of instilling
in humanity the necessary obedience to move closer to God once again. It seems
that Gore believes humanity prior to the Fall to have been more readily able to
authentically express the attributes of union and reconciliation. In Gore’s
understanding, there seems to be something innately priestly about humanity’s
pre-fallen identity. It is these same attributes that the later Levitical
priesthood attempt to re-instil in God’s people, albeit ineffectually. As
further separation occurs with each passing generation, the requirements
relating to the Levitical priestly office become more and more complex as it tries
to redirect an increasingly disobedient Israel back towards God. But all the
time humanity’s relationship with God becomes progressively more estranged
because of its wilful disobedience. The problem is considered by Gore only to be
partly one of knowledge (a lack of the kind of knowledge about God that Christ
would bring). For Gore, there was also a deeper problem: lacking the power of
God working within to bring reconciliation about.
It is clear in Gore’s understanding that
Christ’s priestly life provides the means for such reconciliation. Christ,
through his priesthood, achieves what the Levitical model is incapable of, and provides
the means by which humanity may be reunited to God. Christ somewhat opens the
possibility for humanity to grasp its pre-fallen identity. More than that,
something about Christ’s uncorrupted credentials enables his expression of
priesthood to be more effective than anything that went before. His life,
example and teaching draws followers into his divine life and in turn implants
the divine life within his followers, drawing them back into the eternal
fulfilment of the Triune God.
Gore believes that Christ’s high priesthood
is significant for humanity’s salvation.
Christ expresses a pure model of priesthood precisely because he genuinely and
truly shares his perfect life with us, by the Spirit. Christ’s priesthood is
distinguished from the earlier Levitical priesthood because Christ’s human life
is in full union with God, and so morally perfect. God by sharing this humanity
of Christ with us, and making it take root within us, by the Spirit, is uniting
us all to himself. Thus, in comparing Christianity to Old Testament Israel, Gore
asserts that: ‘The Christian Church is in an infinitely higher sense a royal
priesthood, a holy nation’.
So, what are the elements that make
up his pure priestly example?
c)
The Incarnation; Natural and
Supernatural
The
dogmatic decisions of the councils are formulas rendered necessary for no other
purpose than to guard the faith of scripture from what was calculated to undermine
it. They do not make any addition to its substance, but bring out into light
and emphasis some of its most important principles.
Gore is clear that the overall
picture provided by the patristic legacy is one of consistency and truth about
the person of Jesus Christ. To underline this argument, Gore explores the
Chalcedonian Creed and identifies four main principles behind the creedal
statement concerning the incarnation, designed to protect believers from error.
These, he claims, are also consistent throughout patristic literature and the
New Testament evidence:
1)
‘That
as Son of God, Jesus Christ is very God, of one substance with the Father.’
2)
‘That
as Son of Man, he is perfectly Man, in the completeness of human faculties and
sympathies.’
3)
‘That
though both God and man, he is yet one person, namely the Son of God who has
taken manhood into himself.’
4)
‘That
in this incarnation the manhood, though it is truly assumed into the divine
person, still remains none the less truly human, so that Jesus Christ is of one
substance with us men in respect of His manhood, as he is with the Father in
respect of His Godhead.’
It is not surprising to see Gore
taking an orthodox Christological stance when it comes to these creedal texts,
albeit in a rather simplified form.
He sees in them negative safeguards consistent with the Jesus portrayed in scripture.
This is important, because he considers that this consistency itself provides
the evidence of who Christ is. This consistency in the overall portrayal of who
Christ is enables humanity to become intimate with his personhood and relate better
to him. But to Gore, it is Christ’s high priestly credentials that enable humanity
to begin encountering God in a most profound way, quite unlike anything since
Eden.
Added to this, Gore believes that the
consistent portrayal of Christ found in the scriptural and patristic evidence does
not make the person of Christ inconsistent with nature. In his attempts to
explain this, we see Gore’s thinking begin to break with the traditional
approach as he develops a quasi-evolutionary understanding of how the Christ revealed
in scripture and patristic evidence relates to the natural world.
Gore considers the evidence of the natural
world to suggest that nature has a certain amount of ordering. The world as Gore
considers it has a certain amount of unity, and progresses over time.
Gore considers that in the different forms of life and elements of creation
there is an identifiable development from the ‘inorganic to the organic and
from the animal to the rational – a progressive evolution of life’.
Behind these we may observe a divine will and purpose relative to their scale.
The pinnacles of these, Gore suggests, are ‘reason, conscience, love,
personality’, and we observe these reaching an absolute ‘climax in Christ’.
Christ restores humanity to full relationship with God, and so to a state
comparable with Eden’s glory. In Christ we see the source and hope of new
humanity: personhood as it was designed to be.
According to Gore, Christ is the
‘supernatural’ but not the unnatural;
in fact Christ is the ‘crown of nature’.
Illingworth, Gore’s compatriot, ponders that ‘the divine presence which we
recognise in nature will be the presence of a Spirit, which infinitely
transcends the material order, yet sustains and indwells it’.
In like manner, Gore believes that behind nature there has always been divine
‘power’ present and at work in all created things.
He points out, however, that there is nothing to suggest that the divine
attributes we see in nature are complete. Far from it; rather than the divine
qualities being exhausted in nature there is ‘every reason to believe nature
incomplete’. Come
1914, and the outbreak of the First World War, Gore’s words would take on new meaning,
as just how incomplete and removed from the divine perfection creation actually
was became evident to all.
Nonetheless, that is not to disprove Gore’s or Illingworth’s earlier claims, both
that creation shows evidence of divine power at work in it, and that in Christ
we see human perfection and creation moving on a path towards completion.
Even so, Gore does not claim that in Jesus’
perfect humanity we see the ‘suspension of nature’, but instead the ‘legitimate
climax of natural development’.
As he clarifies: ‘this supernatural person is no unnatural phenomenon, but is
in very truth the consummation of nature’s order’.
To paraphrase Gore’s thinking; creation finds itself sustained and indwelt by
the Holy Spirit. This is progressive and so the Spirit indwelling creation
becomes more and more capable of displaying the divine will. As this becomes
increasingly recognised, it appears to us as incomplete, and for us creation
begins to point to a fulfilment it does not contain. Christ is that fulfilment,
where nature is fully susceptible and obedient to God’s will and purpose. But,
even more profoundly, this is not just the story of one human being and his intimate
relationship to God, but a story impacting every human being. Christ is God and
in his human nature humanity is able to touch God. Merely the touch of his
cloak has the power to heal and transform lives.
Gore portrays a sense of the infusing
power of God. For Gore, the incarnation is about more than just showing
humanity how to live, it is about drawing humanity into the life of the Spirit;
Christ brings us into the divine nature. There is something about Jesus’ personality
and credentials that helps us to enter more readily into complete relationship
with God. Such attributes are priestly. As a consequence, Christ’s life and priesthood
draws humanity closer to God through a life lived in the Spirit (infusing
Christ’s life into us by the work of the Spirit). This encourages Christ-like
behaviour and obedience to God, and helps humanity to live more in tune with
the indwelling Holy Spirit evident in the created order, deepening humanity’s
union with God.
Moving on, Gore’s stance has
significant consequences for his understanding of the miraculous events attributed
to Christ in scripture, and these are not without significance for understanding
priesthood either.
Throughout the Gospel accounts,
miracles are attributed to Jesus.
There are so many that, irrespective of our opinion about their validity, they
offer strong evidence for our understanding of Christ’s person and purpose as
portrayed in scripture. Even to the most sceptical scholar, they offer insight
into the ideas that were circulating in the communities that produced these
texts about Jesus’ person and purpose.
The sheer volume of space attributed
to these miracle accounts in the Gospels means that they cannot be ignored in
any serious investigation into the incarnation and, in like manner, any understanding
of priesthood. They completely colour an individual’s
perception of who Christ is and what he achieves.
It is not the purpose of this investigation to
go into any great detail regarding prevailing arguments about the authenticity
of these miracle accounts, only to note that Gore considers them to be entirely
accurate. Gore’s argument is inevitably coloured by his desire to defend
orthodox Christian belief in the context of advances in various other
disciplines. It is a standpoint that proves significant in influencing his
entire perspective of the incarnation. Ramsey sums Gore’s stance up perfectly:
To Chares
Gore, the incarnation was inherently miraculous, and the miracles accompanying
it stood attested by good historical evidence, unless blind prejudice against
the miraculous gave bias to an historian’s mind. Miracle was to him the
vindication of freedom of the living God, intervening to restore a created
world wrecked and disordered by sin.
To Gore’s mind, miracles are God’s
action working upon creation. They are born out of love and compassion for a
broken world. The incarnation is itself a miracle of God’s making, as he
intervenes to heal humanity of the sinfulness that disorders creation. To Gore,
God the Creator is not subject to the laws which he himself creates in nature.
In fact, Gore considers that the miracle accounts provide an essential insight
into Christ’s person and purpose, and as such also the example of priesthood we
see exhibited through Him. The miracle accounts broaden our understanding of Christ’s
priesthood and its importance for the created order.
As Christ is both supernatural and
the consummation of nature’s order, to deny the miracles is to Gore tantamount
to Arianism. If
Christ is indeed the ‘legitimate climax of natural development’ and completes
the incompleteness of the natural order, no longer does it seem consistent, to
Gore, to uphold arguments against Christ’s miracles from the point of view that
they are incompatible with nature, because what is revealed in Christ suggests
to Gore quite the reverse.
We may notice here something
significant about the way Gore approaches his argument. He is not using the
miracle stories as justification for Christ’s divinity, but Christ’s divinity
as justification for the miracles. In turn, the miracles become supports for
Gore’s particular interpretation of what Christ’s divinity means. Apparently working
from Augustine’s definition that a miracle is not contrary to nature, but
simply what is known about nature,
Gore applies his interpretation of Christ as both supernatural and natural to
assert proof for the ‘miraculous personality’ of Christ, a view also supported
by Illingworth. Accordingly,
far from being irrational or discredited, Gore considers that miracles make
perfect sense and are consistent with all the evidence at hand if one accepts
Christ to be fully divine. We are then left asking what divine characteristic
do we see reflected through these miraculous events?
For Gore, the miracles reveal who Christ
really is: what his personhood and personality look like. Following Gore’s
thought: if Christ is divine and that divinity is what convinces us of the
validity of the miracle accounts, then the unfolding of these miraculous events
should reveal to us something of that divine personality. What we notice most
obviously is that nearly all of the miracles are born, on some level, out of
compassion and love: a desire to heal, mend, feed, protect, save…
What is more, Gore considers that
miracles are not only apparent in and through the person of Christ, but
continually taking place in the ‘ordinary course of events’ through the divine
power present in creation. It is only because of sin that humanity has become
blinded to them, because ‘sin has blinded his (or her) spiritual eye’.
A person freed from the distortion that sin has placed upon his or her
spiritual vision would be able to move imminently closer to the divine goodness
once again: an imminence reflected in unique bodily form in Christ. We may
therefore conclude that it is Christ’s priestly personality that enables
humanity to glimpse the divine more fully and see the miraculous in the world
around them, because Christ’s priestly qualities enable humanity to gain a purer
spiritual vision and show God’s power working in the midst of creation, to heal
it and give it new life.
Whilst we may or may not be convinced
by Gore’s arguments asserting the validity of the miracle accounts, we must now
ponder where this leaves Gore’s understanding of the person of Christ, if we
are also to discover more about his thoughts on priesthood. For instance, we must ask whether such
qualities would render Christ less than human on account of his ability to
transcend what we may consider as being normal human experience. After all,
normal human beings are not often credited with having the gift of performing
miracles!
Gore considers that the evidence of
Christ’s ability to perform miracles does not equate to a limiting of his human
credentials. Miracles are an expression of Christ being more fully natural –
the crown or completion of nature. For Gore, Christ is able to perform miracles
precisely because in Him humanity is perfected – ultimately natural. He is so
in touch with the divine creative spirit evident in nature that it is able to
work through him. This involves a transcending of the constraints that we
experience in our present relationship with creation, constraints resulting
from our own sinfulness and distancing from God. Therefore, one is left pondering:
is this the kind of human nature evident in Adam before the fall?
In answer, Gore does consider Christ to
be the second Adam, returning humanity to its pre-fallen state in order to
advance it towards an evolutionary completion. To Gore’s mind, such a completion
requires humanity to rediscover elements of its pre-fallen personality. Gore is
not suggesting that human evolution will eventually produce superpowers, but
that the progressive fulfilment of human nature, seen most fully in Christ, is
at the same time a growing into union with God who is nature’s Lord. And so, in
Christ we see miracles not as actions of his human nature alone, but of human
nature in perfect union with the divine.
Prior to the Fall we see humanity
basking in the radiance of good relationship with God. There is something about
humanity’s pre-fallen personality that enables Adam to relate to God in a way
that is just not possible following his disobedience and humanity’s resulting fall
from grace. According to Gore, in Christ we see a return to that pre-fallen
personality as he exhibits the traits necessary to live in full relationship
with God. In Christ, the image of God implanted at creation is perfected. But
it is Christ’s priestly credentials that enable us to live life in the Spirit,
changing us to be like him, transforming our knowledge and action, and nurturing
the image of God more fully within us, and so helping us grow towards a heathier
relationship with God.
Given that Gore believes that Christ’s
priesthood offers the means to restore the previously broken relationship, what
are his thoughts on Christ and whether or not he sinned? And does it have any
bearing on our understanding of the nature of Christ’s priesthood?
d)
Did Christ sin?
As we discovered earlier, it is
Gore’s belief that humanity is created to be in relationship with God, to be
embraced by his divine goodness. Humanity’s sinfulness, however, has separated it
from that divine goodness. Theologians as recent as O’Collins have pondered the
question of whether Christ sinned.
For Gore, as with O’Collins, the evidence for such a claim is unconvincing.
Indeed, Gore would claim that the patristic evidence would strongly oppose such
an argument.
Gore, employing a line of reasoning strongly paralleling that of Gregory of
Nyssa, states; ‘in the first place humanity in Him is sinless… (all the
evidence suggests that) in every form temptation was rejected’.
O’Collins argues that, ‘sin is to be
attributed to the person and is a personal offence against God’.
To sin is to act in a way that hurts God and so causes a breakdown in
relationship with him. From this perspective, sin is a distancing from God, a
damaging of relationship between humanity and God. Gore seems to adhere to this
interpretation and claims that in Christ both divinity and humanity find no
separation and are fully and completely united. In Christ we see humanity and divinity
in perfect relation; each inseparably seen in their fullest expression.
Therefore, to Gore, it makes no sense to infer that Christ could betray his
essence by embracing sin, because to do so would, to Gore’s mind, mean deceiving
his own divine characteristics. So, continuing to follow this line of thought, Gore
considers it preposterous to suggest that Christ sinned. Christ, he claims, is
sinless precisely because sin is not natural. Christ’s sinlessness is not a
mark of him being unnatural, but a mark of him being completely and more fully
natural than those corrupted by sin.
By association, Gore reveals
something significant about the human condition that may have significant
consequences for our understanding of priesthood. According to Gore, Christ
exhibits no conflict in his personhood, and that personhood is both fully divine
and fully human. If, then, his divine attributes prohibit him from sinning and
this does not limit his humanity, it follows that a sinful nature is not a
natural part of the complete human form. Sin, then, is not natural to the human
condition. Thus, sinless humanity is the more natural and desirable state. This
is a state we see exhibited most perfectly in Christ. Christ’s priestly
credentials stand as a blueprint for ministerial orders in the Church, in which
encouraging the resistance of evil and the repentance of wrongdoing are
important facets in order to inspire humanity to enter more readily into deepening
relationship with God.
At this point, Gore returns to a more
traditional exposition of Christology and his distinctive quasi-evolutionary
Christological approach drops to the background. He remains steadfast in his
conviction about the amount of evidence justifying Christ’s truly human nature.
Christ lived a fully human life, was born, taught, was tempted and died.
Everything about His life suggests that he lived a ‘really human existence’.
Even his own consciousness of his
full unity with the Father does not, in Gore’s understanding, limit this human
experience. He
ponders: ‘there was present to him the consciousness of his unique Sonship,
but that consciousness did not interfere with his properly human growth’.
We see the divine Sonship asserted to him at the River Jordan
and during his ministerial life, but his full understanding of his divine inheritance
does not limit his development as a human, in any regard. Even at the point of
death, the pain of human suffering is not held from him and he enters into the
plea of every suffering human heart, ‘My Father,
if it is possible, let this cup pass from me’.
And so, what is it, if he is so
perfectly human, that sets Christ apart as the supreme archetype? For Gore, it
is a combination of his ability to resist all temptation, his life of constant
prayer
and the way he exhibits perfect human and yet fully divine qualities and so
offers fallen humanity a route back to the Father. He says, ‘In the person of
the Incarnate we see how true it has been all along that man is in God’s image:
for this is man, Jesus of Nazareth; his qualities are human qualities, love and
justice, self-sacrifice and desire and compassion; yet they are the qualities
of none other than the very God’.
There is no compromise or condition
upon God becoming man, since from the very beginning man was made in God’s
image. This has left God free at the opportune time to express himself as man
and yet not limit his own revelation of himself.
The traits we see in Christ are the traits we see in the Father and the Spirit,
and as is appropriate they are in perfect relation to one another as they
portray the ‘ultimate’ reality. In Christ we do not see the limited character
of a creature but of ‘God himself’.
And so, as Athanasius points out, Christ ‘sanctified the body by being in it’,
and all creation along with it.
In his humanity, Christ realigns the broken human condition so that it may
fulfil its potential and offers the same to all those in communion with him.
What is more, in Christ’s personhood we see God in human form: in Christ we see
the unveiling of God.
And what is the marked quality we see in this unveiling? According to Gore, ‘we
are taught by the incarnation that the quality of the divine personality is
love…the world apart from Christ gives us no adequate assurance that God is
love,’
and so ‘God cannot come any closer to man, man cannot come any nearer to God,
than is effected in Him.’
All of this has deep and long-running
consequences for our understanding of Christ, because, as Gore continues; ‘the
relation which love holds to justice or to any other quality in him, is the
relation which it holds in the ultimate reality; his aims are God’s aims; his
will God’s will; his victory God’s victory’.
Christ is the essence of priestly life, in which prayer, resisting temptation
to sin and nurturing a deep relationship with God are all key. The qualities of
love, service, truth, justice, self-sacrifice and compassion all feature
prominently.
These are all attributes that we see
expressed most fully in the events surrounding Christ’s death and resurrection.
In order to move our understanding on, we will now explore how Gore considers that
these two defining events influence our understanding of Christ’s salvific
nature and priestly existence.
e)
The Resurrection and Ascension; Drawing us back into Relationship
with God
According to what we have just
explored, Gore believes that sinless humanity is the more natural and desirable
state. This is a state we see exhibited in Christ. In him we see the most
authentic personality of God.
Gore informs us of how, in Christ, God ‘has shown that he is alive; in human
nature he has given glimpses of his mind and character’.
Through Christ, we see that God is unqualified love; extreme love; ultimate
love. He is the consummation of the Old Testament prophecies partly because in
him, this love is intertwined with his faithfulness, justice, compassion and
truth, all divine traits recognisable throughout the Hebrew Scriptures.
Thus, through these traits we are also struck by how alike we can be to Him;
and yet because of sin, how different we remain.
Gore considers Christ’s priestly
credentials important in order for humanity to enter more readily into
relationship with God. In the incarnation, we see both revelation and
reconciling action. Sinless nature being the more desirable state, and following
Christ’s priestly example, resisting evil and repentance for any wrong doing
are attributes that the Church and its ministerial orders are to promote so
that humanity may aspire towards a higher spiritual state, ultimately communion
with God. Christ is the essence of the priestly life.
According to Gore, it is the
paradoxical mix of his humiliating death with his love and faithfulness that
provide the backdrop for his victory and our redemption. Through them he is
able to consume our inability to reach the mark. As Gore continues; through his
self-sacrificial death ‘he took upon himself all that tells against divine
love, all that has ever wrung from men’s hearts the bitter words of unbelief,
or the more chastened cry of agonizing enquiry’
For Gore, Christ does this in three ways. First, he reveals the truth about
God. Second, he re-establishes the conditions for relationship and enables that
relationship to flourish. Third, by living a fully human life and dying an
agonizing human death, and by facing all the temptations, humiliation and fear
that terrorises the human condition, but doing so with dignity, acceptance and
uncorrupted moral character, Christ opens the possibility for every person to
relate to him and find assurance in him. And so, in Christ God draws near. Thornton
develops this thinking some years later by saying, ‘the probation and the
ordeal of his voluntary self-oblation were the divine answer to the sin of the
world.’
For Gore, the world, having been torn
apart by the ravages of sin, required Christ not just to perfect all that had
gone before, but also to redeem lost humanity. To steal a phrase from Ramsey;
‘hence Christus Consummator must needs also be Christus Redemptor…’
Before this could be realised, however, there had to be his agonising and
humiliating death. The cross banishes all that stands in God’s way. As Thornton
further identifies, ‘this humiliation was only temporary; for he whom we thus
contemplate has now been crowned with glory and honour…that which belonged to
the plan of creation has now been won; but only because Jesus suffered and
died’.
For Gore, it was the faithfulness, the humility, the love at the point of death
that brought about the spoils. And so the bitter taste of death and failure is
transformed into the voluptuous banquet of resurrection, and with it fresh hope
for humanity once lost.
St Gregory of Nyssa has something
significant to offer here. Gregory outlines how God’s victorious act through
the paschal mystery is revealed in the gospel’s realignment of our
understanding of power. He says, ‘let us penetrate the successive events of the
gospel story, in which the union of power with love for man is displayed… That
the omnipotent nature was capable of descending to man’s lowly position is
clearer evidence of power than supernatural miracles.’
It is in this realignment of power that
we see true kingdom values breaking through. Their presence on earth brings
humanity closer to the heavenly realm and God’s divine purpose. For Gore, all
of this is captured in one significant phrase, ‘God is love!’
This realignment of power is
significant for Gore because, ‘Jesus as an essential Son of the Father reveals
no other love than God’s, and by His resurrection from the dead manifests that
love triumphant through all seeming failure’.
Consequently, the glory of God is brought to bear through the vulnerability,
meekness and submissiveness of Christ combined with His divine authority.
For Gore, the tragedy of the Cross is
central to salvation as indeed is the power of the Resurrection. The two are
completely necessary and inseparable in his understanding of atonement. Gore
often infuses his thoughts on the subject of atonement into his wider
deliberations. This adds a level of complexity to our task, as any atonement
theory evident in his writings are inextricably bound up with other aspects of
his theology. All the same, from what he does reveal of his thinking on
atonement, he appears to draw on a number of Christian soteriological
typologies. In Myers’ opinion, Christian thought on atonement can be broken
down into a number of significant typologies: Christ the second Adam, Christ
the sacrifice, Christ the teacher, Christ the brother, Christ the law-giver and
Christ the healer.
At different stages of his writing, Gore uses terminology that one could
associate with many of these classifications. We get an insight into Gore’s
thoughts on atonement on an occasion when he discusses the issue directly:
Is there
not an immense difference between the effect upon men’s minds of a mere
announcement of free forgiveness and the effect upon them of a covenant of free
forgiveness brought at so tremendous a price as the death of the Son of God?
The reason for the fearful price paid to win forgiveness seems to be found
rightly by St Paul in the necessity for guarding the revelation of the divine
mercy from all associations of easy going indulgence or indifference to sin. It
was guarded by the Sacrifice; and it was God himself who paid the price.
Gore seems to suggest that Christ’s
death was necessary in order to reveal to humanity how precious the gift of
relationship to God truly is. In such a way, the incarnation brings all peoples
into ‘the light of Christ’, where they will be judged by their relationship to
him’. And so Christ establishes himself as ‘the
second Adam’ bringing all people ‘age by age into relation to himself’ until he
may ‘come again… as the acknowledged centre and head of humanity and the
universe.
As we touched upon earlier, Gore
considers the incarnation to be about enabling life to be lived in the Spirit;
a rebuilding of relationship by God’s own miraculous intervention in the person
of his Son. This includes teaching and revelation, but more than that it is an
infusing of Christ’s life into us by the work of the Spirit, which in turn
transforms our knowledge and action. In these we see Christ’s priestly identity
at work.
Gore clearly sees the high price of Christ’s death as necessary for humanity’s
free forgiveness, by revealing to humanity the true value of good relationship
to God. He offers an amnesty for previous destructive behaviour. It is through
this forgiveness that the relationship begins its restoration
and through revelation that this forgiveness is unveiled for humanity to grasp,
but it is a forgiveness brought at a great price.
Christ’s sacrifice necessarily secures freedom from sin and wrenches such
freedom away from evil intent, sanctifying the human condition as it goes. This
divine action transforms us from within. In so doing, Christ provides the means
by which the true self-sacrificial and loving personality of God is revealed,
the conditions of relationship laid down and the prospect of deepening relationship
between God and humanity is restored.
Gore understands Christ to be the embodiment
of uncorrupted humanity, whilst also portraying the very attributes of God.
Through the nature of his death Christ absorbs death into the divine life. He
subsequently removes the power of the fear of death through the resurrection,
because only by rising again does Christ truly conquer the power that death has
to drive fear into human hearts.
Gore sums all of this up perfectly in the opening paragraphs of his Bampton
lectures:
Christianity
is faith in a certain person Jesus Christ, and by faith in Him is meant such
unreserved self-committal as is only possible, because faith in Jesus is
understood to be faith in God and union with Jesus union with God. True
Christianity is thus a personal relationship – the conscious deliberate
adhesion of men (and women) to know their weakness, their sin, their
fallibility, to a redeemer whom they know to be supreme, sinless, infallible.
We may note in this
passage how Gore places faith and union side by side as significant factors.
Whilst Gore may well see faith as being concerned with revelation, knowledge
and action, his use of union here reveals his understanding that something much
deeper is at work within each believer. And so, to Gore, Christ is healer,
teacher, sacrifice, restorer, redemptor, sanctifier, exemplar and much more
besides.
But how is this to
effect the individual? Gore’s answer is simple, but not necessarily easy. To
Gore, a response required; every person needs to want to take the actions
necessary to restore the relationship. Right action and intent from the
individual are important if the benefits of Christ’s sacrifice are to be fully received.
The individual needs to move towards God as God moves closer to them. Gore is
consistent here with his fellow Lux Mundi contributor, Lyttelton. Lyttelton claims,
‘The isolation of the truth about the atonement from other parts of Christian
doctrine has led to a mode of stating it which deprives us of all the motive to
action, of all responsibility for our own salvation… this error springs from
ignoring his (Christ’s) perfect humanity’.
This is essential to
our understanding of what Gore has to offer our notion of priesthood. He
considers that the nature of true Christian priesthood is to reveal, lead and
realign humanity towards the redemptive rewards won by Christ through his
sacrifice on the cross and his glorious resurrection. How does Gore consider
that ministerial orders can do this most effectively? Simply by drawing their
priesthood from Christ and promoting those attributes of behaviour, teaching
and personality discernible through his priestly existence.
The author of the
Hebrews tells us that ‘when Christ had
offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand
of God’.
Westcott considers that this singular passage ‘marks a unique dignity of the
ascended Christ. Priests stand in their ministry, angels stand or fall
prostrate before the Divine Majesty; but the Son shares the Father’s throne. As
priest, as intercessor, he reigns still, reigns in his glorious manhood’, so that ‘every word of
Christ is seen to be a sacrifice and a victory’. Like Westcott, Gore is
convinced that, by standing as the completion of the sacrificial mosaic
priesthood and after the order of Melchizedek, Christ’s supreme example laid
down in his self-sacrificial life and death and certified through his resurrection
and ascension leaves an authoritative moral system, not of prescriptive rules
necessarily, but certainly for the formation of Christian character. As
formation develops so the individual is more open to the Spirit working within.
Christ’s priesthood, then, is the supreme priesthood, the perfect example; the
par excellence to which all those called into ordained ministry in the Church
must aspire. Christ sets the context for all subsequent priestly work in the
Church.
As we explored
earlier, the incarnate Christ provides Gore with a model for how humanity is
designed to be. Furthermore, he
recognises in Christ both the prophetic and transformative being equally at work,
without separation. Christ
is ‘Prophet, Priest and King’.
As prophet he reveals the divine life. As priest he realigns humanity’s
disordered desire. As king he leads humanity towards free forgiveness,
redemption and, ultimately, eternal life. Christ
provides access to redemption and in his exemplary high priesthood sits
ascended in glory. This eternally present reality leaves, for Gore, moral obligation
on behalf of humanity to respond, if it is to be drawn by the Spirit into the
eternal life Christ offers. He says, ‘let anyone who would be a sincere
disciple contemplate steadily the moral character expressed in the words of
Jesus Christ and exhibited in His actions… he needs must also be filled with a
great dread, on account of the tremendous standard which is there before him’.
Here, the Church and
its ecclesiastical offices have a leading part to play. Because Christ leaves
such a clear moral imperative and sets the example, the Church has an
obligation to strive to make the ideal a reality and reveal the works of God
through the incarnate and ascended Christ afresh to each new generation. As
individuals are transformed by the life of Christ growing within them, through
by the work of the Spirit, so they become better acquainted with the person and
nature of Christ and more aware of God’s power. Gore states, ‘As Son of man he
shows us what human nature should be, individually and socially, and supplies
us with the motives and the means for making the ideal real’. The motive, then, is our
salvation and the means, the Church and its ministerial orders.
Gore considers that Christ
is not just a supreme example, not just a figure in history, but is alive
through the resurrection and reigning eternally in heaven. His humanity places
him in the closest possible relation to us and through it he has experience and
understanding of our innermost being and personality. Because of his divinity,
Christ knows of what we are made in a mystical and not just metaphysical sense.
By sending his Spirit he is alive in our hearts and the timeless example of the
Gospels. The forces for good we see in him are also present in us through his
Spirit. It is this Spirit that indwells his Church: its traditions, its
ministerial orders and each believer. But what further part does the Church and
its ministerial orders have to play, according Gore’s understanding?
f)
The Church an Extension of the
Incarnation
In the last section, we explored how,
for Gore, the tragedy of the Cross is central to salvation as indeed is the
power of the resurrection. He believes that Christ’s death was necessary in
order to reveal to humanity the importance of relationship to God. Christ’s
sacrifice secures freedom from sin, sanctifying the human condition as it goes.
In so doing, Christ provides the means by which the true loving personality of
God is revealed, the conditions for renewed relationship are laid down and the
prospect of deepening relationship with God restored.
Gore believes Christ to be the embodiment
of uncorrupted humanity, whilst portraying the very attributes of God. Through
the nature of his death, Christ absorbs death into the divine life and removes
the power of the fear of death by his resurrection.
For Gore, the Church is consequently an
‘extension of the incarnation’: it continues what Christ began by revealing
God’s works of salvation to each new age.
The Church strives to unveil the glory of the Incarnate Lord so that those
ignorant of the salvation won through Christ may enter into relationship with him
and so that the faithful may move deeper into the sacrificial offering of the
paschal mystery: Christ’s self-giving act of salvation completed through the
cross, resurrection and ascension. This is because, to Gore, Christ is always
the exemplar of any ministry undertaken in his name: he is the great high priest.
Ministerial orders of the Church are called under his authority and must be
ever mindful of the protocol he lays down. Whilst they can never fully
replicate him, they are nonetheless called to extol such values as are
essential to any good functioning of the priesthood in Christ’s name. They are
called to make him known in the world, so that through him every human may come
to know God more completely and recognise Christ’s life being worked within
them by the Spirit. Christ is ‘Prophet, Priest and King’.
He is the great high priest. Authentic priestly values are, then, only to be
found in the example laid down by Christ, and through them humanity is infused
by the Spirit and may gain fleeting glimpses of God’s heavenly values breaking
through.
In previous sections in this chapter,
we discovered what Gore considered some of the main attributes of Christ’s
priestly example looked like. As a consequence, these are, for Gore, also
characteristic elements of the Church’s ministerial orders if that ministry is
to have authenticity and follow Christ’s supreme model of priesthood. It is
worth reminding ourselves of what these are before moving on. For Gore, the
priesthood must:
§ Point towards/reveal the highest
moral good that is God
§ Make God more fully known by
revealing the divine personality - love
§ Encourage humanity to live in that
love so that their spiritual vision might be enlightened
§ Enable humanity to live more in tune
with the indwelling Holy Spirit at work within them and evident in the created
order
§ Help each human being live more
authentically according to the image that God has implanted in them at
creation, helping them grow into a healthier relationship with him
§ Help humanity to recognise that
sinlessness is the more natural human state, enabling humanity to deepen union
with God by:
o
Resisting
evil and temptation
o
Repentance
of previous wrongdoing
o
Increased
prayerfulness
§ Call humanity to repentance -
revealing how previous divisions caused by disobedience to God (sin) may be
reconciled
§ Reveal the means for reconciliation –
healing the broken relationship
§ Offer an example based on moral
integrity: love, compassion, service and self-sacrifice
§ Looking to Christ as prophet, priest
and king,
the Church and its ministerial orders are to reveal, realign and lead humanity’s
disordered desire towards the redemptive rewards of free forgiveness and
eternal life won by Christ
In Gore’s understanding, these elements
can only be aspired to in the Church and its ministerial orders by studying,
contemplating and promoting Christ’s attributes of behaviour, teaching and
personality – most notably love, compassion, forgiveness and prayerfulness. The
ministerial priesthood is called to act as an aid in revealing the divine
goodness drawing near and an instrument for the restoration of relationship to
God. Such divine goodness is never more evident
than in the incarnation. For Gore, this is where the Church, its ministry and
its mission must always be grounded, because as he declares, ‘it is a
satisfactory consideration that the Church is naturally of a piece with the incarnation,
the fruits of which it perpetuates… and has finality which belongs to its very
essence’.
As Christ is the
second volume of the divine revelation, Gore sees the Church and its
ministerial orders as forming the bridge between Christ’s incarnation and the
final chapter when all things will be gathered to the divine goodness through
Christ. In evaluating this line of thought, Cox rightly concludes that; ‘the
life of the church, then, becomes a necessary implication of incarnational
dogma.’
Gore sees the Church as the ‘Body of Christ’... ‘the extension and perpetuation
of the incarnation in the world’,
because it embodies the principles of Christ and infuses and enfolds the lives
of its members with his life.
It is this ‘life’
that makes the Church Christ’s continuing body in the temporal world by way of
his Spirit. For as Gore expounds; ‘if our Lord is our example and sacrifice, he
is also, by the infusion of his Spirit, our present inward life, “the life of
life”: that if the Church exists to uphold a moral standard, she exists also as
a body ensolved by a Spirit who makes that standard practicable.’
It is this inward Spirit that provides each believer with every right moral
action and thought. And so Gore concludes, ‘in light of this principle one can
see why it is that our sins may be forgiven us ‘in the name of Jesus’; why the
sacrament of our incorporation into Christ is also the sacrament of plenary
absolution and we can confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.’
As Cox so eloquently puts it;
Gore
claimed that the Church intentionally reflected the incarnation. Jesus’ calling
of disciples, bestowing of rites and claiming to be the Messiah of a new
kingdom all indicated to Gore a clear dominical design. Never coexistive with
the kingdom of God, the Church nevertheless represents the kingdom on earth as
a visible society, which is the body of Christ.
The ordained
ministries of the Church today find themselves planted into this worldly ‘visible
society’ but must remain focused upon the heavenly realm. The kingdom has not
yet come, but the Church’s ministerial orders should desire to move earth ever
closer to heaven. They stand mindful of their immense calling to help teach,
nurture and reveal to a people too often inclined to want to remain in the
decay of the worldly, a new life infused with Christ’s life and transformed by
the Spirit, a heavenly kingdom breaking into this temporal realm: a kingdom
disclosed most exceptionally in the incarnate Christ.
g)
Concluding Thoughts
For Gore, the
incarnation was primarily about humanity’s individual and corporate
transformation through a process of example, revelation and invocation of the
Spirit. The incarnation was the entering into the world of a first step towards
the formation of a society of transformed people, the Church, called to live as
salt and light in the world. This society is called to make visible the
blessings of Christ, partly in doctrines and local rituals, but most especially
in the sharing of spiritual realities and experiences through unity and
communion. The incarnation, to Gore, is about drawing people into belonging to
a body of transformed people, which the Spirit infuses and invigorates, drawing
them deeper into the life of Christ who leads them towards the eternal source
of goodness in God the Father.
Chapter 2: The Evidence of History
a)
Introduction
Charles Gore believes that the
Church’s formation and development was intentional on the part of Jesus, and is
the next stage of his masterplan for unveiling the love of God upon the world
following his incarnation.
He deems the books of the New Testament,
the writings of the apostolic and sub-apostolic eras, and the wider historical
picture, to provide irrefutable evidence for this.
Gore also considers the ordained ministry within the structuring of the Church
(consisting of bishops, priests and deacons) to be divinely instituted, and
believes that the evidence of history helps to substantiate his stance.
During the course of this chapter, we
will look to draw out the significant points of Gore’s argument and use
supporting evidence to explain his position. It would, however, require an
entire thesis in itself to look in depth at all the evidence that Gore provides
to justify his conclusions regarding the ministerial ordering of the Church and
associated areas. Therefore, this chapter will aspire to being appropriately
selective in its investigations. First, it will look to uncover how Gore
considers the Church to find its focus for structural and spiritual unity in
the teachings and oversight of the apostles. Then it will unearth how Gore
interprets evidence from the apostolic and sub-apostolic eras as pointing, with
remarkable clarity and consistency, to the early church settling into an
ordering of ministry which consists of three independent orders of bishops,
priests and deacons, with the authority given to the first apostles being
passed down through successive generations of bishops via apostolic succession.
In order to explore this adequately,
we will need to examine Gore’s historical justification for his belief in the
validity of the ministerial ordering of the Church, and look at the evidence
Gore provides for the existence of the Church and the forms it takes. It will
not be our purpose to provide an assessment of Gore’s claims in the light of
contemporary historical scholarship and the evidence it has amassed, but simply
to understand the nature of Gore’s claims, and the ways in which he read and
deployed the evidence. First, in the sub-section entitled ‘The Foundation of
the Church’, we will uncover how Gore believes Christ intended the Church to be
structured to ensure continuity and authenticity in its teaching and function
as it developed following his ascension. Then, in the sub-section entitled
‘Common Unity of the Church’, we will discuss Gore’s justification for his
claim that the Church’s unity is to be found through continuity with the
teaching and oversight of the apostles, amidst rich local diversity. Finally,
in the sub-section entitled ‘The Threefold Ministry and Apostolic Succession’,
we will explore how Gore considers the ministerial ordering of the Church to be
a constitutive factor of this teaching and oversight. We will also observe how this
develops into the threefold ordering of bishops, priests and deacons so
familiar with us today, and how Gore considers the Church down the ages to
maintain its authenticity through a line of succession of first apostles and
then bishops, continuing down to the church of today.
So then, let us begin by pondering
the first of these matters, the foundation of the Church.
b)
The Foundation of the Church
To begin his investigation, Gore
considers there to be one glaring question that needs considering concerning
the authenticity of the Church and its structures. We find his answer to this
concern providing the bedrock for his entire thinking around the Church and its
ministerial orders. The question may be put this way: did Christ intend his
legacy to be entwined with the ministerial formation of the Church, or was his
intention for a more free-flowing dissemination of his truth through more
versatile means? Or as Gore puts it:
The
question is whether believers were left to organise themselves in societies by
the natural attraction of sympathy in beliefs and aims, and are, therefore,
still at liberty to organise themselves on any model which seems from time to
time to promise the best results, or whether the Divine Founder of the
Christian religion Himself instituted a society, a brotherhood, to be the home
of the grace and truth which he came to bring to men: so that becoming his
disciple, meant from the first this – in a real sense this only – incorporation
into a society.
For Gore, the answer has far reaching
consequences for the way we view the Church. If the body of believers are
simply a locally organised group who are free to adapt according to whichever
sympathies are prevalent at a given time, then the nature of the society to
which they are members is in many ways of human origin – primarily organised
according to human discretion and influence. This would mean that structures,
teaching and ordering would all be open to change according to the prevailing
fashion or sympathies of a given era or location.
If, on the other hand, there is an
origin of divine direction behind the Church and the way it is ordered then it
follows that the Church is not something created by humans in response to their
reflections upon God’s action in the world, but it is God’s action in the world. As Gore clarifies: ‘If this was the
case, the Church was not created by men, nor can it be recreated from time to
time in view of varying circumstances. It comes upon men from above. It makes
the claim of a divine institution. It has the authority of Christ’.
According to this view, the Church is an extension of the Incarnation, the next
stage of the divine masterplan and, through the Spirit, the life it breathes is
the very life of Christ himself.
This conclusion is in glaring
opposition to his fellow bishop, Lightfoot, who concludes that the Church and
its ministry is more heavily influenced by human origin and social need than
divine direction.
This is a stance that Gore simply cannot accept and he is in good company, most
notably in line with the Anglican Divine, Richard Hooker. In Book 5, Chapter 77
of his ‘Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity’, Hooker describes the ordained
ministry as ‘ministers of God as from whom their authority is derived and not
from men’.
Lightfoot’s conclusions attribute the Church’s development to a historical
process of human influence, whereas Gore (and Hooker) insist upon a far greater
acknowledgement of divine inventiveness and involvement.
Gore acknowledges the attraction of
concluding that Christ intended a more fluid process through which his truth
could be disseminated across the world, without the need for a united society
of believers structured under a system of ministerial ordering, but considers
such a conclusion to be at odds with the wider evidence provided by the New
Testament and early church tradition. Gore interprets that evidence in outline
as follows:
1.
Christ
chose to work in and through a small band of followers, who come to be known as
the Apostles.
2.
These
twelve are in the privileged position of witnessing Christ’s teaching, actions
and life events first hand.
3.
In
the period leading up to and during his trial, death, resurrection and
ascension, the Gospel evidence portrays Christ instructing apostles to expand
and grow the society of believers according to the direction and example he has
laid down.
4.
In
this way the Church finds its foundation and formation in Christ himself.
5.
Almost
immediately, apostles begin implementing a structure of ministerial ordering
within each local church.
Does this suggest that Gore does not
see surrounding society and culture having an influence in shaping the Church
as it is being established? Not at all. Cox offers a helpful commentary on
Gore’s ecclesiological thinking in this regard when he notes that whilst Gore
concedes that the Jewish background and Greco-Roman surroundings will have
shaped some periphery marks of the Church, it nevertheless grew from Jesus’
deliberate design and intention in every significant way.
Gore believes that the New Testament reveals evidence clearly portraying a
method behind Christ’s plans for how believers were to be drawn into his life
through the Spirit. This ‘method’ exposes Christ’s true intention for the way
in which this gathered society of believers was to be developed and ordered
into the future. Gore says:
We can conceive … easily enough how
our Lord might have cast the truth which he came to teach mankind broadcast
over society, and left to make its own way. But the more you examine the
Gospels, the more you will note that his method was not in fact this, but the
opposite. More and more he concentrates all his efforts on that little band
beside him, whom by steady discipline he was preparing the nucleus of his new
and distinctive society.
Cox is once again obliging in helping
us outline how in Gore’s understanding ‘Jesus’ calling of disciples, his
bestowing of rites and his claiming to be Messiah of a new kingdom all pointed
to clear intentionality. Whilst (for Gore) the Church is not to be equated with
the kingdom of God, the Church does represent that kingdom on earth as a
visible society which is the Body of Christ’.
It is certainly true that Gore considers Christ to have instituted a society
into which all Christians are called, a point clearly evident when he states:
‘Christ did not, according to this view, encourage his disciples to form
societies; he instituted a society for them to belong to as the means of
belonging to him.
Gore is not only adamant that the
Church was instituted by Christ, but that it is the only mechanism through
which Christ’s truth is to be disseminated in the world. He continues:
We should
notice that so deeply was it impressed upon the mind of the primitive church
that Jesus (if the expression may be pardoned) staked his all on the Church,
that there does not appear the least suggestion in the New Testament that this
great salvation or his covenant of grace is to be found outside it. There is,
in other words, no idea to be found there of a membership of Christ which is
not also membership in the Church which is the New Israel.
According to Gore, the Church begins
with a small group of individuals who Christ chooses to focus all of his
attentions upon, teaching them by word and example before encouraging them to
go out into the world to grow their number according to the parameters he has
laid down. Through them, Christ is the Church’s foundation and focus.
From this standpoint we will now move
on to discover, how Gore considers that the Church is united through its
authentic adherence to the apostle’s teaching and authority, apostolic
succession and ministerial orders. He says: ‘It is in fact impossible to
exaggerate the intimacy with which the episcopal succession is bound up with
the fixed canon of scripture and the permanent and stable creed to constitute
what can rightly be called ‘historical Christianity’’.
Therefore, we will now move to
consider the Church’s mechanisms for common unity in more depth, and this will
naturally lead us to consider what Gore has to say about ministerial ordering
and apostolic succession.
c)
Common Unity of the Church
In considering what constitutes this
sacred society of believers, Gore draws upon Newman’s earlier doctrine of the
‘visible Church’. Newman eloquently translates the Church as ‘the gift which
Christ let drop from him as the mantle from Elijah, the pledge and token of his
never failing grace from age to age’.
Gore is not one for indulging in the beautiful poetic language of this earlier
churchman, nor does he come to all the same conclusions regarding
denominational superiority,
but he does share Newman’s concern to assert the central importance of the temporal
visible society of united believers representing and providing access to the
perfect eternally worshipful society of heaven.
In so doing, Gore is keen to impress
upon his readers that the temporal church maintains its authenticity through
its allegiance to the apostolic teaching and ordering. For Waddell, Gore
communicates a conviction that, ‘Apostolic faith and order belong together as a
part of the ‘transmitted trust’… the early church was in no doubt on this
score’.
It is certainly true that, for Gore, the early church evidence points to Christ
having formed a society into which all early Christians were called. It is also
clear to Gore that this society found a common unity through its belief in Christ
and in certain structures, principles and beliefs passed down and defended from
error by the apostles’ teaching and oversight. In this way the apostles’
teaching and oversight is regarded as the focus for unity from the very outset
of the formation of the Church following Christ’s ascension.
Justifying his stance, Gore draws
upon evidence to be found within the New Testament, especially the Gospels. He
uses St Matthew’s Gospel as one example, and claims we can identify clear
intention in that Gospel regarding how the Church was to be ordered and
exercise authority. He says: ‘St Matthew’s Gospel ascribes to our Lord with
much greater distinctiveness the intention to found his Church – his new
Israel: a body representing him and exercising authority over its members in
his name.’
Thirty years later, Knox concurs with this overall assessment by Gore when he
outlines how the apostles ‘were given the privilege of a peculiarly close
association with (Jesus) in order that after his departure they might be able
to carry on the task of preaching to all mankind the salvation which he had
come to earth to bring men’.
Whilst the Gospels speak to Gore of
Christ’s intentions for the Church, the book of Acts shows that church actually
growing up into an ordered society under the apostle’s tutelage and this, to
his mind, demanded a certain level of allegiance. Acts provides hard evidence
for the way the Church was to mature under the apostle’s guidance,
and pondering the importance of the Church for salvation, Gore pleads for his
readers to ‘notice with what clearness the religion of Jesus Christ appears in
history as a visible society, and nothing else than a visible society. Its
story is told simply enough in the Acts of the Apostles. In that book being a
Christian means nothing else than membership in the visible body, the Church.’ In order to get a better grasp of this, let
us explore in more depth the overall testimony Gore appears to draw from
various passages in Acts in order to come to this conclusion and what these
passages say to Gore about the concept of the Church.
The book of Acts speaks to Gore about
the spreading Christian movement and how the Church developed following
Christ’s ascension.
He sees evidence that the Church was unified by the authority of the apostles
in Jerusalem; Paul is accepted by them which gives his ministry the authority
it needs to become more widely accepted and their decisions were determinative
for local churches.
Gore sees a clear correlation between the growing strength of a church and the
influence of the apostles’ direction upon them.
We should note how Gore draws upon a
double usage of the notion of church
in these passages. On the one hand, the
Church is a group of local believers forming a small society adapted to the
needs of their location, whilst on the other it is a centralised body or
movement under the authority and governance of the apostles.
For Gore, this provides evidence for how the
Church as a universal body advances from place to place. The local bodies,
known as the churches, are the
expansions of the universal body, the
Church, guided by the ‘apostles’ doctrine’, continuing in the ‘apostles’
fellowship’ and falling under ‘the common apostolic authority’.
Amidst all the diversity necessary for each individual church to flourish at a
local level in localised cultures and societies, the apostolic teaching and
oversight serves as a central point of unity and conformity.
Gore continues to provide further
evidence for his argument by drawing upon the New Testament epistles. To his
mind, the entire letter to the Ephesians and the pastoral epistles together
with certain passages from 1 Corinthians all show a clear understanding of a
distinction between ‘those within and those without. Christianity is not a set
of opinions which people may hold… To be a Christian means to be within that
apostolic society…’
Here we begin to see how, for Gore, it is not enough just to hold opinions
which simply fall in line with the Church’s teaching, one must actively be a
member of the Church’s unified body under the apostolic teaching. A group can
only claim the name of ‘the Church’ if it is itself a society holding true
under apostolic oversight. This is a view with which Gore’s contemporary,
Moberly, entirely concurs. In Moberly’s words, such unity ‘is in scripture
direct and complete. It is there as an ideal, not implicit only but expressed,
not in the early aspirations of the Church only, but in that which was divinely
set before the Church, before as yet the Church had begun to be’.
For Gore and Moberly then, Christ’s intention was the visible Church and they
find clear evidence for this in the Gospels. Then, in the other New Testament
material, Moberly and Gore see evidence for how that church began to grow up
into an ordered society under the apostles’ guidance as local churches with a
shared unity based on the apostolic teaching and oversight. Interestingly, this
is once again a view that Knox, a few decades later, finds entirely agreeable.
Moving on from the New Testament,
Gore considers evidence from the apostolic and sub-apostolic eras. Just like
the material to be found in the New testament, Gore sees in the material from
the Church Fathers not just good theological thought around the ordering and
ministry of the Church, but also evidence for how things actually were on the
ground at that time. Gore claims that the First Letter of Clement to the
Corinthians,
‘comes under the immediate shadow of the apostolic influence and teaching’
on account of his belief that it was written around the same time as the Gospel
of St John.
Whether or not the Gospel of St John and Clement’s epistle share an authorship
period does not detract from Gore’s more central point, that Clement’s letter
provides the earliest Christian evidence outside of the New Testament for the
nature of the visible Church. In it Gore sees clear evidence for the Church
being an ordered and united society of believers under the apostolic ordering.
For Clement this was the common practice at the time of his writing which he
sought to uphold. And so Gore wishes to bring to our attention that within this
epistle ‘there is no conception of Christianity… except this conception of an
actual society, with its divinely established order and its officers
commissioned by apostolic authority’.
Building on this, Gore begins a
broader overview of what he calls the ‘record of history’. In doing so, he sees
evidence of ‘the Church in different parts of the world assuming different
characteristics’.
For example, he notes how the Western Roman model has been characterised by
order and discipline, whilst the Eastern ‘Alexandrian’ model is more concerned
with the truth, as a way of educating, satisfying and attracting the ‘intellect
and life of man’.
Rather than proving a stumbling block to Gore’s conception of unity found in
shared ordering, for Gore this variation and diversity in approach only serves
to bring into more clarity those things which unify and are common to all; ‘the
common underlying creed and conception of the visible church’.
The apostolic succession and threefold ministry are constitutive factors of
this.
Using a quote from Tertullian, Gore
drives his point home:
So long as
he (Jesus) was living on earth, spoke himself either openly to the people, or
apart to his disciples. From amongst these he had attached to his person twelve
especially who were destined to be teachers of the nations. Accordingly, when
one of these had fallen away, the remaining eleven received his command, as he
was departing to the Father after his resurrection, to go and teach the
nations, who were to be baptised into the Father, and the Son and the Holy
Spirit. At once, then, the Apostles, whose mission this title indicates, after
adding Matthias to their number… and after receiving the strength of the Holy
Ghost to enable them to work miracles and preach, first of all bore witness to
the faith in Judea and established churches, and afterwards, going out into the
world, proclaimed the same teaching of the same faith to the nations, and
forthwith founded churches in every city, from which all other churches in
their turn have received the tradition of the faith and the seeds of doctrine;
yes, and are daily receiving, that they may become churches; and it is on this
account that they too will be reckoned apostolic, as being the offspring of
apostolic churches…
In this passage, Gore sees evidence
of a fount of grace, authority and teaching starting with the Apostles and
disseminating out through space and time to each individual church in its turn,
providing them with continuity and unity.
We will see later in this chapter how
Gore also considers the Spirit to play a central role in the authorisation and
direction of the ministerial orders of the Church. We shall also move to
thinking more about the importance of apostolic succession in Gore’s framework,
and will explore what Gore uncovers regarding the threefold ministry of
bishops, priests and deacons. Before we move on to those areas of thought,
however, Gore offers us one further statement that serves well in this instance
to round off his thinking and draw this particular section on the unity of the
Church to a close. He says:
It is
reasonable to think that, if he (Christ) came to leave among mankind the
inestimable treasures of redemptive truth and grace, he would not have cast
them abroad among men, but given them a stable home in a visible and duly
constituted society – a society simple enough in its principles to be capable
of adaptation to the varying needs of ages and nations and individuals, simple
enough to be catholic, but organised enough to take its place amidst the
institutions of the world with a recognisable and permanent character.
For Gore, this is the church he sees
manifest through history, instituted by Christ, sharing a common creed,
maintaining the apostolic teaching and succession and sharing a threefold
ministry. It is the exploration of the threefold ministry to which we now turn.
d)
The Threefold Ministry: Bishops,
Priests and Deacons
Gore considers the threefold ministry
to be both an essential platform for the good ordering of the Church and to
carry divine influence in its formation and development. As we noted earlier,
this stance differed greatly from his fellow bishop, Lightfoot.
According to Treloar, their difference in opinion can be outlined thus:
Lightfoot discerned the ministry as ‘a process of evolution from below’, whilst
Gore considers it to be a process of ‘devolution from above’.
Lightfoot’s perception of ministerial orders seems to come from a task centred
approach – one which sees ministry growing from a desire to address the
essential tasks that need doing from within the growing society of believers.
On the other hand, Gore’s understanding seems to stem from a belief that these
orders develop in the early church from a direct response to the promptings of
the Spirit as the community grows spiritually and in obedience to God’s will.
Gore thus identifies a spiritual core to ministerial orders and asserts with
much firmness how ordination was regarded sacramentally to include a bestowal
of the Holy Spirit upon the candidate through the laying-on of hands from the
very beginning.
It is no wonder then that the two come to such differing conclusions. In
defence of his stance, Gore begins his discussion of the threefold ministry
with what he considers to be the earliest evidence we have, the Pastoral
Epistles and 1 Clement.
In these letters, Gore interprets a
dividing of what he deems as ‘local’ and ‘general’ ministry. Local ministry is
that which serves the regular functions of the local church or group of
churches. The general ministry is that of the apostles or evangelists, those
who represent the wider apostolic authority. Explaining this he says: ‘In the
Pastoral Epistles, then, we find in the church a general and local ministry…
the local ministry consists of presbyters also called ‘bishops’ and deacons’. These localised ministries then are
structured in a way to serve the local Christian body and to ensure its
day-to-day functioning and flourishing. ‘The general ministry – which
represents the original and central authority of the church – consists of the
apostle and his delegates... who, though supervising for the time a church or
group of churches… do not belong to those churches, but represent the common
apostolic control over all churches alike.’
‘In the period of the Pastoral Epistles, then, we have the central or apostolic
officers, apostles and evangelists, exercising a more or less general ministry
in the churches, and the local presbytery in each church, consisting of the
bishops, with the assistant ministry of the deacons.’
Gore is right to interpret the
Pastoral Epistles and 1 Clement clearly using the terms bishop (episkopos),
presbyter (presbyteros – commonly priest or
elder), and deacon (diakonos) to refer to ministerial functions at the local
level. Whilst these epistles use all three terms to refer to differing
functions, Gore notes how bishop and presbyter are often used interchangeably
in these churches at this time to describe different elements of the same
person’s role in the assembly. In these letters Gore finds evidence to assert
that, ‘practically… the presbyters and the bishops of the local church are the
same persons. St Paul can address the presbyters of Ephesus as those whom the
Holy Ghost hath made bishops; and he can tell Titus to choose presbyters
carefully, because the bishop must be blameless: and Clement can speak of
presbyters as holding the bishop’s office’.
According to this view, it would
appear that the presbyter-bishops were given the responsibility of founding the
local Christian community by the apostles and represent the apostles in their
absence.
Gore then turns his attention to the
later witness of Ignatius.
To Gore’s mind, Ignatius’s writings have a different more distinctively eastern
influence, but the testimony found seems to provide similar evidence as to the
identification of roles with one notable exception; referring to bishops and
priests as separate individuals. Gore outlines how Ignatius, who himself is
already a bishop at the time of writing, is ‘hard pressed to deliver his
message to the churches before he is taken away’ to be martyred,
and in the course of doing so has two main points he wishes to communicate. The
first is ‘the truth of the incarnation, that Christ, the very Son of God, did
really take our human nature’.
The second is an ‘insistence upon the truth that God’s message to man is
enshrined in those visible societies which have for their ministers - bishops,
priests and deacons, “without which three orders no Church has a title to the
name”.
Ignatius seems concerned to defend the church he is leaving behind from heresy
or destruction from within. As such he is keen to assert those things that are
central to its continued flourishing. Gore identifies how Ignatius ‘pleads
passionately with them to rally round their officers, that is, the bishop,
presbyters and deacons in each church. The bishop is conceived of… as
representing Christ while on earth… among his apostles, who are represented by
the presbyters’.
In turning to Ignatius at this point,
Gore reveals two significant things. First, how in such a short space of time
the threefold ministry began settling itself out so that the bishop was no
longer one and the same as the presbyter but a completely different order of
individual, becoming the chief officer of the local church or churches. The
second is how, following the apostles’ deaths, bishops begin standing in the
apostles’ place as Christ’s representatives. Gore then draws on the evidence
found in Clement, Irenaeus and Tertullian,
to suggest that John the Apostle may have been one of the first to separate out
presbyters and bishops in these roles.
Be that as it may, this is not the
outline of developing orders evidenced in every part of the early church.
Gore returns to the Acts of the Apostles to provide evidence that at Jerusalem,
Jesus’ brother James was already exercising a localised ministry which Gore
associates as similar to that of a diocesan bishop, James being the head of the
Church in Jerusalem with presbyters operating under him.
Here then, we already see the threefold office in operation at a very early
stage of the Church’s history. Might St John have looked to Jerusalem for
inspiration on how to model an increasingly complex and growing church? Is this
what Clement, Irenaeus and Tertullian report?
Gore does not elaborate further. What he does assert, however, is that
the orders of bishop, priest and deacon were present in the very earliest
models of the Church and very quickly these separated out to form three
distinctive offices. Although Gore recognises exceptions to the rule, he
outlines how this seems to have happened very early on in Jerusalem, whilst in
many other places it seems to have occurred over a time-frame of no more than a
century.
According to Gore, James also appears
to have exercised the authority of an apostle as well as an independent bishop
from very early on, as his episcopate is outlined as succeeding not to the
other apostles, but to Christ. As evidence for this, Gore uses a fragment from
Hegesippus’ writings preserved in the works of Eusebius, where Hegesippus is
quoted as saying, ‘James, the brother of the Lord, succeeded to government of
the Church in conjunction with the apostles’.
Following James’ death the office passes down in succession to Simeon,
but according to Gore, this continuing office does not revert to looking to the
other apostles for its authority after James’ death as one might expect, but
continues to look to Christ himself, thus retaining the status of an
apostleship.
This seems to be the pattern that
grew up all over the Eastern churches of Palestine, Syria and Asia, each bishop
having autonomy and taking their authority directly from Christ. Gore is
convinced that the witness of history shows how the ‘monepiscopal constitution’
(the rule of one bishop in each church) grew in the East to become the
uncontested form of church government under the sanction of the apostles. In
the West, on the other hand, Gore interprets a much more hierarchical structure
having developed where apostolic men instituted bishops for each church and
that their authority derived from these apostles, with the idea of each bishop
directly representing the monarchy of Christ seeming less prominent.
Nevertheless, in both regions Gore
identifies the threefold ministry acting as a central focus for unity as the
Church matured, with it serving a significant spiritual, missional,
governmental and functional purpose for the growing church.
Here, it is helpful once again to draw upon Knox’s later contribution as he
appraises this period more succinctly, but with remarkable consistency to the
thoughts of Gore. He says:
Thus at the
close of the Apostolic age we find that the normal Christian community is
governed by a group of local presbyters appointed by the Apostle, who himself
pays visits to the community as far as the circumstances permit… In certain
circumstances personal representatives (of the Apostle) are sent to reside more
or less permanently at important centres in order to supervise the local
community and those of the adjoining region. These Apostolic delegates are for
all intents and purposes equal in rank to the Apostles.
From this
state of affairs it is but a small step to the position which meets us in the
early second century… in all the large Christian centres we find a college of
presbyters at the head of which stands a bishop.
Gore interprets this ordering as
having divine authority on account of its supporting evidence in scripture, its
sanctioning by the apostles and its general acceptance by the people of God (as
attested to in the later historical evidence).
The fact that this model grew up everywhere in a consistent fashion and that
everywhere there was development headed for the ‘same goal’, also speaks to
Gore of a divine institution that Christ, as the Church’s head, had impressed
upon it.
For Gore, ‘a ministry of bishops, priests and deacons, of apostolic descent and
divine authorisation, is the centre of unity in each local Christian society,
and that bishop is charged with the administration of that worship and
discipline, and with guardianship of that doctrine, which belong to the whole
church’.
As we look deeper into Gore’s
understanding of how these three offices work themselves out over the passage
of time, it would appear that each person’s ministry when called to a higher
office retains elements of the lower. This is inferred, of course, by the fact
that the bishop was originally also referred to as the presbyter in the early
textual evidence, but even as the two offices begin to be seen independently,
it should be noted how Gore does not consider bishops relinquishing their
calling to the priesthood despite being escalated to the higher role of
authority. Even as the head overseer of the local college of presbyters, a
bishop remains one of their number.
This is not then an ordering along
the lines of that of St Paul’s ‘gifts’ where each person has a select skill set
which commends them to a certain position, like that of teachers, evangelists,
prophets etc., although it does not exclude or devalue such gifts being present
among their number.
The threefold ministry in Gore’s understanding is fundamentally ascertained by
spiritual calling and service which is then recognised by those already in
authority and the wider congregation.
So then, a bishop continues to exercise certain priestly functions in
continuity even after they have been elevated to the higher calling, especially
in regards to liturgical and sacramental undertakings.
In like manner, the bishop and priest continue to exercise a role of service in
keeping with the diaconate.
Despite the subtle differences
between East and West that we noted earlier, Gore considers that, generally
speaking, as the threefold ministry matured and each church gained its ‘local
representative of apostolic authority’, so the title of bishop began to be used
more and more to distinguish them from the other presbyters under their charge.
Bishops thus began to be identified more readily as the ‘successors to the
apostles’,
a point alluded to in our earlier quotation from Knox.
From this point of understanding Gore
considers the essential part that apostolic succession has to play in the
Church’s long-term structure and authenticity. According to Cox, Gore relies
heavily upon the Tractarian teaching of apostolic succession for his
understanding of the ministerial orders of the Church.
Cox is right to make this claim since apostolic succession is central to Gore’s
thinking and he spends much time writing about it. In one of his many
statements explaining his thoughts on apostolic succession, Gore states:
Christ, in
founding his Church, founded also a ministry in the Church in the persons of
his apostles. These Apostles must be supposed to have had a temporary function
in their capacity as founders under Christ. In this capacity they held an
office by its very nature not perpetual – the office of bearing the original
witness of Christ’s resurrection and making the original proclamation of the
Gospel. But underlying this was another – a pastorate of souls, a stewardship
of divine mysteries. This office, instituted in their persons, was intended to
become perpetual, and that by being transmitted from its first depositories.
Gore considers the apostles to serve
two essential functions in the development of the early church. First they were
witnesses to the events of Christ’s incarnation and resurrection. He says:
‘Jesus Christ taught by events. He made his apostles not so much prophets as
witnesses’.
This role in Christ’s design for his church was for them alone to undertake.
Second, however, they operated a stewardship over the essentials of faith, such
as discipline, sacramental actions, ordering and the care of souls. They were
to guard these from error or deviation and then to pass them on to future
generations of leaders who would take their place as chief authority under the
guidance of the Holy Spirit. For Gore, this apostolic succession is essential
in guarding the Church from error, preserving its ongoing life and fuelling its
future development.
He states:
It was
intended that there should be in each generation an authoritative stewardship
of the grace and truth which came by Jesus Christ and a recognised power to
transmit it, derived from above by apostolic descent. The men who were from
time to time to hold the various offices involved in the ministry would receive
their capacity to minister in whatever capacity, their qualifying consecration,
from above, in such sense that every ministerial act would be performed under
the shelter of a commission, received by the transmission of the original
pastoral authority which had been delegated by Christ himself to his apostles.
To Gore’s mind this succession is an
essential element in the ongoing authenticity of the Church’s ministerial
orders. Each apostle, and later bishop, passes on to their successor the
functions they have held in authority from their predecessor, and their
predecessor before them. Thus as successive bishops pass down to their
successors the authority they received from the apostles, so the principle of
apostolic succession is secured. Gore clarifies:
The local
president, the bishop, received his authority not from the congregation, but
from those who were bishops before him, back to the apostles and apostolic men.
Therefore, even in the smallest community, the bishop represented the great
church; and the fellowship of the bishops amongst themselves kept all the local
churches together.
At this point, we need to make a
distinction between the succession of bishops and the sanctioning of priests
and deacons. Whilst bishops have their office passed on in succession, priests
and deacons receive their office at the hands of their local bishop. Gore’s interpretation
understands ‘chief authority laying with the bishop, and accordingly episcopal
ordination was regarded as essential to constitute a man a member of the clergy
and give him ministerial commission’.
Drawing upon a wide span of evidence from the Church Fathers,
Gore emphasises (with much vigour) the point that only bishops may ordain and
no priest may pass their office on directly:
There have
always existed in the Church ministers, who, beside the ordinary exercise of
their ministry, possess the power of transmitting it; they may, so far, be one
or many in each community; but they ordain men to holy offices of the Church,
they are only fulfilling the function intrusted to them out of the apostolic
fount of authority. There are other ministers, again, who have certain clearly
understood functions committed to them, but not of transmitting their office.
Should these ever attempt to transmit it their act would be considered invalid.
For this is the Church principle: that no ministry is valid which is assumed,
which a man takes upon himself, or which is merely delegated to him from below.
That ministerial act alone is valid which is covered by a ministerial
commission received from above by succession from the apostles.
Not only does Gore consider that
bishops are the only ones with the authority to ordain, he continues on to
claim that it seems completely improbable that any ‘presbyter had in any age
the power to ordain… it is absolutely certain that for a large number of
centuries it had been understood beyond all question that only bishops could
ordain and that presbyters had no episcopal powers’.
This is a view which again sees Gore sided in opposition to Lightfoot, who
through his historical investigation of ‘the Christian Ministry’ draws
conclusions that to Gore’s mind seriously undermined the Church’s ministerial
orders.
For Lightfoot, the scriptural evidence of the New Testament shows how bishop
and presbyter were originally one and the same. He seems to interpret little of
special significance in either order apart from the task of their office,
apparently seeing both born out of societal practicality and need.
His conclusions concern Gore greatly as they seem to leave the door open to a
devaluation of the authority of the Episcopate and the place of the
Presbyterate, possibly even paving the way for wider acceptance of
non-episcopal ordination. To Gore, such a stance threatened the very
foundations of the Church and its ministry, not to mention the Anglican
tradition.
Nonetheless, Gore owns that others
may have differing views of who may have the authority to ordain, but himself
remains convinced that all the significant historical facts of the first
fifteen hundred years of the church point to such powers always having been
limited to the rank of bishop.
He also recognises the consequences of this assertion for other denominations
who have taken to allowing ordinations to be conducted by fellow presbyters.
His response is to recognise the great gift these other denominations have
bestowed upon the world through their ministry, but contends that until that
ministry fully enters back into the structure of apostolic succession, the
entire church remains in some way flawed, because he considers apostolic
succession to be one of Christ’s intended mechanisms for unity.
In an age when ecumenism has achieved
so much by way of breaking down barriers, such statements can sound unhelpful.
As regrettable as they seem, however, we need to remember to read Gore in his
own historical situation, and as Waddell contends, there does nonetheless
appear to be something of fundamental importance in the Anglican understanding
of the historic episcopate and the threefold ministry for providing authentic
structure and oversight.
Gore’s underlying principle about
ministerial ordering and those authorised to ordain remains an important piece
in the puzzle if we are to properly understand how he views the Church. This is
because Gore understands the sacrament of ordination to be regarded from the
very earliest of times as an act bringing about ontological change within the
individual. For such to be authentic and effective, it is necessary that those
conducting ordination are appropriately chosen by God and recognised by the
wider church body (both past and present) to carry the authority to undertake
them.
As with all the sacraments, Gore
considers that the physical material of the human body is of the earth, but
through the redemptive credentials of Christ, the would be priest, during
ordination, is transformed at consecration into being a gift of the kingdom – a
symbol and spiritual conduit of those same Christ-like redemptive qualities
which draw people through the Spirit into the Body and life of Christ. By way
of example, Gore uses what happens at the consecration of bread and wine during
the Eucharist as a comparison. He says:
A
consecration from above comes upon the sacrament; the bread which is of the
earth, which man offers for the divine acceptance, receiving the invocation of
God, is no longer common bread, but Eucharist, made up of two things, an
earthly and a heavenly… we have the material offered from below and the
empowering consecration from above. It is just these same two elements, then,
that are present to constitute the ministry.
The person remains the same person,
but at a much deeper level, a similar spiritual change is true as for all the
sacraments. Ordination, to Gore, does not constitute the mere granting of an
office or the giving of a charge (although both these have their place), but
most importantly it is, to steal Treloar’s phrase, a ‘devolving’ of the Spirit
of Christ’s priesthood directly from
Christ in his high-priestly state, channelled through the bishop who stands in
the apostle’s shoes.
It is this bestowing of the Holy Spirit drawing the individual into sharing in
Christ’s priesthood that brings about an ontological change within the person,
and only the bishop has the apostolic authority to consecrate to such a
ministerial calling. To repeat one of our earlier quotes from Gore: ‘no
ministry is valid which is assumed, which a man takes upon himself, or which is
merely delegated to him from below. That ministerial act alone is valid which
is covered by a ministerial commission received from above by succession from
the apostles’.
Whilst I use the term ‘ontological
change’ to describe what Gore believes ordination to bring about, there is a
sense that it may be a little too clumsy to capture properly what he is trying
to purvey. In using this term to describe his thinking, we need to keep in mind
all that we have explored in our earlier chapter on the incarnation. There we
found Christ fulfilling the human state and through his priesthood bringing
humanity into a place where it can most authentically live according to the
image that God has implanted in it at creation. In so doing, Christ opens the
way for creation to enter more fully into the life of Trinity. Gore does not
consider the ordained ministerial orders of the Church to be some kind of
pseudo-magical/cultic office, but understands each priest drawing their
ministry directly from Christ’s unique high-priesthood. It is the Spirit of
this priesthood, bestowed on them at ordination, that causes a change to the
internal metaphysical direction of the individual so that the ordained person
becomes connected to and a part of the wider ministry of Christ, through whom
salvation is found. Therefore it could be said that the ‘ontological change’
brought about by ordination is more accurately an individual calling fulfilled
by grace.
Christ’s priesthood remains unique
and exemplary, with each ordained bishop, priest and deacon drawing their
ministry from it and not simply looking to replicate it. So a collective
‘college’ of presbyters may well share in the liturgical function of the laying
on of hands at ordination, but their presence serves merely to re-affirm that
the Bishop is the central focus of apostolic unity under Christ, through whom
the presbyters of the local assembly hold and undertake their priestly office.
Gore also outlines how, once an
individual is ordained in the spirit of episcopacy, presbyterate or diaconate
it cannot be taken away. Even congregational disquiet cannot remove a person
from being a bishop, priest or deacon once the spirit of ordination has been
received either directly from Christ (in the case of the first apostles) or
from apostles themselves (in the case of future bishops, priests and deacons).
Once the ontological change has occurred resulting from ordination, then it
cannot be undone. A priest may exercise their priesthood poorly, and may even
be removed from being allowed to practically exercise their ministry as a
result, but at a deep metaphysical level they remain a priest nonetheless.
Because Gore considers the
ministerial orders to be a ‘devolution from above’, the single most important
qualification for each role, to Gore’s mind, is an individual’s spiritual,
moral and prayerful credentials.
Such supernatural qualifications are in every way superior to concerns
regarding function, even though Gore recognises that tasks need to be attended
to and ‘at every stage the church is presented to us as a highly articulated
body in which every member has his own position and function by divine
appointment’.
Thus, a person’s effectiveness or efficiency in an associated task may not be
the primary concern, since if the person is spiritually mature and is called to
the role by God, then it follows that the tasks of the office will work
themselves out under Christ’s direction through the Spirit. This does, however,
make the appointment of such persons far more difficult to discern, and in the
end a combination of careful discernment at spiritual, congregational and
hierarchical level is necessary to recognise an individual’s calling to office.
e)
Concluding Thoughts
In the course of this chapter, we
have seen how Gore considers that the Church is divinely instituted by Christ
and Christ shows clear intentionality regarding how the Church is to develop.
In his understating, it is not, as Lightfoot proclaims, created by humans in
response to God’s action in the world, but is God’s action in the world. God
works through the Church to achieve his purpose. In this way, the Church is an
extension of the Incarnation, the next stage of the divine masterplan following
Christ’s ascension. The life it breathes is the very life of God as it remains
in touch and draws from Christ’s own High-Priesthood, through its ministerial
orders.
Using apostolic and sub-apostolic
evidence, Gore finds evidence enough to claim that following Christ’s
ascension, and as the Church expands, so common unity is found in the apostles’
leadership, teaching and oversight. He is convinced that the very concept of a
Christian at this time means nothing less than being a member of the Church;
committed to the growth and flourishing of the society of believers, under the
apostles’ oversight. Gore recognises a certain amount of diversity within each
local church helping it to adapt to local culture and need, whilst retaining
unity around those things which are common to all churches: the Creed and
visible Church, of which apostolic succession and threefold ministry are
constitutive factors.
Gore then provides evidence for the
threefold ministry, of bishops, priests and deacons, beginning its life in
localised churches under an apostle’s oversight. Over time, as more and more
churches grow up, so the apostles begin delegating responsibility to individual
bishops, who become the head of their local college of presbyters. Then, as the
apostles hand on their authority entirely, so bishops begin to be recognised as
standing in their place and the threefold ministerial order grows up to be a
central focus for unity itself, under the bishops’ oversight. As each bishop
passes down their authority to the next so the principle of apostolic
succession becomes firmly rooted. All the time, Gore is keen to re-assert how
this is not a human process from below being primarily driven by a task
oriented approach to the society’s needs, but is directed from above as Christ
devolves his Spirit of priesthood. Thus, Gore sees a spiritual core to the
Church’s ministerial orders which supersedes all else.
Moving on from here, we have also
found in this chapter how episcopal ordination provides the significant step in
safeguarding and maintaining that ministerial orders are appropriately directed
from above. At ordination, Christ devolves his Spirit of priesthood to each
priest and deacon through the actions of the laying on of hands by each bishop,
ensuring that their ministry is appropriately connected to his eternal high
priesthood. In this way, Christ’s priesthood remains unique and exemplary with
each bishop, priest and deacon drawing their ministry from his and not simply
looking to replicate it. In this way, it may be said that an ontological change
takes place within each candidate so that they become spiritual instruments for
Christ’s redemptive qualities and salvific nature, which draws individuals
through the Spirit into the Body and life of Christ.
Chapter 3: Sacramental Principles
a) Introduction and a Beginning to Sacramental Principles
In the first chapter of this dissertation,
we explored one of the most prominent areas of Gore’s theological thought: the
incarnation. We looked at how, for Gore, the incarnation is central to the
Christian faith, how Christ provides the blueprint for Christian ministry and
is the foundation of the ecclesial structures of the Church. As we explored,
for Gore, Christ epitomises perfect humanity and through his sacrifice sits as
high priest, exemplar and head of his body, the Church. The Church and its
ordained ministry looks to represent and replicate his perfect example. Jesus,
earthly yet divine, reveals through his life, death and resurrection the full
reality of God and the Church looks to communicate this to each new age so as
to pass on the fruits of Christ’s atonement.
For Gore, the incarnation offers
humanity the opportunity to share in the life of God in a unique way. Waddell
interprets Gore’s thinking this way: ‘The incarnation happened so that human
beings could come to share in the relationship of the Son to the Father’, and
so ‘Gore’s Christology flows naturally into ecclesiology…’
We will continue to track this flow from Christology to ecclesiology as we move
forward in this third chapter, especially in regards to sacramental principles.
Gore asserts that ‘God has given us a
revelation of himself in his incarnate Son; and this revelation or disclosure
of God in Christ is expressed in the threefold office of Christ as prophet,
priest and king’.
Christ, through his divine nature, reveals the richest exposition of God and
so, as prophet, Christ reveals the essence of God’s loving nature through words
and actions. As priest, Christ offers reconciliation with God through his
once-for-all-time sacrifice for sin and enables healing of the previously
broken relationship. As king, exalted high-priest, robed in eternal splendour
and sitting at the Father’s right hand, he governs the universe, mediates for
the sin that separates humanity from God and moves creation towards its
eschatological conclusion.
Ramsey interprets Gore as transposing
these elements directly onto the Church; itself being prophetic, priestly and
kingly, on account of its incarnational attributes.
This is because Gore considers the Church to be an ‘extension of the
incarnation’ by making the incarnation apparent in each new age, revealing
Christ’s prophetic, priestly and kingly nature through its ministry of
teaching, revelation and sacramental principles, which together constitute
incorporation into Christ.
In the second chapter of this
project, we moved to consider how Gore interprets the development of the Church
and its ministerial orders following Christ’s ascension. Drawing from the
textual evidence of the early church, Gore concludes that the Church is
divinely instituted by Christ, who shows clear intentionality regarding how the
Church is to develop. He believes that the Church is God’s action in the world
and God works through it to achieve his purpose.
Gore considers common unity within
the Church to be found in the apostle’s leadership, teaching and oversight.
Recognising a certain amount of diversity within each local church during the
apostolic and sub-apostolic eras which allows it to adapt to local culture and
need, he nonetheless considers that, as the Church advances, so it retains
unity around those things which are common to all churches: the Creed,
apostolic succession and teaching, and the threefold ministry of bishops,
priests and deacons.
For the Church’s ministerial orders,
Christ’s priesthood remains unique and exemplary with each bishop, priest and
deacon drawing their ministry from his and not simply looking to replicate it.
In this way, Gore alludes to some kind of ontological change taking place
within each candidate so that they become facilitators in the Spirit acting as
instruments for Christ’s redemptive work and salvific qualities which opens the
way for individuals to be drawn through the Spirit into the life of Christ.
Having explored all of this in such
depth, we now need to pay more attention to matters of ecclesiology; especially
in regards to sacramental principles. In the chapter on the incarnation, we
discovered how the Spirit infused the life of Christ within each individual
believer. Then, in the chapter on the evidence of history, we discovered how
the ordained priesthood might facilitate this by themselves acting as
instruments for Christ’s redemptive work so that individuals may be drawn
through the Spirit into the life of Christ. As we move through this chapter we
shall look more deeply at how the Spirit draws us into the dispersed life of
Christ present within the sacred community: the corporate Body of Christ. We
will see how it does this by means of forming a certain kind of communal life,
by ordering that life and through its sacramental principles. In Gore’s
understanding, these are the ways the Spirit unites us to Christ. The Church is the result, revealing Christ
through its communal life, priestly function and authentic Christ-given
ministerial orders and sacraments. This is the means by which humanity may
enter into the divine life of the Trinity. It is this sharing in the divine
life that constitutes the Church. Waddell paraphrases Gore this way: ‘Jesus
lived and died to share his life, to bring our lives within his. That
incorporation, that communion of transformed lives in Christ... we call the
Church. It happens supremely through the sacraments: through bodily, social
rituals in which God reaches out to claim our bodily and social life’.
As we move through this chapter we
will be able to discern quite a lot about Gore’s understanding of the ordained
priesthood and the Church’s ecclesiological ordering. We will discuss what Gore
considers are the differences between the priesthood of all baptised believers
and those God calls to a special ministry as ordained priests. We will see how
this ministerial priesthood is not some kind of elite caste, but instead how
priests are to gather the worshiping community and direct the Church’s action
so that it relates to God’s action, through teaching and sacramental functions.
Along with Gore’s understanding that Christology informs ecclesiology, we will
also discover how Gore understands Christ to have ordained his Church and its
priesthood for the eternal good of creation.
This naturally raises many questions
regarding what Gore’s understanding of the Church and its ministerial
priesthood is. How and why does the Spirit, catching us up into Christ’s
prophetic, priestly, and kingly work, take the form of the Church’s
ministry? It is clear from the outset
that sacramental actions play a large part in this, for Gore. We must ask,
however, how and why, exactly, does the work of the Spirit involve giving the
Church sacramental actions to perform?
These are complex questions. We may
have partly answered them in previous chapters, but we have by no means done
that adequately. I hope we will find some further resolution to them in this
chapter. In order to begin unravelling an answer we will begin by contemplating
how Gore contributes to our understanding of the Church’s nature and purpose.
b) The Church’s Nature and Purpose
Drawing upon biblical and patristic
material, Gore is in no doubt that Christ instituted a society to continue his
work after his resurrection. That society is the Church and Gore’s confidence
in the validity of the Church stems from this point.
Whilst he believes this society was intended to become ‘perpetual’,
it is, he believes, also a ‘society simple enough in its principles to be
capable of adaptation to the varying needs of ages and nations and
individuals…’
To his way of thinking, the Church has an abiding structure that enables its
continual participation in the life of the Spirit, whilst being adaptable
enough to make room for the necessary change and development of each new age.
Nonetheless, despite his openness to
the Church embracing the advances in ‘contemporary critical thought’
that come with each new era, Gore also retains a certain conservatism in
regards to central dogmatic facets, believing certain church practices and
teachings to be consistent with Christ’s teachings and thus not open to such
adaptation; certainly not to be relegated to history in an attempt to ‘engage’
with new emerging culture. For Gore, the Church only remains valid through
apostolic succession and by authentically passing down its traditions from age
to age
according to its sociological and intellectual situation. In the clearest
statement he seems to give us on the subject, he states: ‘The unchanging
tradition goes hand in hand with the steadfast ministerial succession’.
In the last chapter we explored at
length Gore’s historical justification for the threefold ministry of bishops,
priests and deacons. Here, we once again note that Gore sees biblical texts,
authorised creedal formulas, apostolic succession, ministerial orders and
sacramental principles remaining consistent in their authority over time.
Beyond this, he does not prescribe just how much the Church should ‘bend’ to
the pressure of surrounding culture in order to engage with a changing context.
Some commentators, such as Waddell and Carpenter, suggest that this is an
example of inconsistency in Gore’s thought.
Is Gore inconsistent in the way he discusses flexibility and uniformity within
the Church?
On the face of it there does appear
to be inconsistency prevalent here. Gore never really nails his colours to the
mast over what may advance or adapt without damaging the inheritance he is so
determined that the Church must pass on. In some aspects he appears terribly
dogmatic and yet in others radically liberal.
We must remember, however, that we view Gore’s thinking with the benefit of
hindsight from a very different theological and cultural context. There is one
other significant point that we must also consider and is pertinent for our
wider deliberations in this dissertation.
For Gore, to have posed the question
regarding flexibility and uniformity in the way we have (and the way Waddell
and Carpenter have fallen into the trap of doing) is to have misinterpreted completely
the nature of the Church as Gore depicts it. Drawing upon what we discovered in
the earlier section, we saw how Gore considers the Church as the community
being brought through the Spirit into relationship with the Trinity. As such,
it cannot abandon any practice or form of order that is required for that purpose,
or else it simply ceases to be the Church. For Gore, such structures and
practices include biblical texts, authorised creedal formulas, apostolic
succession, ministerial orders and sacramental principles. The Church can,
however, adapt where this may be in keeping with the Spirit’s guidance, and can
certainly change anything that is not essential and conducive to the Spirit’s
ambitions. This does not make deciding what may or may not change very easy,
but so long as these primary principles are followed, it does make for a church
that remains true to its overall purpose, guided by the Spirit into
relationship with God, which is of course Gore’s main concern.
All the same, faced with the
expanding secular understanding of the world, Gore is concerned that the Church
must work all the harder at teaching its timeless principles in ways that
embrace the fresh insights of any new era by using such insights to re-communicate
ancient truths, whilst not undermining them. So revealing a vigour to match
such advances, Gore worked tirelessly throughout his life to expound the
Church’s understanding of its longstanding, and to his mind, consistent
God-given tradition and dogmas. As was evident in the Lux Mundi debates, Gore was willing to push boundaries to encourage
fresh thinking. At the same time, however, he retained a concern to protect
core values and teachings and this particular concern only seemed to advance in
him with age.
So then, the first point in Gore’s
thinking that we need to note here is a concern for the Church to authentically
preserve what Christ instituted; in word, ritual and orders, together with a
tension for the Church to respond to advances in understanding that accompany
the cultural development of each new era.
Gore believes that the Church is called to reflect the love that we see
in Christ to the world, because Christ shows humanity the route into
relationship with the divine. Gore observes that what we see in the incarnate
Son is perfect love: Christ, through his life, actions and words, communicates
the reality of God most dependably. Therefore, the most perfect reflection or
representation of God is only evident in and through what Christ instituted.
In the Chapter on the Incarnation we
discovered how Christ in his high priesthood was the blue-print for all
Christian ministry. Gore identifies three main characteristics to this – Christ
as prophet, priest and king. Gore understands relationship with God to hinge on
at least three principal points – witness/revelation, participation and
obedience. These appear to map on to Christ as prophet, priest and king in
Gore’s thinking. As prophet he witnesses to God’s action in the world and
reveals it to the human race. As priest he encourages humanity’s participation
within it. As king he leads people to obedience to the will of God. Using
Christ as its example, the Church’s function is to authentically teach,
encourage and enable these in each new age in order to draw individuals into
the work of the Spirit and the life of the Trinity.
Advancing this pattern of thought, we
see Gore drawing upon the thinking of his fellow Lux Mundi co-contributor Moberly, who proposed that the Church
represents a perfect inward reality, albeit whilst often lacking outward
perfection.
In Moberly’s thinking, the perfect inward reality represented by the Church is
God and his revelation of himself in the person of Jesus Christ. The ‘outward’
and imperfect reflection of the divine, in Moberly’s understanding, is the
Church and its ordering and function. Whilst Gore appears loosely content with
Moberly’s depiction, he is confident that the ‘outward’ Church is more than
just a pale reflection of the true and perfect reality that is God: for him,
the Church represents Christ and it works within the structures Christ
instituted. Gore states, ‘To the true and typical Churchman…all the
ecclesiastical fabric only represents an unseen but present Lord’.
Be this as it may, at the present
time the Church is not yet all that it is called to be and Gore is only too
ready to accept that the Church throughout history has often made mistakes, and
continues to do so. Theologising this, Gore states:
…we believe
that the imperfections in the Church do not prevent her true function and that
our reverence for her is not as our reverence for Christ; it is our reverence
for the Bride of Christ, not yet purified – for the organ of the Holy Spirit,
not yet perfect. The Church exists not yet to exhibit her glory, save to the
eye of faith’.
Here we see Gore keeping his
attention on the true function of the Church: its relation to Christ. This is
what enables him to talk about continuity and change, and about imperfection
and perfection. The Church aspires towards perfection by carefully preserving
what Christ instituted, and this perfection is something hoped and prayed for.
‘As for the vision of the Church in her perfection of unity and truth and
holiness’, Gore explains, ‘…it is the vision of heaven but the hope of earth –
we shall see it, but not now, we shall behold it, but not nigh.’
This has moved us neatly on to
another relevant aspect of Gore’s thinking: a belief that the Church and the
ordained priesthood is involved in actively and authentically revealing and
implanting Christ’s love into the world and that through this love creation is
heading towards consummation in Christ. The work of Christ, into which the body
of the Church is incorporated, is for the good of creation; ultimately towards
the consummation of God’s creative work.
Gore emphasises that Christ
instituted his Church and that through the Spirit, its orders, central teaching
and many of its rituals it must resist inappropriate corruption from other
agendas if it is to faithfully communicate Christ’s love to the world.
Recognising that individualism and experientialism can so easily cause the
promptings of the Spirit to be confused with personal or collective whim, Gore
offers a small warning and safeguard. It is a warning that has a high level of
significance for the individual priest. Gore considers that the Spirit reveals
the ‘truth’ and breathes life into the Church. He insists that the life of the
Spirit is not something entirely new, unseen or unknown, for the life the
Spirit breathes is the very life of Jesus himself – the life seen most
authentically in and through the Incarnation.
He says, ‘The Spirit is the life-giver, but the life with which he works is the
life of the Incarnate, the life of Jesus’.
The work of the Spirit, therefore, is, and will be, entirely consistent with
the orders, teaching and ritual instituted by Christ.
In pointing this out, Gore offers a warning to those with a low regard for
inherited ministerial orders, teachings and sacramental principles.
Added to this, through the
invigoration of the Spirit, the Church communicates God’s love. It does not
just communicate that love exists, nor that love is ‘something in God’, but
also that love is the ‘motive of creation’, and that ‘the realization of the
purpose of love’, heaven, is the Church’s certain goal.
Under God’s guidance, the priesthood must be mindful to communicate authentically
this eschatological and eternal love to the temporal world. As we shall
discover shortly, the Church’s sacramental principle is central to this
exchange.
For Gore, the Old Testament
represents the ‘first volume’ of the divine revelation; the incarnation
represents the ‘second volume’. The ‘third volume’, is still unrealised, but
will contain ‘revelation of the glory, the far off divine event to which all creation
moves’.
It is this that the Church, through its ministerial orders, is called by God to
look towards and prepare creation to embrace. This is seen most authentically
in and through the person of Jesus Christ.
Christ’s self-sacrifice enables us to peer to heaven. And so in the
present, the Church is at once looking back to what Thornton later deemed as
‘the supreme sacrifice of Christ’;
whilst also perceiving with Christ at its head, the future eschatological
conclusion.
We seem to have covered a lot of
complex ground in a short space of time, so let us now draw together some of
what we have just discovered before moving on. So far in this chapter we have
seen how Gore understands the Church (and its ministerial orders) as having a
responsibility for authentically preserving what Christ instituted and passing
it on to each new generation in appropriate manner. This is because in Christ
we see the most perfect way of entering into relationship with God. Christ
stands in his high-priesthood as prophet, priest and king and as such
re-establishes the means of relationship with God through witness/revelation,
participation and (individual and corporate) obedience. The Church communicates
and encourages this through its teachings, actions and rituals so that
Christian life corresponds with the prophetic, priestly, kingly work of Christ.
Gore thus believes that teachings, actions and rituals, authentically
delivered, are on some level the most reliable representation of God after the
incarnation. Each refers back to the incarnational example, and their
authenticity rests in the actions and instructions of Christ himself.
The Church, according to Gore, is
called to proclaim Christ’s love to the world, whilst the Spirit invigorates
the Church with the life of Christ. This life is entirely consistent with the
Church’s authentic function through which the Spirit has consistently been
active and points towards the eschatological conclusion of creation. As we move
forward, we will see how all of this is grounded in material and communal
characteristics through the sacraments.
For the priesthood, this is reflected
in their actions, after the example of Christ and on behalf of the Church Body.
We will, therefore, now move our exploration on by looking at the sacramental
imperative of the priesthood.
c) The Personal, the Corporate and the Eternal
Having explored something of Gore’s
understanding of the Church’s nature and purpose, we are now going to look into
the detail of how Gore deepens that understanding, sometimes controversially
so. For Gore, much of what we have just discussed is reflected in what the
priesthood is and does and as we look at the sacraments in more depth, we
discover that they are not only important, but a central part of the life of
the Church and the role of the priesthood.
The overtly social and physical
characteristics of the sacraments, as Waddell states, ‘say something important
about God’s method and purpose’,
and they also reveal to us the central place of social concern in the priest’s
role. For Gore, it is telling that God has chosen to reveal these realities
through rituals and not just words. God has chosen to engage with humanity
through material substance. Christ, the divine word, came as a living,
breathing, walking, talking piece of physical matter; human in form. By God’s
grace, the Church similarly continues to bestow his blessings on creation
through the sacraments in everyday physical material; through water, bread,
wine, oil, hands... For Gore, the
necessity for this lies in our created nature. He states, ‘The production on
this earth of a human soul or personality, with all its tremendous and eternal
possibilities, is by God’s creative will indisputably attached to material
conditions.’
Sacraments properly feed the soul precisely because they combine the spiritual
with the material.
Here, we get a glimpse of Gore’s
theological anthropology. His understanding of ordained priesthood and the
sacraments is fed by his perception of what humanity is. Gore believes humanity
to be of both material and spiritual capacity, but whose spiritual capacity has
fallen by its slavery to sin.
The incarnation offers a return to that spiritual nature through a restoration
of relationship with God, and in like manner a return to a more holistic
existence. Through the sacraments, the Church and priesthood reveal the
incarnation and open up the possibility for humanity to live accordingly.
And so, the sacraments are central to
Gore’s theological understanding of the priesthood and the Church, and his
sacramental theology reveals three main characteristics that link Christology
to Ecclesiology. Firstly, through the incarnation, sacraments make possible our
communal sharing in the divine life. They ritually re-member and re-enact
significant moments of divine encounter and re-engage the community into the
divine life by retelling and recognising God’s interaction with creation.
Second, they enable our incorporation into Christ, and this incorporation
constitutes the Church (the Body of Christ). Through the imparting of the
distinctive sacramental grace associated with each sacrament, the receiver
becomes one with Christ, united with his Spirit. Third, they gaze forward to
the eternal Christ as the Church’s consummation, whilst at the same time
looking back to the incarnate Christ as the Church’s foundation and implant the
historical and eternal Christ into the present through the sacrament’s physical
attributes.
The sacraments’ physical
characteristics combined with their indwelling in the person and historicity of
Jesus Christ give sacramental acts their full spiritual substance through a continuity
of what Christ instated: faithfulness to his teaching and making it present to
the world. Through sacramental enactment the past is made present and the
gathered body is united with eternity through Christ who ever reigns in heaven.
As we discovered in the last chapter,
Gore understands the ordained priesthood as historically valid and he also
believes that it is theologically essential in the midst of this because the
priesthood is an important component called to authenticity and outward action
in the Spirit. Gore understands that a priest receives the sacrament of holy
orders through the laying on of hands. As such, they stand in a line from the
first Apostles as chosen by the Spirit to share in the one priesthood of
Christ. By virtue of their office, only priests and bishops may perform certain
‘Christ-like’ functions and in so doing they draw other individuals into the
body by their actions to be touched by the grace of God. For Gore, historical
authenticity is an especially important facet not to be overlooked, because for
a present sacramental action to remain valid it must retain those principles
that Christ inaugurated.
A closer investigation reveals that
Gore’s sacramental theology seems to operate on three co-dependent spheres, the personal, the corporate and the eternal, and the way he talks about
individual sacraments independently of one another seems to reaffirm this.
For example: if we look at Gore’s
ponderings on baptism, we discover how through the baptismal prayer and action,
the historical narrative becomes present reality. In baptism, a person is
united with Christ in his historical baptism (the personal), but also enters into the ever living Christ by
membership of his Church (the corporate) and under the eternal Christ as he
sits as the head of the society (the
eternal).
Once again, there is an obvious mapping on to Christ as prophet, priest and
king.
Alongside this, the communal and
social aspect of the sacrament is vitally important. For this reason, Gore
feels that what he calls ‘popular Protestantism’ is to be completely rejected.
He refutes what he regards as the individualistic approach that sees baptism
and other sacraments as primarily ‘an allegiance of the individual soul to
Christ…’ where all other allegiance to earthly organisation is simply a matter
of personal taste or preference.
For Gore, such thinking is in ‘glaring discrepancy to the New Testament’.
Gore considers the scriptural evidence to be unequivocal in demanding that an
individual’s ‘baptism into Christ is also baptism into the one body’.
Elsewhere he continues: ‘Thus our new birth into Christ is attached to a
washing of water. This is the ‘bath of regeneration’, the being ‘baptised into
Christ’. But it is also our introduction into society; ‘by the one Spirit we
were all baptised into one body’’.
If we peruse Gore’s thoughts on
Confirmation, we see a similar understanding and concern being followed to
identify the personal, corporate and eternal. Gore says:
Our Confirmation,
or unction by the Holy Ghost, which is the completion of our baptism, is
attached to the laying on of hands of the chief pastor of the society; and
while it is the enriching of our personal life, it is also our investiture with
a kingship and priesthood, which imply the full privileges and obligations of
membership in the society.
Similarly, if we consider these three
elements in relation to the sacrament of Confession (or Reconciliation of a
Penitent), we see the same logic follows through. This sacrament sees the
individual at once personally feeling the restorative healing grace of the Holy
Spirit (the personal), whilst also
being reconciled back into the community of believers (the corporate) and to the eternal worshipful body of heaven with
Christ at its head (the eternal).
Equally, if one were to consider Ordination, Marriage and Divine Unction (the
Sacrament of Healing), we see that similar attributes are equally recognisable
within them. Each sacrament through its individual, corporate and eternal
elements restores the individual into the life of the Trinity. Each sacrament
therefore concerns itself with the needs of the personal, corporate and eternal
longings of the soul.
All of this is also certainly true of
the Eucharist, and as we move through an exploration of the Eucharist, we will
find that it has far reaching consequences for Gore’s understanding of ordained
priesthood.
d) The Eucharist
Gore wrote more about the Eucharist
than any other sacrament.
Beyond the theological elements Gore draws out above, he believes that the
Eucharist contains one other significant characteristic: its association to
Christ’s sacrifice. Pondering this, Gore says; Christ ‘through eternal Spirit
offered himself without spot. In the Eucharist, what gives its meaning to the
rite is his eternal offering of himself present among us. Whatever we offer at
the Altar gains its acceptance through its relation to his sacrifice’.
Gore uses the patristic legacy to justify his stance:
But before
communion, through the consecrating action of the Holy Spirit upon the bread
and wine, of which these Fathers
speak with such rapt devotion, Christ’s body and His blood become present, and
Christ Himself is there, our high priest, our king, and our sacrifice, in the
midst of the worshipping church.
Gore sees, through re-membrance and
communal participation, Christ’s eternal sacrifice being made present before
reception in the offering of the bread and wine through the involvement of the
Holy Spirit. For Gore, Christ’s words recalled by St Paul in his letter to the
Church at Corinth to ‘do this in remembrance of me’,
are a call to more than just a mental recollection. Gore’s understanding could
no doubt be considered closely aligned to that of Leenhardt’s later
consideration that ‘remembrance’ is being used in this context to refer to ‘the
restoration of a past event. To remember is to make present and actual’.
And so it is that for Gore the Eucharist is a representation, a memorial meal,
a commemoration all rolled into one, and much more besides. Gore visualises the
Eucharist transcending the limits of earthly time and space as each offering
unites with Christ’s prophetic, priestly and kingly action, and exists
simultaneously past, present and future. Sharing in Christ’s priesthood, the
ordained priest stands as the intermediary helping the wider body to
participate in these eternal realities. As bread and wine are placed on the
Altar, so Christ transforms them and unites them with his eternal sacrifice,
making present his atoning reality.
As is immediately apparent here, Gore
quickly moves beyond simply claiming that the Eucharist is ‘connected’ to
Christ’s sacrifice through this re-membrance, to the notion that the Eucharist
itself is a sacrifice. This is important to Gore because through the Eucharist
he considers the Church participating most fully in Christ’s redeeming work,
whilst also offering continuity with God’s revelation throughout time. He sees
the Church, through the ordained priesthood and the Eucharist, uniting itself
through Christ with the whole of salvation history and the most primitive and
authentic model of both sacrifice and priesthood: the offering of bread and
wine as seen in the example of Melchizedek.
To suggest that the Eucharist is a
sacrifice, however, was no less controversial in Gore’s time than it may be in
some quarters today. As Waddell reminds us, the relation of the Eucharist to
sacrifice has been a terribly controversial issue for many centuries’.
Recognising this chequered history and the likely challenges that would come
his way in response to this claim, Gore justifies his assertion by
demonstrating three further characteristics that, to his mind, make it thus.
First, it is a sacrifice because of
the actions and aspirations of the gathering body of believers. He says:
First of
all, the eucharist is a sacrifice because in the Christian church – the great
priestly body, and “soul of the world” – exercises her privilege of Sonship in
free approach to the Father in the name of Christ. She comes before the Father
with her material offerings of bread and wine, and of those things wherein God
has prospered her, bearing witness that all good things come from Him; and
though He needs nothing from man, yet He accepts the recognition of His
Fatherhood from loyal and free hearts. She comes with her wide-spreading
intercessions for the whole race, and for her members living and departed. She
offers her glad sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving for all the blessings of
creation and redemption. She solemnly commemorates the passion in word and in
symbolic action, through the bread broken and the wine outpoured, the appointed
tokens of Christ’s sacrificial body and blood, reciting before God His own
words and acts in instituting the holy eucharist. This is the church’s
sacrifice, and it is all she can do.
The nature of the Church, as Gore
considers it, is a participation in the incarnate life of Christ. This is why
he refers to the Church as an ‘extension of the Incarnation'.
His account of Eucharistic sacrifice makes sense in this context. In fact, he
views all the sacraments contributing to the life of Christ being made present
by the Spirit in the Church body, individually and corporately, through the
sacramental grace which they contain.
Gore sees in the Eucharistic offering
an intent, a purpose and a unifying of diverse individuals into one body
through their shared objective and focus. And yet, it is also much more than
this, because it is also a taking-part-in God’s offering of himself within the
Trinity. Christ makes it possible that a fitting sacrificial offering of bread
and wine may be acceptable for us to be brought back into relation with God.
The Eucharist is a joint enterprise of devotion, giving thanks for the actions
of God through Christ, accepting the sinfulness of human nature and seeking
corporate repentance and absolution for it, and bringing the pain of the world
to the altar for healing. In the unity of prayer, the people of God offer a
sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving and Christ meets them in their offering
from his heavenly seat.
Second, Gore sees eternal
connotations providing the next factor suggesting the Eucharist is a sacrifice;
namely God’s involvement in uniting the ‘Body’s’ earthly sacrifice of the
Eucharist with the eternal sacrifice of Christ reigning in his heavenly realm:
…Now the
eucharist is a sacrifice in a second and deeper sense, for God has united the
offerings of the church to the ever-living sacrifice of the great high priest
in the heavenly sanctuary, or has given His presence among them who is their
propitiation and their spiritual food.
Williams no doubt had this concept in
mind when, many years later, he asserted that ‘this is evidently the vocabulary
underlying Rom. 12:1 [and other similar passages]. Christians offer what the
Angels offer “the pleasing savour of a rational and bloodless sacrifice”.
For both Gore and Williams, it is the association between the temporal
sacrifice of the body and eternal sacrifice of heaven that grants access to the
heavenly priesthood and eternal intercession of Christ: his eternal petition on
our behalf.
The Eucharist recalls and makes present the paradox of past eternal realities
concerning God and his action in the world, and fleetingly gazes upon
eschatological events which incorporate all creation into a culmination of
eternal heavenly feasting and devotion – bringing these also into the present.
It makes real and present Christ’s atoning sacrifice and enables believers to
fleetingly engage in the eternal worship of heaven, giving them a foretaste of
the heavenly banquet: the eternal worship for which all creation longs. The
Church offers bread and wine as participation in the event of God’s self-giving
to himself, a one-off historical event eternally valid and perpetual. As Aulèn
describes so aptly: ‘The past is here, too, the present, as the Lord himself
makes the past and eternally valid contemporaneous with us’.
Any sacrifice may only be considered
valid once God accepts the offering and brings it to culmination through his
interactive and reconciliatory nature. And so, for Gore, the third and final
consideration moves seamlessly on from the other two; that in the Eucharist,
God having accepted the body’s offering brings it to culmination by uniting the
entire body to himself though the indwelling of the same Spirit:
Then once
more, united afresh in one body to God by the communion in Christ’s body and
blood, the church offers herself, one with Christ as a body with its head,
living in the same life and indwelt by the same spirit: she offers herself that
her whole fellowship, both the living and the dead, having their sins forgiven
through the propitiation of Christ, may be accepted with all their good works
and prayers “in the beloved.” And in the self-oblation of the church is the
culmination of the sacrifice.
The Church’s offering is only made
possible by its encounter with the Trinitarian life through the Spirit. The
Eucharist makes real something of this divine-earthly encounter. The Spirit
abides in the Church in a similar way that it indwells Christ’s historical
body. Gore is keen to impress, however, that the individual priest does not by
virtue of his or her status personally receive special ‘powers’ through this
association; the sacred mystery of the sacraments are purely the result of
Christ’s actions alone. This is all a part of the Church body’s participation
in Christ and entering into the life of the Spirit. By way of clarification,
Gore tells us that ‘the Church nor the priesthood are in and of themselves
capable of bestowing supernatural power except for that which institutes and
seeds them with Spirit and Grace – Christ’.
He continues: ‘The priesthood then makes present that supernatural grace
through interpretation and sacramental actions, they do not themselves possess
supernatural ‘power’, but through their calling to ordination by God they
receive the authority to enact supernatural functions in order to reveal the
grace of God in the temporal’.
And so Gore, is keen to impress that whilst the ordained priesthood may well be
called by God to receive authority to enact supernatural functions through the
sacraments that reveal God’s action in the world, and just because we are
united with Christ’s sacrifice through the Eucharist, it in no way makes the
ordained ministry a ‘cultic’ priesthood by merit of such a calling. He adds:
The
sacrifice is the sacrifice of the whole body, and the communion is the
communion of the whole body. The celebrating priest is indeed the necessary
organ of the body’s action. He
is the mouth with which she prays, and the hand by which she offers and blesses
in the name of Christ. But the sacrifice is the Church’s Sacrifice…
At this point, Gore once again
underpins his argument with evidence taken from patristic literature. Gore
says: ‘The utmost that God can give – the very being of His own Son – is given
to all alike to bind them in one divine and human life. “Sometimes” says St
Chrysostom, “there is no difference between priests and people; for example,
when we partake of the awful mysteries”’.
Gore believes that the Eucharist,
along with all the sacraments, are not privileges of an elite priestly caste.
Neither are they done by priests ‘to’ their receivers. The priesthood is not
given a special channel to God that everyone else is barred from. Neither does
the priesthood police such gateways. Priests are simply set apart by the Spirit
at ordination to ensure that the Church’s action continues to relate authentically
to God’s action through not just words, but also sacramental functions, which
are based in material and earthly things. They are committed to the giving of
‘God’s holy gifts for God’s holy people’.
This gives us a brief insight into what Gore considers differentiates the
‘ordained priesthood’ from the ‘priesthood of all believers’. We will now turn
to explore this in a little more depth.
e)
The Ordained Priesthood and the Priesthood of All
Believers
For many decades, there have been
prevalent and ongoing debates concerned with differentiating between the nature
of baptismal priesthood over and against that of ordained ministry. These
debates were significant for the contributions of the Second Vatican Council,
but the council’s outcomes did not bring an end to such deliberations. Even in
the twenty-first century there is still a concern to try and clarify what
exactly it means to be baptised into a priesthood of all believers
in a church that also recognises individuals to a special ministry of ordained
priesthood. As Risley states: ‘one of the more vexing problems that faces the
Church today is the relationship between the priesthood of those who are
ordained and the baptismal priesthood of all the faithful’.
Although Gore is writing at a time in
history before the major debates over the nature of the baptismal priesthood
had reached their climax,
it is interesting to observe the attention Gore gives to this area of his
theological thought. Gore is only too aware of the dangers associated with
holding a theology of ordained ministry that diminishes the role of the wider
body of believers in the Church’s redemptive and salvific task under Christ. In
a significant statement, Gore says: ‘It will appear that there are in the
Church (those) who are in a special sense entrusted with ‘the ministry of
reconciliation’ just as there are in a special sense prophets and teachers. But
this special office must not be allowed to interfere with the truth that the
whole body is priestly – a royal priesthood…’
In light of this statement, one may
well puzzle over what it means to be called to ordained ministry. How is the
ordained priesthood different from the one received at baptism?
In order to answer this conundrum, we will need to look at each in turn.
i.
Baptism and the ‘Priesthood of All Believers’
Gore is convinced that the baptism of
new believers was expressly instituted by Christ and is recorded as such in the
Gospels.
He is also keen to remind his readers that baptism is regarded in the New
Testament as the instrument of the forgiveness of sins and incorporation into
the community, and was accompanied or followed by the gift of the Spirit’.
For Gore, baptism carries both symbolic and effectual meaning. He states:
‘going down into the water and being immersed in it and rising out of it is an
acted representation of life through death, the dying to an old life and being
buried and rising again to the new life.’
So baptism, according to Gore, symbolises a change in direction in one’s
personal and spiritual life: it symbolises a person recognising their previous
alienation from God and from that moment beginning to live a life more in tune
with God’s wishes. It is also much more than that, because as Gore continues:
baptism ‘effects what it symbolises. It is the transference of a man into a new
spiritual sphere’.
Following St Paul’s teaching that one is baptized ‘into Christ’,
and ‘as many of you as were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves with
Christ’,
Gore understands that Christ, through the rite itself, brings about the
effectual change it symbolises by the bestowal of the Holy Spirit. Baptism is a
coming to Christ, a beginning to live a life in Christ, through his Spirit.
Gore is keen to impress, however,
that this is not simply a calling of a lone individual to relationship with a
personal Jesus, as important an element of faith as that may be. Ramsey states
that: ‘Christianity is never solitary’. Gore is in complete agreement. For him,
baptism ‘into Christ is also baptism into the one body’.
According to Gore, the individual aspect of faith cannot be distinguished from
their incorporation into the society that Christ inaugurated.
He believes that baptism is entering into the community of the Church - eternal
and temporal. To be united with Christ is to be united with his eternal body in
the heavenly realm and his earthly body, the Church, which he inhabits through
his Spirit. An individual does not first unite with Christ and then join other
members of a gathered group of likeminded individuals, which we call a church.
Instead, an individual is baptised into the Church where they encounter the
living Christ. Gore states, ‘Thus our new birth into Christ is attached to a
washing of water. This is the “bath of regeneration”, the being “baptised into
Christ”. But it is also our introduction into society, “by one Spirit we were
all baptised into one body.”’
As we discovered in an earlier
chapter, Gore’s deep seated incarnational theology is significant in his
understanding of the Church, and it also impacts on the significance he places
upon baptism. According to Cox, Victorian Ecclesiologists like Gore ‘marvelled
at the doctrine of the Word-made-flesh as a key to understanding the Church as
the Body of Christ, one means whereby the Incarnate One may abide on earth. The
Church becomes an outward and visible sign of a vivid inward reality of unity
between God and humanity’.
For Gore, incorporation into the Church is incorporation into Christ’s body,
the tangible expression of an individual entering into spiritual relationship
with God. As Gore states, ‘Christ is our salvation, because in being united to
him, we are united to nothing less than God himself’.
Whilst every baptised Christian may
well enter into the one body, we need to ask: in what sense is this associated
with incorporation into a baptismal priesthood, a priesthood of all believers?
Well, Gore believes that through
baptism each individual begins a journey of faith, a faith which cannot be
realised outside of the Church. This faith opens to each believer the
realisation that ‘alive in heaven, (Jesus) is also alive in us. He is moulding
us inwardly and gradually, in this life and beyond it, into the likeness of
that example, which at first he set outwardly before us’ (through the
incarnation).
Christ’s example is ever before us. We relate to him through his humanity. His
attractive ideal stands before us as our aspiration. Through our faith, he
touches our inmost being.
For Gore, there is a ‘priesthood
which is common to all’ believers and has a role in helping the world receive
the fruits of Christ. This ‘priesthood is common to all by virtue of their
baptism and confirmation’.
For Gore, this baptismal priesthood, as
with all Christian priesthood, is first to find its calling in its committed
relationship to Christ. Standing as their example, each believer is called to
imitate the qualities they see in him. Added to this, there is another aspect
to the priesthood of all believers
that makes it priestly. Gore continues on to explain:
Not only
does each member of the Christian society enjoy on his own behalf and on that
of his brethren in Christ the freedom of approach towards God which Christ has
won for him; but also he stands, and the whole Christian society stands, before
the world as exercising on behalf of all humanity its priestly function. It
stands ‘lifting up holy hands’ on behalf of all men. It thus offers itself to
all men as the example and the instrument of reconciliation with God’.
As faith and trust in Christ grows,
so each baptized believer becomes increasingly aware of the infinite love he
has for them and in return each believer begins to respond in a priestly way as
they offer themselves as a living testimony to all humanity of the power and
fruit of reconciliation with God. Ramsey sums it up thus: ‘…the Christian’s
growth in Christ is a part of the growth of the one Body and all its members.
His knowledge of Christ grows, as the one Body grows by the due working of all
its parts, and as Christ is made complete in all His saints’.
Be this as it may, Gore is also keen
to impress that ‘within the Church are those entrusted with a special “ministry
of reconciliation”’.
‘Bishops and priests, who have specially accepted the responsibility for
maintaining the faith and handing it on unimpaired to the generations that are
to come’.
ii.
The Ordained Priesthood
According to Gore, the ‘freedom’
afforded to the baptismal priesthood
is only possible within the ordered system of the Church.
It is his consideration that such ‘freedom’ only belongs to a believer as a
result of their membership of ‘the Church, (being) baptized and anointed and a
communicant, and therefore dependent on the ministry of her clergy’.
In this way, ‘God offers in support a visible authoritative commission in
sacred ministry – ‘to feed his sheep’’.
He continues:
‘The
Christian ministry is at once, under normal circumstances, God’s provision to
strengthen the hands of the spiritual men, the natural guides of souls, by
giving them support which comes of the consciousness of an irreversible and
authoritative commission: and it is also God’s provision for days when prophets
are few or wanting, that even then there may be the bread of life ministered to
hungering souls, and at least the simple proclamation of the revealed truth…’
In this passage, we see Gore
recognising that the baptismal priesthood has a significant role in guiding
other souls to God. At the same time, we see how he considers that task
impossible outside of the Church and the support the ordained priesthood offers
in spiritually feeding them and helping them to grow in the faith by guarding
the authenticity of teaching and sacraments.
One needs to be careful not to
interpret Gore as devaluing the role of the ordained priesthood. Gore does not
agree with his contemporary Lightfoot who completely dismisses the ‘sacerdotal
system’ and moves close to suggesting that the priest is simply a delegate of
the congregation. For Gore, the ordained priesthood does
represent the Spirit endowed congregation, but also has authority itself
bestowed by the Spirit at ordination in order to represent God to the congregation
through its actions. Gore walks a careful balance in recognising the priesthood
holding a special spiritual function under God, whilst at the same time calling
for caution in how we understand the difference between the two forms of
priesthood. The ordained ministry is no closer to God and is not deemed any
better or more effective by virtue of ordination. But neither is everyone
really the same.
On the one hand Gore tries not to
suggest that the baptismal priesthood is able to replace the important role
that the ordained priesthood has to play in the ordering of Christ’s Church and
its sacramental principles. Whilst on the other, and as we explored earlier in
this chapter, he is keen to dismiss any notion of the ordained priesthood being
a special caste. Avis paraphrases Gore’s stance this way: ‘While Gore defends
the term ‘priesthood’, as applied to the ordained, he equally insists that the
whole Church is ‘a high priestly race’ because ‘it lives in the full enjoyment
of [Christ’s] reconciliation and is the instrument through which the whole
world is to be reconciled to God’. Gore is quite clear that the ordained have a
‘representative, not vicarious role’.
As Gore clarifies: ‘the difference between clergy and laity ‘is not a
difference of kind but function’.
For Gore, the ‘reception of eucharistic grace, the approach to God in
eucharistic sacrifice, are functions of the whole body… But the ministry (of
ordained priesthood) is the organ – the necessary organ – of these functions.’
Gore works hard to establish an
understanding of priesthood that at once encourages and supports the ministry
of every believer – a ministry of witness and fellowship bestowed at baptism –
whilst ensuring that the ministry of the ordained priesthood is appropriately
supported as being charged with spiritual and sacramental oversight, guidance
and ensuring that the Church’s key sacramental functions remain authentic to
Christ’s example.
All these undertakings include a
necessary gathering of community and so we see a healthy balance in Gore’s
thinking where the two modes of priesthood are inseparable. In more recent
times Guiver has described it thus: ‘the priest is no independent species – the
laity are part of the picture of what the priest is, and the priest is a part
of the picture of what the laity are’. And so, we are once again touching upon
something communal at the core of Gore’s sacramental thinking. If Gore believes
that the priesthood and the sacraments have an innately communal or social
aspect, then we should now turn to exploring what he understands this to
be.
f) Sacraments – Social Ceremonies
Gore is absolutely convinced that the
real wisdom behind the sacraments is that they are both divinely instituted and
communal; they are at once gifts from God and binders of community. The two are
inseparable. Gore understands these ‘social actions’ to encompass the spiritual
richness of Christ’s life through their materiality. This, he believes, is in
keeping with both the example of the incarnational witness (in human form) and
the rich complexity of created humanity (social, being made of matter). So we
return to considerations to do with Gore’s Christology and theological
anthropology. In the sacraments God binds up the community into his loving arms
and unites them with Christ in his heavenly splendour through the fellowship’s
joint engagement in the Church’s spiritual ceremonial life. Gore states:
And the
obligation of fellowship in the society was presented in a concrete shape by
the institution of sacraments, that is, visible and symbolical actions, which
were both appointed channels of divine grace and at the same time social
ceremonies which admitted into the full membership of the society, baptism and
the laying on of hands and a ceremony by which membership was maintained and
expressed – the breaking of bread.
At this point we may naturally ponder
the consequences for our understanding of ordained priesthood. Through the
sacraments, the priesthood is called to nurture the entire body and promote the
equality of all. As the convener of the body and the celebrant of the rite,
this requires the priest to exercise integrity within the liturgical offering,
recognising themselves and everyone else they serve as equally valued
within the sacred gathering. This fact is not lost on Gore, for if the
sacraments are ‘social ceremonies’, then they must also invite all to engage
with equal standing.
Waddell interprets Gore’s thinking this way: ‘That incorporation, that
communion of transformed lives in Christ, is what we call the Church. It
happens supremely through the sacraments… the sacramental and the political
were as one… (Through the sacraments) human beings encounter each other as
brothers and sisters. The Eucharist is to be the end of exploitation.’
Gore draws on an Aristotelian concept
of the human condition in order to expand our thinking. ‘First’, he says, ‘[the
Church] is natural: it corresponds to a law of our nature. Aristotle said long
ago that man is a social animal. The meaning of this is that though society is
made up of individuals, and indeed the aim of society is the development of the
faculties of the individual, yet no man realises his individuality only by the
relations to a society’.
What Gore is challenging here is the ever prevailing concept of spiritual
individualism – as prominent (or possibly more so) in our present age as it was
in his own. Gore sees equality in community as promoting this important
spiritual facet; a guard against the destructiveness of spiritual
individualism. Gore says, ‘the attachment of the particular spiritual gifts, by
divine institution, to sacraments – that is, to social ceremonies, is the
divine provision against spiritual individualism.’
Anyone called into community, called
to share the social sacramental gifts of God in equality, must accept that,
whilst being valued as an individual, they are not able to fully realise who
they are designed to be, to become truly human, unless they are fully committed
to that same community where they are fed – a community of other equally valued
individuals. God draws individuals into the body and priests work on behalf of
the body. Gore’s theological understanding of ‘social sacraments’ does not
start with a theory that everyone can do everything, nor that priests do them
to the laity. It starts with ‘the body’ as a differentiated whole: a structure
in which priests are a part which helps the body to achieve its aims; temporal,
eternal, material and sociological.
Consequently, Gore considers the soul
to be formed and fed through being a member of the body. This cannot be
replaced by individual spiritual wandering. These ‘social’ sacraments by their
corporate and material nature are therefore instrumental in directing each soul
towards the divine reality.
g) Sacraments and the Soul.
So far in this chapter, we have seen
how Gore considers that Christ through the incarnation shows us the most
authentic example of how to enter back into relationship with God, and the
Church conveys this truth through its teachings, actions and rituals.
Gore also believes that the Church is
called to proclaim Christ’s love to the world and through the Spirit points
towards the eschatological conclusion of creation. All of this is grounded in
material and communal characteristics through the sacraments.
Ordained priests reflect this through
their actions, grounded in a sacramental imperative and sharing in Christ’s
priesthood by virtue of their ordination. In spite of this, Gore does not
consider the priesthood to be an elite caste, set apart from the Church body.
In Gore’s understanding, priests are called to convene and unite the body of
the faithful and ensure that the Church’s action continues to relate to God’s
action through words, activities and sacraments; sacramental functions based in
material and earthly things. All of this has spiritual connotations, and as we
continue on, we will discover how Gore considers the spiritual and material
completely interdependent upon one another. The spiritual reality of the
sacraments is revealed through their material objects. The same is true for
humanity – the soul completely dependent upon the body. Sacraments then are
about forming the soul by uniting spiritual truths in material undertakings. If
one were to follow Gore’s logic and try and describe in a few words what the
ordained priesthood is called to in all of this, one would likely conclude that
formation, engagement and relationship are all central facets to their
ministry.
Gore’s anthropology sees humanity as
primarily of spiritual nature in need of restoration from sinfulness and
corruption. It is no surprise, then, that ‘spirituality’ runs through every
aspect of Gore’s thought. As Waddell states: ‘Gore thought all the themes –
politics, ecclesiology, Christology - … intimately and inextricably bound up
with our spiritual life: they are our spiritual life, considered under
different aspects and from different angles’.
They form our personality, our spirituality and our soul. Williams ventures
that ‘we live in a society, and indeed as part of a fallen humanity, that
deceives us constantly about what we most deeply want’.
Gore was only too aware of the perilous journey and the many pitfalls this
presented. For him, an holistic understanding of the formation of the soul and
its dependency upon the materiality of life provided the ‘most convincing
refutation of a great deal of language used in the repudiation of the
sacramental principle’.
Much of this principle has been explored above, and as is evident Gore
considers that without it, without the spiritual and material engagement of
these social ceremonies, humanity’s condition would be completely subjected,
without challenge, to the whims of its currently flawed state. To his mind this
would, by inference, diminish the plausibility of being able to acquire
immortality of the soul (salvation). Furthermore, development of the soul
towards God is fully dependent upon participation in the Church. As he states:
God may
indeed ultimately take the soul into His own absolutely equitable hands, to
reconstitute it solely in view of its individual possibilities and
responsibilities, but for this world, at least, its whole condition, spiritual
as well as material, is, to a degree which is not easy to exaggerate, dependent
upon the society which is responsible for it…
Eternal salvation is completely
dependent upon the soul’s development towards reuniting with God, and that
progress is not just the responsibility of the individual, but also the
community of believers, the Church to which they belong. This is why for Gore,
the priesthood holds a central responsibility for ensuring that the gathered
community remains obedient to the disciplines of Christ, as communicated
through the teachings, sacraments and orders of the Church. It is no surprise
to discover then that Gore is uncompromising in his belief that through the
Church and its sacraments we are united to Christ and see that ‘Christ is our
salvation, because in being united to him, we are united to nothing less than
God himself’.
What is notable here, is how closely Gore aligns the Church’s action with God’s
action in reuniting the individual soul to Godself. In fact, Gore is clear that
God acts through the worshipping community to bring the individual soul back to
himself.
Here, we begin to see the deep
spiritual significance of Gore’s sacramental theology for the formation of the
soul, because Gore believes that the soul is indisputably bound up with
materiality and corporality. Gore appears to understand the soul and body as
materially and spiritually bound on earth and interdependent upon one another.
He states:
[the soul]
is by God’s creative will indisputably attached to material conditions; and as
such conditions as are in experience found the most liable to be misused, and
to become not material only but carnal. This does at least give us something to
think about. It shows us something of the mind of God. This dependence of the
immortal spirit – the only seat of human spirituality – upon material
conditions, at its origin and throughout its existence upon the earth…
The soul is inseparable from the body
in this life and it is through the lived experience of earthly conditions that
the soul is formed and refined towards the Godhead, most especially through ‘the
divine society: the Church and its ‘social ceremonies’.
Gore considers body and soul completely united and inseparable in a formational
earthly pilgrimage designed to assist the individual’s aspirations to reach
potential immortality with God. The soul is bound to material things and as
such every aspect and experience of life is subjected to spiritual dimensions.
Gore sees the soul as ‘destined for immortal fellowship with God’ and as having
‘tremendous and eternal possibilities’.
It is, therefore, for the Church and its ministerial orders to provide
appropriate and authentic opportunities for the individual to recognise,
nurture and grow towards God through sacramental and corporate engagement.
h) Concluding Thoughts
This chapter has given us much
insight into Gore’s theological understanding of the Church, the ordained
priesthood, the baptismal priesthood, the sacramental principles of the Church
and its ministry and how all these help unite the individual soul to the
Trinity.
Earlier in this chapter, we recalled
how Gore sees the ministerial orders of the Church as instituted by Christ;
that he understands the Church, through its ordained ministry, having a
responsibility for authentically preserving what Christ instituted; and passing
it on to each new generation in appropriate ways. We explored how in Christ
Gore sees the most perfect way of entering into relationship with God and how
the Church is called to communicate and encourage this through its teachings,
actions and rituals. Gore believes that these, authentically delivered, are on
some level the most reliable representation of God after the incarnation. Each
refers back to the incarnational example, and their authenticity rests in the
actions and instructions of Christ himself.
Gore also believes that the Church is
called to proclaim Christ’s love to the world and that the Spirit invigorates
the Church with the life of Christ. This life is entirely consistent with the
Church’s authentic function through which the Spirit has consistently been
active and points towards the eschatological conclusion of creation. Gore shows
how all of this is grounded in material and communal characteristics.
For the priesthood, all of this is
reflected in their actions, after the example of Christ and on behalf of the
church body. This is grounded in a sacramental imperative. Gore does not
consider the Eucharist, or any other sacrament, to be privileges of an elite
priestly caste, but instead Gore recognises priests as set apart to convene the
body of the faithful and ensure that the Church’s action continues to relate to
God’s action through words, actions and sacraments. These sacramental functions
are based in material and earthly things.
For the ordained priesthood then, it
is this sacramental and social concern that helps form its identity. Gore
considers that the priesthood is to reveal the grace of God through
interpretation and sacramental actions so that individual believers may begin
to unite themselves with his divine will.
In order to do this, each individual must unite themselves to the corporate
body, the Church, and, together with the individual, the Church also bears
responsibility for each member’s spiritual wellbeing and growth. Because of the
interdependence of each individual soul upon the material body, the Church does
this through its material and social ceremonies, the sacraments, which in
themselves help to form and realign each individual soul to Christ.
Conclusion and Application to the Present
Situation
a) Gore’s Theology of Priesthood as Discussed in this Work
In the first chapter, looking at the
incarnation, we explored how Gore considers the human race to be in great peril
if it were not for God’s own intervention in the person of his Son, Jesus
Christ, who redeems humanity. This is because, in Gore’s understanding, Christ
enables humanity to know God more completely and opens up the means to enter
more fully into relationship with him through actual living union, where
spiritual infirmity may be healed. Christ offers a remedy for the morally
corrupted world and thus a route back into the divine relationship.
Gore believes that Christ does not
come to approve the messiness of broken humanity, but to reunite the flesh to
spiritual purity, a purity similar and yet superior to what is experienced in
Eden, so that humanity may experience holistic completeness through its earthly
pilgrimage. Hence, Gore sees Christ as re-orientating our outlook in order to
bring about an objective change to our situation so that we may experience
unity with the Father.
To Gore, Christ lives a perfect and
uncorrupted existence. Free from sin and yet confronted with all the temptation
of worldly experience, Christ offers an example of completeness, void of the
separation and damage that sin can erode at the base of the human soul. In this
way, Christ is the example of both human perfection and the ‘legitimate climax
of natural development’,[328]
revealing the ways one may come to know God better, whilst also repairing the
previously broken relationship. Thus, the incarnational example draws creation
into the life of the Spirit because Christ shows us the true nature of God,
which is unqualified love. As such Christ opens God up to us so that we may
come to know God more fully, whilst also reconciling us to God by
re-establishing the means by which we may enter back into relationship with
him.
Gore interprets Christ as fulfilling
the Old Law and Levitical Priesthood by exhibiting a refreshed understanding of
priestly life based on moral purity, integrity and service. For Gore, Christ
ushers in a new era of moral justice based upon compassion and forgiveness. In
this way Christ exhibits high-priestly credentials: he is a crescendo of moral
authority and the quintessence of sacrificial life and priesthood. Thus, his
life proves essential for humanity’s salvation.
As we dig deeper into Gore’s thought
we become enlightened by the realisation that Gore sees a significant feature
of Christ’s priestly nature advancing humanity towards perfect union with God,
by helping each individual recognise God’s action infusing Christ’s life into
them by the work of the Spirit and encouraging them to draw others into the
same awareness. For Gore, Christ helps humanity live more in tune with the
indwelling Holy Spirit evident in the created order. Christ’s priestly
personality grounded in love and compassion enables creation to enter into the
divine life more fully. Living in that love, humanity is more readily able to
see the miraculous in the world around it by developing a purer spiritual
vision. And so, for Gore, priesthood as it is witnessed in Christ is associated
with helping each human being live most authentically according to the image
that God has implanted in them, thereby helping them grow into a healthier
relationship with God the Creator.
Gore understands Christ as the
essence of the priestly life, in which prayer, resisting temptation to sin and
nurturing a deep relationship with God are all key. The qualities of love,
service, truth, justice, self-sacrifice and compassion all feature prominently
in the example he lays down.
Gore believes that this is only
possible because Christ is the embodiment uncorrupted humanity, whilst
portraying the very attributes of God. Through the nature of his death Christ
absorbs death into the divine life and by his resurrection he overcomes the
power that the fear of death has on humanity, by offering renewed hope.
In Gore’s understanding, Christ
reveals that sin is unnatural and that sinless humanity is the more natural and
desirable state. This is a state we see exhibited perfectly in Christ, and in
him we see the most authentic personality of God.[329] Gore
informs us of how, in Christ, God ‘has shown that he is alive; in human nature
he has given glimpses of his mind and character’.[330] Thus,
through Christ, we see that God is ultimate love. Christ is the consummation of
the Old Testament prophecies partly because, in him, this love is intertwined
with his faithfulness, justice, compassion and truth, all divine traits
recognisable throughout the Hebrew Scriptures.[331] From
this position, Gore believes that Christ is the embodiment of the priestly
life, grounded in service and grace, rather than law. He ushers in a new era of
moral justice based upon compassion and forgiveness, where a new form of
relationship with God is working within us in the new covenant through the work
of the Spirit. And so, to Gore’s mind, Christ is the embodiment of sacrificial
priesthood, affording him the position of eternal high-priest.
Gore considers that
Christ, through his divine nature, reveals the richest exposition of God. As
prophet Christ reveals the essence of God’s loving nature through words and
actions. As priest, Christ offers reconciliation with God through his
once-for-all-time sacrifice for sin and enables healing of the previously
broken relationship. As king, exalted high-priest, robed in eternal splendour
and sitting at the Father’s right hand, he governs the universe, mediates for
the sin that separates humanity from God and moves creation towards its
eschatological conclusion.
Thus, we see how Christ’s priestly
credentials are important in order for humanity to enter more readily into
relationship with God. In the incarnation we see both revelation and
reconciling action. Sinless nature being the more desirable state, and following
Christ’s priestly example, resisting evil and repentance for any wrong doing
are attributes that the Church and its ministerial orders are called to promote
so that humanity may aspire towards a higher spiritual state, ultimately
communion with God. Christ’s life, example and teaching draws followers into
his divine life and in turn implants the divine life within his followers. As
this divine life works within us it moves creation towards its eschatological
conclusion in the Triune God.
Gore concludes that: ‘Alive in
heaven, he is also alive in us. He is moulding us inwardly and gradually, in
this life and beyond it, into the likeness of that example, which at the first
he set outwardly before us’.[332]
As believers in the divine revelation, we are reworked, even healed, by the
life of Christ working in us through the Spirit as a result of our inclusion in
the Church body, through which God the Creator is causing new life to grow and
flourish. The Church is the means by which we may be united to Christ, because,
as Gore states: ‘Christ is our salvation, because in being united to him, we
are united to nothing less than God himself’.[333] As such, Gore considers that the nature of Christian
priesthood is to reveal, lead and realign humanity towards the redemptive
rewards won by Christ through the cross and resurrection. The Church’s
ministerial orders look to the example of Christ, promoting those attributes of
behaviour, teaching and personality discernible through his priestly existence.
This is how Gore comes to see the
Church as an ‘extension of the incarnation’, because it continues what Christ
began by disclosing God’s works of salvation to each new age.[334]
And so he believes that the ministerial priesthood is called to act as an aid
in revealing the divine goodness drawing near and as an instrument for the
restoration of relationship to God.
As Christ is the
second volume of the divine revelation, Gore sees the Church and its
ministerial orders as forming the bridge between Christ’s incarnation and the
final chapter when all things will be gathered to the divine goodness through
Christ. It embodies the principles of Christ and infuses and enfolds the lives
of its members with his life. It is this ‘life’ that makes the Church Christ’s
continuing body in the temporal world by way of his Spirit.
Considering the
scriptural evidence, Gore sees reason to claim that the Church is divinely
instituted by Christ who shows clear intentionality regarding how the Church is
to develop before he ascends to the Father. Gore is convinced that there is a
wealth of further historical evidence to back this up, most especially from the
first two centuries of the Church. He considers that the Church is created as
God’s action in the world and not by humans in response to God’s action. This
divine direction at the very centre of the Church’s formation and progress
proves to be a significant building block in his entire theology of priesthood.
This leads him to understand that after the incarnation the next stage of the
divine masterplan is the Church and the life it breathes is the very breath of
Christ himself.
Drawing further
conclusions from scriptural and patristic evidence, Gore believes that Christ
shows clear intentionality regarding how the Church develops and orders itself.
As the Church expands, so common unity is found in the apostles’ leadership,
teaching and oversight, on account of them having been chosen by Christ and
experiencing his ministry and the events of his life first hand. In this way,
Gore considers that from the very earliest times, to be a Christian means being
a member of the Church and committed to the flourishing of the society, under a
common unity which finds its focus in the Creed and the ‘visible Church’; which
to Gore’s mind includes apostolic succession, the threefold ministry and being
under the apostles’ oversight and direction. Gore does not interpret these as
stifling diversity, far from it, it is precisely the security found within the
boundaries of this shared focus that enables local diversity to flourish within
the early church, according to local culture and need.
Gore sees the
threefold ministry of bishops, priests and deacons beginning its life in
individual churches under the apostles’ oversight. Gore interprets the evidence
as showing that initially, in some churches at least, the bishop and presbyter
are indistinguishable, and that both titles are often used to refer to the same
individual. Over time, as more and more churches grow up, the model matures
into one that we would consider recognisable today. Apostles begin handing more
and more responsibility to individual bishops who become the head of their
local college of presbyters. Gore also sees evidence of the apostles slowly
handing on their authority in its entirety, and so the local bishop begins to
be seen as standing in the apostle’s place and the threefold ministerial order
grows up to be a central focus for unity under the bishops’ oversight. As each
bishop passes down their authority to the next so the principle of apostolic
succession is firmly secured.
Gore deduces a
concern within the early church for the process to be appropriately governed
from above, and so a spiritual discernment of selecting bishops, priests and
deacons is adopted where candidates are recognised according to spiritual,
moral and prayerful integrity, affirmed through the congregation and sanctioned
by the apostolic representatives. This is not a task centred, earthly approach
to suitability, but a spiritual one. For Gore, ordination is a significant part
of the process, precisely because at ordination God bestows through the bishop’s
actions something of the Spirit of Christ’s priesthood upon the person.
Christ’s priesthood remains unique and exemplary with each ordained bishop,
priest or deacon drawing their ministry from his. Gore alludes to an
ontological change taking place within each individual at the point of
ordination, individual callings fulfilled by grace, as they become spiritual
instruments for Christ’s redemptive qualities and salvific nature, which draws them
through the Spirit into the body and life of Christ.
Gore understands the
Church, through its ordained ministry, having a responsibility for
authentically preserving what Christ instituted and passing it on to each new
generation in appropriate ways. In Christ, Gore sees the most perfect way of
entering into relationship with God. Christ stands in his high priesthood as
prophet, priest and king, re-establishing the means of relationship with God
through witness, participation and (individual and corporate) obedience. The
Church is called to communicate, encourage and provide access to this through
its teachings, actions and rituals so that Christian life corresponds with the
prophetic, priestly, kingly work of Christ. Gore believes that these,
authentically delivered, are on some level the most reliable representation of
God after the incarnation. This is because, if authentic, they refer back to
the incarnational example, and their authenticity rests in the actions and
instructions of Christ himself.
Gore also believes
that the Spirit invigorates the Church with the life of Christ so that it may
proclaim Christ’s love to the world. This life is entirely consistent with the
Church’s authentic function through which the Spirit has consistently been active
and points towards the eschatological conclusion of creation.
Ordained ministers are
called to follow the example of Christ’s priesthood on behalf of the Church
body through their actions, so that the entire body may be drawn deeper into
the life of Christ, through the work of Spirit. This is grounded in a
sacramental imperative. In the sacraments, and especially in the Eucharist,
Gore sees Christ being made present through his eternal offering: the sacrifice
of the cross. By the community’s joint participation and re-membrance, every
Eucharist makes Christ’s eternal sacrifice present and actual in the offering
of bread and wine. For Gore, the Eucharist (and other sacraments) transcend the
limits of time and space as each unites the gathered body with Christ’s
prophetic, priestly and kingly action, and thus exists simultaneously past,
present and future.
Sharing in Christ’s
priesthood, the ordained priest stands as the intermediary between heaven and
earth, helping the earthly church body participate in those eternal realities.
As bread and wine are placed on the Altar, prayers said and the words of Christ
recited, so Christ transforms them with his eternal sacrifice, changing them
into his body and blood so that the Church is given access to his atoning
reality.
Gore identifies two
significant aspects that underlie each sacrament and give them their potency.
The first is that they all use material objects to communicate and effect
spiritual grace. The second is that they are all communal, drawing each
individual believer into the community in which the life of Christ is active.
In Gore’s understanding, the individual aspect of faith cannot be separated
from an individual’s calling into the community of faith, past, present and
future. So, coming to faith is to Gore incorporation into the Church which is
also incorporation into Christ’s body; a tangible expression of an individual
entering into spiritual relationship with God the Trinity, who exhibits perfect
unity and embraces eternal community.
The spiritual
reality of the sacraments is revealed through their material objects in order
to engage the entire being of the person whose soul is likewise completely
dependent upon the body. These sacramental functions are based in material and
earthly things, precisely because sacraments are about forming the soul by
uniting spiritual truths in material undertakings. In this way, sacraments,
these material and social ceremonies, help to form and realign each individual
soul to Christ through bodily engagement.
This sacramental and
social concern helps form the identity of the ordained priesthood. Gore
considers that the priesthood is to reveal the grace of God through
interpretation and sacramental actions so that individual believers may begin
to unite themselves with God’s divine will.[335] In order
to do this, all individuals have a responsibility to unite themselves to the
corporate body, the Church, and as a consequence the Church bears some
responsibility for each member’s spiritual wellbeing and growth.
Even though Gore
considers the priesthood to be called into a specific spiritual function within
the Church, he does not consider the Eucharist, or any other sacrament, to be
privileges of an elite priestly caste, but instead recognises priests as simply
set apart in the Spirit to convene the body of the faithful and ensure that the
Church’s action continues to relate to God’s action through words, actions and
sacramental integrity. This proves to be significant for Gore’s understanding
of the ordained priesthood and its distinction from the baptismal priesthood
(also referred to as the priesthood of all believers).
In Gore’s
understanding, the baptismal priesthood finds its calling in two significant
areas of the Church’s mission. First, the baptismal priesthood is called into a
committed communal and individual relationship with Christ. For those called to
a lay model of priesthood by virtue of their baptism into Christ, they are
first and foremost to be an outward testimony to the world by their very lives
lived in faith and commitment to Christ through the Church body. They are a
testimony to the fruit of a life lived with God. Second, they have a role in
guiding other souls to God and are the Church’s outward mission ‘in the world’
offering themselves as a powerful testimony of what reconciliation with God can
nurture within each individual.
Gore understands
that the ordained priesthood is called to live similarly as any other baptised
Christian, but that they also hold a ‘special ministry of reconciliation’.[336]
It is Gore’s deep seated belief that the ordained ministry is not set aside for
some kind of spiritual privilege, for all are equal before God. However, Gore
does consider that they have a special place in the ordering of the Church to
ensure that the rest of the gathered body, the entire baptismal priesthood, are
spiritually fed and grow through authentic teaching and sacramental engagement.
In this way the entire body is invigorated by the Spirit and drawn into the
life of Christ which advances creation towards its eschatological conclusion.
What we have discovered in this
dissertation and then rounded off in this conclusory segment forms the
significant discovery of this research. Nonetheless, having discovered the
depth and richness of Gore’s theology of priesthood, it would now feel slightly
incomplete if we were not to fleetingly consider what Gore’s understanding may
have to offer a few significant points of contemporary debate on the subject of
Christian ministry. The contemporary debate is vast and there is little space
here to do it proper justice, but it may be that what we begin other scholars,
with far greater insight in this regard, may be able to develop further in
times to come. Therefore, we now move to completion by considering what Gore’s
insight may offer concerning three most significant contemporary issues
concerning the theology of priesthood; namely the effect that individualism,
obsession with task and experientialism has on the Church’s current approach to
ordained ministry.
b) A General State of Concern.
There is no shortage
of contemporary scholars who voice a concern regarding the condition of
theological understanding concerning ministerial orders within the Church.[337]
These observers claim that a number of perceived difficulties are damaging
central ecclesiology and the deep historical structures of Christianity. If
these claims are true, then it would seem imperative that the Church reignites
its common interest in a true understanding of ordained ministry. This was in
part the catalyst behind undertaking this research. From what we have discovered
in this dissertation, Charles Gore would doubtless be sympathetic to this
concern. Gore has considerable regard for the Church’s understanding of
priesthood and, as we have seen, much of what he produces as a result is
directly concerned with attending to this.[338]
i.
Individualism
Through his deeply
social understanding of the Church and the sacraments, Gore offers a challenge
to the modern-day individualism that ravages the communal underpinning of the
Church. Gore opposes the commonly held notion that the Christian faith is only
concerned with an individual’s personal relationship to Christ.[339]
Gore asserts that Christianity is primarily about allegiance to Christ through
commitment to the gathered body and engagement in its sacramental undertakings.
Personal relationship is an important factor, but only under the wider
imperative of communal faithfulness. For Gore, we mature into the Christians we
are called to be through obedience and service to Christ, becoming less
concerned about ourselves and less dominated by our feelings. He states, ‘by
losing our lives in Christ and his cause, we are meant to save them; to serve
Christ, not to feel Christ, is the mark of his true servants; they become
Christian in proportion as they cease to be interested in themselves and become
absorbed in their Lord’.[340]
This is a stark
challenge to those who would associate their allegiance to Church as about
quality of experience or momentary theological whim. To Gore’s mind, Christian
faith is about something far deeper than such partiality will allow. It is a
communal gathering of faithful individuals uniting together within the
ecclesial legitimacy and continuity derived from the apostles under the
guidance of the Holy Spirit and sanctioned by Christ.
In an age where the
embracing of all-round diversity too often paradoxically undermines the claim
that different individuals are called to serve God in different ways, Gore
offers a radical counter-claim: one does not recognise the crucial importance
and distinction of lay ministry by denying ordained ministry the same. This is
a critical point. There is a most aggressive force in our current age
apparently attempting to flatten out distinction of hierarchy in the ungrounded
assumption that it in some way allows for greater recognition of diversity and
individual calling. Whilst it is necessary that the Church has a healthy
understanding of hierarchy: one which enables debate and attends properly to
individual concerns and aspirations, it is also vital that the Church is
ordered through those chosen and sanctioned by the Spirit and tasked with
keeping the Church authentic to the Gospel imperative. Gore shows us how God can be equally present
to every individual, whilst, at the same time, each individual is called
uniquely to serve God in different ways. Gore offers us a reminder that God
calls us in distinction to different orders for the blessing of creation and
ordering of his Church. He outlines how the foundation of all Christian
ministry rests in the sacraments and the ordained priesthood is called to
minister these gifts of God. Gore reveals how the sacraments (together with Scripture
and shared creedal belief) are fundamental to faith and how essential it is
that we have ministerial orders to ensure and protect their administration.
ii.
Task over Office
Billings, Heywood
and Greenwood all question whether the ordering of the Church in its present
form is fit for purpose. They claim to observe a lack of clarity
over role and decline in confidence over abilities
within the ordained ministry as leading to the Church being ineffectual. This
leads loosely to them conclude that the answer lies in some kind of reimagined
ministry.[341]
The real concern is that they seem to approach the problem from a purely task-centred
perspective of ministry. We can identify an historical and theological
underpinning here similar to that of Lightfoot, interpreting the ordering of
the Church as something negotiable according to a human perception of need.[342]
It could be said,
however, that this worldly obsession with task is a part of the problem. The
Church of today needs to be mindful of how a 21st Century western
managerial mind-set combined with an approach to interpreting history which can
remove space for an acknowledgement of the work of the divine within it, can
seriously distort our understanding of God’s direction for his Church. As Pritchard points out, ‘task centred
approaches, those that try to provide a blueprint of tasks in an honourable
attempt to help today’s (or yesterday’s) ordained priesthood to better cope
with the pressures of the ‘role’, are rarely timeless. Often only tiny elements
of what they propose have the blessing of being relevant beyond their given
moment’.[343]
As Allen evaluates,
‘There is a good deal of confusion about. Some appear to think that priests are
simply the managers of the Church or that priesthood is a professional calling
like other caring roles.’[344]
Croft and Oliver add their voices to the bank of opinion outlining the dangers
to the priestly office from such individualistic, task centred and secularly
focused attempts at an answer.[345]
It is understandable then, why to Allen’s mind such approaches have only
exacerbated the problem.[346]
If the priesthood simply tries to respond to every passing whim and has no
solid theological grounding, no central harmonization of what it understands
God calls the ordained ministry to, then not only does it risk increasing a
sense of confusion and fracas, but the whole Church is threatened with losing
its central ecclesiological structure and spiritual integrity.
To a climate where
such a dominant task-centred approach to ministry may be said to undermine the
spiritual foundation of ministerial orders, Gore also stands as a formidable
opponent. Working within Gore’s theological framework of priesthood, we see how
he considers ordained ministry to be primarily based in spiritual integrity and
the historical acknowledgement of God’s direction in the formation of the
Church’s ordering. Managing churches and congregations, and all the material
demands that are inevitably associated with it in the 21st Century,
can as easily be the enterprise of the baptismal priesthood as it can be the
ordained. If Gore teaches us anything, it is that supernatural concerns
supersede all others in relation to the calling of individuals to the ordained
ministry and this supernatural calling finds its base in the threefold order.
Those involved in the preparation of candidates for this essential ministry
would do well to ponder Gore’s warnings and absorb his theological framework.
Gore shows how gaining experience and acquiring practical skills must always
run secondary to the nurture of spiritual integrity and deepening of
relationship to God. Reimagining ministry throughout every layer of the Church,
lay and ordained, may well be prudent in response to modern demands, but if we
are to follow Gore’s direction, then ordained ministry must remain rooted in
apostolic succession, the threefold order and a sacramental priesthood that
draws its ministry directly from Christ’s high-priesthood; holding up the
incarnational ideal and drawing new generations of believers into the way of
the Spirit and the life of Christ through engagement with his Church.
iii.
Experientialism
Reflecting on the
contemporary situation, Robin Ward voices a concern that ‘there has been a loss
of nerve in contemporary English Anglicanism which perceives all too well… that
the parish churches which seem to be most flourishing are those which often have
least interest in preserving anything but the most tangential purchase on the
shape and context of traditional Anglican piety’.[347] Ward’s
is an insightful observation. Over recent decades there has been a sharp
increase in short-lived experiential, non-sacramental approaches to worship, aimed
at instant experience and gratification as opposed to deeper forms of spiritual
engagement. This increase in experiential approaches seems to be due to a
belief that they attract greater numbers than more traditional approaches.
There are many concerns one could raise about this recent phenomenon, but most
pertinent to this dissertation is the danger that the more worship begins to
look like a combination of a secular music festival and a business conference,
the less the deeper spiritual and sacramental aspects of the priestly calling
will be valued as an essential part in the process of redirecting humanity’s
vision towards God. Without this, the Christian church will undoubtedly be by
far the poorer and more ineffectual.
Recent research into
church growth challenges the assumption that only less traditional churches
grow. The Church of England’s research paper entitled ‘From Anecdote to Evidence’ found that growth in congregational
numbers appears to have less to do with tradition and more to do with intention
and quality.[348]
Those places that express a belief in what Christ has to offer the world and a
conviction that he intends for their local church to grow, generally saw an
increase in attendance, whilst those who showed less intentionality generally
did not.[349]
This suggests that if there is one thing that threatens the future of the
Church more than anything else, it is not traditional models and
understandings, but a general undermining of confidence and belief in God’s
commitment and intention for his Church, its historical ordering and its
sacramental principles.
Gore would fully
support such a conclusion and would refute claims to the long-term wisdom of
purely experientialist approaches. Recognising the Spirit’s work through
history, Gore sees biblical texts, authorised creedal formulas, apostolic
succession, ministerial orders and sacramental principles remaining consistent
in their authority over time. He challenges a theological outlook that bases
results on emotional response and personal feelings, encouraging a deeper
engagement, with obedience and service to Christ at its core. Gore supports the
need for the Church to adapt to its surrounding culture, but considers that our
obedience and commitment to biblical texts, authorised creedal formulas,
apostolic succession, ministerial orders and sacramental principles must remain
constant if any adaptation is to retain its authenticity and integrity. Holding
on to a long term vision, Gore considers that only then will such adaptations
prove effective.
This is because Gore
sees the Church as the community being brought through the Spirit into
relationship with the Trinity. The Church can however adapt where this may be
in keeping with the Spirit’s guidance, and can certainly change anything that
is not conducive to the Spirit’s ambitions. Gore emphasises that Christ
instituted his Church and that its orders, central teaching and many of its
rituals must resist inappropriate corruption from other agendas if it is to
faithfully communicate Christ’s love to the world.
Recognising that
experientialism, driven by an individualistic agenda, can so easily cause the
promptings of the Spirit to become confused with personal or collective whim,
Gore offers a warning and safeguard. He reminds us that the life of the Spirit
is not something entirely new, unseen or unknown, for the life the Spirit
breathes is the very life of Jesus himself – the life seen most authentically
in and through the Incarnation.[350]
As a clarificatory remark, he says, ‘The Spirit is the life-giver, but the life
with which he works is the life of the Incarnate, the life of Jesus’.[351]
In his understanding, the work of the Spirit is and will always be entirely
consistent with the orders, teaching and ritual instituted by Christ.
From this
perspective, it seems that Gore would be fully supportive of attempts made by
the Church to reach out to new generations through such initiatives as the
Fresh Expression movement. What he would demand, however, is that such things
are done with a high level of intellectual forethought, an understanding of the
historical ordering of the Church and with a desire to draw people into and not
away from the communal body of the Church, its ordering and its sacraments.
The visible Church,
instituted by Christ, infused by the Spirit, under apostolic oversight, ordered
through the threefold ministry, drawing individuals through the communal life
and sacramental grace to aspire to live according to the incarnation example
has but one purpose to Gore’s mind:
When
the slow-working forces of the incarnation have borne their perfect fruit, it
is not Christ the head alone, who will be seen to crown and justify the whole
development of the universe, but Christ as the centre of the redeemed humanity,
the Head with the body, the Bridegroom with the bride; and things in heaven and
things on earth and things under the earth shall acknowledge in that triumphant
society the consummation of the whole world’s destiny.[352]
These included: H. S. Holland, Aubrey Moore, J. R.
Illingworth,
E. S. Talbot, R. C. Moberley, Arthur Lyttelton, Charles Gore, Walter Lock, Francis Paget, W. J. H.
Campion, R. L. Ottley
As an aside, in this section we see a little more
readily Gore’s ability to reconcile orthodox patristic teaching with advances
in other contemporary fields of investigation, such as in the natural sciences.
There are two ways we could interpret what he produces as a result. On the one
hand, we might consider that what he produces departs from solid orthodoxy in
order to attract and intelligibly communicate with his contemporary audience by
providing a completely modern and revised interpretation of the patristic
framework. On the other, we might think his ponderings are a simple development
of that patristic framework in line with fresh revelations of the created order
discernible through the investigations of other disciplines. Personally, I lean
more towards this later interpretation and believe Gore attempts to tell an
orthodox story by engaging the most developed set of intellectual and scholarly
resources available to him at that time.
Even
though this dissertation is being written in the second decade of the
twenty-first century, we may observe that many of these same questions
regarding authorship and dating of New Testament texts are yet to be
satisfactorily answered and, depending upon one’s perspective, remain to a
greater or lesser extent open to debate. As the author of this dissertation, I
naturally have certain inclinations regarding these debates. Some theories
concerning authorship seem more plausible to me than others, but it is not the
focus of this project to go into any real depth investigating and casting
opinion on these as-yet inconclusive areas of scholarship. Whilst we may touch
upon them, more broadly, I believe it will be enough to follow Gore’s stance in
this instance and affirm such ongoing debates as enriching and constructive to
wider academic understanding, and given their inconclusive nature, will also
follow a belief that taken as a whole they contain enough trustworthiness and
authenticity to regard what they include as valid to be used in this
investigation into Gore’s understanding of the primitive church’s progress,
conduct and ordering.
Gore, The Mission of the Church (1892), p. 14
- 15; Tertullian, ‘On the prescription of
heretics (de praescriptione
haereticorum)’, XX. In Tertullian - On the Testimony of the Soul and on the "Prescription" of
Heretics, T. Herbert
Bindley (trans.), (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1914),
pp. 30 - 61
Clement, ‘Who is the Rich Man that Shall
be Saved? (Liber Quis Dives Salvetur)’, XLII. In The Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Writings of the Fathers down to A.D.
325: Volume 2: Fathers of
the Second Century: Hermas, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and Clement
of Alexandria, A.
Cleveland Coxe, Alexander Roberts & James Donaldson (eds.), William Wilson
(trans.), (Grand Rapids, MI:
Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1885), p. 603; Irenaeus, ‘Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses)’ III,
XI. In The Ante-Nicene Fathers. Volume 1: The Apostolic Fathers, Justin
Martyr, Irenaeus, A. Cleveland Coxe, Alexander Roberts & James Donaldson
(eds.), M. Dodds
(trans.), (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library,
1885), pp. 426 – 429; Tertullian ‘Anti-Marcion
(Adversus Marcionem)’ IV, X. In The Ante-Nicene Fathers. Volume 3: Latin
Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian. I. Apologetic; II. Anti-Marcion; III.
Ethical, A. Cleveland Coxe, Alexander Roberts & James Donaldson
(eds.), Peter Homes
(trans.), (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library,
1885), pp. 357 - 360
Gore, The
Reconstruction of Belief (1926), p. 745. Gore continues on to highlight
that there is a complication to our argument when considering the practice of
today’s Church because the bestowal of the Spirit by the laying on of hands has
been separated out from baptismal cleansing to form the separate sacrament of
confirmation. This
poses a question regarding when a believer may be considered to have entered
fully into the ‘baptismal priesthood’? For Gore, the answer seems to be
adulthood, in so much as any believer baptised as a child and reaching
adulthood in the Church may be expected to have been confirmed and any adult
being baptised may be expected to be confirmed at the same time. See Gore, The Reconstruction of Belief (1926), p.
752; Gore, The Church and the Ministry (1949
[1886]), p. 77
This raises the question of how Gore can speak of
equality in the Church when at the time of writing ordained ministry was not
open to both genders? There is no way of knowing what position Gore may have
supported regarding the ordination of women today. It is clear, however, that
Gore considered that the Church (and the Eucharist) should offer a challenge to
any corrupted social norms. The Church should seek to reconcile and unite
amidst any division, and where there was prejudice it should exert fairness.
The Church was to be a force for good in society and challenge immoral
political structures. All of this speaks of an aspiration towards true equality
in all its forms. Two contrasting considerations in Gore’s legacy should be
noted here. On 28 September 1917, Gore famously
licensed 21 women as lay readers, possibly
the first bishop to do so. On the other hand, Gore also showed some strong
conservative tendencies especially in regards to certain doctrinal and social
‘norms’.
How can Gore speak of the body holding equal standing
in the Eucharist without undermining the distinction between priest and people?
Our modern sense of entitlement is not helpful here. Sometimes discussion of
equality within a body that includes different roles and levels of authority
within it can sound rather nonsensical. We should consider, however, that our
understanding of equality may not be as uncorrupted as we would like to believe
it to be. Today, we are as influenced by our sociological situation as Gore was
in his era. This means that as we ponder what equality may truly mean for the
body of the Church, we may wish to consider its modern-day association of
equality with individual entitlement. These two concepts are often in glaring
disparity with one another, and yet in contemporary society a sense of
individual entitlement has heavily influenced our understanding of what
equality means in a way that wouldn’t have been true for Gore. Each person
within the body can be equally valued whilst being called to different roles
within that body. As we explored earlier, for Gore, priests are not an elite
caste elevated to a special place ‘above’ the rest of the body, they are a part
of the same body and equal to every other member in the way God approaches them
through the sacraments. They are, however, set apart to oversee and convene the
body and to ensure that the Church’s action continues to relate to God’s action
through teaching, actions and sacraments.
For example see Cox, Priesthood
in a New Millennium (2004); various chapters within Goergen & Garrido
(eds.), The Theology of Priesthood (2000);
Gerhard Müller, Priesthood and Diaconate,
M. Miller (Trans.) (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002); Thomas Rausch, Priesthood Today: an Appraisal (Mahwah:
Paulist Press, 1992); Thomas McGovern, Priestly
Identity: A Study in the Theology of Priesthood (Eugene: Wipf & Stock,
2002); Andrew Greeley, Priests (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004); various chapters within Donald Dietrich
(ed.), Priests for the Twenty-First
Century (New York: Crossroads Publishing, 2006); Jean Galot, Theology of the Priesthood (2005);
Donald Cozzens, The Changing Face of the
Church (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 2000); Guiver et al, The Fire and the Clay (1993); Ward, On Christian Priesthood (2011); Robin
Greenwood, Transforming Priesthood (London:
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2001); Gordon Oliver, Ministry Without Madness (London:
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge , 2012); Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer (New York: Doubleday,
1979); Arthur Michael Ramsey, The Christian
Priest Today (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge , 1985);
Don Saines, ‘Wider, Broader, Richer: Trinitarian Theology and Ministerial
Order’, in The Anglican Theological Review, Frederick Borsch, W. Mark
Richardson & Ellen K. Wondra (eds.), 92, No 3 (Evanston: Anglican
Theological Review, 2010), pp. 511 - 535…
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