Anglican Doctrine of Ministry

Early magisterial Protestant leaders were stuck between two extremes in articulating their doctrine of the ministry. On one hand, the Church of Rome’s claims about the priesthood were seen as central to the exercise of papal tyranny and thus needed to be rejected. The reformers were unwilling to countenance the idea that the clergy comprised a spiritual estate superior to and exempt from judgment by the merely workaday temporal world, that they alone had the capacity to celebrate the mass and forgive sins via the confessional. For example, Martin Luther’s 1520 Address to the Nobility of the German Nation declares that all Christians are priests by virtue of their baptism and that ordained ministers are simply those set apart to fulfill an office that anyone in principle could perform. Indeed, he asserts that were a group of lay Christians shipwrecked, they could choose one of their number to preach and administer the sacraments and he would be just as genuinely ordained as if he were ordained by all the bishops and popes.

On the other hand, these leaders were deeply worried about radicals who claimed direct authority from God to preach and teach without authorization from the institutional church, disrupting congregations with confused exegesis and wild doctrines. The flourishing of Anabaptism in Zurich made this a particularly keen question there. Ulrich Zwingli, the Zurich reformer, wrote an important text in 1525 called The Preaching Office, in which he grounded an ordered, authorized ministry in Ephesians 4 and condemned self– appointed preachers via Romans 10:15, ‘How are they to preach unless they have been sent?’

Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor as leader of the Zurich church, summed up the problem well in the third sermon of the fifth decade of his Decades, the sermon collection which in English translation was one of the key theological texts of the Elizabethan Church of England:

Some … do give the ministers an equal power in a manner with Christ; and that which only pertaineth unto him, they communicate also unto them … Other some again so speak of the inward drawing of the Spirit, that they seem as it were to make superfluous, or to take clean away, the outward ministry, and to attribute nothing at all unto it. Therefore the ministry must be limited within his [sic] bounds, lest it be drawn hither and thither with the affections and lusts of men, and either too much or too little be attributed to it.

Against both of these errors, Bullinger and other early magisterial Protestant theologians sought to articulate a doctrine of the ministry as divinely instituted and necessary for the church without attributing to human beings what belongs only to God, always distinguishing between what God does and what the minister does in working salvation. In doing so, they also sought to reframe the understanding of what the ministry was, recentering it from an emphasis on the priest as offering the mass as a sacrifice for the living and the dead and serving as an instrument of sacramental grace via baptism, absolution, communion, and the other sacraments to the minister as one fundamentally concerned with, and with power grounded in, the preaching of the Word of God.

The use of Bullinger’s Decades as an authority in England suggests that this doctrine of the ministry was not a feature of continental Protestantism only but was also characteristic of the Church of England. In this piece, I look at two early disputes that were significant for the development of the Church of England’s view of the ministry: the controversy between John Jewel and the papal polemicist Thomas Harding around Jewel’s Apology of the Church of  England and the conformist response to Puritan objections to the ordinal. We will see that the ordinal as well as these Elizabethan disputes set forth an account of the ministry as grounded upon the Word, fundamentally concerned with preaching and teaching, and with a power and authority carefully distinguished from that of God’s.

John Jewel began the controversy that would take up much of the rest of his life with a sermon. On November 26, 1559, at St. Paul’s Cross, the outdoor pulpit in London, the Bishop of Salisbury John Jewel preached his Challenge Sermon. He laid out 14 examples of contemporary Roman practice and challenged Catholics to justify them in terms of the Scriptures, the fathers, general councils, or the example of the early church, promising that if they could be justified he would return to Roman obedience. In 1562, Jewel expanded his argument into a full defense of the English church, his Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, or Apology of the Church of England. Just as with his Challenge Sermon, Jewel’s Apology quickly prompted responses from English Roman Catholics in exile; his duel of competing treatises with Thomas Harding was particularly fierce. It was in the context of the Apology and his subsequent controversy with Harding that Jewel set out his doctrine of the ministry.

In the Apology, Jewel makes the ministry primarily about teaching, rather than offering, the sacrifice of the mass or absolving sins. This is particularly clear when Jewel discusses the office of the keys, that is, the power of loosing and binding sins that Jesus gave to His disciples, a power which was used as a proof text for Roman views of the power of the priest to absolve. For Jewel, this power of loosing and binding refers either to the preaching of the Gospel and threatening of God’s punishment to unbelief, or to the minister’s capacity to excommunicate sinners from the communion of the church or restore them upon repentance (that is, to either preaching or church discipline). But Jewel specifically denies that this power was given that ministers ‘should hear private confessions of the people, and listen to their whisperings’ – rather, it was given ‘to the end they should go, they should teach, they should publish abroad the gospel’.

When Harding attacks Jewel for holding an insufficiently high doctrine of the ministry, for lacking a proper succession of ordinations and a sacrificing priesthood, Jewel responds by denying that the ministry requires such apostolic succession or involves the offering of propitiatory sacrifices. He rejects the position reasserted by Harding that loosing and binding refers primarily to giving or withholding sacramental absolution. For the power of binding and loosing is not found in priestly absolution but in the Word of God, distributed by the minister via preaching and church discipline. While Jewel upholds the necessity of an ordered ministry, both in the Apology and his further writings in the dispute with Harding, Jewel consistently attacks the conception of the ministry as grounded in sacramental authority made possible by ordination in succession for an account of ministry as fundamentally about and grounded in the power of the Word of God which the minister preaches.

Jewel’s controversy with Harding was a controversy across the great Reformation fracture between the Protestant churches and the Church of Rome. But of course, Elizabeth’s reign also saw controversy among English Protestants, between ‘conformists’ who supported the use of the Prayer Book, government by bishops, and the monarch’s role as supreme governor of the church and those (now typically called Puritans) who took issue with all three. And once again the doctrine of the ministry was implicated in the debate. I want to focus on one particular area of controversy over the ministry between conformists and Puritans, namely, over the ordinal appended to the Prayer Book.

In An Admonition to the Parliament, the 1572 declaration of Puritan principles which called for the rejection of the Book of Common Prayer and the establishment of a presbyterian system of church government and discipline in England, the anonymous authors complained that the ordinal ‘is nothing else but a thing woorde for woorde drawne out of the Popes pontifical, wherein he sheweth himself to be Antichrist most lively’. The Admonitioners particularly objected to one key phrase in the ordinal: the ‘ridiculus’, ‘blasphemous’ phrase ‘receave the holy ghoste’. The key Presbyterian theologian Thomas Cartwright responds to Archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift’s answer to the Admonition by expanding on the problems with this phrase, arguing that

it is not unlawfull also / that he [the bishop] with the congregation should make a prayer for the assistance / or encrase of God his gifts upon him that is ordained, but to command that he should receive it / is merely vnlawfull.

Whitgift’s defense of this phrase in his Answere to the Admonition clearly shows the magisterial Protestant worry over granting too much power to the ministry. For he argues that the use of the phrase in the ordinal does not suggest that the bishop ‘take upon him to give the holy ghost’, any more than a minister personally remits sins when he pronounces that God remits sins to those with penitence and true faith. This is how Whitgift explains the phrase used in ordination:

by speaking these wordes of Chryst, receyue the holy ghost, whose sinnes soeuer ye remitte, they are remitted. &c. he doth shewe the principall duetie of a minister, and assureth him of the assistaunce of Gods holy spirite, if he labour in the same accordingly.

That is, the point is not that the bishop is granting by his own power the persons ordained some new presence of the Holy Spirit; he is rather declaring their responsibility to remit sins and announcing to them that the Holy Spirit will aid them in this work. And, as we’ve seen, this remission consists primarily of the preaching ministry, not any sacramental power of absolution. It is worth noting too that this interpretation of ‘receive the Holy Ghost’ follows from Whitgift’s conviction that priestly absolution is not actually a power to forgive sins but rather a declaration of the forgiveness that God works.

Upon further pressing from Cartwright – who notes that the phrase ‘Receive the Holy Ghost’ is, rather inconveniently for Whitgift’s argument, in the imperative mood – Whitgift adds that ordination is not a vain ceremony, that God really does pour His Spirit upon the ordained. However, he continues to assert that the bishop has no authority to give the Holy Spirit, rather, God gives the Spirit to His ministers, of which the ‘imposition of hands is a token, or rather a confirmation’. The most he will grant is that bishops are in some sense an instrument of God’s working – but as we saw from Bullinger at the beginning of this piece, there must always be a careful distinguishing between God’s action and human action.

Lest one worry that this is just a matter of Elizabethan divines drinking too deeply from Continental cisterns, it is worth adding that this is also substantially the doctrine of the Edwardian ordinal they inherited and passed on substantially to the 1662 revision. To be sure, the ordinal does uphold the threefold ministry of bishop, priest, and deacon as congruent with Scripture and the practice of the early church, but it does not unchurch those without such a ministry. And the physical action of the laying on of hands with the phrase ‘receive the Holy Ghost’ does suggest that something of the divine institution of the ministry and the promised divine assistance for ministers is being signified here, but this is hardly in opposition to continental Protestant thought or practice.

Then, right after the laying on of hands and ordination formula (that is, Jesus’ words in John 20:22–23 plus a charge to faithful dispense the Word and the sacraments and a Trinitarian invocation), the bishop does something very important that shows the Anglican ordinal’s reorientation of ministry toward teaching. Where in the pre– Reformation rite for the ordination of priests, the priest was handed a chalice and paten for offering the sacrifice of the mass, the bishop, by the 1552 ordinal, gives to the newly ordained priests a Bible with the words ‘Take thou aucthoritie to preache the word of god, and to minister the holy Sacramentes in thys congregacion, where thou shalt be so appointed’. That is, the fundamental symbol of priestly ministry according to the ordinal is the Bible, the Word of God. Small surprise that the bishop then prays that God would bless the priests’ words and make them means of salvation for us, as God’s Word spoken by human mouths.

For many Anglicans today, this account of the ministry – an account that is unconcerned with, even contemptuous of ideas of apostolic succession, that sees the minister as primarily a teacher and preacher of the Word rather than a purveyor of sacramental grace, that is worried about granting too much power to ministers in absolving or ordaining – might seem surprising or even unattractive. But as an Anglican minister, I find it an attractive one indeed, and useful for the present moment. In a contemporary ecclesial context that (in my experience) is often quite dismissive of the minister’s preaching and teaching office and sees the minister’s role as administering sacraments, fostering spiritual experiences, and providing nonjudgmental pastoral care, traditional Anglican teaching on the ministry is a helpful corrective. It roots all that ministers do in the Word of God and sees preaching as our primary function. This does not, of course, mean that sacraments are unimportant – but rather means that they are the visible preaching of the Word, rather than some other means of grace independent of the Word. Moreover, I think the traditional Anglican (which is to say traditional Protestant) teaching about ministerial power rightly navigates the Scylla and Charybdis about which Bullinger worried. It rightly expresses the significant and generally necessary role of the minister in God’s salvific work, the amazing truth that, as Bullinger puts it, though God might choose to deal with us directly, instead He ‘speaketh unto us by men’. But it also prevents ministers from attributing too much to themselves, recognizing that it is Christ alone who ‘as the only teacher and master in the church, [internally] teacheth his disciples … enduing them with the Holy Ghost, regenerating and drawing them, sanctifying and making them free from their sins’. May we priests rejoice to see ourselves as heralds and instruments of the salvation that remains entirely God’s, human mouths through which God’s Word goes forth to do its work.