CHAPTER ONE<\/p>\n
The Beginning of the Gospel<\/p>\n
\u201cThe beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.\u2026 John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins\u201d (Mark 1:1, 4). So, curiously, begins the gospel of Mark. We expect John, the forerunner announcing the imminent appearance of the King. An eschatological kerygma that begins with baptism, though, is peculiar.
\nBut to whom?
\nApparently not to those to whom John preached, for they responded with sufficient enthusiasm to alarm King Herod and to win John an undisputed reference in Josephus. What did they think they were doing? Why was a man baptizing in the wilderness \u201cgood news\u201d?
\nIn the quotation from Isaiah (vv. 2\u20133), Mark hints at the answer. Though Isaiah\u2019s prophecy of Israel\u2019s \u201cnew Exodus\u201d from Babylon had been fulfilled, by the first century the Jews had relapsed into a kind of exile and impatiently awaited another deliverance. And now, here is John, clearing the pathway of return (cf. Wright 1996). That he appears with water could only heighten expectations:<\/p>\n
The afflicted and needy are seeking water, but there is none.
\nAnd their tongue is parched with thirst;
\nI, the Lord, will answer them Myself,
\nAs the God of Israel I will not forsake them.
\nI will open rivers on the bare heights,
\nAnd springs in the midst of the valleys;
\nI will make the wilderness a pool of water,
\nAnd the dry land fountains of water.
\nI will put the cedar in the wilderness,
\nThe acacia, and the myrtle, and the olive tree;
\nI will place the juniper in the desert,
\nTogether with the box tree and cypress.\u2026
\nFor I will pour out water on the thirsty land
\nAnd streams on the dry ground;
\nI will pour out My Spirit on your offspring,
\nAnd My blessing on your descendants;
\nAnd they will spring up among the grass
\nLike poplars by streams of water
\n(Isa. 41:17\u201319; 44:3\u20134; cf. Ezek. 36:24\u201327, 30).<\/p>\n
When John\u2019s water falls on the scorched clay of Israel, it can only be a matter of time before she again crosses the sea, before Eden is restored.
\nIn this wider perspective, Mark\u2019s opening verses reflect assumptions about the gospel shared by the entire New Testament. A gospel that begins in baptism is a Jewish gospel, arising within the particular history of Yahweh\u2019s dealings with Israel. Since it deals with the fortunes of a historical people, a gospel that begins in baptism refuses to be tucked safely into the mystical interstices of human life. It is a material gospel, public truth. A voice that proclaims baptism must reverberate with political overtones. Such a gospel thus stakes a claim in the field of history and culture, but this is ground that secular thought has claimed as its exclusive possession. A boundary dispute is inevitable.
\nThus, Mark\u2019s opening verses can serve as a touchstone for competing accounts of Christianity. To avoid this touchstone, which is for modern thought a scandal, a stone of stumbling, secularism has attempted, with great success and considerable cooperation from Christians, to evict the gospel to different ground. Against Mark, modern philosophy, sociology, and theology imagine that Christianity is \u201cinternal\u201d and \u201cspiritual.\u201d Thus, for Nietzsche, Jesus\u2019 teaching was a flight from the real world of culture to the inner kingdom (1988: 29); for Kant, true piety was rational moralism (Kant 1960); and for the romantics and the early Hegel true religion was inner religion (Fackenheim 1967: 53\u201354). The evolutionary schema for religious development posited by Comtean sociology of religion cannot encompass a gospel that begins with baptism, nor can much modern, especially Protestant theology. Heralding baptism is significantly different from heralding Schleiermacher\u2019s religion of feeling, Barth\u2019s ineffable word, or an evangelicalism combining an affirmation of disputed doctrines with the inner experience of the new birth.
\nAlso against Mark, many modern accounts of Christianity, including theological ones, accept some form of Marcion\u2019s sundering of Old and New. Modern Marcionism, like its ancient counterpart, conspires with a gnostic ambivalence to physical creation and sees Christianity as removing the husks of materialism in religion. Christianity is not merely a different religion but a different kind of religion from that of Israel.
\nTreacherously, each stumbling stone serves as foundation for the other: The Marcionite account of history supports the reading of Christianity as inwardness, and the interpretation of Christianity as inward piety sets it off from the materialism and socio-political concerns of Hebrew sensibility.
\nAmong the \u201chusks\u201d of Old Testament religion supposedly discarded in the emergence of the spiritual \u201ckernel,\u201d ritual has first place. Hebrew religion is to Christianity as empty ritualism is to heartfelt piety, as Baroque Catholicism is to Puritan liturgical minimalism. Modern Marcionism thus has, at its heretical margins, completely repudiated sacraments (Reventlow 1984). Far from proclaiming a gospel that begins in baptism, Marcionism preaches a gospel that ends baptism altogether.
\nHere, however, the problem is historically more intricate and challenging, for modern theology is not alone in combining an uneasiness toward rites and signs with ambiguity toward the Old Testament. As this chapter shows, a spiritualizing semiotic theory and a semi-Marcionite account of redemptive history form sizable and mutually reinforcing eddies in the mainstream of the tradition. By a \u201cspiritualizing semiotic theory,\u201d I mean the belief that signs and rites function as more or less dispensable aids to invisible spiritual transactions, or the similar notion that signs aim primarily at achieving channeling grace to the soul. As David Jones puts it in his much-cited essay, \u201cArt and Sacrament,\u201d defenders and opponents of a sacramental economy of grace share the assumption that interior grace is \u201cwhat matters,\u201d disputing only the usefulness of external signs for achieving this internal state (Jones 1959: esp. 165\u2013166). By \u201csemi-Marcionite,\u201d I mean a structuring theological narrative that, while remaining within orthodox parameters, betrays reservations about Old Testament materialism or legalism, or minimizes the grace offered to Israel. I shall call the intertwining of these themes \u201cMarcionite sacramental theology\u201d or some variation of that label.
\nMarcionite sacramental theology can lead in a realist or a mystical direction. Realists construe the Old as a covenant of \u201cmere signs,\u201d while those of the New are \u201ceffective signs,\u201d \u201csigns that contain or confer realities,\u201d or signs that veil underlying \u201csubstance.\u201d For mystics, the rites and signs of Hebrew religion are bound up with the material and outward form of the Old Covenant, whereas Christianity begins an ascent to spirit, a descent into the heart, or both at once. From the perspective developed here, realism and mysticism are variations within a Marcionite framework, since both dig a chasm between Old and New and both aspire to an divine-human encounter beyond signs. Because of the influence of semi-Marcionite sacramental theology, the church has not supplied an account of either the gospel or of baptism that apprehends how the two arise together.
\nIn the next few sections, I briefly review the Eucharistic doctrine of Paschasius Radbertus, the sacramental theology of Hugh of St. Victor, medieval formulations of ex opere operato, and the Reformers\u2019 criticisms of this formula, showing how Marcionite sacramental theology figures into each. Even theologians who do not embrace Marcionite assumptions often implicitly rely on them. Scholastic theology detaches technical or mechanical questions of sacramental operation from patristic and early medieval typological mystagogy, so that, for example, Thomas construes sacramental \u201ccausality\u201d in the categories of Aristotle rather than according to biblical patterns of flood, Exodus, or the ablutions of Leviticus. Answers to scholastic quaestiones were thus sought outside the typological lectio (Chenu 1968: 127). Marcionite sacramentology thus shapes method as well as content. I then move on to tell three stories of twentieth-century sacramental theology\u2014the question of the Eucharist anamnesis, Continental debates on infant baptism, and the theological use of categories from the social sciences\u2014to show that theologians continue to swim in these waters.
\nStrands in Augustine tell the story of the exodus from Old to New differently and therefore assign sacraments a different role in the New order. Augustine implies that man, made in the image of the Word, lives and moves and has his being in an economy of signs. Therefore, the transition from Old to New is not an ascent beyond semiotic processes but a transformation within the semiotic and linguistic medium that makes up the life of a religious community. In Augustine\u2019s metaphor, the New is a \u201cconjugation\u201d of the Old. If so, then, in scholastic terms, the \u201ctreatise on the sacraments of the Old Law\u201d must serve as prolegomena to a \u201ctreatise on sacraments in general.\u201d Augustine\u2019s formulation thus furnishes the methodological thesis of this dissertation, that the typological lectio has considerable resources, largely untapped, for addressing even the most arcane of quaestiones.
\nEventually, I hope to arrive at a vantage point from which to proclaim a gospel that begins in baptism, that is, a public gospel that grows out of Israel\u2019s history, taking a stand on the stone the builders rejected, which has, of course, become the chief cornerstone of a stable edifice.<\/p>\n
Out of the Shadows: Paschasius Radbertus<\/p>\n
The ninth-century \u201cdebate\u201d between Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus produced the first treatises on the Supper. Though common, it is simplistic to contrast Paschasian realism with Ratramnian symbolism (McCracken and Cabaniss 1957: 92), for on the question of figura and veritas they define their terms so differently that they were talking past each other, assuming they intended to talk toward each other at all. Both, moreover, affirm that the Supper is figure and truth.
\nA genuine difference emerges, however, in their evaluation of Old Testament sacraments, for which 1 Corinthians 10 provides a locus classicus. Ratramnus insists that Christ was truly offered to and received by Hebrew saints. To deny that Israel was genuinely baptized in the Red Sea insanely contradicts Paul, and Ratramnus even claims that the cloud and sea contained (continebant) the invisible operation of the Spirit. Besides satisfying corporal hunger and thirst, Israel\u2019s manna and water administered the power of the word. What the church now eats and drinks in its bodily meal of bread and wine is thus the \u201csame\u201d as the food and drink given to Israel, since unus idemque Christus fed them His flesh and stood in the spiritual rock to offer His blood. Ratramnus concludes ecstatically, insinuating that the meal of Israel, in which Christ offered His flesh and blood before His incarnation and death, was more miraculous and incomprehensible than the meal of the church (mirum, incomprehensible, inaestimabile). Such a miracle should not be subjected to ratio but accepted in faith quod factum sit (paragraphs 20\u201326). The Christological substance of the sacraments remains constant throughout history, as does their visible\/invisible and figural\/real structure. Methodologically, for Ratramnus typology controls ontology.
\nPaschasius does not openly repudiate Paul, but a palpable aversion to identifying the sacraments of the Old and New haunts his discussion. His initial question is decisive: If Israel received the \u201csame\u201d food as the church, why has there been a change? The Hebrews, he concedes, received figures of the body and blood, they might even have received some virtus sacrandi, and they lacked nothing necessary for spiritual life. Yet he remains recalcitrant: He couches the statement concerning the virtus sacrandi in a conditional clause, and his exegesis is shaped throughout by a sharp contrast of figura\/imago over against veritas. Despite Paul\u2019s insistence that God gave the same food and drink to Israel and the church, therefore, Paschasius claims there is clearly a great difference (patet \u2026 multum interest), so that the food is the same not in re but only in specie ac figura. By contrast, the church enjoys the unadulterated mysterium veritatis, which is sola veritas and non figura (McCracken and Cabaniss 1957: 104; 1969: 33, 5.43\u201348). Paschasius grants that the Supper has a figural element so long as it is clear that \u201cnot every figure is shadow or falsehood,\u201d and umbra is to be understood in the sense used in Hebrews as a description of the foreshadowing Old Covenant. Methodologically, in his discussion of 1 Corinthians 10, Paschasius is more rationalist than Ratramnus; unstated assumptions of ontological possibility qualify Pauline typology.
\nPaschasian \u201crealism\u201d thus turns out to be a refraction of his questionable reading of the Old-New transition. To grant that the Supper is figura confines the church under the economy of umbrae, yet to grant that Israel received Christ in re seems to make the incarnation superfluous. Thus, the sacraments of the New must contain or communicate some \u201ctruth\u201d not found in the Old. The Old Testament was an economy of \u201cmere signs,\u201d while the New, though it still employs signs, is an economy of \u201crealities\u201d beyond signs. The difference between Old and New is focused on the difference in the way sacraments \u201cwork.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vases Don\u2019t Cure the Sick: Hugh of St. Victor<\/p>\n
Though he employs sacramentum in the expansive patristic sense, Hugh of St. Victor\u2019s De sacramentis includes elaborate consideration of sacraments more narrowly conceived. To his credit, Hugh continually takes note of the physical and material character of the sacraments and of their specific symbolisms, but the dualistic structure of his theology ultimately leads, as Macy says, to a \u201cmystical\u201d sacramentology. Sacraments are a medicinal remedia for sin, conferring an invisibilium antidotum through the visible rite. Metaphors of sacramental \u201cmedication\u201d are patristic, but Hugh conflates them with a vague form\/matter distinction, so that the sacramental rite becomes the \u201ccontainer\u201d of the medicine of grace. It is only an analogy, but Hugh is willing to press the analogy: \u201cvases do not cure the sick but medicine does.\u201d \u201cWhat matters,\u201d to borrow Jones\u2019s (1959) phrase, is what is inside the bottle.
\nContainers are \u201cmedicine\u201d only in a subtly inverted sense. According to Hugh, attachment to visible things corrupted Adam, a belief that, as with Augustine, blends Christian polemics against idolatry with anxiety about physical creation. Outward and visible as they are, sacraments, secundum se, serve only to exacerbate sinners\u2019 unhealthy infatuation with the visible. Yet, God instituted these paradoxical remedies to show that He alone promotes health (1.9.5; Hugh 1951: 160\u2013163; PL 176, 325\u2013326). External rites thus become remedial when we learn that external rites cannot possibly be remedial, and so are forced to look beyond visible things for healing. Sacraments also contribute to saving humilitatio by subjecting the proud to insensible and visible things over which they were created to rule (1.9.3; Hugh 1951: 156; PL 176, 319\u2013320).
\nHugh\u2019s sacramental theology is set in a historical narrative progressing from the umbra of natural law, through the imago vel figura veritatis of the written law, to the corpus veritatis of the time of grace, which looks to the veritas spiritus of the consummation (1.11; Hugh 1951: 182\u2013187). In part, this is no more than an unveiling: As history moves toward the sunrise of the incarnation, spiritual realities are increasingly illumined (Schlette 1959: 163). Expiation and justification were occulte in the tithes and oblations of the natural law, became vero evidentius in circumcision, and manifeste declaratur in baptism. History\u2019s trajectory also runs, however, from foris to intus: Oblations \u201ccut off\u201d part of a man\u2019s wealth, circumcision \u201ccut off\u201d a superfluous body part, but baptism wounds more deeply, declaring \u201cthe perfect cleansing of man and the interior lustre of the soul.\u201d Eschatologically, humanity follows the same trajectory, eventually resuming its prelapsarian communion with God, which, like the angels\u2019, was wholly intus, outside a symbolic and linguistic medium.
\nIn their structure and operation, the sacraments duplicate the mystical, inward trajectory of redemptive history. Old sacraments were \u201cvisible and signs of the visible\u201d (visibilia, et signum visibilium) while the New, though \u201cin truth visible,\u201d are invisibilis gratiae signa et sacramenta (1.11.2; Hugh 1951: 182; PL 176, 343). Like Ratramnus, Hugh contends that the Mosaic sacraments were effective, deriving sanctification as signa tantum of Christian sacraments (1.11.1, 5; Hugh 1951: 182, 184; PL 176, 343, 345). Sacraments of the church, however, contain \u201ctheir own\u201d sanctification (1.11.2; Hugh 1951: 182; PL 176, 343). Thus, though signum et figura adequately describes the Old rites, the New are, strictly, sacramenta, since they contain \u201cby sanctification some invisible and spiritual grace\u201d (1.9.2; Hugh 1951: 155; PL 176, 317\u2013319). Though Hugh does not draw the conclusion of some later writers that the Old Law had no sacraments, the sacraments of the two covenants have different structures and operate according to different logics.
\nDespite Thomas\u2019s appreciation for the embodied form of Christian practice, Victorine static disturbs his arguments for the necessity of sacraments. He first roots signs anthropologically: Humans know spiritual realities through the senses, which, it seems, is an unexceptionable condition of created life. Contradictorily, Thomas also explains the physical character of the sacraments as an accommodation to sin and borrows Hugh\u2019s idea that sacraments are physical to foster humility (3a, 61, 1). A similar ambivalence toward signs is evident in Thomas\u2019s denial that sacraments were necessary in Eden. Before the fall, there was a proper hierarchy, with Adam\u2019s body subject to his soul, and it therefore would have been contra ordinem if he had needed anything corporale to achieve perfection (3a, 61, 2). The New Law is, further, \u201cintermediate\u201d between the figura of the Old and the nude et perfecte eschatological manifestation of truth (3a, 61, 4). The church thus walks a pathway that leads out of the thicket of signs into the clean and open field of naked spiritual encounter.
\nMethodologically, Hugh\u2019s formulations imply that one cannot conduct an inquiry into the \u201chow?\u201d or even the \u201cwhat?\u201d of Christian sacraments by examining the \u201chow?\u201d of Old Testament rituals. Dualist anthropology, which reflects an ontological dualism, trumps typology. Aquinas implies the same methodological conclusion when he denies that the sacraments of the Old Law contained or caused grace and defines them, in very \u201cProtestant\u201d fashion, as quaedam illius fidei protestationes that solum signified faith in the Passion of Christ (3a, 62, 6). Thus, he explains the causality of the New Covenant sacraments by the distinction of principal and instrumental causality (3a, 62, 1) and does not refer at all to the rites of the Law. While scholastics used Old Testament ceremonies typologically and examined the fittingness of Old Testament ritual law, these considerations were not germane to their explanations of the \u201cmechanics\u201d of Christian sacraments.<\/p>\n
Opus Operatum and Its Reformation Opponents<\/p>\n
Implicit in Hugh, semi-Marcionite sacramentology became more formalized in the later Middle Ages in the distinction between opus operatum and opus operans. Though often employed to underscore the Augustinian view that the moral state of a minister is irrelevant to the validity of a sacrament (cf. Augustine 1974b), this distinction also formed the boundary between the sacraments of Old and New. Jewish sacraments were not efficacious by virtue of the thing done (opus operatum) but by virtue of the recipient\u2019s faith (opus operans); in the church, by contrast, sacraments are effective simply by being rightly performed on a subject who places no obex in the way of grace. Behind Reformation polemics against Catholic ex opere operato, then, were differences concerning the relation of Old and New, and Luther, Calvin, and Chemnitz attacked Catholics on the latter point as well as the former.
\nIn practice, however, Protestant theology continued to play a semi-Marcionite tune. Immediately after affirming that the sacraments of the Old and New are equally effective, Luther explains that the sacraments of the New Law are like those of the patriarchs, while both differ \u201cvastly\u201d from Mosaic \u201clegal symbols,\u201d which did not have any promise attached to them. Reversing the scholastic operatum\/operans distinction, he claims that the sacraments of the Mosaic order were not sacraments of justification but \u201conly sacraments of works. Their whole nature and power consisted in works, not in faith. Whoever performed them fulfilled them, even if he did it without faith.\u201d Efficacy in Christian sacraments, by contrast, wholly \u201cconsists in faith itself\u201d so that one may fulfill them even without enacting the rite (Luther 1959: 64\u201366). In spite of his vigorous affirmation of continuity both of substance and operation, Calvin\u2019s theology of baptism begins with the New Testament, and, apart from a brief typological meditation on the Exodus and an extended polemic for infant baptism from its analogy with circumcision, the Old Testament plays comparatively little role in his fundamental theology of baptism (Calvin 1960: 1303\u20131359; Institutes 4.15\u201316). Theoretically, Calvin overcomes scholastic Marcionism; in practice, he perpetuates it.<\/p>\n
Marcion and Modern Sacramental Theology<\/p>\n
Some major liturgical works of this century, particularly studies of the Eucharist, have sought to expound Christian liturgy by explicit reference to Old Testament or later Jewish rites and institutions. Yet, semi-Marcionite sacramental theology remains widespread. To demonstrate this, I tell three stories of twentieth-century sacramental theology.<\/p>\n
Mystery Religion and Eucharistic \u201cRe-Presentation\u201d<\/p>\n
Influenced by Odo Casel\u2019s \u201cmystery\u201d view of Christian worship, liturgists have interpreted the Eucharistic anamnesis (\u201cDo this in remembrance of me\u201d) \u201cdynamically\u201d as \u201cthe making effective in the present of an event in the past.\u201d For Casel, this means not only that \u201cChrist himself is present and acts through the church,\u201d but also that the God who exists outside time permits the church in the liturgy to \u201center into the divine present and everlasting Today\u201d so that at worship \u201cthere is neither past nor future, only present\u201d (Casel 1962: 141\u2013142).
\nIn several respects, Casel\u2019s work is important and fruitful: He broke with both cognitive and expressivist models of Christianity, attacked individualism in Eucharistic theology, and his insistence that the encounter with mystery must be embodied in signs, rites, and gestures prepared for the \u201cinterpersonal\u201d emphasis of Schillebeeckx (1963; 1968) and Schoonenberg (1967: 3\u201311; see Casel 1962: 9\u201313, 21\u201323, 30). Yet, Casel explicitly grounds his theory in supposed analogies between Christianity and Greco-Roman cults, whose mysteries were closer to Christian worship than anything in the worship of Israel. Contrary to Neunheuser\u2019s assertion (1976: 496\u2013497), Casel argues that Passover was a memorial event but not a mystery, since it was \u201crelated first of all to human events, and human deliverance.\u201d Because of their legalism and their belief that God was \u201ca powerful, terrible ruler, separated from mankind by an unbridgeable gap,\u201d the Jews developed no liturgical sense of \u201cclose relationship\u201d with God, and Christ\u2019s Pasch has \u201cno expression in the old covenant.\u201d Fortunately, outside Israel, God was preparing \u201ccertain religious forms\u201d that \u201ccould offer words and forms to express this new, unheard-of\u201d personal relationship. Thus, \u201cthe Hellenes sometimes found it easier to grasp and to grasp more deeply the truth of the gospel than did the Jews with their purely Semitic, imageless, legal thinking. The Christianity of the ancient world appears to us as the fulfillment and glorification of what Greco-Roman antiquity was\u201d (Casel 1962: 31\u201337). Liturgical expressions of the Old Covenant are now used in a \u201chigher sense concerning the purely spiritual facts of the new,\u201d so that New Covenant worship reaches toward \u201ca new and higher kind of reality\u201d (1962: 40).
\nCasel\u2019s Marcionism colludes with a semiotic theory surprisingly close to Zwinglianism. Baptismal water \u201ccan only be the exterior and visible expression of the inward, real birth from pneuma.\u201d Though in itself the water has \u201conly symbolic value,\u201d this symbolism is \u201cabsolutely necessary,\u201d since \u201cwithout this exterior act we could not recognize God\u2019s act\u201d (1962: 41). Signs as \u201cmere signs\u201d have no potency but only express invisible realities; \u201cwhat matters\u201d is what takes place behind the veil of symbols.
\nA rarity, but this story has a happy ending. Having examined the Old Testament background of the anamnesis, Max Thurian and Joachim Jeremias discovered that it has very little to do with Casel\u2019s time-bending speculations or \u201cdynamic re-presentation.\u201d Biblical memorials instead present a material or enacted \u201creminder\u201d to God. For Thurian, the church joins the heavenly intercession of Christ through its sacramental action, imploring the Father \u201cto recall and not to forget, to have respect unto the covenant, to arise and plead\u201d (1960\u20131961: 2.35, 40\u201341). For Jeremias, the Eucharist \u201crepresents the initiated salvation work before God\u201d so that the Father will remember the Messiah and bring in the fullness of the kingdom (1966: 252\u2013254). Both present a thoroughly anti-Marcionite account of anamnesis allied with a \u201cpragmatic\u201d semiotic in which rites and signs are, in their materiality and bodiliness, \u201cinstruments\u201d in the church\u2019s liturgical transactions with God and in the realization of His redemptive purposes.<\/p>\n
Circumcision, Nationalized vs. Spiritualized<\/p>\n
Our second story, the Continental Protestant debate on infant baptism in the mid-twentieth century, as yet has no ending but bears all the marks of interminability. Ignited by Emil Brunner\u2019s brief comment in The Divine-Human Encounter that the current practice of infant baptism was \u201cscandalous\u201d (1944: 131), the debate was fueled by Barth\u2019s inflammatory 1943 lecture. According to Barth, baptism is not a \u201ccause\u201d of redemption but an auxiliary rite concerned, as Calvin put it, with the cognitio salutis. Christ\u2019s word and work alone cause salvation but this word and work seek public recognition and therefore take on a sacramental Gestalt (1948: 27\u201328). Baptism thus enables the believer to \u201cget sight\u201d of his fellowship with Christ by picturing death and resurrection with Him. If this is true, candidates for baptism must come to it rather than be brought. Thus, Barth castigates infant baptism as a \u201cwound in the body of the Church,\u201d a \u201chole\u201d in baptismal practice, as \u201carbitrary and despotic\u201d (1948: 40\u201342), turning what should be a free dialogue into an act of violence by imposing a religious identity on the baptized without his consent (1948: 47). Rhetorically, Barth is less ferocious in the fragment on baptism that closes the Church Dogmatics, but his rejection of infant baptism is implicit when he describes baptism as man\u2019s initial Yes to God\u2019s prevenient grace (1969: 161).
\nIn his lecture, Barth takes note of the traditional Reformed analogy of circumcision and baptism but dismisses it with the comment that circumcision was a sign of natural birth into the lineage of Israel (1948: 43). In Church Dogmatics IV\/4, Barth concedes that the analogy is \u201cintrinsically correct and important\u201d because it highlights the \u201cunity of the old and new covenants in spite of their formal distinction.\u201d Still, this does not imply that the \u201cdefinitions and meaning of the two were interchangeable,\u201d because the church, in contrast to Israel, is \u201cnot a nation. It is a people freely and newly called and assembled out of Israel and all nations,\u201d recruited not by birth but through the new birth, so that \u201cChristian baptism, as distinct from Israelite circumcision, cannot be on the basis of the physical descent of the candidate\u201d (1969: 177\u2013178).
\nThere are several problems with this. Circumcision was never a sign of purely natural descent, since Yahweh instructed Abraham to circumcise every male member of his household, including servants and their sons (Gen. 17:12; Exod. 12:44). Even conceding that circumcision had a \u201cnational\u201d character, it was equally a religious initiation, since the nation was religiously constituted. It would be wholly foreign to the Old Testament to dissociate covenantal faithfulness from life among God\u2019s people: Belonging to Israel meant belonging to the people belonging to Yahweh; \u201cyour God will be my God\u201d entailed \u201cyour people shall be my people\u201d (Ruth 1:16). Barth\u2019s contrast between Israel as \u201cnation\u201d and the church as freely called assembly hints that the Christian religion no longer has the irreducibly public and political character manifest in Hebrew religion. This interpretation is strengthened by Barth\u2019s claim that baptism is a public expression of Christ\u2019s work of salvation, a formulation that implies that salvation itself is hidden from public view.
\nInclusion of infants in Israel was not a \u201cformal\u201d matter, a fact hinted at in Genesis 17:13, where household circumcision is identical to the \u201ccovenant.\u201d Redemption is the restoration and glorification of humanity, and Israel was elected as the seed and type of a redeemed race, living in Yahweh\u2019s presence as humanity was created to live. Therefore, the covenant was necessarily as wide as human life itself, embracing the whole communal practice of Israel, from worship to politics, from cradle to grave. Were infants excluded, Israel would no longer have been the initial form of redeemed humanity but an organization for the religiously mature. Barth\u2019s protest implies that, while Israel was the type of redeemed humanity, the church is a religious association, consisting of those who have made free and conscious decisions. Barth\u2019s complaint is really against the Old Testament form of religion, and this radically subverts his affirmation of covenantal unity.
\nBarth\u2019s complaint is equally against the Old Testament\u2019s view of initiation, for Yahweh not only permitted but demanded the \u201cviolence\u201d of an imposed religious identity; to neglect this duty was to break covenant (Gen. 17:14). For the Old Testament, initiation was not a matter of \u201cgetting sight\u201d of one\u2019s status, nor the echoing human Yes; for male infants of Israel, it was the prevenient sign that one was included, willy-nilly, under the Yes of God. For Barth, initiation \u201cworks differently\u201d in the church than it did in Israel. Semi-Marcionite sacramentology is hard at work.
\nEerily similar evaluations of the actual content of Old Testament religion are apparent, albeit more subtly, in defenses of infant baptism. Oscar Cullmann directly challenges Barth\u2019s \u201cweak\u201d treatment of circumcision, which, he insists, was not a sign of \u201cnatural racial succession\u201d but a \u201cseal of faith\u201d (Rom. 4:11) that from the outset envisioned the inclusion of the nations. Even in the Old Covenant, Abraham was father of believers in a salvation-historical rather than a racial sense. Rightly understood, then, circumcision was not an outward, national sign but concerned the heart (1950: 57\u201359). In short, Cullmann defends what might be called the \u201cgenuinely religious\u201d character of circumcision by insisting that it had inner, spiritual significance. Pierre Marcel likewise recognizes that the relation of Old and New is crucial (1953: 81), and he adopts the Calvinist view that the two covenants are the same in substance though different in form. To defend the circumcision-baptism connection against Barth and Leenhardt, however, Marcel\u2019s strategy is to insist that circumcision was a sign of the \u201cspiritual\u201d blessings of justification, adoption, glorification, and God\u2019s dwelling among His people, the \u201cmaterial\u201d blessings being only secondary consequences (1953: 72\u201373, 87). Recent work stressing the ecclesiological concerns of New Testament theology has made it difficult to conceive of justification, adoption, etc., as purely \u201cspiritual\u201d blessings since they are linked with membership in the historical community of the church. More seriously, Marcel is sloppy with the Old Testament, since the promises that circumcision sealed were the earthly, material promises of land and an abundant, royal seed (Gen. 17:1\u201314). Marcel is thus an open target to Baptist writers who can simply quote the actual promises to Abraham to insist that those of the New Covenant are much \u201chigher.\u201d
\nWhat Cullmann and Marcel do not say is that citizenship in Israel as such was religiously significant (though it never guaranteed Yahweh\u2019s favor). Rather than \u201cspiritualizing,\u201d paedobaptists should insist that the promises of the New Covenant are precisely the Abrahamic promises: In the Seed of Abraham, the seed of Abraham inherits the earth (Rom. 4:13) as a multitude of kings and priests, spread out like the sand of the seashore (Rev. 1:5\u20136; 4:9\u201310; 7:9). In spite of their disagreement with Barth, Cullmann and Marcel seem to share his ambivalence toward the religious outlook of the Old Covenant. Baptist and paedobaptist, like Eucharistic realist and Eucharistic mystic, compete on the same semi-Marcionite ground. It is hardly surprising that their debates seem impossible of resolution.<\/p>\n
Sacramental Theology and the Social Sciences<\/p>\n
The third story concerns the introduction of models and categories from the cross-disciplinary subject of ritual studies, which, along with concepts from contemporary philosophy and semiotics, provides a welcome corrective to certain tendencies in traditional liturgics and sacramental theology. Anthropology situates rites and practices within a community\u2019s concrete social relations and power structures, which is to say, that sacramental theology is embedded in ecclesiology (Cooke 1990: 286). Moreover, anthropology often attends to the surface of a rite\u2019s actions, materials, sounds, and movements, and thus restores some of the patristic and medieval sensitivity to the multivalent symbolisms of washing, breaking, eating, of water, bread, wine. Sacramental theologies influenced by ritual studies have thus been able to develop Rahner\u2019s (1963) and Schillebeeckx\u2019s (1968) insistence that sacramental efficacy is an efficacy of signs and symbols rather than a quasi-physical or a moral causation.
\nRitual theory, however, is not an entirely benign tool for sacramental theology. Methodologically, some theologians treat the social sciences as theologically innocent foundations upon which to build theological conclusions. Kenan Osborne claims that once a phenomenological approach to the sacraments produces an \u201cinitial understanding,\u201d then \u201cbiblical, historical, and liturgical approaches to the sacrament fall into place\u201d (1974: 536\u2013549). Similarly, Worgul borrows the \u201ccorrelation\u201d method of David Tracy to find the \u201creal foundation for sacraments within concrete human existence\u201d (1980: 31\u201333). Cooke (1990), rather oldfashionedly, repeatedly implies that theology must adjust to the certain deliverances of science. \u201cLarger\u201d concerns of anthropology thus position theology. If Milbank (1990) is right that the social sciences are an alternative, even heretical, theology, then these assumptions are far too credulous.
\nSubstantively, ritual studies privilege certain biases of modernity. As Talal Asad (1993: 55\u201379) and Catherine Bell (1992: 69\u201374) have observed, there is no obvious line of demarcation between \u201csymbolic\u201d and \u201cfunctional\u201d acts (cf. Turner 1976: 504), a distinction that tarnishes the brilliance of Louis-Marie Chauvet\u2019s massive Symbol and Sacrament. For Chauvet, liturgy takes place on the far side of a \u201csymbolic rupture\u201d from the everyday, and is thus \u201cbeyond the useful-useless distinction\u201d because it \u201ccreates an empty space with regard to the immediate and utilitarian.\u201d Whatever worshipers may gain from the liturgy, \u201crituality functions at another level, the level of symbol,\u201d which permits \u201ca space for breathing, for freedom,\u201d for \u201cthe intense experience of the letting go of our theoretical knowledge, our ethical \u2018good works,\u2019 our personal \u2018experiences\u2019 of God\u201d so that we can be opened to grace (1995: 337\u2013338). Ritual opens out a (noumenal?) \u201csymbolic order\u201d that is \u201ccompletely different from that of immediately experienced reality.\u201d
\nMany traditional societies do not, however, share this dichotomy. Asad points out that medieval monks understood the daily office as an intrinsic element in a program of paedeia, not as \u201cexpressive\u201d or \u201csymbolic\u201d actions occupying a realm \u201cbeyond useful and useless.\u201d For all its flaws, Hugh of St. Victor\u2019s notion that sacraments effect humilitatio and exercitatio shows that he was not operating with a functional\/symbolic dualism. By imposing changing bodily postures and movements, Hugh argues, liturgy corrects the \u201cbad changes\u201d that result from sin and inscribes a Christian choreography, training the worshiper to dance life virtuously (1.9.3; Hugh 1951: 156\u2013158; Asad 1993: 77\u201379). On the far side of Chauvet\u2019s rupture, one trembles to ask what \u201ceveryday\u201d life looks like, once scoured of symbol. And the closest answer seems to be, very much like the modern secular West.
\nRitual theory privileges modern biases also in theorizing about the functions, patterns, or features of \u201critual in general.\u201d Undeniable \u201cfamily resemblances\u201d exist among rites from widely varying times and places, but, working with the Kantian form\/content dualism that infects sociology and anthropology generally (Milbank 1990: 64, 67, 104), ritual theory often abstracts a static form from different ritual contents. This reduces the Christian interpretation of a rite to a religious gloss on more basic natural institutions or sequences of action; anthropology isolates the container, while Christianity pours in the medicine\u2014and the Victorine allusion is deliberate. David N. Power, for example, suggests that ritual imitates bodily acts. \u201cRemote action\u201d (moving away from, looking at) is the basis for rites of alienation; copulation is the natural foundation for rites of bonding; and digestion is the basis for rituals of fusion that blur individual identities (1984: 88\u201389). Yet, these bodily actions are not \u201craw\u201d experiences but are always already encoded and suffused with particular intentions. \u201cMoving away\u201d out of embarrassment or revulsion is a different act from \u201cmoving away\u201d out of respect or deference; sex is always already infused with symbols and gestures; and every meal has to be arranged in some manner, so that there is no \u201ceating as such\u201d but only \u201ceating in this or that way.\u201d Similar objections can be brought against Michael Lawler, who defines sacraments as \u201cprophetic symbols\u201d that raise literal realities to the \u201crepresentative-symbolic\u201d level at which Christian meanings come into play. Marriage, according to Lawler, has a \u201cnatural level\u201d meaning of \u201cunion of this man and this woman\u201d but as a representative symbol becomes suitable to \u201cproclaim, realize, and celebrate in representation\u201d Christ\u2019s union with the church (Lawler 1987: 52\u201353)\u2014as if marriage could exist in the slightest degree outside a representative-symbolic matrix!
\nAbstract formalism is only part of the problem here. Against Power and Lawler, I have insisted that no pre-linguistic or pre-semiotic human life exists. If this is the case, then some language and semiosis is already encoded in the activities and institutions relevant to Christian sacraments. By introducing Christianity at a secondary level, theology collaborates with secularism in refusing to allow the Christian coding of reality to enter constitutively into the definition of bodily actions or social institutions. Sacramental theology is thus recruited into the force that \u201cpolices the sublime\u201d and keeps religion in its proper, privatized place (Milbank 1990: ch. 5). If the gospel merely pours content into preexisting forms, it cannot trans-form, cannot burst the wineskins.
\nWorgul goes to an unusual extreme, combining Levi-Strauss and Turner to describe the efficacy of the Eucharist. Having portrayed human life as a set of binary oppositions, he claims that ritual enables passage from the \u201cbad pole\u201d to the \u201cgood pole,\u201d from death to life, and that each transition passes through a moment of Buberian, egalitarian communitas. Strong experiences of communitas keep a culture stable, while weak communitas can lead to disintegration. Worgul claims that the Eucharist is an example of this process, but though the Eucharist no doubt effects a passage from death to life, the path does not run through communitas (1980: 185\u2013193; cf. Hoffman 1987: 168\u2013169). Undifferentiated communitas has nothing to do with the church, which is precisely a differentiated community, one body of many members. Be that as it may, Worgul\u2019s anthropological revision of Eucharistic theology does not provide any \u201cdeeper\u201d insight into how the Eucharist works (Worgul 1980: 224) than theological explanations. To say that baptism is a \u201crite of passage\u201d is not to arrive at some more basic level of description but merely to re-describe what the New Testament calls \u201cdeath and resurrection with Christ,\u201d \u201cthe washing of regeneration,\u201d \u201ccrossing of the Red Sea.\u201d Redescription can have the valuable heuristic function of highlighting unnoticed features of a rite, but the theological description must remain fundamental. In the context of the preceding discussion, anthropological redescription forces typology to the margins, so that Christian rites are interpreted without reference to Old Testament patterns; the scholastic detachment of quaestiones from lectio re-emerges, radicalized. The prolegomena to Christian sacramental theology is no longer a \u201ctreatise on the sacraments of the Old Law\u201d but a \u201ctreatise on the rites of the Ndembu.\u201d<\/p>\n
Symphony in Two Movements<\/p>\n
To evade the semi-Marcionism of the tradition, I take as my guide the fountainhead of Western sacramental theology, Augustine of Hippo. In important respects, Augustine is more plight than solution, combining a suspicion of signs with misgivings about the Old Testament. Regarding \u201csigns,\u201d the early treatise De Magistro serves to illustrate. After persuading Adeodatus, his son and dialogue partner, that we learn nothing apart from verbal or gestural signs (10.29\u201330; 1968: 42\u201344), he abruptly veers in the opposite direction by claiming that knowledge is more valuable than signs, which implies that true knowledge is immediate and transparent perception of res in se rather than a knowledge encoded in signs (10.31; 1968: 45). He then poses this dilemma: \u201cwhen I am shown a sign, it cannot teach me anything if it finds me ignorant of the reality for which the sign stands; but if it finds me acquainted with the reality, what do I learn from the sign?\u201d (10.33; 11.36; 1968: 46). Knowledge of reality does not come through signs after all, but the reverse. One knows a sign is a sign only when one knows the reality, so that knowledge of both signs and realities comes by opening a gap between signa and the world of res (10.33; 1968: 47), a gap that Augustine eventually fills with the deus ex machina of the \u201cInterior Teacher,\u201d Christ. Adeodatus concludes that human teaching does not transmit knowledge but uses verba externa to remind us that Christ dwells within (14.46; 1968: 60; cf. Rist 1996: 32\u201333). The semiotic of De Magistro is, in Derridean terms, a radical form of logocentrism, where even the voice is secondary to the true inner word. Regarding the Old Testament, Augustine admits in the Confessions (6.4.6; 1953: 136) that it was only Ambrose\u2019s allegorizing preaching that freed Scripture from absurdity.
\nThese twin themes come together in De doctrina christiana 3.5\u20139 (1958: 83\u201387). Augustine is discussing the hermeneutical imperative to distinguish between figurative and literal language and warning against taking the figurative as literal. This was the error of the Jews, who fell into the \u201chabit of taking signs for things,\u201d a \u201cmiserable servitude\u201d in which they were not \u201cable to raise the eye of the mind above things that are corporal and created to drink in eternal light\u201d (3.5.9; 1958: 84). Israel was in a superior state to the pagan world, since God appointed useful signs for her worship, while even if a pagan were to ascend from signum to res, he would not be profited since the res itself is an idol. Christ liberated the Jews from useful signs, \u201celevating them to the things which the signs represented\u201d but destroyed pagan signs, not to lead them to \u201cservitude under useful signs, but rather to an exercise of the mind directed toward understanding them spiritually\u201d (3.8.12; 1958: 86). Thus, just as a proper use of signs involves a transitus and elevation from sign to thing, so there is a transitus from useful signs to real thing in redemptive history. This is a classic statement of Marcionite sacramental theology.
\nEven in this passage, there are some countervailing tendencies. \u201cBondage under signs\u201d in Augustine does not always mean that religious signs are confining per se; bondage results from the idolatrous misuse of signs. Accordingly, Augustine does not hold that Christianity escapes signs altogether (3.9.13; 1958: 87). More generally, Augustine brilliantly and originally develops his reflections in the context of communication (2.2.3; 1958: 35) and thereby introduces the subject alongside signum and res as a fundamental component of semiotic reflection (O\u2019Donovan 1982: 384).
\nAugustine eludes his vestigial Marcionism and moves toward a more satisfying theory of signs and of redemptive history in Epistle 138 to Marcellinus (1951\u201356: 3.36\u201353; PL 33, 525\u2013535). Marcellinus had been challenged to provide an explanation for the change of sacraments from Old to New, since this change seemed to imply either that God changed or that the Old rites were evil, since a thing done right ought not to be changed. After pointing out that change is the story of creation and human growth, Augustine distinguishes between the \u201cfitting\u201d (aptum) and the \u201cbeautiful\u201d (pulchrum). The second is constant, but the aptness of a thing depends on connections with other things, so that as the total web of circumstances is altered, what is aptum changes with it. Old Testament sacraments were fitting for their time, but are no longer so. In no way does this imply change in God or His plan, however, since the Old Testament prophesied the transformation of sacraments (1951\u20131956: 3.38; PL 33, 527).
\nThough Augustine refuses to elaborate the reasons for the change in rites, he offers a brief but immensely provocative metaphor as explanation. Just as verbal signs\u2014the letters of a written verb and the sounds of a spoken verb\u2014vary according to the time the verb indicates, so the rites of the church develop to show a shift in \u201ctense,\u201d from anticipation to fulfillment. Though initially distinguished, aptum and pulchrum are harmonized by means of a musical analogy: Precisely by means of variations in what is fitting, the sovereign God orchestrates \u201cthe beauty of the entire world\u201d (universi saeculi pulchritudo) that \u201cswells \u2026 into a mighty song of some unutterable musician\u201d (magnum carmen cujusdem ineffabilis modulatoris; 1951\u20131956: 3.39; PL 33, 527).
\nBy this combination of metaphors, Augustine underscores his repeated insistence that sacramental \u201csubstance,\u201d or, continuing the analogy, the \u201cverbal root,\u201d remains the same in both Testaments. Christ is the Verbum spoken, offered, and received in the word and sacraments of both Old and New. Moreover, just as a conjugation is not a transition from language to not-language but a transformation from one linguistic form to another, so also the transition from Old to New remains within the economy of linguistic and cultural signs. The New is a radically fresh and surprising variation on the themes of the preceding movement but it is not a wholly new musical departure. New Covenant rites and signs are thus not grudging concessions to the weakness of the flesh but are necessary to develop redemptive themes in the symphony of universal history. Practically, this means that words do not give place to silence, nor external rites to interior piety, nor does the New Testament open a gap between signs and realities that was not apparent in the Old. In both Old and New, Augustine implies, worship involves the performance of sacramental signs and confession in a particular form of words. The difference in wholly in the times.
\nFinally, in a proto-structuralist move, Augustine suggests that the New is meaningful only by virtue of its difference from the Old: Resurrexit can be understood only against the background of the prior resurrecturus. On Augustine\u2019s analogy, if this is true for word, it is equally true for sacraments, and this implies that the sacramental forms themselves should embody this conjugation. Augustine\u2019s insistence on the necessary relation of Old and New has implications for the act of worship. In the music that is the liturgy, the sacraments and forms of the church pulse to rhythms set by Israel. Prayer and praise conjugate the offering of sacrifice and incense, baptism recapitulates circumcision and the crossing of the sea, the Eucharist is a fresh performance of Passover and Booths, thank offering and purification. As for theological reflection on liturgy, Augustine intimates that the \u201ctreatise on the sacraments of the Old Law\u201d is a necessary prologue to Christian liturgics. Both liturgically and theologically, the melody of the New lacks the aesthetic power to raise men to contemplationem speciei Dei if unaccompanied by the (more darkly colored) harmonies of the Old.
\nThe same motifs appear in Contra Faustum, with some important developments. According to Faustus, a Manichean, Catholics are hypocrites because they attack Manicheans for dispensing with the Old order but themselves refuse to keep Jewish rites and customs; thus, Catholics as much as Manichaeans dispense with the Old (18.1; 19.4; 22.2; 1974a: 237, 240, 272\u2013273). Appealing to Jesus\u2019 statement that He came to fulfill not to destroy the Law (Matt. 5:17), Augustine\u2019s alternative paradigm is not so much a \u201cspiritualization\u201d as a \u201chumanization\u201d of the Old Covenant order. Preeminently, Christ, the God-Man, fulfills the rites and institutions of Israel, but for Augustine Christ and His body are inseparable. Regarding the Eucharist, Augustine claims that the Christ who is the res of the sacraments is the totus Christus comprising Head and body. In the terms developed by scholastic theology, the res tantum of the Eucharist is the unity of the church in and with Christ; the res sacramenti embraces the incorporated church (cf. Lash 1968: 66\u201367). Or, as Augustine dramatically put it to his congregation, vos estis quod acceptistis (Sermo 227; PL 38, 1099). Thus, the various figures of the Old Testament are fulfilled in the church. Christians do not continue to practice Levitical baptisms since Christ came to \u201cbury us with Himself by baptism into death,\u201d Christ fulfills the dietary laws by refusing to incorporate any who are like unclean beasts into His body, and no architectural tabernacle remains because believers are the dwelling of God (19.10; 1974a: 243). The Christian conjugation of \u201ccleansing rites,\u201d \u201cfood laws,\u201d and \u201ctabernacle\u201d is \u201cChrist,\u201d but, because Christ is totus Christus, the present tense is equally, \u201cchurch.\u201d
\nAnd the church, like Israel, is necessarily a community constituted by rites and signs. Augustine explains that every religious society requires signs and visible sacraments, since without these no people can be \u201ccoagulated\u201d into a unified association (Contra Faustum 19.11; 1974a: 243). This perspective disrupts any attempt, including Augustine\u2019s, to classify sacramenta as a species of signa in Augustine\u2019s technical sense. A signum, Augustine had said, is something that \u201cover and above the impression it makes on the senses, causes something else to come into the mind as a consequence of itself\u201d (De doctrina christiana 2.1.1; 1958: 34). In Contra Faustum 19.11, however, signs have a \u201cpragmatic\u201d and \u201cperformative\u201d role, not a cognitive one. Signs are not merely for raising the mind to things signified; signs do, and what they do is form a body from many members. Moreover, if the res of the Eucharist is the totus Christus, and if the goal of the sacrament is to unify the church in Christ, then contemplating the meal (assuming that contemplation is what one is supposed to do with food) does not bring some other underlying thing to mind: What is sensibly apparent in the Eucharist is what is brought to mind, and this, in turn, is what is accomplished\u2014the unity of the body.
\nAugustine implies, further, that signs and rites are necessary for the achievement of redemption. If humans exist in a linguistic and semiotic medium, the sin will manifest itself there; as Augustine says, even false religious communities employ signs. Redemption, the restoration of man to God, involves the creation of true religious community, which is coagulated through divinely instituted signs and sacraments. Sacraments are not \u201coutside\u201d redemption pointing \u201cinward\u201d but make up the reality of the totus Christus in its earthly manifestation, which is salvation promised and now, though pre-eschatologically, fulfilled.<\/p>\n
Conclusion<\/p>\n
Thus, the pattern of Augustine\u2019s typology is: The Old Covenant order was a real participation in the redemption to come, yet also pointed to its fulfillment in Christ; since Christ is not only Head but body, the types of Israel\u2019s order prefigured both Jesus and the church; since no organized religious group can be united into a body without signs and rites, the rites of the Old anticipated the sacraments of the New; and conjugation of word and sacrament was necessary to attain beauty in the music of history. The following chapters are not an extension of Augustine\u2019s counter-Marcionite semiotic theory but a study in biblical theology guided by these Augustinian principles. Specifically, I shall examine baptism as a \u201cconjugation\u201d of Old Testament priestly ordination. If the argument of this chapter has been correct, the assertion that baptism fulfills the ordination rite, if exegetically and theologically sound, is not typological ornamentation but a necessary dimension of the theology of baptism.
\nImaginative reading of Scripture\u2014something I hope to have come close to achieving\u2014is an art that cannot be reduced to a list of rules, yet I must make, besides these Augustinian principles, some sketchy remarks about my approach to the Bible. I affirm the orthodox view that, though human writers produced the canonical texts, ultimately, as Thomas put it, auctor sacrae Scripturae est Deus. This means, first, that the Bible is a single book whose many episodes and fields of imagery form an interlocking whole. It means, second, that Scripture bears the authority and truth of its Author, so that the theologian is to be mastered by not master of the text. As Thomas recognized, however, Scripture\u2019s \u201cdouble authorship\u201d introduces a hermeneutical dilemma: Since the Author\u2019s intention determines the literal meaning, and since God comprehends all things at once (simul), then there is no question but that secundum litteralem sensum in una littera Scripturae plures sint sensus (ST 1a, 1, 10). If this is true, how, on the one hand, can we make sure that we hear all that God intended to communicate? And how, on the other hand, can we avoid, as R.A. Markus has put it (1996: 12), \u201cputting words in God\u2019s mouth\u201d? I would avoid impalement on the first horn of this dilemma by admitting that the church will never hear all that Scripture says, since Scripture is as inexhaustible as its Author. Dodging the other horn requires more skillful footwork. Several exegetical controls will be operative here.
\nI am situated in an interpretive tradition that serves as a check on individual ingenuity, and I take confidence from the fact that the typology of priestly ordination and baptism is a truism of this tradition. Though patristic and medieval exegesis yields a result I wish to defend, I am not always satisfied with the means by which the result was reached, so some further controls are necessary. Grammatical and historical considerations serve as a foundation and continual guide. Attention to the literal sense does not, however, preclude discovering a network of correspondences within the original setting; a literal sense is thoroughly infused with analogies and symbolic correlations. These correlations are of essentially two related kinds. First, with a nod to cultural anthropology, I seek to understand Scriptural statements, institutions, rites, and events within a set of cultural and social contexts. Moses\u2019 anointing of Aaron, for example, is a link in the chain of ritual actions of ordination; the ordination is a feature of the institution of priesthood; the anointing of Aaron is connected to other uses of oil in ancient Israel; the priestly office is part of the holiness system that ordered Israel\u2019s life; and so on. Second, there are textual correlations. Surrounding structures, allusions to earlier passages, repeated scenarios or sequences of action, tropes and technical terms serve to bring out theological significance. References to the priestly duty of maintaining the lamps of the Holy Place, for example, bracket the chapters in Exodus concerning the priestly garments and ordination, and this suggests an analogy between oil-burning lamps and anointed priests (cf. Exod. 27:20\u201321; 30:7\u20138).
\nTextually justified comparisons such as this bring together two networks of association, which can be compared and cross-compared at length (cf. Soskice 1985: 49\u201351). From the correlation of priest and lampstand, any number of connections may proliferate: Anointing has to do with illumination, priests are light-bearers, priests stand like the lampstand in the Holy Place, and so on. Since each term of the comparison is related to other metaphorical networks, one could extrapolate almost indefinitely. Not all possible elaborations are legitimate; some lack textual support, others run up against the claims of other portions of Scripture, others are plain weird. Yet, through attention to these social and textual contexts, I arrive at a thick exegesis of Old Testament texts on priesthood and ordination, a sensus litteralis plenior. The New Testament is a massive program of innerbiblical interpretation (cf. Fishbane 1985), as New Testament writers view Christ through the prism of earlier events in Israel\u2019s history. Against the background of the Old Testament sensus plenior, I argue that the New Testament describes baptism in terms of the ordination rite. Having established a typological connection between baptism and ordination, I develop some features of a theology of baptism by elaborating comparisons between these two fields of association. I explain these procedures in more detail as the argument progresses.
\nMy study will of course also reveal differences between Old and New, and considering them will disclose the grammatical rules at work in the redemptive-historical \u201cconjugation\u201d of the rites. Thus, through typological interpretation the Bible becomes \u201ca cross-referencing, interglossing semiotic system which can be used \u2026 to assimilate by redescription all the worlds and world views which human beings construct in the course of history,\u201d providing a reading of \u201chistory in biblical terms\u201d (Loughlin 1996: 29 fn. 1). If this is not to be mere sloganizing, it demands substantial grappling with the text, as our discussion of Augustine makes clear, of both Old and New Testaments and the relations between them. In the end, I arrive at a rendition of history using the biblical themes of priesthood and baptism, which will also contribute to a theology that is social science (Milbank 1990). In this way, I hope to measure up to the Markan touchstone, elaborating a gospel that begins in baptism. I freely admit that priesthood and baptism provide only one perspective of many, and in defense I must plead simple creaturely limitation: For I can stand in only one place at a time (cf. Frame 1987).
\nA tree is known by its fruits: so we have it on the highest possible authority. In the end, then, I would have the value of my work judged by its fruitfulness in illuminating Scripture and edifying the church. And, beyond all, I intend this work to be a harmonious echo, however faint, of the song of the ineffable Singer whose mighty song is the history of creation.<\/p>\n
CHAPTER TWO<\/p>\n
Attendants in Yahweh\u2019s House: Priesthood in the Old Testament<\/p>\n
Priests have been principal targets in the Marcionite assault on the Old Testament in modern philosophy, sociology, and theology. In Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant characterizes \u201cpriest-craft\u201d as the \u201coldest of all fictions\u201d and the source of \u201cecclesiastical faith\u201d that corrupts pure religion with dogma and ritual (Kant 1960: 15; cf. Reventlow 1984). Nietzsche also focuses on the dishonesty and nihilism of priestly religion, which entered Christianity through Paul\u2019s teaching and missionary efforts (Nietzsche 1988: 50, 85\u201386, 121, 134). Both Kant and Nietzsche loathe priesthood as a peculiarly Jewish institution, inimical to Kant\u2019s rational moralism and Nietzsche\u2019s celebration of the natural. In Weber\u2019s opposition of institutionalized priesthood and prophetic charisma, the prophets are the promoters of ethical monotheism, the good bit of the Old Testament (Milbank 1990: 83\u201392, 94). Much modern Old Testament scholarship similarly denigrates priestly ministry. Though occluded in the Old Testament text, the real story of Israel\u2019s priesthood was one of continual strife among self-interested priestly families and between temple priests jealous of their privileges and country Levites snatching at a piece of the sacrificial pie. Priests were mean and miserly, the prototypical Jews of anti-Semitic mythology. Oddly, these same priests who dominated both lesser Levites and laymen meekly acquiesced to every liturgical whim of the Davidic kings.
\nNot least among the problems with this account is its remarkably flimsy textual support. To a considerable extent, Wellhausen\u2019s reconstruction rests ponderously on a handful of texts (Ezek. 44:6\u201316; 2 Kgs. 23:8\u20139; Deut. 18:6\u20138), all of which are open to plausible alternative interpretations (Wellhausen 1885: 123\u2013124, 146\u2013147). Wellhausen argues for a late date for \u201cP\u201d partly by drawing attention to the contrast between the elaborate priesthood described in Leviticus and Numbers and the spontaneity of liturgical expression in the narratives of Judges. With characteristic wit, he says that the sudden appearance of the cult is matched by the suddenness of its disappearance after the conquest, so that \u201cthe Book of Judges forthwith enters upon a secular history completely devoid of all churchly character\u201d (Wellhausen 1885: 127). The absence of priests from Judges is alarming because the Hexateuch leaves the impression that the High Priest was the central figure in Israel\u2019s amphictyony. Large historical conclusions built on the evidence of a single text are, however, exceedingly tenuous. More important, Wellhausen ignores the fact that Judges is the work of a \u201cformer prophet,\u201d not a \u201cscientific nineteenth-century historian.\u201d With this in mind, it is significant that the Levites who appear in the long dramas at the end of Judges are little short of scoundrels (Judg. 17\u201321). By placing these events at the climax of the book, the author shows that the political failures of the early theocracy were the fruit of the failure of Levitical priests to guard Israel from Canaanite idolatry (Jordan 1985: 279\u2013334). Absence of priests is a thematic device that underscores their practical absence from the life of Israel. Judges raises precisely Wellhausen\u2019s question\u2014Where are all the priests?\u2014without at all demanding Wellhausen\u2019s answer.
\nEven so sober a scholar as de Vaux somehow knows that the Zadokites were \u201ca conservative-minded family, with little liking for innovation which might change their way of life\u201d (1961: 375). Quite apart from the banality of this characterization\u2014who isn\u2019t resistant to change?\u2014the evidence de Vaux cites (1 Kgs. 15:12\u201313; 2 Kgs. 18:3\u20134; 23) hardly supports his conclusion. As de Vaux points out, these texts show that kings rather than priests initiated reform programs, and he implies that reactionary Zadokites headed the resistance. Yet no mention of priests either supporting or resisting can be found in the first two texts, and the Josian reform was catalyzed by a priest\u2019s discovery of the \u201cbook of the law\u201d (2 Kgs. 22:8\u201320). Why, furthermore, would the Zadokites have resisted reforms that, to all appearances, consolidated their liturgical monopoly\u2014unless perhaps we must add \u201cnaive\u201d and \u201cshort-sighted\u201d to de Vaux\u2019s catalogue of their failings? Reconstructing the struggle between the Zadokites and the descendants of Abiathar, de Vaux relies on the prophecy against Eli (1 Sam. 2:27\u201336) and some passages from Jeremiah (de Vaux 1961: 375\u2013376), all denunciations of massive liturgical abuses. To say that these charges provided pious garb for what amounted to a power play unmasks the larger assumption that Israel\u2019s priests were astonishingly cynical, even to the point of deploying Torah simply to gain an advantage over the competition (cf. de Vaux 1961: 376). No doubt there were power struggles among Israel\u2019s priests, as among Old Testament scholars, but one should not assume that either community is a site of unchecked libido dominandi.
\nRichard D. Nelson\u2019s sympathetic portrayal of Israel\u2019s priesthood provides a useful corrective to the Marcionite scholarship of the past century, but his analysis is occasionally infected by perspectives he elsewhere rejects. Commenting on the difficulty that Jerusalem priests had in responding to Nebuchadnezzar\u2019s destruction of the temple, he writes, \u201cPriestly theology on its own could offer no critique of its own ritual guarantee of Yahweh\u2019s unwavering favor to a disobedient people\u201d (Nelson 1993: 102\u20133). Nelson thus treats \u201cpriestly theology\u201d as if it existed as a discrete ideology in ancient Israel, when in fact it is a modern construct from the Old Testament (and other texts and evidence). Whether or not priestly theology \u201con its own\u201d had resources for self-critique is irrelevant, for \u201cpriestly theology,\u201d assuming it existed at all, never existed \u201con its own\u201d (cf. Nelson 1993: 99). After all, critical reconstructions of textual history, which Nelson largely accepts, place the \u201cpriestly literature\u201d centuries later than other Pentateuchal material. Nelson also notes that priestly literature includes ethical components that go beyond mere external conformity (cf. 1993: 129; e.g., Lev. 19; Pss. 15; 24), but if \u201cpriestly theology\u201d had ethical dimensions irreducible to ritual prescription, then it did possess resources for self-critique after all. Evidence for this is found in Jeremiah\u2019s devastating assault on Israel\u2019s antinomian trust in the temple (esp. Jer. 7); for Jeremiah was himself a priest (Jer. 1:1). Ezekiel, a \u201critualist\u201d if ever there was one, recorded the departure of Yahweh\u2019s glory from His temple (Ezek. 8\u201311), scarcely a vision that accords with a theology of ritual guarantee.
\nNelson occasionally leaves hints of a residual bifurcation of priesthood and eschatological prophecy. He asserts that \u201cpriests developed no eschatology other than one completely realized in ritual\u201d (1993: 103), but this jars with his characterization of the Priestly Writing as a \u201ctheology of hope to a despairing nation\u201d (1993: 105). Nelson\u2019s extended discussion of the \u201cutopian\u201d visions of Ezekiel 40\u201348 and Zechariah 1\u20138 (1993: 112\u2013125), moreover, belies his previous statement that \u201cthe priestly response to exile was limited to attempts to restore everything to the way it should have been before the demolition of the temple\u201d (1993: 103), for, on his reading, Ezekiel proposes changes in priesthood and liturgy (1993: 116). For Nelson, Christianity envisions a \u201cworld without culture map boundaries\u201d with little room for priestly tasks (1993: 170\u2013172), though he insists that the main function of Old Testament priesthood was community maintenance, which is surely relevant to the church.
\nAnimus to priesthood has so infected modern thought that it is necessary to reassemble a theology of priestly ministry from the ground floor. With his emphasis on the priest\u2019s role in the community, Nelson has made significant progress, but his valuable work needs to be carried through more consistently. Eventually, I argue that the Christian gospel, ritualized in baptism, announces the eschatological reconfiguration of priesthood, but I cannot demonstrate that this is good news without a thoroughgoing purge of Marcionite prejudice. In the remainder of this chapter, then, I offer some rudiments of a theology of priesthood, so that, against Kant, Nietzsche, Wellhausen, and many others, I can mount a defense\u2014in a sense to be elaborated below\u2014of priestcraft.<\/p>\n
Solving the Equation<\/p>\n
Though the following discussion has value in comparative religions and relies to some extend on comparative evidence, my main goal is to describe priesthood in ancient Israel. Even with this limitation, the way forward bristles with difficulties. As described by the Pentateuch, the duties of priests can be arranged on a spectrum according to their proximity to the sanctuary. Priests alone had access to Israel\u2019s sanctuaries, and the only High Priest, on the Day of Atonement, entered the Most Holy Place to sprinkle blood before the ark (Lev. 16). In the Holy Place, priests offered incense and trimmed the wicks of the menorah lamps every morning and evening (Exod. 30:7\u20138; Lev. 24:1\u20134). Each Sabbath, the priests removed and ate the old shewbread and put out new loaves on the golden table (Lev. 24:5\u20139). In the courtyard, priests offered sacrifices morning and evening and at feast days on the bronze altar (Num. 28\u201329) and assisted lay Israelites with their private offerings. Though worshipers killed the victims (Lev. 1:4\u20135; etc.), priests alone manipulated sacrificial blood and turned meat and\/or grain products to smoke (Lev. 1:5; 21:16\u201324). Priests, with the Levite clans, guarded the tabernacle (Num. 3:8, 38) and managed firstfruits, tithes, and votive offerings (Lev. 27; Num. 18). They judged matters of uncleanness and performed some rites of cleansing to readmit laymen to the sanctuary (Lev. 12\u201315). In return for their service at the sanctuary, they received tithes and designated portions of the sacrifices (Lev. 7\u20138; Num. 18).
\nThe duties sketched in the previous paragraph form a coherent complex of tasks but in addition priests had several functions within Israelite society. Bearer of the Urim and Thummim, the High Priest delivered Yahweh\u2019s oracles to the people (Exod. 28:30; Num. 27:21). Priests taught Torah (Deut. 33:10), especially ceremonial distinctions between clean and unclean, sacred and profane (Lev. 10:8\u201311; cf. Jer. 18:18; Hos. 4:4\u20136; Mal. 2:1\u20139), and in certain cases, they served as civil judges (Deut. 17:9). This set of duties, like the previous set, is internally coherent.
\nAcute difficulties arise when one seeks to combine the two sets of duties in a single framework. Can we find an umbrella big enough, and of the right shape, to keep the entire priest out of the rain? In asking this question, I am not searching for a hard kernel of unchanging \u201cessence.\u201d Umbrellas can expand and contract and even, in a strong wind, be inverted. Nonetheless, I submit that \u201cpriest\u201d has a certain \u201creach,\u201d such that Israelites from different periods of history would have supplied \u05db\u05d4\u05df (\u201cpriest\u201d) for crossword puzzle definition \u201cx,\u201d just as we supply \u201cpriest\u201d for a crossword puzzle definition such as \u201cone who presides at Mass.\u201d Logically, the issue is one of abduction (cf. Eco 1984: 39\u201343): let \u201cp\u201d = priest, {a, b, c \u2026} = the set of duties of Israel\u2019s priests, and \u201cx\u201d = the definition of priesthood, currently unknown. I shall propose a value of x in the equation p = x. There are two criteria for determining the success of my calculations. First, x must be such that p = x produces the set {a, b, c \u2026}, and, second, it must be true that p and only p = x.
\nThe agnostic option is to deny such an equation exists. Resolving the problem diachronically, some scholars suppose that one or the other set of duties, or one specific activity, was temporally prior; at one time p = x, at another, p = y. Two main reconstructions have been proposed: Some claim that the original priestly function was to deliver oracles, while others suggest that early priests guarded the house of God and its treasures. On both theories, sacrifice came to dominate priestly activity later on. Though the functions of priests undoubtedly changed over time, neither of these solutions is persuasive. In part, the idea that early priests were solely oracular consultants depends on a doubtful etymological connection between \u05db\u05d4\u05df and the Arabic kahin, \u201csoothsayer.\u201d Neither is plausible in the context of Ancient Near Eastern religious practice: Oracles were sought, from early times, through sacrifice (cf. Num. 23:1\u20133, 14\u201316), and the earliest sanctuaries, as \u201chouses of god,\u201d were places of sacrificial food offerings.
\nCommonly, \u201cpriest\u201d is defined as a president of sacrificial worship (p = s), and several texts are cited in support. Leviticus 21:21 describes priests as those who \u201coffer the bread of God,\u201d and Ezekiel 44:16 confines the privilege of approaching the Lord\u2019s table to the Zadokites. Yet, this equation meets neither of the criteria set out above. Though sacrifice was apparently a priestly act, not everyone who sacrificed held a priesthood (e.g., Noah, Gen. 8:20; Abraham, Gen. 12:8). Many who did not fit under \u201cpriest\u201d could therefore huddle under the umbrella, \u201cone who sacrifices\u201d; it is thus not true that p and only p = s. Nor does p = s yield the set {a, b, c \u2026}. Not even all of the priests\u2019 activities in the sanctuary were \u201csacrificial\u201d and their social functions dangle precariously.
\nMediation has also been seen as the basic meaning of priesthood (p = m). After enumerating the duties of priests, de Vaux concludes,<\/p>\n
All these various functions have a common basis. When the priest delivered an oracle, he was passing on an answer from God; when he gave an instruction, a t\u00f4rah, and later when he explained the Law, the Torah, he was passing on and interpreting teaching that came from God; when he took the blood and flesh of victims to the altar, or burned incense upon the altar, he was presenting to God the prayers and petitions of the faithful. In the first two r\u00f4les he represented God before men, and in the third he represented men before God; but he is always an intermediary.\u2026 The priesthood is an institution for mediation (1961: 357).<\/p>\n
Again, some evidence supports this: Aaron\u2019s breastplate was adorned with stones engraven with the names of Israel\u2019s tribes (Exod. 28:15\u201321), which shows that the High Priest officiated as representative of the people (pace Haran 1988: 18). Several priestly duties were not, however, obviously connected with mediation\u2014guarding the house and trimming the wicks of the lampstand, for example\u2014or, at least, they point to a specific form of mediation. With some fudging, p = m might be made to produce the set {a, b, c \u2026}, but it is not true that p and only p = m, for in several passages, prophets rather than priests \u201cmediate.\u201d Scripture first applies \u201cprophet\u201d (Heb. \u05e0\u05d1\u05d9\u05d0) to Abraham when he interceded for Abimelech (Gen. 20:7), and the prophet Amos acted as intermediary, speaking Yahweh\u2019s word and interceding on Israel\u2019s behalf in Yahweh\u2019s council (Amos 7:1\u20136; cf. 1 Sam. 12:23; Jer. 11:14; 14:11; 15:1; Heschel 1962: 1.21). De Vaux recognizes that prophets and kings were also mediators but claims that their mediation depended upon personal charisma, while priesthood was an \u201cinstitution of mediation\u201d (1961: 357; cf. Bergman 1995: 70, 73). Prophetic communities, however, existed in Israel (cf. 2 Kgs 2:5, 15\u201316; 6:1), suggesting that prophecy was institutionalized to some degree and not based on sheer untransmissible charisma. Even if one can legitimately contrast \u201ccharismatic\u201d prophetic to \u201cinstitutionalized\u201d priestly mediation, the same distinction does not hold between king and priest, for the king\u2019s mediatorial role was as institutionalized as the priest\u2019s. In any case, if prophets and kings were mediators, mediation, though doubtless an aspect of priestly ministry, cannot define the distinct nature of priesthood.
\nOthers suggest that sanctuary guarding was the basic priestly ministry (p = g). Guarding the holy place was one function of priests and Levites (Num. 3:5\u201310; 18:1\u20137; Milgrom 1970), and this definition usefully highlights the priests\u2019 location in the Lord\u2019s house. If guarding was the central task of priesthood, however, it is difficult to account for the absence of any reference to guarding in many texts that describe priestly ministry (Lev. 21:21\u201323; Deut. 33:8\u201311; 1 Chr. 6:49). Guarding was at issue in Korah\u2019s rebellion (Num. 16\u201318), but the main dispute concerned who could \u201cdraw near\u201d (Num. 16:5). Levites, moreover, serve as sanctuary guardians, though they are not priests; thus it is not true that p and only p = g. Finally, it is far from obvious that every priestly task fits under the umbrella of guarding; p = g does not produce the set {a, b, c \u2026}.
\nAelred Cody\u2019s conclusion that \u201cthe earliest priests among the Israelites were essentially sanctuary attendants\u201d is more comprehensive (1969: 29), but his diachronic emphasis vitiates Cody\u2019s insight. During the time of Samuel, Cody argues, offering sacrifice did not count as \u201cpriestly activity,\u201d since in those days \u201ca priest was still looked upon as a sanctuary minister.\u201d Only after Deuteronomy, which Cody considers to be much later, did sacrifice become a priestly monopoly (1969: 74, 119\u2013120; cf. 101). Undeniably, sacrifice was offered by men who were not priests in places that were not sanctuaries (though merely erecting an altar implied a mapping of sacred space), but sanctuary ministry always involved sacrifice, among other things. Saying that priesthood developed \u201cfrom sanctuary attendance to sacrifice\u201d makes no sense, for the former was inclusive of the latter.
\nBy making a clear distinction between the respective qualifications for sacrifice and temple service, Menahem Haran has offered a description of Israelite priesthood that satisfies our two conditions. Whatever the practice regarding extra-sanctuary sacrifice, from the beginning Levitical priests had a monopoly of Israel\u2019s temple ministry (1972: 1071\u20131073). In the sanctuary precincts, only ordained priests offered sacrifice, but this was one of a wider set of duties that can be brought under the heading of \u201chousekeeping.\u201d Israel\u2019s sanctuary was the house of Yahweh, and priests were His personal servants who cared for His \u201cneeds\u201d and managed His house, \u201cjust as any reigning monarch has in his palace servants and retinue surrounding him constantly and performing his orders\u201d (1988: 18). Priests were personal attendants to Yahweh in His house (ha = household attendant), and the cult was their personal and household service. Thus, p = ha. In the following pages, I first examine several lines of evidence to show that p and only p = ha, and close the chapter by showing how p = ha yields the set {a, b, c \u2026}.<\/p>\n
Ancient Near Eastern Parallels<\/p>\n
Haran\u2019s description of Israelite priesthood depends in part on comparative evidence. In the Ancient Near East,<\/p>\n
The priests\u2019 involvement in the cult was conceived of essentially as service of the deity. This concept is rooted in the primary nature of the temple which was regarded as a \u2018house of the god.\u2019 \u2026 In this abode there are servants who attend on him and fulfill his wants, the whole cult being designed essentially to provide for the needs of the deity. This conception of the nature of the priesthood was accepted throughout the ancient world and found its expression in images and even in technical terms connected with the priesthood. For example, the Egyptian name designating priest, hom-neter, literally means \u2018servant of the god\u2019 (Haran 1972: 1069).<\/p>\n
According to the New Jerome Biblical Commentary, \u201cIn the ancient Near Eastern religious view, priests waited upon a god resident in his temple, with his presence focused in a mysterious, quasi-sacramental manner in his image or on a sacred object, even as earthly courtiers and retainers waited upon a king resident in his palace\u201d (Castelot and Cody 1990: 1254). Greek conceptions were consistent with this; in Plato\u2019s phrase, Greek priests were \u201csacristans to the gods\u201d (\u03bd\u03b5\u03c9\u03ba\u03cc\u03c1\u03bf\u03c5\u03c2 \u2026 \u03c4\u03bf\u1fd6\u03c2 \u03b8\u03b5\u03bf\u1fd6\u03c2).
\nHaran notes the remnants of this conception in the Bible, but claims that it lost \u201cits actual, concrete meaning as it became fossilized in linguistic usage\u201d (1972: 1069). On the contrary, both in Levitical law and in Ezekiel, references to Yahweh\u2019s food, table, house, and the description of priests as \u201cservants\u201d (see below) are not \u201cdead metaphors\u201d but living clues to the biblical understanding of priesthood, sacrifice, and liturgy. Israel\u2019s tabernacle was \u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05db\u05df (\u201cdwelling place\u201d) and \u05d0\u05d4\u05dc \u05de\u05d5\u05e2\u05d3 (\u201ctent of meeting or appointment\u201d), both terms indicating that Yahweh lived among His people (cf. Exod. 25:8). In general, Yahweh is said to \u05e9\u05c1\u05db\u05df (\u201cdwell\u201d) among the Israelites, but several passages speak of His enthronement (\u05d9\u05e9\u05c1\u05d1) between or above the cherubim attached to the cover of the ark of the covenant (1 Sam. 4:4; Ps. 80:1; 99:1; cf. Exod. 25:18\u201322). Like gods and kings in other Ancient Near Eastern nations, depicted in iconography seated between or upon winged creatures (cf. Keel 1978), Yahweh reigned from the throne of cherubim wings that overshadowed the ark, which served as footstool under His feet. The tabernacle was thus the \u201croyal tent\u201d of the divine King of Israel, appropriately decorated with rich curtains, veils, and gold-plated furniture. With Solomon\u2019s \u05d4\u05d9\u05db\u05dc, the royal connotation is more explicit, for this word can mean either \u201cpalace\u201d (1 Kgs. 21:1) or \u201ctemple\u201d (1 Kgs. 6:3, 5; 2 Kgs. 18:16). Israel\u2019s priests, like their counterparts throughout the ancient world, were attached to the palace of the divine King.
\nThe ministry of Israel\u2019s priests, moreover, was like that of other ancient priests. As Milgrom has described it, the tabernacle was Israel\u2019s \u201cpicture of Dorian Gray\u201d (1983: 75\u201384), which registered the nation\u2019s sin and uncleanness. Sprinkling blood at the altars was a form of \u201chousecleaning\u201d that ensured the palace would remain hospitable to Yahweh. Turning sacrificial meat into smoke was \u201ctable service,\u201d and formed a central part of the priests\u2019 personal attendance upon Yahweh. Were it not for the distortions of theological debates, the fact that Old Testament sacrifice was a food rite would be obvious, and the terminology associated with sacrifice reinforces this conclusion. Ezekiel described the altar as the \u201ctable of the Lord\u201d (Ezek. 44:16); the altar fire, which Yahweh Himself lit, \u201cate\u201d the flesh (\u05d0\u05db\u05dc; cf. Lev. 9:24); the sacrificial meat was the \u201cbread of God\u201d (Lev. 21:17, 21); and according to Gordon Wenham, \u05d0\u05e9\u05c1\u05d4, sometimes translated as \u201coffering by fire,\u201d means \u201cfood offering\u201d (Wenham 1979: 56, fn. 8).
\nComparative philological evidence provides additional support for p = ha. Cognates of \u05db\u05d4\u05df are found in cultic contexts in Phoenician and other Northwest Semitic texts, but the Ugaritic evidence is particularly intriguing. The Ugaritic term khnm is not included in lists of cultic personnel but of administrative officials, sometimes connected with the palace, and Ugaritic texts refer to \u201csacrificers\u201d with other terms (Urie 1948: 45\u201347). Tarragon thus concludes that khn may refer to an administrative office, and he warns that the analogy between the Ugaritic rb khnm (\u201cchief of the khnm\u201d) and the High Priest of Israel is not especially close, since the rb khnm did not have distinctively \u201csacerdotal\u201d functions (Tarragon 1980: 135). Auneau compares the rb khnm to the Akkadian sangu, a general term for administrator with no necessary association with sacrifice or worship, and also cautions against a facile equation of Ugaritic and Hebrew officials (Auneau 1985: 1184; cf. Bergman 1995: 63\u201364). These arguments, however, assume that Israel\u2019s priests were primarily sacrificial ministers, an equation I have already contested, and this assumption gives the arguments a curious turn: The Ugaritic word that we expect to mean \u201cpriest\u201d is not used of sacrificial and cultic personnel; therefore the Ugaritic term is not really parallel to the Hebrew, despite its philological identity. Why not conclude instead that priests in Ugarit and Israel were not \u201csacerdotal\u201d in our post-Tridentine sense of the term? An Ugaritic khn had administrative charge either in the palace or the temple; this can be taken as evidence that Israel\u2019s \u05db\u05d4\u05e0\u05d9\u05dd held analogous posts in the palace of Israel\u2019s King.<\/p>\n
What Does \u05db\u05d4\u05df Do?<\/p>\n
Old Testament usage of \u05db\u05d4\u05df provides another line of evidence. Several etymological hypotheses have been offered, but none is certain. In any case, the history of a word does not necessarily disclose its meaning at any particular time; as Nicholas Lash has put it, words pick up meanings more from the company they keep than from their ancestors. We can learn more about \u05db\u05d4\u05df, then, by interrogating its comrades. Two verbs are found in regular company with \u05db\u05d4\u05df: \u05e2\u05de\u05d3 (\u201cstand\u201d) and \u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea (\u201cserve, minister\u201d). Examining the usage of each in non-cultic contexts, I draw analogies between priestly and non-priestly uses to fill out a sensus plenior. These verbs thus help define \u05db\u05d4\u05df by answering the question, What do \u05db\u05d4\u05e0\u05d9\u05dd do?<\/p>\n
Standing to Serve<\/p>\n
\u05e2\u05de\u05d3 has the literal meaning of \u201cstand,\u201d \u201cstand up,\u201d and \u201cstand still,\u201d and is also used in a variety of metaphorical senses. Applied to priests, the word\u2019s spatial significance is never completely absent, since priestly \u201cstanding\u201d or \u201cstatus\u201d involved physical location in holy space or at the altar (cf. Lev. 21:21, 23). In one passage, the hiphil form of \u05e2\u05de\u05d3 describes the installation of Jeroboam\u2019s \u201cpriests of the high places,\u201d who were \u201cmade to stand\u201d in their ministry at the hilltop shrines (1 Kgs. 12:32: \u05d4\u05d1\u05de\u05d5\u05ea \u05d4\u05e2\u05de\u05d9\u05d3 \u2026 \u05d0\u05ea\u05be\u05db\u05d4\u05e0\u05d9). Joshua the High Priest \u201cstood before the angel of the Lord\u201d (Zech. 3:1), and the priest Phinehas \u201cstood before\u201d the ark (Judg. 20:28). For a priest to \u201cstand in place\u201d could mean to \u201cperform assigned tasks\u201d (2 Chr. 30:15\u201316; 35:10; lit. \u201cthey stood on their standing\u201d; Heb., \u05d9\u05e2\u05de\u05d3\u05d5\u05bc \u05e2\u05dc\u05be\u05e2\u05de\u05d3\u05dd), but this included standing at the altar or within the sanctuary. A \u05db\u05d4\u05df is one who has a place to stand.
\nUsed of \u201cstanding\u201d before a superior in non-liturgical contexts, the word has, besides its spatial sense, several nuances. To \u201cstand before\u201d can imply a one-time audience to submit a request, make a demand, or seek a favor (cf. Gen. 43:15; 47:7; Exod. 9:10; Num. 27:2; 1 Kgs. 1:28; 2 Kgs. 4:12). \u05e2\u05de\u05d3 also describes permanent personal service. Abishag \u201cstood before\u201d David (1 Kgs. 1:2), though her duty was to keep him warm in bed. Saul requested that David \u201cstand before\u201d him, and David became the king\u2019s armor bearer and played the harp when an evil spirit afflicted Saul (1 Sam. 16:21\u201323). Joshua\u2019s apprenticeship to Moses is described in similar terms (Deut. 1:38). Those who permanently \u201cstood before\u201d a ruler not only cared for his personal needs but also offered assistance in matters of state. Joseph became second to Pharaoh, a place of surpassing political \u201cstanding,\u201d to administer famine relief (Gen. 41:46). Solomon\u2019s servants and advisors \u201cstood before\u201d him continually (1 Kgs. 10:8; 12:6; Heb. \u05ea\u05de\u05d9\u05e8\u05bc), and Jehoiakim received Jeremiah\u2019s prophecy with princes standing beside him (Jer. 36:21). During the exile Daniel and his friends were selected for training to \u201cstand before\u201d Nebuchadnezzar in his palace (\u05d4\u05d9\u05db\u05dc; cf. 1 Sam. 1:9; 2 Kgs. 18:16), who consulted them concerning any matter of wisdom or insight (\u05db\u05dc \u05d3\u05d1\u05e8 \u05d7\u05db\u05de\u05ea \u05d1\u05d9\u05e0\u05d4), to interpret dreams or advise on policy decisions (Dan. 1:4\u20135, 19\u201320; 2:2). When applied to a priest, the word implies that the \u05db\u05d4\u05df was to Yahweh as a member of a royal retinue was to a king.
\nProphets also \u201cstood before\u201d Yahweh (e.g., 1 Kgs. 17:1), so to distinguish priestly from the prophetic \u201cstanding,\u201d the second of \u05db\u05d4\u05df\u2019s companions must be introduced. \u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea (noun form \u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea) means \u201cattend to,\u201d \u201cwait on,\u201d or \u201cminister to.\u201d In Joel 1:9 and 2:17, priests are called \u201cservants of Yahweh\u201d (\u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea\u05d9 \u05d9\u05d4\u05d5\u05d4), and in 1:13 both \u201cservants of the altar\u201d (\u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea\u05d9 \u05de\u05d6\u05d1\u05d7) and \u201cservants of my God\u201d (\u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea\u05d9 \u05d0\u05dc\u05d4\u05d9). Samuel, in training with the High Priest Eli, served Yahweh (1 Sam. 2:11; Heb., \u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea \u05d0\u05ea\u05be\u05d9\u05d4\u05d5\u05d4). Nehemiah 10:39 speaks of \u201cpriests who are ministering\u201d (Heb. v. 40; \u05d4\u05db\u05d4\u05e0\u05d9\u05dd \u05d4\u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea\u05d9\u05dd), Ezra 8:17 uses \u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea in the phrase \u201cministers for the house of our God\u201d (\u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea\u05d9\u05dd \u05dc\u05d1\u05d9\u05ea \u05d0\u05dc\u05d4\u05d9\u05e0\u05d5\u05bc), and Yahweh made a covenant with the Levitical priests as \u201cMy ministers\u201d (\u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea\u05d9, Jer. 33:21). In Ezekiel 45:4, the objects of priestly service are Yahweh\u2019s house and Yahweh Himself: Priests were \u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea\u05d9 \u05d4\u05de\u05e7\u05d3\u05e9\u05c1 who come near to \u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea \u05d0\u05ea\u05be\u05d9\u05d4\u05d5\u05d4. Several texts in Exodus demonstrate that \u201cservice\u201d is central to priesthood: Priests \u201cserved\u201d in the holy place (Exod. 28:35; 30:20), clothed in garments that qualified them to \u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea \u05d1\u05e7\u05d3\u05e9\u05c1 and \u05dc\u05db\u05d4\u05df (Exod. 35:19; 39:1, 41). Given the parallel of the two phrases, this passage defines \u201cpriesting\u201d as \u201c\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea in the holy place.\u201d
\nOutside liturgical contexts, the word is used to describe administrative activities. Joseph found favor (\u05d7\u05df) in Potiphar\u2019s eyes and served (\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea) him (Gen. 39:4), and this meant that Potiphar appointed (\u05e4\u05e7\u05d3) Joseph over all his house by giving everything into his hand (vv. 8\u20139). 1 Chronicles 27:1 lists the divisions of Solomon\u2019s \u201cofficers who serve (\u05e9\u05c1\u05d8\u05d3\u05d9\u05d4\u05dd \u05d4\u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea\u05d9\u05dd) the king in all the affairs of the divisions which came in and went out month by month.\u201d \u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea can also connote more direct personal service. Seven eunuch \u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea\u05d9\u05dd attended Ahasuerus (Est. 1:10). The captain of the bodyguard appointed Joseph over the two servants of Pharaoh, and Joseph ministered to them (Gen. 40:4). Joshua was \u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea to Moses, the \u05e2\u05d1\u05d3 \u05d9\u05d4\u05d5\u05d4 (Josh. 1:1; Exod. 24:13; 33:11; Num. 11:28), and Elisha to Elijah (1 Kgs. 19:21).
\n\u05e2\u05de\u05d3 and \u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea are used together in several priestly passages. The tribe of Levi, Moses said, was separated (\u05d4\u05d1\u05d3\u05d9\u05dc) to \u201cstand, serve, and bless\u201d (Deut. 10:8: \u05dc\u05e2\u05de\u05d3 \u05dc\u05e4\u05e0\u05d9 \u05d9\u05d4\u05d5\u05d4 \u05dc\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea\u05d5; 17:12: \u05d4\u05e2\u05de\u05d3 \u05dc\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea), chosen (\u05d1\u05d7\u05e8) to the same purpose (18:5: \u05dc\u05e2\u05de\u05d3 \u05dc\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea). Hezekiah encouraged the priests of his day by repeating this formula to explain their duties as Yahweh\u2019s \u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea\u05d9\u05dd (2 Chr. 29:11: \u05d1\u05d7\u05e8 \u05dc\u05e2\u05de\u05d3 \u05dc\u05e4\u05e0\u05d9\u05d5 \u05dc\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea\u05d5). When the glory of Yahweh descended on Solomon\u2019s temple, the priests were unable \u05dc\u05e2\u05de\u05d3 \u05dc\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea (1 Kgs. 8:11), which suggests that under normal circumstances this was what they were to do. \u05e2\u05de\u05d3 and \u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea occasionally combine without \u05db\u05d4\u05df in their company. The Queen of Sheba marveled at Solomon\u2019s court, remarking on the food and the \u201cstanding of his servants in their robes\u201d (1 Kgs. 10:5: \u05d5\u05de\u05dc\u05d1\u05e9\u05c1\u05d9\u05d4\u05dd \u05e2\u05d1\u05d3\u05d9 \u05de\u05e2\u05de\u05d3 \u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea\u05d5). Joshua stood before Moses (Deut. 1:38) to serve him (Josh. 1:1). Analogously, priests formed Yahweh\u2019s royal retinue, like the robed attendants at Solomon\u2019s banquet table, and priests were personal assistants to Yahweh, as Joshua was to Moses. To say a priest was ordained \u201cto stand to serve\u201d meant he was literally and metaphorically positioned to attend to the One before whom he stood.
\nAccording to Numbers 16:9, Levites were also brought near (\u05e7\u05e8\u05d1) to \u05e2\u05de\u05d3 and \u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea, yet this comes in a text that censures Korah\u2019s claims to priesthood. \u201cStanding to serve\u201d and \u201cdrawing near,\u201d then, cannot in themselves define the specifically priestly location, privilege, and task (Duke 1987: 198). Here, it is essential that we eschew the critical assumption that any complexity in the biblical text reveals diverse sources. Apparently, \u201cdraw near, stand, serve\u201d can have various nuances, some applicable to both the Levites and priests, others only to priests. Numbers 16 itself subtly distinguishes between Levitical service and priestly ministry proper. Levites served the Lord\u2019s house by performing \u05e2\u05d1\u05d3\u05d4, the physical labor of transporting the tabernacle (Milgrom 1970), and they did not give personal service to Yahweh, but \u201cstood to serve\u201d Israel. In Numbers 3:6, likewise, the Levites are described as \u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea\u05d9\u05dd to Aaron, not to Yahweh. Hence, Aaron:Yahweh::Levites:Aaron or::Levites:Israel. Both Levites and priests stood to serve the Lord\u2019s house, but only priests \u05d9\u05e2\u05de\u05d3\u05d5\u05bc in the holy place and at the altar and only they \u05d9\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea\u05d5\u05bc Yahweh Himself.
\nSimilarly, in Ezekiel 44:9\u201315 the distinction between priestly and Levitical ministry relates to proximity to and attendance on Yahweh. Because the Levites had gone astray after idols, their duties would be limited to ministry (\u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea) of the house, defined as oversight (\u05e4\u05e7\u05d3\u05ea; v. 11) and guarding the doorways (\u05e9\u05c1\u05de\u05e8\u05d9 \u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05de\u05e8\u05ea, v. 14). Appointed as \u05ea\u05d0\u05be\u05d4\u05d1\u05d9\u05ea \u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea\u05d9\u05dd (v. 11), they would oversee all the \u05e2\u05d1\u05d3\u05d4 done in the house (v. 14). Yet, these Levites were not priests: They \u201cwill not come near to Me to serve as a priest to Me (\u05dc\u05db\u05d4\u05df \u05dc\u05d9), nor come near to any of My holy things, to the things that are most holy\u201d (v. 13). The house of Zadok, however, \u201ckept charge of My sanctuary when the sons of Israel went astray from Me.\u201d Because of their faithfulness, Yahweh would allow them to \u201cpriest.\u201d While Levites ministered in the house, Zadokites could \u201ccome near to minister to Me\u201d (v. 15; \u05d9\u05e7\u05e8\u05d1\u05d5\u05bc \u05d0\u05dc\u05d9 \u05dc\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea\u05e0\u05d9). While Levites served at the gates, the Zadokites were to perform table service, offering Yahweh the fat and blood on His altar (vv. 15\u201316). While the Levites stood before the people, the Zadokites stood before Yahweh (v. 11, 15). Access to Holy Place and altar was the specifically priestly privilege, and the priestly task was service to Yahweh in the inner chambers of His house.
\nOne criterion of a fruitful equation is its potential for encompassing anomalous data. P = ha fulfills this standard, helping to solve several enigmas in the historical books. In the vast majority of cases, \u05db\u05d4\u05df refers to sanctuary ministers, but several texts apply the title to men who were not descendants of Aaron nor (apparently) ministers of the hole place (2 Sam 8:18; 20:26; 1 Kgs. 4:5; cf. 1 Chr. 18:17). Though a variety of explanations have been offered, our findings suggest that, though the word is used in an unusual context, the meaning of \u05db\u05d4\u05df is consistent with its more common connotation. Since, as we have seen, \u05db\u05d4\u05df verges toward \u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea, it is not surprising to find semantic influence going the other direction as well. \u05db\u05d4\u05df in this political context means precisely what it always means: a king\u2019s personal attendant serving in the palace.<\/p>\n
The Rite of Ordination<\/p>\n
A few threads of evidence in favor of p = ha emerge from the rite of ordination. It is important, first, to provide an overview of the eight-day ritual described in Exodus 29 and Leviticus 8\u20139. On the first day, Moses washed Aaron and his sons, anointed them, and invested them with priestly garments (cf. Exod. 28), and a series of three sacrifices followed (purification, \u201cwhole burnt,\u201d and the \u201cram of filling\u201d). The ordinands then remained in the \u201cdoorway of the tent\u201d for a week, repeating at least the \u05d7\u05d8\u05d0\u05ea, and probably the entire sacrificial series, each day (Exod. 29:35\u201337; Milgrom 1991: 539\u2013540). On the eighth day, Aaron moved to the altar to offer a purification and burnt offering for himself and his sons, then the same two sacrifices for the people, and concluded with a peace offering for the people. Fire burst from the tabernacle to consume the altar portions, a sign that Yahweh accepted Aaron\u2019s offerings.
\nI cannot provide a full inspection of this rite but instead shall examine several technical terms associated with it and a few features of the ritual that support my proposed equation. As the exploration progresses, wider perspectives on priesthood and ordination begin to emerge. As it becomes necessary to my argument, in later chapters I shall reintroduce components of the rite for more detailed dissection.<\/p>\n
Filling the Hand<\/p>\n
To ordain is, in Hebrew, to \u201cfill the hand\u201d (\u05de\u05dc\u05d0 \u05d9\u05d3), an expression also used in this technical sense outside the Bible (Jenson 1995: 335). Though in some passages the phrase describes priestly or quasi-priestly ministry, it normally refers to the rite of ordination itself. By the rite, Yahweh \u201cfills their hands in order to priest\u201d (Num. 3:3: \u05de\u05dc\u05d0 \u05d9\u05d3\u05dd \u05dc\u05db\u05d4\u05df) or \u201cfills his hand in order to put on priestly garments\u201d (Lev. 21:10: \u05e6\u05ea\u05be\u05d4\u05d1\u05d2\u05d3\u05d9\u05dd \u05de\u05dc\u05d0 \u05d0\u05ea\u05be\u05d9\u05d3\u05d5 \u05dc\u05dc\u05d1\u05e9\u05c1).
\nSome scholars have suggested that the term originally referred to payments given to the priest in return for religious services. Stated in baldly mercenary terms, this conclusion is misleading and the textual proof unconvincing. Judges 17:5, 12, where Micah is said to \u201cfill the hand\u201d of his son and the Levite, is frequently enlisted as evidence. Since Micah enticed the Levite to serve at his idolatrous shrine by offering silver, clothing, and regular maintenance (Judg. 17:10), \u201cfilling the hand\u201d means \u201cfilling the hand with fees\u201d (Noth 1962: 231). A more doggedly prosaic reading of Judges 17, which is sharply ironic, is difficult to imagine. That the Levite was willing to serve anyone who would \u201cfill his hand\u201d indicted him as one who shared the cultural ethos in which \u201cevery man did what was right in his own eyes\u201d (Judg. 17:6; 21:25). His hands were not really filled precisely because he was intent only on filling his hands.
\nNelson likewise argues that the expression refers to \u201ca priest\u2019s rights to the sacrificial portions upon which he lived\u201d and cites Exodus 32:29, where Levites \u201cfilled their hands\u201d with swords to execute idolaters, as a \u201crather grim pun on this phrase\u201d (1993: 49\u201350; cf. Gray 1925: 249\u2013250). A pun there is, for the Levites\u2019 reward for resolutely performing this sacrificial slaughter was the privilege of helping in another form of slaughter in the future. Yet, the passage is evidence against Nelson, since the Levites\u2019 hands were not filled with payment but with weapons. A similar sense is found in 2 Kings 9:24, where Jehu \u201cfilled his hand\u201d with a bow as he wreaked vengeance on the house of Ahab. In both passages, the phrase denotes not only grasping a weapon but also implies the execution of Yahweh\u2019s wrath (cf. Ps. 149:6\u20139). Filling the hand means zealously taking in hand the task at hand, even if that task demands enmity toward son and brother or the destruction Israel\u2019s royal house.
\nThe conclusion that hands were ritually filled with responsibilities is supported by two late texts. David asked for Israelites willing to \u201cfill the hand\u201d to Yahweh, and the leaders responded with contributions of gold, silver, brass, iron, and precious stones (1 Chr. 29:1\u20139). Hezekiah, another Solomon, urged those who had filled their hands to Yahweh (2 Chr. 29:31: \u05de\u05dc\u05d0\u05ea\u05dd \u05d9\u05d3\u05db\u05dd \u05dc\u05d9\u05d4\u05d5\u05d4) to bring offerings into the restored house. Whether members of the Levitical choir or the assembly brought \u05e9\u05c1\u05dc\u05de\u05d9\u05dd, in both passages non-priests function in quasi-priestly fashion, and in both cases \u201cfilling the hand\u201d literally involved bringing contributions to the house of God. Hands were consecrated by giving; the people \u201cfilled their hands\u201d to empty them in homage.
\nThe ordination rite included a literal act of \u201cfilling the hand.\u201d Portions of the ram of \u201cfilling\u201d were placed, with several grain offerings, on the palms (\u05db\u05e3) of Aaron and his sons, lifted to Yahweh, and then taken from their hands (\u05d9\u05d3) to be turned to smoke on the altar (Lev. 8:26\u201328). During his initial ministry at the altar on the eighth day, Aaron again \u201cfilled his palm\u201d (\u05d9\u05de\u05dc\u05d0 \u05db\u05e4\u05d5), this time with a grain offering (Lev. 9:17). Priests\u2019 hands were filled not with the portions they received as payment but with the fat, flesh, and entrails of their table service (Kurtz 1980: 337\u2013338). With \u201chands filled,\u201d Israel\u2019s priests were enrolled as household servants and personal attendants to Yahweh. As Potiphar placed the management of his house in Joseph\u2019s hands (Gen. 39:8\u20139), so Yahweh filled Aaron\u2019s hands to take oversight of His palace.
\nIn several senses, priests were also recipients in the ordination, so \u201cfill the hand\u201d has a double connotation. Priestly standing was itself Yahweh\u2019s gift (cf. Num. 16:5), and Yahweh provided the materials for His own service as well. An exchange occurred, but Yahweh remained the primary and in a sense the sole Giver, since the priestly redditio depended entirely on Yahweh\u2019s prior traditio. Moreover, the rite of ordination climaxed in a meal (Lev. 8:31), and portions of the ram of filling were sanctified as priestly food (Exod. 29:27\u201328). Aaron\u2019s hands were thus filled both with the bread of Yahweh and with food for his own consumption. To see this as a purely economic arrangement, however, is to read modern conceptions of exchange into the ancient text. As Mauss showed, in many societies gift-giving has as much to do with forging social bonds and allocating power as with economics (1990). Several details suggest that the ordination is an example of Maussian gift exchange or, in biblical terms, of covenant-making. The preparatory sequence of washing, clothing, and anointing is found elsewhere in the Old Testament in covenant-cutting ceremonies. Israel\u2019s preparations for the Sinai covenant did not include anointing but anticipated the ordination rite in other respects (Exod. 19:10\u201314; cf. Gen. 35:2\u20133):<\/p>\n
Sinai Covenant
\nOrdination Rite<\/p>\n
Purify and wash clothes, Exod. 19:10\u201314
\nWashing, investiture, anointing<\/p>\n
Series of sacrifices, 24:1\u20138
\nSeries of sacrifices<\/p>\n
Feast on the mountain, 24:9\u201311
\nFeast in holy place<\/p>\n
This parallel suggests that within the covenant with all Israel, Yahweh entered, through the ordination rite, into a priestly covenant with Aaron and his sons (cf. Mal. 2:4).
\nThe sequence of offerings underlines the point. As in other sacrificial rituals (Num. 6:16\u201317), the offerings progressed from a \u05d7\u05d8\u05d0\u05ea to an \u05e2\u05dc\u05d4 to a form of \u05e9\u05c1\u05dc\u05dd. As Milgrom has argued, the \u05d7\u05d8\u05d0\u05ea was a \u201cpurification offering\u201d (1983: 67\u201369) that cleansed the altar and worshiper in preparation for entry into Yahweh\u2019s presence. Purified, the altar might be used as a table for His bread. As King and Master of the house, Yahweh received the first and best portions, so the fat of the \u05d7\u05d8\u05d0\u05ea and the entire \u05e2\u05dc\u05d4 were placed on His table to be eaten (\u05d0\u05db\u05dc) into His fire (cf. Lev. 9:24). Fat from the \u201cram of filling\u201d was also given to Yahweh, but the priests shared the flesh of this sacrifice. Through this elaborate multi-course meal, Aaron and his sons were bound to Yahweh as His personal \u05de\u05e9\u05c1\u05e8\u05ea\u05d9\u05dd.
\nBy \u201cfilling their hands\u201d with food, Yahweh invited Aaron and his sons to be table companions; priests thus might eat flesh forbidden to strangers (\u05d6\u05e8\u05d9\u05dd; Exod. 29:33; Lev. 22:10\u201316). Thus, because of the rite, Aaron and his sons were no longer considered \u05d6\u05e8\u05d9\u05dd\u2014but to what were they no longer strangers? Attention to the spatial progression of the rite answers this question. Aaron and his sons began at the \u201cdoorway of the tent of meeting,\u201d where they remained throughout the seven-day incubation (Lev. 8:33). On the first day of a new week, Aaron passed from the doorway to the altar and then into the house itself. Moving from the courtyard through the curtain, the ordinands were installed in a kind of \u201cnaturalization\u201d ceremony as residents of Yahweh\u2019s tent, members of His household, sharers in the bread of God (cf. Gorman 1990: 111\u2013112). The rite forged a personal bond between Yahweh and His priests. \u201cPriest\u201d verges toward \u201cson,\u201d \u201cordination\u201d toward \u201cadoption.\u201d<\/p>\n
Consecration<\/p>\n
Another dimension of the ordination is evident in Exodus 29:1, where Yahweh tells Moses to \u201csanctify\u201d (\u05e7\u05d3\u05e9\u05c1) Aaron and his sons \u05dc\u05db\u05d4\u05df \u05dc\u05d9. In many passages, the language of holiness is used not of Yahweh but of objects, persons, places, and times. In these contexts, holiness was first an objective condition, accompanied by the demand that consecrated things, places, and persons be used or act in ways consistent with their status (Berman 1995: 10). A holy place was one claimed by Yahweh in a theophany (Exod. 3:5; 29:43), and only the chosen and sanctified were permitted to draw near and then only by observing strictly prescribed modes of approach. Holy things were relative to holy places, comprising the furniture of Yahweh\u2019s house and the tools of household service. So too, claimed by Yahweh, holy persons were stationed in the holy place, permitted to draw near, and required to \u201cbe holy.\u201d Israel became a holy nation after Yahweh delivered her in the Exodus, cut the Sinai covenant, and took up residence in her midst (Exod. 19:6). Within Israel, the priests were particularly holy with nearer access to Yahweh\u2019s enthroned glory, and greater freedom of movement and action in His palace. To \u201csanctify\u201d was to position a person or thing in a holy geography; by \u201cconsecrating\u201d Aaron and his sons, ordination granted permission to stand to serve in the holy house.
\n\u201cConsecration\u201d also brings out a further sense in which Aaron\u2019s hands were \u201cfilled\u201d by ordination. Under the Old Covenant, certain things were contagiously holy, so that, for example, anyone who touched most holy food was sanctified (Lev. 6:27), and thus brought under the stricter regulations governing consecrated persons. Ordination sanctified Aaron and his sons, however, so that their holiness matched that of the furnishings of the tabernacle. With hands consecrated by filling, they could safely lift up holy flesh to the altar, carry holy vessels, touch holy furniture.
\nConsecration was also in view when, toward the end of the sequence of sacrifices, Moses smeared blood from the ordination ram on the right ear lobe, the right thumb, and the right big toe of Aaron and his sons (Exod. 29:19\u201320; Lev. 8:22\u201324). According to Gorman, since these extremities \u201crepresent the whole person,\u201d pars pro toto, and \u201cform the outer bounds of the person,\u201d coating them with blood enabled the whole person to pass safely across the dangerous boundaries of sacred space (1990: 105, 131\u2013135; cf. Sabourin 1973: 140). This may be true as far as it goes but does not adequately explain the specifics of the rite: If one wanted to consecrate \u201cextremities,\u201d why not smear blood on the forehead rather than the ear lobe? After citing parallels with Ancient Near Eastern rites and between the daubing of blood on the priests and the atonement of the altar in Ezekiel 43:20, 26, Milgrom concludes: \u201cthe function of the blood-daubing of the priests is for kipp\u00fbr, and \u2026 the nature of this kipp\u00fbr is purgative and apotropaic\u201d (1991: 528\u2013529). \u201cApotropaic,\u201d accompanied by citations from texts where daubing protects against demonic invasion, is surprising in light of Milgrom\u2019s earlier insistence that Israelite religion shows \u201cno traces of demonic impurity\u201d and that for the \u201cpriestly theology\u201d only man acts demonically (1991: 259\u2013260). Acceptance of the idea that ear, thumb, and toe were \u201cvulnerable extremities\u201d is thus contingent on a persuasive answer to the question, vulnerable to what? Since, according to Milgrom, \u201cP\u201d lacks a conception of demonic threat, the priests must have been vulnerable to impurity. While it is true that impurity posed greater danger to priests than to others because they stood before Yahweh, it is not clear why these specific extremities were vulnerable. Milgrom\u2019s explanation thus also fails to account for the specifics of the rite.
\nDillmann\u2019s homiletical explanation of the daubing has been popular: A priest\u2019s ear was consecrated to hear the word of Yahweh, his hands sanctified to be filled with the holy instruments and food of ministry, and his feet to walk on holy ground (1880: 465). This is better than a vague appeal to consecration of \u201cextremities,\u201d and analogies with other institutions of Israelite worship and society provide further illumination. Three issues are relevant: the disposal of the blood of the ordination ram, the structure of the altar, and the rite for making a permanent slave.
\nFirst, blood from the ram of ordination was daubed on Aaron and his sons, dashed on the altar, then taken from the altar and sprinkled on the priests\u2019 garments. Forming a \u201cblood relation\u201d between Aaron and the altar (Noth 1962: 232), the rite purified and consecrated priest and altar to stand to serve in the holy place. Daubing reinforced the connection between priest, tent, and furniture made by the anointing (Lev. 8:10\u201312).
\nThe daubing rite also bears comparison with the smearing of blood from the purification offering on the horns of the altar, a connection hinted at by the verbs used to describe the disposal of blood from the ordination sacrifices:<\/p>\n
Hebrew Verb (Qal)
\nEnglish translation
\nObject
\n\u05e0\u05ea\u05df, Exod. 29:12; Lev. 8:15
\n\u201cput\u201d
\nHorns of altar
\n\u05d6\u05e8\u05e7, Exod. 29:16; Lev. 8:19
\n\u201cthrow\u201d or \u201cdash\u201d
\nAround the altar
\n\u05e0\u05ea\u05df, Exod. 29:20; Lev. 8:22
\n\u201cput\u201d
\nEar, thumb, toe
\n\u05d6\u05e8\u05e7, Exod. 29:20; Lev. 8:24
\n\u201cthrow\u201d or \u201cdash\u201d
\nAround the altar
\n\u05e0\u05d6\u05d4, Exod. 29:21; Lev. 8:30
\n\u201csprinkle\u201d
\nAaron, sons, garments<\/p>\n
Blood is \u201cput\u201d (\u05e0\u05ea\u05df) on the horns of the altar and the appendages of the priests but \u201csprinkled\u201d or \u201cthrown\u201d elsewhere. By daubing the \u201chorns\u201d of the candidates\u2019 bodies, ordination sanctified them as \u201chuman altars.\u201d This again reinforces the conclusion that ordination installed the priest as an essential piece of sanctuary \u201cfurniture.\u201d
\nExodus 21:5\u20137 also illumines the ordination. This passage stipulates that a man or woman was marked as a (voluntary) permanent household slave by having his or her ear bored with an awl. In this way, the slave\u2019s ear was \u201copened\u201d to the voice of his master, and this rite is background for later imagery of the \u201ccircumcision\u201d of the ear (Jer. 6:10; Acts 7:51; Jordan 1984). Similarly, a priest\u2019s ear is symbolically \u201ccircumcised\u201d as a sign that he has become a permanent tabernacle servant with his ear opened to the voice of Yahweh, and the connection with circumcision can be extended to the daubing of the thumb and toe. Priests had their hand \u201ccircumcised\u201d to be filled with the materials for Yahweh\u2019s service and their foot circumcised to walk in His holy house. Unlike the altar, priests were not \u201ccircumcised\u201d in four \u201chorns\u201d because they had already been circumcised on the penis. All Israelite males were circumcised in one dimension; those who received this further threefold circumcision\u2014that is, those circumcised \u201cglobally\u201d in four dimensions\u2014were consecrated to minister to Yahweh within the house. Ordination was thus a specification of circumcision, and, significantly, both were rites of the \u201ceighth day\u201d (Gen. 17:12; Lev. 9:1).<\/p>\n
Conclusion<\/p>\n
As noted at the beginning of this chapter, the duties of Israel\u2019s priests fell into two broad categories: cultic and sociological. My equation, p = ha, is obviously compatible with the cultic role of priests, but does it produce the whole set {a, b, c \u2026}? Have I made good on my promise to provide a functional umbrella? I believe I have, but a bit more reflection on the nature of Yahweh\u2019s house is required to see the full value of \u201ch.\u201d
\nWhen Moses finished building the tabernacle, the glory of Yahweh, which had been burning atop Mount Sinai, took up residence in the Most Holy Place (Exod. 40:34\u201338), so that the tent became a \u201cportable Sinai\u201d (Fretheim 1991: 274). The structure of the tabernacle confirms this connection. During Israel\u2019s encampment, Sinai was divided into three zones: Israel stood at the foot of the mountain but might not touch it (Exod. 19:13); Aaron and his sons, with the elders, ascended halfway to feast in Yahweh\u2019s presence, but were separated from Him by a firmament pavement (Exod. 24:9\u201311); Moses alone pierced the firmament into the cloud on top of the mountain. Corresponding to this, all Israelites might enter the courtyard, the priests alone were admitted to the Holy Place, and only the High Priest, a permanent Moses, passed through the firmament veil into the Most Holy Place, where Yahweh was enthroned in the cloud. In keeping with this, the tables of the law, delivered to Moses on the mountaintop, were placed within the ark of the covenant in the inner sanctuary, and Yahweh promised to continue the mountain conversation by speaking to Moses from above the cherubim (Exod. 25:21\u201322). From this perspective, priests served in an architectural Sinai, and their standing at the altar and in the tent was an \u201cascent\u201d to the mountain of Yahweh\u2019s presence.
\nOne further act of analogous imagination is required: The architectural house of Yahweh paralleled not only the mountain but the human \u201chouse\u201d of Israel (Poythress 1991: 31\u201332, 36; Sarna 1986: 204, 207). Yahweh fulfilled His promise to Abraham when He descended from Sinai to live among the people. Accordingly, the triple structure of the tent matched the socio-religious stratification of Israel, the graded holiness of layman, priest, and High Priest. Arrangement of the camp of Israel around the tabernacle in Numbers 2\u20133 also suggests connections between tent and people.
\nAaron\u2019s High Priestly vestments underline this point. As a preface to its description of the garments, Exodus 28 twice says that they were given to Aaron \u201cthat he may priest to Me\u201d (vv. 3, 4; \u05d0\u05ea\u05be\u05d1\u05d2\u05d3\u05d9 \u05d0\u05d4\u05e8\u05df \u05dc\u05e7\u05d3\u05e9\u05c1\u05d5\u05b9 \u05dc\u05db\u05d4\u05e0\u05d5\u05b9 \u05dc\u05d9 \u05e2\u05e9\u05c1\u05d5). Specifically, he wore the breastplate over his heart when he ministered in the house (Exod. 28:29); he donned the robe of the ephod, with its border of alternating bells and pomegranates, so that he might enter the tent without dying (Exod. 28:35); and both he and his sons wore linen breeches to ascend the altar without exposing their nakedness (Exod. 28:42; cf. 20:26). As Haran says, the priestly vestments are like another piece of tabernacle furniture (1985: 165\u2013166); dressed in them, the priests also were welcomed in the tent. Just as the garments indicate that the High Priest was a servant of Yahweh\u2019s royal house, so they show that he was a servant of the house of Israel. Aaron bore the names of the tribes on his heart and shoulders whenever he ministered in his priestly vestments (Exod. 28:9\u201312, 29); Urim and Thummim were placed in the pouch of the breastplate, though they had no use in the sacrificial cult (Exod. 28:30; Lev. 8:8); and the \u05e6\u05d9\u05e5 or \u201cflower\u201d of gold on the front of Aaron\u2019s turban was for \u201cbearing the iniquity of the holy things\u201d consecrated by Israel (Exod. 28:36\u201339). Vested as priest, Aaron stood to serve in Yahweh\u2019s twin house.
\nMinistry to Yahweh in the sanctuary was ministry for and among Israel, and ministry among the people was also ministry in Yahweh\u2019s \u201chouse.\u201d Priests guarded boundaries of holiness as much by teaching Torah as by serving as custodians of the sanctuary gates, cleansed as much by leading sinners to repentance as by sprinkling blood, performed Yahweh\u2019s table service as much by conducting worship as by turning flesh and grain to smoke. Even when the priests moved out of the holy precincts to stand and serve among the people, they were attending to Yahweh by \u201chousekeeping.\u201d<\/p>\n
CHAPTER THREE<\/p>\n
Baptism to Priesthood: Apostolic Conjugations of the Ordination Rite<\/p>\n
For nearly two millennia, theologians and liturgies have viewed Christian initiation as a typological \u201cconjugation\u201d of priestly ordination, but the New Testament poses two basic problems for the tradition. First, no New Testament text states that \u201cbaptism corresponds to ordination,\u201d as Peter says of the flood (1 Pet. 3:18\u201322). Second, though most later texts associate priesthood with separate rites of anointing or investiture joined to water baptism, no New Testament evidence for such rites exists. The Spirit anointed Jesus at His baptism (Acts 10:38) and Christians are anointed (1 John 2:20, 27), but John administered no rite of anointing (Matt. 3:13\u201317; Mark 1:9\u201311; Luke 3:21\u201323) and apostolic baptism used water alone (cf. Acts 8:26\u201340). Though Paul describes baptism under the metaphor of clothing (Gal. 3:27), no rite of investiture is evident in the New Testament. Laying on of hands may have accompanied baptism in water (Acts 8:16\u201317; 19:5\u20136; Heb. 6:2) but even here the evidence is too scanty to be altogether persuasive and, in any case, laying on of hands had no part in the ordination of Israel\u2019s priests. Does the church then have biblical justification for her belief that baptism forms priests?
\nThis chapter will seek to demonstrate that the answer is Yes. First, I summarize several prima facie Christological, ecclesiological, and liturgical arguments in favor of the typology. In my judgment, these establish that baptism initiates into the Christian priesthood, but they fall short of showing that New Testament texts on baptism draw on ordination symbolism. Attempting the latter demonstration is important for two reasons. First, it strengthens the claim that the New Testament writers were operating within a hermeneutical universe that included this typology. If I am to have a firm foundation for my effort to construct a theology of baptism from materials provided by the ordination texts, I must not only substantiate the loose formula that \u201cbaptism initiates to priesthood\u201d but also defend the more rigorous proposition that \u201cbaptism fulfills the Aaronic ordination.\u201d Second, examining baptismal texts that allude to priestly ordination will reveal the full scope of the typology, moving toward a biblical reading of history.
\nIn this chapter, I examine five passages: Hebrews 10:19\u201322; Galatians 3:27; 1 Corinthians 6:11; Luke 3:21\u201323, and 2 Corinthians 1:21\u201322, several of which patristic and medieval writers interpreted as evidence of the priestly typology (see below, fns. 28, 38, 53). Throughout, I operate on the foundational assumption that the New Testament is an \u201cinnerbiblical\u201d rereading of the Old Testament and I assume the conclusions concerning priesthood and ordination from chapter 2. Otherwise, my treatment of these five texts is uneven, both in the space devoted to each and in the strategy of reading involved. For the first three passages, I use a tightly grammatical and historical method to address two issues: Does the text refer to water baptism? and, Does it allude to the ordination rite? From these passages, I conclude that the New Testament writers taught or assumed that baptism fulfills the ordination rite. Discussion of these texts is comparatively brief, but I shall probe Hebrews 10 and Galatians 3 again in chapter 5 for their ecclesiological and cultural ramifications.
\nHaving established that the first three texts refer to Christian baptism, my argument will proceed according to the following logic: Let O = the ordination rite; X = any person; P = priest; TP = priestly tasks and privileges; and B = baptism. Under the Old Testament, O applied to X produced a P who had TP. New Testament writers might indicate that B fulfills O in several ways. First, one might explicitly assert that B has replaced O, but we have no such proposition in the New Testament\u2014hence the difficulty. Second, a text might state that B produces Ps, but again we lack such an explicit proposition. Third, if a text states that B confers TP on X, it follows that X has become a P and that B has the same function in the church as O had in Israel, that is, producing Ps. Therefore, B fulfills and replaces O. Hebrews 10:19\u201322 states precisely that B confers TP, and I interpret 1 Corinthians 6:11 along the same lines.
\nGalatians 3:27 falls into a final category, where the evidence is inherently less probative. We saw in chapter 2 that O consists of a series of ritual actions. If a text describes B in terms of one of the actions of O, an allusion to O is possible, and if B is described with imagery drawn from several actions of O, the possibility of an allusion becomes probable. Two problems arise here, however. First, proving that the imagery applied to B comes from O, rather than from another image-pool, is virtually impossible to prove beyond doubt. I have narrowed the possible sources with my Augustinian assumption that the New Testament writers were \u201cconjugating\u201d Old Testament texts, rites, and institutions, but this often leaves several possibilities open. I shall consider an allusion to O plausible if I can show 1) that the text on B employs imagery more strongly associated with O and O-texts than with other Old Testament texts or rites, and 2) that a priestly reference makes sense in context. Second, even if a New Testament text explicitly declared it was describing B in terms of O, the status of the allusion would remain ambiguous. B-texts may borrow imagery from O without necessarily implying that B fulfills and replaces O. Yet, the imagery is relevant. It is of the nature of metaphor to refer to one thing in terms suggestive of another. If we can plausibly establish that a text describes B in terms suggesting O, then a metaphorical relationship is set up between the fields associated with B and O respectively, and we can survey the O-field to illuminate B.
\nI devote more space to the final two texts, which will support the typology in the same kind of general way as the prima facie arguments. Here, my reading will take on a more freewheeling literary character. Some features of Luke\u2019s account of Jesus\u2019 baptism allude to priesthood, but much of my discussion will show that the surrounding chapters are saturated with priestly concerns, so that the reader arrives at Jordan\u2019s banks expecting to meet a priestly Messiah. Likewise, though I cannot prove beyond doubt that the anointing of 2 Corinthians 1:21 alludes to ordination, Paul\u2019s metaphorical twists and turns in 2 Corinthians retrace the interpenetrating symbolisms of the tabernacle and ordination texts; these texts thus provide a map of Paul\u2019s argument, without which he seems to be meandering aimlessly through a forest of symbols. Though trying to establish textual warrant for my conclusions so as not to \u201cput words in God\u2019s mouth,\u201d I confess that I go beyond a strictly \u201capostolic view,\u201d elaborating connections with the sensus plenior of the Old Testament and within the New Testament that may not have been apparent to the human authors. My aim is to tease out a theological rather than a historical understanding of baptism.<\/p>\n
Union With the Totus Christus<\/p>\n
First, the prima facie arguments: Augustine (and many others) developed the typology on a Christological basis. For Augustine, Christology is an explication of the \u201cchrism\u201d by virtue of which Jesus is the Christ: Christus a chrismate dictus est, id est, ab unctione. Christ, however, is not Christ except as He is totus Christus, Head and body (cf. Mersch 1936: 2.84\u2013138). All included in the Anointed One are anointed; all in Christ, all who are Christ\u2019s, are christs. In a typical passage, Augustine writes, \u201cCertainly we can properly apply the name \u2018anointed\u2019 to all who have been anointed with his chrism; and yet it is the whole body, with its head, which is the one Christ\u201d (De civitatis Dei 17.4; 1984: 724). Participation in His chrism is conferred by the unction of Christian initiation, an external sign that the donum gratiae that overshadowed Jesus at His baptism as a dove anoints the entire body.
\nAugustine expounds Christ\u2019s \u201cchrism\u201d typologically. Jesus was anointed as Davidic King to defeat Satan on the cross and as Priest to offer Himself as sacrifice and intercede before His Father. Sharing His chrism thus means sharing His offices and ministries. Commenting on Revelation 20:6, Augustine reasons, \u201cjust as we call them all \u2018Christians\u2019 because of the mystical chrism so we call them all \u2018priests\u2019 because they are members of the one Priest\u201d (De civitate Dei 20.10; 1984: 919). In a sermon fragment preserved by John the Deacon, Augustine moves more directly from Old Testament priesthood to the anointed church: \u201cThen one priest was anointed, but now all Christians are anointed.\u201d Old Testament \u201cchrists\u201d therefore prefigured the royal priesthood of the church.
\nEcclesiological considerations ground the typology, though these are not, of course, sharply distinct from Augustine\u2019s Christological rendition. Since the church is the royal priesthood (1 Pet. 2:9\u201310; Rev. 1:6; 5:10; 20:6) and since through baptism the Spirit incorporates members into that community (1 Cor. 12:12\u201313), it follows that baptism inducts into Christian priesthood. This comes to clearest expression in 1 Peter, and the argument is all the stronger if, as some commentators have suggested, a baptismal currents flow under the surface of that letter. Alternatively, since the church is the new temple of the Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19), and since baptism inducts into ministry in the body (1 Cor. 12:12\u201331), baptism ordains \u201chousekeepers.\u201d
\nLiturgical and ritual evaluations of baptism also suggest a link with ordination. Two features are relevant: like the baptism of John, Christian baptism is 1) an unrepeatable initiatory rite; and 2) administered, that is, the baptized does not wash himself but is washed by someone else\u2014hence, \u1f38\u03c9\u03ac\u03bd\u03bd\u03b7\u03c2 \u1f41 \u03b2\u03b1\u03c0\u03c4\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03ae\u03c2 (Matt. 3:1, 13\u201315; 11:11\u20132; 16:14; Mark 1:4; Luke 3:21; Acts 8:38; 9:18; 19:5). These characteristics have made it difficult to identify baptism\u2019s historical source. Some suggest John borrowed the rite from Jewish proselyte baptism, but it is not certain that proselyte baptism predated John, and even if it did, proselytes baptized themselves (Gavin 1928: 35). Others contend for parallels with the ablutions of the Qumran community, but their rites were repeated self-washings, and therefore closer to the cleansing rites of Leviticus 12\u201315 than to Christian baptism.
\nThe assumption that John, Jesus, and the apostles were composing variations on the themes of the Old Testament leads to a different conclusion. Contemporary Jewish and Greco-Roman practices may have been within the horizon of New Testament baptismal teaching and practice, and John\u2019s baptism, especially his baptism of Jesus, also formed a substantial background. Yet, for the New Testament actors and writers as for Augustine, the sacraments of the New are typological conjugations of the events, rites, and institutions of the Old. According to the apostles, baptism is crossing the Red Sea (1 Cor. 10:1\u20132), recapitulates the flood (1 Pet. 3:18\u201322), fulfills circumcision (Col. 2:11\u201312). These are not grafts on a non-typological trunk; the trunk is typology. Thus, the Old Testament is the primary context for answering the question, Why did Johannine and Christian baptism take this form?
\nLike Christian baptism, the washing at the beginning of the ordination rite was an administered initiation, and in these respects the ordination bath was unique in the Levitical system. While most Old Testament ablutions were self-washings, Moses washed Aaron and his sons (Exod. 29:4; Lev. 8:6; cf. Lev. 14:8; 15:16\u201318, 27); while most cleansing rites were repeated as often as one became unclean, the ordination washing was once-for-all. Though priests washed their hands and feet before approaching the altar or entering the tent (Exod. 30:20), this self-washing was not a repetition of the ordination bath since it was partial and not administered. Similarly, when the Levites were set apart to help the priests in tabernacle service, Moses sprinkled them with water, then they shaved themselves and washed their clothes before being installed through a sacrificial rite and the laying on of hands (Num. 8:5\u201315). The ordination bath and the closely related sprinkling of the Levites were the only administered initiatory water \u201cbaptisms\u201d in the Levitical system. Tracing the form of Johannine and Christian baptism to priestly ordination and Levitical consecration is thus more plausible than the rival explanations. Baptism was described under other typologies, but its form points to a connection with ordination. Like the Qumran community and the Pharisees, John was preparing a holy, priestly community for the coming of the Lord (cf. Wright 1996: 434).
\nThese arguments prove Aidan Kavanagh\u2019s claim that \u201cthe Church baptizes into priesthood\u201d (1995: 268; 1991: 187\u2013188). To support the stricter thesis that baptism fulfills and replaces ordination, we turn to specific texts.<\/p>\n
Bodies Washed to Draw Near, Hebrews 10:19\u201322<\/p>\n
In 10:22, the writer to the Hebrews encourages his readers to \u201cdraw near\u201d confidently having \u201cour hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water\u201d (\u1fe5\u03b5\u03c1\u03b1\u03bd\u03c4\u03b9\u03c3\u03bc\u03ad\u03bd\u03bf\u03b9 \u03c4\u1f70\u03c2 \u03ba\u03b1\u03c1\u03b4\u03af\u03b1\u03c2 \u1f00\u03c0\u1f78 \u03c3\u03c5\u03bd\u03b5\u03b9\u03b4\u03ae\u03c3\u03b5\u03c9\u03c2 \u03c0\u03bf\u03bd\u03b7\u03c1\u1fb6\u03c2 \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u03bb\u03b5\u03bb\u03bf\u03c5\u03c3\u03bc\u03ad\u03bd\u03bf\u03b9 \u03c4\u1f78 \u03c3\u1ff6\u03bc\u03b1 \u1f55\u03b4\u03b1\u03c4\u03b9 \u03ba\u03b1\u03b8\u03b1\u03c1\u1ff7). My first concern here is to decide whether this is a baptismal text. Most commentators believe it is. A prominent exception to this consensus is Markus Barth (1951: 473\u2013479), who presents two arguments that ultimately become one. On Barth\u2019s reading, Hebrews 7\u201310 does not encourage establishment of a new cult or priesthood but announces that the death of Christ fulfilled the whole Old Testament system. Anything added to this unique act casts doubt on its sufficiency. Barth, secondly, distinguishes \u201cobjective\u201d and \u201csubjective\u201d dimensions of the Old Testament system; the first refers to sacrifices as means of expiation, and the second to rites of sprinkling and washing that applied expiation to individuals. Hebrews 10:22 can be a baptismal text only if these dimensions of the Levitical system are separated, such that Jesus\u2019 death fulfills the \u201cobjective\u201d aspect while the rites and ceremonies of the church fulfill the \u201csubjective.\u201d Hebrews, Barth argues, teaches instead that the cross fulfills and terminates both the objective and subjective. Thus, Barth interprets \u201cwashing\u201d as the power of the cross erupting into the church\u2019s life, and \u201cbody\u201d as the \u201cwhole man.\u201d
\nBarth\u2019s very Barthian arguments prove too much, undermining a reference to a rite of baptism not only in Hebrews 10 but virtually anywhere in the New Testament. For, on Barth\u2019s premises, baptism as an act of repentance seems to cast as much doubt on the sufficiency of the cross as baptism understood as a sacramental application of redemption.
\nContrary to Barth, Hebrews does envision an ecclesiological fulfillment of Old Testament rites and institutions: Sacrifice, specifically, is offered in the church\u2019s praise and good works (Heb. 12:28\u201313:17). Augustine is thus closer to the spirit of Hebrews when he insists that the charity, signs, and rites of the totus Christus as much as the historical work of Jesus fulfills the Old Testament. Exegetically, Barth fails to do justice to the language of the text. Hebrews speaks of \u201cpure water,\u201d but Barth prefers the more abstract \u201cWaschung\u201d or \u201cReinigung.\u201d For Barth, when the writer says \u201cbodies washed with pure water,\u201d he means that what are not really bodies are not really washed by what is not really water.
\nThough not following Barth, Attridge (1989: 288\u2013289; 1986: 9) muses on what he sees as an abrupt turn in the argument of Hebrews. He describes the transition from first to second covenants as a shift from external and physical to internal and spiritual realities but finds this trajectory surprisingly disrupted by the writer\u2019s insistence that the bodily death of Jesus inaugurates the spiritual covenant. Baptism in 10:22 poses similar perplexities: How can a physical and external rite be part of an internal and spiritual covenant? Attridge\u2019s surprise, however, arises only because he has imposed categories alien to Hebrews. First and second covenants differ as \u201cflesh\u201d and \u201cconscience,\u201d but it is a mistake to transpose this into internal\/external, as if the two dualisms were equivalent. The first covenant was not flawed because it depended on bodies but because its cleansing agent was the blood of bulls and goats rather than the blood of a sinless man. As much as the first, the second covenant is concerned with bodies\u2014with Jesus\u2019 bodily self-offering and with the bodily consecration and living sacrifice of His people. Physical and corporate aspects of the Christian life are evident in the following verses (10:24\u201325), which warn against alienation from the public assembly of worship and good works. Neither Barth nor Attridge, therefore, convincingly undermines the majority opinion that baptism is the ritual that qualifies a people to draw near.
\nIf the washing is baptism, two further questions arise. First, what is the relationship between the baptismal \u201cwashing of bodies\u201d and the \u201csprinkling of the heart and conscience\u201d? Dahl suggests that baptism is \u201cthe application of the work of Jesus to the individual\u201d and thus the sprinkling of the heart identifies the \u201cinner significance\u201d of which baptism is the outer rite (1951: 407, fn. 27). Hughes, along similar lines, points to parallels with 1 Peter 3 to show that baptism is more than outward cleansing (Hughes 1977: 412). These responses will suffice until I take up the relation of \u201cinner\u201d and \u201couter\u201d more theoretically in the chapter 4. Second, the sanctuary Christians enter is a \u201cheavenly\u201d sanctuary (9:24; 10:19), but how can baptism qualify for entry into heaven? Hebrews envisions the church also as the \u201chouse\u201d of God (3:6; 10:21), and the contrast of heaven\/earth in Hebrews is not so much spatial (up\/down) as temporal (Old\/New) (Luck 1963: 192\u2013215). Thus, the writer assures his readers that they \u201chave come\u201d to the heavenly Jerusalem in their entry into the New Covenant people (Heb. 12:22).
\nFinally, what is the source of the imagery? Flemington represents the majority view: \u201cThe background of this language is to be found in the Old Testament passages describing the consecration of priests. They needed to be purified from \u2018uncleanness\u2019 by being sprinkled with sacrificial blood (cf. Exod. 29:20\u201321; Lev. 8:23, 24, 30), and also to be washed with water\u201d (1948: 98). Details of the text support this conclusion. Christ\u2019s blood is definitely the agent for cleansing the heart and conscience. Most of the other uses of \u1fe5\u03b1\u03bd\u03c4\u03af\u03b6\u03c9 in Hebrews refer to sprinkling blood (9:19, 21\u201322; 12:24), and even the reference to the water containing the ashes of the red heifer (9:13) is not an exception, since the heifer\u2019s blood was burned and mixed with the water (Num. 19:5). Throughout the letter, the blood of Christ is alone sufficient to purify the \u03c3\u03c5\u03bd\u03b5\u03af\u03b4\u03b7\u03c3\u03b9\u03c2 (9:9, 14; 10:2). To draw near, one must come under blood and water\u2014a comparatively rare combination in Levitical law but found in the ordination rite (Exod. 29:4, 21; Lev. 8:6, 30). Thus, Hebrews 10:22 describes B with imagery borrowed from O.
\nThis text also proves that \u201cB replaces O.\u201d Sprinkled and washed, believers enter through the veil (10:20; \u03b4\u03b9\u1f70 \u03c4\u03bf\u1fe6 \u03ba\u03b1\u03c4\u03b1\u03c0\u03b5\u03c4\u03ac\u03c3\u03bc\u03b1\u03c4\u03bf\u03c2), a reference to the veil separating the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place (cf. 6:19; 9:3). Some commentators conclude that the Old Testament background is the High Priest\u2019s entry to the Most Holy Place on the Day of Atonement (Dunn 1970: 213). Atonement is prominent in the context (e.g., 9:24) and the writer contrasts the restricted access under the Old system to the confident approach of the New. Yet, the Day of Atonement is not the immediate reference in 10:19\u201322. The High Priest washed before entering the Holy of Holies (Lev. 16:4; cf. Exod. 30:20), but he was sprinkled with blood only at his ordination. Lane suggests (1991: 287) that 10:22 refers to the blood and water of the Sinai covenant (cf. 9:18\u201322). Though undoubtedly included in the text\u2019s allusive web, the Sinai covenant does not strictly fit the bill. Constituted a \u201croyal priesthood\u201d by the sprinkling of blood (Exod. 19:6; 24:1\u20138), even then Israel was not permitted to touch the mountain, or, later, to enter the tent or approach the veil. One might rescue Lane\u2019s interpretation by observing that the writer conflates the Sinai covenant with the priestly covenant (see above, p. 65). This \u201cconfusion\u201d underwrites what 10:19\u201322 implies, that the dual first covenant\u2014priestly and national\u2014no longer exists. All those baptized and sprinkled with the blood of Christ have privileges of access beyond those of Israel\u2019s High Priests. Baptism to priesthood is thus a sign of the dissolution of boundaries between priest and people, a point I shall elaborate at length in chapter 5.
\nFor the moment, we conclude that since B is the rite that confers the privilege of access through the veil (one of the set of TP), and since O conferred the same privilege under the Old Testament system by making Ps, then B is now the rite that produces Ps. B plays the same role in the church that O played in Israel. It follows that baptism fulfills and replaces ordination.<\/p>\n
Investiture with Christ, Galatians 3:27<\/p>\n
It seems that a reference to the baptismal rite in this passage, which employs the verb \u03b2\u03b1\u03c0\u03c4\u03af\u03b6\u03c9, would be beyond dispute, and most commentators simply assume so. James D.G. Dunn, however, claims that \u201cbaptism\u201d is a metaphor for the experience of conversion and incorporation into Christ, which may happen at baptism but is distinct from it. Several of Dunn\u2019s arguments for this remarkable conclusion require attention. First, he argues the text is \u201cdisrupted\u201d if \u201cclothing with Christ\u201d is metaphorical but \u201cbaptism into Christ\u201d refers to a ritual. Whether authors and texts operate at either a literal or figurative level with this kind of rigidity is disputable; even when \u201cbaptism into Christ\u201d refers to a ritual, the phrase is crowned with a metaphorical halo, for no one is actually, physically sprinkled with or dipped in or plunged into Christ. Dunn is, in any case, inconsistent, for he argues that the \u201cwashing\u201d of Hebrews 10:22 is baptismal, though the same passage mentions an apparently metaphorical sprinkling of the heart (1970: 211\u2013212). Second, Dunn avers that Galatians contrasts the Old Covenant, in which an outward rite established a relation with God, with the New Covenant, where sonship is by faith and the Spirit. Nevertheless, the contrast is not between \u201cexternal\u201d and \u201cinternal\u201d as such, for the Galatians received the Spirit by hearing and believing the externally preached word (3:2). Dunn\u2019s contention that Paul would not have substituted another external rite for circumcision begs the question, for one might argue that this is precisely what Paul did.
\nFor most commentators, the key issues are the source and significance of the clothing imagery (\u1f10\u03bd\u03b4\u03cd\u03c9). Scholars propose several sources, either alone or in combination. A few commentators suggest that it arose from the ancient initiation rite, when the candidate put on a white garment after being baptized naked, but most admit it is unlikely that investiture was part of apostolic initiation. A few link Paul\u2019s imagery to the Roman custom of robing a young man at his majority. Betz draws attention to parallels in the mysteries and other ancient religions, but a resort to paganism seems unnecessary given the use of clothing symbolism in the Old Testament and Jewish tradition. Paul himself employed this imagery with some frequency, though normally as an imperative rather than, as in Galatians 3:27, an indicative. In explaining the significance of the clothing image, commentators offer various suggestions: Christ envelops the baptized so they become identified with Him (Ridderbos 1956:148; Fung 1988: 172); or, like actors, Christians take on Christ\u2019s appearance (Dunn 1993: 204\u2013205; Beasley-Murray 1973: 147); or being clothed with the Son confers a standing as sons (Burton 1921: 203); or Christ is like a dye that makes all the baptized the same color (Bligh 1969: 234); or baptismal clothing gives a new identity and admits to the life of the new age (Schlier 1962: 173). Behind this putting off\/putting on imagery is the Old\/New Adam scheme, so that \u201cputting on a new man\u201d implies \u201cnew creation.\u201d
\nAssuming that Paul\u2019s baptismal theology grows from typological interpretation of the Old Testament, there are several reasons for suspecting the priestly ordination is part of his image-pool. First, the High Priest\u2019s garments were by far the most important clothes in the Old Testament. Two chapters of Exodus (28; 39) are devoted to them, and no other set of clothes receives anything close to the same attention. Likewise, Israel\u2019s main clothing rite occurred at ordination. Anointing was the leading rite for installing kings (e.g., 1 Kgs. 1:39) but investiture made the High Priest (Exod. 28:3\u20134; 29:5\u20139; 35:19; 40:12\u201313; Num. 20:25\u201328). Several Old Testament texts cited in commentary on Galatians 3:27, furthermore, refer to the priests\u2019 garments (2 Chr. 6:41; Pss. 132:9, 16; Zech. 3:1\u20135; prp. Isa. 61:10). Faced with the crossword puzzle clue, \u201cofficial with special religious vestments,\u201d the first-century Jew would have immediately answered, \u201cthe High Priest.\u201d
\nAn allusion to priestly investiture fits the context. Paul is discussing the relative status of Jew and Gentile in the church. To say that all wear the same clothes is to say that all have the same religious status\u2014that all can \u201cstand\u201d in the same place, and this is a notion within the zone of priestly concerns. Sartorial customs of lay Israelites are also relevant. Just as his vestments differentiated the High Priest from other priests and laymen, so every Israelite was distinguished from non-Israelites by the tassel at the corner of his garment (Num. 15:37\u201341). Hebrew tassels had a blue cord in them, and since ancient dyes worked only on wool, the blue thread was a woolen addition to what would have been a linen garment. Normally, such mixtures were forbidden because of their holiness (Lev. 19:19), so the mixed cloth worked into the common dress of Israel communicated Israel\u2019s holy status (Milgrom 1991: 548\u2013549). Paul\u2019s statement that Jews and Gentiles now wear the same baptismal garment implies that all the baptized have been incorporated into the holy, priestly people (cf. Wenham 1981: 132\u2013133).
\nSonship, inheritance, and the Spirit, among the leading concepts in this section of Galatians, are also connected to priestly concerns. Romans 8 unravels this same knot of issues. In particular, \u03ba\u03bb\u03b7\u03c1\u03bf\u03bd\u03cc\u03bc\u03bf\u03b9 \u03b8\u03b5\u03bf\u1fe6 in Romans 8:17 is explicated in Galatians 3\u20134 as inheritance of the Abrahamic promise of the Spirit (Gal. 3:14, 29; 4:5\u20136). Behind the notion that Christians are \u201cheirs of God\u201d is not only the Old Testament promise of land, but more specifically, promises to the tribe of Levi. Priests and Levites had no portion in the land, but Yahweh promised to be their inheritance (Num. 18:20; Deut. 18:2; Josh. 13:14). Priests were installed as members of Yahweh\u2019s house, and the Levites were reckoned \u201csons,\u201d since Yahweh adopted them in place of the firstborn sons redeemed at Passover (Num. 3:40\u201351; 8:14\u201319; cf. Exod. 13:11\u201316). When Paul calls the baptized \u201csons\u201d who inherit the promised Spirit, he employs language associated with the priestly tribe. As the Levites became \u201cheirs of Yahweh\u201d through a rite that began with an aspersion and included a clothing change (Num. 8:7), so the Galatians became heirs of the Spirit through baptismal investiture. \u201cHeir of God the Spirit\u201d is the Christian conjugation of \u201cpriest\u201d and \u201cLevite.\u201d
\nFinally, ancient priests frequently wore the insignia and even the clothing of the gods they served, and Wedderburn suggests that this may provide background to Paul\u2019s imagery of \u201cputting on\u201d Christ (1987: 337\u2013339). Consistent with this, Meredith Kline claims that the garments of Israelite priests were sartorial replicas of the glory theophany of Yahweh; the garments of \u201cglory and beauty\u201d were \u201cbadges\u201d identifying the King in whose service priests were enlisted (1986: 42\u201347; Exod. 28:2; see below on 2 Cor. 1:21\u201322). To be \u201cclothed in Christ\u201d is to be covered with the One who is glory in human flesh (John 1:14; Heb. 1:1\u20133). \u201cClothed with Christ\u201d conjugates \u201crobed with garments of glory.\u201d Dressed in the glorious vestments of their God, the baptized are prepared to stand to serve in His house.
\nThe last two paragraphs push toward the conclusion that Galatians 3:27 implies that B fulfills and replaces O. Since, under the Old Covenant, \u201cheir of God\u201d was a distinctive privilege of the priestly tribe (one of the set of TP), and since active membership in that tribe came through O and the O-like Levitical cleansing ceremony, then Paul\u2019s statement that B makes one an \u201cheir of God\u201d implies that B now does in the church what O did in Israel, that is, it confers TP. Likewise, if being robed in glory is one of the set of TP conferred on the High Priest by O, and if now B robes in the Glory, then B has replaced and fulfilled O. Yet, the explicit Old Testament background is the promise to Abraham, so any conclusions about priesthood are inferred rather than explicitly stated. Thus, I cannot draw as decisive a conclusion from Galatians 3 as from Hebrews 10. Yet, the clothing imagery used to describe baptism is, in my judgment, more likely drawn from ordination than from any other Old Testament texts or rites. Thus, Galatians 3 sheds light on the New Testament \u201cchange of priesthood\u201d (see below, chapter 5).<\/p>\n
The Sanctifying Wash, 1 Corinthians 6:11<\/p>\n
Beasley-Murray claims that scholars unanimously hold that this text is baptismal, and cites as evidence the parallel with Acts 22:16; the aorist tense of \u1f00\u03c0\u03b5\u03bb\u03bf\u03cd\u03c3\u03b1\u03c3\u03b8\u03b5, \u1f21\u03b3\u03b9\u03ac\u03c3\u03b8\u03b7\u03c4\u03b5, and \u1f11\u03b4\u03b9\u03ba\u03b1\u03b9\u03ce\u03b8\u03b7\u03c4\u03b5, which may denote a decisive event at a particular past moment of time; the reference to the \u201cname\u201d of Christ; and the mention of the Spirit, often associated with baptism. Dunn, again, dissents (1970: 120\u2013123). From the catalogue of sins in verses 9\u201310 he draws the conclusion that the washing must relate to \u201ca cleansing of the heart and conscience.\u201d But the sins listed are as much \u201csocial\u201d as \u201cspiritual,\u201d so a transfer into a community with purified practices, habits, and goals is inseparable from the cleansing of the heart. Dunn also notes that the phrase \u201cname of Jesus\u201d is used with exorcisms and healings, but these are irrelevant since 1 Corinthians 6:11 refers to a washing in the \u201cname.\u201d It is difficult to avoid the sense that this text refers to baptism.
\nSome conclude from verse 11 that baptism \u201cpurifies\u201d or \u201ccleanses,\u201d but the text uses \u1f01\u03b3\u03b9\u03ac\u03b6\u03c9, and Paul was a sufficiently well-trained Pharisee to know the difference between cleanliness and holiness. Under the Levitical system, one needed no special position or ritual to be \u201cclean\u201d but from this median status, one could move in either of two directions: By a consecrating rite or through contact with a contagious holy object, one became \u201choly\u201d; alternatively, through sin or contact with contagious unclean persons or things, one became \u201cunclean.\u201d To become \u201choly\u201d was to become Yahweh\u2019s property; in a word, to be holy means \u201cyou are not your own\u201d (1 Cor. 6:19). In 6:11, it seems best to understand the three verbs not as different moments in the process of salvation but as dimensions of a single event of washing in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Baptism thus sets apart the baptized as divine property, as a \u1f05\u03b3\u03b9\u03bf\u03c2.
\nFew sanctifying rites existed in the Old Testament system and even fewer sanctifying ablutions. Most washings rendered the unclean clean (\u05d8\u05d4\u05e8; Lev. 11:40; 13:6; 14:9; 15:6\u20137, 10\u201311, 13, 16\u201318), but ordination included a bath that was part of a \u201cconsecration.\u201d Dahl is correct that \u201ceven ordinary men in Israel used to \u2018sanctify\u2019 themselves [by washing] before entering into contact with the divine sphere,\u201d but this does not undermine a priestly connection (1955: 38, 48, fn. 17). In the texts Dahl cites, lay Israelites consecrated themselves, sometimes with a bath, because the Lord was drawing near to cut covenant, to judge, or to receive sacrifice, that is, because they were going to stand, in quasi-priestly fashion, in the presence of God (Exod. 19:10, 14, 22; Josh. 3:5; 7:13; 1 Sam. 16:5). A sanctifying washing thus sanctifies for standing before God. It may be significant also that Paul uses the aorist, referring to a definitive sanctification, for only the priestly bath was part of a once-forall consecration. Verses 19\u201320 also support a priestly reference: The Corinthians are a holy temple of the Spirit, and all who stand to serve the Lord in this temple must be sanctified with the baptismal washing.
\nThe connection between the sanctifying wash (6:11) and the temple of the Spirit (6:19) points to a conclusion developed in later chapters: The sanctified priesthood is now identical, without remainder, to the temple of the Spirit. Yahweh now dwells in His people, invalidating Old Testament distinctions of people and house. This transformation will, of course, have important implications for the meaning of New Testament \u201chousekeeping.\u201d
\nFor now, we conclude that 1 Corinthians 6:11 supports the typology of baptismal ordination. The ordination bath, with other actions, \u201csanctified\u201d Aaron and his sons, consecrating them to stand to serve in the holy place. On my exegesis, Paul claims that baptism sanctifies; since B now accomplishes what O once accomplished, B fulfills O.<\/p>\n
Levi\u2019s Homage to Adam, Luke 3:21\u201323<\/p>\n
I suggested above that John\u2019s baptism derived its form as an initiatory washing administered by a \u201cbaptizer\u201d from the Aaronic ordination. My purpose in the following pages, however, is not primarily historical. Instead, I examine how Luke, writing as a member of the church, theologized on the historical event of Jesus\u2019 baptism. It is a commonplace of post-World War II discussions that the New Testament understanding of baptism grows out of the baptism of Jesus. Assuming this to be the case, if Jesus\u2019 baptism inaugurated His priestly ministry, it follows that Christian baptism is also initiation to priesthood.<\/p>\n
Priestly Messiah<\/p>\n
Several features of Luke\u2019s gospel set up an expectation of a priestly protagonist. First, the temple is prominent in the gospel and particularly in the opening chapters (cf. the statistics in Chance 1988: 1\u20132). Beginning with Gabriel\u2019s announcement to Zacharias at the incense altar (1:9), the \u201cinfancy narratives\u201d close with Jesus in the temple at twelve (cf. 1:5; 2:1 and 3:1; cf. Chance 1988: 48). While the geographic trajectory of John\u2019s history is from temple to wilderness, Jesus begins in the despised province of Galilee and moves toward the temple. Mary conceives Jesus through the \u201covershadowing\u201d Spirit (1:35), an image borrowed from the descent of the glory upon the Mosaic tabernacle (Exod. 40:34\u201335; Goulder and Sanderson 1957: 20). Concern with the temple is not confined to the early chapters. Jesus\u2019 progression from Galilee to Jerusalem as a child foreshadows His solemn procession to the holy city (cf. Luke 9\u201319); the boy who astonished the teachers reappears in the temple, clears it, occupies it as teacher, and again all marvel at His authority (19:45\u201348; Nolland 1989: 40). Ending where it began, the gospel closes with the disciples of the Risen and Ascended Lord rejoicing in the Lord\u2019s house (24:53).
\nJohn\u2019s preaching likewise centers on the temple. He urges repentance with the warning that the \u201caxe is already laid at the root of the trees\u201d (Luke 3:9), alluding to Isaiah 10, where Yahweh wielded the axe of Assyria against the barren forest and unfruitful garden Israel had become (Isa. 10:15\u201319). Harmonizing with this are echoes of Psalm 74:4\u20137, where the cedar-paneled temple is a forest hammered and smashed by the enemies of Zion. Jesus makes it clear that the tree is the temple (21:6) and that the axe is Rome (21:20\u201324; cf. 13:34\u201335; 19:43\u201344; cf. Wright 1996). On his way to the cross, Jesus employs John\u2019s tree imagery to warn the daughters of Jerusalem of woes to come (23:28\u201331). John also warns that the Messiah will clear the threshing floor by separating wheat and chaff (3:17), and, significantly, Solomon built the temple upon the site of a threshing floor (2 Sam. 24:18\u201325; 2 Chr. 3:1). Jesus therefore clears the \u201cthreshing floor\u201d by \u201ccleansing\u201d the temple.
\nIf the temple is dominant, so is priesthood. Alone among the gospels, Luke informs us of John\u2019s descent from a son and daughter of Aaron. Gabriel\u2019s prophecy that John will \u201cturn back many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God\u201d (1:16\u201317) quotes from Malachi, where, condemning the priests for their failure to instruct the people, the prophet said that Levi \u201cturned many back from iniquity\u201d through the instruction of his mouth (2:6\u20137). The ministry of the \u201cmessenger\u201d of Malachi 3:1 is also modeled on Levi\u2019s, and the Elijah figure of Malachi 4:5\u20136 (Heb. 3:23\u201324) also teaches to turn hearts. John is the new Levi as well as the new Elijah who prepares the way for the Lord\u2019s fiery purification of the temple (Laurentin 1957:56\u201357; Wink 1968: 75\u201376).
\nThat Luke presents Jesus as John\u2019s younger twin is underlined by similarities between the announcement scenes to Zacharias and Mary (1:5\u201338), their \u201csongs\u201d (1:46\u201355; 67\u201379), the parallel stories of circumcision and naming (1:59\u201363; 2:21), and the application of \u201cgrowth in wisdom and stature\u201d to both boys (1:80; 2:40, 52). When John protests that he merely prepares for One greater than he, these parallels are percolating in the background. To be sure, the comparison is within the sphere of prophetic ministry: John is the \u201cvoice\u201d and new Elijah, and Jesus is the prophet like Elisha and Moses (Luke 4:25\u201327; but cf. Wink 1968: 42\u201344). In Luke, however, John\u2019s priesthood has been so unrelentingly presented that any comparison of John and Jesus must also be in respect of priesthood. Luke\u2019s allusions to Malachi 2\u20133 belong to the same set of concerns, for Jesus like John is a teacher of Israel (Luke 2:41\u201351; 19:47\u201348; 21:37\u201338). By his preaching and at the baptism, John, a priest of the order of Aaron and Zadok, pays homage to Jesus, as Levi did to Melchizedek (Luke 3:16; cf. Heb. 7:4\u201310).
\nInterlaced with these parallels are numerous borrowings from the early life of Samuel (Burrows 1940: 1\u201334). Zacharias, like Elkanah in 1 Samuel, is a childless priest (cf. 1 Chr. 6:16\u201330) given a son in old age. Mary\u2019s and Zacharias\u2019s prophetic poems draw heavily on Hannah\u2019s Old Testament \u201cMagnificat\u201d (1 Sam. 2:1\u201310; Luke 1:46\u201355, 67\u201379). \u201cGrew in wisdom and strength\u201d (Luke 1:80; 2:40, 52) is drawn from 1 Samuel 2:26 and 3:19, and the appearance of young Jesus in the temple recalls Samuel\u2019s early life in service to Eli. God\u2019s purpose in Samuel was to cut the corrupt line of Eli, Hophni, and Phinehas, and raise up \u201ca faithful priest who will do according to what is in My heart and in My soul\u201d (1 Sam. 2:35). As Samuel catalyzed the transfer of priestly privilege, so the appearance of John and Jesus signals a climatic change of priesthood accomplished by One greater than Samuel.<\/p>\n
Baptized to Priesthood<\/p>\n
These considerations illuminate several details of Luke\u2019s account of Jesus\u2019 baptism. First, why did Jesus accept a baptism \u201cof repentance for the forgiveness of sins\u201d (Luke 3:3)? Theologians have often answered, correctly it seems, by saying that Jesus\u2019 baptism identified Him with Israel as her sin-bearing Substitute; Jesus was baptized \u201cwhen all the people were being baptized\u201d (3:21). This fits snugly with a priestly interpretation, for the High Priest was the Old Covenant sin-bearer. Aaron wore a crown on his turban to bear the iniquity of Israel (Exod. 28:36\u201338), and on the Day of Atonement Aaron transferred the sins and uncleanness of Israel to the scapegoat (Lev. 16; cf. Kiuchi 1987). Like Aaron, Jesus was \u201cbaptized\u201d into substitutionary ministry, not only to offer but to be a sacrifice, His baptism at Jordan climaxing in His baptism in blood at Calvary (Luke 12:50).
\nSecond, after His baptism Jesus \u201cbegan\u201d His ministry, being \u201cabout thirty years of age\u201d (Luke 3:23; but cf. Ogg 1959: 291\u2013293). Levites, and perhaps priests, entered ministry at the same age (Num. 4:3, 23, 30, 35, 39, 43). Joseph and David were also raised to high political \u201cstanding\u201d at thirty (Gen. 41:46; 2 Sam. 5:4), and Luke may allude to the royal typology, for Jesus is David\u2019s Son, endowed, like David, with the Spirit (cf. 1 Sam. 16:13). Immediately after the baptism, however, Luke provides a genealogy (Luke 3:23\u201338), and unlike the genealogy of Matthew 1, Luke\u2019s does not trace Jesus\u2019 descent through Solomon and other Davidic kings, but through the collateral line of Nathan (v. 31). David\u2019s sons, perhaps including Nathan, were \u201cpriests\u201d (2 Sam. 8:18), and \u201cNathan\u2019s\u201d son Zabud served Solomon as \u201cpriest\u201d (1 Kgs. 4:5), though one cannot be certain that the \u201cNathan\u201d in these texts was David\u2019s son. If it is not a royal genealogy, what is it doing here? Generally, we can observe that genealogies were particularly important for priestly houses. To qualify for service, Israel\u2019s priests had to prove descent from Aaron, and later from Zadok (Ezra 2:61\u201363). Luke\u2019s genealogy contains tantalizing hints that it establishes Jesus\u2019 priestly credentials. Contrary to expectation, Jesus is not a descendant of Levi but of Judah. Like Hebrews, Luke shows that this faithful Priest is from an order older than that of Aaron, yet Luke presses the case even further: Jesus is Priest after the order of Adam (Luke 3:38).
\nTo attack from another angle: I am arguing that \u201cSon of God,\u201d applied both to Adam and Jesus in Luke 3, is a priestly title. In some texts, \u201cson\u201d is royal (see 2 Sam. 7:14; Ps. 2:6\u20137), and, given the emphasis on Jesus\u2019 Davidic ancestry in Luke 1\u20132, it surely carries that resonance here. Yet the Bible links priest and son as well. According to some Jewish literature, Adam was a priest because he was \u201cfirst born of the world\u201d (Scroggs 1966: 43\u201344). As noted above, the Levites, who served in semi-priestly capacity, replaced the redeemed firstborn sons of Israel (Num. 3:40\u201351). In chapter 2, I argued that by ordination Aaron and his sons became members of Yahweh\u2019s household, adopted \u201csons.\u201d Hebrews 4:14 identifies the new High Priest as \u201cJesus the Son of God,\u201d and Hebrews 5:5 reads Psalm 2:7 (\u201cThou art my Son\u201d), alluded to by the voice from heaven (Luke 3:22), as a prophecy of Jesus\u2019 glorification as High Priest. So, \u201cSon of God\u201d possibly has a priestly timbre.
\nExamination of the theme of Jesus\u2019 sonship in Luke 2:41\u201351 strengthens the plausibility of this interpretation. When Mary and Joseph find Jesus after a three-day search, Mary claims parental high ground, \u201cYour father and I have been anxiously looking for You\u201d (2:48). Jesus\u2019 surprised answer reminds them of His transcendent Sonship that relativizes even the closest familial loyalties: \u201cDid you not know that I had to be \u1f10\u03bd \u03c4\u03bf\u1fd6\u03c2 \u03c4\u03bf\u1fe6 \u03c0\u03b1\u03c4\u03c1\u03cc\u03c2 \u03bc\u03bf\u03c5\u201d (2:49). Whether one fills the ellipsis of this enigmatic question with \u201cin my Father\u2019s house\u201d or \u201cabout my Father\u2019s things,\u201d Jesus\u2019 unique Sonship is associated with teaching in the house of God. Structurally, Jesus\u2019 appearance in the temple at twelve is paired with the \u201cpresentation\u201d (\u03c0\u03b1\u03c1\u03b1\u03c3\u03c4\u1fc6\u03c3\u03b1\u03b9) scene in Luke 2:22\u201338. This passage is full of difficulties: Under Levitical law, Mary alone was unclean, yet Luke speaks of \u201ctheir purification\u201d (v. 22); the law requires redemption of the firstborn son from service rather than presentation for service (Exod. 13:11\u201313); and verse 23 differs from Exodus 13:2, 12, commonly cited as its source. Without resolving all the problems, Burrows argues that the \u201cpresentation\u201d fulfills Numbers 8:14\u201319, where Yahweh appoints the Levites to assist Aaron in tabernacle ministry. Not being a Levite, Jesus was in actual ritual fact \u201credeemed,\u201d but Luke interprets this \u201credemption\u201d theologically and typologically as the fulfillment of Levitical consecration to household service. In the very next scene, Jesus is found teaching in the house of His Father (Burrows 1940: 17\u201319; Laurentin 1957: 114\u2013117). Jesus is thus dedicated as \u201cfirstborn son\u201d and \u201cLevite.\u201d When the Father announces that He is the \u201cSon,\u201d these Levitical overtones of the title are still heavy in the air.
\nParallels between the transfiguration and the baptism are also relevant. In both, Jesus is declared the \u201cSon,\u201d and the voice at the transfiguration urges the disciples to \u201chear Him\u201d (9:35): Jesus is the teaching Son. Other details of the transfiguration have priestly connotations: The event occurs on the \u201ceighth day,\u201d which was the beginning of Aaron\u2019s ministry (Lev. 9:1; Luke 9:28); Jesus\u2019 clothing is transformed into garments of flashing glory like those worn by the High Priest (Luke 9:29); glory surrounds Jesus (Luke 9:31, 32); Peter wants to build \u201ctabernacles\u201d (Luke 9:33); and Moses and Elijah disappear after a cloud overshadows the mountain (Luke 9:34; cf. Exod. 40:34\u201338). Shortly after, Jesus begins His march to Jerusalem, where He will cleanse the temple, begin to teach, and eventually offer His once-for-all sacrifice (Luke 9:51; cf. v. 31). The transfiguration publishes the truth of the baptism: Jesus has been, and will be, glorified as High Priest over the house.
\nLuke mentions John\u2019s baptism for the last time in 20:1\u20138. Challenging Jesus, the priests demand, \u201cTell us by what authority You are doing these things, or who is the one who gave you this authority?\u201d (20:2). \u03a4\u03b1\u1fe6\u03c4\u03b1 are Jesus\u2019 recent activities in the temple, so that the question contests His \u1f10\u03be\u03bf\u03c5\u03c3\u03af\u03b1 in the house of the Lord; the conflict is about rival claims to priesthood. Typically, Jesus answers by asking the scribes and priests to pass judgment on John\u2019s baptism. Some have interpreted this response as a \u201cdivine red herring,\u201d but it perfectly suits the situation, if we see that Jesus\u2019 baptism, with the gift of the Spirit and authorization by the heavenly voice, conferred authority to do precisely \u03c4\u03b1\u1fe6\u03c4\u03b1. John\u2019s baptism endowed Jesus the Son with \u1f10\u03be\u03bf\u03c5\u03c3\u03af\u03b1 to inspect and cleanse, and to sit in the seat of the teaching priest.
\nChristian baptism, formed on the model of Jesus\u2019, similarly inducts the baptized into household service. This does not mean that the baptisms of the Head and of the body have precisely the same significance; only Jesus could call on John\u2019s baptism as testimony to His supreme authority in the temple. With the other passages we have examined, however, Luke shows that the typology of baptismal induction to priesthood was a living paradigm in the imagination of the early church.<\/p>\n
Christs Christened Into Christ, 2 Corinthians 1:21\u201322<\/p>\n
Between Paul\u2019s first and second letters to the Corinthians, his apostolic standing had come under attack from \u201cfalse apostles\u201d who, though disguised as angels of light, were in reality \u201cservants of Satan\u201d (2 Cor. 11:13\u201315). Paul, a faithful Adamic guardian, intervened to protect the betrothed bride from Satanic attack (11:1\u20134), and this involved a defense of his own status as an apostle, for if Paul\u2019s apostleship was in doubt, so was his gospel. His opponents charged that he operated according to the flesh rather than the Spirit (1:12, 17; 10:2), and put into evidence his apparent vacillation concerning travel plans, which they interpreted as a sign of fundamental unreliability (1:15\u201316). Underlying this charge was the assumption that life and message must be consistent: If Paul\u2019s Yes in travel plans was not Yes, could anyone trust his gospel? Far from dismissing the charge as trivial, Paul accepted the criterion by which they were judging him: Hence, \u201cour word to you is not Yes and No\u201d (1:18) refers both to his travel plans and to the gospel he preached at Corinth.
\nIn the letter, Paul\u2019s defense comes in several stages. First, he insists that his message is an unequivocal Yes because the content is Christ, in whom God affirms all His promises (1:19\u201320). In 1:21\u201322 he reminds the Corinthians that his stability is not a personal achievement but ensured by God (Hughes 1962: 39). Paul\u2019s use of \u201cus\u201d and \u201cyou\u201d in these verses is significant. Throughout the first chapter, he contrasts the experience of the apostles to that of the Corinthians (1:6\u20137, 10\u201311, 12), but in 1:21\u201322 he mentions a common establishment in Christ through \u201canointing,\u201d \u201csealing,\u201d and the \u201cgift of the Spirit\u201d (\u03c7\u03c1\u03af\u03c3\u03b1\u03c2, \u03c3\u03c6\u03c1\u03b1\u03b3\u03b9\u03c3\u03ac\u03bc\u03b5\u03bd\u03bf\u03c2, \u03b4\u03bf\u1f7a\u03c2). By associating himself with the Corinthians, he is saying, \u201cI have received the gift of the Spirit as surely and in the same way as you.\u201d Finally, Paul tells the Corinthians he decided to change plans not out of fleshly self-interest but out of compassion, to avoid another painful visit (v. 23; 2:1). His \u201cNo,\u201d as much as his \u201cYes,\u201d affirms his pastoral concern for the Corinthian church (Hafemann 1989: 332).
\nUnlike Paul, New Testament scholars equivocate when asked if this is a baptismal passage, and I shall do the same. Several details support a Yes. The participles are in the aorist; \u03b5\u1f30\u03c2 \u03a7\u03c1\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03cc\u03bd may refer to baptismal incorporation into Christ; both \u0392\u03b5\u03b2\u03b1\u03b9\u03cc\u03c9 and \u1f00\u03c1\u03c1\u03b1\u03b2\u03ce\u03bd concern guarantees in commercial transactions and sales of property, and thus are appropriate terms to describe the baptismal transfer to ownership by the Lord Jesus; the giving of the Spirit is frequently (though not invariably) linked with baptism (Matt. 3:13\u201317; Acts 2:38; 1 Cor. 12:12\u201313); and \u03c3\u03c6\u03c1\u03b1\u03b3\u03af\u03b6\u03c9 (\u201cseal\u201d) referred to circumcision both in rabbinic writings and the New Testament (Rom. 4:11) and to baptism in postapostolic literature. None of these arguments is absolutely compelling; unlike the passages discussed above, this one does not refer to washing or water. Even if baptism is not immediately in view, however, it is legitimate to integrate this passage into a biblical theology of initiation. Its reference to sharing the chrism of Christ assumes the reality of union with Christ, established by baptism (Rom. 6). Though Paul may not have called baptism an \u201canointing\u201d or \u201csealing,\u201d baptism (at least) symbolizes the union of which anointing and sealing are aspects. Thus, these verses give us warrant to elaborate baptismal theology in the light of these metaphors. Is this a baptismal passage? I assume neither Yes nor No; but, in very unPauline fashion, Yes and No.<\/p>\n
Anointed Priests<\/p>\n
Rites of anointing were not part of apostolic initiation (Furnish 1984: 137), so \u03c7\u03c1\u03af\u03c3\u03b1\u03c2 does not reflect the lex orandi. Normally commentators interpret the anointing in the light of Acts 10:38, which describes Jesus\u2019 reception of the Holy Spirit as an unction. On this interpretation, the Corinthians are anointed because, like Jesus and with Him, they have been \u201cchristened\u201d by the Spirit. Yet this does not explain why Paul should describe the gift of the Spirit as an \u201canointing.\u201d Here, I am interested less in the referent of \u03c7\u03c1\u03af\u03c3\u03b1\u03c2 than in the typological horizon of the metaphor. In the LXX, \u03c7\u03c1\u03af\u03c9 is used most often with reference to royal anointing, which was the rite of installation of kings and which sometimes involved reception of the Spirit (1 Sam. 10:1, 10; 16:13; 1 Kgs. 1:39). To say that Christians are anointed, then, means that by the Spirit they share in the rule of David\u2019s greater Son.
\nSeveral considerations raise the possibility that Paul may also be alluding to priestly anointing. Jewish messianic speculation included predictions of a priestly as well as a royal Messiah (cf. Ps. 110). At Qumran, the messianic community was a community of priests. Thus, in the first century setting \u201cChrist\u201d could bring into play either priestly or royal connotations or both. After the Babylonian exile, however, the responsibilities of both prophet and king devolved on Israel\u2019s priests. High Priests were civil leaders, and John reflects the belief that they also had prophetic powers (John 11:51). To be sure, Jews of the first century expected a Davidic Messiah, but the most immediately available \u201cAnointed One\u201d was the High Priest. Finally, Davidic anointing was reserved for the king alone, but Paul refers to a communal anointing, and all priests were anointed (Exod. 28:41). Paul\u2019s pun on \u03a7\u03c1\u03af\u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03c2 \/ \u03c7\u03c1\u03af\u03c9 may pick up the symbolism of Psalm 133, where unity among brothers comes by sharing in the chrism of Aaron.
\nAn examination of links with other sections of 2 Corinthians suggests a Levitical background to Paul\u2019s discussion. 1:22 is the first reference to the Holy Spirit in an epistle that very much highlights His role in the New Covenant (Belleville 1996: 281\u2013304). The Spirit is the \u1f00\u03c1\u03c1\u03b1\u03b2\u03ce\u03bd, used in commercial Greek for a \u201cdown payment\u201d and in the LXX for a \u201cpledge\u201d (cf. Gen. 38:17). Crystallizing the already-not yet of New Testament eschatology, the word emphasizes both the present bestowal of a gift and that the gift is a pledge of an eschatological inheritance. \u0391\u03c1\u03c1\u03b1\u03b2\u03ce\u03bd recurs in 5:5, where the Spirit is the first installment of an inheritance that Paul calls, with marvelous mixture of metaphors, a heavenly building that clothes the believer.
\nDebate on 2 Corinthians 5:1\u201310 has revolved around determining the referent of Paul\u2019s metaphors: Is the heavenly house the resurrection body or does it refer to the \u201cintermediate state\u201d between death and the general resurrection? Reconstructions of the development of Paul\u2019s eschatology also rely heavily on this passage. Questions such as these are not theologically uninteresting, but I do not wish to extract the referent from \u201cbelow\u201d or \u201cbehind\u201d the text but to luxuriate in the space created by the dizzying interplay among texts. Whatever it is, I want to know why Paul calls it a \u201ctent\u201d or \u201chouse,\u201d and how Paul arrived at the idea that a house might \u201cclothe\u201d believers? Exploring this question would, I think, meet with Paul\u2019s approval. Paul did not develop his eschatology in \u201cabstract\u201d systematic terms, and then seek out decorative imagery. Instead, Paul\u2019s thought moves forward by types, and he often seems to throw a handful of metaphors onto the page to see what chemical reactions occur. Yet Paul\u2019s method is not arbitrary, since the symbolic perichoresis is circulating already in the Old Testament Scriptures that were Paul\u2019s primary locus of theological reflection. For Paul, metaphors of tent, building, and clothing are not husks that enclose the literal and important theological kernel but are themselves theologically significant. At least, the imagery provides clues to the Old Testament realities that Paul is conjugating.
\nOld Testament texts concerning the tabernacle, High Priestly vestments, and ordination form part of the \u201ctext pool\u201d into which Paul dives. \u201cClothed with a house\u201d is perfectly coherent Levitical imagery, for the High Priest was virtually clothed in tabernacle curtains (Kline 1986: 35\u201347). Thus, one clothed in a tent is both a priest and a human tabernacle (cf. John 1:14). Paul\u2019s desire for a solid and eternal building-house to replace his present tent-house recalls the historical transition recorded in 1-2 Samuel, which begins with the ruin of the Shiloh tabernacle (1 Sam. 1\u20134) and ends with David\u2019s purchase of the threshing floor on which Solomon would build the temple (2 Sam. 24; 2 Chr. 3:1; cf. Jordan 1988: 221\u2013237). Paul hopes to wear an \u03bf\u1f30\u03ba\u03bf\u03b4\u03bf\u03bc\u03ae, a permanent temple garment rather than continuing in the earthen vessel of a tabernacle existence.
\nFollowing Paul\u2019s thought from 2 Corinthians 4 to 5 makes clear that the heavenly house for which Paul yearns is equivalent to the glory into which believers are transformed. Paul believes the affliction he endures in apostolic ministry will produce an \u03b1\u1f30\u03ce\u03bd\u03b9\u03bf\u03bd \u03b2\u03ac\u03c1\u03bf\u03c2 \u03b4\u03cc\u03be\u03b7\u03c2 (4:17), which is one of the unseen things on which Paul concentrates his affections (4:18). Immediately he expresses his hope for a building that, like the \u201cweight of glory,\u201d is \u201ceternal\u201d and, being in the heavens, presently \u201cunseen\u201d (5:1). Affliction is producing the glorious temple-clothing that Paul desires; the \u03b4\u03cc\u03be\u03b1 is weighty because it is an \u03bf\u1f30\u03ba\u03af\u03b1. Thus, to the lively stew of tent, house, and clothing is added a dash of \u201cglory.\u201d Again, Old Testament texts on tabernacle and priesthood provide Paul\u2019s recipe, for the sanctuary and priestly vestments were architectural and sartorial replications of the glory theophany at Sinai (Kline 1986: 35\u201347; cf. Jordan 1988: 41\u201351)\u2014hence \u201cgarments of glory and beauty\u201d (Exod. 28:2). Though now endowed as a priest with a tent-like glory, through suffering ministry Paul will be progressively transformed into a house-like glory.
\nWe are now able to assess the linkage of 1:21\u201322 and 5:1\u20135, and the implications for \u201canointing.\u201d By incorporation into Christ, believers are chrismated by the \u1f00\u03c1\u03c1\u03b1\u03b2\u03ce\u03bd of the Spirit, and 5:1\u20135 specifies that the Spirit is an \u1f00\u03c1\u03c1\u03b1\u03b2\u03ce\u03bd of the heavenly house-garment, which, as \u03c3\u03ba\u03b7\u03bd\u03ae, now clothes the believer with an initial gift of glory. If 1:21\u201322 is a baptismal text, it suggests that the gift of the Spirit in baptism is an initial investiture with priestly tent-garments, and places the baptized on the pathway of suffering transfiguration that leads to full investiture with eschatological house-glory. Even if 1:21\u201322 is not a baptismal text, baptism signifies the anointing of the Spirit, and thus points to investiture with the priestly tent and promises a future house.<\/p>\n
Removing the Veil<\/p>\n
Paul\u2019s longing for the heavenly house is also linked to his discussion of the New Covenant in 2 Corinthians 3. As Scot Hafemann (1995) has argued, this chapter continues Paul\u2019s defense of his apostolic ministry. Paul\u2019s question \u03c1\u1f78\u03c2 \u03c4\u03b1\u1fe6\u03c4\u03b1 \u03c4\u03af\u03c2 \u1f31\u03ba\u03b1\u03bd\u03cc\u03c2 (2:16) alludes to Moses\u2019 words in the LXX of Exodus 4:10, and Paul\u2019s answer is that, by grace, he is sufficient (3:5; Hafemann 1995: 43). Chapter 3 expands the parallels of Paul and Moses, but a marked contrast emerges in relation to glory and Spirit, revolving around the image of the \u201cveil\u201d (\u03ba\u03ac\u03bb\u03c5\u03bc\u03bc\u03b1). Because of their hardness of heart, the Israelites were unable to gaze intently on Yahweh\u2019s glory in the face of Moses, and he therefore had to veil his face (3:14). Since it resulted from hardness of heart, Moses\u2019 veil was, symbolically, \u201con the heart\u201d (v. 15). As minister of the New Covenant, however, Paul mediates the Spirit who, fulfilling the promises of Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 36, exchanges stony hearts for hearts of flesh (Hafemann 1995: 372, 380). With hearts made new by the Spirit and the veil removed, believers can gaze with unveiled faces upon the glory and be transfigured progressively into its image (3:18). Structurally and theologically, the veil of Moses\u2019 face parallels the veil separating the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place (though different words for \u201cveil\u201d are used both in Hebrew and in the LXX). In both cases, the veil separates Israel from glory; in both cases, the separation is due to sin; in both cases, there is a promising exception, with Moses ascending into the cloud and the High Priest entering annually before the Lord. If the Spirit of the New Covenant removes the veil that separated the hardhearted from the glory of Moses\u2019 face, He also, in the same movement, removes the veil that separated the people from the glorious throne room of Yahweh\u2019s house.
\nAgain, 1:22 reaches forward to chapter 3. The Spirit who anoints the church as \u1f00\u03c1\u03c1\u03b1\u03b2\u03ce\u03bd removes the veil from the heart and enables an unveiled visio gloriae that transfigures from glorious tent to glorious house. If 1:21\u201322 is baptismal, it suggests, like Hebrews 10:19\u201322, that the baptized are priests and beyond priests, welcomed into the inner chambers where only High Priests once dared enter. Exposure to glory is no longer limited to office-bearers: \u1f21\u03bc\u03b5\u1fd6\u03c2 \u03c0\u03ac\u03bd\u03c4\u03b5\u03c2 gaze intently at the glory (3:18). Even if the text is not baptismal, baptism symbolizes the removal of the veil and thus the destruction of Israel\u2019s holiness system.
\nIn 2 Corinthians, anointing with the Spirit (possibly in connection with baptism) links, through a theology of glory, to a theology of priesthood. \u201cTheology of glory\u201d has a naively triumphalist sense, however, has nothing to do with Paul, for his most elaborate development of a theology of glory occurs in the same letter as his most detailed inventory of apostolic affliction. Faced with this tension, one is tempted to privatize the glory, and Paul seems to do this with his references to treasure in earthen vessels and the inner\/outer man language of 4:16. Overall, however, Paul\u2019s theology is more paradoxical, for through his preaching\u2014his public, visible, external proclamation in the midst of affliction\u2014the Spirit removes the veil and shines the light of the glorious gospel on those who believe (4:1\u20136). Paul bears the death of Jesus within his body, but the life of Jesus, which is inseparable from glory, is manifest in his mortal flesh (cf. 4:7, 10\u201311). As for John, so for Paul: The cross is the glorification of the Son of Man and of all who serve Him. Union with the Anointed One that confers the \u1f00\u03c1\u03c1\u03b1\u03b2\u03ce\u03bd of priestly glory simultaneously consecrates the Christian as a living sacrifice who is swallowed up in glory precisely as he is delivered up to daily death for Jesus\u2019 sake. For Paul, the glory that shimmers from behind the veil, the glory into whose glowing image the believer is translated, is thoroughly cruciform.<\/p>\n
Conclusion<\/p>\n
Both the weaker and stronger formulation of the typology are warranted by the New Testament. From Hebrews 10:19\u201322 and 1 Corinthians 6:11, I argued that since B now does what O did in Israel, B fulfills and replaces O. The other texts support the weaker thesis that B is described in terms reminiscent of O. Overall, the combination of evidence is sufficient to establish that the New Testament practice and theology of baptism were founded, inter alia, on priestly ordination. Moreover, some wider implications of this typology have emerged. This brings us to the threshold of seeing how baptism is the \u201cbeginning of the gospel.\u201d Before we step through that door, however, we will spend the next chapter wandering through adjoining rooms cluttered with the dusty scholastic questions of baptismal liturgy and theology. Perhaps we can discover something to hold our interest.<\/p>\n
CHAPTER FOUR<\/p>\n
Baptismal Ordination as Ritual Poesis<\/p>\n
Sacramental theology has always proceeded by analogy, by reflection on how the sacraments are \u201clike\u201d and \u201cunlike\u201d a philosophical concept, a cultural institution, a natural phenomenon, or some combination of these. For Thomas, sacraments are \u201cinstrumental causes,\u201d so that God\u2019s relationship to them is like that of a carpenter to his tools. Thomas takes this to be a sufficiently close analogy to draw substantive theological conclusions. An instrumental cause, he argues, does not act per virtutem suae formae but per motum quo movetur a principali agenti, yet instrumental causes act in a way proper to their form. Though cutting is proper to a saw, therefore, a bed does not resemble the saw used in its construction but the pattern in the mind of the principal agent, the carpenter. Water, similarly, by its propriam virtutem cleanses the body, but baptism washes the soul as an instrumentum virtutis divinae (ST 3a, 62, 1).
\nIlluminating as Thomas\u2019s comments are, his choice of analogies implicitly separates technical quaestiones from the typological lectio, a method that, by my argument, betrays \u201csemi-Marcionite\u201d assumptions (above, chapter 1). In this chapter, I argue that baptism is more similar to priestly ordination than to a hammer. Working from this sensible premise, I hope to show that biblical typologies are rich and elastic enough to address, sometimes in unexpectedly contemporary ways, even the most esoteric of scholastic quaestiones. There is no need to supplement a sacramental typology with a sacramental ontology, for under intense interrogation the typology will divulge an implicit ontology.
\nWhat I attempt is scarcely original. Theologians have frequently answered questions in sacramental liturgy and theology through Augustinian \u201cconjugations\u201d of Old Testament rites and events. Thus, from the Pauline analogy of circumcision and baptism (Col. 2:11\u201312), they have inferred that infants should be baptized, that baptism is a \u201cseal\u201d (Rom. 4:11), that it signifies the fulfillment of the promises to Abraham, and that it incorporates into the new Israel. Discontinuities also emerge: The Council of Carthage (254) determined that the church need not baptize infants on the eighth day (cf. Cyprian 1964: 216\u2013219), and no one to my knowledge has suggested limiting baptism to males. Similarly, Eucharistic theology and liturgy have drawn inspiration from Old Testament sacrifices and meals. Remnants of semi-Marcionite sacramental theology, however, have often created dissonance; thus, as we saw in chapter 1, paedobaptists \u201cspiritualize\u201d the promises sealed by circumcision to bring them into accord with the supposedly \u201cspiritual\u201d ordinance of baptism (above, pp. 21\u201322). Renouncing Marcion and all his pomp and all his ways, I hope my polyphonic composition on the themes of priesthood and baptism has a more harmonious sound.
\nThis chapter has two sections. First, I address the liturgical implications of what, for the sake of convenience, I shall affectionately call \u201cour typology.\u201d Second, and at greater length, I construct some components of baptismal theology from the materials provided by the ordination and related texts and rites. Questions of baptismal efficacy and causality take priority, and I argue that this typology implies a form of baptismal regeneration and a \u201cpoetic\u201d conception of causality. Chapter 5 examines the ecclesiological, and therefore social and political implications of baptism as induction to priesthood, but since liturgical, theological, and sociological perspectives are connected, at various points I anticipate issues more fully developed later.
\nTo prove the elasticity of the priestly typology requires that I stretch, push, and pull a bit\u2014a risky venture since the concepts can snap back painfully against my fingers or expand past their breaking point. As far as I can see, this chapter ends with no one injured, nothing broken.<\/p>\n
Making Priests: The Liturgy of Initiation<\/p>\n
The Aaronic ordination rite is perhaps the key to understanding the patristic and medieval enhancements of the initiation liturgy; if it does not open every door, it opens many. Two rites especially highlight the connection: the baptismal anointing(s) and the investiture of the baptized with white linen. Anointing rites varied in number, the type of oil used, parts of the body anointed, and their placement in the sequence of the baptismal liturgy. Liturgists interpreted these rites under marital and martial metaphors, as effecting union with Christ, as imprinting a seal (\u03c3\u03c6\u03c1\u03ac\u03b3\u03b9\u03c2), as perfuming with the fragrance of Christ, as exorcizing, as offering the oil of paradise, as conferring the gift of the Spirit or the name \u201cChristian.\u201d According to Georg Kretschmar, however, the baptismal anointings result from \u201ca conscious resort to principles of Old Testament ritual: Baptism is the hallowing of kings and priests\u201d (Kretschmar 1995: 27). Evidence from church orders and liturgies shows that even if the anointing did not derive from Old Testament custom, it early took on this significance. Concerning the prebaptismal anointing, the Didascalia Apostolorum, a North Syrian composition of the early third century (Bradshaw 1992: 88), states: \u201cAs of old the priests and kings were anointed in Israel, do thou in like manner, with the imposition of hand, anoint the head of those who receive baptism, whether of men or of women\u201d (3.12; Connolly 1929: 146). As we have seen, the Apostolic Constitutions refers to 1 Peter 2 to describe anointing as an induction into the royal priesthood (chapter 3, fn. 9). Later liturgical texts also link anointing with Christ\u2019s triple office, and this typology appears in contemporary Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican baptismal rites.
\nSince the candidate for baptism was naked during the water rite, postbaptismal investiture had obvious practical value, but the rites were extended beyond necessity and given mystagogical interpretations. Besides a full clothing with a white robe, we find such festive accouterments as veils, linen bands, caps and crowns. White clothing signified putting on Christ, resurrection, bridal adornment, replacement for the skins of Adam, sharing Christ\u2019s glorious radiance, or a spotless covering for the judgment. As with anointing, priestly interpretations were common, especially among medieval liturgists. According to a letter of the sixth-century figure John the Deacon, chrism inducts into priesthood and royalty, and the linen head covering represents the headgear of priests. Similarly, Rabanus Maurus (780\u2013856) explains that the linen placed on the head after postbaptismal anointing signifies the diadem of kings and the dignity of priests, sharing with John the mistaken belief that Israel\u2019s priests veiled themselves with a mysticum velamen. Rupert of Deutz (c. 1075\u20131129) calls attention to the washing-investiture sequence in the ordination of Aaron and deduces that initiation makes the candidate a member of the royal priesthood. Honorius of Autun (c. 1080\/90\u2013c. 1156) likewise describes the baptismal garments as priestly.
\nThese ornamentations of initiation are consistent with biblical typology, and therefore preferable to the migration of priestly symbolism to confirmation and ordination that distorted later medieval liturgical theology (see chapter 6). This does not, however, necessarily imply that the rites are suitable. The Reformers charged that chrism and linen garments, as well as spittings and breathings, exorcisms, gifts of tabers and other rites polluted the water of New Testament baptism. In their interpretation of the New Testament rite, the Reformers were undoubtedly correct. If baptizing three thousand converts on Pentecost strained the logistical capacity of the church (Acts 2:41), it is incredible that the apostles could assemble sufficient supplies of oil and linen to anoint and invest the baptized. Philip baptized the Ethiopian eunuch along a highway out of Jerusalem, so he was hardly able to chrismate and invest the eunuch as well (Acts 8:26\u201340). Laying on of hands may have accompanied baptism in the apostolic period, but even its status is uncertain. On the evidence of the New Testament, initiation was originally a simple affusion or aspersion of water. Water was charged with the whole significance of the Aaronic rite.
\nFor Protestant liturgists, the fact that medieval \u201cmanmade\u201d rites lacked Scriptural warrant was sufficient to call them into question. Christ, they argued, governs His church through the word, and departure from His instructions is defiance of His Headship. Adornments of initiation, they believed, distorted the rite and obscured its significance. Augustinians that they were, they had no doubt that Catholic baptisms encrusted with extraneous ceremony were valid, but they recognized that ripples from a distorted lex orandi could grow to engulf remote islands in the doctrine and practice of the church and thus did not see their opposition to secondary rites as \u201coverkill\u201d (cf. Spinks 1995: 315). Efforts to mix oil and water, they feared, could only end with the oil rising to the top.
\nThe Reformers\u2019 Scriptural opposition was not a \u201cformal\u201d concern but went to the evangelical heart of the Reformation, a point brought out with clarity in Calvin\u2019s Inventory of Relics (1958). No doubt, Calvin\u2019s mockery of relic veneration combines an almost Voltairean rationalist ingredient with a dash of spiritualist distrust of material means of communication with God, but centrally Calvin\u2019s concern is pastoral: He encourages sinners to seek the gracious God where He has promised to make Himself known. As He promised, God dwells among the people marked out by the preaching of the word, baptism, the Eucharist, and ordered fellowship. Word and sacrament are inseparable for Calvin not because the word magically invigorates the inanimate sign but because it identifies the Lord\u2019s saving \u201caddress\u201d in this world. Since there is no authorization in the word for baptismal anointing or investiture, either by explicit command or by example, there can be no expectation that these rites mediate the presence of Christ, however subjectively meaningful they may be. Seeking contact with God through a lock of the Virgin\u2019s hair, John the Baptist\u2019s foreskin, a vial of St. Stephen\u2019s blood, or through the oil and linen of initiation is doomed to frustration.
\nConsideration of the multivalent biblical symbolism of water supports the Reformers\u2019 position. Baptism fulfills the flood (1 Pet. 3:18\u201322) and Israel\u2019s crossing of the Red Sea (1 Cor. 10:1\u20132), types that indicate that the peril of entering the waters is within the symbolic reach of baptism (cf. Lundberg 1942); the font is a tomb as well as a womb. Water was a common cleansing agent in Levitical law; likewise, baptism purifies. At least since Tertullian, baptism has been taken to represent the waters of Genesis 1:2, from which the brooding Spirit gave birth to the ordered cosmos. Since man is of dust (Gen. 2:7), water poured on human beings gives promise of fruitfulness. Genesis 1:6\u20137 distinguishes the waters above the firmament from the waters below, so that water falling upon the baptized symbolizes the descent of the heavenly Spirit (cf. Poythress 1997b: 151). Rain falls from clouds, so baptismal aspersion is associated with Yahweh\u2019s appearance in a cloud of glory. Keeping the ritual focus on water thus maintains the complex typology of Christian initiation. Oil, for all its symbolic potential, does not have the same density; here, water is thicker than oil.
\nThough I agree with the Reformers that chrisms and investitures are unnecessary and can discordantly interrupt the symbolic resonances of baptism, our investigation encourages inserting references to priesthood in the prayers and performatives of the initiation liturgy, alongside more common allusions to Noah\u2019s flood, the Red Sea crossing, Pentecost, and the baptism of Jesus. Protestant liturgies might, for example, transfer the language of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults from chrismation to the water rite. Thus, one is baptized \u201cso that, united with his people, you may remain forever a member of Christ who is Priest, Prophet, and King\u201d (Roman Catholic Church 1986: 205\u2013206). The 1977 American Episcopal Proposed Book of Common Prayer includes a moment of reception for the newly baptized that encourages him or her to confess the faith, proclaim the resurrection, and \u201cshare with us in [Christ\u2019s] eternal priesthood\u201d (1977: 308).<\/p>\n
Holy Food for the Holy Ones<\/p>\n
In one respect, our typology carries more substantive implications for liturgical practice. For several decades, many have recognized that Orthodox \u201cfull initiation,\u201d which enacts water baptism, confirmation or chrismation, and first Eucharist as a single ritual sequence, is an ancient pattern. The consensus is not exactly in favor of \u201cfull initiation,\u201d since some churches confirm at adolescence, when the confirmand has long since been admitted to the Eucharist (M\u00fcller-Fahrenholz 1982: 70\u201381; Holeton 1981: 27\u201331). Nonetheless, there is increasing ecumenical agreement that baptism and Eucharist are liturgically inseparable, so that baptism, without any additional experience or rite, is the ticket to the Eucharistic banquet.
\nReasoning from our typology, we can make several points in defense of this conclusion. As we saw in chapter 2, the phrase \u201cfilling the hand\u201d means in part that Yahweh filled the priests\u2019 hands with portions of sacrificial food. Ordination began with washing in water and ended with a meal in the holy place, exhibiting the same form as other covenant-cutting rites (cf. Exod. 19:17\u201324:1\u201311). Aaron and his sons entered covenant with Yahweh by exchanging gifts of food and sharing a meal. Once installed, priests might eat holy portions of the sacrifices. Lay worshipers ate only the peace offering, the least holy of the animal sacrifices (Lev. 7:11\u201318). Priests, however, received not only specified portions of peace offerings (Lev. 7:28\u201334), but also the flesh of some purification and trespass offerings, and the greater part of every tribute (grain) offering (Lev. 6:14\u20137:10). As personal attendants in Yahweh\u2019s house, priests served at His table to offer \u201cthe bread of God\u201d (Lev. 21:21\u201322), and it was fitting that they share Yahweh\u2019s bread. The food rite conferred food rights.
\nDistribution of sacrificial food and access to holy places thus traced out Israel\u2019s hierarchal holiness system. We can summarize information from Leviticus 6\u20137; 21\u201322 and Deuteronomy 14\u201316 as follows:<\/p>\n
Sanctuary Environment
\nPersonnel
\nFood<\/p>\n
Most Holy
\nHigh Priest
\nShewbread and sacrifices<\/p>\n
Holy
\nPriests
\nShewbread and sacrifices<\/p>\n
Courtyard
\nPriestly households
\nPriestly portions of peace offering; tithes
\nIsraelite
\nFeasts; lay portions of peace offering<\/p>\n
Land of Israel
\nSojourner
\nFeasts other than Passover; clean food<\/p>\n
Gentile Lands
\nGentiles
\nAll meats<\/p>\n
Priests ate the food of sons, not the comparatively meager fare of \u05d6\u05e8\u05d9\u05dd, \u201cstrangers\u201d to the house.
\nThough the rationale for these distributions was bound up with the contagious holiness of the Old Covenant, the typological parallel with baptism and Eucharist is evident. Jesus is the \u201cbread of God\u201d (John 6:33) not only in the sense that He feeds His people but also in the sense of Leviticus 21: His flesh, sacrificed on the altar of the cross, ascends in a cloud to satisfy the Father, who then pours out the libation of the Spirit. After Jesus fed the five thousand, the leftovers were more abundant than the original food; likewise after the Father has \u201ceaten His fill,\u201d the heavenly bread is not consumed but multiplied. Crumbs fall from His table, and baptized priests who continually offer the bread of praise through the Priest may eat the \u201cmost holy\u201d food reserved from His sacrifice. As Aaron began at the laver and moved to the altar, so the Christian, washed in the font, enters the house and approaches the table. If B fulfills and replaces O, then it makes no sense to baptize without filling hands with holy food; for baptism, on our typology, is the church\u2019s rite of hand-filling. To baptize and refuse admission to the table is, absurdly, to treat the baptized as \u05d6\u05e8\u05d9\u05dd.<\/p>\n
The Kingdom Belongs to Such as These<\/p>\n
Most churches recognize that baptism admits to the Eucharist when the subject is an adult, but from the Middle Ages until recent decades only the Eastern churches have admitted baptized infants and young children to the meal. Yet, the consensus described above involves a growing sense that baptized children belong at the Lord\u2019s table. Our typology implies as much: If infants are consecrated in baptism, they should receive holy food. But is the priestly typology consistent with infant baptism? In what sense can infants be \u201cpriests\u201d or even, more loosely, \u201cmembers of the Christian priesthood\u201d? Does priestly service not require conscious participation? And therefore, does not the notion that the church baptizes to priesthood undermine infant baptism?
\nHistorically, many churches, both Eastern and Western, have claimed that baptism initiates infants as well as adults to priesthood, and several typological considerations vindicate the wisdom of the tradition. As evident from the chart above, members of a priest\u2019s household\u2014including slaves, unmarried children, and divorced or widowed daughters\u2014shared certain kinds of priestly food (Lev. 22:11\u201313; cf. 6:16\u201318, 29; 7:6). Infants were included, since the holy gifts were a prime food source for priestly families, who had no landed inheritance. Lay Israelites, sojourners, or hired men who were not permanent members of the household were forbidden to \u201capproach\u201d holy things or eat sacred flesh, on pain of being \u201ccut off\u201d from the covenant people (Lev. 22:2, 10). If an Israelite layman inadvertently ate holy food, he had to make restitution, adding one-fifth of the value as penalty and presumably offering a trespass offering for his \u201csacrilege\u201d (Lev. 22:14; cf. 5:14\u201316). Though only the priest was \u201cbaptized\u201d into priesthood, his entire household received food denied to laymen. By virtue of the priest\u2019s consecration, the entire household was holy (cf. 1 Cor. 7:14). Transposing this into a New Covenant mode, all the sacred meals of the Old Covenant are now conjugated by the Eucharist, and thus every member of a \u201cpriestly\u201d family should be admitted to the holy meal, regardless of age. Nearly every Christian tradition, however, insists that baptism is the threshold of the Eucharistic community. Thus, children of Christian priests who are admitted to the Lord\u2019s table must first be baptized.
\nInfant boys were, moreover, initiated into a kind of priesthood even in the Old Testament. Though there were degrees of holiness and ranks of priesthood, all Israel was a holy priesthood (Exod. 19:6). Infant boys circumcised on the eighth day were therefore admitted to a priestly people, and there is no reason why the priesthood of the new Israel should be less inclusive. Proof of the priestly status of lay Israelites is found in the rite for cleansing skin disease (Lev. 14). The overall trajectory of the rite is the same as that of ordination. Lepers were cut off from the liturgical assembly of Israel, and the rite reintroduced them to tabernacle, just as priests in the ordination rite moved from the outskirts into the house. In several details, the cleansing rite duplicates the rite of filling:<\/p>\n
1. Both rites began with washings, Lev. 14:8\u20139; 8:6.
\n2. Both followed a 7 + 1 day structure, 14:9\u201310; 8:33 and 9:1.
\n3. In both, blood was smeared on the right ear lobe, thumb, and toe, 14:14; 8:23\u201324.
\n4. Both High Priest and leper were anointed on the head, 14:18; 8:12.<\/p>\n
These parallels suggest that the rites are mutually interpreting. Ordination cleansed Aaron and his sons from defiling affliction, and the cleansing rite inducted the leper into a kind of priestly ministry. Cleansed lepers were not, however, made priests for the first time, for that would have positively encouraged proliferation of skin disease as a means of ascending Israel\u2019s liturgico-social hierarchy. The cleansing rite restored lepers to a priestly standing from which their uncleanness separated them. When did the leper first receive this priestly standing? A clue to the answer is found in the temporal structure of the cleansing ritual: The main rite took place on the eighth day after the priest pronounced the leper clean (Lev. 14:10), and this recalls the eighth-day rite of circumcision (Gen. 17:12). Cleansing a leper, then, renewed his circumcision, as the priestly ordination was an extension of circumcision to the four corners of the priest\u2019s body. Since in a number of details the \u201cre-circumcision\u201d of the leper took the form of an ordination to priesthood, it follows that circumcision inducted to the general priesthood of Israel (cf. Leithart 1995). Though Israelite males were circumcised, women evidently shared some degree of priestly status, for women with skin disease would have been cleansed according to the same quasi-priestly rite as men.
\nSimilar assumptions undergird the rite for deconsecrating a Nazir (Num. 6:1\u201321). Any lay Israelite could take a Nazirite vow, and this put him or her in a state of intensified holiness for a specified time. During the vow, the Nazir refrained from all grape products, let his or her hair grow, and avoided all contact with the dead. When the time of consecration ended, he or she returned to normal lay status by a rite including features that resembled ordination:<\/p>\n
1. Both included three sacrifices in the same order: purification, ascension (whole burnt), and a form of peace offering (Num. 6:16\u201317; Lev. 8:14, 18, 22).
\n2. During the deconsecration rite, the priest placed portions of the peace offering and meal offerings on the palms of the Nazir (Num. 6:19; Lev. 8:25\u201327).<\/p>\n
As with the leper, deconsecration restored the Nazir to pre-vow status as a lay Israelite, ritually imagined as a priestly standing. Again, women taking Nazirite vows would have been restored to the priestly people through this quasi-ordination.
\nThus, the priestly typology is consistent with the practice of infant baptism. Yet our discussion begins to highlight a difference between Israel and the church that I develop more fully in chapter 5. For the moment, we can characterize the difference as a remodeling of the house, the locus of priestly ministry. Under the Old system, Yahweh\u2019s house had, architecturally and ritually, three thresholds: The circumcised crossed the first into the courtyard, but only priests circumcised in four dimensions went through the curtain into the Holy Place, and only the High Priest went through the veil into the Most Holy Place. In the remodeled house, the dividing curtains are rent and the wall of separation broken, so a single baptismal doorway opens into an undivided house (cf. Heb. 9). Whereas priestly \u201cbaptism\u201d once marked out an inner ring within the community of circumcision, ordination and circumcision are now enfolded into Christian baptism. B fulfills and replaces not only O but also circumcision, and this radically reconfigures the people of God. We are beginning to see the grammar of the Christian conjugation of priesthood.
\nThe typology implies a further refinement of paedobaptism. Reflections on infant baptism frequently highlight the benefits infants receive as members of the body of Christ. Augustine (1872) stressed that baptism cleanses the stain of original sin, and Protestants commonly emphasize the catechetical pedagogy that follows baptism. Infants are objects of the church\u2019s care, \u201cpassive\u201d members of the congregation. If baptism initiates to priesthood, however, it initiates to ministry, and this must also be true of infants.
\nTo show how infants serve as personal attendants in God\u2019s new house, we must develop further some implications of our discussion of 1 Corinthians 6:11. As N.T. Wright has pointed out, the Old Testament records of Israel\u2019s restoration from Babylonian captivity nowhere indicate that Yahweh descended in glory upon the second temple in the public, visible way that He had with previous sanctuaries (1996: 621). Christ, as new Moses and new Cyrus, definitively leads Israel from exile, and fulfills the promises to Ezekiel and Zechariah, who saw Yahweh\u2019s return in vision. The One in whom glory dwells bodily fulfills Israel\u2019s hopes (John 1:14). Further, the Pentecostal descent of the Spirit parallels the coming of the glory-cloud on the tabernacle and temple (Acts 2; Exod. 40:34\u201338; 1 Kgs. 8:10\u201311), but here the glory Spirit falls upon the gathered disciples, consecrating the church as the new holy house; and, unlike the priests of Old, the apostles, burning with altar fire, stand to serve in the presence of the Spirit. Thus, the Old gap between temple and people, between house and house is filled, for the assembly of saints is identical to the dwelling place of the Spirit. There is even a kind of circumincession, since each member of the house is individually sanctified as a temple. As 1 Peter 2:4\u201310 makes clear, the priesthood is the house. Baptism inducts into the service of the body of the Priest, whose body is the temple. In this house, priestly service is reimagined\u2014significantly, with an architectural metaphor\u2014as \u03bf\u1f30\u03ba\u03bf\u03b4\u03bf\u03bc\u03ae of the body (1 Cor. 14:3, 12). Housekeeping is conjugated as bodybuilding.
\nBaptized into the priesthood that is the house, therefore, infants contribute positively to the edification of the church. The late Mark Searle wrote,<\/p>\n
a newborn infant alters the configuration of family relationships from the day of its birth, if not sooner, having a major impact on the lives of its parents and siblings.\u2026 Children will test the sacrificial self-commitment, the self-delusions, and the spurious faith of those with whom they come in contact for any length of time. They summon parents particularly to a deeper understanding of the mystery of grace and of the limitations of human abilities.\u2026 All this is merely to suggest that in their own way children in fact play an extremely active, even prophetic, role in the household of faith. The obstacle lies not in the child but in the faithlessness of the adult believers (Searle 1995: 400\u2013401; cf. Poythress 1997a: 26).<\/p>\n
Evidently, this is part of what Herder means when he argues that man is \u201cborn for society.\u201d Though Herder is making the point that human life is an altogether social life, in context he implies infants forge and strengthen social bonds. The radical vulnerability of infants, and the long period necessary for their development to maturity, fosters sympathy, inhibits dispersal, and encourages a common sense of responsibility (Herder 1969: 269\u201370). So also the society of the church is bound together by common concern for her children\u2019s Christian nurture, a concern manifested in baptismal liturgies that require a promise from all members, as well as parents or godparents, to contribute to the infant\u2019s training. Because they are utterly incapable of sustaining their own growth toward maturity, infants help coagulate the community; precisely because infants are entirely passive, their presence is powerfully active and activating.
\nInfant baptism thus implies the question of who is considered a productive member of the Christian priesthood. Physically and mentally disabled persons, social outcasts and refugees, orphans and widows are as much at issue as infants (cf. Hauerwas 1981: 187\u2013194). Paedobaptism enacts Paul\u2019s revolutionary assertion about the Body of Christ: \u201cthe members of the body which seem to be weaker are necessary; and those members of the body, which we deem less honorable, on these we bestow more abundant honor, and our unseemly members come to have more abundant seemliness\u201d (1 Cor. 12:22\u201323). Jesus forms a priestly people from the blind, the lame, the blemished, the weak\u2014precisely those excluded from Old Covenant housekeeping and from the Old Covenant table (Lev. 21:16\u201324).<\/p>\n
Sacramenta Causant Quod Significant<\/p>\n
Thus far, my pushing and stretching have been somewhat modest. My next task, however, is to suggest how the priestly typology sheds light on questions of baptismal efficacy (does baptism do anything, and, if so, what?) and causality (how does it do what it does?). Especially here I push the typology\u2014not, I hope, producing grotesque distortions but squeezing old questions into more serviceable shape. For the moment, I work from John Skorupski\u2019s notion of an \u201coperative ceremony,\u201d a sequence of actions that sets up or cancels a set of rules to govern the person who is the subject of the ceremony (1976: 93\u2013115). I shall eventually agree with Skorupski that sacraments are something more than operative ceremonies, and our paths will diverge; but I hope to show that we can go quite a long way with \u201coperative ceremony\u201d and \u201cpriestly baptism\u201d as coordinates.
\nWe can begin with the obvious: The ordination texts imply an emphatically objective notion of ritual efficacy. At the beginning of the rite, Aaron and his sons were not allowed to approach the altar or enter the tent, but when it ended Aaron was ministering at Yahweh\u2019s table and in the house. Details of the ritual underscore this transition. In the ordination, Aaron and his sons offered a bull as a \u05d7\u05d8\u05d0\u05ea (Lev. 8:14), the proper sacrificial animal for priests (Lev. 4:3). Yet there is a discrepancy in the blood rite. According to Leviticus 4:5\u20137, the blood of a purification for priests was sprinkled in the Holy Place and smeared on the horns of the golden altar of incense. Moses, however, smeared blood from the ordination \u05d7\u05d8\u05d0\u05ea on the horns of the bronze altar and did not take it into the house at all (Lev. 8:14\u201317). If Aaron had offered a purification on the day after the ordination, he would have taken the blood into the Holy Place (cf. Gorman 1990: 122). During the rite, the ordinands did not offer the \u05d7\u05d8\u05d0\u05ea for priests; after the rite, they did. Before the rite they were not priests; after the rite they were.
\nAs Milgrom has pointed out, the disposal of the flesh of the \u201cram of filling\u201d also reflects Aaron\u2019s ambiguous status during the ordination week (Milgrom 1991: 534\u2013535; Exod. 29:31\u201334). On the one hand, its meat had to be eaten in a holy place, and this corresponded to the requirements for most holy offerings (Lev. 6:16\u201317, 26; 7:6). On the other hand, the breast given to Moses as officiant links the ordination ram to the peace offering (cf. Lev. 7:30, 34), the least holy of the sacrifices, whose flesh was distributed among the priest, his family, and the lay worshiper and might be eaten anywhere (Lev. 7:11\u201318, 28\u201334). Thus, the ordination ram was poised in liminal space between holiness categories. After the ordination, however, priests offered no more sacrifices of this type, but only most holy ascension (whole burnt), tribute (grain), purification, and trespass offerings and holy peace offerings. Ambiguous ordination sacrifices were not offered until the next priest was ready to cross the threshold into the house.
\nIn this way, the ordination texts suppress traditional sacramental uses of signum-res. Some commentators have attempted to explain the rites of Leviticus in categories drawn from Christian sacramental theology. For Keil (1980: 2.335\u2013336), the washing of Aaron and his sons signified the spiritual cleansing requisite for approaching Yahweh, the garments of glory and beauty represented the \u201ccharacter required for the discharge of [his]duties\u201d since \u201cthe official costume [was] the outward sign of installation in the office which he was to fill,\u201d and the anointing symbolized the Spirit who equipped the priests for their tasks. There is doubtless some truth in Keil\u2019s interpretation. One can well imagine an Israelite priest reflecting on the tropological implications of the rite and robes of his office. In several senses, one may even say that \u201cfaith,\u201d understood as a trustful and obedient response to Yahweh and His word, is presumed. Faith preceded the rite, first, because Aaron submitted to ordination as a response to Yahweh\u2019s choice and favor (cf. Num. 16:5). Had Aaron not trusted Yahweh\u2019s promise to accept him as priest, he would not have dared draw near the danger zone of His house. Second, Yahweh revealed the ordination rite on the mountain, and Moses performed it in trustful obedience to the vision and voice. Persevering faith was also required after the rite, for maintaining priestly standing depended on hearing, believing, and obeying the word of Yahweh. Nadab and Abihu became watchwords, warning that unfaithfulness in priestly ministry was deadly (Lev. 10:1\u20135).
\nNonetheless, such considerations, crucial as they are, should not obscure the objective efficacy of the ordination per se. Keil, with much of the tradition, confuses different senses of \u201csymbol,\u201d explaining the actions of the ordination service by the Augustinian definition of a symbol as \u201csomething that brings another thing to mind.\u201d In the ordination texts, symbols or, better, \u201critual acts,\u201d were primarily \u201cpragmatic\u201d or \u201cperformative\u201d rather than cognitive. Contrary to Keil, the symbols did not simply point to invisible graces required for priestly ministry but accomplished the ordination. Aaron was not made a priest because his heart was right, or because he experienced or possessed what the ritual symbolized. As far as qualification for priestly standing was concerned, the inner state of his heart was indifferent. He was made a priest by means of the prescribed sequence of ritual acts, because the ritual event became a moment in his life story.
\nAs an operative ceremony, the ordination imposed new tasks, regulations, and responsibilities and conferred new privileges. Priests had their \u201chands filled\u201d with sacrificial flesh to offer on the Lord\u2019s table and were appointed over the house. The intensified holiness of priestly standing also came with strict regulations, for as one drew near to Yahweh, he had to exercise greater care to avoid defilement. Leviticus 21\u201322 enumerates priestly regulations concerning mourning customs, marriage, physical defects and treatment of the body, and the punishment of a wayward daughter. Regarding privileges, we have already seen that the priest stood in Yahweh\u2019s house and shared His food.
\nIf ordination can be construed as an operative ceremony, so, by our typology, can baptism. Faith, again, is necessary. An adult comes to the font in response to the Lord\u2019s electing call through the gospel; he draws near because he trusts Christ to accept him among His people and lead him to the Father. Parents bring infants to the font because they believe Jesus welcomes their children into His family and gives them a ministry in His house. Both adult converts and baptized infants must persevere as disciples of the One whose name they bear. Finally, Christ prescribes the baptismal washing as the initiation rite of the church, so the church expresses her faith that the Lord accepts the baptized into His fellowship whenever she performs it. Yet, baptism makes priests regardless of the faith of the baptized or of the minister of baptism. Rightly done, baptism inducts, ex opere operato, into the priesthood of the Christian church. One may offer strange fire in the Lord\u2019s house immediately following his baptism (Lev. 10:1); but he offers it, and will be judged, as a member of the priesthood.
\nLike ordination, baptism places the baptized under a stricter rule, imposes new obligations, confers new privileges. Fleshly forms of life and relation common elsewhere\u2014strife, ambition, rivalry\u2014are not tolerated within the new household, but are to be replaced with love, mutual encouragement, contentment, service, and edification. As Aquinas emphasizes, the seal of baptism is a \u201cdeputation\u201d to participation in the liturgy that is the church\u2019s life and worship (per ea deputamur ad cultum Dei secundum ritum Christianae religionis; ST 3a, 63, 2). All the baptized contribute to house-keeping\/body-building by cleansing the house of defilement, guarding it from sin, trimming the wicks so that its light burns brightly, continually offering the incense of prayer and the sacrificial bread of praise through the heavenly Priest. Finally, the baptized are privileged to enter the house and approach the table, to share in the sacrificial meal.
\nSo far with \u201coperative ceremony.\u201d To this point, we have affirmed without hesitation the traditional view that baptism \u201ccauses what it symbolizes.\u201d The truth of this claim depends, of course, on what baptism is understood to symbolize. Baptism, I have argued, fulfills and replaces ordination, and thus signifies the making of Christians, those who share in the chrism of the Anointed Priest. Baptism, like ordination, does what it symbolizes by symbolizing what it does, fills hands for household service by \u201cfilling hands\u201d in ritual play, \u201cmanufactures\u201d priests by acting out the manufacture of priests.<\/p>\n
Baptismal Regeneration<\/p>\n
The ordination texts invite us to stretch from operative ceremony to baptismal regeneration. To show how, we will inspect the structure of the tabernacle texts. Recent studies of the ordination have examined it, according to an anthropological taxonomy, as a rite de passage or rite de marge. Of Mosaic rituals, the ordination most closely resembles the triple structure discovered by van Gennep and developed by Victor Turner. After a day of initial rites, the priests remained in the sacred precincts for a week before taking up their duties at the altar and in the house; hence, the rite progressed from separation, through a liminal period, to reintegration. Ordination was, moreover, literally liminal: It took place in the \u201cdoorway\u201d of the tabernacle and the priests passed over the threshold. Van Gennep\u2019s picture of society as a house whose rooms correspond to social positions and whose thresholds correspond to rites of crossing (1960: 26) provides an important clue to the significance of priesthood and sanctuary in ancient Israel.
\nAs Milgrom\u2019s discussion shows, however, not all the details of the ordination correspond to anthropological paradigms (1991: 566\u2013569). During the ordination week, the priests were not subjected to ritual abuse, not stripped of their official robes, and not in a state of undifferentiated communitas, since Aaron remained visibly distinct by virtue of his High Priestly vestments. The most serious danger in the Procrustean effort to cram biblical squares into anthropological circles is that such an approach ignores the shape of the texts themselves. Old Testament passages prescribing longer-term cleansing rites, like the rites themselves, frequently have a seven- or eightfold arrangement that links to circumcision on the eighth day, which, in turn, recapitulates the creation week of Genesis 1. Rather than huddling every feature of ordination under the umbrella of boundary-crossing, the Bible places it under the rubric of creation.
\nFrom an investigation of occurrences of \u201ccompletion formulae\u201d (cf. Gen. 2:1\u20132; Exod. 39:32; 40:33) and \u201ccommand-execution formulae\u201d in \u201cP,\u201d Joseph Blenkinsopp concludes that the construction of the tabernacle recapitulates creation. Links between the tabernacle and creation are also indicated by the prominence and placement of the Sabbath commands (Gen. 2:1\u20134; Exod. 31:12\u201317; 35:1\u20133), the intervention of the Spirit (Gen. 1:2; Exod. 31:3; 35:31), and the fact that the tabernacle was set up on New Year\u2019s Day (Exod. 40:2; cf. Gen. 8:13; Blenkinsopp 1976: 275\u2013292). In a similar vein, Peter Kearney notes that the instructions for building the tabernacle are arranged in seven speeches, marked by the phrase \u201cYahweh spoke to Moses\u201d (Exod. 25:1; 30:11, 17, 22, 34; 31:1, 12). Significantly, the seventh speech commands Sabbath observance, and Kearney makes an effort, not always persuasive, to find correspondences between the previous speeches and the six days of creation (Kearney 1977: 375\u2013387). James B. Jordan has gone beyond Kearney in suggesting that the lengthy first speech (Exod. 25:1\u201330:10) also has a heptamerous structure. In Jordan\u2019s analysis, Exodus 29, the passage prescribing the ordination rite, occupies the sixth-day slot, connecting it with the creation of man (Jordan 1992: 126; Gen. 1:24\u201331). Besides textual allusions to creation, the form of the tabernacle bolsters the ancient view that the sanctuary was a microcosm. Its three zones match heaven, earth, and sea (Gen. 1; cf. Exod. 20:4) and the three-story ark of Noah (Gen. 6:16). Edenic cherubim adorned the tabernacle curtains and veils, and also the cover of the ark of the covenant (Gen. 3:24), suggesting that the tabernacle reconstituted the garden environment (Poythress 1991: 19, 35; Berman 1995: 21\u201334). These parallels lead to two related theological conclusions: Though mediated through Moses\u2019 words and through human labor, the tabernacle, like the original creation, was ultimately the product of the word of Yahweh. Thus, second, the tabernacle is, in some sense, a \u201cnew creation.\u201d
\nAgainst this background, it is significant that Milgrom discovers a sevenfold structure in the ordination text in Leviticus 8, each section marked by a variation of the execution formula, \u201cas Yahweh commanded Moses.\u201d We can diagram Milgrom\u2019s scheme as follows:<\/p>\n
1. Assembling material, vv. 1\u20135
\n2. Washing priests, dressing Aaron, vv. 6\u20139
\nA. Anointing the sanctuary, vv. 10\u201311
\n3. Anointing Aaron, dressing sons, vv. 12\u201313
\n4. Purification offering, vv. 14\u201317
\n5. Burnt offering, vv. 18\u201321
\n6. \u201cOrdination\u201d offering, vv. 22\u201329
\nA\u2032. Anointing the vestments, v. 30
\n7. Seven days of probation, vv. 31\u201336 (Milgrom 1991: 542\u2013544).<\/p>\n
Without trying to correlate each of these seven sections with a day of creation week, some correspondences are striking. The \u201cram of ordination,\u201d which was the climax of Aaron\u2019s qualification as priest, fits into the \u201csixth-day slot,\u201d suggesting that Aaron\u2019s ordination made him a \u201cnew Adam\u201d in the tabernacle \u201cgarden.\u201d The \u201cseventh-day\u201d slot, which stipulates the week-long probation and grants permission to eat in the holy place, has Sabbatical overtones. Thus, the eighth day, when Aaron began his ministry (Lev. 9:1), was the first day of a new creation week, tragically marred by yet another \u201cfall\u201d (Lev. 10:1\u20137). Through the \u201coperative ceremony\u201d of ordination, Aaron did not merely acquire a new social status or religious office. He became a new man.<\/p>\n
You Must Be Born Again<\/p>\n
Applied to baptism, then, our typology leads to a doctrine of \u201cbaptismal regeneration.\u201d Aaron and his sons received new tasks, a new title and name, new privileges and responsibilities, and baptism likewise forms new creatures. But here we meet a sharp objection from traditional sacramental theology, for I seem to have reduced \u201cbaptismal regeneration\u201d to \u201coperative ceremony.\u201d This typology produces a theology of baptism that seems purely \u201cexternal,\u201d \u201cmerely legal,\u201d and \u201cjuridical,\u201d while baptism is something far \u201cmore profound and more inward,\u201d related to \u201can inner salvation-event to which the outward confession is only a precondition\u201d (Schnackenburg 1964: 125\u2013126, 145). This objection goes to the heart of the problematics of sacramental theology, for it poses the question of the relation between outward sign and inward grace. Semi-Marcionite sacramental theology arises here as well, for Schnackenburg\u2019s comments suggest that baptism has a more \u201cinner\u201d and \u201cspiritual\u201d significance than baptism.
\nLouis-Marie Chauvet raises similar objections in his warnings against sociological reductionism. Comparing the sacraments with speech acts, Chauvet cautions that grace is \u201cirreducible to any explanations,\u201d and baptismal grace in particular cannot be reduced \u201ctheologically to the symbolic efficacy of a language act.\u201d This caution is necessary lest theology dissolve into anthropology and become \u201conly a variant within the social sciences.\u201d Thus, \u201cit is one thing to be proclaimed a son or daughter for God and brother or sister for others in Jesus Christ, to be recognized as such by the group, and to be authentically so on the social level; it is quite another to be so on the theological level of faith, hope, and charity\u201d (Chauvet 1995: 439, 443). Distinctions of this sort are central to Chauvet\u2019s work, manifested in a pervasive contrast of Christian identity and salvation (e.g., 1995: 425). In Chauvet\u2019s terms, my account of baptism confuses the sociological with the theological, identity as priest with salvation. Perhaps it is time to cut my losses, abandon the ordination typology, and admit that Marcion\u2019s disciples were right after all. All this stretching and pulling may be even more dangerous than I feared.
\nBrief consideration of Chauvet\u2019s strictures will begin to lead us out of this predicament. Despite its surface plausibility, his distinction between \u201csociological\u201d and \u201ctheological\u201d is erroneous at two levels. Ontologically, Chauvet assumes that \u201clanguage acts\u201d and, apparently, other social and cultural processes are secular realities, not already permeated with religious significance. Even membership in the church, thus, might, for Chauvet, be merely \u201csocial.\u201d Especially in the church, this is never the case. Chauvet\u2019s reminder that church members may be dissembling, though correct enough, is beside the point. A dissembling member is not a \u201csocial\u201d Christian but a \u201cfalse son\u201d or \u201cunfruitful branch,\u201d and this is a theological fact with eternal consequences. Based on this ontological assumption, Chauvet implies that social science can provide an adequate account of immanent social mechanisms, but theology must be trundled out to account for grace. But if social reality is not secular, if every immanent process has a transcendent dimension, then an a-theological sociology cannot give an adequate account of any social process. Moreover, if, as Milbank has powerfully put it (1990), sociology is an alternative theology, and if theology is the social science, then a theological account is sociological, and vice versa. If the social sciences are already theologically committed, then theology cannot supplement them but must revise, perhaps radically, sub-orthodox or heretical social scientific descriptions.
\nWith much of the tradition, Chauvet assumes a conception of personal identity such that the interior self is ontologically fundamental. Since this self is untouchable by external social roles and rituals, no rite can effect truly \u201contological\u201d change but can only skim the surface of personality. For Chauvet, sacraments can affect \u201cidentity\u201d or \u201csocial\u201d standing but not \u201ctheological\u201d status or \u201csalvation.\u201d The way round this obstacle is to abandon the ancient soul imprisoned in the body and its modern counterpart, the Cartesian ego (Kerr 1986), or, to put it differently, to challenge the effort to mark an absolute boundary between inner and outer.
\nA \u201cnarrative\u201d conception of personal identity is helpful here. At a social level, any particular baptism is, as MacIntyre implies, an event in the history of baptism, which is to say, a moment in the church\u2019s story (1989: 100; cf. Jones 1987: 53\u201369). Baptism immerses a person in that history. Identities are formed at the intersection of various narratives of which one is a part (of family, community, nation, and so on), so that when baptism embeds one\u2019s story in that of the church, his identity is objectively modified. To \u201cI am an American, or Scot, or Chinese\u201d is added \u201cI am a member of the Christian priesthood\u201d; one\u2019s \u201cforefathers\u201d now include not only Washington, Robert the Bruce, or Mao but Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; the story that once began, \u201cmy father sailed to the Cape from Amsterdam,\u201d now begins, \u201cmy father was a wandering Aramean.\u201d At an individual level, identity is bound up with the events of one\u2019s life and his (selective) memory of those events. Roles acquired and significant actions done become part of my \u201crecord,\u201d a story that marks my difference from others and traces the continuity of my life through time. Objectively, baptism makes me a priest, and this becomes an episode in the story of who I am. Subjectively, the baptismal narrative into which I am submerged may break violently against the story that, before baptism, identified me, forcing what may be a painful revaluation of my past and producing a revised self-image (Stroup 1981: 95).
\nIn this framework, one can rehabilitate the traditional notion that baptism imprints an \u201cindelible character.\u201d Baptism irreversibly plants my story in the story of the church, for even if I renounce her, my renunciation is part of her history. As a facet of individual identity, baptism is equally permanent, for one is never unbaptized (Pannenberg 1993: 268). A baptized man can renounce Christ, turn persecutor of the church, reject everything he once confessed, forget his baptism. Having once passed through the waters, however, his every action thereafter, including those that are wholly inconsistent with his baptismal identity, are actions of a baptized man. Forgetfulness of baptism is the culpable forgetfulness of the baptized. Even those who leave the Father\u2019s house are priests and sons, however prodigally they may squander their inheritance in riotous living.
\nThus, what is ontologically fundamental is not the naked \u201cI\u201d laid bare by stripping away layers of accidental cultural clothing, any more than God is the \u201cbare minimum\u201d of deity that remains after we peel off His attributes, word, and works. Rather, the ontologically fundamental self, what makes me uniquely me, is a combination of the roles, stories, actions and events of my life; the individual and his world are not hermetically sealed from one another, but mutually defining. Thus, while it is true that I am a husband, it is equally important to see that I am a husband. \u201cHusband\u201d is not an accident inhering in an unmarried self but one of the roles that makes up my identity. Importantly, I am a husband because I have gone through the ceremony of marriage. Operative ceremonies, thus, by placing us in new roles, vesting us with new clothes, and imposing new sets of obligations and rules, effect an \u201contological\u201d transformation, a change in who we are, who we think we are, and who others think we are. Baptism clothes us as priests, and these clothes remake the man.
\nHaving cleared some ground, we can return more explicitly to our typology to show that it implies a theological, not a reductively sociological, view of baptismal regeneration. Aaron received a new \u201cstanding\u201d to serve Israel but the more specific result of ordination was that, as personal attendant and son of the house, he stood to serve Yahweh. Yahweh regarded Aaron differently after the rite, permitting him to enter the house, stand at the altar, offer and eat His bread. Baptism, analogously, effects a transition, as Rowan Williams puts it, not only in the regard of men but in the \u201cgaze of God,\u201d and this makes us \u201cnew creations\u201d in the deepest possible sense. Identity is enmeshed with relations in community, but our most fundamental belonging is to the community of Adam or of Christ, and therefore our basic identity is not constituted by social or cultural factors, but by the transcendent \u201cregard of God upon us\u201d (1996: 90\u201394; cf. Rom. 5\u20136). The baptized is no longer regarded as \u201cstranger\u201d but born again as a \u201cson of the house.\u201d Chauvet notwithstanding, prying apart social and theological \u201clevels\u201d is simply impossible.
\nIt is also helpful here to look more carefully at the blueprints of the remodeled house. In the New Covenant, the house in which the glory-Spirit dwells is the community of believers. Yet, no group\u2019s existence as group is either temporally or logically prior to its common practices. Thousands may be addicted to Tintin comic books, but these teeming multitudes do not form a Tintin fan club until they have declared the club exists, established membership fees and entry requirements, instituted procedures (including the secret handshake), and adopted club identities (e.g., Capt. Haddock, Bianca Castafiore, Prof. Calculus, Rastapopoulos, Snowy, etc.). The club as club exists only in and through these institutions and practices. Likewise, theoretically, any number of individuals may sincerely believe that Jesus is Lord without forming a church. The church as a recognizable human community exists only in her common confession of Christ, obedience to the word, liturgical practices, fellowship and mutual aid, and formal and informal procedures of correction and forgiveness. If the Spirit dwells in the church as church, He dwells in the people constituted by these practices. Baptism is one of the practices without which the church does not exist. Initiation is thus not so much a doorway through which one passes into the house as the first act of membership, and therefore the first contact with the Spirit who circulates through the body (cf. Acts 2:38; 1 Cor. 12:12\u201313). Baptism into the ecclesial priesthood that is the house therefore also confers the \u1f00\u03c1\u03c1\u03b1\u03b2\u03ce\u03bd of the Spirit.
\nFinally, we may consider the relation of baptism to salvation. Salvation is not an entity, substance, or power that floats free of persons in concrete situations. Rather, salvation is \u201cadjectival\u201d: Persons, communities, and, in a sense, the nonhuman creation are or will be saved. A saved person is one who, redeemed in Christ from sin and death, lives as God created him to live, walking with God, submissive to His rule. A saved people consists of the redeemed whose communal life is conformed to the New Covenant under the Lord Christ. Salvation in its fullest sense is eschatological; only at the end will death be swallowed up in victory and \u201cGod\u2019s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.\u201d Yet because the church is on the path toward this eschatological consummation she anticipates, to the extent that she conforms to the will of Christ, the final peace of the kingdom. The church, as a concrete, historical community is thus not merely the means of salvation but the already partially realized goal (Milbank 1987: 204). More specifically, Adam was created to be priest and king, so a saved person is one restored, through Christ, to this Adamic status and task; the eschatological people is the kingdom of priests (Rev. 1:5\u20136; 5:9\u201310; 20:6). By baptism into the royal priesthood, one is incorporated into the race of the Last Adam. It is thus not correct that the Spirit first enlivens and then at some second stage equips for ministry. Living the life of salvation is ministering in God\u2019s house; as baptism authorizes and deputizes to such ministry, it grants a share in the life of salvation.
\nBringing together the arguments of the two preceding paragraphs, and in the light of our discussion of Augustine\u2019s Contra Faustum 19 in chapter 1, we can also address the issue of the \u201cnecessity\u201d of baptism, a question best answered in a corporate rather than individual frame of reference (cf. ST 3a, 61, 1). Within this context, baptism is not merely a pointer to but a necessary part of the now of eschatological salvation. Without her practices, the church would not be the saved people of God because she would not exist at all as a recognizable human community. And that would mean that salvation is not a historical reality. Since it is one of the divinely authorized practices by which the church exists as church, baptism is necessary to her existence; and since the church is the site where salvation has occurred and is occurring, baptism is necessary for salvation.
\nWhat of baptism\u2019s relation to the eschatological \u201cnot yet\u201d? Here I focus on baptism\u2019s effects on the individual. Baptism to priesthood does not guarantee an eternal standing among the people of God, for priests may be removed from the house and cut off from the table. Yet, baptism is not irrelevant to eternal salvation; though baptism \u201cby itself\u201d does not guarantee a standing, baptism never is \u201cby itself\u201d but always a step on a pathway. Perseverance to the end of the pathway, the mark of eschatologically saving faith, is, as Augustine insisted, a gift of grace, which, being grace, is gratuitously distributed as God pleases. God determines which priests stand or fall and brings this about through a variety of specific instruments. He can even use the same means to make one stand and another fall; frogs, pestilence, and hail hardened Pharaoh\u2019s heart but the same plagues prompted others to transfer their loyalty to Yahweh (Exod. 9:20). What we bring under the heading of \u201cthe grace of perseverance\u201d are the concrete ways God holds close and brings nearer, baptism among them. Baptism holds us close by admitting us to His table, where we feed on Christ in the Spirit; by putting us within hearing of His life-giving word; by joining us to people who encourage, exhort, and comfort. Through continual baptismal anamnesis, we stir ourselves to faithfulness in housekeeping and to thankfulness for priestly privileges. In baptism, we are inducted into ministry in God\u2019s house, and continuing in that ministry is the way of salvation. Clothed in the tent, the baptized enters the path of suffering service and living sacrifice whose destination is a weighty and glorious house, the brightness of endless day.
\nPriestly baptism, therefore, implies not a thinly sociological view of \u201cbaptismal regeneration\u201d but a thick theological one, which is equally cultural-linguistic. To say that baptism \u201cregenerates\u201d by conferring new tasks, a new role, and new privileges is not reductionist, for the task is service to the Lord in His house, the role is as His priest, the privileges include fellowship at His table. These are \u201cmerely social\u201d facts only if one assumes that this house is not really God\u2019s house and this table not really His table; but that, of course, is simple unbelief.<\/p>\n
How Can Water Do These Wonders?<\/p>\n
A final question concerns the relation of divine and human action in baptism. Theologians have generally answered Luther\u2019s question, \u201cHow can water do such wonders?\u201d by echoing Augustine\u2019s insistence that God is the principal actor who confers the blessings attributed to baptism. Yet the tradition faces the challenging fact that baptism is palpably a human action. No fire falls, no dove descends, the heavens are not rent, no voices thunder from above. It all seems so very mundane. Is there really a divine action occurring here? How is this God\u2019s act? And if it is, as it appears to be, a human act, how can it confer a spiritual grace? How can washing the body cleanse the soul? (Leeming 1956: 284).
\nAgain, our typology points beyond the impasse. The discussion of \u201coperative ceremony\u201d and \u201cbaptismal regeneration\u201d has already profoundly disrupted the complacent semi-Marcionism that produces such questions. Our typology, as I have extrapolated it, challenges the basic conception that a sacrament is an \u201coutward sign of inward grace\u201d by insisting that the outward signs reach to the innermost parts and that God extends His grace to us in the outward form of concrete favors. Baptism is not, strictly, a \u201cmeans of grace,\u201d a \u201cbottle containing the medicine of grace\u201d or a \u201cchannel\u201d through which the fluid of grace flows. Rather, baptism is a gift of God\u2019s grace, since through it He adopts us as sons. And the \u201csonship\u201d conferred by baptism is not \u201cexternal\u201d to our basic identity but constitutive of it.
\nUnderlying the dilemmas concerning sacramental causation is often a questionable theory of finite causality, for which Thomas Aquinas may serve as an example. According to John Milbank\u2019s account, Thomas taught that being is an effect of creation and cannot depend on any contribution from finite causes. Creative agency requires not just \u201chaving being\u201d but \u201cbeing as such,\u201d and thus, though finite causes give new shapes to things, only God creates. Though Thomas was seeking, rightly, to protect the uniqueness of God\u2019s existence in se, he wrongly confined \u201chuman transitive causation to the level of form\/matter, rather than the level of esse\/essentia\u201d and thus reduced human making to \u201cmere bricolage\u201d (Milbank 1991\u20131992: 1.23\u201326, 28).
\nAccording to William J. Courtenay, scholastic sacramental speculations assume a sharp distinction of creation and causation, the former being reserved to God alone (1972: 189; van den Eynde 1951: [141]). The human enactment of baptism, then, cannot be creative in any strong sense. For much of the tradition, the answer to the question, \u201cHow can water cleanse the soul?\u201d is, it cannot; therefore, the Spirit must intervene \u201cdirectly\u201d alongside the rite to make it effective. But this suggests that the \u201creal\u201d divine-human relationship has moved outside the economy of signs that constitutes human being in the world, and this carries the troubling implication that it is not fully within the compass of human experience. Thus, the scholastic distinction of causality and creation leads to what Peter Cramer identifies as the withdrawal of sacrament \u201cfrom poiesis [\u201cmaking\u201d] into the intangible mysterium of metamorphosis\u2014into a secret mechanics no less mechanical for being secret\u201d (Cramer 1993: 237). A sounder sacramental theology must rehabilitate poesis, and for that we turn again to Milbank, who has made this a centerpiece of his assault on secularism.
\nMilbank claims that a fundamental assumption of modernity is that what is humanly constructed (the \u201cmade\u201d or factum) is secular or religiously neutral (Milbank 1990: 10\u201311). With the Renaissance discovery that culture is wholly a human construction, historical \u201call the way down,\u201d the whole of culture came to be conceived as secular, and religion was pushed into a closet of inner piety. To challenge the identification of factum with the secular, Milbank taps into a \u201ccounter-modern\u201d thread of philosophy and theology found in the work of Nicholas of Cusa and Giambattista Vico, and also in the later metacritical philosophies of Hamann and Herder. At the center of Vico\u2019s thought is the axiom that verum et factum convertuntur (Milbank 1991\u20131992: 1.5), and a key source of this Vichian motto is Cusa, who on Milbank\u2019s reading, makes creation rather than esse the principal philosophical concept (1991\u20131992: 1.22). This has an epistemological dimension, implying that knowledge proceeds by linguistic, scientific, and other cultural constructions, but for Vico the convertibility of verum and factum is absolute, finding its ultimate ontological ground in the interTrinitarian relations. Earlier, Cusa had speculated that the Second Person of the Trinity is the \u201cArt\u201d of God, so that without denying the Nicene Creed, he could speak of a kind of eternal \u201cmaking\u201d in the Father\u2019s begetting of the Son, which rendered \u201cGod\u2019s inner creativity definatory of the divine essence.\u201d Since the Word, \u201cmade\u201d by the Father, contains all truth and wisdom, verum and factum are convertible in the Godhead. \u201cFactum\u201d therefore became one of the transcendentals, along with the good, true, beautiful. Creativity is the chief attribute of the Trinity; a \u201ccreation\u201d ab intra grounds the ad extra (Milbank 1991\u20131992: 1.27\u201330, 82\u201384, 126\u2013132).
\nMan, made in God\u2019s image, is homo creator and, just as the Father is never without His eternal \u201cArt,\u201d so human artifacts are not pasted onto an a-cultural existence but \u201cfully equiprimordial\u201d with human being (Milbank 1991\u20131992: 1.31, 88, 101); Adam, we recall, first lived in a garden. Since human making reflects the eternal character and the continually creative work of God, it is not \u201csecular\u201d or \u201cneutral,\u201d but a reaching for transcendence, an imitation of and participation in God\u2019s ongoing creatio ex nihilo. Reflecting the divine poetry, human construction even partakes of its ex nihilo character. Though the original creation is unique, the inner essence of created existence is ongoing origination, a continual bringinginto-being of new states of affairs. A table is not \u201cmerely rearranged lumber\u201d but a new thing that simply did not exist before being built; Edison created an entire new category of thing with the invention of the light bulb. Thus Milbank, following Cusa and Vico, contests modernity not by rejecting the Renaissance discovery of the \u201cfictional\u201d character of cultural life, but by extending divine concursus to creative cultural activity; though culture is a thoroughly human product, God is the ultimate Author of cultural fictions.
\nThe tabernacle and ordination texts lend support to a fully poetic conception of human being and culture. As we have seen, textual indicators show that the tabernacle was an architectural cosmos, so that when Moses built Yahweh\u2019s house, he was fashioning a \u201cnew creation.\u201d To be sure, the connection between the tabernacle texts and the creation account is an example, in Michael Fishbane\u2019s phrase, of \u201cinnerbiblical interpretation,\u201d evidence of nascent typology within the Old Testament. Yet, the analogy is not a mere trope, nor is it introduced simply to emphasize the tabernacle\u2019s cosmic symbolism. In an objective, historical sense, the erection of the sanctuary inaugurated a new religious and sociological universe. By building it, Moses remade the socio-religious structures not only of Israel but of the world, since the nations were, from Israel\u2019s vantage point, oriented to the sanctuary. Exodus 26:31\u201335, where the hanging of the veil formed the previously unknown division between Holy and Most Holy space, highlights this point.
\nSimilarly, the heptamerous arrangement of Leviticus 8 suggests, as we have seen, that ordination produced new men. This is underlined by the ambiguity about how Aaron and his sons were \u201csanctified.\u201d Exodus 29:43 states that Yahweh Himself sanctified His house, altar, and priest with His glory, yet it is also said that Moses sanctified Aaron and his sons, the tabernacle, and its furnishings by anointing them (Exod. 29:21; Lev. 8:10\u201312). The text offers no harmonization, but one may infer that Yahweh sanctified Aaron and his sons through the actions of Moses. Ordination and consecration of priests was ritual poetry, a participation in Yahweh\u2019s construction of a new world and His consecration of new men. By our typology, baptism too is poetic, for through this human act Christ in the Spirit produces new creations.
\nThe ordination texts also hint at the sense in which we are to take ordination as a divine act. Moses\u2019 actions were poetically creative because they were authorized by the word of Yahweh and revealed on the mountain. Not every act of construction is so authorized. Vico\u2019s idea of \u201cmis-making\u201d comes to the fore here (Milbank 1991\u20131992: 2.5\u20136, 47\u201354), for the tabernacle texts are interrupted by the episode of the golden calf, presented in Exodus as a kind of \u201cnegative tabernacle\u201d (Sarna 1986: 215\u2013220). Though an artifact of human \u201cpoesis,\u201d more importantly the calf had an ultimately destructive effect. An unauthorized cultic \u201cpoem\u201d ended in decreation (Exod. 32\u201334). Numbers 16 makes a similar point concerning priesthood: Korah\u2019s assertion of priestly privilege did not make him a personal attendant to Yahweh, and the result of his presumption in \u201cmaking\u201d himself a priest was catastrophic. Yahweh was determined to dwell only in the house constructed after the pattern on the mountain and maintained according to His Torah, and only a priest \u201cmanufactured\u201d according to His word might approach His house with confidence that he would be accepted as a new man.
\nTo this point, I have come close to the \u201ccovenantal\u201d view associated with the sine qua non theory of sacramental causation (cf. Courtenay 1972: 185\u2013209). On this theory, the causality of the sacraments is like that of cultural institutions and social customs, which depend on value ascribed by an authority within a contingent semiotic economy. Signs have creative power but of a more cultural than magical kind. Because this conception seeks sociological rather than natural\/physical analogies for the sacraments, it protects, better than Thomas, the principle that sacramenta causant significando. Covenantal causality locates the divine role more at the level of institution than at the moment of administration. Contrary to some criticisms, this does not imply that the sacraments lack ontological bulk, that baptism is \u201creally\u201d only water, any more than pound notes are \u201cmerely paper\u201d or boundary stones are \u201cmere rocks\u201d (cf. John Searle 1995; Beardslee 1965: 121). Baptism is efficacious because Jesus assigned this rite value as the entry token for the feast, as the induction ceremony into His Spirit-filled house, as ordination into priesthood. Baptism works because, like the tabernacle and ordination, it conforms to the verbal \u05ea\u05d1\u05e0\u05d9\u05ea revealed on another mountain (Matt. 28:18; Exod. 25:40).
\nA robust sacramental poetry demands a further stretch of our typology; fortunately, the ordination texts comply. The word of Yahweh is not merely a word of authorization but a heptamerous creative word. Moses\u2019 construction was not absolutely originary because it was a response to the Word who was in the beginning, yet it was originary, not only as response but as authorized performance. Because it was the creative word that was performed, the human performance was also creative, producing a new world and new men. Likewise, baptism is efficacious not only because it is authorized, but because it enacts the word of the Incarnate Word by whom the world was made, through whom the world was renewed. The word provides the score: If the church chooses a different arrangement, her music will be dissonant; but as the church sings the creative word, her song is taken up as harmony on the ineffable song of the Creator.<\/p>\n
Conclusion<\/p>\n
Through our typology, we have examined, perhaps with some fresh insight, significant issues of liturgy and theology: the relation of baptism and Eucharist, infant baptism, sacramental efficacy, baptismal regeneration, and sacramental causality. Stretching and pulling have somehow produced a surprisingly lyrical apparatus, for our expansions have ended in poetry and song. Yet the poetry extends further. In the next chapter, we will see that baptism not only makes new men; through it, the body of Christ shares with Christ in making a new cosmos.<\/p>\n
CHAPTER FIVE<\/p>\n
The Priesthood of the Plebs<\/p>\n
In the previous chapter, I developed a theology of initiation in which \u201cbaptismal regeneration\u201d was construed as induction into the \u201ccultural-linguistic\u201d practice of the church (cf. Lindbeck 1984). This is not, as I have argued, an immanentization of transcendent faith, for the \u201ccultural\u201d practice of the church is above all a continual sacrificial liturgy before the face of God, her linguistic practice one of ceaseless prayer and praise. Far from being reductionist, this typology and the framework extrapolated from it permits a richer and stronger affirmation of the objectivity of baptismal grace than found in traditional sacramental theology, which has hesitated to affirm that baptism confers grace ex opere operato (Leeming 1956: 330). If grace is the favor of God manifested in the bestowal of favors, then baptism is and confers grace: the grace of a standing in the house of God, the grace of membership in the community of the reconciled, the grace of immersion in the history of the bride of Christ, the grace of God\u2019s favorable regard upon us. It would be churlish to complain that it does not also guarantee perseverance.
\nObjections may, however, arise from a different quarter. Thus far I have used \u201cregeneration\u201d in the traditional sense of individual transformation, but \u03c0\u03b1\u03bb\u03b9\u03bd\u03b3\u03b3\u03b5\u03bd\u03b5\u03c3\u03af\u03b1 (cf. Tit. 3:5), the Greek term underlying this doctrine, can have a broader significance. Stoic philosophy speculated about cosmic \u03c0\u03b1\u03bb\u03b9\u03bd\u03b3\u03b3\u03b5\u03bd\u03b5\u03c3\u03af\u03b1\u03b9 following periodic \u1f10\u03ba\u03c0\u03c5\u03c1\u03cc\u03c3\u03b5\u03c2 (Dibelius and Conzelmann 1972: 148), and Matthew 19:28 shows the word could be used in a cosmological sense in first-century Judaism and the early church. For some, this cosmic connotation undermines the use of Titus 3:5 as a baptismal text, for how can baptism be a washing that brings cosmic renewal? (cf. Barth 1951: 463\u2013466).
\nAided by the typology developed in previous chapters, I maintain that baptism signifies and extends a covenant renewal portrayed in the New Testament as a \u201ccosmic\u201d transformation; it is, in the widest sense, a \u201cwashing of regeneration.\u201d In chapter 4, I focused on the effect of the ordination rite on Aaron and his sons, and reasoned toward some conclusions concerning baptism\u2019s effects on individuals. Ordination, however, also structured Israelite religious society. When, at the end of the rite of filling, Aaron approached the altar and entered the tent, a spatial distance opened between priests and the congregation who assembled at the \u201cdoorway\u201d (Lev. 8:3; cf. Gorman 1990: 115). Performing the word of Yahweh, Moses composed a new configuration of Israel. On page 123 above, I have sketched Israel\u2019s concentric order of \u201cgraded holiness\u201d (Jenson 1992) radiating from the tent, its ranks marked out, among other things, by clothing, food, and access to or exclusion from holy environments. Two fundamental divisions existed\u2014between priests and people, and between Jews and Gentiles. Both were ritually constituted, by ordination and circumcision respectively, and both marked divisions regarding priestly standing. By comparison with \u201clay\u201d Israelites, priests were attendants to Yahweh in His house, but in comparison with Gentiles, Israel could be called (with apologies to Adam Smith) a nation of housekeepers (Exod. 19:6; cf. Rom. 9:4). Thus, the order of the \u201cfirst covenant\u201d was a graded continuum of priesthood that encompassed not only Israel but the nations. By instituting this continuum, ordination, along with the construction of the tabernacle, formed Israel\u2019s antique order. The \u201ceighth\u201d day of Aaron\u2019s ordination was the first day of a new socio-religious cosmos.
\nIf baptism is the Christian conjugation of ordination, if baptism does now what ordination did then, we have reason to suspect that it also reconstructs the religious landscape. To explain this, I return to two passages discussed in chapter 3, Hebrews 10:19\u201322 and Galatians 3:27, each of which intimates that, as a sign of the \u201csecond covenant,\u201d baptism relocates and redistributes priestly privilege and responsibility. Since the structure of the \u201cfirst covenant\u201d emerged from the construction of the house and the installation of Aaron and his sons as Yahweh\u2019s attendants, the baptismal formation of a new priestly community, historically extending the veil-rending work of Jesus\u2019 ministry, contests and remaps antique Israelite topography. I further argue that the structure of Greek and Roman social life closely resembled Israel\u2019s system of graded holiness, so that the priestly community formed by baptism embodies a critique not only of antique Hebrew but also of antique Gentile order.
\nThis chapter will thus develop the theme with which I began this thesis, that baptism is the \u201cbeginning of the gospel.\u201d Lay Israelites and especially Gentiles, long excluded from Yahweh\u2019s house and table, are, following Jesus\u2019 work, invited in, their hands filled in baptism. If we follow de Lubac\u2019s insistence (1950) that the gospel is an inherently social proclamation about the eschatological restoration of human community in Christ, then baptism, as the washing that effects a global \u201csocial regeneration,\u201d is the beginning of the gospel of the new creation. Like ordination, baptism is an \u201ceighth day\u201d rite, frequently administered in an octagonal baptistery or font (cf. J.G. Davies 1962: 16, 20\u201321).<\/p>\n
To the Jew First<\/p>\n
Though the identity and historical setting of the writer and original recipients of the letter to the Hebrews are subjects of considerable and unresolved debate, the writer describes the theological situation under several metaphors. The first covenant is growing old and becoming obsolete (8:13). Metaphorically the church finds herself at Kadesh Barnea; having left Egypt behind, she must choose, like Israel, between entering to conquer and shrinking back (Heb. 3\u20134; cf Vanhoye 1968: 9\u201326). Some of the book\u2019s descriptions are \u201capocalyptic.\u201d Earthquakes shake heaven and earth, toppling what can be shaken so that the unshakable kingdom alone remains (12:26\u201327). A new \u03b1\u1f30\u03ce\u03bd has come and is coming. The Son is rolling up and changing the \u201cgarments\u201d of heaven and earth (1:10\u201312), for He is the One through whom God made the \u03b1\u1f30\u1ff6\u03bd\u03b1\u03c2 (1:2; cf. Radcliffe 1987: 498). That these \u201cgarments\u201d and \u201cshakable things\u201d refer to the institutions of the \u201cfirst covenant\u201d is evident from the first lines of the epistle, where the author contrasts the filial word with the Torah spoken through angels (1:1\u20132; 2:1\u20134; cf. Gal. 3:19).
\nThe exhortation of 10:19\u201322 springs from this new situation. Several structural features and allusions suggest that this admonition concludes the entire discussion of priesthood, covenant, and sacrifice from the previous chapters. Quotations from Psalm 110 and Jeremiah 31 in Hebrews 10:12\u201317 form an inclusio with the quotations in 8:1, 8\u201312, suggesting that 10:19\u201322 is based on the material of chapters 8:1\u201310:18. But the allusive web stretches more widely. 10:19\u201322 is similar to 4:14\u201316 (Nauck 1960: 203), and the combination of \u03c0\u03b1\u03c1\u03c1\u03b7\u03c3\u03af\u03b1 and \u03bf\u1f36\u03ba\u03bf\u03c2 reaches back to 3:6, which identifies Jesus as \u03c5\u1f31\u03cc\u03c2 rather than \u1f31\u03b5\u03c1\u03ad\u03b1 over the house. The author\u2019s address to his readers as \u1f00\u03b4\u03b5\u03bb\u03c6\u03bf\u03af resonates with the \u1f05\u03b3\u03b9\u03bf\u03b9 \u1f00\u03b4\u03b5\u03bb\u03c6\u03bf\u03af of 3:1, which concludes the discussion of the brothers of Jesus (2:11, 17). Thus, 10:19\u201322 draws implications from the entire discussion of 2:5\u201310:18.
\nHow the pathway leads to this destination is not, however, self-evident. Indeed, the exhortation is surprising. The typological argument of the previous chapters seems to establish only Christ\u2019s entry into the heavenly sanctuary. It seems entirely reasonable to argue that Jesus, the greater Aaron, entered the heavenly sanctuary alone\u2014to cleanse His people to be sure, but not to take His people in. Such a construction would avoid some glaring discontinuities between the Yom Kippur ritual and its fulfillment. Under the law, the High Priest was utterly alone in his approach to the Most Holy Place (Lev. 16:17) and, Calvin\u2019s hints notwithstanding (1853: 234), Israel was not even represented by the stones of the High Priest\u2019s breastplate (Exod. 28:15\u201330), for on the Day of Atonement he wore linen garments, not the mixed garments of his daily ministry (Lev. 16:4). If Jesus takes a multitude into the inner sanctuary, he shatters the whole rite. Truly to fulfill the law, Jesus must enter alone. On this view, the second movement transposes the themes of the first to a higher key, but the melodic and harmonic structure remains entirely intact.
\n10:19\u201322, however, offers a more creative variation of the Levitical theme, apparently leaping from the argument concerning Christ\u2019s priesthood to the conclusion that not only Christ but all Christians may enter the \u1f05\u03b3\u03b9\u03b1. Presumably, the author believed he laid the groundwork in the first ten chapters. Like most foundations, this one is all but invisible to superficial observation, though no less secure for that. Nonetheless, some digging is required.
\nFirst, the epistle opens with four chapters in which the themes of priesthood, sanctuary, and sacrifice figure very little. Jesus is High Priest (2:17), but this title apparently bobs up from some deep current, and it is immediately submerged for two more chapters, only to resurface just as suddenly in 4:14. The focus of the opening chapters is the restoration in Christ of Adamic dominion over the creation. A careful reading of Hebrews 2, however, reveals that the priestly title of 2:17 has been prepared for by several terms that carry, inter alia, Levitical connotations. That crown in 2:9 seems to make Jesus a king, but Israelite High Priests too wore crowns (Exod. 28:36\u201338; Lev. 8:9) and Jesus\u2019 connection with the priest-king Melchizedek is a leitmotif throughout the letter. According to 2:10, Jesus \u201cbrings many sons to glory,\u201d which must, in Hebrews above all, refer to the glory enthroned above the cherubim. Jesus\u2019 purpose in tasting death was to bring His sons and brothers to the glory in the sanctuary, to crown them with priestly (and royal) honor. To accomplish this, He had to be \u201cperfected\u201d (\u03c4\u03b5\u03bb\u03b5\u03b9\u1ff6\u03c3\u03b1\u03b9, 2:10), a verb used in the LXX translation of the technical ordination phrase, \u201cfill the hand.\u201d 2:11 further describes Jesus as the Sanctifier who shares a common origin (\u1f10\u03be \u1f11\u03bd\u03cc\u03c2) with those He sanctifies, so that together Sanctifier and sanctified might form a holy fraternity (3:1), analogous to the Aaronic community of \u201choly ones\u201d (cf. Exod. 29:1). Incarnation in this passage forges a quasi-familial connection between Jesus and the brothers consecrated to stand to serve with Him. Thus, giving him the title of \u201cHigh Priest\u201d is appropriate (2:17).
\nUnderlying the argument of Hebrews 2\u20133, moreover, is the \u201cShiloh pattern,\u201d named for the events recorded in 1 Samuel 1\u20134 (see above, pp. 98, 108). The priestly family of Eli had become incurably corrupt, and Yahweh threatened to remove the \u201chouse\u201d of Eli, to set up the \u201chouse\u201d of another priest, and to desolate His own \u201chouse.\u201d At the same time, He promised a \u201cfaithful priest\u201d who would minister in a purified sanctuary (1 Sam. 2:27\u201336; 3:10\u201314). Soon after, Eli and his sons died, and the Philistines took the ark into captivity. Under Solomon, Yahweh established a new set of houses\u2014the priestly house of Zadok presiding over the Jerusalem temple. Judgment on \u201cShiloh\u201d recurs in the Old Testament: Jeremiah, a priest from the descendants of Eli at Anathoth (Jer. 1:1; cf. 1 Kgs. 2:26\u201327), warned that what had happened to Eli and Shiloh would be repeated in the destruction of Solomon\u2019s temple and removal of its unfaithful priests (Jer. 7:12\u201314). As in the first instance, however, this warning came with the promise of a restored house and a new priestly family, fulfilled in the restoration temple and the High Priest Joshua (Zech. 3).
\nAs we have seen in chapter 3, \u201cShiloh\u201d has its place in the typological imagination of the early church. In the early chapters of Luke, John and Jesus are twin Samuels announcing the coming judgment upon the temple and its corrupt leadership. If they warn of the destruction of \u201cShiloh,\u201d however, they also promise the formation of a new priesthood and the construction of a new house. This typology is operating in Hebrews 2\u20133. 2:17 contains a virtual quotation from 1 Samuel 2:35, describing Jesus as a \u201cfaithful\u201d High Priest, and 3:6 indicates that He is the Son over the \u201chouse\u201d of those sons who have been brought to glory. Since Jesus is a sanctified priest, it follows that His household is a priestly house. He is a new Zadok, who, not coincidentally, bears the name of the High Priest of the restoration. From the very first chapters of Hebrews, the establishment of a new priesthood, a new house of housekeepers, is presented as the goal of Jesus\u2019 ministry. When the author later reminds his readers that they have a \u1f31\u03b5\u03c1\u03ad\u03b1 \u03bc\u03ad\u03b3\u03b1\u03bd \u1f10\u03c0\u1f76 \u03c4\u1f78\u03bd \u03bf\u1f36\u03ba\u03bf\u03bd (10:21), he is assuring them they may enter the house since they have become a holy brotherhood (3:6) through and under their High Priest. For the writer of this letter, the \u201capocalyptic\u201d costume change of heaven and earth involves a change not only of \u03bd\u03cc\u03bc\u03bf\u03c2 and \u03b4\u03b9\u03b1\u03b8\u03ae\u03ba\u03b7, but of priesthood.
\nHebrews 7 provides another cornerstone of the argument by showing that this new priestly house is no longer confined to a single tribe or class but encompasses the whole people of God. Throughout the discussion of the mysterious figure of Melchizedek, the focus of the writer, despite some traditional etymologizing of his name and titles, is fixed on the superiority of this priest to Aaron. He teases this conclusion out of Genesis 14 in several ways. In stressing Melchizedek\u2019s lack of genealogy, the author is not being \u201cplayful\u201d (pace Attridge 1989: 187), nor is he offering a glaringly fallacious argumentum ex silencio. Silences are significant in the midst of surrounding noise; holes in the text are noteworthy if one expects higher ground. And silence concerning the ancestry of a priest is, for both Jew and Greek, nothing short of revolutionary, for \u201cfleshly\u201d descent from the founder of the house was required for many priesthoods of the ancient world (Hughes 1977: 248\u2013249). Dispensing with the genealogical qualification challenges the whole system of graded holiness.
\nThe author also supports his brief for the superiority of Jesus\u2019 priesthood by referring to Abraham\u2019s payment of tithes to Melchizedek. Because Abraham is the \u201cpatriarch\u201d and acknowledged head of all Israel, his homage through gift to Melchizedek indicates that Levi and Aaron too are subordinate to the Melchizedekan priest. This much is on the surface of the text, but the harmony beneath the surface comes from the narrative of Numbers 16\u201318, in which Korah, Dathan, and Abiram attempt to seize Aaron\u2019s priesthood (Num. 16), Yahweh confirms Aaron\u2019s election as priest by causing his staff to bear fruit in His presence (Num. 17), and He institutes a tithe system in which the Levites collect a tenth from Israel and passed on a tenth of their tenth to the priests (Num. 18). The tithe system in Hebrews 7:5, then, was set up to confirm the Aaronides\u2019 exclusive standing in the holy place. Institutionalized gift-giving traced the contours of religious and social order, and the tithe system also reinforced gradations in food rights, for only Levites could eat from Israel\u2019s tithes and only priests from the tithes of the Levites (Num. 18:10, 18). Tithing fortified the partitions separating Israelite from Israelite, showing that some from Abraham\u2019s loins were closer to Yahweh\u2019s house and table than others from the same loins (Heb. 7:5, 10). The argument of Hebrews 7 is less fanciful and more daring than some have dreamed, for by leveling distinctions within Abraham\u2019s seed, the writer seems to take his stand with Korah against the priestly privileges of Aaron.
\nConsensus concerning the book of Hebrews is difficult to come by, but I suspect that scholarly opinion is unanimous that Korah did not write Hebrews. Yet, this background clarifies the implications of Melchizedek\u2019s reappearance. The \u201cchange in law\u201d is, in Hebrews 7, mainly a change in qualifications for priestly standing (cf. \u03bd\u03cc\u03bc\u03bf\u03c2 in 7:12, 16). Under the Old system, priestly privilege was dependent on genealogy, but the Melchizedekan priest is qualified by resurrection (7:16), and therefore voids the fleshly \u201claw.\u201d Christ holds a priesthood that transcends ancient distinctions, a priesthood to which not only lay Israelites but even Abraham paid homage. When Melchizedek appears, all the seed of Abraham bows in and with the patriarch; before Melchizedek, the seed of Abraham is one and undivided. It follows that access to and ministry in the house, once a privilege of those who received tithes, is now extended to all who join Abraham in giving gifts to Melchizedek.
\nGiven the structural analogy of temple and people in the Old system, one would expect that an undifferentiated priesthood would minister in an undivided sanctuary. This is precisely what we find. Hebrews 10:19 states that those who have sprinkled hearts and washed bodies are permitted confidently (\u1f15\u03c7\u03bf\u03bd\u03c4\u03b5\u03c2 \u2026 \u03c0\u03b1\u03c1\u03c1\u03b7\u03c3\u03af\u03b1\u03bd) to draw near to \u03c4\u1f70 \u1f03\u03b3\u03b9\u03b1. \u03a4\u1f70 \u1f03\u03b3\u03b9\u03b1 corresponds to the Most Holy Place, since verse 20 encourages the readers to enter by the way that Jesus has made through the \u03ba\u03b1\u03c4\u03b1\u03c0\u03ad\u03c4\u03b1\u03c3\u03bc\u03b1. Thus, the baptized are now in the position of the High Priest. Continuing to think of \u201cHoly\u201d and \u201cMost Holy,\u201d however, misses the point of chapter 9, which hinges on the contrast between the \u201cfirst\u201d and \u201csecond,\u201d terminology that, applied to the chambers of the tabernacle, is unique to this author (Lane 1991: 219). This distinction is initially applied not to the tabernacle but to the covenant (8:7, 13). Though translators are correct to supply \u03b4\u03b9\u03b1\u03b8\u03ae\u03ba\u03b7 in 9:1, this emendation misses the subtlety of the author\u2019s presentation. \u1f21 \u03c0\u03c1\u03ce\u03c4\u03b7 in 9:1 prepares for the same phrase in 9:2, this time applied to the \u03c3\u03ba\u03b7\u03bd\u03ae: \u201cFirst\u201d tent rhymes with \u201cfirst\u201d covenant (cf. D\u2019Angelo 1979). This creates a fruitful ambiguity at 9:18, where the author asserts that even \u1f21 \u03c0\u03c1\u03ce\u03c4\u03b7 was not inaugurated without blood. Again, most translations emend \u201ccovenant,\u201d but the Greek raises the question, \u201cthe first what?\u201d and the author\u2019s answer is that the initiation of the \u201cfirst\u201d involves both cutting a covenant and constructing a sanctuary (cf. 9:19\u201321). We should also take note of the rare verb \u1f10\u03b3\u03ba\u03b1\u03b9\u03bd\u03af\u03be\u03c9, used in the New Testament only in Hebrews 9:18, where it describes the \u201cinauguration\u201d of the covenant, and in 10:20, where it refers to the \u201copened\u201d way into the sanctuary (cf. Pelser 1974: 47, 49). Covenant and sanctuary are inseparable: A new covenant remodels the holy place.
\nHaving established this homology between covenant and sanctuary, the writer is prepared to offer his summary of the significance of the Mosaic tabernacle. It shows that the way into the \u1f05\u03b3\u03b9\u03b1 has not been manifested \u1f14\u03c4\u03b9 \u03c0\u03c1\u03ce\u03c4\u03b7\u03c2 \u03c3\u03ba\u03b7\u03bd\u1fc6\u03c2 \u1f10\u03be\u03bf\u03cd\u03c3\u03b7\u03c2 \u03c3\u03c4\u03ac\u03c3\u03b9\u03bd (9:8). In context, the \u201cfirst tent\u201d is the \u201choly place\u201d (vv. 2, 6), but through the play on \u201cfirst\u201d and \u201csecond\u201d in the preceding verses, the first tent becomes a \u03c0\u03b1\u03c1\u03b1\u03b2\u03bf\u03bb\u03ae for the entire dissolving first covenant (Lehne 1990: 100). This is so because the Mosaic tabernacle (and the similarly structured Solomon temple of Solomon) architecturally embodied the exclusion of the \u201csons\u201d from glory. While the first tent had standing, only those qualified by fleshly descent from Aaron might draw near to stand to serve. Hebrews announces that the \u201cfirst\u201d no longer has standing, since the \u201csecond\u201d has appeared and the \u201ctime of reformation\u201d has begun at the consummation of the ages. While the first tent blocked the \u1f40\u03b4\u03cc\u03c2, the Melchizedekan Priest has eliminated the first tent and made a \u1f40\u03b4\u03cc\u03c2, so that the new undifferentiated priestly fellowship might minister in an undivided house.
\n12:28\u201313:17 spells out the nature of New Testament \u201chousekeeping\u201d as love for brothers, hospitality, sexual purity, generosity, offering praise, and eating the Eucharistic flesh denied to Aaronic priests, and Hebrews makes clear that these facets of ecclesial life have a priestly character. Christ\u2019s blood cleanses the conscience from dead works in order to prepare for \u201cservice\u201d (\u03bb\u03b1\u03c4\u03c1\u03b5\u03cd\u03b5\u03b9\u03bd) to the living God (Heb. 9:14). While the LXX distinguishes consistently between \u03bb\u03b5\u03b9\u03c4\u03bf\u03c5\u03c1\u03b3\u03af\u03b1 (\u201cpriestly ministry\u201d) and \u03bb\u03b1\u03c4\u03c1\u03b5\u03af\u03b1 (\u201cworship\u201d in a general sense, including both priests and people), in Hebrews this distinction is effaced and the \u03bb\u03b1\u03c4\u03c1- word group is normally used to describe priestly service in the tabernacle (8:5; 9:1, 6). Thus, when 9:14 uses this terminology to refer to Christian service, it means that Christ\u2019s blood cleanses consciences specifically to qualify for priestly ministry (Strathmann 1967: 59\u201365). The new priesthood is not a wholly undifferentiated community. In the Pauline image of the body, the church is harmony of difference rather than a blank unity. Each member ministers to Christ in His house, but housekeeping is multifaceted. Nor is the priestly community not egalitarian in every respect, for among the necessities of housekeeping are ministries of government, administration, and leadership (Heb. 13:7, 17). No member, however, may lay claim to privileged entry rights into the house or exclusive rights at the table. Every member equally stands to serve, hands filled to sacrifice and to feast.
\nBaptismal induction to priesthood is the ritual enactment of the gospel of Hebrews. Through His unique sacrifice and His entry into the heavenly sanctuary, Jesus has shaken the Old Covenant house, and baptism temporally and geographically extends His disruption of heaven and earth. By its very form, baptism conjugates the Old rite, administering the once-for-all priestly bath to those outside the lineage of Aaron, and thus enacts the promise and threat of Shiloh: formation of a new priestly house crowned and enthroned together with Melchizedek, the dissolution of priestly gradations within the seed of Abraham, the end of genealogical qualification for priests, and the replacement of the divided sanctuary. As first-century Jewish converts, once divided into priests and laymen (cf. Acts 6:7), were baptized, a homogeneously priestly people emerged. Baptism formed a new Israel out of the old, molding her into the eschatological race of the Last Adam, the kingdom of priests. It is the efficacious sign of the clothing change of heaven and earth, destroying antique Israelite order and remapping the terrain. It is the \u201cwashing of \u03c0\u03b1\u03bb\u03b9\u03b3\u03b3\u03b5\u03bd\u03b5\u03c3\u03af\u03b1.\u201d<\/p>\n
And to the Greek<\/p>\n
J. Louis Martyn has pointed out that Galatians 6:15 sets \u201cnew creation\u201d not over against \u201ccircumcision\u201d but over against an order founded on the duality of \u201ccircumcision\/uncircumcision.\u201d Similarly, 3:28 announces the end of a world structured by \u201cpairs of opposites,\u201d which many ancients believed were the building blocks of the physical and social universe (1985: 410\u2013424; cf. Lloyd 1966: chs. 1\u20132). Male\/female in Galatians 3:28 alludes to Genesis 1:27 (Hays 1983: 232), and like male\/female, Jew\/Greek and slave\/free are dualisms of the world now engulfed and dissolved in the baptismal flood. In Hebrews 10:19\u201322, baptism announces the rending of the veil between priests and people; in Galatians 3:27, baptismal investiture ruptures the dividing wall between Jew and Greek. Obliteration of the latter distinction, like the dissolution of the former, is an aspect of an \u201capocalyptic\u201d \u03c0\u03b1\u03bb\u03b9\u03b3\u03b3\u03b5\u03bd\u03b5\u03c3\u03af\u03b1.
\nGalatians 3:28 provides rich material for a theological sociology, but here I focus only on questions of priesthood. I argued in chapter 3 that Galatians 3:27 describes baptism with a metaphor most likely borrowed from the ordination rite. Assuming this to be the case, I wish now to investigate more carefully how an allusion to priestly investiture fits into Paul\u2019s argument and illuminates the significance of baptism. To do this, I examine the Jew\/Greek dichotomy, a key theme of Galatians that concerns the \u201csociological\u201d question of defining the boundaries of the covenant people.
\nThough opinions differ concerning the degree to which the Judaizing \u201ctroublers\u201d in Galatia (1:7; 5:12) wished to bring Gentile Christians under the law, it is clear they were demanding submission to Jewish ceremonies before accepting Gentiles as full members of the New Israel. At Antioch, the issue was table fellowship, and the Jew\/Gentile question is still Paul\u2019s concern in chapters 3\u20134, where, however, he does not pose the question as, Who is a table fellow? but, Who is Abraham\u2019s seed? (Beker 1980: 48; Dunn 1990: 131), an emphasis highlighted by the references to Abraham that form an inclusio around these chapters (3:6\u20138; 4:21\u201331). For both Paul and his opponents, however, these questions are virtually equivalent, for all parties in the dispute agree that all Abraham\u2019s seed is welcomed at table.
\nFor Paul, this touches the heart of the gospel. He severely rebuked Peter for withdrawing from meals with Gentiles, calling it a threat to the gospel and an attack on justification by faith (2:11\u201321; cf. Stendahl 1963). According to 3:8, the Lord \u03c0\u03c1\u03bf\u03b5\u03c5\u03b7\u03b3\u03b5\u03bb\u03af\u03c3\u03b1\u03c4\u03bf to Abraham when He promised that \u201cAll the nations will be blessed in you.\u201d There are two dimensions to the gospel blessing. In verse 8, the Gentiles are promised a share in Abraham\u2019s justification, while 3:14 promises the gift of the Spirit. As defined for Paul\u2019s purposes here, the gospel proclaims the dissemination of the Abrahamic blessings of the Spirit and righteousness to all nations (Hays 1983: 203; 1989: 106). If any single nation claims exclusive rights to this blessing, the promise is jeopardized, and the gospel announcing its fulfillment is no gospel.
\nConsideration of the theme of the \u201cone\u201d illuminates Paul\u2019s discussion (Wright 1991: ch. 8). In 3:16, Paul insists, in what appears to be a strained argument, that Yahweh gave the promises \u03c4\u1ff7 \u03c3\u03c0\u03ad\u03c1\u03bc\u03b1\u03c4\u03af, not \u03c4\u03bf\u1fd6\u03c2 \u03c3\u03c0\u03ad\u03c1\u03bc\u03b1\u03c3\u03b9. Though often taken as a direct reference to Jesus, this interpretation fails to meet the crucial test of relevance: No one disputes the \u201coneness\u201d of the Messiah. What the troublers threaten is the \u201coneness\u201d of the Messiah\u2019s church (Wright 1991: 159). Wright\u2019s interpretation is therefore more satisfying. He points out that \u1f11\u03bd \u03c3\u03c0\u03ad\u03c1\u03bc\u03b1 is used in a collective sense in 3:28\u201329. If 3:16 refers to the \u201ccollective Christ,\u201d Paul\u2019s argument is that God did not promise righteousness and the Spirit to many distinct lines of descendants but to a single people, coagulated from many nations. Wright finds support in the use of \u03c3\u03c0\u03ad\u03c1\u03bc\u03b1 in the LXX of Genesis 15:13; 17:7\u20138; 22:17\u201318, and in the light of 1 Corinthians 12:12, the \u201cChrist\u201d of Galatians 3:16 could refer to the totus Christus, Head and body (Wright 1991: 158). Maintaining Jew\/Greek distinctions violates the gospel that promises the Abrahamic blessings to \u1f11\u03bd \u03c3\u03c0\u03ad\u03c1\u03bc\u03b1.
\nWright\u2019s interpretation also clarifies the enigmatic verse 20: \u1f41 \u03b4\u1f72 \u03bc\u03b5\u03c3\u03af\u03c4\u03b7\u03c2 \u1f11\u03bd\u1f78\u03c2 \u03bf\u1f50\u03ba \u1f14\u03c3\u03c4\u03b9\u03bd, \u1f41 \u03b4\u1f72 \u03b8\u03b5\u1f78\u03c2 \u03b5\u1f37\u03c2 \u1f10\u03c3\u03c4\u03b9\u03bd, a crux made more difficult by mistranslations. Paul is not offering an axiom in a general theory of mediation, as most translations suggest, but is making a point about the specific mediator he has just mentioned, Moses. The best translation is: \u201cNow (he) is not the mediator of the one; but God is One\u201d (Wright 1991: 163). Moses was not the mediator of one what? Evidently, this refers to verse 16, but on the usual understanding of that verse, verse 20 would make the weird claim that Moses did not mediate Jesus. On Wright\u2019s interpretation, Paul is saying that Moses is not the mediator of the unified people promised to Abraham; he is not the mediator of the totus Christus. This is basic to Paul\u2019s explanation of why the law cannot be the final form of God\u2019s covenant. God promised the Spirit and justification to the \u201cone seed\u201d of Abraham but the law institutes practices that necessarily divide and segregate. These divisions, while aptum in their time, have to be temporary, for throughout the period of the law, the blessings promised to \u201cone seed,\u201d given 430 years earlier, remained in force (3:17). Ultimately, the reason why God cannot be satisfied with a world or church divided into Jew and Greek is something every Jew knew and confessed daily\u2014that Yahweh our God is One Lord. Thus, as Wright puts it, Paul uses \u201cthe Shema to relativize the Torah\u201d (1991: 171). So, it is central to Paul\u2019s gospel that Jew\/Greek give way to \u201cone seed\u201d; or, to say the same thing, that the dualism of \u201ccircumcision\/uncircumcision\u201d give way to \u201cnew creation.\u201d
\nLiterature on Galatians, however, gives surprisingly little attention to the nature of the distinction that Paul is overthrowing. Jew\/Gentile was not a racial difference, since any man might be circumcised into Israel. Nor was it necessarily a distinction between true worshipers and idolaters, for God-fearing Gentiles worshiped Yahweh without being circumcised or, apparently, observing dietary and cleanliness laws (cf. Acts 10:1\u20132). Rather, the segregation of Israel from the nations instituted by Torah was a division with respect to priestly privileges and tasks, with respect to proximity to and responsibility for Yahweh\u2019s house (cf. Thielman 1994: 55\u201357). Indicative of this, as Hamerton-Kelly points out, the temple was the place where, in Paul\u2019s day, \u201cthere was an explicit system of exclusion,\u201d and Paul\u2019s reference to breaking down and building up (Gal. 2:18) perhaps refers to the dividing wall between Jewish and Gentile chambers (1990: 107\u2013108). Moses was thus not the mediator of the \u201cone,\u201d but of the distinct, separated \u201choly nation\u201d and \u201croyal priesthood\u201d (Exod. 19:6).
\nPaul\u2019s claims about the \u201claw\u201d must be understood in this context. Though often implicitly interpreted in terms of modern conceptions of legal or moral systems, \u03bd\u03cc\u03bc\u03bf\u03c2 refers to the whole constitution of worship and national life instituted at Sinai (Belleville 1986: 71). A chief purpose of the law\u2019s pedagogy (Gal. 3:24) was to enable Israel to live safely with the dangers of the sanctuary. Uncleanness had to be identified and eliminated, sin confessed and atoned, sacrificial food offered, the house maintained, so that Yahweh would not break out in wrath or abandon the house, leaving it desolate (Num. 18:5). To be \u1f51\u03c0\u1f78 \u03bd\u03cc\u03bc\u03bf\u03bd was to be under the strict regulations governing those near the holy house. The specific issues at stake in Galatians revolve around Israel\u2019s priestly standing. Peter\u2019s withdrawal from table fellowship with Gentiles arose from a rigorist interpretation of the Torah\u2019s dietary restrictions, which were part of the system of graded holiness introduced by the Sinai covenant (Lev. 11:44\u201345), and circumcision set the boundaries of the Old priestly people. Judaizers who enforced food laws and required circumcision were implicitly claiming that Jews continued to have a standing that Gentiles did not have.
\nThis helps also to specify the sense in which the dualisms of Galatians 3:28 are dissolved by baptism. He certainly did not believe \u201cthere is neither male nor female\u201d tout court (cf. 1 Tim. 2:12\u201315), he assumed that slavery would continue (Eph. 6:5\u20139), and Donaldson persuasively argues that even the Jew\/Greek distinction remained relevant for Paul\u2019s mission (Donaldson 1997: 158). At the center of the gospel, however, is the declaration that there is no more Jew\/Greek (or male\/female, slave\/free) with respect to access to God, standing in His house as sons, seating at His table, or inheritance of Abrahamic righteousness and the Spirit. Hence, Paul wraps Jew and Greek in common priestly robes. Since the distinction of priestly Jew and non-priestly Gentile forms a fundamental coordinate of antique religious topography, Paul\u2019s gospel of the \u201cone\u201d seed, symbolized and enacted in baptism, announces the beginning of a new creation. Here, again, baptism is the \u201cwashing of \u03c0\u03b1\u03bb\u03b9\u03b3\u03b3\u03b5\u03bd\u03b5\u03c3\u03af\u03b1.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jew, Gentile, Barbarian, Greek<\/p>\n
Though Israel alone was \u1f51\u03c0\u1f78 \u03bd\u03cc\u03bc\u03bf\u03bd, Paul warns that the Gentile Galatians, having been redeemed from slavery, are in danger of reverting (\u03c0\u03ac\u03bb\u03b9\u03bd, 4:9) to a similar subjection under the \u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03b9\u03c7\u03b5\u1fd6\u03b1 \u03c4\u03bf\u1fe6 \u03ba\u03cc\u03c3\u03bc\u03bf\u03c5 (4:3, 9). Though scholars debate the relation of the law and the \u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03b9\u03c7\u03b5\u1fd6\u03b1, it is evident they have a strong family resemblance, so that life in subjection to \u03c4\u1f70 \u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03b9\u03c7\u03b5\u1fd6\u03b1 was for the Gentiles what life under the law was for Israel. If we follow Martyn\u2019s suggestion that for Paul the new creation replaces a world built upon binary oppositions, and if, as I have argued, the opposition of priest\/non-priest is a fundamental structure of the world system whose termination Paul announces, and if subjection under the stoixei\/a is parallel to life \u1f51\u03c0\u1f78 \u03bd\u03cc\u03bc\u03bf\u03bd, then one can hypothesize that Gentile socio-religious organization was, like the Jewish, a system of \u201cgraded holiness,\u201d organized around the opposition of priest\/non-priest. If this is the case, redemption from the \u201celementary principles,\u201d like redemption from the curse of the law, forms a community where this distinction no longer operates. Baptism to priesthood breaks through the boundaries of Gentile order as well as Hebrew.
\nThe classic studies of the ancient Greco-Roman city by Max Weber and Fustel de Coulanges support this hypothesis. In his unfinished treatise on the city, included at the end of Economy and Society, Weber examines the economic, political-administrative, and military dimensions of the ancient city, but he suggestively notes that \u201cThe truly fundamental element in the formation of a polis \u2026 was always thought to be the fraternization of the sibs into a cult community,\u201d the sunoikismos or \u201csettling together,\u201d which involved \u201cthe replacement of the prytaneia of individual families by a common prytaneion of the city in which the prytans took their common meals\u201d (1978: 1286). Admission to cultic citizenship was strictly controlled, so that \u201cthe term denoting a \u2018citizen\u2019 is at times directly identical with the word for a member of the patrician \u2018families\u2019 \u201d descended from the founding clans (1978: 1288).
\nThus, \u201cin historical times only a member of the patriciate (patricius, eupatrides) could validly communicate, as priest or official, with the gods of the polis through conducting the sacrifices or consulting the oracles (auspicia)\u201d (1978: 1288). Ancient cities were \u201creligiously exclusive\u201d to those outside, and because the clans or gentes that were an \u201cindispensable feature\u201d of even democratic cities were themselves exclusive cultic organizations, the system was divided \u201cinternally against everyone who did not belong to one of the confederated sibs\u2014that is, against the plebeians\u201d (1978: 1242). Freed slaves were also denied access to priesthoods (1978: 1357\u201358). Patrician\/plebeian was therefore originally a religious divide, and the \u201cstruggle of the Orders\u201d was a conflict over the distribution of priestly privilege within the ancient city. Over time, the patrician-plebeian distinction became less important, and as religious divisions gave way to stratification by wealth, \u201cstatus conflict\u201d gave way to \u201cclass struggle\u201d (1978: 1308\u20139).
\nIn certain respects, Fustel de Coulanges\u2019s history of the ancient city follows the same lines. According to his evolutionary scheme, ancient religion began as domestic religion, focused on honor for dead ancestors. Archaic religions taught that the souls of the dead lived on under ground, and that the dead were divine. Tombs therefore became places of worship, where the living offered blood and food. Each house, moreover, had its own domestic cult, centered on the hearth fire, which symbolized the continuing life of the ancestors. The fire had to be maintained and worshiped, and it received the first portion of all meals. Since the cult was offered to ancestors, only blood relations might participate as priests, though other members of the household might join in through their mediation. From this construct, Fustel extrapolates primitive conceptions of marriage (a woman\u2019s initiation into the cult of her husband\u2019s family) and property (based on the association of departed ancestors with the soil).
\nWhen families organized into a city, they preserved many elements of domestic religion, projected onto a larger screen. Each gens of a city had its own ancestral religion, and the gentes banded together to form a civic order by adopting a common worship, usually that of the most powerful families. Like the domestic, the civic cult centered on daily offerings at the hearth in the prytaneion, dedicated to the founder of the city or to the eponymous deity. The chief ceremony of the civic religion was the common meal, which the priests ate daily but which occasionally involved all citizens, whose festive dress, at least in Athens, was reminiscent of priestly garments. Every city was \u201choly,\u201d a \u201csanctuary,\u201d and only the citizens could enter its temples and sacred spaces (1980: 117, 133, 142\u2013143, 147\u2013149).
\nAlso living in the city\u2019s territory were the \u201cplebs,\u201d excluded from the religion of the city because they lacked genealogical connection with the founding clans. Segregation of patrician and plebeian was sometimes geographic:<\/p>\n
Originally a Greek city was double; there was the city, properly so called\u2014\u03c0\u03cc\u03bb\u03b9\u03c2, which was built ordinarily on the summit of some hill; it had been built with the religious rites, and enclosed the sanctuary of the national gods. At the foot of the hill was found an agglomeration of houses, which were built without any religious ceremony, and without a sacred enclosure. These were the dwellings of the plebeians, who could not live in the sacred city (1980: 223).<\/p>\n
Foreigners to the civic religion and geographically thrust to the margins, the plebs had no political rights, for citizenship required membership in a clan and participation in the cult. At base, what separated pleb from patrician was the former\u2019s lack of religion: Plebs might not hold a priesthood (1980: 225). Over several centuries, the archaic city witnessed a series of revolutions that ended with the plebs\u2019 entry into the city. Having gained their share of wealthy men, soldiers, and their own priests, the plebs made a bid for equality with the patricians. In Rome, the struggle climaxed when the plebeians secured the right to priesthoods previously reserved for patricians.
\nThe formal similarities between the antique order of Greece and Israel are striking. Both were internally structured by the distinction between priest and non-priest. In the Greek city, the citizens exercised \u201cpriestly\u201d functions and enjoyed priestly privileges, while non-citizens were excluded. Originally (and always mythically) citizenship was inherited from founding clans. Within Israel, the Aaronic priests alone served in the house of Yahweh and only the circumcised participated fully in the community and its worship. In both Israel and Greece, the gradations of priesthood extended to encompass the entire political world: Greek\/barbarian echoes Jew\/Gentile. In both, the divisions within the community were displayed in access to or exclusion from sacred places and holy food. On the other hand, both Greece and Israel anticipated to some extent a wider distribution of priesthood. After the struggle of the orders, priesthood and citizenship were extended to those outside the hereditary ranks, and already at Sinai Israel became a priestly nation.
\nIt was, however, the rise of Christianity that finally destroyed the hereditary principle of priesthood and with it the graded holiness of antique order. Medieval cities were, Weber argues, still \u201ccultic,\u201d but clan ties no longer dominated social order (though this transformation was more complete in Northern than in Southern Europe; 1978: 1243\u20131247). Remarkably, for Weber, it was Paul who first challenged the ancient city and pointed the way to the medieval, when, in the event of Galatians 2, he insisted that Peter return to table fellowship with Gentiles. Paul grounded his reformation of table fellowship in the priestly investiture of baptism. Baptism of the Greek city reconstructed its foundations, rearranged the seating at the civic table, and remodeled its social order.
\nSo we return to Paul, and Galatians 3:27. For Gentile converts to submit to Jewish regulations of holiness would be to revert to a variation of the same old dualistic system \u1f51\u03c0\u1f78 \u03c4\u1f70 \u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03b9\u03c7\u03b5\u1fd6\u03b1. In baptism, the Galatians have become citizens of a new polis where all wear the Priest who has gone through the veil to destroy the excluding system of graded holiness. In Galatians, baptism announces and creates a new polis where the \u201cone seed\u201d of Jew and Greek share the Abrahamic blessing, where none are forced outside the city walls, where the marginal are welcomed to the agora and its joyful assembly.<\/p>\n
Conclusion<\/p>\n
From these exegetical considerations, several speculative conclusions of a more theoretical nature follow\u2014more points for further reflection than \u201cassured results.\u201d According to Paul, Christ has fulfilled the Abrahamic promise of the Spirit to the \u201cone seed,\u201d and the Spirit wars against the enmities, strife, jealousy, disputes, dissensions, factions, envy of the flesh (Gal. 5:19\u201321). Given the use of \u201cflesh\u201d elsewhere in Galatians, it seems that Paul considers life both \u1f51\u03c0\u1f78 \u03bd\u03cc\u03bc\u03bf\u03bd and \u1f51\u03c0\u1f78 \u03c4\u1f70 \u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03b9\u03c7\u03b5\u1fd6\u03b1 as \u201cfleshly\u201d forms of existence that promote rivalry and dissension (3:3; 6:12). Our discussion suggests that the priest\/non-priest dichotomy is one feature of both forms of the fleshly organization of life, and that the Spirit opposes the flesh by removing the veil that establishes this dualism. That is, the Spirit\u2019s work condenses into enduring institutional structures that inhibit the flourishing of fleshly life. As the hovering Spirit formed the divisions of the original creation, so the Spirit of Pentecost destroys old religious and cultural boundaries, draws new lines, and makes the world new. Against this background, baptismal induction to priesthood is one of the Spirit\u2019s weapons to destroy vanity, enmities, and factions. Several specific points can be made in this regard.
\nFirst, a somewhat Girardian point concerning Christianity\u2019s exposure and destruction of the mechanisms of mimetic rivalry and violence. From Cain and Abel, through Korah, to the conflicts of Jesus with His Jewish adversaries (cf. Wright 1996: 523, 525\u2013526, 606), the Bible shows that violence arises from contests over sancta. Paul says in Galatians 4:17 that by \u201cshutting out\u201d the Galatians who do not observe Jewish holiness regulations, the Judaizers hope to foster a desire to \u201cget in.\u201d Paul\u2019s response is that the Galatians are not in fact \u201cshut out\u201d of anything\u2014clothed as they are by baptism as heirs and ministers in the Spirit\u2019s house. Because it destroys the divided sanctuary and its prohibited spaces, opening the door and rending the veil, the baptismal city undermines one of the bases of rivalry; for when the sanctuary is open, access to sancta unrestricted, and the supply of holy food inexhaustible, no one need fight for entry to the inner ring. By eliminating the possibility of \u201cshutting out,\u201d baptismal induction to priesthood also dissipates the mimetic desire to \u201cget in.\u201d
\nThe same mimetic dynamics were at work in the Greco-Roman city. Ballanche, like Weber and Fusel de Coulanges, argues that the ancient city was divided among patrician \u201cinitiateurs\u201d and plebeian \u201cinitiables.\u201d Under the conditions of antique order, the excluded plebeians gained entry only through violent confrontation but Christianity initiates without violence, transforming ancient solidarity into Christian charity (1981: 15, 172 fn. 3). Importantly, the baptismal assembly no longer ritually enacts conflict among orders, as Greek feasts often did (Vernant 1988: 31\u201332) but shares a sacred meal where faction is strictly forbidden (cf. 1 Cor. 11:18\u201334). Thus, our typology provides a gloss on Augustine\u2019s \u201cdeconstructive\u201d reading of pagan virtue.
\nFrom the third century, an agonistic element is present in baptismal renunciations and exorcisms and later appears in decorations on medieval fonts and baptisteries. Formation of the baptismal polity of the church thus did not imply either quietism toward evil or a dissolution of all boundaries. Internal grades of priesthood are entirely eliminated, but baptism itself radically partitions the baptized priesthood from the world. To pass through the waters is to die to fleshly life whether \u1f51\u03c0\u1f78 \u03bd\u03cc\u03bc\u03bf\u03bd or \u1f51\u03c0\u1f78 \u03c4\u1f70 \u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03b9\u03c7\u03b5\u1fd6\u03b1, and to be enrolled in the army of the Spirit who makes war against the flesh (Gal. 5:17). Baptismal consecration to priesthood encourages imitation of the zeal of the Levites (Exod. 32) and of Phinehas (Num. 25). The water incorporates the oil of soldiers as well as of priests (cf. Finn 1992a: 78); the garments of baptismal investiture are also the armor of God.
\nRelated to this, the elimination of sacred space through Christ\u2019s work, extended in baptism, decenters the religious world. According to book of Hebrews, the world is still centered on the sanctuary, but the sanctuary is now in heaven and wherever heaven and earth meet through the Spirit. Wherever there is a body washed or a community gathered around the word and sacrament, there is a temple of the Holy Spirit. While a central earthly sanctuary existed, a spatial gradation from near to far was inevitable, for it is physically impossible for everyone to be equally near the house of Yahweh in Jerusalem. Heaven is, however, equidistant from all terrestrial points, so a heavenly sanctuary eliminates the distinction between near and far. Again, the socio-religious shape of the New Covenant undermines a basis for rivalry and pride.
\nSocieties organized by principles of graded holiness have a centripetal cultural force: Everything moves toward the center. All roads led back to Rome, Athens, Jerusalem. Exile from the land sanctified by the sanctuary or by the graves of dead ancestors was abnormal, tragic. Radcliffe notes the irony of Hebrews 13:13, which redescribes movement through the veil as movement out of the camp, to the place of reproach and shame (1987: 500). If N.T. Wright is correct that Jesus proclaimed the end of Israel\u2019s exile (Wright 1996), it must be said that this \u201creturn\u201d has an ironic twist, for the last word of the gospels is not \u201cgather\u201d or \u201cwait\u201d but \u201cgo.\u201d By eliminating the \u201ccenter,\u201d baptism to priesthood reverses the direction of cultural force, which now leads centrifugally to the four corners of the earth. As Ballanche put it, the ville des expiations formed by baptism stands between immobile civilizations of antiquity and the progressive civilizations of the Anno Domini.
\nThe baptismal dissolution of antique order also challenges the Greek antipathy to manual labor and mechanics. Behind Plato and Aristotle\u2019s subordination of artisans and tradesmen to citizens are religious motives, including fears of contagion. Though the primary place of Christian \u201chousekeeping\u201d is the church, the enthroned Christ also \u201cfills all things\u201d (Eph. 1:21\u201323), consecrating a cosmic house. For the baptized, therefore, all lawful labor is ministry to Christ, and thus labor becomes a sphere for the exercise of virtus and a form of \u03bb\u03b5\u03b9\u03c4\u03bf\u03c5\u03c1\u03b3\u03af\u03b1. Weber points out that the medieval city of the baptized ruled by tradesman, merchants, and producers would have been unimaginable for the Greeks. Baptism to priesthood grounds a theology of labor and vocation, much as Ruskin attempted to restore the dignity of craft labor by allegorizing it as \u201croyal\u201d and \u201cnoble\u201d (cf. Milbank 1990: 199\u2013200).
\nFinally, with a nod to Durkheim, one might suggest the destruction of sacred configurations of society registered in forms of consciousness. Without claiming that \u201cdual classification\u201d was the sole or even dominant mode of Greek thought, G.E.R. Lloyd\u2019s Polarity and Analogy (1966: 15\u2013171) provides extensive evidence of the prevalent use of \u201cpaired opposites\u201d (e.g., hot\/cold, moist\/dry, right\/left, which last was still used by Aristotle) in Greek cosmology and the argumentative strategies of the philosophers. Lloyd also suggests that natural dualities acquired cosmological significance partly because they were \u201cthe symbolic manifestation of fundamental religious or spiritual categories,\u201d so that dual classification \u201cmay reflect, and itself form a part of, a system of religious beliefs which expresses the ideal of society, and by which the whole life of the society is regulated\u201d (1966: 80). Cosmological uses of political and social imagery are also relevant. Plato\u2019s \u201cauthoritarian bias\u201d in politics reproduces his cosmological monarchy of reason, and Heraclitus\u2019s belief that war is \u201cfather of all and king of all\u201d reflects \u201cthe social upheavals of the late sixth century\u201d (Lloyd 1966: 97, 222\u2013224). Drawing together polarity and analogy, we might suggest that the dualistic tendency of thought registers the dual ordering of society, the priestly division of citizen\/non-citizen. By decentering the socio-religious world, the cross and baptism transformed not only ancient society but the topography of the ancient mind, opening vistas never before glimpsed. Patterns of thought and argument dominated by paired opposites reproduce the agon of antique order, so that a dissolution of those agonistic structures dethrones dialectic as the sole or primary mode of reaching truth and replaces it with persuasion of a rhetorical, musical, aesthetic, poetic, or liturgical character (cf. Milbank 1990).
\nBaptism is in these ways the water that effects a \u03c0\u03b1\u03bb\u03b9\u03b3\u03b3\u03b5\u03bd\u03b5\u03c3\u03af\u03b1 of the social, cultural, and political cosmos\u2014the water that washes away the old sacerdotal distinctions and recreates social space, which is also religious space. A new order is born from the fecund waters of baptism. The font is the womb not only of the church but of the world.<\/p>\n
Addendum<\/p>\n
Though recent work has questioned or discredited certain details of Weber\u2019s and Fustel\u2019s analyses (cf. Finley 1977: 305\u2013327; Momigliano 1977: 325\u2013344), scholarship vindicates their emphasis on the religious nature of the polis and its structures. Christine Sourvinou-Inwood writes,<\/p>\n
Each polis was a religious system which formed part of the more complex world-of-the-polis system, interacting with the religious systems of the other poleis and with the Panhellenic religious dimension; thus direct and full participation in religion was reserved for citizens, that is, those who made up the community which articulated the religion. One belonged to the religious community of one\u2019s own polis, (or ethnos); in the sacra of others, even in Panhellenic sanctuaries, one could only participate as a xenos. On at least some occasions a xenos could take part in cult only with the help of a citizen, normally the proxenos of his city, who acted as \u201cintermediary\u201d (Sourvinou-Inwood 1990: 295\u20136, cf. 304).<\/p>\n
Details of Greek social and political life confirm this judgment. Meetings of the assembly (ekklesia) were opened with the sacrifice of a pig, a curse and a prayer (Garland 1990: 87). For Xenophon, citizenship was defined, among other things, by \u201ctaking part together in the ceremonies \u2026 of the cult.\u201d One became a citizen by offering sacrifice at the city-hearth of Hestia in the prytaneion, the political counterpart to the domestic hearth-altar (Nilsson 1949: 243). New colonies were formed by the transfer of hearth and fire to a new location (Miller 1978: 14; Detienne and Vernant 1989: 3\u20134). Within the polis, each subdivision\u2014its tribes, demes, phratries\u2014was also a religious organization with its own cults and festivals (Martha 1882: 9).
\nIn the narrow sense, a Greek \u1f31\u03b5\u03c1\u03b5\u03cd\u03c2 was, like his Ancient Near Eastern counterparts, a minister to the image of a god in a sanctuary, to which he often had exclusive access (Martha 1882: 7\u20138, 45\u201354, 88\u201389; Garland 1990: 77\u201378), and like other priests he exercised authority over \u201creligious\u201d matters. Yet, an exclusive focus on such forms of priesthood misses Fustel\u2019s insight into the \u201csacred\u201d character of the entire Greek city. Thus, for example, Robert Garland examines the religious authority of Greek priests, and concludes that no exclusive priestly \u201cclass or caste\u201d existed in classical Athens, that most priesthoods (excluding the older \u201cgentilic\u201d priesthoods that were the preserve of a single gens) were \u201cavailable to all Athenians,\u201d and that there was no ordination rite (1990: 75\u201377). Yet this occludes the fact that \u201call Athenians\u201d means \u201call Athenian citizens\u201d\u2014still a restrictive category in democratic times\u2014and that to become a citizen, one passed through the rite of entry at Hestia\u2019s hearth in the prytaneion (Zaitmann and Schmitt Pantel 1992: 65\u201367; Miller 1978: 14). Garland himself recognizes the \u201cpriestly\u201d character of the entire Athenian democracy when he summarizes by saying that \u201cit would be valid to think of the Athenian d\u00eamos, sitting in ekkl\u00easia (assembly), as a focus of communication between men and gods,\u201d and this applies also to the boul\u00ea (1990: 86\u201387).
\n\u201cSocial\u201d divisions within the Greek city were gradations of priestly rank. This is true in the sense that some formal priesthoods were reserved to certain families and that \u03c0\u03bf\u03af\u03b7\u03c4\u03bf\u03b9 citizens and \u03c7\u03ad\u03bd\u03bf\u03b9 were excluded from holding the archonate or priesthoods, apparently to prevent defilement of these offices by foreign blood. Again, in a more important sense citizenship was itself a priestly privilege. With its hearth-fire burning to Hestia in the prytaneion, the polis was a civic house, and every citizen had the right and duty of \u201chouse keeping\u201d and was permitted to participate in sacrifice. Those who were not citizens, by contrast, were not part of the house, nor did they share its table. As de Polignac points out, the polis was the preserve of rightly ordered relations between gods and men, and right order required proper distancing and separation and also appropriate forms of intimacy (1995: 35\u201336). These separations encompassed the world outside the city walls. Delphi was considered the center of the world, as reflected in the order of consultation with the oracle and the organization of the Delphic games:<\/p>\n
Greeks came before barbarians; among the Greeks, the Delphians before all other Greeks; after the Delphians and before the other Greeks came the other ethnic groups and poleis who were members of the Delphic Amphictiony [League].\u2026 the same articulation pertains in the Panhellenic Games as in the order of the oracular consultation: the Delphic polis at the centre, the Amphictiony forming the inner circle, the other Greeks the outer one. Here the barbarians were excluded from competition\u2014for this was one of the rites defining membership of the group \u201cGreeks\u201d (Sourvinou-Inwood 1990: 298\u2013299).<\/p>\n
Both institutions mapped out the ethnic and religious terrain, as seen from Delphi. Confusion of these divisions was a possible source of pollution. Robert Parker writes,<\/p>\n
The danger that demanded constant vigilance was not so much that of attack from below as infiltration [of the citizen body]. Shortly after the expulsion of the Peisistratids, citizens who were \u2018impure in descent\u2019 were rejected. (The timing, of course, suggests that this was a purification from tyranny as well as a cleansing of the citizen body.) Pericles\u2019 law of 451\/0, excluding the children of non-Athenian mothers, rendered the citizen body, in principle, a sealed and impenetrable unit. Penalties for infiltration were savage, and it is clear from comedy and oratory that the possibility was one that was constantly present in many people\u2019s minds. The language of \u2018purity\u2019 is sometimes found in this context (1983: 262\u2013263).<\/p>\n
According to Marcel Detienne, for the Greeks \u201cpolitical power cannot be exercised without sacrificial practice,\u201d and sacrificial meals formed alliances between cities. Within the sacrificial community, distribution of meat marked out political and religious rankings. Unequal cities received unequal portions of the alliance-forming sacrifice. Durand describes the procedure in detail:<\/p>\n
the animal\u2019s body is completely taken apart, as if it has exploded in such a way as to coincide with the very limits of the society of men in the city organized around it. The trajectory assigned to the animal\u2019s body, beginning with the splanchnic center, slice after slice, reaches out to the whole social body. The ultimate raison d\u2019etre of the edible body is to be blended with the civic space, conforming ultimately to an exact geometry.\u2026 Shares of meat are placed on the table in oblation to the gods; later the priest disposes of them. Along with the inedible shares that have been completely consumed by the flames, the gods thus receive shares eaten by the ministers of the cult. The priest has a special relationship to the divine. Like the god who receives the total oblation of the animal with its death, the priest receives the part that made for its wholeness in the beginning, the vital wrapping: the hide, the only evidence of what once was, left at the end of the rite. The status of the hiereus is indicated by samples taken from the center out of the men\u2019s share, even before the question of finding a place in the animal\u2019s body that honors men arises (Durand 1989: 104).<\/p>\n
Still in the Hellenistic period, feasts distinguished between citizens and non-citizens:<\/p>\n
Le festin est avant tout celui des citoyens (citoyens, cit\u00e9, d\u00eamos) et parfois m\u00eame des seuls notables (citoyens membres des assembl\u00e9es et des corps de magistrats). Ces derniers sont toujours invit\u00e9s au repas. L\u2019ouverture plus ou moins grande de la f\u00eate concerne les autres cat\u00e9gories de population: les habitants de la cit\u00e9, qui se confondent souvent avec les \u00e9trangers domicili\u00e9s, les voisins, les \u00e9trangers de passage, les Romains. Plus on est proche, dans la vie quotidienne, des citoyens, plus on a de chance d\u2019\u00eatre convi\u00e9 au banquet.\u2026 Ces non-citoyens n\u2019ont normalement pas leur place au banquet public, sinon dans des repas qui leur sont r\u00e9serv\u00e9s, dans des lieux distincts (Schmitt Pantel 1981: 92).<\/p>\n
By contrast to the archaic city, with its highly restrictive policies regarding sacrificial banquets, Hellenistic civic feasts were sometimes offered to all free inhabitants (Schmitt Pantel 1981: 93). Into the Roman period, however, fellowship among different social classes occurred only in private religious fraternities, many of which came from the East (Gager 1975: 99; Beaujeu 1964: 74\u201375).
\nGreek political philosophy masks the religious character of its gradations but traces of the gradations survive to be defended on a different basis. Plato patterns his ideal republic after the hierarchy of the faculties of the human mind (or vice versa), but the classes of his city are fairly homologous with those of Athenian society. The community of philosophers, who have mystical insight into the real, are like priests who have contact with the gods. Aristotle\u2019s politeia is essentially a discourse about citizenship: Constitutional types register different distributions of political participation and power, and even more than Plato he suppresses the religious dimension (cf. Moss\u00e9 1967: 17\u201321). Occasionally, however, Aristotle reveals something of the religious background of the polis, as when he excludes mechanics (banausos) and farmers from holding priestly offices, arguing that only citizens should worship the gods (Politics 1329a; 1981: 416). In other respects also, his politics may be linked to graded priesthood: his use of koinonia terminology in definitions of the polis (e.g., the city is a \u201cpolitical association,\u201d Politics 1252a; 1981: 54), since this word-group was used, among other things, with reference to fellowship with the gods in sacrificial banquets; the limitation of civic feasts to citizens, and the connection of common meals and temples (Politics 1330a, 1331a; 1981: 419\u2013420, 424\u2013425); the exclusion of mechanics and tradesmen from the agora and the separation of the city center into two agoras, one for trade and one for schole (Politics 1331a; 1981: 425\u2013426); the emphasis on being \u201cwell-born\u201d as a precondition for the life of virtue (cf. Nic Ethics 1099a; 1976: 80; cf. Wood and Wood 1978: 219\u2013222); the fundamental distinction between \u201cparts\u201d (meroi) of the political koinonia and other residets who function as a conditio sine qua non of the citizens\u2019 happiness; and the inclusion of religion among the functions of the citizen body (cf. Politics 1328a\u2013b; 1981: 412\u2013413).<\/p>\n
CHAPTER SIX<\/p>\n
O Foolish Galatians! Who Has Bewitched You?<\/p>\n
In a classic passage, Augustine intimates that baptismal chrism implies a radical restructuring of ecclesial life:<\/p>\n
Et solus tunc ungebatur rex, et sacerdos: duae istae illo tempore unctae personae. In duabus personis praefigurabatur futurus unus rex et sacerdos, utroque munere unus Christus, et ideo Christus a chrismate. Non solum autem caput nostrum unctum est, sed et corpus ejus non ipsi. Rex autem est, quia nos regit et ducit; sacerdos, quia pro nobis interpellat (Rom. 8:34). E quidem solus ille sacerdos talis extitit, ut ipse esset etiam sacrificium. Sacrificium obtulit Deo non aliud quam seipsum. Non enim inveniret praeter se mundissimam rationalem victimam, tanquam agnus immaculatus fuso sanguine suo redimens nos, concorporans nos sibi, faciens nos membra sua, ut in illo et nos Christus essemus. Ideo ad omnes Christianos pertinet unctio: prioribus autem Veteris Testamenti temporibus ad duas solas personas pertinebat. Inde autem apparet Christi corpus non esse, quia omnes ungimur: et omnes in illo et Christi et Christus sumus, quia quodammodo totus Christus caput et corpus est.<\/p>\n
A temporal contrast between what was the case tunc and what is true nunc structures this entire passage. The newness of the New is a relocation of royal and priestly privilege, marked by anointing. Tunc only king and priest received the unction, and Augustine seems initially to be heading toward an affirmation that nunc it is more widely administered. Instead, surprisingly, he first notes a restriction: The duae personae of the Old Testament prefigured the futurus unus rex et sacerdos. The two point to One who combines the two, and that One alone rules and leads, sacrifices and intercedes. Nonetheless, the limitation is ultimately for the purpose of extension, since \u201cnot only our head is anointed but also his body, we ourselves,\u201d or, more briefly, because the One has made the many concorporans sibi. The unity of head and members is remarkable: in illo (i.e., in the Head) et nos Christus essemus and omnes in illo et Christi et Christus sumus. Quodammodo in the final clause signals Augustine\u2019s desire to protect the priority and uniqueness of the priestly kingship of the Head but the proclamation of totus Christus is powerful. What tunc pertained to only two, nunc is granted to omnes Christianos.
\nThe eschatological dimension of this passage is no less important: To the tunc and nunc, there is added a futurus, of which the present is a figure. The whole passage is a comment on the title of Psalm 26, which, in Augustine\u2019s Latin Bible was, \u201cOf David, before he was anointed.\u201d Augustine thus sees the Psalm as the anointed believer\u2019s desperate cry for the presence of God. Believers, already anointed in sacramento, are, like David, in a sense yet to be anointed; though wearing already the tent-garment, they long for the weight of a glorious house. Unction does not confer a static position but impels forward, leading the anointed ones toward a future fullness of the oil of gladness. Augustine hears the same cry in Psalm 118 (119:81), where the regale sacerdotium strains avidissime ac vehementissime toward a good not yet seen or granted (Enarratio in Psalmum 118 (119); PL 37, 1557).
\nIn Augustine\u2019s view, Christ\u2019s priesthood consists preeminently in His self-offering, and since the church\u2019s priesthood is a participation in that of the Head, her ministry takes the same form. Through the Only-begotten Priest, the church offers her multifaceted sacrifice in the whole of her corporate life: by defending the truth to the point of shedding blood, by cultivating the fires of holy and pious love, by keeping appointed feasts as a memorial of Christ\u2019s saving work, by humility and praise. At the close of De civitate Dei 10.6, Augustine adroitly moves from the general sacrifice that encompasses the whole life of the church to its ritual expression in the Eucharist. Christ offered Himself as a servant, and Augustine cites Romans 12:1\u20136 to prove that the church\u2019s living sacrifice likewise involves \u201cnot thinking of yourself more highly than you ought.\u201d True sacrifice is humble promotion of the unity of the body, as each seeks not his own but the other\u2019s good: Hoc est sacrificium Christianorum: multi unum corpus in Christo, and this unity is liturgically embodied in sharing one loaf in the Eucharistic feast, where the church both offers and is offered (De civitate Dei 10.6; Augustine 1984: 379\u2013380; PL 41, 283). The Eucharist is not a propitiatory sacrifice, but it is sacrificial in that it liturgically condenses the whole-life self-offering of the church.
\nAugustine insists that sacrifice is the work of the whole people, yet he does not discount the importance of ordained leadership. Pastors exercise their authority not in se but in corpore Pastoris, so that even evil bishops have the right to be obeyed (Jourjon 1954: 166, 173\u2013174). Without pastors, men neither become Christians nor live Christian lives (Pellegrino 1968: 73). Despite his emphasis on order and authority in pastoral office, however, Augustine writes little about the privileges of the ordained, and presidency at the Eucharist does not play a large role in his thought. Pastors exercise the authority of service, as expressed in his repeated episcopal motto: praesumus, sed si prosumus (cf. Pellegrino 1968: 59ff). Augustine\u2019s focus is thus on the different ways ordained and non-ordained participate in the one priesthood of Christ. Pastors do not stand guard to exclude the baptized from the house but lead the whole community in procession up to the altar. Bishops are perhaps chief priests but they preside over and train a thoroughly priestly community (Hofmann 1933: 413\u2013420).
\nAlready in the New Testament, analogies are occasionally drawn between Old Testament priests and ministers of the gospel (1 Cor. 9:13\u201314). These scattered references were systematically developed in the patristic period. Clement of Rome compared the Old Testament priestly orders to those of the church (1 Clement 40:1\u20133) and Jerome developed this into the classic correlation matching Israel\u2019s High Priest, priests, and Levites with the church\u2019s hierarchy of bishop, presbyter, deacon (PL 22, 1195). Yet, as Aidan Kavanagh points out, it was especially under the \u201cmedieval polity\u201d that \u201creligious vows and priestly ordination took on much of the aura once possessed by baptism,\u201d and this has led to an ecclesiology in which baptism creates \u201ca Christian proletariat while holy orders creates something called \u2018first-class citizenship\u2019 in the Church\u201d (1995: 4). In this final chapter, I explore the liturgical evidence for Kavanagh\u2019s claim, and discuss some wider ramifications for the ecclesia that was Western Christendom. Though the following discussion is scarcely exhaustive, it shows that the eclipse of the New Testament\u2019s radical reconfiguration of antique order is an undercurrent of modern church history, and plays a role in the rise of secularism.<\/p>\n
Follow the Oil<\/p>\n
The story of the introduction of anointing into initiation rites provides a cautionary tale of lex orandi leading lex credendi into a ditch. Though not inevitable, the development possesses a powerful logic: Anointings were added very early to the primitive rite of water baptism; priestly meanings were attached to the oil; and, as the oil migrated from initiation to other ritual sites, priestly meanings migrated with it. Once this happened, trying to reattach a fully Augustinian significance to baptism, that is, trying to recover the full power of the gospel, was like trying to gather water in a sieve. The Reformers might be excused a knowing smirk: Had water alone been left to bear the multiple significances of initiation, no such migration would have been possible.
\nThough the church never surrendered the priestly dimensions of initiation, the oil did flow, with priestly dignity following in its trail. The earliest liturgical shift was the temporal separation of chrismation\/confirmation from initiation, which seems to have arisen as something of an accident in fifth-century Gaul and by the eighth century in Germany. Hugh of St. Victor in the twelfth century said the baptismal candidate was anointed on the chest and back so that fortitudinem accipiat ad portandum onus Domini (2.6.11; PL 176, 457C\u2013D). As with some earlier theologians, investiture is the specifically priestly act of initiation, and for Hugh, the priestly anointing takes place at confirmation. Priestly dignity thinned as it was stretched to encompass both baptism and confirmation, and a question mark appeared over the \u201cmerely baptized.\u201d
\nOil flowed further with the introduction of anointing into ordination. Early ordination liturgies, both Eastern and Western, consisted of election or acclamation by the people, a series of prayers, the laying on of hands, and various incorporative gestures (e.g., a kiss) between the newly ordained and the people. Though the Leonine Sacramentary speaks of \u201cthe dew of heavenly unction\u201d (Bradshaw 1990: 216), there is no evidence of an actual chrism in Western ordination at the time. Similarly, Gregory Nazianzus\u2019s ordination sermon begins with references to the unction he received, and alludes to the Aaronic ordination, but the text does not necessarily imply rites of anointing and investiture (L\u00e9cuyer 1983: 83\u201384). The earliest undisputed evidence appears c. 700\u2013730 among the Visigoths of Aquitaine, who anointed the hands of presbyters at their ordination. Anointing of episcopal candidates on the head did not arise for several more decades, and then in North-Central France, at the time that Pope Stephen anointed Pepin. The Roman Sacramentary did not include episcopal anointing, so when Charlemagne imposed it on the empire he in effect suppressed the practice. It revived during the later Carolingian period and after, inspired by the posthumous influence of Amalarius and the False Decretals, and Rome adopted the rite in the mid-tenth century.
\nHands were anointed to consecrate them for Eucharistic ministry. Thus, both Ivo of Chartres and Hugh of St. Victor explicitly connect the anointing of the hands with the gratia consecrandi (Bligh 1956: 38\u201340). For Thomas, ordination imprinted an indelible character in the traditio of chalice and paten, yet he states that the unction consecrates ad aliquod sacramentum tractandum and is reserved for priests alone, since they propriis manibus corpus Christi tangunt. Chalice and paten are anointed for similar reasons (quoted in Bligh 1956: 42\u201343). Significantly, the prayer accompanying anointing in some liturgies asks that whatever the priest consecrates will be consecrated and whatever he blesses will be blessed, and it is immediately followed by the traditio of chalice and paten. By ordination, the priest received permission to touch holy objects and power to perform sacred actions prohibited to or impossible for the unordained.
\nFrom the first, ordination anointings were interpreted by Old Testament typology. In the earliest texts, the anointing of the hands is accompanied by a prayer recalling Samuel\u2019s anointing of King David, and Amalarius and tenth-century English ordination rites directly connect ordination anointing with Aaron\u2019s. Chydenius suggests that the Old Testament typology was the source of both presbyterial and episcopal chrismation. Aaron was anointed on the head at his ordination, and consecrabis manus, the Latin translation of the technical Hebrew phrase \u05d9\u05d3 \u05de\u05dc\u05d0, might have produced hand-anointing (Chydenius 1965: 41). Even if episcopal anointing copied the Carolingian royal rite, as Kantorowicz claims, the ultimate inspiration was still from the Old Testament, since the Frankish kings fancied themselves heirs of the regnum Davidi rather than of the Roman imperium (Kantorowicz 1958: 56\u201357, 63).
\nEucharistic sacrifice eventually became defined by consecration, which was a monopoly of the ordained. As a result, later medieval and counter-Reformation Catholic theologians assume that only the Eucharistic consecration is \u201ctrue sacrifice,\u201d and accordingly reduce lay sacrifices of praise, virtue, contrition, and repentance to \u201cfigurative\u201d status. A similar inversion of terminology occurs with priesthood: Parallel to the change in the use of mysticum and verum uncovered by de Lubac (1949: ch. 9), Congar finds a limitation of verus sacerdos to the ordained (Congar 1985: 188, fn. 2). While for Augustine anointing was a sign of the priestly dignity of the baptized, for later writers the oil of ordination highlights the privileges of the hierarchy and confines the laity to a \u201cmetaphorical\u201d priesthood.<\/p>\n
The Return of Antique Order<\/p>\n
Ordination anointing had by the tenth century introduced a sharp liturgical cleavage within the Christian priesthood. Ideological support was provided, above all, by the theorists of the eleventh-century Gregorian Reform and papal theorists of the following centuries. To be sure, the Gregorian party did not create the gap between clergy and laity (Oakley 1979: 83\u201384). Already in the aftermath of the barbarian invasions of the sixth century, a cultural and social chasm had opened, which widened during the Carolingian period. Many of the most egregious offenses against the laity, moreover, were committed in centuries following the Gregorian reform (Congar 1983: ch. 5, 324\u2013332). I do not endorse in an unqualified way the system that Gregory dismantled, nor do I wish to deny the salutary effects of his program, including its substantial contribution to the twelfth-century Renaissance and his efforts to protect the church and clergy from entanglements in sticky social and political webs. But his reform did more than this: When Gregory defrocked the emperor and other political leaders, he removed most of the laity\u2019s remaining priestly vestments and confirmed the clerical monopolization of \u201creal\u201d priesthood. Whatever the immediate fortunes of Gregory\u2019s claims for the papacy, this aspect of his program endured. Gregory\u2019s revision of the Augustinian (and biblical) conjugation of ordination was a powerful undercurrent of later Western political, social, and intellectual history. I cannot attempt a full portrait of the post-Gregorian West, but a brief caricature can capture some of the important features.
\nAccording to the early medieval conception the Christian empire was the ecclesia, a single family ruled by papal and imperial parents (Congar 1968: 81, 258, 291). Conflicts within the Carolingian world were tensions, as Congar puts it, between rival monisms; all agreed that the ecclesia had a single finality, with no division of natural and supernatural (Congar 1968: 286, 307). In keeping with this, in France, England, and among the German emperors after Otto I, princes had, by virtue of their anointing and a hand-laying rite that resembled the ordination for priests, a quasi-clerical status and allegedly \u201cmagical\u201d powers. Since a bishop anointed the ruler, the argument could be and was made that the king\u2019s political power was mediated through the church (Ullmann 1975: 86\u201387); nonetheless, the king was a member of the ordo clericalis, or, in the terminology applied to Charlemagne, rex et sacerdos.
\nGregory\u2019s was a triumph of dualism, not merely of sacerdotium and imperium within a single ecclesia but of two societies, ecclesia and imperium (Congar 1983: ch. 4, 94). Gregory and his party sought to strip political leaders of their sacred character, at times deploying rhetoric that suggested the political order was virtually diabolical (Bloch 1983: 122). The liturgical dimension of this struggle focused on the status of the royal anointing, and in the twelfth century the Gregorian position institutionalized its victory when the royal unction was downgraded from a full sacrament to a sacramental (Ullmann 1975: 87).
\nThis was not, as Gaudemet suggests (1967: 568), merely a result of growing precision in the definition of sacraments, but part of a conscious program at whose center was a redefinition of \u201clayman.\u201d Etymologically, a layman is a member of the laos, and in this sense \u201clayman\u201d is perfectly compatible with the Augustinian theology of priesthood. Following the Gregorian reform, \u201clayman\u201d began to take on a derogatory connotation. Albert the Great could dismiss lay requests for the spiritual bread of the clergy and religious with Non est bonum sumere panem fiiliorum et mittere canibus (quoted in Congar 1983: ch. 5, 329). Clerical supremacy in the church was legitimated by claims to a special form of priesthood. Gregory reintroduced the ancient dualism between priestly patricians and non-priestly plebs, a principle that Paul scorned as among \u03c4\u1f70 \u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03b9\u03c7\u03b5\u1fd6\u03b1, at the heart of the Christian polis.
\nClosely related to this were changes in Eucharistic liturgy that took place over several centuries. The cup was withdrawn from the laity, and their infrequent participation in Eucharistic bread highlighted their subordination to the clergy. As I argued above, both ancient Israel and the Greek city-state were koinoniai in sacrificial food; citizen and table companion were synonymous, and both terms described a priestly dignity. Christ introduced a new seating arrangement at the table, which remodeled the church and eventually the city. With the restriction of commensality to the clergy, archaic distributions of sacrificial food reappeared and architectural and other liturgical changes reinforced clerical sacredness. Cloisters and choirs were marked off for clergy, the priest celebrated the Eucharist silently with his back to the congregation and often with no congregation present, the people no longer brought forward the bread and wine, and the host was changed from the bread of the \u201clay\u201d table to specially prepared wafers. Communal offering per sacerdotes became a sacerdotal sacrifice pro populo (Jungmann 1976: 64\u201370). In the end, the one loaf exploded into its many grains, as the laity\u2019s role devolved from \u201cdoing\u201d to \u201cseeing\/hearing\u201d to individual \u201cfeeling\/thinking\u201d (Dix 1948: 249, 616), a shocking ecclesial \u201catomization\u201d that originated with the fission of priest and people at the Mass. In this retrogression toward passivity, we see one dimension in the development of modern consciousness. Spatial separation of sanctuary and nave impressed itself on the worshiper, whose active eyes and mind were encumbered by a passive body. Thomas \u00e0 Kempis, with his emphasis on interior communion, anticipated not only Zwingli but Descartes.
\nBy the eleventh century, these shifts in practice were having their impact on sacramental theology. Conflict over Berengar\u2019s \u201cfigurative\u201d understanding of the Eucharist arose, significantly enough, in the same period as the Gregorian Reform (Sheedy 1980), and Berengar was savagely treated because he threatened the reform party\u2019s vision of order, centered on the priest\u2019s ability to confect the sacrament (Rubin 1991:19, 35, 49\u201351; cf. Troeltsch 1931: 1.232, 235). According to Gregory\u2019s own defense of his deposition of Henry IV (1081), the superiority of priesthood to royalty is evident in the priest\u2019s sacramental powers. Even the exorcist, among the lowest orders of clergy, is superior to the king since he commands spirits, not men. No king can \u201csnatch a Christian from the devil\u201d through baptism or confirm with the oil of chrism. Supremely, \u201cwho among [royalty] is able by his own word to create the body and blood of the Lord?\u201d\u2014this being the \u201cgreatest thing in the Christian religion.\u201d Gregory concludes, \u201cFrom this it is apparent how greatly superior in power is the priestly dignity\u201d (Tierney 1964: 69\u201370). Berengar, by suggesting that the priests were doing \u201cnothing more\u201d than manipulating \u201csigns,\u201d endangered clerical dignity.
\nModifications in the meaning of corpus mysticum are relevant here. Following de Lubac, Michel de Certeau (1992: 82\u201384) displays the changing \u201cpunctuation\u201d of Eucharistic dogma by graphing various ways in which theology transmutes the threefold body of Christ to binary form. Let H = historical body, S = sacramental body, C = ecclesiastical body, ^ = conjunction, and \/ = separation. The earlier relation can be diagramed as, H \/ (S ^ C): the sacrament performance by the whole church continues or reproduces in some way the temporally distinct events of Christ\u2019s history. Importantly, sacrament and church are on the same side of the partition. In later medieval theory, the relation is, (H ^ S) \/ C: the historical body is mystically present in the priest\u2019s sacramental actions and materials, now screened off from the ecclesial body. This exactly reproduces Gregorian hierarchy: On this theory, the priest stands alone within the veil confecting God, as the plebs outside strain for a glimpse of the marvel.
\nEmphasis on the priestly miracle of consecration eventually created a crucial watershed in medieval culture. William Courtenay points out that for Bernard in the twelfth century, symbols as such have \u201cpower,\u201d but by the time of the high scholastics, this power was limited to a few rites done in the church. On this view, non-sacramental signs only symbolize or declare an action or event that occurs by other means. Sacramental magic thus interrupts the chain of cause and effect that binds natural and cultural life (1972: 208\u2013209). Courtenay suggests this twelfth- and thirteenth-century development is a more significant change in the medieval world view than anything achieved by Gregory, but he fails to realize that a sharp distinction between ecclesiastical and cultural semiotic processes relies on a prior distinction between ecclesia and societas. This duality did not exist in the Carolingian empire but was a product of the Gregorian reform. Restriction of symbolic \u201cmagic\u201d to the church, that is, to the clergy, begins to carve out a \u201csacred\u201d sphere set off from a \u201csecular\u201d counterpart. More on this below.
\nDignitas in the quotation from Gregory is also important. In the Latin fathers and early medieval theologians, the word is commonly found in discussions of baptismal anointing. A Tractatus attributed to Maximus of Turin contrasts the royal and sacerdotal anointings of the Old Covenant to the baptismal anointing of the New: the latter chrisma, id est haec unctio quae vobis imposita est, illius sacerdotii contulit dignitatem (Tractatus 3; PL 57, 777D\u2013779A). Rabanus Maurus likewise says that baptismal unction and investiture confer a \u201csacerdotal dignity\u201d (PL 107, 313D), and for Peter Damien the whole church shares a regia dignitas (PL 144, 556 CD; 755 AB). Already in the late eighth century, Theodulf of Orleans exhorted the clergy to semper memores esse tantae dignitatis (Bligh 1956: 130). Disputing Peter Damien, Cardinal Humbert, a leading member of the Gregorian party, condemned the exaltation of worldly power in a way that would minimize the \u201cdignity of the church.\u201d Employing a traditional analogy he argued that \u201cas the soul excels the body and commands it, so too the priestly dignity excells the royal or, we may say, the heavenly dignity the earthly\u201d (Tierney 1964: 40\u201342; cf. Gierke 1987: 130, fn. 72). Humbert was not so accurate as the thirteenth-century canonist Hostiensis, who estimated that the \u201cpriest\u2019s dignity is 7,644\u00bd times higher than the royal,\u201d since that is the \u201cproportion between sun and moon\u201d according to Ptolemy (quoted in Rosenstock-Huessy 1993: 546). If so high is the priest above the king, I suspect medievals lacked adequate technology to calculate the proportionate dignity of priest and commoner.
\nThe Gregorian program was supported by an explicit appeal to the principles of archaic binary order. On the one hand, a flattened typology obscured the centrality that the totus Christus had played in Augustine\u2019s biblically-grounded hermeneutics. Isidore had expanded Jerome\u2019s use of Old Testament hierarchy to encompass other orders of the church (PL 83, 781\u2013790), and in this he was followed by Pseudo-Alcuin, a tenth-century writer (PL 101, 1231), whose treatment was picked up by twelfth-century scholastics (Chydenius 1965: 23\u201326, 56\u201358, 86\u201389). A similar hermeneutics grounded Carolingian political theory: Charlemagne, not the totus Christus, became the new David (Morris 1972: 25), even, in a sense, the new rexsacerdos, Melchizedek. During the Gregorian period and after, regulations governing the holiness of the Aaronic priesthood were applied to the Christian clergy. Priests had to avoid the contagions of simony and sex so as not to pollute the Lord\u2019s body. When Leo IX defends clerical celibacy by asking rhetorically, \u201cif you commit incest with your spiritual daughter, with what conscience do you dare to handle the mystery of the Lord\u2019s body?\u201d (quoted in Morris 1989: 103; cf. Bossy 1985: 37), one hears a distant echo of Levitical prohibitions. Humbert\u2019s defense of the superiority of the clergy to laity is supported by quotations from Numbers that emphasize the fearful danger of laymen touching sacred objects (1891: 212\u2013213). In the century after Gregory, Bernard called for a more contemplative papacy but he had no doubt that the Pope was \u201cby [his] dignity, an Aaron\u201d (Tierney 1964: 93). Though the Augustinian typology was never wholly abandoned, in the later medieval period, and even more in Counter-Reformation Catholicism, the grammar linking Aaronic priests to the ordained absorbed Augustine\u2019s more radical conjugation.
\nOn the other hand, the post-Gregorian papacy adorned itself with the trappings of the ancient city. From the time of Urban II, the Roman clergy began to style itself a \u201ccuria,\u201d a term that originally referred to a union of clans in archaic Rome (Alf\u00f6ldy 1985: 6) and which for medieval papalists \u201cevoked the ancient Roman senate\u201d (Le Goff 1988: 271). Though not referring to antique Roman order, Urban drew elaborate analogies between medieval society and the hierarchical structure of the church (Reynolds 1978: 2, fn. 6); instead of presenting an alternative configuration of social life, the church simply imaged the segmentations of worldly society. Several centuries and a Reformation later, Johannis Maldonati (1534\u20131583) argued that a division between priests and people characterizes all human society: As Rome was divided between patricians and plebeians and Israel into the ordained and the circumcised, so the church has its classes of clergy and laity (1965: 93, 290, 391\u2013392, 398; Book 2, De Ordine, 1. 3, part 2). Maldonati saw the archaic binary order of priest\/non-priest, whose destruction by the cross and baptism is part of the apostolic gospel, as a permanent, natural feature of social order.<\/p>\n
The Gregorian Construction of Modernity<\/p>\n
Reintroduction of gradations of priesthood reignited the ancient \u201cstruggle of the orders\u201d (cf. Le Goff 1988: 265, 271), and much of later medieval and modern church history recounts permutations of this struggle. Throughout the later Middle Ages, the Gregorian church faced a series of sectarian or heretical revolts, many of which expressly attacked the clerical monopoly of sancta. Orthodox movements, such as those of Hus and Wycliff, took aim at the Eucharistic practice of the Roman church, urging utraquism and frequent communion (Bossy 1985: 80\u201382). Luther\u2019s early polemics have as much to do with the location of priestly privilege as with justification by faith: To Gregory\u2019s 27 theses in Dictatus Papae Luther opposed his 95, challenging the system of papal indulgences. Though Luther emphatically affirmed the \u201cpriesthood of the baptized\u201d in a fully Augustinian sense, later Reformers suppressed this theme (Avis 1981: 95\u201396, 102). Corporate and sacramental dimensions of priesthood especially were stifled. \u201cPriesthood of believers\u201d (not, \u201cof the baptized\u201d) came to mean that each can make his individual approach to God, the key anti-Gregorian slogan ironically aiding and abetting the very atomization Gregory did so much to foster. Anabaptist and Spiritualist reactions to the Reformation were further attempts to secure, through \u201cprivate inspiration,\u201d the dignitas and ministry of the laicus, but these too ended in failure, not least because \u201cbeliever\u2019s baptism\u201d perpetuated a semi-Gregorian dichotomy of priest\/non-priest within the church. Within Roman Catholicism, Gregory so raised the stakes that the papacy became an object of rivalry, ultimately resulting in schism (Oakley 1979: 32\u201373). In response to the Reformation, Trent formalized the Gregorian system in a rigorous form, and the reforms of Vatican II, welcome and even radical as they are, perpetuate an \u201cessential distinction\u201d between the priesthood of the clergy and of the baptized (Flannery 1980: 361). These opposition movements, inchoate and even heretical as they sometimes were, contested the Gregorian demotion of the laity. Finding themselves excluded from the city constructed to welcome them, the plebs again stormed the gates.
\nResentment against clerical privilege manifested itself also in post-Gregorian theology. Reventlow traced the intricate links between medieval and early modern anti-clerical movements and the rise of biblical criticism (1984), and I have briefly noted how hostility to priesthood has distorted theology, philosophy, and sociology (cf. p. 41). Since clerical privilege was defended by resort to Old Testament models, attacks on the former modulated into Marcionite renunciation of the latter. And, since the clergy clung to its monopoly of sacraments, anti-clericalism was often accompanied by a rejection of sacrament and ritual per se. Liberal theology is largely a sophisticated continuation of these currents of anti-priestly animus, preaching a Christ stripped of layers of priestly\u2014i.e., Old Testament\u2014cult and dogma.
\nAnti-clericalism took a severe form in the Enlightenment, but by this time it had made a volatile alliance with secularism. The latter too was a development to which Gregory unwittingly contributed. At the verbal level, during the Gregorian period, the meaning of saeculum changed significantly and permanently (Berman 1983: 109\u2013110). In earlier Christian theology, saeculum could refer to the time between fall and eschaton in which both church and state participated (Milbank 1990: 1). From the twelfth century, the line between secular and spiritual ran through the ranks of clergy rather than bounding off the clergy from the laity. Gregory\u2019s reform drew the line elsewhere: Humbert urged laymen to refrain from interference in ecclesiastica, since their proper concern is with saecularia (1891: 208), and Hugh of St. Victor in the following century employed the term in the same sense. As the soul is superior to the body, Hugh argues, so those devoted to spiritualia are dignior than those who are dedicated to terrena. Thus, spiritualis potestas terrenam sive saecularem potestatem honore, ac dignitate praecedit (PL 176, 417\u2013418). By confining the laity to terrena while maintaining a clerical monopoly of spiritualia and ecclesiastica, the Gregorian program destroyed the unity of the Carolingian arrangement. Gregory, to be sure, distinguished to dominate, but the way the distinction was drawn initiated the process that eventually led to the retreat of the church from terrestrial affairs into the private sphere of soul cure. Plebs, excluded from the sanctuary and table, determined to construct a new city, and found they could get along well enough with no help from the priests. By the eighteenth century, the \u201cstruggle of the orders\u201d was no longer a protest on behalf of the plebs but brought forward the secular claim that the entire ancien regime was a smokescreen of priestly deception, a conclusion then retroactively used to reconstruct the history of ancient Israel.
\nIn the Carolingian model, society was ecclesia, so that Gregory\u2019s bifurcation of priest and layman introduced a fundamental division within the social body as much as in the ecclesial body. The marginalized that, according to Paul, received special honor in the new Israel were re-marginalized in Gregorian order. Post-Gregorian clergy became the first \u201cnew class,\u201d whose monopoly of potent symbols and specialized language, whose common aims and protective instincts provided a model for other modern elites (Berman 1983: 108\u2013109). Gregory did much to initiate the divergence of specialized elite and marginalized majority that gathered pace over the following centuries. It is a commonplace of modern sociology, and a correct one, that the post-Gregorian church was the prototype of the modern bureaucratic state.
\nShifting relations between clergy and laity influenced the development of political thought, providing an impetus for contractual models of authority. Manegold of Lautenbach, a papal apologist, distinguished, in Ullmann\u2019s terminology, the \u201cdescending\u201d character of papal and clerical authority from the \u201cascending\u201d trajectory of royal authority: The king is such at the behest of the people, but if he breaks the popular pactum he has no legitimacy (Tierney 1964: 75; Gierke 1987: 38\u201339, 146 fn. 138). For Manegold, the king is little more than an exalted pigherd, and if he fails to take good care of the pigs, they can dismiss him (Bloch 1983: 121). Thus, efforts to protect papal superiority modulate into a secular democratic foundation for political authority. Royalists, for a time, defended the king\u2019s supremacy to other laity and clergy by accentuating the significance of royal anointing. This, of course, was an inversion within an essentially Gregorian framework: Clerical and royalist theories converged in the judgment that the plebs are not priests. Eventually, political theorists determined, correctly, that relying on sacramental or Christological models played into the hands of papal apologists, and they began to imagine a political theory on purely secular or natural grounds. The Gregorian system made another indirect contribution to secular politics. Following the Reformation, the \u201cstruggle of the orders\u201d spilled over the boundaries of the church into a century of violence through much of Europe, until politicians, sickened with blood, concluded that purging theology from political life was the price of peace.
\nThe influence of spatial conceptions on political thinking is important here as well (cf. Milbank 1997: 268\u2013292). Baptismal ordination to priesthood, as we have seen, radically decentered antique order, or, more accurately, located the center in heaven rather than any earthly point. Baptism thus implies and, if its implications are followed through, brings into being a complex ecclesiastical arrangement, and, insofar as the ecclesia serves as model for the larger society, a complex political space, concretely realized in a proliferating host of institutions and practices mediating between political authorities and the individual. The Gregorian reform reintroduced a binary system, undermining the basis for mediating structures; thus the theory that takes ecclesiastical form as Pope\/church and clergy\/laity takes political form in a dualism of state\/individual.
\nModern social science normally presumes a Gregorian world, divided between spiritual and political institutions. Troeltsch admitted that his theories applied only to a society where \u201cdifferentiation\u201d of \u201cvalue spheres\u201d had already occurred (Milbank 1990: 89), and the fountainhead of this process in the Christian West was the dichotomy of cleric\/layman. For Weber, this differentiation was the dormant genius of biblical religion, though it came to fruition mainly in the modern West (Milbank 1990: 93). In the same vein, Comte, Durkheim, Parsons, and Eliade consider the sacred\/profane distinction to be the ahistorical essence of society and religion (Milbank 1990: 60, 63, 129). These theorists, like Johannis Maldonati, take Gregorian space as a given, rather than as a contingent re-assembly of priesthood. Against this, one should \u201cout-Marx Marx\u201d by insisting that the church created the gap of sacred and profane in its modern form (and so created \u201cclass\u201d). Insofar as the social sciences are \u201csciences of conflict\u201d (Milbank 1990: 23), they presume the dialectical oppositions that proliferated from the Gregorian settlement. It does not seem fanciful to ponder whether and to what extent the potentially violent dualisms of modern thought and society\u2014capital\/labor, interior\/exterior, public\/private, society\/individual, state\/individual\u2014are transmutations of priest\/non-priest.<\/p>\n
Conclusion<\/p>\n
Baptism is the beginning of the gospel because it announces Christ\u2019s boundary-transgressing work, because it extends the redistribution of priestly privilege and ministry that began with the cross and Pentecost, because it symbolizes and effects the opening of the house, altar, and table to Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free, because it forms the eschatological city peopled by the royal priesthood in the midst of the pre-eschatological world.
\nWithin a few centuries, and more grossly after Gregory\u2019s papacy, the church returned to something like life \u1f51\u03c0\u1f78 \u03c4\u1f70 \u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03b9\u03c7\u03b5\u1fd6\u03b1, which, being a form of fleshly existence, could only produce the fruits of rivalry, violence, strife, and schism endemic in the modern world. Unfortunately, even the greatest of protests against the Gregorian regime, the Reformation, did not consistently hit the nail on the head. Luther was right that the gospel was at stake in his protest, but wrong about the central message of the gospel: The good news is not justification by faith, for that, as Paul insists, is a truth as old as Abraham. Luther was closer to the heart of Paul\u2019s gospel when he attacked the Babylonian Captivity of the church and exulted in the \u201cclerical\u201d status of the baptized.
\nAs we near the end of the second millennium of the new creation, we have some cause to hope that the momentum of the Gregorian detour is decreasing and that the church is prepared to proclaim without embarrassment a gospel that begins with baptism, one that makes good on the promise of a priesthood for the plebs.
\nWhether or not this lies on the immediate horizon, it is thrilling and sobering in equal measure to reflect that much of the evangelical work of building the city imagined in baptism remains to be done.<\/p>\n
EPILOGUE<\/p>\n
Summary and Areas of Future Research<\/p>\n
In the first chapter, I identified a persistent theological framework for sacramental theology, which I labeled \u201csemi-Marcionite.\u201d According to this paradigm, the New Covenant begins an ascent out of the economy of signs and rites that makes up human cultural life. Therefore, the sacraments of the New Covenant function differently from those of the Old; while the Old sacraments were bound up with a materialistic and ritualistic form of religion, the New sacraments aim to effect spiritual and internal transformations. After offering several examples of this tendency, I turned to Augustine for an alternative. In a number of works, Augustine describes the New Covenant sacraments as \u201cconjugations\u201d of the Old, which implies that signs and rites have the same corporate function in both Old and New, and that the signs of the New can only be understood properly against the background of the rites of ancient Israel. The beauty of liturgy and of liturgical theology, on Augustine\u2019s rendering, depends on a polyphonic interlacing of Old and New.
\nBased on this conclusion, the second chapter turned to my specific thesis that baptism is a conjugation of, among other things, the Aaronic ordination rite. Chapter 2 examined priesthood and the ordination rite in the Old Testament. Several lines of evidence were presented to show that Israel\u2019s priests were essentially \u201cattendants to Yahweh in His house,\u201d and I continued by exploring some features of the ordination rite, not only to support this understanding of priesthood but also to set out some of the rite\u2019s symbolisms. Turning to the New Testament in chapter 3, I offered prima facie Christological, ecclesiological, and ritual-liturgical arguments for the hypothesis that baptism inducts into the Christian priesthood, and I supported this conclusion with extended exegetical studies of Luke\u2019s account of Jesus\u2019 baptism and 1 Corinthians 1:21\u201322. To prove the stricter hypothesis that baptism fulfills and replaces (\u201cconjugates\u201d) the ordination rite, I examined three other New Testament passages, Hebrews 10:19\u201322; 1 Corinthians 6:11, and Galatians 3:27. From the first two, I concluded that baptism in the church does what the ordination did in Israel, making priests, conferring sanctuary access, and consecrating \u201csaints.\u201d The conclusions from Galatians 3 were more tentative, but I suggested that the idea of baptismal \u201cinvestiture\u201d with Christ is rooted in the ordination and therefore it supports the typology.
\nIn chapter 4, I applied the typology to questions of baptismal liturgy and theology. Patristic and medieval writers interpreted baptismal anointings and investitures in terms of the priestly typology, but I contended that these enhancements of baptism were unnecessary and potentially misleading. Since Aaronic priests and their households ate sacrificial food denied to laymen, I argued typologically that the baptized, including infants, should be permitted to eat the church\u2019s sacrificial food, the Eucharist. Concerning baptismal theology, the typology of priestly ordination implies that baptism \u201ccauses what it symbolizes,\u201d effectively making priests ex opere operato. The structure of the ordination texts in Exodus and Leviticus also suggests that Aaron and his sons were made \u201cnew creations\u201d through the rite of ordination, and this led me to a doctrine of baptismal regeneration. I defended my formulation against the objection that it was \u201cpurely juridical\u201d by arguing that roles and narratives constitute personal identity and by arguing that baptism effects a transition in the \u201cregard of God\u201d upon us, which is the deepest ground of who we are. I closed chapter 4 arguing for a \u201cpoetic\u201d account of baptismal causality; as the church enacts God\u2019s creative word in baptism, she participates with Him in His creation of new people, a priesthood.
\nChapter 5 broadened the scope of the discussion. The Aaronic ordination changed not only Aaron and his sons, but the entire socioliturgical system of Israel and the world, and I suggested baptism also renews socio-religious order. The covenantal change announced by the New Testament is described in many passages in \u201capocalyptic\u201d terms; new covenant brings new creation. Against this background, an investigation of Hebrews 10:19\u201322 led to the conclusion that baptism is the sign of the end of Israel\u2019s system of graded holiness, both announcing and effecting the formation of a new priesthood without grades of access or divisions in food rights. From Galatians, I argued that baptism also effectively marks the end of the priestly division between Jew and Gentile, forming the \u201cone seed\u201d of Abraham. Since the division of priest\/non-priest was also one coordinate of Greco-Roman social order, I further argued that the baptismal community of priests challenges antique Gentile order divided between patricians and plebs. In these ways, baptism is the \u201cwashing of cosmic regeneration.\u201d
\nChapter 6 is a story of decline. Already in the church fathers, and especially in the aftermath of the Gregorian reform, the priestly significance and symbolisms associated with baptism were transferred to ordination. While the church never completely denied that the baptized are priests, clergy claimed exclusive food rights and exclusive rights of access to \u201choly\u201d spaces. This reintroduced archaic divisions of patrician\/plebian, priest\/nonpriest in the heart of the new polis of the church, and was sometimes explicitly defended by appeal to principles of antique order. In this way, Gregory reinitiated the ancient struggle of the orders, so that Gregorian dualistic order is also implicated in the rise of modern secular thought and culture.<\/p>\n
For Further Investigation<\/p>\n
Nearly every stage of my argument would benefit from further study, but a few specific areas of research suggest themselves:
\n1) My study of baptismal priesthood needs to be supplemented by a theology of ordination and pastoral ministry. Paul himself drew analogies between New Covenant apostle and Old Testament priest (1 Cor. 9:13\u201314). How do these analogies fit into the typology I have defended? If, as I have argued, one cannot make a complete and direct transfer from the authority of the Aaronic priests to that of the Christian pastor, on what biblical\/theological basis might this authority be founded? What is the significance of the ordination rite of laying on of hands? What Old Testament rite does it \u201cconjugate\u201d? More specifically, what implications does the typology of baptismal priesthood hold for women\u2019s ordination? Does the typology undermine the basis for the clerical monopoly in the administration of sacraments?
\n2) A second set of concerns centers on the cultural implications of my thesis. More study of the forms of Greco-Roman civic religion is necessary, with more detailed attention to the links between Greco-Roman religion and philosophy. A fuller comparison of the competing poleis of Aristotle and Paul would be illuminating. It would be of interest to investigate in detail the impact of the baptismal priesthood as it permeated Greco-Roman civilization during the first few centuries A.D. I also need to fill out the impressionistic narrative of chapter 6, for I suspect that sacramental theology is deeply implicated in the rise of modern thought and culture.
\n3) Finally, the Levitical system has been the basis of much of this thesis, but I have only begun to plumb the resources available there for theological reflection. I hope I have made a plausible case for my belief that Levitical patterns are at work behind the scenes in a good deal of the New Testament, but I need to offer a more systematic defense of this prejudice. Beyond that, study of the Levitical system would shed considerable light on Eucharistic theology and also contribute to ecclesiology. The church is now the \u201csanctuary\u201d consecrated by the presence of the Spirit, and the Pentateuch provides the most detailed biblical information about the significance of the sanctuary, its maintenance, and the proper conduct of its ministers. Because the sanctuary is also a social model, study of its significance, in conversation with cultural anthropology, could serve as a basis for a theological sociology.
\nIf I complete one-ten-thousandth of this work in what remains of my life, I shall be content.<\/p>\n
@book{Leithart_2003,
\nplace={Eugene, OR},
\ntitle={The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism},
\npublisher={Wipf and Stock Publishers},
\nauthor={Leithart, Peter J.},
\nyear={2003}}<\/p>\n
Exportiert aus Verbum, 15:11 3. April 2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CHAPTER ONE The Beginning of the Gospel \u201cThe beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.\u2026 John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins\u201d (Mark 1:1, 4). So, curiously, begins the gospel of Mark. We expect John, the forerunner announcing the imminent appearance … <\/p>\n