Sarx

Continuing with our posts from Worship at St Gregory’s by Rick Fabian.

The lapse of lay communion after the fourth century, and later canons forbidding laypeople to carry or even handle the consecrated bread for fear of witchcraft, only reinforced this Cyprianic notion that the eucharist was something the presiding clergy did, and laypeople watched them do. In place of the New Testament view that the whole cohen-ish Christian laos community share in Jesus’ sacrificial death, from which God gives the world new life, medieval worshippers pictured their bishop and presbyters as the church’s cohens, sacrificing Christ on behalf of passive laypeople—hardly the Hebrew cohen’s authentic role! This medieval misunderstanding triumphed in Germanic languages like English, which translate the Hebrew title cohen by a contraction of the very different Greek title presbyter —namely, “PRIEST”— thus mixing up two separate scriptural functionaries. That is why high-church Anglicans reading their bibles naturally identify their clergy with Old Testament shrine personnel (false!) and with Jesus (hyperbolic!). The fact that English has no other word whatever for the Hebrew cohen causes undying confusion between ministries that are historically unrelated, and groundless prejudice between denominations that actually share the same presbyteral order.

Roman politics changed church structure as well, particularly in the west. Like Roman emperors, sovereign bishops were anciently elected, although many elections (Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom) showed heavy influence by church leaders, including the Christian emperor himself. Until the sixth century, moreover, candidates could be chosen freely from the laity or any other ministry, just like emperors elected from the military ranks. Good deacons were popular candidates for the episcopate, for example. But senatorial Rome liked aristocracy,(*) and as the turbulent life-current of empire shifted eastward, leaving Rome a provincial backwater, the Roman church began ranking ministers on a rigid scale of dignities like hereditary landholders, reserving candidacy for each job to those who had attained the level just below. Thereafter Roman clergy progressed from layman to doorkeeper to reader to exorcist to acolyte to subdeacon to deacon to presbyter to bishop—or stopped their careers en route. Roman popes elected out of sequence were rushed through all these ordinations in a matter of days.

Meanwhile, the collapse of westward imperial power meant that indigenous churches in Britain and northern Europe declined; and Roman missions to rebuild them inevitably spread the new Roman church order — despite the wishes of broadminded popes like Gregory the Great, who charged Augustine of Canterbury to preserve whatever local Christian customs he found. (Augustine ignored him, and stamped out British usage relentlessly: we may assume Augustine was a typical Roman missionary.) Hence within two hundred years the entire west had adopted the aristocratic Roman system, and kept it till the Reformation; and papally or royally- appointed local bishops served as chôrepiskopoi for Roman popes, who ran medieval Europe and the worldwide Roman Catholic denomination as a single metropolitan diocese until Vatican II.

Renaissance reformers set out to refurbish the New Testament notion of a whole messianic cohen-ish laos, which Luther called “the Priesthood of All Believers.” In practice, however, they largely kept or reshuffled the aristocratic Roman categories, moving laypeople into former clergy roles as governors and sometime liturgical leaders. Nevertheless, full lay participation in the eucharist was restored and encouraged, and the consecrated bread was once again entrusted to laypeople’s hands.

Today, Episcopalians wrangle needlessly over licensing lay Christians to carry the eucharist to the sick, as laypeople (including acolytes) anciently did. Our laypeople have had the right to handle and carry the eucharist for four hundred years, since the Anglican reformers deliberately expunged every canon and rubric restricting these functions to clergy. The reformation left English bishops no discretion over this matter, nor does the Constitution of any Anglican province restore it to them. Notwithstanding ultramontane arguments to the contrary, the Anglican reformers’ intentions were abundantly clear, and it would now take a Constitutional change, or another new Prayer Book, to undo their work. Training laypeople for the pastoral opportunities attached is an excellent, even an urgent idea; but this training supports them in an authority they already have, and want to exercise responsibly. Licensing laypeople for ministries within the liturgy (carrying the chalice or paten) may fall within an Anglican bishop’s charge to see that all is done decently and in order there; but demanding that the bishop license laypeople carrying eucharistic vessels and not other liturgical ministries (reading, leading prayers) is superstitious. Ecumenical discussions will force us toward consistency in these matters. Ironically, the Roman Catholic denomination, which still has canons forbidding laypeople to handle the sacred species, has proved more flexible than us in sending lay communion acolytes to the sick. It does no ecumenical good when modern Anglicans treat the reformation the way modern American voters treat the Bill of Rights, as an embarrassment to be ignored.