The Royal Priesthood of All Believers
by Gillian Crow
Feast of St Sylvester, Pope of RomeAnno Domini 2020, January 2
The Church is the gathering of the laos, the whole people of God. A lay person is not, as in the popular usage of the word “layman,” an amateur or an ignoramus. Instead, a lay person has the highest status, which all the baptized share: “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,” as St Peter says in his first epistle.
Orthodox Tradition guards the concept of the royal priesthood of all believers. At chrismation – the second sacrament of initiation which is administered immediately after baptism – the newly baptized person, anointed with the holy chrism, is “sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit” as king, priest, and prophet, a member of the laos, which is “God’s own people.” This confers to all the baptized, including infants, full membership of the Church in which there is “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female,” in St. Paul’s words.
Each person, made in the image of God and living in a continuing movement of growth towards the likeness, the divine potential, is a holy member of the Church, dedicated to the absolute calling of taking up his or her cross to follow Christ to the self-sacrifice of Calvary and beyond to eternal life. Each person is called to be completely open to the Holy Spirit given at baptism. Each person is called to be a witness to Christ, with the totality of life and, if necessary, of death, as so many Orthodox have found in Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, as they have rediscovered the correlation between the words “witness” and “martyr.” The laos
is a wholeness, the Body of Christ in which each member is irreplaceably unique, but also a vital part of the one living organism which has as its head not an earthly hierarch but the Lord Jesus Christ.
In this exalted and beautiful vision of the meaning of “laity,” the sacramental priesthood is included. This priesthood can only develop within the universal priesthood of all believers, because it is a position of service, not of power or superiority. The priest is the person chosen and delegated by the laos
to serve at the altar, but the laity concelebrate with him and he still remains a member of the laos. That is made clear in the way he serves the Liturgy. He stands at the head of the congregation, facing east with them, and not on the far side of the altar in the place where only Christ has the right to be. He represents the laity and he also represents Christ, but not in the sense of an alter Christus. In an Orthodox Liturgy, Christ remains the only celebrant, just as He remains the head of the Body and the head of the Church.
Tradition regards hierarchical structures as positions of responsibility and service rather than power. The Orthodox bishop standing in the center of the church surrounded by his flock, as happens at many services, is a familial image of a father surrounded by his children. Church structure has been described as an inverted pyramid, supported ultimately by Christ through the bishops and presbyter, in contrast to the perceived Roman structure of the Pope at the apex of the triangle. Orthodoxy is unequivocal in its rejection of the papal model. Tradition, going back to the first Church Council in Jerusalem, sees the Church in conciliar terms, with each bishop having an equal charism, and this principle of conciliarity has been cherished by Orthodoxy down to the present.
The equality of dedication and mutual reverence of the royal priesthood of believers, straight from the New Testament, is as exciting and revolutionary as any modernist agenda. However, it has to be said that it is in practice often forgotten by the Orthodox themselves. Both clergy and non-clergy are often wrongly inclined to equate ordination with professionalism… History has given power to bishops and they have rarely been conformed to the authority of the servant king whom they were supposed to represent. Nevertheless, the vision, the image of the Church as divinely intended, the potential not yet realized but attainable through grace, remains like an ancient icon beneath the accretions of worldly pollution. In striking instances it still shines brightly.
The place of women is another area in which tradition’s vision of the wholeness of the Church is waiting to be rediscovered. Orthodoxy does not have a good record for treating its members as “neither male nor female.” The vital role of women in the Gospels, the honor accorded to those in the early Church who were given the title “equal to the Apostles,” has not been sustained. Although there has been talk for some time of restoring the New Testament institution of deaconesses, which Orthodoxy kept until the thirteenth century, this has not yet been implemented…
The vision of the Church as a model which the world was intended to follow has very often been replaced by the sad spectacle of an institution challenged by the lead of secular society. However, many people are now acknowledging the part which women – the silent, dogged babushkas – have played in keeping alive the Church in Russia during the years of Soviet persecution. St Paul’s words remain true that the communion of saints is a wholeness, realized in eternity but still potential on earth, in which there is truly neither male nor female.
The struggle to be a saint of God, expressed by the Russian St Seraphim of Sarov in the 19th century as the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, is the goal of the Orthodox life. Sainthood, like Tradition, may seem to today’s culture to be a word from the past with little relevance to the consumer society. Like the idea of holistic living, both conjure up an unworldly image which invites a certain mockery.
It is often forgotten that it is the Christian vocation to expect the same mockery as the Master. Growth towards the potential which God wills both for the human person and for the Church, within the wholeness of Tradition, is an all-absorbing, exciting process, but it inevitably remains at odds with secular aspirations. It is the pearl of great price, entrusted as a treasure to the Orthodox Church, but at the same time a vocation towards which the Church must still grow.
~Gillian Crow, excerpt from “The Vision of Wholeness” in Living Orthodoxy in the Modern World
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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