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Gerhard Forde on Ministry
. . . Ministry is first and foremost the ministry of proclamation, the concrete speaking of the Word of God, doing of the sacramental deed, in the living present. The primary paradigm for ministry is absolution-present-tense, I-to-you declaration in Word and sacrament authorized by the triune God: “I declare unto you the gracious forgiveness of all your sins in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” That is the culmination of all we have been saying. Ministry is the actual doing of the deed. Almost since the beginning churches in the Reformation tradition have had difficulty establishing a solid and perhaps we could say appropriately high doctrine of ministry in the shadow of more Roman Catholic understandings of holy orders. Lutheranism in particular has vacillated between a low understanding of ministry in terms of purely functional operations where ministry is necessary merely for the sake of “good order” and ostensibly “higher” views supported by episcopal and Roman claims to ontological status. In the former case, ministry is a function assigned to one called merely for the sake of order. The called and ordained minister tends to be looked on as a more or less dispensable “hired hand” of the congregation. In the latter the called and ordained minister acquires something of an ontological status necessary and “constitutive” for the church. The clergy are the “real” church, or at least church makers. The question from which discussion must start is whether it is possible to arrive at a view of ministry that avoids the pitfalls of these two alternatives. In the terms of this study a major contributing factor to this constant vacillation is a failure to comprehend just what ministry is and what it is supposed to accomplish. The view of ministry, that is, has not been sufficiently rooted in an understanding of what proclamation is all about. The ministry of proclamation, as we have repeatedly insisted, is the concrete doing of the divine election in the living present. In the words of the text at the beginning of this chapter, to minister is “to preach . . . the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all people see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places.” Through the church and its ministry, that is, in the here and now, the mystery is to be made known, to be made public. What was hidden is to be revealed even to the principalities and powers in high places. All this is according to God’s eternal purpose in Jesus Christ. Ministry is doing the deed of election here and now, publicizing the mystery in and through the church. It has to do with the concrete, present-tense, public doing of the deed. Everything has been accomplished in Christ so that this is now to be done. Ministry is obedient service to the divine deed accomplished in Jesus Christ in the living present. Ministers ought to operate in the consciousness that this is what they are supposed to be doing. Where this consciousness is absent, one of two things seems to happen. Either ministry degenerates into the mere dissemination of information about the past deed of reconciliation, explaining rather than proclaiming, in which case it is not clear what called and ordained ministry is for, since most any sufficiently intelligent and pious person can do that. Or, ministry is elevated to the status of a special ontological class endowed with the ability to complete what is supposedly lacking in the divine deed of reconciliation. The minister, that is, has to be elevated to an “order” of beings who can “re-present” the sacrifice of Christ because Christ did not quite manage to overcome the problem of time. The ministers, somehow, are elevated to a class of being able to do what Christ could not do. The mark that distinguishes them from the laity, therefore, is that they can “preside” at the eucharist. But if ministry is the public doing of the divine deed of election in the living present, why is ordained ministry necessary? Is not every Christian obligated to do the deed? In the first place, it should be clear that ministry is the task of the church and thus of all the baptized. All are called by virtue of baptism to the ministry of making public the mystery hidden from the ages but now revealed in Christ. All are authorized and obligated to do it. This is entailed in the priesthood of all believers. Baptism, not ordination, as the Reformers insisted, is what makes priests. Some care must be taken at this point, however. The fact that all are called to ministry does not mean that everything the baptized do is ministry as such. If ministry is service to the divine deed of election, one ought to avoid the current inflation of the terms that inclines to call anything and everything ministry. Where everything is ministry, specific and concrete service to the deed of God in Christ easily gets lost, on the one hand, and the quite worldly nature of God-given tasks in this world gets obscured, on the other. It is the business of priests to sacrifice-in this case to sacrifice ourselves in deeds of service and love for one another. We should, in this regard, speak of the priesthood of the baptized rather than the ministry of the baptized when referring to our daily tasks. A minister, however, is different from a priest. It is the task of a minister strictly to follow the orders of the sovereign. One should not confuse priesthood and ministry. Such confusion would be avoided if the understanding of priesthood were more clearly worked out in terms of the doctrine of vocation, and distinguished from the call to minister. We are called to be priests in our worldly tasks for one another. We are, in addition, called to do ministry, to follow the orders of the Lord. But not everything the Christian does should be called ministry lest such calling simply be lost. Ordained ministry takes the cause of making the mystery public one last step. Here the drive to publicize the mystery culminates in a public office. In ordained ministry, the Christian vocation to minister “crosses the line,” converges upon, or coins itself in an office in this world and all that is involved in that. In the public office the age to come, the kingdom of God, makes its claim known in this age. Ordained ministry is consequently a precarious and at the same time audacious move. It is precarious because on the one hand the possibilities for abuse, pretense, perversion, high handed clericalism, and the like, are legion. The temptation to politicize the office, to usurp for it too much of this world’s power, always lies near at hand. Formerly that was done by claiming power over the state and appropriating royal forms of authority-swine rights, succession, and so forth. More recently, it seems, the urge is to involve the office in political advocacy. Such abuse of the office generally leads to its discrediting, to slighting, demeaning, disdaining, to anti-clericalism. The audacity of the move to public office must be recognized, however, because here a claim is made, an authority is asserted in the trappings of this age, so to speak, which is not of this age. The public office announces the end, the limit, the goal (telos) of all offices. The precariousness and audacity of the move to public office means that the church must take utmost care in how it orders this office. Ordained ministry is ordered ministry. It is that in a double sense. It is a ministry one is ordered (called) to do, and it is to be done in ordered (carefully regulated) fashion. Ordained ministry is ministry incarnated, so to speak, in the orders of this age, this public. It is crucial, therefore, to look upon it not as a being elevated above this world as such but rather as an instance in which the new age invades, and stakes out its claim over and against the public order of this world. This is the view of the ministry presented in the Augsburg Confession. Articles 5 and 14 set it forth quite tersely and plainly. Article 5 says that in order to obtain the justifying faith claimed in Article 4, “God has instituted the office of ministry, that is provided the Gospel and the sacraments.” Through these concrete and external means God the Holy Spirit works faith when and where he pleases. But Article 5 does not yet explicitly speak of ordained ministry though it seems strongly to imply it. Article 14, however, provides the conclusive move to the public office: “Nobody should publicly teach or preach or administer the sacraments in the church without a regular call.” It is important to look carefully at these articles to get the point of what we are trying to say. In the first place, the office is a divine institution, not a human invention. It is not an option that churches may or may not exercise. The office is God’s idea, not ours, because God provided the gospel and the sacraments. God insisted on making the mystery public through the proclamation. The German version says it quite clearly: “Gott hat das predigtamt eingesetzt . . .” (“God established the office of preaching”). The office, that is, is instituted by virtue of the fact that God has gone public in and through Jesus Christ, the gospel and the sacraments. God has invaded the age in just this way and staked out his claim. The confession, therefore, avoids the usual impasse created by arguments about whether Jesus “ordains” a special class of followers whose “rights” are guaranteed by a line of succession, or whether Jesus envisaged or intended such. By virtue of what happened to Jesus, the gospel and the sacraments are given, and with them ministry is entailed and demanded. The gospel and the sacraments demand the office. God thereby instituted the office. The sole difference between clergy and laity is comprehended in the fact that the clergy are called and ordered to a public exercise of the office. The move from Article 5 to Article 14 is quite consequent and natural. “Nobody,” says Article 14, “should teach or preach or administer the sacraments publicly without a regular call.” The confessors see no inconsistency between divine institution and churchly calling to the public office. All public offices, for them, are divinely instituted, even through the particular mode of filling such office is left to the needs and demands of times and places. On this score the public office of ministry is no different from other public offices. God institutes, the church orders, just as in the state God institutes the office of the head of state, magistrate, and so forth, and these are ordered according to existing political structures. Nor can there be any real cause for competition between lay and clerical exercise of the office. The whole church, all of its members, are to be involved and concerned about the public exercise of the office, the drive to make the claim of God public. Since it is the concern of all the baptized, no one can arrogate the public exercise of the office to himself or herself. It is not a private matter. It is God’s gift to the church. Therefore, the church through its quite public ordering calls and approves those appropriately qualified to exercise the public office. This means, however, that the congregations of the church do not own the office nor do they “transfer” their authority to it. The gift of the office has been given by God to the church and demands filling in responsible fashion. The church through its structures is to do this, but the church does not give the office its authority. It is helpful to make a distinction here between the authority to fill the office and the office, but the authority of the office is rooted in the Word its holders are called to proclaim. The church in its ordering is to see that the Word may have free and public course in its midst and in the world. But at this point it is necessary to be clear about what a public exercise of the office entails so as to complete the understanding of ordained ministry. Public exercise of the office does not simply mean that it is done “in public.” It gets its meaning rather from the fact that for the confessors Christianity was a public cult (cultis publicus). It belonged, that is, to the “republic” (republica). The ordained ministry was in that sense akin to a public official who was authorized to do the public acts of the cult in and for the people. The ordained minister was to make public proclamation of and pubic argument for the Word of God, to care for the public witness and theology of the church, to administer the sacraments as public acts, and to call the public and its magistrates to public account before divine law. Such public exercise of the office was set in contrast to a more private exercise in family, between individuals, among Christians. In such instances one had to do with Christianity as a private cult. This may be somewhat confusing since we have spoken throughout about publicizing the mystery. The point is that the mystery is to be made known, publicized, both in more “private” ways and through the explicitly public exercise of the office. Everyone is called to a “private” exercise of the office. The public exercise of the office, however, has to be publicly ordered. Only those regularly called are so ordered. The difficulty encountered in the modern world with this distinction is that Christianity, or any religion for that matter, is no longer accorded the status of public cult. The modern state has more or less taken over the public sphere altogether. It is concerned for the most part only with what affects the physical well-being of its citizens, the economy, defense of the realm, just distribution of goods and services, and so forth. Only such matters are considered “public affairs.” The modern state cares little about religion as long as it does not interfere with public affairs. The result is that religion is banished to the sphere of private or individual matters. Christianity, too, quickly becomes a private cult. The general result of banishment to the sphere of the strictly private is that the rationale for ordained ministry tends to disappear altogether. When the church becomes simply a private cult it is difficult to say just why any Christian cannot perform most if not all the “functions” ordinarily assigned to the ordained. A democratic society will find it perhaps presumptuous to assume that some are raised to a different level by ecclesiastical fiat. Since religion is a private matter, what difference can ordination make? Furthermore, when clergy no longer understand the office as public doing of the deed authorized to Jesus Christ, when they no longer do what could be called public proclamation, teaching, or absolution, but rather just make public display of private emotion and experience or invest most of their time in private counseling, what does one need ordination for? Ordination per se does not automatically confer any noticeable skills or make a person “nice.” Cannot properly “sensitized” lay people do just as well? Ironically, the state itself turns out to be one of the last holdouts here. The state still clings to the vestigial remains of the public office when it refuses to allow just anyone to marry, acquire tax exemptions, perform chaplain’s duties in institutions, and the like. For more public duties, the state wants to know about ordination. Since the idea of a public office has largely been lost, ordained ministry has to go begging for a rationale. Quite naturally it tends to take refuse in the one manifestly public act left, the Sacrament of Holy Communion. Even here there are pressures to privatize of late, to do the eucharist in cozy and private groups. The church becomes a “support group.” Even in more public celebrations the ordained are more and more marginalized by lay substitutes. Since ministry is no longer the eminently public act of doing the electing deed, it becomes more a matter of our private “sharing” with one another. So it is more meaningful, no doubt, to receive the bread and wine from someone “just like me” than from one ordained to public office. The sole function left for the ordained minister is to “preside.” Why one has to be ordained to do that remains something of a mystery. Cannot intelligent lay people read the words in the book? Since the most eminently pastoral act, that of the actual distribution, has largely been taken over, it is not strange that clerics have to fall back on the old idea that ordination somehow mysteriously imparts the power to re-present the sacrifice. Having lost its status as a public office, ministry seeks validation in the hidden agenda, behind-the-scenes theology. The public office becomes mystified. Ministry gets its rationale from a theory of the eucharist, and as such becomes constitutive for the church, and the church in turn, is understood primarily as the “eucharistic community.” Where the public office of ministry is understood as the doing of the divine deed in the living present, however, it is possible to recover a “high” doctrine of ministry without succumbing to mere occasional functionalism on the one hand or an ontologizing view of holy orders on the other. We do indeed need to be careful about what we say of this office today. What is needed is a doctrine that comprehends its crucial importance at the same time as it avoids the ecclesiastical mythology which only provokes anticlericalism. Ordination does not mean elevation to some higher order, but rather invasion of the order of this world with the Word of the gospel to announce God’s claim upon the world. In spite of pressures to privatize, the church must not surrender this claim to public office. Here the church carries through on God’s eschatological claim. To be called and ordained to the public office is to be called through the church to give public voice to the Word of God. ;It is not the office holder as such who transcends the congregation by elevation to a higher order, but the Word of God. The only ultimate defense against anticlericalism is the proper preaching of this Word so that the gospel is heard. To be called and ordained is to take up this public office. The ordained pastor is not a guru or a shrink or a perpetual optimist or nice person, but a public proclaimer. The ordinand, therefore, is to be properly examined and ordered to do the task. One is not called to this public office to peddle private opinions, but to serve, proclaim, care for the public witness and theology of the church in a particular time and place, to have the guts (or the Spirit, in theological terms), to say it and do it. To that end the church through the holders of this office lay on hands, prays, and invokes the Spirit on those called so to do.
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