St. Paul on the Priesthood and Ministry

In order to address and define the Pauline view of a priesthood and ministry, it is necessary to look at how Paul could have come to conclusions or indeed hypotheses about the proper configuration of a priesthood for the nascent Christian cult in the first century AD. To do that, it is necessary to look not only at Paul's own writings, which are evidence of how his thought had been shaped around the issues confronting the new church, but also at writings roughly contemporaneous with his own, which reflect a larger body of thought emergent in the apostolic and post-apostolic periods that was shaping the religious sensibilities of all of those who intended to have a voice in church structure, hierarchy, doctrine, and praxis. According to Roman Catholic doctrine, the idea of a Christian priesthood is connected to the sacrament of Holy Orders, which has its sanction in the g

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om the holy one . . . cannot err in matters of belief.'" Paul's first mission, accordingly, is to unify belief. Campbell cites I Cor. 11 to explain the far-reaching effects of Paul's institutionalization of the church, which occurred within the context of a response to spiritual Judaism and secular Imperial Rome. As Campbell puts it: Be imitators of me," wrote Paul to his sheep, "as I am of Christ." Which is to say: let no one conceive or follow his own image of Christ . . . but only that of Paul and his community. And so it was that in the name of this community, as its own image of Christ gradually matured, the history of the West for the next two thousand years was to be carved and trimmed (Campbell 380). The specific question that Paul is answering in I Cor., especially at 6:12-20, is "the use of prostitutes by male Christians" (Countryman 104). Paul urges celibacy: it is good for a man not to touch a woman, and married Christians should be celibate. On the other hand, patronizing non-Christian prostitutes does a Christian celibate marriage no good. Thus Paul concludes that it is better to marry (a Christian) than to burn (I Cor. 7:9). But this famous remark does not necessarily go to the heart of Paul's message to the Corin
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Approximate Word count = 9309
Approximate Pages = 37 (250 words per page)

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