s Beloved Son, Our Lord, into the world to save men's souls, so Our Lord sends His Apostles and their successors through the world to save souls. God told the priests of the Old Law that if they did not warn the people of coming dangers they would be held responsible for their own destruction. So, too, in the New Law . . . you should take every warning coming from the ministers of God as you would from Himself (Kinkead 227).
It is all very well to cite a reductionism explanation of the existence and shape of pastoral and ministerial Christianity. But informing that reductionism is a complex history, not only of pastoral and ritual practice per se but also of the very structure of Christianity as an institution, and more than this, of the Protestant and Catholic configurations of Christian ministry. The fact of Jesus's life and the manner of his death, as described in the gospels and as articulated and explained to the early Christians chiefly by Paul, was held to be the defining moment in human history, that moment in which the very cosmos was to be altogether reconceived and the purpose and practice of human experience to be altogether reconfigured. To order and direct this reconfiguration, given the Crucifixion, were the followers of Jesus, who had been taught and in effect commissioned by him to continue the teaching and explanation of the new possibilities in human experience, specifically, the experience of divine grace, that Jesus's example and teaching had enabled.
In the aftermath of the Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension were the followers of Jesus, who had been given "secrets" of the kingdom of God (Mark 4:11-12), i.e., the "word of God" (Luke 8:11), the seed of the sower (Mark 4:14), to be spread as the "good news" not only among those who knew the secret but also among the whole of mankind. More than this, Jesus's most intimate core of followers, the apostles, had been specifically empowered by Jesus to spread th...