Priesthood: ontological change?

One of our students/ordinands very recently was plunged into thinking about this, see here: Re-vis.e Re-form: Priesthood and ontological change
Her dilemma will probably sound familiar to many of us as it probably names something many of us who have evangelical streaks will likewise struggle with: "If, as I heard today at my ordinands' Christmas retreat, that ordination brought about an ontological change in the curate who stood at the front to tell us of his experiences, am I to understand that his essence is changed by this ceremony? Will I be ontologically changed? My essence - changed? If I deny that this can happen am I blocking the power of the Spirit - that I would never want to do? But if I think of myself as ontologically changed because I am a priest, isn't that almost like saying I am super-holy? I don't get it, aren't we all saints (Ephesians 1)? Aren't we all consecrated by God, set apart, if we are 'in Christ'? What does this kind of talk do to the idea of the 'ministry of all believers'? Didn't the reformation aim to break down some of the divides between laity and clergy and isn't a claim to clerical ontological change recreating the divide?"

Now, when she raised this on Facebook I responded by pointing to a blog post I wrote a handful of years back when my wife was ordained. It was kindly noted that perhaps this wasn't expressed in a way that helped address the issue in the way I thought it did. I looked again and thought perhaps it could be clarified (I'm thinking about the last few paragraphs which talk most directly about the issue of this post).

So what might I say further or (hopefully) better?
Well, In the Anglican church, the move to reappropriate more Catholic (vs arguably catholic) understandings of sacraments including regarding ordination as such came with the Oxford movements rallying cry to 'magnify your office'. In this sort of view, the dispensing of valid sacraments depends on a valid priestly ministry: in order to effect the kind of essential changes in blessed bread and wine and water to produce efficacious sacraments carrying the grace of God, an essential change is envisaged as needed in the human agent of such changes. Some Catholic theology speaks of an indelible 'stain' (in a positive sense) on the soul. Now I'm no expert in this, and it's a while since I was reading up on this stuff, so I can't say much more than that. However, I note that this kind of view presupposes ways of looking at anthropology and even ontology which made a lot more sense when the philospohical background to our society had more Plato and Aristotle in it: where things have substances and forms and somewhat dualistic conceptualisations were in vogue. Our problem with some of this, Reformation heritage aside for now, is that we tend to start with the Material and work on from there.

Anyway, because of that I said and still think that perhaps we shouldn't try to decide whether we want to think of ministerial priesthood either in terms of 'ontology' or of 'function' (which tends to be the opposite extreme of the debate). I tend to think of our identity as formed in a nexus between our social locations and the attendant meanings given there, our relating to God and our biological/physical history. I would have to say that I would locate our relationship to Church as overlapping the social and God dimensions.

So, who am I before God? Is 'priest/presbyter' part of that? And if so, in what sense?
Who am I within 'my' social networks? Is priest/presbyter part of that? How?
Who am I physically? Is 'priest/presbyter' part of that? How so/not?

I think that the first of those questions is most likely to yield an answer on the 'ontological' side of things, but I don't think it's straightforwardly so.

Easier to answer, as I did in the previous blog post, is the social one: "...acquiring the 'right' to wear a dog-collar, be addressed with 'Revd' and all those other social and cultural odds and ends that go with being a CofE clergybeing...". So, in as far as we 'are' our social beings (and I think we are) this is an ontological change, but probably not the kind Catholics usually mean. In some way it might gain the sympathy of functionalists -but only if they are willing to recognise that perhaps we don't have some kind of essence that is unrelated to our social roles. I'm arguing, I guess, for an emergent understanding of identity where role and 'being' mutually inform and generate giving rise to something that is more than the sum of the parts. In such an account you can't pull the two things apart, but neither are you thinking in a way that wholly satisfies the previous 'language games' the debate has run between.

Physically/biologically ... hmmmm at first the instinct was to say 'no'. But wait: the 'performing' of oneself as a priest rewires our brains over time and even leaves physical marks on our bodies. And perhaps we need to see that the act of ordination is (among other things) a ritual which has the effect of cementing and activating 'gestalts' (some of which are socially derived some of which are being built in training) which have neurological configurations and so change, as we learn to perform them appropriately, our social being. This has physical correlates in body language and more mundane things related to the decisions we make about where we 'park our bodies' in everyday life.

So back to the 'coram Deo' dimension (before God): part of the deal is that we are acting on a sense of vocation to something that is best, we think, lived out as a public representative of the Church and by being authorised to carry out certain kinds of duties on behalf of the Church. Is that ontological? It sounds a bit functional. But, again, I think it is both and neither. It is ontological in that it concerns who we are before God. It is ontological in respect of the way that God wills leadership, service, public representation etc and so that some people do that stuff because they are fitted naturally and grace-fully for it.

We all have callings, for some people these are best expressed by ordained ministry because this is the way to demonstrate the Church's confidence in and authorising of publicly representative ministries. And this is where it starts to feel functional too: I do think we need to recognise a certain degree of contingency in all of this. Especially given the wide expression of ministry in the catholic (not Catholic) Church or churches. If it was clear that the threefold ministry was unequivocally The Way of doing things, then we could be more confident of a certain 'ontological' givenness about ordination. But if in fact we don't think ordination is a sacrament in the way that Baptism or the Lord's Supper is, then we have to recognise a degree of contingency. And by that I mean that it could be otherwise: if I happened to be a Quaker and had the sense of calling that I do, I might be expressing it by offering to be a Clerk of Meeting or an Elder, perhaps. In the Methodist system, I wouldn't have been ordained deacon (which from my current standpoint I would see as a significant symbolic loss). I think it is hard to be firm about a Catholic 'ordination ontology' without denigrating ecumenical partners' expressions of leadership or pastoral ministry.

So where have I got to? That there is an ontological change but that it is more contingent on particular church polities and our social being than on some God-ordained absolute leadership-ordering and so has quite considerable similarities to a functional account.

However, something else needs to be said, I think. And that is to do with the other issue raised of the priesthood of all believers (a non-biblical phrase to express a biblical concept, captured by the RC recovery of a high appreciation of Baptism in thinking about church order). Part of the reason why the issue of ontology relating to ordination is so big an issue is the issue of comparative valuing of ministries. The practical ecclesiocentrism of the churches manifests itself in an over-concentration on ordained ministries rather than the ministries in the world. This also manifests as 'maintenance' rather than mission (yes I know that's a cartoon, but I trust you'll take the sense rather than quibble just now) and the failure of ministerial priesthood to properly equip and encourage those in missional priesthood -that is living out their baptisms in service and witness in the 'secular' world. Instead we have churches where the actual agenda is to serve the institution and so support the ordained and ordained-a-like rather than where the ordained help to fashion the institution to support the world-facing ministry of God's whole people.

If we could get that more right, it'd kick the feet out from under a lot of the issues about the ontological status of the ordained.

Perhaps that's no clearer than before, but I'm too tired now to improve it further. I'll publish and let comment and discussion, if any, help clarify: the posse is the priest, people! And crowd-sourcing is the name of the game.