and sacer, but ordinary language tends to be muddled on these matters. Religion, it turns out, models our encounter with the HOLY so successfully that we often fail to distinguish the original from the copy. In what follows,I will use the arcane names, particularly GOD and the HOLY, to refer to what we encounter in the border country. I will use “sacred” to refer to the institutions of religion that serve as models, images, or maps of the arcana.
This does not mean that religion is completely divorced from the HOLY. Like everything else in the everyday world, religion may, at any moment, surprise us by opening onto the HOLY. GOD may—and often does—meet us through it. Religion prepares us to recognize and interpret the HOLY when we do encounter it. The young Samuel, for example, heard the voice of GOD in the Temple at Shiloh, but the old priest Eli had to tell him what he was hearing (1 Samuel 3:1–18). The rites of religion accustom us to certain patterns of encounter with the HOLY. Religion maintains the language and patterns and traditions of spirituality that help us interpret what we encounter in the border country. Still, we should avoid confusing the sacred with the REALITY it stands for. Such confusion constitutes idolatry and can cause profound harm.44
Religion is almost as inevitable as our fundamental priesthood.45 It is not hard to understand why. The HOLY that we keep bumping up against in our lives is both all-pervasive and also hard to find when we want it. Our experience of it, the experience that grounds our priesthood, is elusive. Because we are creatures of time and space, we feel the need to settle this omnipresent but ungraspable REALITY into the concreteness of a sanctuary, a fast or feast, a rite—in short, in religion. GOD, TRUTH, ULTIMATE REALITY, the HOLY—these we cannot see or hold or visit at will; but we can make pilgrimage to a sacred shrine, perform sacred gestures, recite sacred texts, sing hymns, and join together in celebrating sacred occasions.
If these rites are of more than the simplest sort, if (for example) they require the combined efforts of many people or take several days to perform or involve many different activities, they will probably require the services of religious specialists. The approach to GOD, remember, is dangerous. If our shrines and festivals and rites are to be good images of the HOLY (their very purpose in being), they, too, must be presented as foci of power and danger. Otherwise, they are of no value. We grant them power ourselves, through our reverence for them; and then we seek help to deal with their ascribed power without endangering ourselves. The power we grant them is real power, for it represents the culture’s or community’s collective extension of authority to the designated signs and rites. The power of those appointed to help us in the presence of the sacred is equally real.
Hence the creation of priest-specialists, whom we might also call “priests of religion.” Their office comes into being in order to replicate or reproduce, on the level of religion, the role of the fundamental priest in life itself.46 As we live out our fundamental priesthood on the margin between everyday life and the HIDDEN REALITY, so the priest of religion (in serving that role) lives on the margin between the profane world, with its spaces, times, and people, and the separate and sacred sphere of religion. The worshiper lives, for the most part, in the profane sphere, all those aspects of life defined by religion as non-sacred. She or he approaches the boundary of the sacred as if a stranger, seeking guidance from someone more at home there in order to enter the sacred realm and depart unharmed. All this replicates the experience of the fundamental priesthood in the presence of the HOLY—an experience that is too diffuse, too scattered throughout our existence, and too unpredictable for us to maintain a clear grasp of it. Since we cannot afford to lose sight of such important things in our life, we create maps, icons, and images to point us toward them.
Religion and its priesthood have as many different forms as there are different conceptions of the HIDDEN HOLY and different methods of mapping it. We are concerned here, ultimately, with the life of the church and its priesthoods—the priesthood of the whole people and the priesthood of the ordained. But if we are to understand how Christian religion deals with priesthood, we have to pay attention to its roots in the ways the people of ancient Israel ordered their religion and its priesthood. Much has been written on this topic by historians of Israel and of religion in general, and no doubt much more remains to be said. We do not need a detailed account, however, or a complete history of how the institution developed and changed in response to changing times—only a broad sense of its basic outlines and its particularity.
I do not want to overemphasize the uniqueness of the religion of ancient Israel. The sacrificial system at its heart was, in fact, broadly the same as that of other Mediterranean cultures.47 Still, each religion is significantly unique, significantly different from all others. Each takes materials from a common stock of human religiousness and fashions them into its own unique essence in an effort to reflect a particular experience of the HOLY. In learning and living with our faith, Christians, like other people, have to learn and value the specificity of our own tradition. It gives us our ongoing character and provides the building materials with which, under the guidance of the SPIRIT, we create our future. Even elements in our tradition that no longer have living force are still part of our collective memory and therefore of who we are. They live on as powerful metaphors and symbols even now. And the roots of our identity, without doubt, are in ancient Israel.
The religious rites of ancient Israel were largely centered on sacrifice and the altar where it took place. Given what we have said about meeting the TRANSCENDENT at the boundaries of human life, it is not difficult to see why the ritual killing of an animal might effectively symbolize the encounter with GOD. We do not have to find these rites to our own liking in order to grasp their potential power. Probably they seemed quite natural to farmers and pastoralists like the early Hebrews. In their world, human life depended in part on the life and death of animals, a process with which they were directly involved.
The Israelite tradition was of two minds about the altar, the place of sacrifice. On the one hand, the nomadic element in the tradition militated against a fixed, localized sanctuary. This element continued to be evident in the rule that the altar must be built of unaltered stones, which were not reshaped for the purpose with human instruments (Deuteronomy 27:6). In other words, it was the sort of altar one could build anywhere in the stony pastures of Canaan. On the other hand, by the time the documents of the Old Testament were reduced to writing, most Israelites were settled farmers and strongly attached to their local “high place” and to the great pilgrimage shrines such as Shiloh, Dan, Bethel, Beersheba, and, above all, Jerusalem.
The more nomadic strand of Israel’s traditions probably did not place much reliance on a separate order of sacred priests, since a small traveling band could not afford to take them along as it moved from one pasture to another. Nomads might make use of the settled sanctuaries that lay along their path; but in the main, the elders of the nomadic group were their own religious experts. The settled farmers of Israel, however, could create settled sanctuaries with more elaborate religious rites. With that practice, an important niche for the priest of religion appeared. The high place of a small village, to be sure, might still make do with the wisdom of the village elders or the expertise of an occasional visitor—like Samuel when he came to Bethlehem in search of David (1 Samuel 16:1–5). If the village grew to be a town, however, it could support its own resident priest. A great pilgrimage center could do better yet, eventually supporting a whole corps of priests in its sanctuary. In due time, sacrificial worship was limited, at least in theory, to a single temple—the royal sanctuary in Jerusalem, with a very large body of religious officials.
While some of the older documents in the scriptures of Israel reveal the gradual development of this priestly efflorescence, documents that lay out the priestly role in detail, such as Leviticus, are relatively late. They reflect the highly developed religion of the Jerusalem Temple. For these texts, Jerusalem and its one Temple were GOD’S residence on earth, the place where GOD’S name dwelt. Here the HOLY comes dangerously close to being collapsed into the sacred place of religion. There was still an awareness that one could not control the HOLY through the rites of religion. Yet to worship at the Temple was at least the religious equivalent of approaching GOD. The worshiper had to purge the self of all uncleanness and to leave the profane world behind in order to draw near. The only thing to bring along was the sacrifice, and it had to be of the very best that the profane world could offer, an unblemished specimen of an animal considered clean for human consumption-along