that sort of treatment, and the history of the Church is littered with too many failed attempts to do so. Certainly a brief survey like this needs to be nuanced and refined in all sorts of ways. But it does seem difficult to deny that the first century of the Church’s life was generally familiar with the ministry of presbyters in its interconnected life. And they were most definitely part of the warp and weave of the second-century Church and beyond.
The relationship between presbyters and other members of the people of God is one of the most significant aspects of the ordination liturgies of the Church.11 Our earliest example comes from the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, an influential manual of church order probably originating from Rome in the third century. The ordination liturgy of the Apostolic Tradition, and other early sources show a carefully balanced ecology between presbyter and people. Ordinations are ecclesial events in which the interdependence between presbyter and people is expressed at a number of points, not least in the basic requirement that each presbyter is ordained to a particular Christian community. This is the origin of the ‘title parish’ to which Anglicans are ordained today. There is no such thing as an ‘absolute ordination’, a conferral of position in the Church abstracted from the realities of service within a local community of Christians.
The two critical moments in the early rites were the election of the presbyter and the equipping of the presbyter with the needful gifts for ministry through prayer and the laying on of hands. The election was not a modern democratic process but it was a formal recognition by the people that the candidate for ordination had been called by God and would be received by them. The fourth-century Canons of Hippolytus invite the people to declare ‘we choose him’ and in the Apostolic Constitutions, the people were asked three times whether they believed that the person was worthy to be ordained. ‘Axios’, ‘He is worthy’, would have been their reply, though we know that when Demophilos, a follower of Arius’ teaching, was appointed bishop of Constantinople in 370 AD some of the people cried out ‘Anaxios’, ‘He is not worthy!’ In Rome things were more restrained. A statement was read to the people on the Wednesday and Thursday before the ordinations and then by the pope at the ordination itself inviting them to declare any objection to the ordinations – a sort of publishing the banns of ordination – and if silence was kept the ordination could go ahead.
Although it was the bishop who prayed the ordination prayer and who, accompanied by other presbyters, laid hands on the candidates, the action was seen very much as the work of the Church. It was preceded by the prayers of the people in which they called upon God to equip the candidate with the particular gifts needed for this new ministry, and the bishop was seen to be speaking on behalf of the Church when he prayed:
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, look upon this your servant, and impart the Spirit of grace and counsel of the presbyterate, that he may help and govern your people with a pure heart . . .12
These words from the Apostolic Tradition reappear in several other ordination prayers through the centuries. Helping and governing God’s people with the grace and counsel of the Spirit and with a pure heart is the calling of the presbyters. They are to ‘shepherd the people blamelessly’ (Canons of Hippolytus) and to be their steward (Sacramentary of Serapion) as ‘an instrument of the Holy Spirit always having and bearing the cross of [God’s] only begotten Son’ (Testamentum Domini). These various images from a number of fourth-century ordination prayers and the relationship they envisage between the presbyter and other members of God’s people are succinctly gathered together in the Apostolic Constitutions:
O God . . . now look upon your holy Church and increase it, and multiply those who preside in it and give them strength that they may labour in word and deed for the building up of your people.13
Presbyters are to preside over the priestly people of God and to labour (as later eastern prayers put it) for ‘the edification and perfecting of [the] saints’. Very much in the spirit of these ordination prayers, John Chrysostom, the brilliant fourth-century preacher and author of On the Priesthood, one of the pastoral treasures of the theological tradition, said that priests ‘must consider one end only, the edification of the Church’:
For the Church is Christ’s own body . . . and [those] who are entrusted with the task of developing it into health and beauty should look round at every point, lest there be a spot or wrinkle, or any other blemish, marring its bloom and comeliness, and in short should make it worthy, so far as lies within human power, of the pure and blessed Head which it possesses.14
John likens the priest to a parent bringing life to birth or to a navigator of a ship guiding ‘a ship to safety in the midst of a stormy sea’ and makes much of the image in Matthew 24:25 of the ‘faithful and wise slave, whom his master put in charge of his household’ to protect and prosper them.15 We will return to these and other images of presbyteral ministry in the next chapter.
The early ordination liturgies, and the accompanying voices of the fourth century, give some precision to the interdependence between presbyter and people that we see in the New Testament. The presbyter needs the people to be a presbyter. The people need a presbyter to be the people of God. The one, as Daniel Hardy puts it, interanimates the other. This is not to fall into a crudely functional notion of ordination, as though people are only ordained to the extent that they are performing presbyteral activities. Neither is it to imply a clericalized understanding of the Church in which the Church can only be present and active when authenticated by the ordained. But it is to say that presbyters are ordained to serve the ‘health and beauty’ of the Church and that the ‘bloom and comeliness’ of the Church requires the sort of presiding ministry that presbyters are called to exercise. The particular pastoral responsibility laid upon the presbyter is to see that the Church grows into its natural form – the priestly body of Christ, a community embodying and demonstrating the with-other-ness and for-other-ness of God’s life of love.
We will think more about the presiding ministry of the presbyters and their animation of the people of God in the next chapter. At the close of this one, there are three further points worth noting from the early ordination liturgies. The first is that the ministry of presbyters is closely related to the ministry of deacons and bishops. The early western ordination prayers are the most explicit about the relationship between bishops and presbyters, even to the point of unhelpfully calling presbyters a ‘lesser order’ and ‘secondary preachers’, but all the early liturgies assume a closely connected ministry between the two orders. The ministry of deacons is also assumed in the liturgies and two eastern ordination prayers refer to the complementary ministry of prophets and teachers who also share in the building up of the Church. Second, the prayers, especially the eastern ones, have a strong emphasis on the work of the Spirit not only in the ordination service but throughout the ministry of the ordained. ‘Ordain . . . Lord, by the coming of your Holy Spirit’, one prayer implores; several others ask for ‘the great gift of your Holy Spirit’. The prayers recognize that the Spirit is not only the source of the presbyter’s gifts for ministry but is also the gift that will be imparted through the presbyter’s ministry. The Spirit is invoked as the people gather around the bishop to ordain the presbyter in the ordination liturgy so that the presbyter can invoke the Spirit on the people in other liturgies of the Church:
May [your servant] be worthy and meet to call down your Holy Spirit from heaven for the spiritual quickening of those who are born over again in the luminous font.16
In similar language John Chrysostom compared presbyters at the Eucharist to Elijah on Mount Carmel and concluded that they ‘stand bringing down not fire, but the Holy Spirit . . . [to] kindle the souls of all, and make them appear brighter than silver refined by fire’.17
The third consistent