Church’s Kingly Ministry

The Blackwell Companion to Ethics (edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells) looks to be a stimulating collection of essays. The contributors examine ethics through the lens of liturgy, on the assumption that what God seeks are worshipers, companions who will walk and eat with him. Thus, for instance, abortion is covered in an article on baptism (emphasizing that baptism engrafts us into a social body so that our bodies cannot be our own but are enmeshed with other bodies), and euthanasia and related issues are covered in a chapter on “receiving communion.” The specific conclusions may be off (there is, for instance, the typical squishiness concerning homosexuality), but the approach is welcome.

The editors lay out the general program in the first four chapters of the book. In the midst of a discussion of the “gift of the church,” they write: “The Church does not have a kingly ministry,” though it does have prophetic and priestly ministries. Only Jesus is king, and “to take upon itself a kingly ministry . . . either assumes Christ was not victorious or that he no longer reigns. Either way, it points away from and inhibits the prophetic and priestly ministry.” But this makes no sense. The church’s prophetic and priestly ministries grow out of her union with Christ in His prophetic and priestly ministries; but how can the church share in a portion of Christ (“is Christ divided?” Paul wonders). Nor is this true to the NT, which clearly teaches that the church shares Christ’s triple office. We are made “a kingdom and priests” so that we may “reign on the earth” (Rev 5:10) ?Eand this declaration is made in the context of the heavenly liturgy. The conclusion that the church has no kingly ministry appears to owe more to the editors’ preconceived ecclesiology than it does to the NT or the liturgy.