Transcript
Whose love is infinite and in whose will is our peace, grant us the peace of God as we bow before thee. Grant that Jesus Christ may keep watch over us and that we may know the peace that is in him, for we pray in his blessed name, amen. Christ is made a sure foundation, Christ the head and border stone, guilty of the law and precious by the law of the church in the mother, holy sire of
heaven forever and her confidence alone. To his temple where we call him, the Lord of us two. With that water in heart, in kindness, here our people have saved way. Grant an honest elevation, shall live in his walls away. Give our sake to God our service, but they ask of thee to pay. God may gain from him forever, without message to betray. And hereafter, in thy glory, evermore will be a true name. Father and mother, dear
father, God and father, as you have said, God and mother, just with you, you ever be and evermore. Alleluia, alleluia, I long to live in each and every one. Dean Wesk has asked me to remind you that this afternoon in Miller Chapel, this afternoon, pardon, in the main lounge of the campus center, Dr. Alan Geyer will give a lecture on the church arms control and disarmament. That's this afternoon at 1:30 in the main lounge of
the campus center. Dr. Geyer is director of the church's center for theology and public policy in Washington, D.C. I could present Professor Torrance as a renaissance man, but I'm quite sure he would much rather be presented as a reformation man. Dr. Torrance is an old friend of this institution. He is one of the most distinguished theologians today. His most recent book is Reality and Evangelical Theology, just published by Westminster only a few months after Oxford
published Divine and Contingent Reality. We welcome him to the campus. Tomorrow afternoon at 1:30 in the main lounge of the campus center, he will deliver a public lecture on the priesthood of Jesus Christ. At 12:30 on Wednesday, he will meet in the auditorium of the campus center with the theological forum, and at 12:45 will deliver an address there. I am happy to present Professor Thomas F. Torrance, who will be our preacher for the
morning. Hear the Word of God from the Book of the Prophet Malachi, Chapter 2, reading at verse 5. My covenant with Levi was a covenant of life and peace, and I gave them to him that he might fear, and he feared me. He stood in awe of my name. True instruction was in his mouth, and no wrong was found on his lips. He walked with me in peace and uprightness, and he turned many from iniquity. For
the lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and men should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts. But you have turned aside from the way. You have called many to stumble by your instruction. You have corrupted the covenant of Levi, says the Lord of hosts, and so I make you despised and abased before all the people, inasmuch as you have not kept my ways, but have shown partiality in
your instruction. In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These words, the lips of the priest should guard knowledge, and men should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts. This was one of John Calvin's favorite passages, to which he referred again and again and again to show that the priesthood properly understood, and the ministry of the Word of God belong inseparably together. Priesthood in
that proper sense is in fact the primary aspect of the holy ministry. We're all accustomed in the reformed tradition to think of the triplex munus, prophet, priest, and king. But Calvin pointed out that bringing of those three together in that way happens incidentally only three times in the Old Testament. The primary emphasis is upon the priesthood, and the prophet was sent by God to call the priest back to his proper office in the ministry of the
Word of God. So that it is the priestly office of the Word of God that is the continuing and primary function of holy ministry also in the New Testament. It was toward the end of his life, as he was concerned with expounding the minor prophets and writing his comments on the harmony of the Pentateuch, as he called it, that we find Calvin's mind gathering together and coming to quite clear and definite conviction about how we are
to regard the priestly aspect of the ministry in the church, the body of Christ. And here he says something that many people find quite shocking. For example, in the concluding prayers to his homilies on the minor prophets, for example, on exposition of Malachi 1:10, Calvin says again and again that there is a distinction between some of us whom God has set apart to be priests and the priesthood of the whole church. That is to say,
Calvin is now convinced that there is a priesthood within the corporate priesthood of the church. He has nothing to do with the priesthood of all individual believers. That's not his kind of expression at all. There is a corporate priesthood of the church, but within that there is also a particular and a special priesthood of the holy ministry. Several years ago, about 20 years ago, the Baker House Press published a collection of Calvin's prayers and devotions, many
of which were selected from the homilies on the minor prophets. But it is a fact that they left out every single prayer from Calvin where he distinguishes the particular priesthood of the ministry from the general priesthood of the church. Let's say Charles Edwards who edited that thought Calvin was quite wrong at this point. I believe Calvin was right. And I believe that we Protestants have developed a conception of the ministry to which Calvin would never subscribe
when every young minister gets up in the pulpit and thinks he can behave like a prophet. No, he gets up into the pulpit, conducts worship as a priest, and as a priest he must be the messenger of God and minister the word of God. Now, learning from Calvin's interpretation of the harmony of the Pentateuch and the minor prophets, let me put before you three aspects of the priestly ministry which he emphasized. First, the priesthood has to
do with a unique function to which some people are separated, and it is an awful function. It is one in which the priest has to bear the iniquity of the people of God and to bear God's judgment upon them. As Calvin understood it, as expounded the Pentateuch, there was an intimate bond between the priest, the offerer, and the offering. They are inseparable, and the priest can only offer the oblations and prayers of the people, offer the
sacrifices, insofar as he himself takes their hurt upon himself and penetrates into their need and himself bears penitently the judgments of God upon them. And it is that intimate relation between the offerer and the offering that we find brought out in the 53rd of Isaiah. Now, there we have the heart of the fearful nature of the ministry. You cannot be a minister of the Gospel unless you are prepared to be brought into a relation to your
congregation, to your people, in which you take their sins, their iniquities, their transgressions upon yourself, and offer yourself in penitence with them before God. At the end of his life, unfortunately it didn't come earlier, Calvin became aware of the apostolic constitutions where we have embedded the liturgy of the Nicene period of the Church. And where we find, as in Hippolytus, that the person was ordained with the priestly spirit of Christ. And as in the Old Testament,
the sons of Aaron were not consecrated in their own right. Aaron was consecrated, the high priest, but they were sprinkled with his consecration. So Christ alone has consecrated our high priest, but we are sprinkled with his consecration. And it is only in that way, as we are consecrated in and through Christ, that we can share this ministry. The very fact that the minister has to bear the sins and iniquities of his people means that he must
continually be reconsecrated. He cannot do his task otherwise. And therefore he has to have holiness to the Lord burned into his being. Now that is a priestly aspect of the ministry, which I think we have forgotten. Second, Calvin was aware that whenever the Old Testament speaks about memorial, as we have it in the Lord's Supper, it was always, without exception, a memorial before God. Now that again is something we Protestants have forgotten or changed. We think
of the Lord's Supper as remembering his death, as remembering what he did. That's not the biblical concept. Take a concordance sometime and go through every use of the term memorial and the Pentateuch, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus. I don't know whether it comes to Deuteronomy. And you will find that in every instance, the offering and the priestly offering, offering of the offering are a memorial before God. And it's in that sense we have to think of the Eucharistic
memorial. And so Calvin says in his comments on Numbers 19 that Christ is our memorial and we offer Christ daily to the Father, and we do that per praes et herationes. And that's what we do at the Eucharist, he says. In the Eucharist we have no other sacrifice but Christ. As we say in our hymn, nothing in my hands I bring, simply to thy cross I cling, because that is our one memorial before God. And it
is as we are participant in that that God hears us and we draw near to God, for he draws near to us. And then the last point and the primary point of our text, the ministry of the Word is a priestly function. The priest is God's messenger. That's the point of Malachi, the messenger from God. His prime task is to bring a Word from God to his people, but in such a way that he evokes or
provokes or brings their offering toward God, because the priestly function is dual. He ministers from God to man and man to God. And it is only as he brings the Word of God to man in such a way that there is created a response of the people toward God, and he brings that response to the people toward God through the way in which he ministers the Word that he fulfills his ministry. Calvin speaks of these terms,
this connection, uses the word mediator and the word interpraise, because the mediator is an interpreter, interpraise between God and man, but the interpraise is one who mediates the Word, bringing God's Word to man and man's response back to God. And it's in that reciprocity that the minister fulfills his function. Now, I don't believe that anyone can do that simply from the pulpit or simply through conducting the liturgy. He can only do that if he visits his
people in their homes and brings the Word to God there, and their whole lives are opened out before God so that he can share with them their hurt and their need, understand their responses and mold it to them, and then he can proclaim the Word of God to them and in the worship of the church bring their true responses back to God. Preaching is essentially a priestly function. It's priestly in that you bring the Word of
God to man. It's priestly also in that the whole act is an offering before God. Now, look at it in this way. The ministry has a profoundly terrible and harrowing character, and who can be sufficient for that? Now, granted that Isaiah 53 refers to the servant of the Lord and supremely uniquely to Jesus Christ, nevertheless, it picks up the heart of the priesthood of Moses and Aaron put together, and it's in that light that Calvin understood
how we in Christ are to minister. If you are prepared to have the priestly spirit of the servant of the Lord put upon you in your ordination, then you are prepared to be a minister of the Gospel. If you are not prepared to do that, then I don't believe you are ready to be a minister of the Gospel because it's only as you share it by your prayer life, your intercession, your sympathy with the people in
the priesthood of Jesus that you can say in his name, be reconciled to God. So in the Institutes, Calvin could say, the ministry regarded in this way fulfills vicaria opera, in Christ's dead, in Christ's name. The ministry acts in such a way that there takes place a representare peso nam Christi. You're representing the person and the role of Christ as your minister. That is what he meant by the priestly character of the ministry. And now unto
him who loved us and freed us from our sins through his own blood and has made us a kingdom and priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.