One of the pleasures of teaching young adults is encountering levels of intelligence exceeding what one credits one's self with.  Recently I had an exquisite experience of this kind.  We had been exploring the idea of church.  Now most of us assume that this is not an item in the supermarket of ideas which today's youth would drop into their shopping trolleys.  But this group engaged keenly with historical aspects of church which a study of early house churches had brought us up against.

Church as problematic
  Since most of the students seemed to have studied French at some stage of their schooling, I began by asking them the French word for church.  With Église duly offered, I drew up two columns on the b/b and at the top of one wrote CHURCH and at the top of the other …GLISE.  Then it was a simple matter to add under CHURCH a list of words from other languages like kirk, kerk, Kirche, kyrka, while under …GLISE we added iglesia, chiesa, ecclesia.  Lastly, at the bottom of the respective columns I wrote the Greek word from which words in each list had derived.  These were kyriake, meaning "belonging to the Lord", and ekklesia, meaning "assembly of people called together". 
  The final task was simply to put these two components together to discover that at the roots of the European experience of Christianity we discern a sense that the church was a gathering of people who felt they had been called together to belong to their Lord. 
  To give this view of church some authenticity I was able to summon up what might at first sight appear to be an unlikely ally in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.  Here, in the paragraph improbably but memorably numbered 777, we are provided with the following teaching.
The word "Church" means "convocation".  It designates the assembly of those whom God's Word "convokes", i. e., gathers together to form the People of God, and who themselves, nourished with the Body of Christ, become the Body of Christ.
  At a further stage of my own teaching we had occasion to reflect on the differences between a church made up of people in this way and the ancient institution of the Temple in Jerusalem.  The latter was a site of political, economic, social and religious power where access to the divine was open only to a hierarchical elite.  An institution of this kind contrasted starkly with an understanding of the early church as a group of people linked by bonds such as link people in a household.  Leading characteristics of a household are mutual generosity, forgiveness, and sharing of food and shelter.  This adds up to open access for all to the life-giving elements accruing to the household.
  It was during the consideration of such contrasts, drawn largely from the work of the social scientist of early Christianity John H. Elliott, when we were all entertained by a display of raw intelligence.  The student suddenly thrust herself into the discussion almost like someone jumping into the path of oncoming traffic and signaling "Halt!"
  "So when did it happen - ", she said, " and why did it happen - that the church became like a temple again?  Because that's what it is.  All that power and wealth and special people."
This was indeed the very point of illumination at which I had wanted to arrive, but I had been thinking that there was a deal more teaching to do and some rather heavy hints to give before I might be able to deliver the punch line.  Instead, the student had done her own line of interpretation, made her own connections, and by her sheer intelligence and no little courage saved us all a lot of time and endeavour.

Recent reading
  The incident came to mind when I put down the last of a few recent books on priesthood.  Up to ten years ago authors on priesthood were all in their way coming to terms with the loss of the temple mystique which surrounded the Roman Catholic priesthood. The issue was encapsulated in the shift from sacerdotal language about priesthood to language about presbyters and presbyterate.  "This shift," said Avery Dulles in his lectures on The Priestly Office, "has been partly responsible for the crisis of priestly identity " (p. 33).   Paul Dinter's The Changing Priesthood was not only a vigorous attempt to demystify the old sacerdotal priesthood but also struck out in a new communitarian direction.  That was 1996, and is the last theological venture on priesthood I am aware of.
In the year 2000, however, there is virtually nothing for authors on priesthood to write about any more.  As far back as 1994, and significantly in the 50th anniversary issue of the conventional priestly journal The Priest, Basil Cole put the forlorn question "O Priest, Who Are You?"  In fact, of priesthood there is virtually nothing left, perhaps only what Donald B. Cozzens calls in The Changing Face of Priesthood "the lingering question" hanging over priests' heads "like a storm cloud".  This is the question of their priestly identity, no less.  He even subtitles his book A Reflection on the Priest's Crisis of Soul.  In Priesthood in the Modern World one contributor explains that there is no longer "a common understanding" of who the priest is. 
  And so writers now often turn to words of solace and encouragement for the group of men who have suffered such dislocation.  Bernard Haring's Priesthood Imperilled exemplifies this approach.  These men, so many of them almost traumatised, would need more than such soft pabulum, however, if they ever got around to reading Herbert Haag's Clergy and Laity: Did Jesus Want a Two-Tier Church? Haag is an Old Testament specialist but moves authoritatively through this whole question.  He is astonishingly succinct and effective, coming to the point on his very last page (which is only p. 110): 
a sacramentally ordained priesthood is not necessary and can be justified neither biblically nor dogmatically.

Parting company
  Such a statement from a Roman Catholic theologian is, of course, the stuff of tabloid headlines, and it certainly appears here also for its shock value.  The words, while meant for what they say, are, however, taken out of their context.  Haag is not denying the need for leaders of liturgy.  In fact his thesis, built up on the views of scholarly predecessors who are an even mix of Roman Catholic (Roloff, Merklein) and Lutheran (prominent among these is von Campenhausen), is that leadership emerged from liturgical activity, which involved teaching as well as ritual prayer and actions.  But the leadership was a designation or commissioning to this public role and was not thought of as effecting the kind of personal transformation which concepts like "indelible sacramental character" imply.
  In this, of course, Haag parts company with the leading teacher of the church today, John Paul II, whose interests in the question of priesthood are widely known through such documents as the Post-Synodal Exhortation I will give your shepherds but not least through his letter to priests each Holy Thursday.  The keystone in the pope's teaching is the concept that only the ordained priest acts "in the person of Christ".  This phrase is a curious one in the history of theology, and bears reflecting on.

"in the person of Christ"
  Concepts deriving from the traditional phrase "in the person of Christ" were prominent in documents of the Second Vatican Council on priests, bishops, liturgy and church.  Thus, in the phrasing of the Constitution on the Church, "in the person of Christ [the ministerial priest] effects the eucharistic sacrifice" (10).   Nearly 20 years before the council, the phrase had attained prominence in Pius XII's encyclical Mediator Dei, the peak expression of the post-Reformation theology of Roman Catholic priesthood.  John Paul II himself frequently invokes the phrase and relates it to expressions like "configuration", "living image", "sacramental representation" and so on.
  These last are from I will give you shepherds where he emphasises that the new sacramentally induced condition of the priest is very real indeed.  In fact it arises from "the specific ontological bond" uniting the priest to Christ (11), this favoured expression of the pope's meaning that the bond is found "in the very being" of the priest (16).  Thus endowed - or rather constituted, priests "exist and act in order to proclaim the Gospel in the name and person of Christ the head and shepherd" (15).
  In recent years ideas associated with "in the person of Christ" achieved notoriety by reason of the fact that official documents drew on them in order to support John Paul II's teaching of 1994 in Ordinatio sacerdotalis about "reserving priestly ordination to men alone".  This document itself did not elaborate arguments but referred to earlier teaching of the period in the early 1970s when the Vatican initiated special reports on the issue of the ordination of women.
  The main document here was Inter insigniores from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which emphasised the anthropological character of the concept carried by the phrase.  It did this in the way it pointed to a "natural resemblance" between priest and Christ: "there would not be this 'natural resemblance' which must exist between Christ and his minister if the role of Christ were not taken by a man." (27)  In the unlikely event of this reasoning not being understood for what it is, namely, an irreversible genderisation of priesthood, the Congregation continued:
In such a case it would be difficult to see in the minister the image of Christ.  For Christ himself was and remains a man.

Medieval theology
  The prior history of this line of thinking hardly goes back beyond Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century.  In his writings on the Eucharist Aquinas drew on the phrase in its Latin form (in persona Christi) because this derived from the Latin Vulgate translation of a phrase of Paul's at 2 Corinthians 2:10.  What Aquinas meant by it has been the subject of a lengthy debate between two American theologians, Sara Butler and Dennis Ferrara.  Unfortunately for the health of theology, however, the debate loses much of its relevance when we reflect on the fact that the Latin "in persona Christi" is a mistranslation of Paul's Greek at 2 Corinthians 2:10.
  We get a glimpse of the significance of this when we compare the 1582 Rheims version with the Revised Standard Version of 1971.  In Rheims we read:
For, what I have pardoned, for your sakes have I done it in the person of Christ.
In RSV, by contrast:
  What I have forgiven has been for your sake in the presence of Christ.
From the Rheims version we can see how one might think of Paul acting out of some mandate "in the person of Christ".   Any sense of this dissipates, however, on the correct understanding of the Greek phrase here (en prosopo) as represented in RSV.  This indicates that Paul was not writing in the "person" of Christ but was expressing how he felt in the "presence" of Christ, more or less as in an oath.  In other words, Paul is not writing in a ministerial capacity or claiming ministerial privilege over the community.  Indeed, on the contrary, in expressing his forgiveness he is taking a lead from the community's own forgiving attitude.
  This being the case, much recent theology of the priesthood - and much of the recent theological discrimination against women in regard to priesthood - rests on a phrase and concept which is medieval in origin and has no connections with biblical teaching.  In fact, its claims to a biblical provenance rest on a faulty Latin translation.  In an analysis of John Paul II's theology of ordained priesthood, Timothy Costelloe noted at this point (p. 254 note 83) in relation to the misreading of Paul's meaning:
  This is an interesting example of the way in which a particular conviction in the Church's self-understanding is amplified by reference to a scriptural text which later proves to be incapable of supporting the meaning given to it.

Adjusting to 21st century
  Even more interesting in the light of such a glitch in official theological process is the increased level of confidence with which we can look back on Haag's concluding assessment highlighted earlier that a sacramentally ordained priesthood cannot be justified biblically.
Adjustments to official theology are of course never made.  Official theology takes on a life of its own, and those parts of it which do not work are eventually hung out to dry on the dead branches of history.  In Rome Has Spoken Maureen Fiedler and Linda Rabben have reminded us of leading instances of this.  What interests me in where Haag leaves ordained ministry is how his précis of its historical development overlaps points which emerged from my own much narrower exercise of a linguistic analysis of the language of ministry in the first generations of Christian writings.
Without taking readers on yet another Cook's tour of diakonia, the word which was Paul's preferred expression for how ministry effected what it was supposed to do, I will simply allude to some reflections contained in the Afterword to Diakonia: Reinterpreting the Ancient Sources and in the final chapter of Are All Christians Ministers?
  In the first place, the church does indeed require ministers (Ephesians 4:7-12).  Ministry is not just a given, in spite of most of the rhetoric about baptismal rights and obligations to ministry.  But since the function by which ministry supports and enriches the church is essentially the ministry of the word (2 Corinthians 4:1-2), whether this is the proclamation of the death and resurrection in the eucharistic prayer and memorial (1 Corinthians 1:23-26) or prophecy and instruction within congregations (1 Corinthians 14:1-25), the persons performing the ministry need to be especially equipped with appropriate gifts (1 Corinthians 12:1-31) and with appropriate familiarity with the tradition (Acts 1:15-26).
  Members of the local community are the ones to know who is likely to succeed at these tasks (Acts 6:3), and their candidates will themselves be required to reflect on their own sense of calling before receiving the endorsement of the community.  Nothing in the endorsement requires that those commissioned continue in commission for the rest of their lives, just as nothing in the nature of the tasks requires that the candidates should be only men or only women.
  Finally, since the nature of the task does require that communication of the word be effective, it is to be unfaithful to the nature of ministry to require ministers to communicate to thousands and thousands of men, women and children.  The local church needs many ministers, perhaps teams of ministers.  And each church will be in regular communication with neighbouring and distant churches for the purposes of exhibiting the love demanded of Christians and for the purposes of developing communion - with churches in Rome, Canterbury, Istanbul, and Chiapas.
A last word with Herbert Haag (p. 108):
  This survey has shown that all ministries are the creation of the Church.  None can be traced back to Jesus, not even that of the bishop, and least of all that of the priest.  Hence the organisation of these ministries remains even today in the hands of the Church.