We continue this week with an examination of the New Testament sacrificial priesthood that is found in the writings of the ancient Church. Let us begin again by acknowledging the aversion Protestants typically have to the idea of “priests” in New Testament worship, an opinion with which we are sympathetic and to which we are equally averse. Nevertheless a “priesthood” is found in almost all the ancient writings, just as we find evidence of an ancient “sacrifice” on an ancient “altar.” In fact, the “bishop” of the ancient church was sometimes called “high priest.” As we suggested last week, let us set aside (for a moment) the objection to having priests, and focus instead on what those priests are found to be offering. Once we discover the substance of the offering, we find an implicitly Protestant liturgy in which the chief objective of corporate worship was to glorify God according to a “pure religion” that worships in spirit and in truth, while caring for the material needs of the widow, the orphan and the stranger (James 1:27). In their new spiritual temple a New Covenant priesthood is found offering spiritual sacrifices (1 Peter 2:5), and in that paradigm, the New Covenant clergy was considered a limited conceptual analog of the ancient Levites, in which the clergy, as well as “the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow” could “come, and shall eat and be satisfied” (Deuteronomy 14:29) from the first fruit offerings of the people. So they cast aside the propitiatory sacrifices of the Old Testament, and offered their praise and the fruit of their labors to the Lord out of gratitude for what He had done for them. And they called these New Covenant sacrifices their Eucharist and prayers.

Continue reading Priests of the New Temple Sacrifice, part 2 →