In similar fashion, the priestly community of the Church is expressed in ways “both ecclesial (in the gathered life of the church) and diasporic (in the dispersed life of the church)” (Stevens 175).
Both the Magisterial and Radical Reformations were very concerned with protecting each believer’s direct access to the means of grace. In the twentieth century, the Roman Catholic communion has also recovered this insight through its stress on the people of God, though obvious differences still exist between denominations and communions. What is especially important about this doctrine is the role it places on Christian responsibility and service as extending from the high priestly nature of Christ himself. “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people” (I Peter 2:9). Being a priest means to stand before God in adoration, confession, and intercession; it also means serving as representatives to our world.
The priestly role, too, reminds us that we handle the physical world as signs of God’s creation. We are priests of creation, as well as priests of God to a world in rebellion, as Alexander Schemann points out. In terms of higher education, the priestly role of believers imparts a special sense of sacredness to our task, whatever field and emphasis it may entail. We are to offer our work to God as a sacrifice pleasing to him. As priests we must handle the particulars of the sacrifice with care and reverence. We cannot as educators treat our field's subjects as neutral tools to manipulate to value-free ends. They have a preciousness about them that comes from being the creatures of God--be they rock, tree, sea, animal, fish, mitochondria, family, village, book, painting, spice, hammer, microscope, and on and on.
This priestly role requires that we seek out a true understanding of the things we handle in our teaching. To be a priest of creation means to recover the complex metaphysical value of creatures. Nothing is simple brute, deterministic matter. The Spirit is ever continually brooding on creation, upholding it in his wings. The world is charged with God’s grandeur as Gerard Manley Hopkins knew so well. Or as Thomas Traherne understood, the holiness of things is meant for our perception and reception:
Can you be Holy without accomplishing the end for which you are created? Can you be Divine unless you be Holy? Can you accomplish the end for which you were created, unless you be Righteous, unless you be just in rendering to Things their due esteem? All things were made to be yours, and you were made to prize them according to their value: which is your office and duty, the end for which you were created, and the means whereby you enjoy. The end for which you were created, is that by prizing all that God hath done, you may enjoy yourself and Him in Blessedness. (7-8)
Our metanoia, the change in our direction, extends far beyond a simple list of do’s and don’ts to a holistic change in our understanding and practice in every aspect of living. Regenerate hearts and repentant directions, which need Spirit empowerment, extend into the way we conceive of the foundations of mathematics, the applications of bio-technology, the design and implementation of sewage systems, the protesting of economic oppression of nations in the new global economy, the delicate balance in a sestina, the flavors of a chocolate soufflé, the harmony in family structures, the stunning wealth in undersea biology, and so on. Our blessedness as priests of God comes in “giving things their due esteem.” Teaching this implies a need for repentant examination from time-to-time, lest the thou of our students becomes it, lest we take the creation, which is only ours by imparted authority, and treat it as something easily isolated and destroyed.
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