Prophet, Priest and King

The threefold office, the munus triplex, says that everything Christ does for us can be gathered under three headings taken from the anointed offices of Israel. He is the prophet who makes God known, the priest who deals with sin and stands between, and the king who rules and defends. It is in the catechisms of several communions, it supplies the frame for a great many systematic theologies, and most Christians who use it have never been told where it came from.

The earliest full statement is in Eusebius of Caesarea, in the third chapter of his Church History and in the Demonstration of the Gospel, both written in the early fourth century. Eusebius observes that in Israel only prophets, priests and kings were anointed, that the title Christ means anointed, and that Jesus alone holds all three at once. Medieval theology did not make much structural use of it; Thomas Aquinas treats Christ's prophecy, priesthood and kingship in the Summa but in separate places rather than as a single frame. It was John Calvin who made it architecture. In the 1559 Institutes, book two chapter fifteen, he says that to know why Christ was sent we must look at three things in him, the prophetic office, the kingship and the priesthood, and he had already used the scheme in his Geneva Catechism of 1545. From there it went into the Heidelberg Catechism at question 31 and into the Westminster catechisms, where the Shorter treats it at questions 23 to 26.

It is not a Reformed possession. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches at paragraph 436 that Jesus fulfilled the messianic hope in his threefold office of priest, prophet and king, and the Second Vatican Council, in Lumen Gentium, extended the three offices to the whole People of God. The Heidelberg Catechism does the same thing at its next question, asking why the believer is called a Christian and answering in terms of the three offices shared with the anointed one. Karl Barth structured the whole fourth volume of the Church Dogmatics on the scheme, taking the priestly, the kingly and the prophetic office as three angles on one reconciliation. Robert Sherman's King, Priest, and Prophet in 2004 tied the three offices to three families of atonement doctrine and to the persons of the Trinity. A scheme this widely adopted across traditions that agree on little else deserves to be examined rather than assumed.

So: found in scripture, or laid over it? The case that it is found is not weak. The title itself carries it: Messiah and Christ both mean anointed, and the anointed ones of Israel were exactly these. Scripture calls Jesus each of the three in so many words. He is the prophet of Deuteronomy 18 according to Peter in Acts 3:22 and Stephen in Acts 7:37, and the crowds call him a prophet repeatedly. He is a high priest throughout Hebrews. He is king in Luke 1:32-33, in his own answer to Pilate at John 18:36-37, and in Revelation 19:16. On this account the scheme does not invent a category; it collects what the texts already say under the heading the title itself supplies.

The case that it is laid over the text is also real and should not be brushed aside. No New Testament writer puts the three together; the combination is Eusebius's, not Luke's or Paul's. The anointing of prophets, on which the whole unifying logic rests, is thin in the Old Testament: there is one command to anoint a prophet with oil, and the narrative of its execution substitutes a cloak. And the scheme is selective in a way that has no obvious principle. Jesus is also called the shepherd, the last Adam, the lamb, the mediator, the bridegroom, the light, the vine and the servant, and none of those is an anointed office, so the three are chosen rather than counted. A scheme that organises is useful; a scheme that filters is dangerous, and the way to tell them apart is to ask whether anything the New Testament says about Christ has to be left out or squeezed to fit.

The workable judgement, and it is the one most careful users of the scheme actually hold, is that the threefold office is a genuine collection with real exegetical warrant, and not a revealed structure. It is a very good filing system. Use it to make sure you have not left out an office your tradition neglects, which is most of its value; do not use it to decide in advance what a passage is allowed to say.

Deuteronomy 18 is the text. In verses 9 to 14 Moses forbids the divination, sorcery and necromancy by which the nations found out what to do. Then verse 15, where the LORD your God promises to raise up for you a prophet like me from among your brothers, and the verse goes on to say that you must listen to him. Verse 18 repeats it as God's own speech, with the promise to put his words in the prophet's mouth. Verses 21 and 22 give a test for telling a true prophet from a false one, which is the sort of thing you provide for an ongoing arrangement.

Read in its own place, the promise most plausibly concerns the prophetic institution: Israel will not need the nations' methods, because God will keep raising up prophets, and here is how to sort them. That reading has to be given its weight rather than skipped past. But Deuteronomy itself reopens the question at the very end. Deuteronomy 34:10 says that since that time no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face. The book that promised a prophet like Moses closes by reporting that nobody like Moses has come. That sentence turns a description of an institution into an expectation, and the later tradition read it that way.

By the first century the expectation was live and unresolved. The delegation that goes out to John the Baptist asks him three distinct questions, whether he is the Christ, whether he is Elijah, whether he is the Prophet (John 1:19-25), which means those were three separate expectations. After the feeding of the five thousand the crowd says truly this is the Prophet who is to come into the world (John 6:14). The community at Qumran collected Deuteronomy 18 among its messianic testimonies and expected a prophet alongside two anointed figures. Peter and Stephen both apply the passage to Jesus directly.

The New Testament's claim, though, is not simply that Jesus filled a vacancy. It is that the category breaks under him. The prophets said thus says the LORD, delivering a word entrusted to them. Jesus says but I tell you (Matthew 5:22 and following), setting his own word alongside what was said to those of old, and the crowds notice the difference, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as the scribes (Mark 1:22). The writer of Hebrews puts it in the first sentence of his letter: God spoke through the prophets, and has now spoken by his Son (the BSB footnote gives the alternative in his Son, and the Greek has no article before Son). The prophet carried a message; this one is the message. That is why John's prologue calls him the Word rather than a speaker of words.

The office did not end at the ascension, on every traditional account. Calvin's version, followed by the catechisms, is that Christ continues to exercise his prophetic office by his Spirit through the scriptures and the preaching of the church, so that the teaching office of the church is derivative and not additional; the Heidelberg Catechism calls him our chief Prophet and Teacher who fully reveals the counsel of God concerning our redemption. Catholic teaching makes the same move and adds that the whole baptised people share in the prophetic office by witness. Both are saying that the last word has been spoken and that its delivery continues.

Hebrews faces an obstacle it does not hide. Priesthood in Israel belongs to Aaron's line inside Levi, and Hebrews 7:14 says flatly that our Lord was descended from Judah, a tribe as to which Moses said nothing about priests. So the writer must find a priesthood that is not Levitical, and he finds it in two verses of Genesis and one of a psalm. Melchizedek appears in Genesis 14:18-20, king of Salem and priest of God Most High, blesses Abraham, receives a tenth from him, and disappears. Psalm 110:4 has God swearing to the king that he is a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek. Hebrews builds chapter 7 on those two passages.

The argument is worth watching, because it is a piece of exegesis a modern reader should be able to describe honestly. Hebrews 7:3 says Melchizedek is without father or mother or genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life. That is not a claim about a man without parents. It is an argument from the silence of the Genesis text: Genesis gives Melchizedek no lineage and records no death, in a book obsessed with lineages and deaths, and Hebrews treats the silence as significant. Reasoning from what a text does not say was a recognised interpretive move in that world, and a teacher who presents Hebrews 7 without saying so has left his students unable to answer the first hard question they will be asked about it. Three things follow for the writer: a priesthood by oath rather than descent, a priesthood not interrupted by death, and a priesthood Abraham himself acknowledged, and therefore prior to Levi who was, in the argument of 7:9-10, still in Abraham's body.

What the priest does in Hebrews is two things, and the vocabulary keeps them apart. He offered himself, once for all, ephapax, and the word is fixed to the offering every time: 7:27, 9:12, 10:10. The seated posture at 10:11-12 makes the same point in a picture, against priests who stand because they are never finished. And he intercedes, continuously: he always lives to intercede for them (7:25), he enters heaven itself now to appear on our behalf in the presence of God (9:24), which Romans 8:34 and 1 John 2:1 say in their own words. One act completed, one ministry continuing.

Now the question that divided the Western church, and it must be put fairly because it is still a wound. Roman Catholic teaching holds that the sacrifice of the cross and the sacrifice of the eucharist are one single sacrifice. The Council of Trent taught in its twenty-second session that in the Mass the same Christ who once offered himself in a bloody manner on the cross is offered in an unbloody manner, the victim and the offerer being the same and only the manner of offering differing, and the Catechism restates this at paragraphs 1362 to 1367. Nothing is re-sacrificed on this account; the one offering is made present. The ministerial priesthood is a participation in the one priesthood of Christ, and Catholic teaching holds it to differ from the common priesthood of all the baptised in essence and not only in degree. The Eastern Orthodox understanding runs on the same lines with a different accent and largely without the Western scholastic framing: the prayer of the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom addresses Christ as the one who offers and is offered, who receives and is distributed, which makes the identity of the earthly and the heavenly offering a matter of worship rather than of theory.

The Reformation objected, and the objection is exegetical before it is anything else. Hebrews 9:25-28 contrasts Christ with a high priest who enters repeatedly, and says he has appeared once for all. Hebrews 10:14 says that by a single offering he has made perfect for all time those who are being sanctified, and 10:18 concludes that where these have been forgiven, an offering for sin is no longer needed. On that reading what continues is intercession and application, not offering. The thirty-first of the Anglican Articles puts it at its sharpest, calling the offering of Christ that perfect redemption, propitiation and satisfaction for all the sins of the whole world, and denying any other, in language about the Masses that is deliberately harsh. The Lutheran Confessions draw a distinction that is more useful than the polemic: Melanchthon, in the twenty-fourth article of the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, grants a eucharistic sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving while denying a propitiatory sacrifice offered by a priest for the living and the dead.

Each side has an answer to the other, and a student should be able to give both. Catholics and Orthodox reply that they do not deny the once for all at all but presuppose it, and that the Protestant objection assumes the eucharist adds a new offering, which is exactly what they deny; what is claimed is the presence of the one offering, not its repetition. Protestants reply that the language of offering in the Mass, whatever the qualification, does what Hebrews says nothing further may do, and that the burden of proof rests on the addition. The gap has narrowed in the modern dialogues: the Anglican and Roman Catholic commission's Windsor statement on the eucharist in 1971 claimed substantial agreement on exactly this question, and the Lutheran and Catholic dialogues have moved a long way. The gap has narrowed and it has not closed, and any teacher who tells you otherwise in either direction is telling you what he wishes were so.

One thing the whole church holds together, and it belongs in this section rather than in a footnote. All the baptised are priests. You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation (1 Peter 2:9); he has made us to be a kingdom, priests to his God and Father (Revelation 1:6). Catholic teaching calls this the common priesthood and affirms it as vigorously as any Protestant confession does. The disagreement is about whether there is also a ministerial priesthood of a different order, not about whether the people of God are priests.

The kingship runs back through the whole Old Testament: the promise to David of a son whose throne will be established forever (2 Samuel 7:12-16), the enthronement psalms, Psalm 2 with its installed king and its nations, Daniel 7:13-14 with one like a son of man receiving dominion and a kingdom that will never be destroyed. Note that the BSB prints One like the Son of Man, with capitals, and His for the figure's dominion; that is the translators' identification of him with Christ, and the Aramaic phrase means a human-looking figure whom Daniel's own chapter goes on to link with the holy ones of the Most High, so readers have taken him as Christ, as Israel, or as an angelic representative, and Jesus' use of the title for himself is the reason the Christian reading holds. Gabriel's announcement to Mary is made in those words: the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and his kingdom will never end (Luke 1:32-33).

What the New Testament then does with the claim is more disciplined than popular usage. The kingship is real and exercised now. Matthew 28:18 has all authority in heaven and on earth already given. Ephesians 1:20-22 has him seated with all things under his feet. Philippians 2:9-11 has the name above all names already bestowed. And yet the kingship is also contested and incomplete: Hebrews 2:8 concedes that at present we do not see everything subject to him, and 1 Corinthians 15:25 says he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet, which is a sentence about a process. This is the already and the not yet, and it is not a clever modern phrase but a description of two sets of texts that both have to be believed.

One passage in this territory shaped a major controversy and is worth knowing. 1 Corinthians 15:24-28 has Christ delivering the kingdom to God the Father and then being himself subjected to the one who put all things under him. Arians used it to show the Son's inferiority. The answer the church gave, and it is held across the traditions, is that the subjection described is of the mediatorial kingdom, the reign exercised for the purpose of bringing the world back, which reaches its end when the purpose is complete; it is not a statement about the eternal relation of the Son to the Father. Whether that answer is read out of the passage or brought to it is a fair question to ask, and the answer has held up better than most.

What Christians do with the kingship in public life is where they divide, and the divisions are old and serious. Luther's two kingdoms distinguished the sphere in which God rules by the gospel from the sphere in which he rules by law and the sword, and warned against confusing them. The Anabaptist traditions concluded that the church is a separate people whose politics is its own common life, and have paid for that conclusion in blood. The Reformed tradition, at its most confident in Abraham Kuyper, held that there is no area of life over which Christ does not claim authority, and set out to work that claim through culture and politics. Catholic social teaching built an extensive body of doctrine on the same conviction, and Pius XI instituted the feast of Christ the King in 1925 precisely as a public claim against the secular states of his day. Liberation theologies and much of the global Pentecostal movement have read the reign as present power for the poor and the oppressed. This course is not going to settle that, and it will say plainly that nobody who confesses the kingship gets to avoid the question of what it means on Monday.

The offices say what Christ does. The two states say in what condition he does it, and they come straight out of Philippians 2. The state of humiliation, status exinanitionis, runs from the conception to the burial: conceived and born in a low condition, made under the law, undergoing the miseries of this life, the wrath of God and the cursed death of the cross, buried, and remaining under the power of death for a time. That is close to the wording of the Westminster Larger Catechism at questions 46 to 50. The state of exaltation, status exaltationis, is the resurrection, the ascension, the session at the right hand, and the return in judgement, which the same catechism treats at 51 to 56.

Two differences between the traditions are worth carrying out of this module because they show you how the earlier lessons connect. The first is the descent. For the Reformed the descent belongs to the humiliation, and Calvin reads the clause of what Christ suffered before he died. For the Lutherans it is the first act of the exaltation, the living Christ going to proclaim victory. The same words in the same creed sit on opposite sides of the line, which is why lesson four insisted that you learn the clause's history. The second difference is what the humiliation is a humiliation of. Lutheran theology, holding that the divine majesty is really communicated to Christ's human nature, has to say that the humiliation consists in that human nature refraining from the full use of what it possessed. The Reformed, denying the communication, say the humiliation is the assumption of a genuinely finite human life by the person of the Son. Those are two answers to the question you met in lesson two, and a student who can trace the line from the communicatio idiomatum in 1577 to the arrangement of the catechism's questions understands how doctrine actually works.

What you can do now that you could not at the start of this module. You can state the incarnation from the texts rather than from a slogan, work Philippians 2:6-11 word by word, and say what is genuinely disputed in it and what is not. You can give kenotic christology as Thomasius and Gore actually proposed it and name the objections that sank most of it, instead of using the word kenosis as a synonym for humility. You can handle Isaiah 7:14 in front of a sceptical questioner without either pretending the Hebrew says more than it does or pretending Matthew's use of it is arbitrary.

You can give an account of the christological controversies in which Apollinarius, Nestorius and Eutyches each sound like people with a problem to solve, which is what they were, and you can quote Chalcedon accurately and say what its four load-bearing terms rule out and what it deliberately leaves unexplained. You can explain the communication of properties and give the Lutheran, Reformed, Catholic and Orthodox versions each in a form its own defenders would accept. And you can say why calling the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and Ethiopian churches monophysite is inaccurate, what they actually confess, what the modern agreements said, and how far those agreements have and have not been received.

On the atonement, which is where this module will be judged, you can now set out six accounts of how the cross saves, each with its defenders, its texts and its named weakness, and you can state the modern objections to penal substitution in the words their authors used and the answers its defenders give. More to the point, you know what the church has actually settled, which is a good deal, and what it has never defined, which is the mechanism, and you know why the two moves that look like neutrality, ranking the models or dissolving them into metaphors, are both positions that have to be argued.

And you can preach the resurrection as something that saves rather than something that proves, handle the descent clause without pretending your tradition's reading is the only one, and say what it means that a human being with wounds is on the throne. That last one is not an abstraction. It is the pastoral centre of this whole module, and the students of this school, many of whom are in places where the powers are not friendly, need it more than they need anything else in these five lessons.

The next module takes up what follows: how the work of Christ becomes yours. Calling, regeneration, faith, justification, adoption, sanctification, perseverance and glorification, the sequence the older theologians called the ordo salutis, and with it the arguments that split the Western church in the sixteenth century and the questions that Catholic and Orthodox and Protestant readers still answer differently. This module has told you who he is and what he did. The next one asks how it reaches you, and it will be worked to the same standard: every position from its own defenders, every claim from the texts, and an honest line drawn between what is settled and what is not.