Orders of Ministry

Sir, The Rev Michael Galloway thinks it obvious that the Prayer Book Ordinal refers to three separate Orders: Bishop, Priest and Deacon and takes issue with the Rev JJ Frais’s assertion to the contrary (letters, 7 March).

Historic documents need to be understood as the words and phrases were used at the time they were composed, and in this case it is also useful to know the usage during the previous thousand years.

Most people familiar with Church history know of the seven orders of the Medieval Church and it might be assumed that the top three of the seven orders were Bishop, Priest and Deacon, but this would be wrong. In both Saxon and Medieval Canon Law the Priest and Bishop constituted but a single order with the Diaconate a second Order. So when our Church was reformed under Henry VIII, Henry’s King’s Book lost the lower five Orders and repeatedly refers to the single order of Bishops and Priests and of necessity had to use the two names to refer to this single order.

So when we come to the Ordinal it does not refer to three orders but “that from the Apostles’ time there have been these Orders of Ministers in Christ’s Church; Bishops, Priests and Deacons” where everyone knew that the three names referred to only two orders with the names Bishop and Priests distinguishing a structured order.

It may be interesting to add that from the unreformed perspective the additional powers of Bishops were quite modest when compared to the ordinary Priest’s power to create God’s presence in the Mass. Hence apart from a small Spanish party at the Council of Trent most of that communion accepted Bishops and Priests were a single order. Thus the Jesuits started exalting the Pope as a distinct office over all clergy and towards the end of Elizabeth I’s reign, some of our theologians countered with the idea that our Bishops were his equal as a distinct third order.

The questionable scholarship behind this third order theory started to crumble under the scholarship of the last 150 years so that a new “plene esse” theory emerged during the Church of South India debates after the war. This was proposed in The Historic Episcopate in the Fullness of the Church, edited by Kenneth M Carey, Principal of Westcott House. Conceding only two orders, it was argued that the episcopate would emerge in the fullness of the Church.

Alan Bartley, Greenford, Middlesex