{"id":796,"date":"2010-03-06T15:05:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-06T15:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=796"},"modified":"2010-03-06T15:05:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-06T15:05:00","slug":"separation-horizontally-and-vertically-ordination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=796","title":{"rendered":"Separation horizontally and vertically (ordination)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Justin Martyr (presumably not _the_ JM) <a href=\"http:\/\/elizaphanian.blogspot.com\/2010\/02\/does-ordination-make-difference.html?showComment=1267607202903#c4062792902042232136\">asked me to expand<\/a> on <a href=\"http:\/\/elizaphanian.blogspot.com\/2010\/02\/does-ordination-make-difference.html\">my comments about ordination<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>One point at issue is whether ordination confers any sort of spiritual superiority compared to other Christians, to which the fairly uncontentious answer is No. However, there are things which the church does which do confer that spiritual superiority (superiority is a bad word for this, but I can&#8217;t fathom a better one just now).<\/p>\n<p>I am thinking of baptism. Baptism grafts a person onto the Body of Christ and equips them for ministry. The community of the church is a community set apart, consecrated, a royal priesthood. The church functions for the world in the way that the Levitical priesthood functioned for the people of Israel. They are called to be holy.<\/p>\n<p>Ordination to the priesthood neither requires nor enables any greater degree of holiness on the part of the minister, compared to what is expected of any baptised believer. What it does do is mark out a person for the exercise of a particular role; it also prays for the guidance and blessing of the Holy Spirit to be with them as they exercise that role (this could be rendered in &#8216;ontological&#8217; language but doesn&#8217;t have to be). So someone who is ordained is not called to be more holy than someone who is baptised.<\/p>\n<p>The separation is not vertical (more or less holiness) but horizontal (a different part of the body).<\/p>\n<p><span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Justin Martyr (presumably not _the_ JM) asked me to expand on my comments about ordination. One point at issue is whether ordination confers any sort of spiritual superiority compared to other Christians, to which the fairly uncontentious answer is No. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=796\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ministry","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3npsc-cQ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}