06 — The Royal Priesthood

The consequence Afanasiev cared about most. If the Church is the eucharistic assembly, then the assembly is an assembly of priests: every baptized and chrismated Christian is consecrated, holds a charism, and is a minister. Afanasiev’s most radical formal move is to call the rites of initiation an ordination — the ordination of laics — and to argue that the Church’s long habit of dividing herself into “the consecrated” and “the non-consecrated” is a linguistic accident that hardened into a theology. From this he derived a critique of clericalism, an account of the ministries as charisms rather than as offices over the Church, and a doctrine of the bishop as the one who presides in the midst of the royal priesthood rather than above it.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration; the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s Western European exarchate)

Files in This Section

File Description
The Royal Priesthood and the Ordination of Laics 1 Peter 2:9 as ecclesiology; chrismation as lay ordination; the distinction of laics and clerics and its hardening into separation; The Ministry of Laics in the Church (1955)
Ministries, Charisms, and the Bishop No non-charismatic ministries and no non-charismatic members; the proestos; the people’s part in ordination; the difference from Zizioulas on the episcopate

The Discipline of This Section

This is where Afanasiev is most easily misused, in both directions. His account of the royal priesthood has been quoted in support of positions he did not hold — that the ordained priesthood is dispensable, that the distinction between clergy and laity is an abuse, that laypeople may celebrate the mysteries. He held none of these. He held that the distinction is real, ancient, and necessary, and that its conversion into a separation of two classes of Christian is the error. The files below state his position as he stated it, and mark where later writers have gone beyond him.

The Church’s discipline is not his to alter, and is stated separately. Per METHODOLOGY §4.1, what the Orthodox Church holds and practises about ordination, the mysteries, and the priesthood is set out in The Holy Mysteries and Ecclesiology. Afanasiev’s theology of ministry is presented here as his proposal about that practice.

Anastacia Wooden’s judgment frames the section. Of everything in the corpus, she writes, “the area where it needs to be most urgently lived out and experienced is the royal priesthood of all the baptized,” and Afanasiev’s ecclesiology “can be seen as an extended excursus into how the whole ecclesial organization was built to assure the exercise of the royal priesthood” (Anastacia Wooden, “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev,” The Wheel 36 [Winter 2024]: 56–59, at 59). If that is right, this section rather than Section 03 is the heart of him.

See Also