The Royal Priesthood and the Ordination of Laics

Afanasiev’s first chapter is about the laity, and it is the least negotiable thing he wrote. His claim is that “royal priesthood” in 1 Peter 2:9 is not a metaphor for lay devotion but a statement about what the Church is; that the rites of Christian initiation are the ordination by which a Christian is consecrated to that priesthood; and that the Church’s later division of herself into “the consecrated” and “the non-consecrated” is a grammatical convenience that became a theology and then became clericalism.

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

The Text and the Claim

“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people” (1 Peter 2:9); “and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father” (Rev. 1:6). Afanasiev’s move is to read these as ecclesiological data about the composition of the eucharistic assembly, not as devotional encouragement.

The logic connects directly to the eucharistic thesis. If the Church exists as the assembly gathered for the eucharist, and if the eucharist is offered — as the anaphora says — by the whole people through the hands of the one who presides, then the assembly is an assembly of priests, and the presiding minister is a priest among priests exercising a distinct ministry, not a priest instead of an unpriestly congregation. Michael Plekon’s summary of the position is exact: for Afanasiev the eucharistic assembly is an assembly of the royal priesthood under the presidency of one endowed with a special charismatic gift and a unique ministry of presidency — “but not a different degree of priesthood.”

The consequence is the sentence in which Afanasiev’s whole theology of ministry is compressed: in the eucharist, “the people of God could neither celebrate without him [the cleric], nor could he celebrate” without them (Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit, trans. Vitaly Permiakov, ed. Michael Plekon, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007, 6; quoted in “Actualizing Baptism: The Font of Lay Authority,” Church Life Journal, University of Notre Dame, churchlifejournal.nd.edu).

Neither party is dispensable, and neither is complete alone. That is not a compromise between two theologies; it is the whole of his.

Chrismation as Ordination

The chapter title that startles is the second: “The Ordination of Laics.”

Afanasiev’s argument is drawn from the rites themselves. He examines the texts of the baptismal liturgy alongside the texts of ordination and of the eucharist, and finds that the language of consecration, of the gift of the Spirit, and of appointment to service is used of the newly baptized and chrismated Christian in the same register as it is used of the ordained. Chrismation, on his reading, is precisely the rite by which a Christian receives the gift of the Holy Spirit for the service of God in the Church — and is therefore, structurally, an ordination: the ordination of a layman to the order of laics.

The word “order” is doing real work. Afanasiev’s laikos is not a residual category — the Christian who is not a cleric — but a positive one: a member of the laos, the people of God, holding a determinate place and a determinate charism in the assembly. A Christian is not first a generic believer who may then be ordained to something; he is ordained at his initiation to the priesthood of the people, and some are subsequently ordained to further ministries within it.

The Distinction That Became a Separation

Afanasiev’s critique is not of the distinction between laics and clerics but of what happened to it.

The distinction is liturgically real and he does not attack it: the assembly has a shape, some stand at its head, and this is neither an accident nor an abuse. What he attacks is the moment at which “the liturgical distinction between [laity] and clerics . . . turned into their separation” (The Church of the Holy Spirit, 18; quoted in “Actualizing Baptism,” Church Life Journal).

He locates the mechanism in language. Once ordination to the priesthood came to be described as the consecration, the Church needed a way of naming the difference between two kinds of consecrated person — and found it by declining to call the first kind consecrated at all. Laics became “the non-consecrated,” clerics “the consecrated,” and a difference of ministry within one priestly people had been re-described as a difference between a priestly class and a non-priestly one. The reduction, on Afanasiev’s account, is not of the clergy’s dignity but of the baptismal dignity of everyone else: the richness of what happens to a Christian in baptism and chrismation is impoverished by a vocabulary designed to protect something that was never in danger.

He argues, correspondingly, that the difference between a Christian who holds a particular ministry and one who does not is functional rather than ontological — a difference of charism and place within the one royal priesthood, not a difference of substance between two kinds of Christian (The Church of the Holy Spirit, 15–16; discussed in “Actualizing Baptism,” Church Life Journal).

Peter Phan’s summary of the chapter’s upshot is that for Afanasiev the hierarchical distinctions between clergy and laity are “secondary and necessary but not essential,” and that ordained ministries are themselves charisms of the Spirit rather than non-charismatic offices set against lay gifts (Peter C. Phan, review of Nicolas Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit, Catholic Books Review, 2013, catholicbooksreview.org).

A caution, because this is where Afanasiev is most often overread. “Functional rather than ontological” in his usage is a claim about the kind of difference ordination makes, not a denial that ordination makes a difference, and not a claim that a layman may celebrate the eucharist. His own sentence — that the people could not celebrate without the cleric — forecloses that reading. Readers should also note that the ontological language he is resisting is the scholastic idiom of an indelible character, and that his target is a particular Western formulation as much as a general principle. Whether he was right to resist it is a live question; that he was not proposing a lay eucharist is not.

The Ministry of Laics in the Church, 1955

Afanasiev published the argument separately, and while he was alive, as Sluzhenie mirian v Tserkvi [The Ministry of Laics in the Church] (Paris, 1955; 2nd ed. Moscow, 1995) — a short book which overlaps substantially with the first three chapters of the still-unpublished thesis (Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев Николай Николаевич,” pravenc.ru/text/77064.html). Its companion is Vstuplenie v Tserkov’ [Entry into the Church] (Paris, 1952; 2nd ed. Moscow, 1993), on Christian initiation, which supplies the liturgical evidence.

This is the book that drew the first serious criticism from a fellow Orthodox theologian. In the mid-1950s the young John Meyendorff, then in Paris, argued against positions Afanasiev had taken in it (noted in Victor Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev,” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 [2020]: 223–278, at 224). Meyendorff’s own treatment of the same theme — “Hierarchy and Laity in the Orthodox Church” — is available in English and takes a more institutionally cautious line while granting the substance of the baptismal priesthood (see John Meyendorff). The disagreement between them is one of the earliest markers of the fault line that would run through the whole reception of Afanasiev.

Why He Thought This Was the Centre

It is easy to treat the royal priesthood as an appendix to eucharistic ecclesiology. Afanasiev did not. In the abstract of his doctoral dissertation he wrote that the priestly ministry of all the members of the Church “was the main core of church life in early Christianity, that determined its structure; and changes in understanding [of royal priesthood] determined the further development of church organization” (abstract of Afanasiev’s dissertation, archive of the St. Sergius Theological Institute, Paris; quoted in Anastacia Wooden, “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev,” The Wheel 36 [Winter 2024]: 56–59, at 59 n. 11).

That is a causal claim about church history, and it explains the architecture of The Church of the Holy Spirit: the royal priesthood is chapter 1 because, on Afanasiev’s account, it is the variable whose change explains everything downstream — the rise of a clerical order distinct in kind, the reconception of ordination, the reconception of authority, and finally the juridicization of the Church’s order (see The Argument of the Book).

Wooden draws the pastoral inference and states it as a loss: “Today, in the absence of visible mechanisms for the exercise of royal/baptismal priesthood, our experience is absent, and the gifts given for it remain latent” (“On the Legacies,” 59).

Reception

The reception of this part of Afanasiev has been unusual: it is the material of his that has travelled furthest outside Orthodoxy and been discussed least inside it.

In Catholic theology the royal priesthood of the faithful became a conciliar theme, and Radu Bordeianu’s archival study of the Orthodox presence at Vatican II reports that Afanasiev’s eucharistic ecclesiology “influenced the Council’s texts on the local church as the fullness of the Church in communion with other local eucharistic assemblies and the priestly character of the laity” (Radu Bordeianu, “Orthodox Observers at the Second Vatican Council and Intra-Orthodox Dynamics,” Theological Studies 79, no. 1 [2018]: 86–106, at 95 n. 39, citing Olivier Rousseau’s preface to L’Église du Saint-Esprit). The claim, and its limits, are examined in Vatican II and Lumen Gentium.

Within eucharistic ecclesiology it has been the great casualty. Alexandrov lists the teaching on the people of God as the royal priesthood in the liturgy — the point from which Afanasiev’s theology of ministries begins — among the elements not present in Zizioulas, who focused instead on the episcopate; traces of it survive in Zizioulas only in the notion of an ordained laity, in the insistence that all ministries be present in the local church, and in the weight given to the axios and amen of the whole assembly (Alexandrov, “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev,” 274–275). Since Zizioulas’s version is the one that prevailed, this is the part of Afanasiev that the twentieth century mislaid.

See Also

References

  • Afanasiev, Nicholas. The Church of the Holy Spirit. Translated by Vitaly Permiakov. Edited by Michael Plekon. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
  • Afanasiev, Nicholas. Sluzhenie mirian v Tserkvi [The Ministry of Laics in the Church]. Paris, 1955; 2nd ed. Moscow, 1995.
  • Afanasiev, Nicholas. Vstuplenie v Tserkov’ [Entry into the Church]. Paris, 1952; 2nd ed. Moscow, 1993.
  • Alexandrov, Victor. “Zizioulas’s Criticism of Afanasiev.” Eastern Theological Journal 6, no. 2 (2020): 223–278.
  • Bordeianu, Radu. “Orthodox Observers at the Second Vatican Council and Intra-Orthodox Dynamics.” Theological Studies 79, no. 1 (2018): 86–106.
  • Phan, Peter C. Review of Nicolas Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit. Catholic Books Review, 2013.
  • Plekon, Michael. Editor’s introduction to Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
  • Wooden, Anastacia. “On the Legacies of John Zizioulas and Nicholas Afanasiev.” The Wheel 36 (Winter 2024): 56–59.
  • “Actualizing Baptism: The Font of Lay Authority.” Church Life Journal, University of Notre Dame (churchlifejournal.nd.edu).
  • Pravoslavnaya entsiklopediya, s.v. “Афанасьев Николай Николаевич” (pravenc.ru/text/77064.html).