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Royal Priesthood: A Theology of Ordained Ministry. By T.F. Torrance. Edinburgh, T&T Clark, Second Edition, 1993. Pp. xvii+108. $8.95.

Royal Priesthood: A Theology of Ordained Ministry. BY T.F. TORRANCE. Edinburgh, T&T Clark, Second Edition, 1993. Pp. xvii+108. $8.95. THIS book was written in the aftermath of the Lund Faith and Order Conference of the World Council of Churches in 1952, when theology was in its heyday as a discipline in its own right, 'the queen of sciences', and was not untrammelled with politics or demoted as a branch of 'religious studies'. It is magisterial in exegesis, in the history of doctrine and in its statement of the Church' mission and ministry, free of the perpetual backward glances at sociology, psychology, the apocryphal gospels and other faiths, which seem, for better or worse, inseparable from much theologising today. Its new edition is timely not only because it recalls Christian thinkers to traditional methods and enables the faith to be seen in its own light and to stand or fall in its own terms and not by criteria from elsewhere, but because the whole issue of priesthood is of urgent debate in a situation very different from that of the 1950s. Then the question surrounded the Catholic doctrine of sacerdotal ministry and the episcopate. That has not gone away, but is complicated by the issues of women's priesthood and its consequences, as to whether women are to be priests in the sacerdotal sense with, as Torrance says in his new preface, 'power' to celebrate the Eucharist and give absolution, or whether their ordination gives opportunity to re-think the whole concept of ordination, leading, as some Catholics fear and many radicals hope, to lay presidency. A further surd in the equation is the financial cost of separated ministry in times when the Churches are not likely to have much share in the world's wealth and voluntary clergy who, if possible, earn their livings in secular employment, replace those whose vocation has been to 'direct all their cares and studies' to the historic roles of pastor, preacher and minister of their Eucharist. Torrance has no doubt that women's ordination is totally compatible with Catholic and Apostolic faith and not simply one more concession to the spirit of the age. Christ assumed all humanity, female as well as male, and it is as such that he save us. Moreover the mistaken idea that it is not the priest as person but as male who can represent Christ, not only involves a form of Nestorian heresy in dividing between the divine and human natures of Christ, but conflicts sharply withthegreatsoteriological principle of the ancient Catholic Church that 'what has not been assumed, has not been saved'.