Monday, February 25, 2008

Braaten on office of ministry

In an article, The Special Ministry of the Ordained, in the book The Marks of the Body of Christ, Carl Braaten writes:

"My thesis is threefold: first, that Lutherans have been and are still confused on the doctrine of the ministry; second, that there is no way to resolve the difficulty by going more deeply into our own confessional sources because they bear the imprint of ambiguity inherent in Luther's own statements on ministry; and third, and most importantly, there is no ecumenically viable way out of this morass without eventually realigning and reconciling Lutheran ordained ministry with the episcopally ordained ministries in apostolic succession in the Eastern and Western brances of the one holy catholic church."

It seems to me that the ambiguity Braaten mentions is also present within Anglicanism.

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