Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom. Allies Thomas William
of the former. It is no less clear that this subjection was repaid with support. This condition of things was most clearly expressed as well as most powerfully established in the position of the Roman Emperor, who, as he received the tribunitial power, which in union with the consular was distinctive of the imperial dignity, from the Senate, so received also the supreme authority in matters of religion which belonged to the Pontifex Maximus. This authority had indeed been in its origin and its descent from age to age in the Roman city distinct from secular power, but henceforth became practically united with the civil principate. That undivided supremacy betokened the ultimate constitution of the heathen State, antecedent to the coming of Christ, in what concerns the relation between the two Powers. According to this, the Civil Power prevailed over the Spiritual, and casting off the subjection to religion in which itself had been nurtured, directed all its actions to a temporal end.
Far otherwise was it with that people which Moses, under the divine command, had created according to the pattern which he saw in the Mount. Chosen by God to conduct the race of Abraham out of captivity into the promised land, he alone in the history of the Israelitic race united in himself the three powers bestowed by unction of Priest, of Prophet, and of King. These powers he left to the people he was forming, but did not deposit them all in the same hands. His creation of the priesthood in the tribe of Levi, and of the high priesthood in the person of his brother Aaron and his lineal descendants, stands without a parallel in all the history of the world before the coming of Christ as an act of transcendent authority. For instead of the original priesthood of the first-born, which he found existing as it had been transmitted from the earliest time, he selected a particular tribe, which was not that of the first-born, to bear from that time forth the priesthood among the children of Israel; and further, he selected a particular person in that tribe, his brother Aaron, to erect in him the high priesthood, the most characteristic institution of the Jewish people. In like manner he took the ancient institution of sacrifice, dating, as we have seen, from Paradise itself, and formed it into an elaborate system to be carried out day by day through the whole succeeding history of his people, by priests springing from the person of the first High Priest. At the door of the Tabernacle, in the presence of all the assembled tribes, Moses invested Aaron with the priestly garments, especially the ephod, bearing attached to it the Rational, which contained the twelve stones indicating the twelve tribes of the holy nation, by which the High Priest, consulting God, issued the oracle of doctrine and truth. Moses further set the mitre on his head, bearing on its golden plate the inscription, “Holiness to the Lord;” and pouring on his head the oil of unction, he anointed and consecrated him. Thus the whole Jewish priesthood descended from above, being gathered up in one person, from whom all succeeding priests were drawn, and the sous of the first High Priest were to continue the line for ever according to primogeniture.
The High Priest’s office had in it four points peculiar to him beyond the office of the ordinary priest. First, once in the year, on the great day of the atonement, he alone entered into the most holy place, “not without blood, which he offered for his own sins and the sins of the people” (Heb. ix. 7), inasmuch as he sent into the wilderness one he-goat, charged with the sins of all the people, and sacrificed the other, whose blood he carried into the sanctuary, sprinkling it seven times over against the oracle, to expiate the sanctuary from the uncleanness of the children of Israel (Lev. xvi. 15, 16). He thus once every year represented in his person the whole sacred nation in that most remarkable act of confessing its guilt before God, and offering an expiation of it, which pointed even more to a future Redeemer. Secondly, he consecrated the whole body of the priests and Levites for their several work. The oil of unction poured upon his head was the palpable sign of priestly power transmitted from him to the priest, in which, again, he was an image of the future High Priest. Thirdly, whenever the civil rulers of the nation required advice in matters concerning the good of the whole people, it was the office of the High Priest to inquire for them by means of the breastplate of light and truth, which he carried upon the ephod. The relation of the Civil to the Spiritual Power was symbolised in the first bearer of the former after Moses, to whom Moses was commanded by God to communicate “part of his glory.” God said to Moses, “Take Joshua the son of Nun, a man in whom is the spirit, and put thy hand upon him, and he shall stand before Eleazar the priest (who had then succeeded his father Aaron in the high priesthood), and all the multitude, and thou shalt give him precepts in the sight of all, and part of thy glory, that all the congregation of the children of Israel may hear him. If anything be to be done, Eleazar the priest shall consult the Lord for him, he, and all the children of Israel with him, and the rest of the multitude, shall go out and go in at his word” (Num. xxvii. 18). Thus David afterwards consulted God by Abiathar, the High Priest in his day. Fourthly, on all questions concerning the decalogue, or commands in the moral law, or the ceremonial law, which embraced the whole field of the divine worship, or the judicial law, which concerned reciprocal rights and duties between man and man, the High Priest possessed a supreme and decisive jurisdiction, from which there was no appeal.
It is necessary to distinguish between the third of those privileges, the judgment by the breastplate of light and truth, which was an extraordinary gift of God, bestowed at particular times, and analogous in this to inspiration, and the fourth, the supreme jurisdiction and judgment of the High Priest, which belonged to him as an ordinary part of his office, and may be likened to a perpetual divine assistance inherent in it.18
2. Such was the high priesthood in its institution, and its operation through the whole of Jewish history down to the final destruction of the Temple corresponds to its institution.
The children of Israel were made a nation for a specific purpose, that is, in order that the race of Abraham, by Isaac his chosen son, should maintain upon earth, in the midst of an ever-growing defection, the worship of the one True God, and should likewise embody and represent no less that which was bound up in this worship, the promise of redemption given at the beginning of the world. The reason of its existence, therefore, was to be the bearer of the Messianic idea. To this all its ordinances and sacrifices pointed, and in the execution of all this purpose the High Priest was the chief organ. The Pontificate was the stem of the nation, of which the civil unity was made from the beginning dependent on the spiritual. On Aaron, by God’s command, Moses devolved one “part of his glory;” and when Eleazar had succeeded his father in the office of High Priest, and Moses was about to die, he devolved, by the same divine command, another part of his glory upon Joshua, appointing him to lead the children of Israel into their promised inheritance. To invest him with this solemn charge, the civil leadership of the nation, he brought him before Eleazar the priest, that, according to his instruction, Joshua and the whole congregation “should go out and go in.” This relative position of Eleazar and Joshua is continued in the respective religious and civil rulers during several hundred years down to the kingship of Saul. When the Israelites chose themselves a king after the pattern of the nations round them, the word of God to Samuel respecting their act is, “They have not rejected thee, but me, that I should not reign over them” (1 Kings viii. 7). Nevertheless God sanctions the erection of a kingdom, leaving unaltered the position of the High Priest. During the time of the kings the high priesthood continues the centre of Jewish worship; and when the civil unity is broken by the revolt of the ten tribes, they revolt likewise against the worship which had its seat in Jerusalem and was gathered up in the High Priest. The long-persistent iniquity of the people is punished by the captivity, and when a portion of the nation comes back to take root afresh in its own land, it is in the high priesthood more than ever that its unity is restored and maintained. Thus, through the three periods of Israelitic history, under the judges, under the kings, and after the return from captivity, the High Priest remains the permanent centre of Jewish life, the organ of spiritual, and therein of civil unity. Our Lord recognises this spiritual ruler as at the head of the Great Council, “sitting in the chair of Moses.” At His birth Herod inquires of this authority where Christ should be born, and receives the undoubting answer, “In Bethlehem of Juda.” Of Him Caiaphas, being then High Priest, uttered the famous prophecy denoting the great act of His mediatorial sacrifice; and the same Caiaphas, sitting as supreme judge of the nation, adjures Him by the living God to declare if He be the Christ; and our Lord answers the adjuration by the explicit declaration of His divine Sonship, and His authority to be Judge of the living and the dead.
The judges pass, the kings pass, the nation
See Die Harmonie des alten und des neuen Testamentes, von Dr. Konrad Martin, p. 190.