In our previous post, we compared the role of Christian professors with that of the Old Testament prophets as “stewards of truth.” Following the model of the prophets of the Old Testament, we are required to maintain the truth of our respective disciplines, deliver it convincingly in the classroom, and continuously refine it to apply to new situations through our research and publication efforts. No matter the internal or external pressure, we are also called to commit ourselves to truth, both the eternal truth of God and the truth of our disciplines, as best we understand it. Failing to maintain our fidelity to God’s truth and to preserve the currency of our understanding of the subjects we teach renders us worse than useless. We become unfaithful prophets. In this post, we explore the similarities between Christian faculty and the Old Testament priests and consider the implications that comparison may hold for us.
Old Testament priests often had a different relationship with the people of God than did the prophets. Prophets tended to be episodic, particularly following the period of the Judges, when prophets no longer practiced national governance functions. Prophets tended to travel widely and might be viewed as living on the fringe of the community (2 Kings 2:1-6; Jonah 1:1-3; 1 Kings 19:15-16). Some of their prophecies were highly performative, and you wouldn’t have blamed their contemporaries for thinking they were a little outside cultural norms (Ezekiel 5:1-4; 2 Kings 1:10-12; Jeremiah 27:1-2).
Priests, by comparison, were a fixture of the community. Their role was unshakably stable in terms of location, timing, and activity. In the Temple practice, they offered the exact same sacrifices in the exact same way on the exact same days of every year. They inherited their roles through primogeniture and served until their death. At any one time, an ancient Israelite could identify both the current High Priest and the next High Priest (or even the next two) just by knowing the family. The ancestral cities where they lived were fixed from the time of Joshua, and they served in Jerusalem according to a rotation that was both systematic and predictable (Luke 1:8-9). The primary roles of priests were of teacher (Leviticus 10:10-11; Nehemiah 8:2-8) and intercessor (Leviticus 16; Joel 2:17).
The closest modern representations of those Levitical priests are probably the Catholic priests who serve their parishes all over the world. My (Laura’s) parish priest is a constant not just in my community but in my own life. He faithfully guides and supports our family and the parish during significant life events. In the first year that he came to our parish, he spent 10 minutes before each service explaining to the congregation the different aspects of the Mass we were about to celebrate. These brief teachings helped everyone in the parish have a better understanding of the traditions that have been passed down through the generations. They also helped us have a better appreciation of the significance behind the various parts of the liturgy and to understand why we practice certain rituals during Mass. This deepened my own understanding of the faith and helped me engage more meaningfully in the Mass because I understood the different parts in a way that, even as a cradle Catholic, I had never fully comprehended.
The Old Testament priests, however, were also the expositors of the hard issues of life. The Bible sometimes refers to it as distinguishing the common from the holy and the clean from the unclean (Leviticus 10:10). When an Israelite had an epidermal abnormality, he brought it to the priest, and it was the priest who determined whether he was clean or unclean. Likewise, when a house showed evidence of mold, the priest was summoned to determine whether the house was inhabitable or had to be destroyed (Leviticus 14). In more serious moments, the priest would administer a trial by ordeal to determine if a woman had been unfaithful to her spouse or if her husband was wrongfully jealous (Numbers 5:11-31).
The combination of tasks laid out for the Old Testament priests can be summed up as being the liaison between God and the community. They served the community in God’s place, teaching people the ways of Yahweh and adjudicating issues for them according to His law. They also served the Lord on behalf of the people, interceding for them and offering the requisite sacrifices.
Modern professors hold many characteristics in common with ancient Hebrew priests. While there are some itinerant professors who change universities regularly, the tenure system encourages most of us to settle in for long periods of time, giving us the opportunity to integrate into our communities of faculty, students, and alumni. We can also identify with our larger communities. Christian professors can take up posts within the local church, in regional government, and in the school system, and support local businesses with their expertise.
In all these contexts, the teaching role is our raison d’être. At our home university, 60% of faculty evaluations comes from our performance as teachers. Those in more research-intensive institutions will have lower hurdles in terms of the number of classes and students they teach, but hopefully not in terms of quality. Both of us have suffered under famous professors who were international authorities in their respective fields but whose skill sets did not include teaching. May they all find rewarding, remunerative work (outside the classroom).
More importantly, like priests, we are charged with loving the flock we have been called to teach. Few, if any of us, might identify our daily work at the university as equivalent to sacrificing lambs and other animals in the Old Testament temple worship. Seen through a Christ-animated lens, however, it is very much the same. Like Jesus, we are both the priest and the sacrifice. Our calling is to lay down our lives for our students and the others we are called to serve, devoting our time on this earth and whatever energy we have to their benefit. We are not hired guns, brought in to solve a problem before riding into the sunset. Even research faculty, some of whose grants will follow them wherever they affiliate, are called to care for the people among whom they have been planted. These communities in which we have integrated are the “one another” whom we are called to love and for whom we are to sacrifice ourselves as Christ did for us (John 13:34). Shame on the professor who mistreats his students or colleagues for his own advantage. Like the selfish priests of Ezekiel 34, the Lord may give us the respect we deserve for taking advantage of those we serve.
Though not heritable like the priesthood, the job of being a professor is multigenerational. The University of Bologna, University of Paris, Cambridge University, and Oxford University date their pre-institutional origins to the late eleventh century, and ever since that time there have been universities with professors serving their communities and the greater good. Each generation of faculty must be trained, qualified, and led into successfully fulfilling the role. University professors are not just accountable for their own students, but for the continuation of their trade so that future students may also receive the benefits of higher education. We are called to invest in junior faculty and graduate students who will carry the torch after we have gone to our reward.
Like Old Testament priests, Christian faculty are called to sanctify our students, to commit them to the service of God. Perhaps not in every class meeting, but in the totality of our classes, advising sessions, research meetings, and chance conversations, we are called to steer their lives towards commitment to Christ and His Kingdom. There are faculty on our hallway who have students lined up at their doors during their office hours. Sometimes it is to clear up academic questions, but more often it involves the harder questions of life. How to distinguish the common from the Holy in terms of career opportunities. How to identify the clean and the unclean in relationships, off-campus possibilities, and research options.
Some Christian faculty are extremely good at making these conversations redemptive. They are invited to their students’ weddings. Sometimes they are invited to officiate at those weddings. We have faculty whose former students named their children after them, and it wasn’t because the faculty taught them business statistics. When I (Larry) teach research classes, I continually remind my students that there are things we could write that would yield high academic impact but fail in our divine calling. At each commencement ceremony, Christian universities commission our students to go forth in service. Like the Beloved Disciple, we will have no greater joy than to later hear that our former students are “walking in the truth” (3 John 1:4). Likewise, there is no pain like learning that one of our former charges used all we invested in them to satisfy their own appetites to the detriment of others.
These roles of Old Testament prophet and priest are generally distinct, but sometimes they were combined. Zechariah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel all appear to be either actively serving as priests or of the priestly caste. One could see these roles combined in John the Baptizer, serving as the prophet of Jesus and also the son of a priest, and therefore an inheritor of the priestly office. Most certainly, we see the roles of priest and prophet combined in the person of Christ, whom we are all called to follow and emulate. Is it surprising then that we see reflections of both of those roles in our calling to the Christian university? The culture may not always reward our work with high pay and prestige, but in the currency of the Kingdom, we are certainly not the least of these.
The combination of these two archetypal roles, of prophet and priest, is not easy. It requires us to speak truth when our institutions may not reward us for it. It places a fiduciary duty on us to put the needs of our students, our colleagues, and even our universities above our own. There is rarely an uneventful day for Christian faculty. We are one of God’s liaisons after all, and He is always at work among His people. It requires us to rely on our inheritance from the Lord, not from the land, but it is a high calling and can build us into people of faith.
