'God forgiveth by them': Ussher, the ordained minister, and the ministry of reconciliation

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As this is the week in which Lent begins, laudable Practice will pause the readings from Nelson, Cranmer, and Lindsay until next week. This will allow for some hopefully appropriate seasonal reflections as we enter into the season of penitence and fasting.

Today and tomorrow, there will be extracts from Ussher. Ussher has been on my mind recently as I have pondered the possibility of a revisionist reading of the Irish Articles of 1615 - that is, seeing them as something more than simply a 'Calvinist' statement (a simplistic term which Ussher would certainly not have regarded as praise). Ussher, in his own terms, was not a 'Calvinist'. Rather, he understood himself to be an orthodox catholic:

the way which they call heresy is not new, but hath been trodden in long since by such as in their times were accounted good and catholic teachers in the Church.

These words are taken from his Answers to a Jesuit (1622). In this work, Ussher addresses 'the Priest's power to forgive sins'. Contrary to his opponent's charge, "the open wrong he hath here done, in charging us to deny that priests have power to forgive sins", Ussher points to the Form of Ordering Priests (and Ussher uses this title in his footnotes) in the Prayer Book Ordinal:

Whereas the very formal words which our Church requireth to be used in the ordination of a minister, are these: "Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained." 

The debate, therefore, is not whether the priest has power to forgive sins, but how this ministry is exercised:

For we acknowledge most willingly, that the principal part of the priest's ministry is exercised in the matter of "forgiveness of sins;" the question only is of the manner, how this part of their function is executed by them, and of the bounds and limits thereof ... we must in the first place lay this down for a sure ground, that to forgive sins properly, directly, and absolutely, is a privilege only appertaining unto the Most High.

This, then, identifies the sense in which priests do have the power to forgive sins, as servants through their "external ministry":

Having thus therefore reserved unto God his prerogative royal in cleansing of the soul, we give unto his under officers their due, when we "account of them as of the ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God" not as Lords, that have power to dispose of spiritual graces as they please; but as servants, that are tied to follow their master's prescriptions therein; and in following thereof do but bring their external ministry, for which itself also they are beholding to God's mercy and goodness, God conferring the inward blessing of his Spirit there upon, when and where he will ... To forgive sins, therefore, being thus proper to God only and to his Christ, his ministers must not be held to have this power communicated unto them, but in an improper sense, namely, because God forgiveth by them, and hath appointed them both to apply those means by which he useth to forgive sins, and to give notice unto repentant sinners of that forgiveness. 

"God forgiveth by them." Having thus defined the manner in which priests have a power to forgive sins, Ussher pointed to the various administrations by which this power is exercised, quoting from the German irenic Catholic theologian Ferus (Johann Wild): 

And "though it be the proper work of God to remit sins," saith Ferus, "yet are the Apostles" and their successors "said to remit also, not simply, but because they apply those means whereby God doth remit sins: which means are the word of God and the Sacraments." Where unto also we may add the relaxation of the censures of the Church, and prayer; for in these four the whole exercise of this ministry of reconciliation, as the Apostle calleth it, doth mainly consist. 

We see in Usher, therefore, what surely can only be termed a 'high' view of the ordained minister's ministry of reconciliation, in succession to the Apostles, flowing from the dominical words used in the Prayer Book's Ordering of Priests, and applied through those means - Word, Sacrament, prayer, discipline - which God has ordained in the Church. This is a rich Reformed Catholic vision of the nature and necessity of the ordained ministry, to which the term 'Calvinist' does not do justice. Indeed, in Ussher's own words, it is "the selfsame thing that the Fathers of the ancient Church delivered as a most certain truth".

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