THE journey that gave us our word deacon was not a very long one: from diakonos in Greek, meaning “servant”, it got to us through diacon in Old English. Priest can also be from the Greek of the New Testament. Contrary to popular notions, it didn’t start out because the word for a pagan religious functionary, stretched and misappropriated for Christian ministers, but comes from the biblical presbyteros, meaning an elder.
Perhaps, within the Early Church, a presbyteros and an episkopos were much the identical thing. Once the Church took off, and began to grow in far-flung rural areas, nonetheless, it became useful for the successors of the apostles to appoint representatives with real but more circumscribed authority in word and sacrament. In that way, words around episkopos attached themselves to the senior, apostolic leaders in town, while the language of the presbyteros became related to their junior colleagues. Passing through Germanic forms corresponding to preost, that gave us the English “priest”.
A curate is someone entrusted with the “care” (Latin cura) of a gaggle of individuals in a certain place (a parish). There are stricter and looser ways of speaking here. More accurately, the curate is the incumbent (entrusted by the bishop with the “cure of souls”), but today we are inclined to use the word for a clerical apprentice (strictly, an assistant curate), or a non-stipendiary priest (an honorary assistant curate).
THE word incumbent is helpful since it allows us to discuss a priest with the cure of souls while not having to tell apart between a rector (originally, one who rules), a vicar (at first, a stand-in or deputy), or a priest-in-charge.
The etymology of “incumbent” offers some impish opportunities, arising because it does from “to lie or rest upon” (consider the parallel in “recumbent”). An 18th-century cleric, living it up on the financial proceeds of his clerical appointment, definitely reclined on his parish. Happily, the clerical word “incumbent” seems to chart the other tack: an incumbent is the person on whom spiritual responsibilities rest.
The sense of a priest leaning on the parish is healthier preserved in the thought of a parish as a “living”: a job — historically, sometimes simply an appointment and the income, independent of truly doing the job — which provided a sufficient income to live to tell the tale.
Parson comes from “person”, although quite how or why just isn’t entirely clear. It is likely to be the one that represents the church, or who’s entrusted with legal authority.
ENGLISH words to do with bishops split into two groups, in relatively a captivating way. Although “bishop” doesn’t look very very similar to “episcopacy”, they each derive from the Greek epískopos, which is formed from two parts, epi- (“over”), and skopos (“seeing”, like periscope and telescope), i.e. an overseer. One family of words, including “episcopacy” and “episcopal”, comes through French (where the word for a bishop today is évéque). This family keeps the initial letter “e” in place. Words of a German lineage, nonetheless, like “bishop” (and the trendy German Bischof), have dropped it. The story is something like this: epískopos eventually becomes biscop (since p to b is a standard shift), and on to bishop.
Mitre, by the way in which, comes from the Greek mitra: a turban or headband). Bishops have been called “primates” (someone of the primary rank) for the reason that high Middle Ages. We have used the identical word to designate the primary rank of mammals only for the reason that mid-18th century.
SENIOR bishops have been described in fatherly terms (Greek pappas) for the reason that early centuries of the Church. We still speak of the bishops of the oldest and most influential dioceses as patriarchs: Rome and Alexandria, as an example, but then also places like Venice and Lisbon. The Greek pappas has also survived as “Pope”, not just for the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, but in addition for the Patriarch of Alexandria, whether Coptic or Greek Orthodox.
The notion of the pope as Supreme Pontiff comes from the Latin Pontifex, meaning builder (or repairer) of bridges — not, originally, as “helping people get together with one another”, but as erecting a structure for crossing a river. In ancient Rome, that noble task was related to senior priests. Transfer of that title to the pope reminds us that bishops of Rome, corresponding to Gregory the Great, played a valiant part in practical, economic matters because the Roman Empire collapsed. Today, we are saying only that the pope is “pontiff”, however the adjective “pontifical” can apply to any bishop in a liturgical context: a “pontifical mass”, as an example, is one celebrated by a bishop.
CATHEDRAL is from the Latin cathedra, meaning chair. The cathedral houses the chair from which the bishop teaches (so literally “the seat of the bishop”). Note the contrast here in late antiquity: the Christian faith is taught openly, in contrast to the gnostic tendency (“gnostic” from the Greek for “knowledge”), by which insights are passed in secret from one initiate to a different.
“Ordination” gets that name since it confers a particular place within the order of the Church. Since the Church is a body, those that have been ordained have particularly to work for the health and good order of Christian community. To them is entrusted the divine ordering, as Thomas Aquinas put it, by which one Christian delivers the sacraments to a different. The idea of a spiritual “order” is slightly different, being a gaggle of individuals living under a specific rule (Latin ordo).
IF OUR minds today tend relatively too easily to associate a diocese with matters of economics — with parish share, and diocesan spending — the relation can also be there within the etymology. “Diocese” comes from the Greek oikia (household), related to oikos (house, dwelling, family), from which we also get “economics”.
The diocese is the elemental unit of the household of the Church, a household gathered across the bishop. The bishop directs and manages the diocese, since oikonomia means administration or management. “Ecumenism” comes from the identical root (which is clearer if we spell it “oecumenism”).
Theologians also talk concerning the “theological economy”, meaning all the pieces to do with God’s motion on this planet. Thus, Karl Rahner spoke about God because the immanent Trinity, when considered simply and eternally in himself, and because the economic Trinity once we take into consideration God’s activity towards his creatures (although Rahner distinguished between the immanent and the economic only in order to equate them).
Like “diocese”, parish also comes from oikos (house), through the French paroche, although the deeper etymology just isn’t so clear. Before the present distinction of the parish because the smaller unit, and diocese because the larger one, the words were sometimes used interchangeably. “Parochial” is solely the adjective regarding parish as a noun. Only within the middle-Nineteenth century does it involves mean narrow or confined.
The Revd Dr Andrew Davison is Regius Professor of Divinity within the University of Oxford and a Canon Residentiary of Christ Church.
Word/s of the month:
”Doctrine” is the body of what the Church teaches (from the Latin docere, to show, such that a “doctorate” was originally a qualification to show). When the emphasis is on this teaching as authoritative, we call this “dogma” or “dogmatics” (from the Greek dokeo, to appear or to determine, within the sense that the Church has decreed that which seems right). We call this “systematic theology” when the emphasis is on how the weather of the religion hold together and inform one another.
