Threefold Office of Jesus as Prophet, Priest, and King

Paul Dafydd Jones

The threefold office (munus triplex) identifies Jesus Christ as prophet, priest, and king, and it draws on these titles to advance theological accounts of his saving work. Although the munus triplex is typically associated with John Calvin and the Reformed tradition, it holds broad significance for the study of Christian thought. Employed as an exegetical framework, it illumines important trajectories in the Hebrew Bible and enables one to read the New Testament as a continuation and recasting of earlier biblical claims. Used as an interpretative tool, it sheds light on patristic and medieval works’ description of Christ’s past, present, and future activity. During and after the Reformation, it becomes a staple of Reformed theology and an occasion to pay tribute to the multidimensional nature of salvation. In recent years, it has become a site of ecumenical interest.

To illustrate these claims, this article proceeds in five steps. First, it considers the titles of priest, prophet, and king in the scriptural witness. Second, it notes the meaning and significance of these titles in selected patristic and medieval texts. Third, it attends to the codification of the munus triplex in Calvin’s writings. Fourth, it considers the application of this dogmatic construction in Christian theology from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, with a particular interest in Reformed confessions, Protestant scholasticism, nineteenth-century Protestant theology, the work of Karl Barth, and some contemporary thinkers. Finally, comments are offered on the affordances and limitations of the threefold office.

Table of contents

• 1 Introduction

• 2 Prophet, priest, and king in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament

  • 2.1 Prophet

  • 2.2 Priest

  • 2.3 King

  • 2.4 Theological implications

• 3 Dogmatic history: patristic and medieval

• 4 Dogmatic history: the Reformation

  • 4.1 John Calvin

  • 4.2 Reformed confessions, Protestant scholasticism

• 5 The (long) nineteenth century

• 6 The twentieth and twenty-first centuries: from Karl Barth to the present

  • 6.1 Karl Barth

  • 6.2 After Barth

• 7 Conclusion

1 Introduction

The contention that Jesus Christ is the holder of a threefold office (munus triplex) is aptly associated with John Calvin. Initially in the Geneva Catechism, then more expansively in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin developed a powerful account of Christ as the unification and fulfilment of the ancient offices of prophet, priest, and king. Calvin’s admirers then turned his insights into a dynamic tradition. The munus triplex became a mainstay of Reformed confessions and scholastic texts, played an important role in nineteenth-century Protestant theology, and served as an organizing rubric in Karl Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation.

To treat the threefold office as a parochial affair, however, is unhelpfully limiting. It forecloses the possibility that the titles of prophet, priest, and king, taken singly and in conjunction, could feature in a wide-angled inquiry that integrates scriptural, historical, systematic, and constructive modes of reflection. With an eye to broadening the view, then, this article begins exegetically. It suggests that the titles of prophet, priest, and king highlight key ‘institutions’ in the life of ancient Israel, and it considers how those institutions are reconceived in view of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. The second section engages patristic and medieval authors while confronting a disquieting fact: although the titles under consideration have great christological and soteriological value, they can also be used to buttress dangerous forms of anti-Judaism. The third section analyses the threefold office in Calvin’s writing, where Christ is identified as the saviour whose prophetic, priestly, and royal life fulfils God’s covenant with ancient Israel, and as the saviour who conveys transformative benefits to those who comprise his body. The fourth section considers the afterlife of Calvin’s insights, reflecting on Protestant confessions and Protestant scholasticism and exploring the career of the threefold office in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While Barth’s innovative exposition is given close attention, earlier authors – particularly Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl – are also brought into play, and the section ends with remarks on the munus triplex as a site of contemporary interest. Finally, some evaluative observations are offered. A salutary function of threefold office, it is suggested, is its capacity to hold in view multiple dimensions of Christ’s saving work. More debatable is the degree to which it connects with other descriptions of what it means to become a ‘new creation’ (2 Cor 5:17) in Christ, and its pertinence (or lack thereof) for projects that connect Christian faith with the imperative of ecclesial and sociopolitical liberation.

2 Prophet, priest, and king in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament

Characterizing the God of Israel as ‘nonnegotiably sovereign’ and ‘endlessly faithful’, Walter Brueggemann advances the compelling suggestion that prophets, priests, and kings are presented as distinctive mediators of God in the Hebrew Bible (Brueggemann 1997: 567). Such mediators, obviously, do not stand apart from the covenant, the history of which is defined by God’s ‘glorious deeds’ (Ps 78:4; see also Wright 1952): God’s calling and blessing of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the liberation of Israel from Egypt; God’s disclosing God’s name; the conveyance of the law to Moses; and God’s granting Israel its own land. Yet these mediators have profound significance within Israel’s history. Prophets, priests, and kings ‘made Yahweh available’ (Brueggemann 1997: 575) to Israel, serving – for better and for worse – as vehicles of God’s presence. Concomitantly, prophecy, priesthood, and kingship were ‘human enterprises’ (Brueggemann 1997: 698) whereby Israel expressed its commitment to God. It is thus unsurprising to find these titles used in the New Testament. As Israel’s Messiah, Jesus is acclaimed as ‘a prophet mighty in deed and word’ (Luke 24:19), ‘a merciful and faithful high priest’ (Heb 2:17), and the ‘king of Israel’ (John 1:49) who is now ‘seated at the right hand of God’ (Col 3:1).

One must of course proceed cautiously at this juncture, lest a manifestly complex set of texts be forced into over-narrow interpretative straits. The Hebrew Bible does not provide neat doctrinal formulations about prophecy, priesthood, and kingship. And it is significant that the titles do not feature in many early New Testament passages, which tend to trade in charged honorifics like ‘Christ’, ‘Lord’, or ‘Son’ (e.g. Rom 1:4; 1 Cor 16:22; 1 Thess 1:10), focus on Jesus being raised from the dead (e.g. Rom 4:24–25; 1 Cor 15:3b–4), or contend simply that God was ‘in’ Jesus (2 Cor 5:19). Moreover, when the New Testament tenders its boldest claims – Jesus being associated with God’s primordial decision to save (Eph 1:4–5), presented as the one through whom creation subsists (Rom 11:36; 1 Cor 8:6; Col 1:17; Heb 1:2b), identified as the ‘suffering servant’ of Deutero-Isaiah (Phil 2:6-11 and Rom 4:24–25) and the ‘lamb’ through whom God’s righteousness will be displayed (Rev 5:6 and passim), and described as the Word incarnate (John 1:1–18) – references to prophet, priest, and king are not explicitly foregrounded, much less systematically coordinated.

Nevertheless, the titles can usefully guide exegesis. They serve to highlight key trajectories in the Hebrew Bible, they signal how New Testament authors extend and recast earlier ideas, and they establish a foundation for the analysis of later texts.

3 Dogmatic history: patristic and medieval

The frequency of scriptural references to prophets, priests, and kings effectively guaranteed that these titles would feature in the earliest postbiblical writings. This did in fact occur in the final decade of the first century with the Apostolic Fathers. First Clement presents Christ as a teacher who ‘inculcate[s] gentleness and suffering’ and conveys ‘knowledge that never fades’, while also identifying him as the ‘High Priest and Ruler of our souls’ (Kleist 1946: 17, 31, 47, cf. 49). A little later, Ignatius of Antioch depicts the incarnation as the overthrow of an ‘ancient empire’, with the consequence that one is now able to become a ‘freedman of Jesus Christ’ – an intriguing theopolitical statement, to say the least. Gentleness, patience, and longsuffering, Ignatius further notes, can be learned from ‘Christ, our only teacher’, who is also ‘the High Priest, entrusted with the Holy of Holies’ (Kleist 1946: 67, 72, 82).

Justin Martyr and Eusebius set the stage for future developments. In his second-century Dialogue with Trypho, Justin declares that Christ is ‘spoken of as a King, and a Priest, and God, and Lord, and an Angel, and a Man’ (1948: 198; cf. 202, 299, 323, 330). The prophets of the Hebrew Bible, concomitantly, are presented as having predicted Christ’s suffering and Christ’s (impending) return, and Justin insists that Christ himself – whom he identifies as ‘our Teacher’ in the First Apology – speaks directly in Israel’s scriptures, summoning his followers to disavow ‘the teachings of men’ and to heed ‘those which have been announced by the Holy Prophets and Himself’ (Justin Martyr 1948: 45, 221). Later, in the first decades of the fourth century, Eusebius bundles the titles into a neat triad. He suggests that the Hebrew Bible bears witness to preliminary ‘types’ that find their completion in Christ, one who is now ‘honoured by his worshippers throughout the world as king, wondered at as more than a prophet, and gloried as the true and only High Priest of God’ (Eusebius of Caesarea 1926: 39–40; see also Wainwright 1997: 110).

It is instructive to broaden analysis to other patristic writers, even when their texts bear less explicit cues. In De Incarnatione, for instance, Athanasius writes about Christ’s ‘offering his own temple and his bodily instrument’ to convey incorruptibility to those labouring under the ‘corruption of death’, while reasserting himself as ‘King of all’ and dispelling ignorance by making himself ‘known to be the Word of the Father’ (Athanasius 2011: 58, 66) – sufficient reason, arguably, to ask if the titles of prophet, priest, and king underwrite his Christology and soteriology. Augustine’s theology of the totus Christus (whole Christ) is also ripe for exploration, perhaps with the Ennarationes as a primary source (e.g. Augustine of Hippo 2000: 274–275): one could inquire as to how the titles of prophet, priest, and king are deployed when ‘the person of the incarnate Word [is] considered together with the connections he bears to the created order’ (Walker-Lenow 2023: 21–22), ruling over history and drawing the redeemed towards the heavenly city.

Further study, however, is needed to reckon with the advent of theological anti-Judaism in relation to these titles. Consider again Justin Martyr. On one hand, the Dialogue’s identification of Christ as priest and king, and more subtly, as the fulfilment of prophetic teaching, discloses a vivid sense of the ‘aliveness’ of Christ as the Lord who acts, before the Father and in the power of the Spirit, to establish, lead, and grow the church – a sense of ‘aliveness’ that marks an intriguing intervention in the fluid religious context of the second century, the complexity of which far exceeds the crude binary of Christianity versus Judaism (Den Dulk 2018). On the other hand, this intervention often trades in worrying descriptions of Israel and Judaism. While the Dialogue is eager to identify earlier ‘types, symbols, and prophecies’ of Christ (Justin Martyr 1948: 211), it also seems reluctant to view the covenant that God made with Trypho’s forebears as fulfilled, expanded, and recast by the incarnation, preferring instead to present that covenant as passé to the point of obsolete. With this kind of supersessionism in play, the intertextual linkages on which the New Testament depends are weakened to the point at which Christ’s royal, priestly, and prophetic work seems less about his being the Messiah of Israel, more about God ‘pivoting’ to deliver salvation to Gentiles alone. And this ‘pivot’ runs alongside a tendency to describe Jewish rituals as divine punishments, meted out on a people who faithlessly rejected Christ and is ‘ruthless, stupid, blind, and lame’ (Justin Martyr 1948: 188). The first stirrings of an acclamation of Christ as prophet, priest, and king, it seems, are bound up with rhetorical forms that have had tragic application over the last two millennia.

While it is inadvisable to generalize about medieval European theology, the titles in question clearly continue to circulate. Thomas Aquinas is a case in point. Although the tertia pars (third part) of the Summa Theologiae does not promote the notion of ‘offices’, it shows a marked interest in connecting Jesus’ person and work with the institutions of Israelite prophecy, priesthood, and kingship, which dovetails with a broader concern to present Christ as the fulfilment of Torah and the temple (see Levering 2002; also useful is Congar 1983). The ‘gift of prophecy’, for instance, is presented as an effect of the hypostatic union upon the humanity assumed by the Word, such that Christ as ‘wayfarer’ imaginatively grasps and conveys truths that would otherwise remain hidden (ST III.7.8). As priest, Christ continues the sacrificial work of those who prefigured him: motivated by charity, he communicates grace and his death renders satisfaction to God (ST III.22.1, 2; note that here, as elsewhere, Aquinas integrates ‘Anselmian’ and ‘Abelardian’ emphases into his account of atonement). Christ as king, finally, sits at the Father’s right hand and ‘possesses over all other creatures royal and judiciary power’ (ST II.58.3) – such power being inseparable from the fact that he is both a man of Israel, descended from the ‘seed of David’ (ST II.31.2), and the saviour who fulfils God’s promise to Abraham, such that God’s blessings extend across the world (Gen 12:18). Aquinas’ commentarial work proceeds along similar lines. De commendiatione et partitione sacrae scripturae (Commendation and Division of Sacred Scripture) advances the intriguing suggestion that the three ‘dignities’ of Christ as king, prophet, and priest are reflected in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke respectively (see Aquinas 1954: 493). And the Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews (see Aquinas 2006) takes an additional step, suggesting that Christ’s ‘anointing’ is followed by his conferral of the gifts of kingship, priesthood, and prophecy upon Christians.

4 Dogmatic history: the Reformation

Precedents notwithstanding, it is only in the sixteenth century that the munus triplex becomes a dogmatic fixture. Erasmus of Rotterdam and Martin Bucer get the ball rolling in the 1520s, with the latter employing the titles to boost the standing of academically trained ‘pastor-teachers’ in the context of a christocratic vision for reformation in Strasbourg, and Andrew Osiander seems to be the first to conceive of Christ holding a threefold ‘office’ (Latin: munus/German: Amt) in 1530 (see Williams 2000: 44, 376, 483–486; see also Wainwright 1997: 103–104) – a term that treats the titles of prophetic, priest, and king as distinct (but related) aspects of Christ’s mediation of salvation. And with John Calvin, the munus triplex receives its first definitive articulation.

5 The (long) nineteenth century

It is tempting to presume that the nineteenth century was an inhospitable environment for a formulation with a scholastic reputation. Surely the cumulative impact of the European enlightenments, Romanticism, German idealism, and various modes of critical materialism set the munus triplex back on its heels? Not as much as one might expect – and certainly not once one jettisons outdated attitudes towards Protestant ‘liberalism’. Granted that many theological agendas were transformed by philosophical, political, and cultural developments, an identification of Christ’s prophetic, priestly, and royal office remained a dogmatic touchstone for many. Particularly significant on this front are works by Friedrich Schleiermacher, Albrecht Ritschl, and the unhappily maligned Ernst Troeltsch. At the same time, and more disappointingly, one finds otherwise capable authors handling the munus triplex derivatively or, worse, blithely casting it aside – Charles Hodge and Adolf von Harnack being notable examples.

A deep indebtedness to Calvin pervades The Christian Faith, and that debt is especially evident throughout Schleiermacher’s exposition of the threefold office. No doubt Schleiermacher’s point of departure is described in terms that differ from anything found in the Institutes:

[If] every activity of the Redeemer proceeds from the being of God in Him, and if in the formation of the Redeemer’s person the only active power was the creative divine activity which established itself as the being of God in Him, then […] His every activity may be regarded as a continuation of that person-forming divine influence on human nature […] [T]he activity of the Redeemer […] is world-forming, and its object is human nature, in the totality of which the powerful God-consciousness is to be implanted as a new vital principle. (Schleiermacher 1999: 427)

Careful readers, however, will soon discern that altered conceptual and rhetorical forms do not portend a drastic change in terms of dogmatic content. Although Schleiermacher does not engage the scriptural witness as explicitly as Calvin, the munus triplex continues to underscore that the ‘original activity of the Redeemer […] precedes all activity of our own’ (Schleiermacher 1999: 425), and it serves, once again, as a vehicle to describe how Christ’s activity ramifies in nobis (in us). It is an occasion to analyse the ‘payoff’ of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, as God’s redeeming action is progressively ‘naturalized’ in Christian communities (and, in the fullness of time, in humankind as such).

The details of Schleiermacher’s perspective are laid out in a characteristically intense series of paragraphs. The office of prophet is understood in terms of Christ’s person and work effecting ‘the end of all prophecy’ (Schleiermacher 1999: 445). And, following Calvin, Schleiermacher emphasizes that Christ fully discloses what God intends for God’s children, even as Schleiermacher suggests that the ontological consequences of the incarnation exceed anything envisaged by his predecessor. (A good example: ‘whatever is yet in store for the human race, so far as fellowship with God is concerned, is to be regarded […] as a further development of Christ’s work’ [Schleiermacher 1999: 449].) The office of priest might initially appear to be a dogmatic nonstarter, since Schleiermacher does not seem to make the cross fundamental to redemption. Yet Schleiermacher’s capacity to rework the Reformed tradition soon pays dividends. Christ’s ‘active obedience’ is presented as an unflagging adherence to God’s will – an adherence that shapes those who comprise the church, and that leads human beings ‘to an ever more perfect fulfilment of the divine will’ (Schleiermacher 1999: 456). Christ’s ‘passive obedience’, concomitantly, is viewed as a priestly exhibition of ‘absolutely self-denying love’, such that Christ can be identified as our ‘satisfying representative’. There follows, in fact, a largely unnoticed willingness to recover some measure of substitutionary thinking, for Schleiermacher shares Aquinas’s concern to balance an ‘Abelardian’ emphasis with an ‘Anselmian’ complement when describing the atonement. Christ’s commitment to the redemption of humankind includes his entrance into a life defined by sinfulness, and Christ’s ‘sympathy’ for sinners, paired with the constancy of his God-consciousness unto death, ‘stimulate[s] a redemptive activity sufficient for the assumption of all men into His vital fellowship’ (Schleiermacher 1999: 458, 461–462). Finally, and with respect to the office of king, Calvin’s emphasis on spiritual protection is routed through a deft analogy, with the anhypostasic/enhypostatic relation of Christ’s human nature to Christ’s divine nature paralleled in the church’s relationship to Christ as its head. ‘He stands to the totality of believers in exactly the same relation as the divine nature in Him does to the human, animating and taking it up into the fellowship of his original life’ (Schleiermacher 1999: 468). As the being and act of God sets the terms for Christ’s human life, so Christ’s presence amongst his people defines the Christian community.

Although this précis signals the impropriety of reading Schleiermacher through the lens of some ill-conceived twentieth-century critiques (e.g. Brunner 1924; cf. Jones 2023), the question of whether Schleiermacher’s perspective succeeds is of course another matter. An obvious upside, and another indication of Schleiermacher’s dependence on Calvin, is that Schleiermacher’s deployment of these titles supports a ‘holistic interpretation of the meaning of Christ’s redemptive work’ (Ralston 2022: 96). The absence of a trinitarian framing, and thus the lack of reflection on the operations of Christ’s Spirit, however, seems problematic – even granted that the conclusion to The Christian Faith proposes a retroactive enclosure of each preceding dogmatic ‘part’ within a triune ‘whole’. Also worrisome is a lack of engagement with the Hebrew Bible. Granted that Schleiermacher supposes that the ‘whole redemptive and reconciling activity of Christ […] is completely [sic!] reproduced in terms of these three offices’ (Schleiermacher 1999: 440), his reluctance to consider how Christian piety is shaped by an engagement with the length and breadth of scripture opens the door to the kind of anti-Judaism that Justin Martyr helped to accredit. An emphasis on the ‘newness’ of redemption, secured through remarks on Christ as prophet, priest, and king, floats free of a robust account of God’s multifaceted relationship with ancient Israel.

Albrecht Ritschl stands among the most important European Protestant theologians at the end of the nineteenth century, and his work has had a lasting influence in Anglophone circles (mediated, in part, through the articulation of the ‘social gospel’ promulgated by Walter Rauschenbusch and others). The context in which Ritschl operated obviously differs from Schleiermacher. He writes after the heyday of German idealism, in light of revived interest in Immanuel Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy, and in view of an increasingly well-established academic concern with the ‘historical Jesus’. A rejection of his august predecessor’s dislocation of dogmatics and ethics is also significant. Ritschl always sought to connect theological reflection and ethical life, with discipleship requiring ‘[p]ractical proof of sonship with God in spiritual freedom and labour for the kingdom’ (Ritschl 1972: 240, original emphasis) – a marked contrast to the Glaubenlehre’s interest in pious ‘affections’. Yet just as Schleiermacher’s account of the munus triplex connects with an analysis of Christ’s effects on the Christian community, so also Ritschl.

Although remarks on the munus triplex are offered in preceding volumes, the third instalment of Ritschl’s masterwork, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Sanctification, holds most importance. In line with Calvin and Schleiermacher, Ritschl’s starting point is Christ as the decisive revelation of God’s will. More insistently than either of his forebears, however, Ritschl views the kingdom of God as ‘the common end of God and the elect community’ and understands the substance of Christ’s redemptive work to be the stimulation of ‘the freedom of the children of God’ for the sake of the ‘moral organisation of mankind’ (Ritschl 1902: 10, 13). Put in terms of a sequence of events: Christ is the gift of the Father, revealing God’s love to humankind and securing our justification; this gift establishes the Christian community, organized around a vital experience of Christ’s redemptive power; and the task of Christian community consists in passing on, through ethical action, Christ’s redemptive power, in order to realize the kingdom as a historical reality.

The basic function of the munus triplex is to elaborate how divine initiative and human response define Christian life. To be sure, earlier treatments are deemed deficient. Ritschl worries about the distinctiveness and the coordination of the titles of prophet, priest, and king in earlier authors. He also commends the category of ‘vocation’ (Beruf), instead of ‘office’ – a move that likely forestalled a substantive engagement with the witness of the Hebrew Bible and narrowed the possibilities for thinking about salvation. But the munus triplex nevertheless highlights the ‘significance of Christ for the community that believes on him’, and it points towards the importance of ethical actions that ‘found and maintain a community of believers’ (Ritschl 1902: 432–33). To make the same point differently: while Ritschl supposes the munus triplex to be a questionable reading of the New Testament and a less-than-adequate feature of the Protestant scholastic tradition, it nicely indicates how the Christian community’s receipt of justifying grace opens out into the broader project of reconciliation, wherein the world is transformed and ordered to God’s kingdom through free human activity. Because that community ‘stands to God in a relation essentially conditioned by the forgiveness of sins’ (Ritschl 1902: 3), so that community is summoned to demonstrate, through ethical relationships, what it means to have ‘been brought into a harmonious direction to God’ (Ritschl 1902: 78). Because Christ is at once prophet, priest, and king – or, better, a ‘royal prophet’ and ‘royal priest’ (see McCulloh 1990: 14–85), for Christ’s advocacy of God’s kingdom is most basic to his identity – so Christians are empowered to act as prophetic, priestly, and kingly agents of the kingdom he establishes and animates.

It is not necessary to determine here the extent to which Ritschl’s theology was beholden to parochial norms, with his ‘ideal of life’ being ‘the epitome of the national-liberal German bourgeois of the age of Bismarck’ (Barth 2002: 642). Suffice it to say that this critique has often been overstated, then treated as a pretext to suppose that Ritschl (and other nineteenth-century luminaries) have nothing to offer Christian theology today. More important, in this context, is the fact that one of the last great ‘liberals’ continued to view the threefold office positively, and in terms that indicate continued interest in the lines of thought laid down by Calvin. Ernst Troeltsch puts it thus in his Glaubenslehre:

as prophet, Jesus is the one who reveals God […] As high priest, Jesus is the one who leads us to God and mediates salvation and wholeness […] as king, Jesus is both the head and the original image of the community that gathers about him, calls itself by his name, confesses him as its unifying point, and celebrates his presence in the devotional cultus. (Troeltsch 1991: 89; see also 99–100)

Is there not here, perhaps, a starting point for further reflection about Christ as a ‘rallying point’ for the Christian community (Troeltsch 1990) and an opening for sociological insights, themselves tied to the titles of prophet, priest, and king, to inform theological inquiry?

Yet the news is hardly all good. Around the time that Ritschl was advancing a thoughtful critique of earlier articulations of the munus triplex, Charles Hodge and others promoted a pinched vision of Protestant orthodoxy as a bulwark against the (supposed) missteps of Western modernity. Hodge’s treatment of the threefold office is serviceable, in its own way, but it did not move theological conversation forward; it functioned as one more fusillade in an ill-advised attack on an increasingly diversified religious and political context. Still more problematic is the blithe disregard for the munus triplex in writings by Adolf von Harnack. In contrast to Hodge’s outsized emphasis on Christ’s priestly office, and without any of Hodge’s salutary concern for the Old Testament witness, Jesus’ saving work is now limited to his teaching office – an office itself reduced to a timeless message, routed through modern scholarship, such that Jesus is only a ‘prophet, guide and Lord’, who ‘takes possession of those who are his in their inward being’ (Harnack 1991: 310). The expansive account of salvation that Calvin developed, via the threefold office, seems now to be a distant memory. The coming kingdom of God, the reality of God qua Father and the absolute worth of the human soul, and the obligations of righteousness and love (Harnack 1978): if these bland tenets distil the ‘essence’ of Christianity, what need for the complexities of the munus triplex?

6 The twentieth and twenty-first centuries: from Karl Barth to the present

The history of the threefold office from the first decade of the twentieth century to the present day cannot be laid out in detail here. A full treatment would need not only to track doctrinal developments – it would also have to reckon with shifting relationships between the churches, the academy, and the public sphere; the utility – or lack thereof – of descriptions of various intellectual movements (‘modern’, ‘dialectical’, ‘evangelical’, ‘liberal’ and ‘postliberal’, ‘postmodern’, ‘liberationist’); the advent of new Christian formations, inside and beyond the northern hemisphere; and, most recently, the proliferation of various forms of ‘digital theology’. In this final subsection, however, the focus will necessarily be limited to Karl Barth and the career of the munus triplex in recent scholarship.

7 Conclusion

The affordances of the munus triplex, as well as some possible limitations, can now be articulated.

First, this dogmatic construction is aptly responsive to the scriptural witness. The titles of prophet, priest, and king are native to the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, not arbitrarily foisted upon them; and an engagement with these titles, singly and conjunction, proves exegetically valuable. It sets in vivid relief distinctive mediations of God in the life of ancient Israel and, in turn, enables reflection on how those mediations are recast in light of Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension.

Second, the munus triplex proves helpful when reading ancient and medieval Christian texts. If the risk of anachronism looms at this point, it is a risk that is usefully run – not least because there seems to be a gradual consolidation of interest in this triad of titles among medieval Christian thinkers. Also significant is the issue of how elements that later coalesce into the munus triplex relate to theological anti-Judaism, which sometimes figures the unity-in-distinction of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament not in terms of promise and fulfilment, continuity and expansion, but rather in terms of the (putative) obsolescence of Judaism in light of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Reckoning with this issue is imperative for contemporary Christian theologians. It is an opportunity to interrogate the dogmatic sources of anti-Judaic and anti-Jewish imaginaries and, by extension, an opportunity to ask how those imaginaries may have functioned as staging areas for modern racism (see Carter 2008; Jennings 2010).

Third, in numerous Protestant texts the threefold office anchors a multidimensional account of salvation, with Christ’s identity as prophet, priest, and king supporting a richly patterned account of the ways that Christ benefits those whom God saves. Calvin’s work remains exemplary. On one level, talk of offices mitigates the temptation to confine christological reflection to a single idiom or conceptuality. While one might think profitably about one or another office, no office exists in isolation from others; and it is only by thinking about Christ as prophet and priest and king that one begins to honour the richness of salvation. On another level, the munus triplex cautions us not to consider Christ in isolation from the benefits that he imparts. The threefold office, to make the point more positively, does more than span the gap between Christ’s ‘person’ and ‘work’. As it lends density and complexity to christological reflection, it urges one to understand how Christ transforms those whom the Spirit draws into Christ’s body, the church, such that prophecy, priestliness, and royalty become keynotes of Christian existence in the quotidian.

Fourth, the munus triplex is an occasion for dogmatic creativity. Karl Barth’s writing bulks large on this front. In Church Dogmatics he converts a dogmatic formula, previously internal to an account of Christ’s saving action, into a structuring motif for the entire doctrine of reconciliation; and his explication of each office guides reflection on Christ’s divine and human natures, the ‘states’ of exaltation and humiliation, the character of sin, the nature of the Christian community, and the dynamics of Christian life. There are signs that Barth’s penchant for innovation is now extending to others, not least those who think and write in an ecumenical key.

Fifth and finally, one must ask: is this dogmatic formulation the best way to describe Christ’s saving work? Is the threefold office a desirable option for theological reflection? Granted the open-ended quality of the question (desirable for whom, in what context, and for what ends?), one cannot dispatch it with a bluff response of ‘well, clearly!’. One can acknowledge the obvious advantages of the threefold office – its capacity to differentiate and unite diverse strands of the entire scriptural witness, its historic significance for the Reformed tradition, its facilitation of a rich and complex description of Christ’s work and its effects, etc. – while remaining cognizant of possible drawbacks. On this front, three points seem particularly worthy of consideration.

(1) Might an interest in the munus triplex risk marginalizing alternate descriptions of Christ’s person and work? Does it ‘tilt’ theological inquiry in such a way that other titles, names, and conceptualities are liable to suffer underdevelopment? To respond by noting that there is strong scriptural warrant for this trio will not do, since numerous titles and names in scripture present themselves as candidates for dogmatic analysis (Son/Word, Wisdom/Sophia, Torah, etc.). Moreover – and beyond the obvious point that theological reflection is not slavishly bound to biblical particulars – one cannot credibly suppose, on point of principle, that dogmatic mischief results if one frames reflection on Christ’s person and work not in terms of his bearing the offices of prophet, priest, and king, but rather in terms of his being a healer, an ancestor, our mother, our friend, the epitome of ‘new being’, or the lamb of God. So, the questions continue to press. What kind of ‘grip’ should the munus triplex have on the theological imagination? In what contexts might it prove useful or detrimental for dogmatic reflection? Should the threefold office be a ‘first port of call’ for inquiry, or should one view it as one option among many?

(2) Does the munus triplex help or hinder the development of theologies that acknowledge the complicity of Christian thought with various forms of anti-Judaism, which has itself served as an incubator for other discriminatory postures? One can hardly forget, of course, that the exegetical bases of the threefold office disclose a deep continuity between the (inspired) textual witness to the life of ancient Israel and the (inspired) textual witness to the ‘mighty deeds’ of God in Christ and the Spirit. Nor should it be missed that the New Testament depends on, and thus reinforces, the authority of the Hebrew Bible. But such caveats only raise the stakes. With an often lazy conflation of ancient Israel and rabbinic Judaism in hand, Christian thinkers have weaponized the New Testament, treating the fulfilment and recasting of ancient Israel’s priestly, prophetic, and royal traditions as an occasion to denigrate Jewish communities (and, by extension, the Jewish scriptures). So, again, questions press. Can the munus triplex be framed in ways that enable Christian theologians to repent of hostility and wrongdoing, past and present? Might the munus triplex be an occasion, in fact, for Christian thinkers to understand the deep connections between anti-Judaism and modern forms of racism, and thus pave the way for a mode of reflection that might contribute to better forms of interreligious and political cooperation? Or might it be prudent to set this dogmatic construction aside for a while?

(3) Finally, and relatedly: does the munus triplex have a role to play in theological projects that foreground the liberative dimensions of gospel? Granted that it has not yet been taken up by thinkers who advocate for a progressive theopolitics, could the munus triplex be articulated in ways that show Christ’s prophetic, priestly, and kingly action to be expressive of God’s preferential option for the poor, the marginalized, the downtrodden? Is there a way, to put it more bluntly, to connect Calvin’s concern for a scripturally shaped piety, keyed to God’s saving action in Christ, with the imperative ‘to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, [and] to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’ (Luke 4:18–19)?

Attributions

Copyright Paul Dafydd Jones  (CC BY-NC)

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• Further reading

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  Jones, Paul Dafydd. 2026. 'Threefold Office of Jesus as Prophet, Priest, and King', St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology. Edited by Brendan N. Wolfe et al. https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/ThreefoldOfficeofJesus

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