Ideas of justice held by those who are continuously in possession of wealth are bound to be different from the ideas of those who are continuously out of it. The basic anxiety of the former is to ensure the stability of the profitable order by which they are enabled continuously to take possession; that of the latter is to escape from the disorder by which they are continuously dispossessed. There is no common moral order, no community of interest between rich and poor by which it might be said that justice consists in its preservation. In a society as unequal as that of Britain, the moral order is already something broken.

Theories of justice generated by possessors are concerned with stability, even if — as with liberal reformists — this can only be achieved by a wider spread of benefits. In other words, they are concerned to define and defend a partial community of interest in which the access to wealth of those who already have it is preserved while the poverty of those who don’t is explained and justified in general, if not in particular. So they always imply the presence of a moral order behind the existing social and economic one. Furthermore, possessors are likely to hold the restricted concept of justice (see previous article), favouring commutative and criminal justice and then such distributive justice as will fit with these. The dispossessed however, when they find the voice to talk about these things — which is rare — take naturally to the comprehensive view of justice which looks for a different order altogether. The “greater justice” of the gospels is the justice of the dispossessed.

Much of the recent interest taken in work springs from our present plight of high unemployment, united with fears that the microchip technological revolution will increase unemployment such that we shall have to move to a leisure society, where to work is a privilege.

This presentation (in the medical sense) of the problem affects the diagnosis and affects, too, the way we think of work. For instance, very few commentators seriously challenge the equation of work with paid employment. This shoft-term focus excludes areas of work which should be included both because they are definitely work, and also because taking cognizance of longer-range matters might help us see the present position more clearly, although at a greater distance from the plight of the depressed ex-steel workers of Consett. Incidentally, here it is worth remembering that if we look at the world as a whole, the vast majority of its inhabitants are not in paid employment — they are either outside the market economy altogether, living in subsistence societies, or, as in Britain, supporting those in paid employment by the hidden subsidy of home work, the cooking, cleaning, child-rearing necessary for the maintenance of society, and the consuming necessary for the maintenance of our kind of capitalist society. Thus out of a British population of some 55 million, only about 18 million are in paid employment. On the old model of society these 18 million were seen as supporting the rest; a shift in the phantasm, partly brought about by reflecting on the possible consequences of the micro-chip, has enabled us to see things a little differently — the old,

In the previous article of this series, Authority and Ministry in the New Testament, I set out to show how two planks of the ultramontane platform of magisterial papalism not only have no basis in the New Testament, but are actually at odds with the whole spirit of these foundational documents of the New People of God. The major plank is, of course, the concentration of all authority in the papacy, with the inevitable stress on uniformity that will accompany such a policy; the second or supporting plank is hierarchical clericalism, the promotion of the clergy, in particular of bishops, as a ruling priestly class in the Church. In this article I will confine myself to this second plank, and investigate how this particular distortion and obscuration of true gospel values arose in the Church. We shall try to discern as far as we can what is sound in the developing tradition of the Church’s doctrine and practice of ministry from what is sick and in urgent need of reformatory healing.

We discovered two things from an examination of the New Testament evidence on the Christian ministry. First, that in the New Testament Churches there was no distinction between bishops and presbyters, these being simply two names for the same persons, one (‘bishop’) denoting the office or function of ‘overseeing’ the community, or being ‘in charge’, the other (‘presbyter’) denoting rank or status, that of elder or senior member. Secondly, that nowhere in the New Testament are these bishops/presbyters talked of in sacerdotal language as priests.