The Three Offices
A person known as Eusebius of the early church worked out this threefold classification, writing: "And we have been told also that certain of the prophets themselves became, by the act of anointing, Christs in type, so that all these have reference to the true Christ, the divinely inspired and heavenly Word, who is the only high priest of all, and the only King of every creature, and the Father’s only supreme prophet of prophets." During the Reformation this concept played a substantial role in scholastic Lutheran Christology and in the christology of Reformed theologians such as John Calvin as well as that of John Wesley.
Walter A. Elwell claims that Christian theologians view all the other roles of Christ as falling under one of these three distinctions.
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Famous quotes containing the word offices:
“The dogma of the mystic offices of Christ being dropped, and he standing on his genius as a moral teacher, ‘tis impossible to maintain the old emphasis of his personality; and it recedes, as all persons must, before the sublimity of the moral laws.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)