Wisdom

Priest, King, and Prophet

Jordan teaches that priest, king, and prophet are not three simultaneous offices sitting side by side (as reformed shorthand often has it) but often three successive stages of maturation. Each has a different relation to God’s word and world. The priest receives the word as written code and carries it out without improvisation: inspect the beast, read the rule in Leviticus, perform the rite.

The priest is a servant, specially a palace servant… The priest as such has very simple jobs: He inspects the animal brought for sacrifice; he helps the layman offer it; he inspects for leprosy… It is simple: You either obey or you don’t. (James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics, “Priest, King and Prophet”)

The king receives the word as internalized principle and must apply it in situations the code never anticipated. He adjudicates between competing goods and chooses among lesser evils; he wields the sword; he does the work the law cannot accomplish.

A king has a different and far more mature task. When we get to the kingdom era, we get wisdom literature. Wisdom concerns not simple questions of right and wrong, but questions of what is wise and what is unwise in any given situation, new situations not specifically covered by the Law. More than this, the king must usually decide not between right and wrong, but between two evils… An example of such kingly wisdom is seen when Solomon must decide between the claims of the two harlots in 1 Kings 3. (James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics, “Priest, King and Prophet”)

The prophet, finally, speaks a word that no longer describes or adjudicates but reframes; his sentence bends history.

A prophet is someone who by his words alone tears down an old world and creates a new one. His words cause people to think in a new way. He does not merely repeat what has been said before, or apply the old ways into new situations. He provides a new vision, a vision encompassing death and resurrection. Once a true prophet has spoken, no one can continue to think in the old comfortable way any longer. (James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics, “Priest, King and Prophet”)

This pattern is exhibited in the Bible’s own literary structure. Torah is the priestly book; the histories and the wisdom literature are the kingly books; the prophets and Revelation are the prophetic books. The pattern is reflected in Israel’s political history: Moses and Aaron give way to Saul and David and Solomon, who give way in turn to Elijah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

In a larger way, the whole Adamic period is priestly, down to Noah. God gives the right to exercise capital punishment to mankind through Noah, and thus we enter a larger kingly period. With the age of the Patriarchs, we come to a larger prophetic period… With Moses, the new world arrives as a new creation, with Israel as a nation at its heart… [which] starts a new cycle within the nation of Israel: priestly (Sinaitic), kingly (Kingdom), prophetic (Remnant), and full prophetic (Restoration). (James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics, “Covenant Phases in the Bible”)

The pattern is repeated in the locations of redemption: garden, then land, then world.

Adam was created to be a priest in the Garden. He was exiled into the Land… Cain went out and built a city, and thereby became the first king… Toward the end of this period, the prophet Enoch began to prophesy judgment in the larger World… Then after the death and resurrection of the world, Noah came as a prophet to set up the new world. (James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics, “Covenant Phases in the Bible”)

The pattern repeats with food: bread, then wine, then fire.

You have bread in the morning when you wake up… wine is for relaxing when the work is finished. Another difference… is you don’t ordinarily give a lot of wine to your children… But right now, as little kids, you can have all the bread you want. And when you grow up and become an adult, you don’t eat bread anymore. You just drink wine. Or beer, which is liquid bread… See, this difference between beginning and end, between child and adult, corresponds to one of the most important differences between priests and king in the Bible. (James B. Jordan, “One Life, Many Deaths,” Lecture 1)

It repeats within each human life: a child who must obey rules, a young adult who must judge in complexity, an elder whose words are few but weighty. It is the pattern of Jesus’s own life, for he is the Greater Priest, the Greater King, and the Greater Prophet; he passes through each stage in his own career, climbing the cross as priest, ruling from the Father’s right hand as king, sending the Spirit as prophet.

We are placed in union with Jesus, and the deep pattern of His life is given to us. Ultimately, the pattern of Jesus’ life from childhood to full maturity, from priest to king to prophet, arises from the fact that as Son He is eternally immature, eternally adult, and eternally fully mature. By eating His body and drinking His blood, we are restored and renewed so that we can move properly through these three phases of life. (James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics, “Priest, King and Prophet”)

From Law to Wisdom

Jordan is especially interested in the middle transition from priest to king, from law to wisdom. This is where much of Christian life happens, and it is the transition where much of the Christian church gets stuck. Law is given because children need rules; it provides the definite shape obedience must take before a person is mature enough to improvise. The Levitical code and the Ten Words train Israel in holiness. But the law was never meant to be the adult form of obedience. It is, as Paul indicates, a tutor or guardian: a role that expires at majority. When Israel grows up, the child’s catechism becomes the man’s internal bearing; what was once a wall around the heart becomes a spring within it.

In Proverbs chapter 8 and verse 15, wisdom says, “by me kings reign.” This is the important statement about wisdom. Wisdom is for kings. Wisdom is not for priests. Priests have law. Kings have wisdom. (James B. Jordan, 2005 BH Conference, “Wisdom and Rule I”)

Solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil. Ah, that takes us back to Genesis 2. Knowledge of good and evil. Mature people have knowledge of good and evil. Babies don’t have knowledge of good and evil… The first stage of the Word of God is law, rules for kids. The second stage of the Word of God is wisdom for those who have acquired knowledge of good and evil and are ready to move out of the kindergarten. (James B. Jordan, 2005 BH Conference, “Wisdom and Rule I”)

The king is not going to have such wisdom unless he learns the Law first. Wisdom builds on law, and king builds on priest. There must be a “priestly phase” of our lives, during which we learn wisdom through obedience and struggle, before we enter a “kingly phase” and have wisdom to give to others. (James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics, “Priest, King and Prophet”)

Wisdom is the name of that mature bearing. It is law breathed in, experienced, turned over, tested against difficulty, and then applied by judgment. Jordan’s favorite illustration is Solomon and the two harlots. No rule in Leviticus tells the king how to decide who is the baby’s mother; he must read hearts. He must issue a command he does not mean literally (the sword-threat) as a way of exposing the true love that no written code could adjudicate.

What is the first big picture of wisdom that we have after Solomon asked for wisdom? What’s the next story we read? The story of the two harlots… Now, Solomon probably said, let me consult Deuteronomy and see what it says about how to deal with this. There wasn’t anything in there. It required wisdom to deal with that. It wasn’t written down. Now, you don’t get wisdom unless you live under law for a while and internalize the rules; then you grow up and you have your senses exercised to discern good and evil. (James B. Jordan, 2005 BH Conference, “Wisdom and Death I”)

The king is therefore more than a priest, not less. He has not escaped the law; he has metabolized it. And because he has, he is free to bend the letter in service of the spirit, knowing from within why the law said what it said in the first place.

The priest can choose between right and wrong, between obeying and disobeying, because his life is simple. The king has to choose between the lesser of two evils. And that is always true in politics… The best example in common life is a commander on the battlefield. If you are a private in the infantry, all you’ve got to do is obey… But if you are a king in the military, if you’re a commander, you have to pick some guys out for suicide missions… That’s not a right and wrong decision. That’s a lesser of two evils decision. (James B. Jordan, “One Life, Many Deaths,” Lecture 1)

This has a pastoral corollary. An officer of the church who has never lived the law cannot rule wisely, and an officer who has only ever lived the law, and has never passed beyond it into judgment, will rule rigidly and do harm. Wisdom requires both. The priest who has not yet become a king is a child; the king who has not first been a priest is a tyrant.

Because of sin, human beings apart from grace are bad priests, bad kings, and bad prophets. As bad priests, they are disobedient and rebellious… As bad priests, they are not willing to be learners for a time. They move right away into the trial-and-error phase that should come later, and often blab away their opinions to others, trying to be prophets to them when they have little useful to impart. As bad kings, they rule poorly. Because they refused to serve, they don’t know how to rule well… As bad prophets they give bad advice and set in motion evil trends that move history in the wrong direction. (James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics, “Priest, King and Prophet”)

What one must become is a priest who has grown up, whose obedience is now a formed second nature rather than an external rule, and who can therefore be trusted with the sword, the cup, and the counsel.

Notice that you don’t cease to be a priest when you become a king. The rulebook is still there, and occasionally you have to go back and consult it. (James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics, “Priest, King and Prophet”)

Crisis, Death, and the Limping Elder

No one moves from one stage to the next without a death, a death which should not be over spiritualized. The pattern is set in Genesis 2: Adam enters a tardema (a deep, death-like sleep) and his side is opened. When he wakes, he is not merely married; he is glorified, for the woman is his glory, and she could not come forth except through this cutting. Glorification, from the beginning, has the shape of a tomb with a garden on the far side.

Yahweh God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man. And he slept. That is a special word… a totally different word in Hebrew. And he slept, and he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh of that place. Now, you know, if you were sound asleep and somebody ripped a bone out of your side, I think you’d wake up. That didn’t happen because this was death sleep. . . . The Hebrew word is, the verb is radam, to fall into death’s sleep. Tardema is the noun. He was experiencing tardema, death’s sleep. . . . This place, this tardema place, is where visions take place. (James B. Jordan, 2016 BH Conference, “Good Death and Transfiguration”)

Very important for us to understand that God put Adam into a death situation and then resurrected and glorified him. How do we know that Adam was glorified?… Adam was not glorified. Then, after he woke up, he was glorified. Why? Because the woman is the [glory] of the man, according to Paul… So this is the first moment of glorification in history. (James B. Jordan, 2005 BH Conference, “Wisdom and Rule I”)

That’s what happens when you pass through really serious death sleep; you get ripped in half and you get put back together again as one flesh and you’re glorified. Doesn’t look so bad does it? That’s what death is. (James B. Jordan, 2016 BH Conference, “Good Death and Transfiguration”)

Every subsequent movement of covenant history repeats this pattern. The wilderness generation dies so the new generation can inherit. The priestly order under Eli collapses so the kingly order under David can rise. Solomon’s temple burns so the prophetic word can be heard without its shelter. And in Jesus the pattern is both fulfilled and universalized: his death is the door every Christian must walk through in order to enter an adult inheritance.

That crisis is seen in history when at the end of Israel’s priestly period in the days of Eli, God kills Eli’s two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, and he kills Eli because of their sins. And he tears the tabernacle in half… And he brings it back again with David and Solomon. And Solomon builds a temple and the priesthood is restored with the king. And at the end of that period… God kills the sons of King Zedekiah… And he starts again with Daniel and Ezekiel as very young men as prophets starting something new on the other side of that second death and judgment experience. (James B. Jordan, “One Life, Many Deaths,” Lecture 1)

In an individual human life, the death is often the mid-life crisis, the shattering of the plans and identities one had constructed in the priestly, rule-keeping years. Jordan is matter-of-fact about this. Wine cannot be made unless the grape is crushed, and it must ferment in the dark. The structures of a baked life are broken open so that the complex, time-requiring fermentation of wisdom can begin. His lecture series One Life, Many Deaths emphasizes this point: a single biography contains many little deaths, and each of them is a doorway to a larger measure of authority and glory for those who do not refuse them.

In most people’s lives, there is a crisis in the middle of their life, just as there is a great crisis in the middle of history when Jesus comes. He doesn’t come at the end of history or at the beginning. He comes in the middle of history. (James B. Jordan, “One Life, Many Deaths,” Lecture 2: Breaking the Bread)

You know, when men are young, they think they’re going to accomplish certain things. You get to be 40, 45, somewhere in there, and one day you look in the mirror and you realize you’re not going to accomplish all the things you thought you were going to accomplish… And something dies… And that becomes a great crisis in the lives of many men. (James B. Jordan, “One Life, Many Deaths,” Lecture 2)

At some point human beings begin to lose their strength; they begin to die in preparation for their final death and transformation into glory. Sometimes this death begins with some kind of mid-life crisis. With women it is associated with menopause. With men it is associated with the loss of power and the realization that they will not accomplish everything they had hoped to accomplish when they were young. This is when human beings start to become elders. Their kingly wisdom matures into prophecy, the ability to speak life-changing words. (James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics, “Covenant Phases in the Bible”)

You’re going through a real hard time. And in the middle of that real hard time, it seems as if Jesus isn’t there either… This is what the Puritans call the desertion… It’s what the medievals call the dark night of the soul… That’s part of going through the cross. On the cross, Jesus didn’t have any sense that the Father and the Spirit were with him, did he? Real death is a sense of abandonment in the midst of suffering. (James B. Jordan, “One Life, Many Deaths,” Lecture 2)

The man who emerges on the far side of such a death has a limp. Jacob at Peniel is the paradigm: he wrestles all night, receives a new name, and emerges forever lame. The limp is not his punishment; it is his ordination.

A bruised thigh was Jacob’s reward, so that for the rest of his life he limped (Gen. 32:25–32). His limp was not a sign of his defeat, but of his victory… As Jacob crossed joyously over the river into the Promised Land, the sun rose behind him… Jacob could be assured of victory because of his limp. (James B. Jordan, Primeval Saints, 1988)

The message of Peniel is this: It was God who raised up Esau, Isaac, and Laban to wrestle with Jacob. All those years when Jacob wrestled with these three enemies, it was really God with whom he had to do. And why? Not to punish Jacob, but to train him, to make him strong. Just as a father gets down on the floor and wrestles with his children, so God had wrestled with Jacob. (James B. Jordan, Primeval Saints, 1988)

Every pastor, father, magistrate, and elder Jordan knows of has a similar wound somewhere in his story. The limp is the visible sign of earned authority: this person has been through something, has lost something, has failed at something, and has learned from it. The wound is what makes one’s counsel trustworthy. A wise man who is not limping somewhere is almost certainly not yet wise.

The Church always limps, because she always has the bruised heel. There are always embarrassments. There is always infighting. There are always inadequate responses. There are always problems… What looks like chaos to us, as the Church limps in circles, is from the perspective of eternity a beautiful dance, outwardly spiraling; a dance that will eventually draw all the universe into itself. (James B. Jordan, Primeval Saints, 1988)

Long Time Sense, Patience, and the Slow Ferment of Wisdom

Wisdom requires patience; it requires what Jordan calls a long time sense. It operates on large scales that modern people, and especially modern evangelicals, have difficulty grasping: generational, centennial, eschatological. The Garden itself was built on a postponement: Adam and Eve would eventually eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but they were to wait until God said so. They could not wait.

Right now, Adam can’t have the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He’s not supposed to. But when God says it will be food for you, that means eventually he will eat of it. (James B. Jordan, 2005 BH Conference, “Wisdom and Rule I”)

The refusal of patience is the original folly, and every subsequent impatience recapitulates it. Israel demands a king before the time and receives Saul. A church demands revival and gets a technique. A father demands that his son be mature before he has finished being a child, and produces neither.

Solomon says, I’m too young… So give thy servant an understanding heart, a hearing heart, to judge thy people, to discern between good and evil… Now that’s the opposite of Adam’s attitude, you see. Adam’s attitude was, hey, I’ve been around for 14 hours already. I am ready to have knowledge of good and evil. Solomon says, I’m not old enough. He’s humble. (James B. Jordan, 2005 BH Conference, “Wisdom and Rule I”)

It took ninety-nine years for Abraham to mature to the point of being made a prophet, and it took ninety-seven years for Jacob to prevail with God. Yet, great as their privileges were, there was more to come. (James B. Jordan, Primeval Saints, 1988)

Abraham had matured through patient faith… Jacob had matured through wrestling faith to the point where he could wrestle with God and prevail. In both cases the development took a long time and involved patience and perseverance. And here again, the contrast is with Adam, Ham, Lot, and Esau, who were impatient, and who as a result never attained this high standing with God. (James B. Jordan, Primeval Saints, 1988)

Wisdom is intrinsically slow because it is intrinsically fermented. It is the product of a certain kind of weather acting over a certain amount of time on a life that has been broken open. This is why Ecclesiastes belongs to the wisdom canon as the necessary shadow of Proverbs: Proverbs assumes the sufficient time horizon in which obedience bears its characteristic fruit; Ecclesiastes reckons with the horizon of mortality, within which even wisdom cannot guarantee results. The mature man lives in both simultaneously, working as if both Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are true. Short-horizon piety gives up too quickly when Proverbs appears to fail. Pure Ecclesiastes resignation mistakes mystery for meaninglessness. The wise man can farm the earth patiently while acknowledging that his barns will one day belong to someone else.

At the center of this section is the statement, “all things are wearisome.” … If we look at things under the perspective of the judgment of God, then everything looks different… He still says, yeah, it’s vapor, but it’s not wearisome. God is going to bring an explanation to it all. God is going to bring it all under judgment. And so you can rejoice in all of it, even when things are not very pleasant. (James B. Jordan, 2005 BH Conference, “Survey of Ecclesiastes”)

Wisdom and Death: Why the Wise Man Must Die

Jordan teaches that wisdom is oriented toward and structured by death. This is the burden of his 2005 conference on Ecclesiastes and wisdom literature and the 2016 conference on death. The wise man is the one who has come to know his own mortality at close quarters, and wisdom’s depth is proportionate to that knowledge. A young man may be intelligent, gifted, even trained; but if he has not yet buried anyone, watched a work of his collapse, or confronted his own limits, his counsel will be fragile. Wisdom about death is not a morbid appendix to wisdom; it is the center.

Death was originally intended to be what Jesus goes through on the Sabbath day. And awakes to higher glory… But death is not a threat. Death is simply a promise… Then it’s because of sin that death becomes a problem for us. (James B. Jordan, 2016 BH Conference, “Good Death and Transfiguration”)

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it remains by itself alone, but if it die, it bears much fruit… You plant one [seed] in the ground and you get one stalk… 800 corns on it. So one becomes 800… But it has to die… But now it’s coming to life again as something else. Just like a caterpillar. It spins itself a little tomb. And then it comes out as a butterfly. Glorified. (James B. Jordan, 2016 BH Conference, “Good Death and Transfiguration”)

This is why the king, who bears the sword, must have first stood inside the grave. The magistrate who would administer capital punishment lightly is disqualified. Kingship is serious because life and death are serious, and only those who have taken their own death seriously are fit to adjudicate the deaths of others. The priest never had to carry this weight; he slaughtered animals according to a code. The king slaughters according to judgment, and must be the kind of man whose judgment can be trusted. The way his judgment becomes trustworthy is by his own dying.

It is correct to say that part of the calling of the priest is to die for others, to be a sacrifice. Israel as a nation of priests was under the laws of uncleanness (symbolic death)… But it is also true that the king is called to die. Jesus died for us as priest and as king, so that we might become priests and kings… He dies as Melchizedekal priest-king, not as Aaronic priest only. (James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics, “Priest, King and Prophet”)

The fact that the king is called upon to give up his glory and “die” for others is overlooked in this set of answers, because of the notion that sacrificial death is associated only with priesthood. This is a significant error, which we must see if we are to begin to understand the Biblical teachings regarding life and history. (James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics, “Priest, King and Prophet”)

Job is a fitting example. His friends exhibit simplistic wisdom and it fails in their hands because the case exceeds their reach. Job learns, and the reader learns, that wisdom ends in faith, not in formula. The last move of the wise man, confronted with the whirlwind, is silence. And this, too, is a kind of death. It is the death of the claim to comprehend.

What are the four wisdom books? Proverbs. No, not Psalms. Ecclesiastes. Job and Song of Solomon. Those are the four books about how to be a king. Four king books. Job is the king of the land of Edom. (James B. Jordan, 2005 BH Conference, “Wisdom and Death I”)

While law and obedience are associated with the Sinaitic Era, wisdom and skill are associated with the Kingdom Era. The books of Law are given through Moses, while the books of wisdom are given through Solomon. It seems very likely, then, that Solomon was the author of Job… The book of Job, then, is not just about the sufferings of a righteous man… It is also about chaos in the body politic, and the position of the suffering king within that chaos. (James B. Jordan, Biblical Horizons, 1989–2007 archive)

Solomon, the Bride, and the Feast: Wisdom’s Consummation

Jordan and his associates also bring into their teaching the notions of feast and bride, thus making kingship and wisdom inherently nuptial. Jordan reads Proverbs 8 and Proverbs 31 together with the Song of Songs; Lady Wisdom is not a metaphorical accessory but the very personification of the mature kingly state. She is the one by whom kings reign. She is the competent woman of Proverbs 31; engaged in trade, in real estate, in manufacture, whose hands grip the spindle and whose lamp burns late. That is to say, she is the image of kingly dominion gathered into an adult life. The Song of Songs is the erotic consummation of this same complex: the king and his bride meet in a garden that has become a banqueting house, and their union is the proper end of the maturation sequence.

Peter Leithart writes:

It should be recalled, too, that the Proverbs are written by a King to a Prince… The dramatic premise of the book of Proverbs is this: A Prince must determine whether Lady Wisdom or Dame Folly will be his princess… The answer to our dramatic question is given in the final chapter of the book, the well-known Proverbs 31. It is no accident that the Proverbs ends with a celebration of the excellent wife. In the drama of Proverbs, the excellent wife is Lady Wisdom from the earlier chapters. (Peter J. Leithart, “The Dramatic Structure of Proverbs,” Biblical Horizons archive)

This structure and these characters are generally analogous to the major structures and characters of the Bible. The first prince, Adam, chose to follow the word of his adulterous wife (2 Cor 11:1–3), and ended up, as the Proverbs say, in Sheol. The Last Adam listened intently to the Word of His Father, and died to win a spotless Bride. Now He praises His bride in the gates; she is an excellent wife. (Peter J. Leithart, “The Dramatic Structure of Proverbs”)

From Jordan’s own treatment of Proverbs 8 wisdom:

Wisdom is not simply knowledge or even common sense. In the Biblical sense, wisdom has to do with making things and controlling things. Wisdom is practical. Thus, in Proverbs 8:30, wisdom is a “master workman.” Wisdom “knows how” as well as “knows what.” (James B. Jordan, Biblical Horizons archive)

The feast stands to the kingly stage as the sacrifice stands to the priestly. Where the priest ministers inside a tent, mediating between God and people through blood, the king throws a banquet in his hall, presiding over a joyful community of adults who eat meat and drink wine and sing. The Lord’s Supper combines both: Christ’s body is the priestly bread, his blood is the kingly wine; and thereby becomes the liturgical rehearsal of this entire sequence. Every Sunday, the church dies and rises, eats bread and drinks wine, is a priest on its knees and a king at table. The eschaton toward which the whole sequence bends is a wedding feast, because the mature church is a bride, and the mature Christ is a bridegroom who throws a banquet.

Look at the whole history of the Lord’s Supper. The cup was removed from the laity for centuries until the Hussites came along and demanded that they be given wine as well as bread, and the church excommunicated them all and they had to fight wars about it. (James B. Jordan, 2010 BH Conference, “Wine, Women, Song” Lecture 1)

This business of taking bread and breaking it, because what you eat tonight is broken bread, means that Jesus’ death has been given to you so that you can die. And what you drink tonight is poured out wine. It’s actually been taken out of a bottle and poured out into those things. And you drink it so that when you die and you pour out your life, it counts for something. (James B. Jordan, “One Life, Many Deaths,” Lecture 2)

Christian worship as it has developed, especially in the West, has the same shape:
1. Announcement of God — Call to Worship;
2. Transition from old to new — Confession and Absolution;
3. Laws — the Word;
4. Blessings and curses — the Lord’s Supper;
5. Arrangements for the future — Benediction and Dismissal
This shape arises from the heart of the covenant renewal itself.
(James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics, “The Literary Shape of the Covenant”)

The Prophetic Overflow: Speech That Reshapes the World

At the far end of the sequence stands the prophet. If the king still acts in the world through sword and scepter, the prophet has passed beyond action into speech. At this final stage, the saint does very little, but what he says reorients the nations. The prophet is a dying king whose voice is outliving his power. Old age gathers its authority into the single instrument that is left—the word—and that word, if the prophet has kept faith, carries more weight than armies. Gray hair, as Proverbs says, is a crown.

At the end of life, you don’t do things anymore. It’s speaking. The king acts, the elder speaks. And what he says, if he has really learned wisdom… then he has the super wisdom to know exactly what things to say: to cause David to repent instantly; to know exactly what things to say to cause his grandchildren to look at the world in a new way and to start things a different way. (James B. Jordan, “One Life, Many Deaths,” Lecture 1)

In the Bible, a prophet is one of God’s chief counselors, whom God consults before He acts (Amos 3:7; 7:1–6; Genesis 20:7; 18:16–33). The prophet is the mature image of God, now woven into God’s fellowship as a junior partner in His Council. Becoming prophets is a third phase of our lives, our eldership, when we have not only acquired wisdom, but have tested our wisdom through years of being “kings” and now have acquired the ability to pass on both law and wisdom to others, those coming after us. (James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics, “Priest, King and Prophet”)

The prophets Elijah and Elisha were human chariots of God (2 Ki. 2:12; 13:14). So was Ezekiel to be, and since now all of God’s people are prophets, so are we all to be. God is to ride enthroned on us, and we are to move at His direction. (James B. Jordan, Chariot of Fire, 1991)

In Jordan’s vision, the prophets from Elijah onward are preparing for the end of the old creation by speech. They do not build a new order themselves; they announce it and thereby call it forth. This is why the prophetic age is always apocalyptic; it culminates in fire. And this is why Pentecost, for Jordan, is the moment at which the Spirit of prophecy is universalized; every Christian in the new covenant is now a prophet, a king, and a priest, with the full maturation sequence miniaturized into each baptized life. The cosmic story has leapt into the individual biography, and what Israel traced over centuries, the Christian must trace over a lifetime.

On Pentecost, this Presence-fire was distributed as tongues to the Church, which carries its judgment and blessing to the four corners of the earth… The disciples were made chariots of fire in Acts 2 when tongues of fire came upon them, but when they united other people into their fellowship, they did so by sprinkling water on them (Acts 2:38). (James B. Jordan, Chariot of Fire, 1991)

We have moved from the priestly Old Creation to the kingly New Creation, but our kingship consists of words. It is a prophetic kind of kingship, and as history moves along the Church will become more and more mature as a prophetic host. Finally, after the day of judgment, the Church will be fully mature. (James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics, “Covenant Phases in the Bible”)

The Cosmic-Historical Sweep: Childhood of the World to Maturity of the Church

Behind all of this is a story about the creation itself. God made the world immature, destined to mature. He made Adam a child-priest in a small garden sanctuary: not because a child-priest was the goal, but rather presenting the goal of maturity to him. Israel’s long tutelage under law was the childhood of the redeemed humanity. The Davidic-Solomonic monarchy was its adolescence. The prophets were its teachers at the threshold of adulthood. Christ’s death and resurrection are the moment at which the redeemed humanity comes of age; Pentecost is the moment at which the mature Spirit is poured out on all flesh, not only on a priestly caste. The New Covenant is therefore structurally adult, structurally prophetic; the church’s refusal to inhabit this maturity is a refusal of Pentecost itself.

Yet it is the destiny of this race of men to mature into a holy host… the fact that men are to mature from glory to glory (2 Corinthians 3:18), becoming ever more glorious in time, while the angels were created glorious at the outset, again indicates that the angelic host forms a picture of the goal of human maturation: from fetal “formlessness” to “angelic” glory. (James B. Jordan, Through New Eyes, 1988)

It was man’s task to build the world, carrying it from glory to glory, and making it a fit house for God. God dwells in heaven, but He wants also to dwell on earth, when man has made it ready for Him. (James B. Jordan, Through New Eyes, 1988)

Each epoch’s glory is real, and each subsequent epoch’s glory is greater. This is glory-to-glory (2 Corinthians 3): not a straight line of constant improvement, but an ascent by stages, each of which is a new plateau that required a death to reach. It is the same shape at every scale. It runs through cosmic history, through Israel’s biography, through Christ’s life, through the church’s history, through a single Christian’s years.

Western theology usually uses the word “glorification” to refer only to the final phase of human life, after the resurrection. The Bible, however, speaks of growing from glory to glory. Glorification is a work of the Spirit that begins in immaturity and ends in full maturity. We are fully glorified at the end, but we are in a process of glorification throughout our lives. The history of the covenants is a history of progressive glorification. (James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics)

In each case there is a transition through death into resurrection, a passage from darkness to greater light, an evening before a new day. This is how God’s Spirit acted in Genesis 1, and it is the same way He acts in Bible history. (James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics, “Covenant Phases in the Bible”)

From these two examples, which could be multiplied billions of times, we can see that the passage from priest to king to prophet is not something distinctively “religious,” but is in fact the essence of human life and growth. We are moving through these phases all the time, not only in small ways, but also in the larger course of our entire lifespan. (James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics, “Priest, King and Prophet”)

The Critique of Modern Infantilism

Jordan’s pastoral critique follows directly from this. Much of modern evangelicalism and some of modern Reformed life is arrested at the priestly, childhood stage. Its concerns are the concerns of a well-trained child: personal conversion, rule-keeping, boundary-policing, the memorization of verses, the fear of the world, the anxious anticipation of the end. These are not wrong, any more than childhood is wrong. But they are not the goal. When a church refuses to grow into kingly wisdom—when it refuses to take up adult responsibility for art, politics, education, economics, the raising of its grandchildren—it leaves the kingly office vacant, and other powers move in. A church that will not be a king will be ruled by one. A church that will not exercise wisdom will be managed by cleverness.

We tend to miss [the holy war] because we’re so concerned about sin and redemption, but most of the Gospels are concerned with Jesus beating up demons… part of those controversies come from people who are only concerned about sin and salvation and evangelism, and they get very nervous if somebody starts talking about Christian government and applying the kingdom to all of life and those kinds of things. They don’t have that broader perspective. (James B. Jordan, 2005 BH Conference, “Wisdom and Death II”)

My topic this week is wine, women, and song, and also war… these are three things that are important, essential, new characteristics of the new covenant glory, which the church has done a bad job of affirming over the centuries… These are areas in which the church and Christendom have pretty regularly failed to be what God intends. And so there must be something important about these things, because somebody doesn’t want us to think about them. (James B. Jordan, 2010 BH Conference, “Wine, Women, Song” Lecture 1)

Today, let’s talk about wine for a few minutes… it’s part of childishness and other problems, but it’s also because somehow principalities and powers fear these things and they’re part of our warfare… Why was [the cup] rejected? Why is it a problem? (James B. Jordan, 2010 BH Conference, Lecture 12)

Jordan diagnoses the same condition more systematically two decades earlier:

In this essay, we have only skimmed the surface of the problems faced by the American Church in the area of music… [I have analyzed the problems in terms of] the economic poverty of the frontier era; the anti-intellectualism of the revivalistic heritage; the development of sentimentalism in the 19th century; the loss of the constraints of liturgy, or else the loss of the constraints of exclusive psalmody; the studied pursuit of infantilism in the 20th century. (James B. Jordan, Reconstruction of the Church, 1985)

The solution is not to skip priesthood and grasp directly at wisdom; that produces cleverness without righteousness, which is folly with a vocabulary. The solution is to live the priestly stage faithfully, accept the deaths that come at its end, and walk into the kingly stage with a limp. It is to sit long at the feet of the law, to eat bread in the garden, and then, when the breaking comes, to consent to the breaking and step into a larger room where wine is poured.

Now, you don’t acquire the ability to do that unless you spend a number of years being a priest and learning right and wrong. So you have to grow up as a child and be obedient and be spanked when you’re disobedient and learn right and wrong, and once you get that down inside yourself, then you can have these challenges where you’ve got much more difficult and complex decisions to make, and you kind of have to grope your way along. (James B. Jordan, “One Life, Many Deaths,” Lecture 1)

[We ask you to] make us more fully the kind of priestly bread that you want us to be, and give us the wisdom and the kingly wisdom that comes from the wine as well, and help us to live more faithfully as priests, and with greater insight and understanding as kings. (James B. Jordan, “One Life, Many Deaths,” Lecture 1, closing prayer)

Summary

In Jordan’s theology, wisdom is the name of the second stage of maturation through which God brings his covenant people and every individual Christian. It is what obedience becomes when it has been internalized, tested by time, broken open by suffering, and raised again on the far side of a death. It stands between the priestly age of law and childhood and the prophetic age of vision and elderhood, and it is entered only through crisis. Its paradigm figures (Solomon, Job, David, Jacob, Joseph) all limp in some fashion, because all of them have been wounded into kingship. Its literary canon (Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs) spans the range from the buoyant confidence of young obedience to the dark silence of the suffering saint to the consummating joy of the wedding feast. Its virtues are patience and long time sense; its instruments are the sword of judgment and the cup of wine; its telos is a bride, a banquet, and a world ruled in the Spirit. Jesus is the wisdom of God because he is the one who has walked the whole sequence: he became a child under the law, died the kingly death, rose into prophetic speech, and now gives his Spirit so that his people may, generation by generation, grow up into him. To seek wisdom in Jordan’s sense is therefore to consent to grow up: to accept that the life of faith will be marked by breakings, that its authority will come with a limp, that its fruits will ripen slowly, and that its final form will be a feast.

There is one covenant in three large phases. These phases of maturation in history reflect in time the eternal maturation of the Son by the work of the Spirit. These three phases can be characterized as:

1. Priestly, childhood;
2. Kingly, adulthood;
3a. Historical prophetic, eldership;
3b. Full prophetic, resurrection in glory.

These 3–4 phases of the one covenant cover all of human history, and they also cover the full course of the normal human life… These 3–4 phases also cover smaller periods of history at various levels, as God’s Spirit causes humanity to mature through expanding cycles. (James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics, “Covenant Phases in the Bible”)

The meaning of Jesus’ perfect human life is not only that He came to die for our sins, but also that He gives to us His perfect life. He gives it to us not so much as a model, for we do not in fact do the same things Jesus did, but as a type. A type is a deep-pattern impressed into us by the Holy Spirit. We are placed in union with Jesus, and the deep-pattern of His life is given to us… By eating His body and drinking His blood, we are restored and renewed so that we can move properly through these three phases of life. (James B. Jordan, Biblical Theology Basics, “Priest, King and Prophet”)

We can do so, confident that the limp of victory in Christ will mature into the dance of eternity. (James B. Jordan, Primeval Saints, 1988)

Bibliography

Quotations above are taken from James Jordan’s lectures and writings. Principal sources:

Through New Eyes (1988)
Primeval Saints (1988)
Chariot of Fire (1991)
The Sociology of the Church (1986)
Christian Piety: Deformed and Reformed (1986)
Reconstruction of the Church (1985)
Biblical Horizons archive (1989-2007)
Biblical Theology Basics essays (2002–2007)
“One Life, Many Deaths” (three lectures)
2005 Biblical Horizons Conference on Ecclesiastes and Wisdom Literature
2010 Biblical Horizons Conference on Wine, Women, Song
2016 Biblical Horizons Conference on Death.

A few quotations are from Peter Leithart rather than James Jordan, and are noted as such.

Written by Scott Moonen

May 3, 2026 at 8:59 pm

Posted in Biblical Theology, Quotations

I gotta have my orange juice.

Wisdom

Priest, King, and Prophet

From Law to Wisdom

Crisis, Death, and the Limping Elder

Long Time Sense, Patience, and the Slow Ferment of Wisdom

Wisdom and Death: Why the Wise Man Must Die

Solomon, the Bride, and the Feast: Wisdom’s Consummation

The Prophetic Overflow: Speech That Reshapes the World

The Cosmic-Historical Sweep: Childhood of the World to Maturity of the Church

The Critique of Modern Infantilism

Summary

Bibliography

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I gotta have my orange juice.

Wisdom

Priest, King, and Prophet

From Law to Wisdom

Crisis, Death, and the Limping Elder

Long Time Sense, Patience, and the Slow Ferment of Wisdom

Wisdom and Death: Why the Wise Man Must Die

Solomon, the Bride, and the Feast: Wisdom’s Consummation

The Prophetic Overflow: Speech That Reshapes the World

The Cosmic-Historical Sweep: Childhood of the World to Maturity of the Church

The Critique of Modern Infantilism

Summary

Bibliography

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About Scott

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