As a professor, ordained minister and participant in the ongoing debate over ordination standards in the Presbyterian Church (USA), I have more than once desired the kind of considered study offered by Thomas Dozeman in Holiness and Ministry. Responding to the lack of a comprehensive biblical theology of ordination, Dozemann, professor of Hebrew Bible at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, prepared this volume in response to the World Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Paper on Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry. Dozeman packages the whole in seven compact chapters and a mere 135 pages of text, apart from endnotes and bibliography. Methodical and didactic in style, Dozeman indicates his agenda at the beginning of each chapter and summarises the content at the end of each chapter, producing a valuable and accessible, if slightly repetitive, biblical theology of ordination.

The overarching thesis is that ordination emerges from the holiness of God and is established both to safeguard God's holiness and to mediate it to humans. Dozeman sees the foundations of ordination in two different understandings of the call and commission of Moses. In one, divine holiness is viewed as a dynamic, charismatic force which, when routed through Moses, transforms him into a prophetic teacher of the word. This understanding is found in Exodus 3–4 and Deuteronomy. The paradigm and language of the numinous infusing the other with itself is taken from Rudolf Otto's Idea of the Holy. The second paradigm of ordination is found in the priestly literature, particularly Exodus 6–7 and Leviticus, where holiness is understood as a ritual force that consecrates sacred spaces (tabernacle/temple), objects (vestments, furnishings, sacrificial animals) and public offices (priesthood). Jacob Milgrom's studies in Levitical literature provide Dozeman with the paradigm of this second understanding. In the priestly model, holiness does not infuse the other with the divine, but creates a separation between the sacred and profane which is mediated by the priestly office. Dozeman thus sees holiness as a prophetic and charismatic force which penetrates and transforms the common and unclean; and alternatively as a ritual and institutional force which establishes sacred places and offices to demarcate sacred and profane – both of which are fulfilled by Moses.

There is considerably less reflection on ordination in the New Testament, but Dozeman sees Otto's dynamic and prophetic paradigm represented in the ministries of Jesus and Paul, and Milgrom's spatial and priestly paradigm reflected in the understanding of apostleship in Luke-Acts. The charismatic versus institutional models of ordination provide the foundation for the ordination of word and sacrament, respectively, in Christian tradition. No attempt is made in either testament to combine or reconcile the two paradigms, according to Dozeman. Indeed they cannot be reconciled, but must be held in complementary tension by means of a hermeneutic of canonical criticism, which seeks to uncover the ‘controlled pluralism’ (so B. Childs) of scripture in a pluralistic world.

Dozeman is to be commended for subjecting ordination to constructive exegetical consideration framed in provocative theoretical constructs provided by Eliade, Otto and Milgrom. Current ordination debates (e.g. women, practising gays and lesbians) are omitted from consideration, with the one exception of servant-leadership, which Dozeman locates within the dynamic-prophetic paradigm, but faults for failing to take holiness seriously, thus blurring the identity of clergy. Foundational to Dozeman's thesis is that the prophetic and priestly idealisations of ordination derive from two different Pentateuchal sources with distinct and competing theologies of God, worship and ordination. Whether current source-critical theories of the Pentateuch will be unchanged in the future – and what will become of Dozeman's thesis if they do not – remains to be seen. But in the current state of the discipline, Holiness and Ministry offers two constructive co-ordinates by which to consider ordination from a biblical, theological perspective.