Leadership Quote by Arthur Middleton

Middleton’s line is a power move disguised as theology: it strips the priesthood debate of its most negotiable framing - that clergy are basically a management layer the Church can redesign when the times change. By insisting priesthood is "not a convenient, historically conditioned form", he preempts the language of reform before it can even get traction. Convenience is what you accuse your opponents of when you want to brand them as modernizers, fad-chasers, people treating the sacred like a committee charter.

The counterclaim lands with the Incarnation. That’s not just a doctrine here; it’s a rhetorical anchor. If priesthood is "rooted in the Incarnation", then it’s wired into the central Christian assertion that God entered history in a particular body, at a particular time, and did not remain an abstraction. Middleton links the Church’s structure to that scandalous specificity: priesthood isn’t a policy choice, it’s a continuation of Christ’s embodied mission. Notice the double bind: to argue the priesthood is historical and revisable starts to sound, by implication, like arguing the Incarnation is merely symbolic or adaptable too.

As a politician writing in the late 18th century - an era thick with revolutions, constitutional tinkering, and institutional suspicion - Middleton’s intent reads as defensive realism. He’s trying to immunize ecclesial authority against the prevailing political mood that everything ancient is just power with good PR. The subtext: if you treat priests as optional bureaucrats, you’ll end up treating Christianity itself as an optional cultural inheritance.