Are You a Priest?: Luther Said Yes, Anglicans Hedged, and Southern Baptists Almost Split over the Question

They could have billed it as the “Fall of the Alamo, Part 2,” only this time it was an idea that was about to be massacred.

On June 15, 1988, during the one-hundred-thirty-first Southern Baptist Convention in San Antonio, a group of Southern Baptist dissidents stalked out and marched over to the ruined shell of the Alamo. There they ceremonially put a match to a resolution that had just passed, a resolution declaring that “misunderstanding and abuse” of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers had undermined the authority of pastors over their congregations. The protesters wanted to let everyone watching know what they thought of the resolution (and of what event its passing reminded them).

Now, fireworks are common enough among Southern Baptists. What was curious about this controversy was the topic of the resolution being put to the torch. It had to do not with biblical inerrancy, nor women elders and pastors, nor homosexuality. It was about the priesthood of all believers.

The priesthood of all believers? It always seemed to be a given of life itself that Baptists were the chief guardians of “the priesthood of all believers” (and the cluster of ideas about “soul competency” and “the right of private judgment” that seem to go along with it). But the truth is that, while Baptists (and almost all evangelicals) have seen the priesthood of all believers as a key principle of Protestant Christianity, the fiery debate in San Antonio showed that it is one principle that is far from being well understood. No slogan of the Reformation has remained so much a mere slogan. No Protestant teaching has so often embarrassed Protestant teachers, or so often been seen as a threat to their office. This is a matter for regret, for the priesthood of all believers stands as the necessary corollary of the Reformation’s first principle—justification through faith. It is also the ground out of which all real ministry grows.

A Surprising Priesthood

There is no way to come at “the priesthood of all believers” without getting surprised. And the New Testament will surprise us the most of all on this point because it actually has a great deal to say about Christian priesthood; but it surprises us again by saying nothing about Christian priests. That is, the authors of the New Testament had a very clear notion of what the word priest meant, with all its history of association with the old covenant, and they avoided applying it to ministers of the new covenant. “Every high priest …” says the author of Hebrews, “is appointed to act on behalf of men in relation to God to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins” (Heb. 5:1). By means of “gifts” (the Levitical offerings of grain and meat) and “sacrifices” (the sin offerings of bulls and goats), the priest made up for the failures of God’s people in regard to his law, appeased God’s wrath, and, especially on the Day of Atonement, stood in God’s presence in the innermost sanctuary of the temple to plead with God for mercy on the basis of the sacrifice just offered. In each case, the priesthood was the indispensable agent of mediation, for it was by these actions that the people of God were once more given access to God.

Now what is striking in this light is the utter absence in the New Testament of any Christian officer or leader who corresponds to this description of priest. The New Testament speaks of presbyters (or elders), bishops, and deacons, but never once is the word for priest given to them as a title, nor do any of their qualifications suggest the need for exercise of any sacrificial functions. Why? The answer lies once again in Hebrews, where the author stakes out the breathtaking claim that the entire sacrificial system, including the priesthood, was but a foreshadowing of the death and ascension of our Lord.

Jesus is described not only as the sacrifice, but also the sacrificer. Only Jesus Christ, as the Son who is greater than all the angels, and as the high priest greater than all the heirs of Aaron, is qualified to mediate this sacrifice. “Indeed,” we read in Hebrews 7:28, “the law appoints men in their weakness as high priests, but the word of the covenant, which came later than the law, appoints a Son who has been made perfect for ever.” It is on that basis that Christ then “passed through the heavens” (Heb. 4:14) to “the inner shrine behind the curtain” (Heb. 6:19) where he performs the culminating act of the sacrificial process, that of intercession for the people for whom he died. “Consequently,” concludes the author of Hebrews, “he is able for all time to save those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them” (Heb. 7:25).

On those grounds, the priestly work of Christ renders a new order of priests unnecessary. His death and intercession are of such a nature—“holy, blameless, unstained … exalted above the heavens” (Heb. 7:26)—that he has no need to be offered again and again, nor does he require a new regiment of Christian priests to participate with him in it, or to rehearse it afterwards.

A Spiritual Priesthood

But the New Testament does have a great deal to say about a priesthood for Christians. For instance, Christians are repeatedly described by the apostle Paul as offering sacrifices to God through their conversions (Rom. 15:16), their faith (Phil. 2:17), their gifts (Phil. 4:18), and even their bodies (Rom. 12:1). Even more surprisingly, five times the New Testament actually speaks of Christians as having a priesthood: In 1 Peter 2:5 and 2:9, Peter addresses the dispersed Christians of Asia Minor as “a holy priesthood” and “a royal priesthood.” In Revelation 1:5–6 and 5:10, the elect saints are hailed as a “kingdom of priests” who, according to Revelation 20:6, “shall be priests of God and of Christ” who will “reign with him a thousand years.” If Christ’s death has ended the need for priestly sacrifice, what can be the purpose of describing Christians as “a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 2:5)?

The answer is found in noting the peculiar way the New Testament describes this priesthood. The priestly works of this priesthood are always put in spiritual terms, rather than the material terms of bloodshed and killing. Their “sacrifices” are never said to atone for anything; they are, in fact, sacrifices only metaphorically, and more resemble thank offerings than literal sacrifices. Furthermore, while 1 Peter and Revelation speak of a priesthood for all Christians, and Hebrews speaks of Jesus Christ as the full and final sacrifice, the two ideas are never conjoined in one place. Nor is there really any association of either of these “sacrifices” with the administration of the Eucharist (as Paul describes it in 1 Corinthians 11). To the contrary, the real point of this “sacrificial” language is to show that every gift of praise and thanksgiving that Christians now offer is regarded as being a priestly service.

We also need to notice that this “priesthood” is always spoken of corporately, never individually, and the New Testament never implies this priesthood is to be confined only to the ministry of presbyters, bishops, or deacons. The reason is, again, wrapped up in the nature of Jesus’ death on the cross. Remember that the whole point of the Old Testament sacrifice was to give God’s people a means of access to God. It was on the basis of the expiation and propitiation provided by the sacrifice of bulls and goats that Israel’s high priest could enter God’s presence and intercede for the people. But in the Old Testament scheme of things, the extent of this access was drastically limited: it had to be done again and again, year after year, on the Day of Atonement. With the sacrificial work of Christ, however, the work of expiation and propitiation is final. When Jesus Christ, the eternal Son, enters into the heavenly tabernacle to intercede for us, he opens up for all who are in him permanent, direct access to God. To the extent that we are “in Christ,” all of us may now enter into the presence of God. As W. H. Griffith-Thomas put it so well, Christianity does not have a priesthood; it is a priesthood, a priesthood for all believers.

Perils Of A Priestly Elite

A candid look at church history shows, however, that the sixteenth-century Reformers—Luther, Calvin, others—did not come upon this idea of the priesthood of all believers in quite the direct fashion charted here. The history of Christian theology, from the third century to the thirteenth, is the slow tale of how priestly ministry in the church became identified with a sacrificial representation of the body and blood of Christ in the Mass, performed by a tiny elite who transferred the Old Testament idea of priesthood to the clergy.

For Luther, who described himself as “soaked in the pestilent doctrine of the papists which we have taken into our very bones and marrow,” it was far from easy to redefine what might be meant by “priesthood.” His discovery of the spiritual and common priesthood of all believers actually came as the byproduct of two other, more basic, discoveries: justification by faith and the corruption of the popes and their resistance to reform.

Once Luther became clear that salvation is found, not by trusting in works, but by faith in the perfect righteousness that Christ has bought, he had to re-examine what the church had done over the centuries in transforming the ministry of presbyters and bishops into a sacrificial order of priests. To be a Catholic priest had meant that Luther was supposed to enjoy the special privilege of access to God that others did not have. But he realized that if no one could please God apart from the saving merits of Christ, then not even a priest who lacked faith in those merits could really have any such access. Luther could not harmonize any notion of a specially entitled priesthood with the universality of justification by faith. All believers must have access to God through Christ; therefore, either no one is a priest or everyone is.

Luther was driven further along these lines by the refusal of the papal hierarchy in Rome to deal effectively with the corruption that riddled the church. Luther believed he knew what needed to be done to reform the church. But the papacy turned a deaf ear to Luther’s appeal. Luther had to find an alternative outside the church hierarchy to accomplish this reform. In the end, he turned to the secular princes of Germany, and his reasoning was simply an extension of his thinking on justification. “To call bishops, priests, monks and nuns, the religious class, but princes, lords, artisans, and farm workers the secular class, is a specious device invented by certain time-servers,” Luther wrote. “All Christians whatsoever really and truly belong to the religious class, and there is no difference among them except insofar as they do different work.” As such, the Christian prince has as much priestly authority as the pope to punish wickedness and misrule in the church. Thus Luther began to speak of “the general priesthood of all the baptized Christians” (a phrase he seems to have used in that form only for the first time in 1538).

Calvin shared Luther’s general conviction that the designation of one single class of ministry in the church as “priestly” was wrong, but he arrived at this conviction by a very different route. The stark individualism packed into Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith forced Luther to attack the clerical “priesthood” on the grounds that the priesthood had usurped prerogatives that belonged equally (although perhaps only potentially) to every Christian. Calvin was less interested in assailing the Roman priesthood, and more curious about the foundations of the very idea of ministry. In Calvin’s thinking, the ministry of Christ—the threefold office of prophet, priest, and king—eliminated any suggestion that the ministry of the church had a priesthood. But if there was no such thing as a ministerial priesthood, there was a general priesthood shared by all believers; and it was obtained—not by a special grace of ordination—but by the mystical union with Christ into which all his elect people enter. “In consequence of the intimate union between Christ and his Church, the peculiar attribute of Christ himself is often transferred to his body,” Calvin observed. “We are made partakers of Christ if we come to him sanctified in body and soul.”

The Reformers of the Church of England said many of the same things. Archbishop Cranmer and his assistants stripped all mention of a sacerdotal offering of Christ out of the new English Reformed liturgy and pointedly revised the ordination services to eliminate any reference to presentation of “power to offer sacrifice to God and to celebrate mass.”

The one problem in this reconstitution of the idea of ministry in England was the retention of the term priest. It was a decision with which few, if any, of the English Reformers were happy. But the innate conservatism of the English Reformation favored keeping whatever did not have absolutely to be thrown out. Since one could point out that, etymologically, priest was simply an English contraction of presbyter and not a proper translation of the Greek hiereus or the Latin sacerdos, the title of priest stayed.

And for a very long time, that was generally the way Anglicans explained the matter. But in the nineteenth century, when the Oxford Movement issued its call for England to reject the Reformation as a terrible mistake, priest became a convenient vehicle for rehabilitating all the old sacrificial and mediatorial notions. To be sure, the Oxford Anglo-Catholics fell short of getting their notion of priest accepted throughout the Anglican world. But their arguments had their effect.

More Than Dog Collars And Suits

What significance should this “priesthood of all believers” have for us? What should it mean—and not mean?

One thing it should certainly do is remind us of the New Testament’s insistence that there is no such thing as a Christian without a ministry, whether it be a ministry of teaching, administering, or the specific work of ordained ministry. Ministry belongs to the whole people of God through their union with Christ and through the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The offices of presbyter, bishop, and deacon (however we define them) exist in the church to give that universal ministry shape and focus, not for a handful of individuals in dog collars or navy-blue suits to concentrate all ministry in their own hands. But that is a cheap and easy point to make; the truth is that almost imperceptibly the special and demanding qualifications of these offices create a professional segregation of “clergy” and “laity.”

George Carey, the new evangelical archbishop of Canterbury, ruefully acknowledges that more often than not “we have relied upon the ‘one-man-band,’ thus stripping the laity of their ministry. ‘Turn up, pay up—and shut up’ sums up tersely the traditional areas conferred upon the laity.” And for just that reason, any prescription for realizing the priesthood of all believers that begins, “The clergy have to give the laity a chance to …” is doomed to fail. It implies that “priesthood” is a something that clergy own and are not going to share freely with others.

The first necessity, then, in recovering a priesthood for all believers, is for the laypeople—not just the ordained clergy—to restore to our churches a working sense of the priesthood. Certainly the most obvious way in which that priesthood should make its appearance is the involvement of laypeople in the actual administering of the church’s work. Councils of the churches must be a real voice for the laity rather than being (as they usually become) simply a platform for dueling parsons. This applies to denominationwide and regional bodies as well as to committees and boards in local churches. On denominational levels, for example, conventions must be more than occasions for clergy factions to contend for issues while the laity look on and perhaps rally behind clerical standard bearers. On the local level, the laity must do more than expect clergy to come up with the program, which they then simply vote up or down.

The people should also have a real voice in the appointment of pastors, rather than acquiescing sullenly to whomever the bishop or the presbytery, in their mysterious wisdom, feel free to send them. And the people as well should take up a role in church discipline, remembering that the discipline and order of the church was something Christ vested in the whole church, not just a board.

Sometimes, of course, the most obvious recommendations can be the most difficult to implement. The laity don’t always want to become “involved” publicly in these ways and are happy to leave church leadership to the clergy. Or some ministers will argue that certain laypeople in their congregations have entirely too much to say about the running of their churches and want to divert the church from its confessional identity or send it off in the pursuit of self-serving goals. And sometimes we hear rumblings in the church that suggest it would be a good idea indeed if the priesthood of all believers could somehow render the whole notion of an ordained ministry superfluous.

Three Principles For Priesthood

With such questions in mind, we can nail up three short theses about the priesthood of all believers:

1. The priesthood of all believers calls for the active work of all believers in the life of the church, but it does not mean that all believers can or need to do every kind of work. In whatever way we structure all believers’ use of their gifts in our churches, the fact of a designated ministry in the New Testament is undeniable. It is clearly sanctioned as part of the permanent structure of Christian life, and not only sanctioned, but given its own right to self-perpetuation. The ministry may not, strictly speaking, have been the creation of the apostles, but it never developed far outside the umbrella of their authority. In none of the epistles do we find any evidence of individual churches appointing or removing pastors; it is invariably the apostles and their delegates after them who perform the commissioning for service, the laying on of hands.

The priesthood of all believers should not be trivialized to suggest that “everyone’s a layman.” Presbyters, bishops, and deacons have gifts—gifts of oversight, service, preaching, and administration; there is still an appropriate distinction between laity and clergy.

2. The priesthood of all believers calls for the active work of all believers in the life of the church, but it does not guarantee the wisdom of each believer. Just as no individual Christian can manipulate “the priesthood of all believers” to mean that anyone has the right to seize the functions of ministry for him- or herself, neither does it mean that each church member has a putative “right to private judgment” over every confessional or biblical article. The priesthood of all believers is precisely for all believers. No one may grab ministry or interpretation for himself or herself with the claim that it is a “right.” And certainly not without the consent of the other believers who make up our common priesthood. The church is not a collection of individuals popping up to preach or pray as they see fit, but a kingdom of priests—a united spiritual society exercising in various ways the priesthood common to all. If the exercise of “private judgment” really teaches us anything, it is how little we know and understand out of our own fund of wisdom, and it should lead us to a humble dependence upon others.

In the long run, however, these first two theses may well turn out only to be answers to the wrong questions about the priesthood of all believers. And these, unhappily, are precisely the questions that churned the 1988 Southern Baptist Convention into such a froth. The conservative majority of the convention used the “priesthood of all believers” as a whipping boy to enforce consensus. The resolution they passed on the subject explicitly stated that “the priesthood of all believers … in no way gives license to misinterpret, explain away, demythologize, or extrapolate out elements of the supernatural from the Bible.” And in the light of thesis one, it is hard to disagree. But the dissenters who then burned the resolution in front of the Alamo took their stand on the ground of Luther: One Texas pastor actually charged that the resolution was erecting “a papal system that Martin Luther died to defeat.” And it is equally hard for Protestants to disagree with that proposition, too.

The problem with both positions is that neither entirely captures the purpose of the New Testament’s idea of the priesthood of all believers. Questions about who should have the power to do what are political in nature; but the notion of the priesthood that we have in the New Testament is concerned, not with politics or power, but with worship. What other “active work” can a priesthood call us to, except the work of sacrifice and intercession—which, in our case, is the sacrifice of praise and the intercession of prayer? And such worship need not be limited to public worship services.

The purpose of being “a royal priesthood” is to “declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pet. 2:9). It is not intended to promote laissez-faire approaches to doctrine; but neither is it intended to be a procrustean bed to compel doctrinal conformity.

3. Finally, the priesthood of all believers calls for the active work of all believers in the life of the church, and the place where it all begins is liturgy. By this I mean that the priesthood of all believers has to be given back to the people in terms of worship. Ironically, many of the churches I know that have proclaimed the priesthood of all believers with the best of intentions have never troubled to give expression to this “sacrifice of worship” in the most obvious of ways—by means of a truly corporate order of worship. Too often the preacher dominates the service with his long sermon and functions the rest of the time as the pleasant emcee who is always in the spotlight. In liturgical worship, the people have plenty to say as they give voice to the creed and the ancient prayers and the psalms. And in a true reformed service of the Word, the preacher is clearly the servant of the Word, even as the people are.

In the largest sense, then, laypeople and clergy are all part of a single, whole, and indivisible ministry. The clergy give leadership and focus to our common priesthood, the laity give it body and strength, and each owes its being, not to the other, but to Christ. As that happens, we shall at last see with our own eyes what Peter saw by the Spirit of God—ourselves as a temple of living stones, “built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 2:5).

Eugene H. Peterson is pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church, Bel Air, Maryland, and author of A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (InterVarsity) and Answering God (Harper & Row), both of which are about the Psalms.

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