Representing Christ

A Vision for the Priesthood of All Believers

Uche Anizor, Hank Voss

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780830851287
• eBook ISBN: 9780830899746
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Denominaciones cristianas

The priesthood of all believers is a core Protestant belief. But what does it actually mean?Uche Anizor and Hank Voss set the record straight in this concise treatment of a doctrine that lies at the center of church life and Christian spirituality. The authors look at the priesthood of all believers in terms of the biblical witness, the contribution of Martin Luther and the doctrine of the Trinity. They place this concept in the context of the canonical description of Israel and the church as a royal priesthood that responds to God in witness and service to the world. Representing Christ is much more than a piece of Reformation history. It shows that the priesthood of all believers is interwoven with the practical, spiritual and missional life of the church.

1

Exalted Clergy or Egalitarian Priests?

For through him [Christ] we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.

Ephesians 2:18

Developing a faithful doctrine of the church is a practical and theological challenge facing the global evangelical church in the twenty-first century. Pastors and church leaders are asking new questions about the church and often finding the answers of previous generations unsatisfactory. One Roman Catholic author suggests that “as far as the development of doctrine is concerned, the twentieth century was the century of the church.”1 We believe something similar may be said at the end of this century—if the Lord tarries—about the Protestant and indigenous churches exploding around the globe. In the midst of rapid change, a return to the sources can provide much-needed guidance for a new generation of missional disciples. Some five hundred years ago, similar winds of change were blowing. At that time the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers was retrieved by a man named Martin Luther. The doctrine became a pillar for the Protestant church and continues to possess powerful resources for the church today. Yet like any good thing—money, sex or power, for example—the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers can be used for good or ill. What is a faithful and fruitful understanding of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers?

Potential Priesthood Problems

Ordained priests have recently received much negative attention. Headlines abound: “Priest Faces 7 Years for Endangering Children,” “Archbishop, Under Fire over Abuse, Apologizes but Says He Won’t Resign,” “U.N. Panel Says Vatican Is Lax over Abusive Priests” and so on.2 In much of Europe and North America ordained priesthood is associated in the popular imagination with scandal, cover-ups and abuses of power. Others find themselves confused and ambivalent regarding clergy, describing priests as at once holy, detached, committed, aloof, devoted and out of touch.

At one end of the spectrum, there is the admirable Bishop Myriel of Les Miserables—a paragon of goodness and mercy. The novel begins with a description of Myriel’s characteristic benevolence. When he arrives in Digne he is installed in the episcopal palace, “a vast and handsome town house built in stone,” which happens to be next to a hospital. Three days after his arrival the bishop visits the hospital, and upon seeing its small size and bad conditions he resolves to house its twenty-six poor patients in his palace and himself in the hospital.3 It is this same priest who later welcomes the vagrant Jean Valjean with open arms. Who can forget the scene where, after running off in the night with the bishop’s silverware, Valjean is apprehended by police and escorted back to Myriel? When the police inform the priest that they found his silver in the thief’s bag, the priest responds by turning to Valjean and saying, “Ah, there you are. Am I glad to see you! But, heavens! I gave you the candlesticks, too, you know; they are made of silver like the rest and you can get two hundred francs for them, easily. Why didn’t you take them with the cutlery?” Upon giving the crook the candlesticks, he releases him and sends him on his way to go and become “an honest man.”4

At the other end of the spectrum, one might think (scornfully) of Jane Austen’s fairly irreligious parson, Rev. Collins, whose high esteem of himself and his authority as clergy “made him altogether a mixture of pride and obsequiousness, self-importance and humility.”5

Yet for many of the faithful the ordained priest stands at the top of an ecclesiastical hierarchy—one, perhaps, divinely instituted—as a go-between for God and his people. When the ordained priest comes to be seen as categorically different from and highly elevated above the common believer, it is no wonder that falls from grace amount to catastrophes.

What about the “priesthood of all believers”? What comes to mind when this notion is trumpeted? If we entertain some of the previously mentioned concepts of priesthood, it is difficult to imagine anything good coming from the idea. One reaction might be a sense of incongruence between what is being affirmed (“Everyone’s a priest to God!”) and our honest self-evaluation (“Me, a priest?!”). The syllogism is simple: (1) If priests are holy (or anything else we typically ascribe to priests) and (2) we are not, then (3) we are not priests. For those with such a mindset, the priesthood of all believers is not a doctrine so readily embraced. That’s the first potential problem.

Second, the doctrine has often come to mean something akin to the First Amendment right to “freedom of speech” or “to petition the [church] Government for a redress of grievances.” Under the guise of freedom of conscience or religious liberty (two wonderful concepts, mind you), the priesthood of believers has sometimes been used to sanction unfettered individualism and schism in Christ’s church. If I do not approve of another’s judgment, I can simply secede and band together with those who agree with me. According to one story, likely satirical, a Georgia church split forty-eight times in a hundred-year period.6 Denominations, factions and sects often appear to be the natural offspring of the priesthood of all believers.

We are thus confronted with two potential priesthood problems: clerical priesthood and individualistic priesthood. The former sometimes manifests itself in unhealthy hierarchy, the latter in unfettered democracy—and neither is desirable. What, then, do we mean when we declare every Christian a priest? Is the priesthood of all believers a concept worth salvaging?

A Common Priesthood?

Yes! The doctrine of the priesthood of all believers is essential for the church today! However, as with many doctrines, the devil is in the details. Much depends on how we understand and practice the doctrine. Ordained leadership need not carry with it the aura of superiority, and believers’ priesthood need not be individualistic. Both official leadership and the priesthood of all believers are necessary for Christ’s body to grow into maturity (see Eph 4:11-16).

When we look at the New Testament, we discover that no ordained Christian leader is explicitly called “priest.”7 This term is reserved for Christ and for all of God’s people. During the first two centuries of the post-apostolic church, priestly language and imagery were similarly applied in this restricted manner.8 Justin Martyr (AD 100–165), for example, identifies Christians as a priestly race because of their unique election, unique worship and unique mission (i.e., preaching for the conversion of humankind).9 Being a priest is at the core of what it means to be a Christian. It is an identity, not simply a set of lofty but optional tasks one might perform should he or she choose. Priesthood connotes a dignity before God and a responsibility to creation. That such a motley crew as the church should be given such a designation seems completely out of touch with reality. Nevertheless it is true, and therefore must be regularly restated.

Early church theologians such as the author of the Didache, Tertullian (d. AD 222) and Origen (d. AD 254) would sometimes describe church leaders as priests, but they never did so in a way that denied the priesthood of all believers. Origen’s sermons on Leviticus, for instance, regularly appeal to the “royal priesthood” described in 1 Peter 2:9. He speaks of believers as a “spiritual priesthood” and applies priesthood to all believers at least a dozen times.10 Origen’s example illustrates that, for the most part, the title “priest” applied to all believers during the early centuries of the church.11 This emphasis on the priesthood of all believers never completely faded from the church’s consciousness, but it did undergo a decline—what we might call “the dark ages” of the doctrine (the medieval period)—until its rehabilitation by Luther and others (described in some detail in chapter three). Today the doctrine goes by different names within different traditions: “the priesthood of the baptized” (most often used in the Orthodox communion), “the priesthood of the faithful” (the preferred term among Roman Catholics) and “the priesthood of all believers” (usually used by Protestants and global indigenous church movements). Each term, carrying slightly different connotations, can helpfully illumine an important aspect of the doctrine, and we will look at each in turn.

The priesthood of the baptized (Orthodox). One writer observes that “the Orthodox baptismal rite preserves to this day the idea of the ordination of the laics.”12 Another writer notes that the connection between baptism and ordination into the universal priesthood is “found uniformly in Latin, Greek and Syriac writers of the early Church.”13 Contemporary Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas writes, “It must be said emphatically, that there is no such thing as ‘non-ordained’ persons in the Church.” He elaborates on the connection between baptism and ordination:

Baptism and especially confirmation as an inseparable aspect of the mystery of Christian initiation involves a “laying on of hands.” . . . The East has kept these two aspects (baptism—confirmation) not only inseparably linked with one another but also with what follows, namely the eucharist. The theological significance of this lies in the fact that it reveals the nature of baptism and confirmation as being essentially an ordination. . . . The immediate and inevitable result of baptism and confirmation was that the newly baptized would take his particular “place” in the eucharistic assembly, i.e. that he would become a layman. That this implies ordination is clear from the fact that the baptized person does not simply become a “Christian,” as we tend to think, but he becomes a member of a particular “ordo” [structure] in the eucharistic community.14

For the Orthodox Church baptism does not merely initiate someone into the church, but it gives them a particular office; namely, a priestly layperson—one who participates in the church’s worship (chiefly the Eucharist) in a particular way. To be a Christian is to be simultaneously baptized and ordained for a certain kind of priestly ministry. Hence the preferred Orthodox term for the doctrine is the “priesthood of the baptized.”15

The priesthood of the faithful (Roman Catholic). The Second Vatican Council’s Lumen Gentium is the first conciliar document to address “the common priesthood of the faithful.”16 It provides a clear affirmation that the whole church is a priestly people—in a manner reminiscent of Luther and other Protestants. Archbishop Oscar Romero explained the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church to his parishioners this way:

How beautiful will be the day when all the baptized understand that their work, their job, is a priestly work, . . . and each metalworker, each professional, each doctor with the scalpel, the market woman at her stand, is performing a priestly office! How many cabdrivers, I know, listen to this message there in their cabs; you are a priest at the wheel, my friend, if you work with honesty, consecrating that taxi of yours to God, bearing a message of peace and love to the passengers who ride in your cab.17

Roman Catholic doctrine teaches that there is only one priesthood—Christ’s—but there are two distinct participations in it—one ministerial, belonging to ordained clergy, the other common, belonging to all baptized believers. Christ the high priest made the church into a kingdom and priests to serve God. The Catholic catechism reads: “Through the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation the faithful are ‘consecrated to be . . . a holy priesthood,’” and they live out their baptismal priesthood “through their participation, each according to his own vocation, in Christ’s mission as priest, prophet, and king.”18 Each Christian exercises his or her priesthood in a distinctive way, in accordance with their calling. Within the baptismal priesthood of the faithful, a subgroup is ordained to the ministerial priesthood. This group of ordained leaders are the ones most people think about when the word priest is mentioned. They lead congregations in celebrations of the Lord’s Supper, preach the Word of God, baptize and perform other duties in the Roman Catholic Church. For Catholics the ordained priesthood is special, with a unique sacrament, but it exists to serve the common priesthood. It is “the means by which Christ unceasingly builds up and leads his Church.”19 While “the common priesthood of the faithful” is the most common term used by Roman Catholic theologians, many now also use the traditionally Protestant “priesthood of all believers.”20

The priesthood of all believers (Protestant). Martin Luther did not coin the phrase “the priesthood of all believers”—the closest he comes is the “general priesthood of all baptized believers”—but he remains the most important source for the Protestant understanding of the doctrine, referring to believers as priests hundreds of times throughout his writings. The doctrine, according to Luther, denotes the believer’s sharing in Christ’s royal priesthood through faith and baptism. Its primary implications are every believer’s access to the Father through Christ and responsibility to minister to other believers, especially through the proclamation of the Word.

Other traditions took up Luther’s mantle, some conforming to his intent and others diverging. For example, the Anabaptist traditions held what Luther deemed a radicalized version of the doctrine. Like Luther, they emphasized believers’ direct access to God, although they sometimes minimized the role of ordained leaders in the church. One writer observes:

The experience of the immediacy with God led Anabaptists to reject any notion that special places, persons or objects brought one closer to God. The relationship of the human being with God was not depende...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Exalted Clergy or Egalitarian Priests?
• 2 A Royal Priesthood: Scripture’s Story
• 3 Priesthood Reformed: Luther’s Burden
• 4 Life in Communion: The Trinity and the Priesthood of All Believers
• 5 Worship, Work and Witness: The Practices of the Royal Priesthood
• 6 Representing Christ
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name and Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Praise for Representing Christ
• About the Authors
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright