Priesthood of All Believers

History

Causes

The medieval West divided Christendom into the spiritual estate and the temporal estate. Priests were ordained by a sacrament that was held to imprint an indelible character, they alone offered the sacrifice of the Mass, they alone absolved sins, and canon law gave them their own courts. Martin Luther attacked the division in To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520) as the first of three walls the Romanists had built around themselves. His claim was that baptism, not ordination, makes a priest, and that the difference between a minister and any other Christian is one of office and calling, not of spiritual status.

The texts behind it are short and well known. Peter tells scattered Christians they are “a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9); Revelation says Christ has made his people “a kingdom, priests to his God and Father” (Revelation 1:6); Hebrews gives every believer confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus (Hebrews 10:19–22). The New Testament never calls a Christian minister a priest.

Influence

The doctrine is the hinge on which much of the Reformation turned. If every believer may approach God directly, the Mass as a sacrifice offered by a priest for others loses its rationale, confession to a priest becomes advice rather than necessity, and Scripture in the vernacular becomes urgent, since laypeople are now expected to read it. Luther said so in the same decade in the Smalcald Articles (1537), where the Mass is rejected because it conflicts with justification by faith.

Downstream it shaped church order. Reformed churches gave government to elders including laymen, Baptist and Anabaptist churches to the gathered congregation, and both avoid the word priest for their ministers. It fed Protestant lay ministry, the expectation of personal Bible reading, and eventually the Protestant idea of vocation: a farmer or a magistrate serves God in that work as truly as a monk does in a cell.

Key ideas and contributors

Baptism ordains. Luther’s sharpest form of the claim: “all Christians are truly of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them except that of office.” What a minister has is a job the congregation has called him to do, not a character the rest lack.

Direct access through one high priest. The argument is Christological before it is ecclesiological. If Christ is the one priest who has entered once for all (Hebrews 7:23–27), the church does not need a human priesthood mediating between God and the believer.

A priesthood of sacrifice, redefined. Protestants kept sacrificial language and moved it: the believer’s sacrifice is a living body (Romans 12:1), praise and good works (Hebrews 13:15–16), not an offering on an altar.

Not a priesthood of each believer alone. Luther and Calvin both held the priesthood to be corporate, exercised in and for the congregation. Later Protestantism often read it individualistically, which its own confessional defenders regard as a misreading.

Other contributors: John Calvin, who tied the doctrine to Christ’s threefold office; the radical reformers, who drew the most congregational conclusions from it; and the Second Vatican Council, which gave the common priesthood a strong Catholic restatement without conceding the Protestant conclusion.

Key controversies

Both, not either. The Catholic answer is that the common priesthood is real and that a ministerial priesthood exists alongside it. The Second Vatican Council taught that the two “differ from one another in essence and not only in degree,” each a participation in Christ’s one priesthood (Lumen Gentium §10). On this reading 1 Peter 2:9 proves less than Protestants claim, since Israel was called a kingdom of priests (Exodus 19:6) while also having a Levitical priesthood.

Holy orders as a sacrament. The Council of Trent’s twenty-third session (1563) defined ordination as a sacrament conferring the Holy Spirit and a character, and anathematised the view that all Christians are alike priests. Eastern Orthodox churches hold the same without Trent’s terms (Holy Tradition).

Does it dissolve ordained ministry? The practical objection, raised by Lutherans against enthusiasts within a decade of 1520, is that if everyone is a priest then no one is a pastor. The confessional answer distinguishes the priesthood all share from the public office of preaching and administering the sacraments, to which a person must be rightly called.

The argument about women. If priesthood rests on baptism rather than on sex, the Protestant doctrine makes the exclusion of women from ordained ministry harder to ground in the nature of the office, which is one reason the dispute over women’s ordination runs differently in Protestant churches than in those holding a Male Priesthood.

What remains unresolved

All sides affirm that Christ is the one high priest and that his people share in his priesthood. The unresolved question is whether the ordained ministry is a distinct participation in that priesthood or the same priesthood exercised in a public office, and that question turns on how much the Levitical pattern continues under the new covenant.