The Priesthood of All Believers

A Royal Priesthood Recovered

he medieval church divided Christendom into two estates. Popes, bishops, priests, and monks belonged to the spiritual estate; princes, merchants, farmers, and craftsmen belonged to the temporal. The first stood nearer to God and mediated His grace to the second. The plowman worked, the priest prayed, and the line between them was drawn not merely in duties but in standing before God.

The Reformers erased that line. They did not abolish the pastoral office, and they did not make every Christian a preacher. But they insisted from Scripture that every believer stands before God on the same ground, through the same Mediator, with the same access, and that the humblest Christian at the humblest work is as truly consecrated to God as any man at an altar.

The Wall Luther Broke

In the summer of 1520 Martin Luther addressed a treatise in German, not to theologians, but To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. He argued that Rome had fortified itself behind three walls: the claim that spiritual power stands above temporal, the claim that only the pope may interpret Scripture, and the claim that only the pope may summon a council. The first wall rested on the doctrine of the two estates, and Luther struck at its foundation.

All Christians are truly of the Spiritual Estate, and there is no difference among them, save of office alone. This is because we have one baptism, one gospel, one faith, and are all Christians alike; for baptism, gospel and faith, these alone make Spiritual and Christian people.¹ Martin Luther

Tonsure, anointing, and vestments, he said, may make a man a hypocrite, but never a Christian. What makes a Christian is what God gives in the gospel, and what God gives He gives alike to all who believe. Thus, in Luther’s words, we are all consecrated as priests. The difference between a minister and a plowman is one of office and function, and not of estate.²

Then came the sentence that would reshape the Christian understanding of ordinary work:

A cobbler, a smith, a peasant, every man has the office and function of his calling, and yet all alike are consecrated priests and bishops, and every man in his office must be useful and beneficial to the rest, that so many kinds of work may all be united into one community: just as the members of the body all serve one another.³ Martin Luther

A Royal Priesthood

Luther did not invent the doctrine; he read it. Peter writes to scattered and ordinary Christians that they are being built up “as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ,” and that they are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession” (1 Peter 2:5, 9). John praises the One who loved us and freed us from our sins by His blood, “and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father” (Revelation 1:5–6; compare 5:10).

The New Testament is strikingly consistent here. It uses the Greek word for priest, hiereus, of the priests of Israel, of Christ Himself, and of the whole people of God. It never uses it of a minister in the church. Church officers are elders, overseers, and servants, never sacrificing priests. When the veil of the temple was torn from top to bottom (Matthew 27:51), the holy place was opened, not to a new class of mediators, but to every sinner who comes through the blood of Jesus (Hebrews 10:19–22).

Christ the One High Priest

Everything here depends on Christ. The priesthood of believers is not a priesthood alongside His, still less a rival to it. It is a share in His. There is one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5). He offered Himself once for all (Hebrews 7:27; 10:10–14), and He ever lives to make intercession for those who draw near to God through Him (Hebrews 7:25). Because we have such a great high priest, we come boldly to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:14–16).

John Calvin made the point with care. Christ bears the office of priest not only to reconcile us to the Father, but to bring us into His own priestly fellowship:

For we though in ourselves polluted, in him being priests, offer ourselves and our all to God, and freely enter the heavenly sanctuary, so that the sacrifices of prayer and praise which we present are grateful and of sweet odour before him.⁴ John Calvin

The sacrifices of this priesthood are not offerings for sin. That sacrifice is finished. They are sacrifices of thanksgiving: our bodies presented as living sacrifices (Romans 12:1), the praise of our lips (Hebrews 13:15), and the doing of good and sharing with others, “for such sacrifices are pleasing to God” (Hebrews 13:16).

Tyndale and the Plowboy

In England the doctrine traveled in the pages of Tyndale’s New Testament. When the octavo of 1526 reached English readers, they found Peter telling them, in their own tongue, that they were “an holy presthode” and “a royall presthod.”⁵ They also found that the church’s officers were called elders, not priests, a choice that enraged the bishops precisely because they understood what it meant. (See Tyndale’s New Testament.)

Tyndale’s plowboy was more than a reader. He was a priest. Having received mercy in Christ, he was bound to show it, and Tyndale traced that obligation straight back to the gospel. In The Parable of the Wicked Mammon he wrote that the Christian is to do his duty to his neighbor, “to be unto him as God is to us,” and that “God hath given one man riches, to help another at need.” The root of it all is what the believer has himself received:

For as a man feeleth God in himself, so is he to his neighbour.⁶ William Tyndale

That is the priesthood of all believers in a single line. The priest receives from God and turns to give to others. No one is a priest for himself alone.

What the Doctrine Does Not Mean

Few Reformation doctrines have been more often misread, and the misreadings are not harmless. Four cautions are worth keeping.

It does not abolish the ministry. Luther himself, in the very passage that declares all Christians consecrated priests, added at once that “it does not beseem everyone to exercise these offices.”⁷ Every Christian holds the priesthood; not every Christian holds the pulpit. The Augsburg Confession of 1530 put it plainly: no one should publicly teach in the church or administer the sacraments unless he be regularly called.⁸ The Reformers recovered the dignity of the pew without diminishing the office of the pastor; if anything, they raised that office by restoring it to the ministry of the Word.

It is not individualism. The doctrine is often summarized as “every man his own priest.” The Reformers would hardly have recognized that slogan. In Luther’s account each believer’s office exists to be useful and beneficial to the rest, as members of one body serving one another. In Tyndale’s, the believer is to his neighbor what God has been to him. The priesthood belongs to all believers together, and its direction is outward: toward God in worship, and toward others in intercession, instruction, and love.

It is not a license for private interpretation against the church. Every Christian may read Scripture and is accountable to it, and Luther’s second wall fell with the first. But the same Reformers who put the Bible into the hands of the plowboy also labored to give him faithful preachers, catechisms, and confessions. The priesthood of believers stands under sola Scriptura, not above it.

Its first application was political, and the consequences were mixed. Luther’s 1520 appeal was addressed to princes. Having argued that Christian rulers belong to the spiritual estate, he called on them to take up the work of reform that the clergy had neglected. That appeal served the Reformation well in the short term, but it also helped prepare for territorial churches in which civil rulers held considerable power over church affairs. The doctrine is sound; the arrangement that grew up around its first use is open to question. (See Church and State.)

A note on terms. The phrase “priesthood of all believers” is a convenient later summary rather than Luther’s own heading in this treatise; his language is that all Christians are of the spiritual estate and are consecrated priests. Luther also grounds that consecration in baptism, gospel, and faith together. Reformed and Baptist readers will place the emphasis differently on baptism, but all three traditions agree that the priesthood belongs to those united to Christ by faith.

Why It Still Matters

Five centuries later, the two estates have quietly returned in new forms. Some assume that ministry is what professionals do and that the rest of the church watches. Others assume that serious devotion belongs to the few and that ordinary work is spiritually neutral. Both errors deny what the Reformers recovered.

The mother changing a child, the farmer in his field, the clerk at his desk, and the believer praying for a friend are not doing second-class work while the real business of God happens elsewhere. If they are in Christ, they are priests, offering themselves to God through Him and serving their neighbors in His name. And the pastor in the pulpit is not a mediator between them and God, but a servant of priests, equipping the saints for the work of ministry (Ephesians 4:11–12).

All of it rests on the One who needs no successor. Christ is our great High Priest. Because He has entered the holy place by His own blood, every believer may draw near. That is the access the medieval church withheld, and the Reformation, by the Word, gave back.

Theological Recoveries Next: Vocation

Sources

Martin Luther, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Respecting the Reformation of the Christian Estate (1520), in First Principles of the Reformation, ed. Henry Wace and C. A. Buchheim (London: John Murray, 1883). Text available at Christian Classics Ethereal Library. ↩
Luther, To the Christian Nobility, in Wace and Buchheim, First Principles, on the first wall. Luther’s phrase is that “the only real difference is one of office and function, and not of estate.” ↩
Luther, To the Christian Nobility, in Wace and Buchheim, First Principles. ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2.15.6, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845). The parenthetical reference to Revelation 1:6 in Beveridge’s text has been omitted here. ↩
William Tyndale, The New Testament (Worms, 1526), 1 Peter 2:5, 9, in original spelling. ↩
William Tyndale, The Parable of the Wicked Mammon (1528), in Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1848). All three quotations in this section are from this treatise. ↩
Luther, To the Christian Nobility, in Wace and Buchheim, First Principles. The full sentence reads: “For whatever issues from baptism, may boast that it has been consecrated priest, bishop, and Pope, although it does not beseem everyone to exercise these offices.” ↩
Augsburg Confession (1530), art. XIV, “Of Ecclesiastical Order,” in Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Ev. Lutheran Church, trans. F. Bente and W. H. T. Dau (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921). ↩