The Priesthood of All Believers

To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, published in August 1520, is a political tract as much as a theological one, addressed to the lay rulers of the empire and arguing that they were entitled to reform a church that would not reform itself. Luther framed the obstacle as three walls. The first was the claim that the spiritual estate, meaning pope, bishops, priests and monks, stands above the temporal estate of everyone else and is not subject to it. The second was that only the pope may interpret scripture. The third was that only the pope may summon a council. He attacked the first as the one holding up the other two, and his instrument was baptism.

All Christians are of the spiritual estate by baptism and the gospel, differing only in the work they are called to do, so a cobbler, a smith or a farmer is as much a consecrated priest as any bishop; what a priest has that a layman does not is an office in the congregation, held on the congregation's behalf. Luther drew the language from 1 Peter 2, where the whole people is called a royal priesthood, and from Revelation 1 and 5, where the redeemed are made priests to God. The consequence he pressed hardest was practical rather than metaphysical: if the difference is one of office and not of spiritual kind, then a council can be called by whoever is able to call one, and scripture belongs to whoever can read it.

The doctrine is regularly read as an argument against clergy, and none of the churches that hold it read it that way. Article XIV of the Augsburg Confession, ten articles after the one on justification, states that nobody should teach publicly or administer the sacraments in the church without a regular call, and the Reformed confessions are at least as insistent on examination, call and ordination. The logic is consistent: if the difference between minister and member is one of office rather than of spiritual estate, then the office still has to be conferred by the church rather than assumed, and a congregation is no more entitled to be preached at by anyone who fancies it than a city is to be judged by a self-appointed magistrate. Where the doctrine did real work was in what it removed. It removed the sacrificing priest, since a completed sacrifice needs no repetition; it removed obligatory auricular confession to a priest as the ordinary channel of absolution; and it removed the wall between a religious life and an ordinary vocation, which is why the Reformers wrote so much about the holiness of household and trade.

The radical wing of the Reformation pushed further than the magisterial one, and the Quakers eventually dispensed with ordained ministry altogether. Roman Catholic teaching, for its part, affirms a common priesthood of the faithful conferred in baptism while holding it different in kind, and not only in degree, from the ministerial priesthood conferred in orders, which is where the argument still sits.