The Priesthood of All Believers: A Misread Doctrine?

Nothing Stands Between Me and My God

Imagine a young Christian who’s been a believer for three years. She loves the Lord, reads her Bible, and prays regularly. She shares Bible verses and devotional contents on social media. For two years she went to a mega church in the city. One time, however, she just stopped going to church. She got busy at work and her weekends have become her only time for rest. This has been happening for over a year now. She never stopped reading her Bible, praying to God, and sharing Bible verses on social media. In short, she never stopped loving the Lord—or so she thinks.

We’ve heard of this story time and time again. And if you happen to have a conversation with such a person, they would humbly say they have never forgotten the Lord, “Pero hindi naman ako nakalimot sa Diyos.” If you dig deep into the reason why this experience is so prevalent you would discover a common thread: I have a personal relationship with Christ. No priest, no pastor, no pope, no any other human stands before me and my God. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that statement. But that is incomplete. And many have taken that statement as the whole truth which has harmed the church for longer than most of us realize.

The Claim to the Priesthood of All Believers

It is not unknown among Baptists that one of the key distinctives of its tradition is the priesthood of all believers. However, even if not explicitly identified as the priesthood of all believers, most Protestants and evangelicals embrace the idea. But Baptists would definitely say they hold to it more tightly than any other tradition. Baptists inherited this doctrine from the 16th century Reformation, and even beyond it, from the New Testament itself.

However, there’s a difference between inheriting a doctrine and understanding it. When the American Protestant missionaries came to the Philippines at the beginning of the 20th century, the kind of Protestantism we received was already different from that of the Reformation of the 16th century. The same thing may be said of the priesthood of all believers. It was already reinterpreted in some ways, or at least, reshaped. The priesthood of all believers that we inherited as Filipinos, therefore, is not in the same shape as it was once passed down from the Reformation. This reinterpretation caused multiple complexities to contemporary thought and practice including the way Scripture passages on this doctrine are interpreted.

Tracing the Source

To better understand how this doctrine — also called the universal priesthood or common priesthood — was reshaped, we must look past the Baptist riverbank and trace the water source further in history. As we mentioned earlier, this doctrine was passed down to Baptists from the Reformation. However, it did not begin with Martin Luther (1483–1546). The Church Fathers taught the priesthood of all believers and connected it to various doctrines.¹ The medieval ages obscured this doctrine and emphasized the role of the clergy too heavily. What Luther did, along with others, was to recover the common priesthood of believers for the church. He once wrote, “For whoever comes out of the water of baptism can boast that he is already a consecrated priest, bishop and pope.”² Another Reformer, John Calvin, said in his commentary on 1 Peter 2:5, “It is a singular honor, that God should not only consecrate us as a temple to Himself, in which He dwells and is worshipped, but that He should also make us priests.”³

The English Baptists of the 1600s and 1700s gladly embraced it to solidify their conviction that all members of the New Covenant are believers and are dignified as priests. It is assumed in the whole system of Baptist theology. Nevertheless, the Protestant church went through a challenging period.

Approximately between 1700s and 1800s, Europe went through the Enlightenment phase, the elevation of human reason. This elevation became the soil for pointing man to himself, his feelings and desires, as the fulfillment of humanity. In the same period, there came the Great Awakening that emphasized the individual crisis conversion, the visible experience of repentance. Britain and the American colonies witnessed mass conversions through itinerant preachings. Revivalism became a phenomenon both praised and criticized by many. This prepared the fertile ground for people to emphasize the emotional and personal dimensions of faith.

While all this was happening, the rising nation in the new world, America, championed the democratic rights of every individual. This did not arise from a vacuum but the continuing influence of the European Enlightenment—the philosophy that every individual has an inalienable right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. This, too, shaped the impulse of the Christian mind. By the early 20th century, the church in Europe and America went through key cultural and political evolution that formed the minds of the elite, the poor, and everything in between. Although the priesthood of all believers was preserved in the church, the developments prior to the 20th century molded the Christians that inherited the doctrine.

Common Deviations

Having traced this broad arc, we can now identify deviations from the classical doctrine of universal priesthood.

1. Soul Competency

The early Southern Baptists of America emphasized the conviction that each individual soul is created to be competent to deal with God directly. E. Y. Mullins (1860–1928) argued in his book, The Axioms of Religion, that every man has the inalienable right to direct access to God. No man or institution, or even sacrament, is necessary to get to God. It says that man is competent by himself, not in the sense of self-sufficiency, but in the sense of competency under God, to commune with the Creator without the mediation of other men or institutions. The only medium to access God, of course, is Christ Himself. Therefore, as long as an individual has faith in Christ, that individual is a priest to himself. This deviation is subtle because it does not say that man is competent to commune with God without Christ, but finds the root of man’s priesthood in his natural capacity. Because man is such a creature, he has such rights. And because he has such rights, he is capable of being a priest to himself.

To a degree, this is just a formulation of classic Baptist conviction on religious liberty. The direction is generally sound as it affirms, with strong emphasis, the non-intermediary nature of evangelical faith versus the Roman Catholic system. Unfortunately, both the language of democratic idealism that Mullins used and his decision to make soul competency as the basis of important Baptist principles—religious liberty, regenerate membership, separation of church and state, and the priesthood of all believers—invited not a few problems into the Baptist thought.

Baptist scholar Stephen R. Holmes, who speaks of Mullins generally positively, admits that the “Baptist vision can easily be mistaken for an importation of democracy into church life,” yet:

The danger in that alignment is that the modern person, who assumes democracy as a given fact, would apply his understanding of political democratic principles into the theology of the church. Although there is a level of democracy in the local church, especially in Baptist churches, one should not define it according to the principles of this world.

Moreover, the term soul competency almost naturally generates an idea that man, in his personal dealings with God, is not totally disabled by human depravity. In his attempt to argue against human mediators imposed by religions such as Roman Catholicism, Mullins unintentionally invited a new problem, elevation of man’s competence. Holmes states it more forcefully:

And this is what the 16th century Reformers argued against the Pope and his theologians. “Man, by his fall into a state of sin, has wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation.”⁶

I want to point out, however, that Mullins is not an enemy here. But by making the doctrine of universal priesthood a corollary or immediate consequence of soul competency, he propelled the next generations to equate the doctrine with one’s natural right.

2. Private Interpretation

Because the Christian is by himself competent to commune with God through Christ without the help of other men or institutions, he has, therefore, a right to read the Scriptures not simply for himself but by himself. The right to private interpretation is also a consequence of soul competency, according to Mullins.

People who hold to this deviation would consider the “one’s right to private interpretation” and “the priesthood of all believers” synonymous or at least intimately connected. This is unfair, not simply to the authors of the ancient creeds and confessions, but to the Spirit Himself who gifted the church with able men to help the church properly read the inspired Scripture.

3. Minimizing Ordained Ministry

If everyone is a priest, then why is ordained ministry necessary? This is a legitimate question that is often answered with a bias. Modern day evangelicalism has grown a strong dislike of authority. In fact, this phenomenon is not unique to Christians of our day. Aversion to authority is just a cultural fact in this day and age.

Evangelicals today, whether knowingly or unknowingly, bring this psychology to the New Testament farther than Mullins ever imagined. They view the pastor as someone who does not have any sense of authority over the spiritual lives of others. It emphasizes that Christ is the only Head of the church and no other authority may be exercised over any individual. To some extent this is true since all legitimate authorities are derived from Christ. And this is precisely what makes it appealing to modern Christians. It allows the current psychology, that one’s self and comforts and ideals are the priority before others, to prosper in the life of believers.

4. Individual Spirituality Outside the Church

If you put all three deviations we’ve talked about together, you would end up with the most extreme conclusion. If you have a natural right to be a priest to yourself, a privilege to interpret God’s word without the church of the past, a Christian life without the authority of ordained ministers over your life, then what is stopping you from cultivating spirituality outside an organized church? This is the most dangerous to the Christian faith because this often leads to apostasy at worst, or false assurance at best.

It would be unfair to blame this all on a single theologian or even a single century. Instead, we must look at these deviations as a symptom of a theological landscape that has been shaped by centuries of cultural and theological developments.

While it is not wrong to stress the individual’s personal relationship with God against institutional coercion, we cannot ground it on the foundation of Enlightenment individualism and use the language of democratic idealism.

The Common Denominator

It should be obvious by now what the common denominator is in these four deviations or distortions: the primacy of the human individual. The priesthood of all believers that was recovered by the Reformers was centered not on anthropology, the reality of man, but on Christology, the person and work of Christ.

Once we place the foundation of the priesthood of all believers on the individual, it becomes the priesthood of one believer. It robs the individual priest of their relationship and dependency on other priests who are all together participating in the unique priesthood of Christ.

The priesthood of one believer is a reality. But it is not the primary one. The priesthood of Christ is the primary reality, and the collective priesthood of all believers is only a secondary one. As John Gill (1697–1771), the Baptist expositor and systematician, pointed out:

The individual believer participates in the common, universal priesthood of all God’s people that is rooted in Christ.

Go Back to the Real Source

In the final analysis, we see that the problem with these distortions is the grounding. All of them are trying to head in a direction that has some truth in it: freedom from any spiritual abuse and coercion, privilege to access the word of God, personal faith and salvation, and the liberty of one’s conscience. The Reformers fought for these things as well. They just grounded them on something else.

The priesthood of all believers, properly understood, is primarily not a claim about what believers are entitled to. It is a claim about who Christ is and what He has accomplished. And only when we frame it that way can we provide a meaningful answer to the question that is fundamental to our human existence.

It is not, therefore, wrong to talk about anthropology when addressing the priesthood of all believers. What’s wrong is to start there and not with Christ and His work. To explore what this question is, we must go back to the real source. Not to the Reformers, or the Church Fathers, but to the very beginning: the writings of Moses.

The question is captured by the Psalmist in this way:

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