The Royal Priesthood possesses access to the truth of Scripture through the sacraments in a manner analogous to how the Son and the Spirit proceed from the Father. Just as the persons of the Trinity contain the same divine ousia, so likewise the Bible, the Lord’s Supper, and baptism all contain the same gospel message. Similarly, just as there is a Son and a Spirit as self-communications of the Father, so too there is a sacrament of the Spirit (baptism) and a sacrament of the Son (the Eucharist). Likewise, just as the Father is the fount of divinity and therefore the source of the Son and the Spirit from all eternity and as well as the sender of Son and Spirit in their missions within time, so too, the Bible authorizes baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Finally, just as the Son and the Spirit are the exegetes of the Father in eternity and in the history of redemption recorded in Scripture, they also serve as exegetes for the Royal Priesthood gathered around Word and Sacrament.
In baptism, the Spirit gives the Triune Name to believers so that they might call on the Lord in faith and repentance. Such faith and repentance invariably leads the believer to the Son and his work. Because the believer has called upon the Name of the Lord given in baptism for repentance, he now gains access to the Son’s sacrificed body and blood given in the Eucharist for the forgiveness of sins. Hence, faith and an encounter with Christ in the unilateral promise of the gospel through the public ministry of the Church gives the Royal Priesthood of believers an accurate perspective from which to read and understand the Bible. It also therefore provides a means of testing all teachers and ministers in the Church.1
Nevertheless, the gospel-authority of the Church is not reducible to the authority of the Royal Priesthood. The Augustana is very clear that the ministerium of the Church has a real and public authority in the teaching and preaching of the Word of God, and the administration of the sacraments.2 As we have seen, Baptists and other Evangelical Protestants have made a significant mistake in positing that Martin Luther taught that all believers have the right to interpret the Bible according to their own conscience. Rather, what Luther taught is that the Royal Priesthood in community had the right to challenge and hold accountable fellow believers regarding their teaching of the Word of God and the exercise of their public responsibilities.3 It is their right to do this since all false doctrine is an attempt to destroy Christian freedom through the opinio legis and its attending legalism or antinomianism.
Exercising the public authority bestowed upon them by the Royal Priesthood, Ministers have the same gospel-authority to publicly interpret Scripture. Australian Lutheran theologian John Kleinig notes that there are two sorts of authority: authority to take away freedom and authority to grant freedom.4 Ministers of the Word are publicly granted the authority to give the freedom of the gospel through the Word and Sacrament ministry of the Church. Even the exercise of the Office of the Keys, whereby the unrepentant are told that their sins are unforgiven is a matter of maintaining Christian freedom. Individuals who reject the grace of Christ are enslaving themselves to sin and the condemnation of the law (Jn. 8:34). Likewise, those who infect the Christian community with sin should be removed since they threaten to lead the faithful away from freedom to bondage. Likewise, the public teaching and preaching office only maintains its authority to the extent that it teaches in ways that are coherent with the external and internal clarity of Scripture, namely, the gospel and the historical-grammatical meaning of the text.5 If public teachers of the Church do not interpret Scripture in a manner that coheres with this twofold criterion, then the Royal Priesthood is under no obligation to accept such teaching.
Of course, it may be objected (as it was by August Vilmar6) that the gathering of the assembly of believers in its visible form cannot exercise authority because it is a mixture of those with merely profess faith with those who are genuinely faithful. This doctrine of the invisibility of the true believers within the Church is very clearly affirmed by Jesus’s parable of the wheat and the tares (Matt 13:24-30) and the fish and net (Matt. 13:47-52). In light of these passages, St. Augustine described the Church as a “mixed body” (corpus permixtum),7 a notion that passed into the teaching of the Lutheran Confessions on the subject of the gathered assembly of believers.8 The key thing to understand about the invisible and visible Church is that the Church still has a concrete existence and is not, as Philip Melanchthon puts it, a “Platonic state.”9 The holiness of the Church and its members subsists in the means of grace. Therefore, if there is a ministry of the means of grace, the efficacy of the Word and sacraments means that a true community of believers exists there. Moreover, if a community of believers exist, then the assembly of believers is competent to exercise evangelical authority and bestow authority on an occupant of the Office of Ministry.
The confessional Lutheran paradigm’s concept of Church and ministry stands in stark contrast with the conception of authority in other historic Christian ecclesiologies. Most assume the Church is a legal order rather than a communion of freedom, and therefore fall into the unhelpful dialectic of legalism and antinomianism. On one end of the spectrum, the Roman Catholic Church affirms that the Church is infallible under certain limited circumstances.10 The difficulty with this position is that it exempts ecclesiastical authorities from any accountability to Scripture or the Royal Priesthood. Indeed, the basis of the infallibility of the Catholic Magisterium is an invisible charisma that the Royal Priesthood cannot observe or test, thereby militating against Christian freedom and the right and responsibility to test all teachers. Roman Catholicism is a kind of ecclesiological legalism, which in its authoritarianism and lack of accountability to the law becomes a kind of antinomianism. In practice, antinomianism is legalism and legalism is antinomianism. This is so because, ultimately, both antinomianism and legalism find their basis in the deeper reality of enthusiasm. The enthusiast listens to the god within his own heart and, as a result, ceases to be accountable to the external Word of God.
On the antinomian end of the spectrum, one can also criticize the claim of American Evangelicals that everyone has the right to interpret Scripture according to their conscience. To say that everyone has the right to interpret the Bible according to their conscience is to place such interpretation outside the realm of responsibility to the grammatical-historical meaning of the text and gospel-testimony of the sacraments. In fact, believers only gain access to the proper interpretation of the text and the sacraments through the activities of the office of ministry and assembly of believers. Whereas Catholicism is an authoritarian enthusiasm, American Evangelicalism encourages an egalitarian—or anarchic—enthusiasm, wherein every believer becomes his own unaccountable Pope.
- See similar argument in: Jack Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, 191-192. ↩︎
- CA XXVIII; CT, 83-95. ↩︎
- To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520); LW 44:136. ↩︎
- John Kleinig, God’s Word, 41. ↩︎
- The Bondage of the Will (1525); LW 33:24-36. ↩︎
- August Vilmar, Theologie der Tatsachen wider die Theologie der Rhetork: Bekenntnis und Abwehr (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984), 91. ↩︎
- Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 3.32.45; NPNFa, 2:569. ↩︎
- Ap. VII-VIII.19-20; CT, 232. ↩︎
- Ap. VII-VIII.20; CT, 232. ↩︎
- See: Richard F. Costigan, The Consensus of the Church and Papal Infallibility: A Study in the Background of Vatican I (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005); Hans Küng, Infallible? An Inquiry (New York: Doubleday, 1993); Brian Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150-1350: A Study on the Concepts of Infallibility, Sovereignty and Tradition in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2022). ↩︎
From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).
Images from “FAQs about Worship & Congregational Life,” Worship and Congregational Life, The Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, accessed May 30, 2024, https://www.lcms.org/about/beliefs/faqs/worship-and-congregational-life; and Edward Riojas, Office of the Keys artwork, from “About the Office of the Keys,” Concordia and Koinonia of Concordia Lutheran Church, March 24, 2017, accessed May 30, 2024, https://concordiaandkoinonia.wordpress.com/2017/03/24/about-the-office-of-the-keys/.