The justification of believers within the Church through the means of grace effects a happy exchange between Christ and believers. Christ possesses all things and shares them with believers through the union brought about by forensic justification and faith. This means that believers share in Christ’s offices of king, priest, and prophet (Dn. 7:27, Rom. 8:17, 8:32, Eph. 2:6, 1 Pt. 2:9, Rev. 1:6, 5:10). Being conformed to Christ’s image begins the restoration of the image of God in humans. This restored image enables believers to assume the protological roles of king, priest, and prophet that find their ultimate fulfillment in the eschaton.
As we have previously seen, Luther develops this point strongly in Freedom of a Christian (1520). As kings, believers are no longer subject to the law coram Deo because the law has been fulfilled in them through reception of justification and sanctification in Christ. Coram mundo, believers become priests because possessing all things in Christ. As priests, they sacrifice themselves for one another through their individual vocations.1 Scripture also teaches that believers are now Spirit-anointed prophets empowered to proclaim the Word of God to all nations (Acts 2:16-21). As prophet, believers also test all teachers by the standard of harmony with the biblical witness centered in Christ (1 Thess. 5:21, 1 Cor. 2:15, 1 Jn. 4:1-6).
The Priesthood of All Believers
In his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520), Luther develops his insight about Christian freedom into a new ecclesiology. The concept of the “Priesthood of All Believers,” or according to its more proper New Testament designation the “Royal Priesthood” (1 Pt. 2:9, Rev. 1:6),2 is central to Luther’s ecclesiology. Unfortunately, Luther’s conception of the Royal Priesthood has been profoundly misunderstood throughout Christian history.
Misunderstanding of the Royal Priesthood
In particular, Baptist theologians confuse Luther’s concept of the Royal Priesthood with the Baptist theological concept of the believer’s liberty of conscience.3 In this doctrine, all believers have the right to approach God without any form of mediation according to their own conscience. This finds expression in the belief that all believers have the right to interpret Scripture according to their own conscience.
Historically, Baptists have based their idea the Church as a free association as individual congregations on the doctrine of liberty of conscience. State Churches are not simply less preferable (something with which most Christians in North America would agree), but are inherently wrong.4 This is because Baptists believe the Church is the place where believers who have read Scripture according to their consciences, and agree on its teachings, come together and covenant with one another to submit to mutual discipline. Water baptism is the public declaration of this willingness to submit to mutual discipline.5
Luther’s View of Freedom
To say the least, this is not what Luther meant by the Royal Priesthood of Believers.6 Luther’s concept of the Royal Priesthood logically proceeds from his conception of Christian Freedom as developed in Freedom of a Christian. Here, freedom has nothing to do with personal autonomy, or the right to individual conscience. Tragically, we see this misunderstanding as early as the invocation of the treatise as a justification for the Peasants’ War.7
Rather, as we have already seen, Luther’s conception of freedom exists on two horizons. Coram Deo, Christian freedom is the freedom from the law. When the believer relates to God through Christ in the power of the Spirit, no authority can intervene and bind the conscience to the condemnation of the law, much less human rules about fasting, pilgrimages, or the like.8 Coram mundo, the freedom of a Christian is freedom to act as a self-sacrificial priest to one’s neighbor without the need for self-justification.9
The ability of the Royal Priesthood to exercise gospel-authority received by faith in the Church is an outworking of this freedom.10 Luther emphasizes in his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, that the lesser magistrates of the Holy Roman Empire have the right and responsibility to act as “emergency bishops” (Notbischof). As emergency bishops, they could use their gospel-authority to test the teaching of the Roman Pontiff and remove bad clergy and reform doctrine if the Roman Church’s teaching and practice do not agree with the gospel.11
Therefore, Luther’s point is that through the power of the Holy Spirit, the Royal Priesthood possesses the freedom of the children of God. This means that not only are they not subject to the law coram Deo, but but also that coram Mundo they can free others from the condemnation of the law through the Office of the Keys’ binding and loosing of sins. Christ has given them rest (Matt. 11:28) and they can give others rest through the forgiveness of sins. Freedom from all law coram Deo also means freedom from the enslavement to false doctrines, or false laws, which bind the conscience.
The Royal Priesthood Interprets in the Church through Word and Sacrament
All false doctrine boils down to the replacement of the gospel with the law. All true doctrine stands in coherence with the “inner-clarity” (Luther) of Scripture, we find in the freeing gospel of grace in Christ (2 Cor. 2:15-17). All false doctrine therefore militates against the gospel in the form of either antinomianism or legalism. Christian freedom means the ability to test all teachers within the Church, not on the basis of some supposed inner-autonomous conscience, but on the very public gospel-proclamation of the Church as well as the same gospel-word spoken through the sacraments.
Such authority by the people of God to test teaching is never an individualist one, but exercised in community with the Church-Catholic. As St. Peter reminds us: “. . . no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation” (1 Pt. 1:20, KJV). St. John affirms that the Spirit, not men, speaks the word of forgiveness eternal life in Christ (Jn. 5:11-2) through the apostolic kerygma (Jn. 1:1-3).
This being said, the Holy Spirit’s word of testimony is not spoken in isolation, Rather, the Holy Spirit loudly proclaims His message in unison with the water (baptism) and the blood (the Eucharist): “For there are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three agree” (5:7-8). Hence, what the Holy Spirit says in the Word spoken through the prophets and apostles must agree with what He says in the Sacraments and vice versa.
The Word of the gospel present in Baptism and the Lord’s Supper serve as a loadstar to guide believers into the inner clarity of Scripture.12 When true believers and ministers of the Word interpret Scripture within the Church, they must interpret in harmony with the unconditional promise of grace that the Spirit gives through the visible words of the Sacraments. Interpretations of Sacred Scripture that are out of joint with what the Spirit says through the “water and blood” (i.e., Baptism and the Lord’s Supper) cannot be accurate interpretations.
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 the Son and Spirit are self-communications of the Father, so too the sacrament of the Spirit (Baptism) and the sacrament of the Son (the Eucharist) proceed from the Word of God. The Father is the fount of divinity and, therefore, the source of the Son and the Spirit from all eternity. He also sends the Son and Spirit on their missions within time. So too, the Bible authorizes Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Finally, the Son and the Spirit serve as the Father’s exegetes in eternity and in the history of redemption recorded in Scripture. So too are they exegetes to the Royal Priesthood gathered around Word and Sacrament.
In Baptism, the Spirit gives the Triune Name to believers so 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, the Royal Priesthood of believers receives an accurate understanding of the Bible through the gift of faith and an encounter with Christ in the unilateral promise of the gospel through the public ministry of the Church. This ability to interpret the Bible through faith in Christ and unity with the Church Catholic allows the Royal Priesthood to test all teachers and ministers in the Church.13 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 teaching and preaching of the Word of God and the right administration of the sacraments.14
As we have seen, Baptists and other Evangelical Protestants have made a significant mistake in positing that Luther taught 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 with the Church, has the right to hold fellow believers accountable for their teaching and the exercise of their public responsibilities.15 It is our right and duty to challenge of teaching out of alignment with Word and Sacrament since all false doctrine is ultimately an attempt to destroy Christian freedom through the opinio legis and its attending legalism or antinomianism.
- Freedom of a Christian (1520); LW 31:344. ↩︎
- Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520); LW 44:126-129. ↩︎
- W. David Buschart, Exploring Protestant Traditions: An Invitation to Theological Hospitality (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 162. ↩︎
- David Allen, “Autonomy of the Local Church: A Crucial Baptist Distinctive,” in Upon This Rock: A Baptist Understanding of the Church, eds. Jason Duesing, Thomas White, and Malcolm Yarnell (Nashville: B & H Publishing, 2010), 57-83. ↩︎
- Emir Canter, “Covenant or Confusion? ‘Association by Covenant in the Faith and Fellowship of the Gospel,” in Upon This Rock: A Baptist Understanding of the Church, 84-101. Also see: Mark Dever, “Baptism in the Context of the Local Church,” in Believer’s Baptism: Sign of the New Covenant in Christ, eds. E. Ray Clendenen, Shawn Wright, Thomas R. Schreiner (Nashville: B & H Publishing, 2014), 329-352. ↩︎
- See: Herman Preus, The Communion of Saints: A Study of the Origin and Development of Luther’s Doctrine of the Church (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1948). ↩︎
- Hubert Kirchner, Luther and the Peasant’s War (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972). ↩︎
- Freedom of a Christian (1520); LW 31:344-355. ↩︎
- Freedom of a Christian (1520); LW 31:355-366. ↩︎
- Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520); LW 44:127-129. ↩︎
- Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520); LW 44:126-137. ↩︎
- The Bondage of the Will (1525); LW 33:26. ↩︎
- See similar argument in: Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, 191-192. ↩︎
- CA XXVIII; CT, 83-95. ↩︎
- To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520); LW 44:136. ↩︎
From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).
Cover image from: Clayton Dowd, “The Priesthood of All Believers,” Jesup Church of God, accessed August 5, 2024, https://jesupcog.com/media/series/66t8t4w/the-priesthood-of-all-believers; other images from: