Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, clothed in white robes, and from where have they come?” I said to him, “Sir, you know.” And he said to me, “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
“Therefore they are before the throne of God,and serve him day and night in his temple;and he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence.”
Revelation 7:13-15
All four Gospels record Jesus’ saying “whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Mk 8:35; Mt 10:39; Lk 9:24; Jn 12:25). These words provide another reminder of the powerful truth to which baptism points. Like Noah’s flood, the waters that cover us symbolize the loss of our old life. As we rise from the water we publicly find our new life in Christ—a life of mission and ministry as members of Christ’s royal priesthood. The life all baptized believers now live is one of royal and priestly service before the throne of God. We represent Christ to one another and to the world.
Christians in the Middle East understand that representing Christ is costly. In 2014 many Christians living in lands controlled by the Islamic State had their homes marked with the Arabic letter nūn (ن), which stands for “Nazarene.” Believers who chose to represent Christ had their homes, businesses and churches spray-painted with the symbol. But many believers have faced much worse than the loss of home and property. Countless Middle Eastern believers have given their lives for their identification with Christ. In February of 2015 twenty-one Christians had their throats slit and were then decapitated because of their refusal to renounce Christ. Their mass martyrdom was displayed as a publicity video by the Islamic State. More powerful than the twenty-one black-robed executioners is the courage of the twenty-one Christian believers. Not one of the believers ran away or cried out in fear as they were led to martyrdom. Their last words, captured on the video, were Ya Rabbi Yasou’ (“my Lord Jesus”).
Milad Zaky, Abanub Atiya, Maged Shehata and the other eighteen Egyptian and African men martyred on that day understood that representing Christ is a serious calling. If the Western church hopes to faithfully perform the priesthood of all believers in our various contexts, we must take our privilege and responsibility no less seriously than our Middle Eastern brothers and sisters for whom baptism is a serious life and death commitment. Reclaiming the riches of the priesthood of all believers can help us in the Western church take our baptismal calling (or commission) just as seriously. Doing so may well bring suffering, but it will also bring great reward.
This book has argued that Jesus the Christ (Anointed One) is the long-awaited Priest-King, the ruler of the beautiful and glorious city of God. The splendor of the heavenly Jerusalem is beyond description, but the hints we find in books such as Ezekiel and Revelation include images of light, gold, sparkling jewels, incredible trees, gardens, feasting and a joyful multitude of worshipers from every tongue, tribe and nation. This heavenly vision is not simply a futuristic vision—it has already begun. Disciples of Jesus participate in his royal priesthood in the present. This is our great privilege and responsibility. We share in Jesus’ royal priesthood, and we represent him in the world.
Our desire in this book has been to paint a contemporary vision for representing Christ as members of his royal priesthood. Like Paul, our “labor” is to see each believer mature in Christ (Col 1:28-29). What separates the orthodox Christian doctrine of the priesthood of all believers from other versions is its absolute refusal to conceive of itself apart from the royal priesthood of Jesus Christ. A mature doctrine of the royal priesthood is Christocentric-Trinitarian. Through faith and the public proclamation of our baptisms we have been united to Christ, and we now share in his mission and ministry. Throughout the book we have explored this Christocentric vision of the priesthood of all believers through four perspectives. Next we take a few pages to review the ground we have covered.
The Gospels present one Jesus, but he is seen from four different perspectives. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John each emphasizes and directs our attention to different aspects of Jesus’ life and mission; reading them together gives us a fuller and more complete understanding of who Jesus is than reading any of them by themselves. In a similar way, this book has presented the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers from four perspectives: biblical, historical, theological and practical. Each perspective enriches our understanding and equips us to better appropriate the doctrine for our particular church contexts.
In the introduction we saw that the priesthood of all believers is a catholic doctrine. Catholic simply means “universal,” or representative of all members of Christ’s church. Every major branch of the church agrees with this doctrine, even if they may have lost sight of its importance at one time or another during the last two thousand years. The Orthodox church of the East knows the doctrine as “the priesthood of the baptized,” the Roman Catholics as “the priesthood of the faithful” and the Protestant church as “the priesthood of all believers.” All agree that that the doctrine is essential for a church to grow into maturity, into the “fullness of Christ” (Eph 4:13).
Biblical. The first perspective from which we approached the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers was that of biblical theology. Scripture is the authoritative tradition within the Great Tradition of the church.1 All other perspectives must ultimately be judged against this norming norm. In the drama of God, the great protagonist is Jesus Christ, the Priest-King of Israel. It is Christ who has made an end of blood sacrifices through his sacrifice on the cross. Today his family of brothers and sisters share in his royal and priestly office by offering up spiritual sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving (Rom 12:1).
The people of God are a unified cast of performers, not a small caste of professionals with a great throng of spectators. All believers have a priestly ministry to fulfill. This priestly ministry can be fleshed out through study of the responsibilities of Levitical priests in the Old Testament. Members of the royal priesthood are called to discern, to teach, to judge, to read the Scriptures, to bless and to guard—all for the sake of the holiness of God’s people. Within the royal priesthood some are ordained to leadership roles—but those in leadership are not more “priestly” than other members who hold forth the word of life (Phil 2:14-17).2 Rather, each member of Christ’s priestly body, the lowliest part as well as the most exalted, shares in Christ’s royal priesthood. The transforming power of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers is ultimately the way it helps believers grasp the great significance of our baptismal union with Christ.
The democratized royal priesthood of God’s people is a major theme in Scripture. It helps believers understand connections between Adam and Eve in Eden and white-robed martyrs singing in the book of Revelation. It reveals connections between Exodus’s royal priesthood and 1 Peter’s priestly people, between Isaiah’s promise of an end-time community made up of priests and ministers and Paul’s claims about this same community in his many letters. The doctrine helps us to think with the author of Hebrews about the significance of the great royal Psalm 110, and it ultimately helps us understand more clearly the significance of many of the episodes recorded about Jesus in the four Gospels (e.g., the rent veil).
Historical. Our second perspective comes from the lens of history. It reveals that a proper understanding of the priesthood of all believers can release the transforming power of the church into the world in ways that shatter the status quo. Luther labored hard to help his generation understand that maturity in Christ meant embracing the privileges and responsibilities of the priesthood of all believers. There had been a gradual drift away from the doctrine over the previous twelve hundred years. Walls between ordained leaders and monastic orders on one hand and the rest of the priestly people of God on the other had grown to titanic heights. The vast majority of the baptized were not encouraged to know and proclaim God’s Word, permitted to have the Scriptures in their common language or given access to the cup during the Lord’s Supper.
Luther’s great contribution to the church was the recovery of the priestly dignity of the whole people of God. His commitment to translate God’s Word into the vernacular and his equipping of the whole people of God to teach God’s Word to themselves and one another were the results. Luther’s seven priestly functions of the whole people of God, described in his short booklet Concerning the Ministry, were revolutionary and provided a firm foundation for the ecclesial reforms he launched. Luther rediscovered and returned a priestly identity for the whole people of God. All God’s people—the shoemaker and the milkmaid, the mother at home and the merchant in his shop—had a priestly vocation to represent Christ to one another and to seek the Father through the Son in prayer and in the Scriptures. Europe, and eventually the whole world, were powerfully influenced by this doctrine embodied in Luther’s life and teaching. A faithful performance of the doctrine in our own century could release the same power in the church today.
Theological. Our third perspective for looking at the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers was theological. One mark of Christian maturity is a conscious awareness of a believer’s distinct relationship with each member of the Trinity. A truly Christian doctrine of the royal priesthood will attend to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In chapter four we explored the dynamics of the relationship between the members of the royal priesthood and the triune God. We saw that the royal priesthood can respond in especially appropriate ways to each person of the Trinity. It is especially appropriate for the royal priesthood to respond to the Father with worship and prayer; to the Son with every-member ministry within Christ’s temple-body; to the Spirit with courageous witness in the world.
Focusing on one member of the Trinity does not mean the others are ignored. Think again of Milad, Abanub, Maged and the others martyred on a Libyan beach; they died with the words “my Lord Jesus” on their lips. From where did the power for their courageous witness come? Or I think of Byron, a new believer at church who began a Bible study at his high school in South Los Angeles. Byron was repeatedly publicly mocked by one of his teachers for identifying with Christ. Yet empowered by the Holy Spirit, Byron continued to share the story of how Christ had transformed his life. The Egyptian martyrs and Byron all witnessed to Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit, for the glory of the Father. Ultimately, the work of the triune God is undivided and so is the response of the royal priesthood. But failing to attend to the triune nature of the God the royal priesthood worships has resulted in a number of inadequate versions of the doctrine—the most dangerous contemporary North American version being the “atomistic” distortion of the priesthood of all believers.
Practical. The final perspective from which we approached the doctrine was practical. We strongly believe that Scripture is a script to be performed, and the history of a doctrine can teach us how our brothers and sisters have performed Scripture with greater or lesser degrees of faithfulness in different cultural situations in the past.3 Our job in the present is to learn from their performances so that we can one day hear “Well done, my good and faithful minister” from the great Priest-King. We are convinced that a faithful contemporary performance of the priesthood of all believers will involve attention to seven practices. These are the same general practices identified by Luther: baptism, prayer, lectio divina, ministry, church discipline, proclamation and the Lord’s Supper.
A long time ago a man named Noah received a vision for an ark. He decided (intention) to build it in the face of great opposition. God provided the means, and after one hundred years of labor an ark was built. Today’s master builders working in the church will need to follow the same reliable VIM pattern: vision, intention and means. This book has sought to provide a vision from a variety of perspectives of what it might look like for the people of God to allow the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers to shape their identity and guide their practice. If the book stimulates you to deeper discussion and reflective action about how this doctrine might shape your life at home, at church and in the world, then we will deem the book a success.
In college I (Hank) attended a conference where after each plenary speaker finished, a woman would come to the platform and ask, “So what?” Twenty years later I can still hear her question ringing in my ears. So what? So what difference will this book make? So what will happen if our identity and imaginations are captured by a biblical vision of the royal priesthood? What kind of societal transformation would take place if all of the baptized began to take their priestly ministry seriously—in homes, hospitals, factories, investment banks, schools, technology companies, police departments, government, shops and, most importantly, churches? What if the church took its baptismal commissioning to share in the mission and ministry of Christ’s royal priesthood seriously?
There are many possible answers to these questions. Luther’s life illustrates the vast potential for transformation of church and world by a group highly committed to fleshing out the priesthood of baptized believers. We can imagine groups of parents or medical workers, groups of teachers or government professionals, groups of mechanics or social workers all meeting to reflect on what faithful priestly ministry looks like in their context. The priesthood of all believers has implications for the private life of the household, for the corporate life of the church and for believers’ priestly witness in the world. As we saw in chapter four, Lesslie Newbigin thought this last aspect of the doctrine, what he called “the priesthood in the world,” was what was most desperately needed in the West’s post-Christendom context.
But again we ask, So what? So what if the priesthood of all believers is fleshed out in faithful ways at home, at church and in the world? What will be the result? The answer to this question can be found in an ancient scroll written more than 2,500 years ago. As we saw in chapter two, the main theme of the third part of Isaiah (Is 56−66) focuses on the servants of the Lord. This group is described as the “seed” of the Servant who will carry on his mission and ministry in the last days. At the heart of this larger section, what some commentators call the “theological core,” is Isaiah 61 with its description of the servants as priests and ministers of the Lord (Is 61:6).4
This passage not only describes the followers of the suffering Servant as priestly, it also speaks about them wearing “a crown of beauty” (Is 61:3 NIV). The idea of God displaying his own beauty through his people is a central theme in the passage. The word for “beauty” appears some seven times in the immediate context. God will beautify his beautiful temple (Is 60:7). He will make his people beautiful (Is 60:9). He will beautify his sanctuary (Is 60:13). He will do all this so that he can display his beauty (Is 60:21). He will give his people a crown of beauty, a beautiful priestly crown (Is 61:3, 10). So what will happen if the royal priesthood takes Isaiah’s vision of God’s people as a royal priesthood seriously? The answer is simple—the beauty of God will be revealed in the world. The beauty of God’s kingdom will be unveiled.
For the author of Isaiah 61, all this talk of beauty called to mind the image of a bride adorned with jewels (Is 61:10). A faithful performance of the royal priesthood will lead to greater displays of the Lamb’s beauty on the face of his bride. That beauty of Christ will bring glory to the Father as it is displayed in sacrificial suffering and service on behalf of the world. The end has already begun. We now serve day and night before the throne in worship, work and witness. Like one of the first Christian songwriters, we too can sing, “I am a priest of the Lord, and I serve him as a priest.”5