Transcription
Foreign [Music] priesthood of all believers, which is, um, such an important term, especially in Protestant theology and experience, and yet one that is open, as you’ve pointed out in some of your writing, to some misunderstanding. Also, one of the things that struck me as I’ve read you again, uh, here in the last bit, in some of your recent work, is how you return to that image of royal priesthood. There’s even a difference in feel between saying “priesthood of all believers” and “royal priesthood.” Take us into, um, the beauty and power of this, and maybe some of the ways this gets misunderstood or misconstrued.
Yes. I mean, the idea of the priesthood of all believers would be anchored for many people in the line in First Peter 2, verse 9: “You are a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, etc.” But people don’t always realize that that is a direct reference back to Exodus chapter 19, verse 6, and also to Isaiah 61:6, where God says to all Israel, on bringing them out of Egypt, “You are to be for me, um, the royal priesthood, a holy nation.” And that means that all God’s people are, in that sense, priests. But the shock for the Protestant is that that didn’t mean that then they didn’t have people who were priests—the Aaronic priesthood and the Levites, who—the Aaronic priesthood were priests to the nation of priests. And that that kind of blows our mind, um, because for me that means that actually, yes, the priesthood of all believers is really important as a reformational slogan, to say that every Christian, every man, woman, and child who comes to God can come to God direct in prayer. You don’t have to go through some sort of hierarchical system, which was how the Middle Ages had constructed it, and how they—they suddenly—how they were perceived, um, and and many, many ordinary worshipers were told, “You know, you come to the priest, and you make confession that he speaks on God’s behalf and forgives you,” whatever. And it goes all the way through to a system where the priest knows what the Bible says, so the priest will tell you, and you mustn’t read it for yourself. And I’ve known people in that tradition who’ve—who’ve said, “We were—we were not supposed to read the Bible; the priest would tell us what it meant.” And I think the idea of the priesthood of all believers is reacting against that, but it reacts too far if it gets to the point of saying, “Therefore, there should be no such thing as ministerial priesthood within the church.” And in my tradition, I’m ordained as a priest, um, and I don’t think that means that I am actually doing animal sacrifices. You know, there’s been a huge transition, obviously, from the Old Testament dispensation to the New Testament—that’s a whole other—whole other area. And at the Reformation, that too was part of the problem, because people were seeing the Eucharist or the Mass as specifically a sacrifice, in which—though this gets very muddled—in which Jesus was somehow being sacrificed again, and different people said that in different ways, but the priest had to do that because that’s what priests do—they offer sacrifice. And the reformers said, “Absolutely not; it’s not that sort of a thing.” I think they were right to say it’s not that sort of a thing; I’m not sure that what they put in its place actually makes biblical sense. We’ll perhaps come back to sacraments in a minute.
Um, so I want to say, yes, insofar as this means every single Christian has instant right of access to God the Father through Jesus in the power of the Spirit—that’s Romans 5:1—“justified by faith, we have access to God the Father through Jesus.” And then Paul goes on to talk about the Spirit. Insofar as that slogan has been used as a way of saying, “Therefore, we don’t need ministers in church who have a special responsibility and role to sum up the praises of the congregation and also to minister to the congregation in teaching and leading,” then I think that’s gone too far. I think it’s quite clear in the New Testament that we do have such roles, and certainly in my own experience, that’s—that’s how it’s worked out. Um, so but I—I would again want to locate and anchor all this within the idea of the image, and as you’ve seen in my work, um, it seems to me from the image of God in Genesis 1, echoed in Psalm 8, through to the royal priesthood in Exodus, First Peter, and particularly in the Book of Revelation, it’s very interesting that the—the Lamb, who is also the Lamb, has been slaughtered to ransom people for God, not so that they can sit around and on the cloud and play harps all the time, but so that they can be the royal priesthood. This is the vocation of human beings. And then we—we have people who, in the present time, are called to specific vocations of looking after congregations—a sort of a heightened version of the image doctrine, with all the horrible responsibility that goes with that—to enable the nation of royal priests to be—to be who they’re meant to be. That—that’s really what it’s all about; it’s enabling the people to be who they’re called to be in Christ.
Yeah. Thank you. I—I’m so grateful for the—the powerful ways that you have drawn temple imagery, the language of the priesthood in, as you write about the person of Jesus, the helping us hear that in the writings of Paul. One of the things I notice as students encounter this language is that, um, there’s a—it seems to me a challenge we have with, um, really feeling deep down in our gut that holiness is beautiful, is good, and that, um, that some of the resistance, uh, whether it’s explicit or sort of implicit, is that—is that our—our working understanding of holiness ends up being something that’s not all that happy or joyful or good. Or say a little bit about—about the connection of holiness with that vision, and—and, uh, you know, how we can work at that. You remind me of something that C.S. Lewis said about Charles Williams. When Charles Williams was here in Oxford, uh, during the war, he was a literary critic, but he was a—a very devout and—well, a Christian. And when he lectured on medieval or Renaissance literature and was describing the life of holiness which these great poets and so on had had in mind, Lewis said he achieved this extraordinary thing of making holiness deeply attractive. And Lewis realized that for most of the students, holiness was not attractive at all; it was very negative and very—“No, you can’t even know; you mustn’t; no, you shouldn’t.” Um, but actually, if you think about the construction of the Tabernacle in the Old Testament—I was in dialogue a week ago with a wonderful artist, Roger Wagner, who lives here in Oxford and has painted some amazing things—and we’re talking about the beauty of holiness and so on, and he went back to Bezaleel, the son of Uri, in Exodus, who is the one charged with making the Tabernacle. And when you think of the people of Israel in the wilderness, surrounded by desert, no beauty, nothing to attract the eye or stimulate the senses, and suddenly here is this amazing creative nation, this tent which is full of rich color and symbolism and drama and so on, um, and—and of course the point of the tent—this is where God is going to come and live in—in amongst and with his people. And so God’s place is going to be stunningly beautiful because it is God’s place. And wow, that means it is the holy of holies; it is the holy place. And this idea of—of the beauty of holiness, um, corresponding to the beauty of God, God the Creator—that’s something we constantly have to work back towards. And I do fear that sometimes in our Protestant traditions, particularly, we’ve gone so much with the via negativa that we’ve worried about idolatry; we’ve worried about—I mean, yeah, the people of the—the people in the wilderness, and they got the instructions—Moses got the instructions about making the Tabernacle, but before they made it, oh my goodness, they made the golden calf, and that had to be dealt with before then the Tabernacle could be constructed. So yes, the danger of idolatry is always there, but that doesn’t mean that we then shouldn’t have beauty and symbolism and life and ritual and color and music and drama, all to say that holiness is about being genuinely human, being lifted up from the humdrum ways of being human, the stultifying negative ways of being human, and being able to thrive as the full humans we were meant to be. That’s what holiness is supposed to be all about. [Music]