The following, from two Anglican authors, reveals the problems faced by those who reject an ordained, ministerial priesthood in the New Covenant, and how, when discussing the issue, seem to admit that the Protestant aversion to “priest” and other like-terms and concepts is untenable:
The priestly ministry of the presbyter
So far we have talked quite a bit about the presbyters. We are, of course, in very good company. Even John Henry Newman in the first of his famous Tracts said, ‘I am but one of yourselves—a presbyter’. But, you may well ask, when are we going to talk about priests? Well, it is no bad thing to remind ourselves that in its earliest centuries the Church was very reticent about describing individual Christians as priests. Hierus, the Greek word for priest was reserved for Christ, the true priest of the Church, and for the Chruch itself which, as a body, shared in the priesthood of its head. The ministry of priests, the hiereis of the Old Testament, had been fulfilled in Christ and was not being enacted corporately through the new covenant community. In the Roman Catholic Church, where Latin remains the official language, this care over language has often been preserved in its more technical statements, such as the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on the Ministry and Life of Presbyters and the liturgy it inspired, ‘The ordination of Presbyters’. And yet we know that in the Roman and in several other traditions, Anglicanism included, presbyters are usually called priests and that this way of describing them goes back to at least the third century.
Some Christians find this embarrassing and prefer to speak about ministers, pastors, parsons or are more comfortable with more occupational descriptions like vicar, rector or chaplain. Others justify calling some ministers priests on linguistic grounds, making the point that when sacred, the old English word used for hierus in the Greek and its Latin equivalent sacerdos went out of use, préost (like the old French prestre) became the everyday word for presbyter and sacerdos. Hence, it is argued, that ‘priest’, derived from ‘préost’, means nothing more than the original Greek presbuteros. And there have certainly been many who, like Richard Hooker in the late sixteenth century, have believed that it was a mistake to continue with this apparent semantic confusion and that we should revert to the more ancient term of presbyter. For our part we do not think it is so easy to dismiss the nomenclature as a semantic mistake precisely because the presbyter’s ministry among the priestly people of God takes on certain priestly characteristics. (Christopher Cocksworth and Rosalind Brown, Being a Priest Today: Exploring Priestly Ministry [Norwich, U.K.: Canterbury Press, 2002], 22-23, italics in original, emphasis in bold added)
Of course, the authors, due to their errant theological tradition, make a number of mistakes and hold a number of false a priori assumptions, but one does appreciate the integrity they reveal in the above.
For a book-length treatment of the issue from the Latter-day Saint perspective using the Bible as the main source (which should satisfy those from a Sola Scriptura background!), see my book:
I have also a number of articles here: