Tuesday, May 24, 2022

Paul D. L. Avis on Luther vs. Melanchthon on the Importance of the Priesthood of All Believers

  

The doctrine of the universal priesthood or the priesthood of all believers was at the heart of Luther’s reform. It figured more prominently in his popular pamphlets than the doctrine of justification by faith alone. It is not an appendage to evangelical theology; it is nothing less than a paraphrase of the Reformation concept of the Church. In the protestant tradition, the universal priesthood has sometimes become merely a shibboleth, invoked to cast a cloak of spurious sanctity over abuses of the right of private judgment. As Gordon Rupp remarked: ‘The priesthood of all believers never means for Luther what it has sometimes meant in degenerate protestantism, the secularisation of the clergy, the doctrine that we are all laymen’ (E. Gl Rupp, Patters of Reformation [London, 1969], 315). (Paul D. L. Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers [London: Marshall Morgan and Sons, 1981], 95)

 

Luther’s statement of the universal priesthood derives directly from his fundamental concept of the Church. The gospel is the Church’s true treasure and the source of its life; it is expressed and embodied in the preached word and the sacraments) visible words); the gospel is the possession of every true believer. Thus all Christians are constituted priests by the gospel in its twofold form of word and sacrament, for all partake of these. If we have Christ’s word, Luther asserts, we have Christ himself and all that is his, so sharing in his priesthood. ‘Now he who has faith and is Christian also has Christ; now if he has Christ, so that everything Christ has is his, he also has the power to forgive sins; and if a Christian has the power to forgive sins, he also has the power to do everything a priest can do.’ (Ibid., 97)

 

THE REACTION AGAINST LUTHER’S EARLY VIEW

 

Among second-generation Reformers, there was a marked reaction against the spontaneity and liberty of the early years: a turning away from charismatic ministries, a stress on structure at the expense of spirit, a growing clericalization of the evangelical Churches. Even for Melanchthon, so close to Luther himself, ‘the idea of the universal priesthood had only minor significance’ (Werner Elert, The Structure of Lutheranism [St. Louis, 1962], 342). At the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, Melanchthon advised against discussion of the priesthood of all believers, relegating it to the category of ‘odious and inessential articles which are commonly debated in the schools’, and the doctrine is not mentioned in the Augsburg Confession.

 

Melanchthon’s position is the antithesis of Luther’s. For Melanchthon, it has been said, the ministerial office is the living nerve of the Church, on which all depends. The universal priesthood stands unquestionably in the background of his thought, having little constitutive significance for his doctrine of the ministry (Helmut Lieberg, Amt und Ordination bei Luther und Melanchthon [Gottingen, 1962], p. 259). He goes as far as to say that, just as the Church cannot be without the gospel, so it also cannot exist without the ministry: ‘To be without pastors would be tantamount to being without the keys, the gospel and the forgiveness of sins’ (C[orpus]R[eformatorum] 8. 430). God does not save except through the ministers he has ordained; if the ministry ceased the Church would not exist (CR 12.490). Where there is no ministry, there is no Church (Non est ecclesia, ubi non est verbum ministerium: CR 14. 892; cf. 21.832). (Ibid., 102)