No. I’m not talking about the famed star of 90’s hit TV show, Beverly Hills 90210, Jason Priestley… although his ground-breaking sideburns did strongly influence me to jump on the side-burn band wagon. It looks like he has updated his lamb-chops… nice work Jason.
What I talking about is the Christian teaching from the 16th century officially called “the universal priesthood of believers.” What that basically means is that Christians don’t have to go through a priest to talk to God or confess or whatever, that in a sense they are priests and can go directly to God for themselves. A pretty liberating thought to the mass of 16th century parishioners and at the same time a scary thought to minority population of priests whose livelihood depended on people depending on them.
The back story about this new 16th century teaching is pretty riveting. A young Augustinian monk named Martin Luther started reading more of the Bible (see 1 Peter 2:5,9) and listening less to the pope and church tradition. He felt that people were being taken advantage of by the Church so he wrote out 95 things he thought the church was doing wrong and nailed the list to church doors… pretty ballsy. His attempt to get church leaders to have a family discussion and get back on the right track didn’t exactly work out and the event grew into the Reformation which birthed a new style of Christianity we call Protestantism.
Now his idea that Christians can go directly to God… we call it “the universal priesthood of believers”… has been twisted by some people. Some people respond by saying, “Cool, I can go directly to God and I don’t really need the church… because I’m a priest.” This can lead to a Christianity of “me & God” without the church… that is quite foreign to the Bible. I was reading my handy-dandy Church history book yesterday which fleshed out Luther’s thoughts on this everyone is a priest idea. Here it is…
“While it is true that all Christians, by virtue of their baptism, are priests, this does not mean as some later interpreters have said – that one is self-sufficient to approach God for oneself. There is a direct communion with God that all Christians can and should enjoy. But there is also an organic reality within which all communion with God takes place, and that reality is the church To be priests does not mean primarily that we are our own individual priests, but rather that we are priests for the entire community of belief, and that they are priests for us. Rather than setting aside the need for the community of the church, the doctrine of the universal priesthood of believers strengthens it. It is true that access to God is no longer controlled by hierarchical priesthood. But we still stand in need of the community of believers, the body of Christ, in which each member is a priest for the rest, and feeds the rest. Without such nourishment, an isolated member cannot live.” (Justo L. Gonzalez, 33-34).
WOAH… our priestliness actually means our lives depend on others MORE not LESS. How un-American! How Radical!
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