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One of the unusual characteristics of the New Testament church was the lack of priests. The pagan religions had their priests, a group through whom the average citizen was supposed to be able to reach their gods. Even Judaism, despite its separation from the religions around it, had a priestly order, one which the normal Israelite, who was not a descendant of Levi, could not join, an order that played a large role in the affairs of the Israelite nation. But the church was different; every member could read God’s words in the Scriptures and reach Him through prayer. What must the pagans and Jews have thought to hear Paul, one of the highest leaders of the church, imploring the Thessalonian Christians to pray for him? But in the context of the church, this made sense.

Certainly the churches had leaders—“bishops”—who made church decisions and even rules for the membership to follow (Hebrews 13:17). But these leaders were not the means of grace whereby the common member could draw nigh to God; rather, they existed to assist the members of the brotherhood to maintain their own relationship with God.

Leaders were qualified or disqualified based on the holiness in their lives, and were apparently usually chosen from the congregation. To see this in action, look in Titus 1 (paragraph breaks omitted):

For this cause left I thee in Crete, that thou shouldest set in order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders in every city, as I had appointed thee: If any be blameless, the husband of one wife, having faithful children not accused of riot or unruly. For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God; not selfwilled, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre; But a lover of hospitality, a lover of good men, sober, just, holy, temperate; Holding fast the faithful word as he hath been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers. For there are many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers, specially they of the circumcision: Whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre's sake. One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, The Cretians are alway liars, evil beasts, slow bellies. This witness is true. Wherefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith; Not giving heed to Jewish fables, and commandments of men, that turn from the truth. (Titus 1:5-14)

Later, however, especially in Constantine's time, the practices of the church were mixed with the practices of the pagan religions, and the early church’s ministerial offices began to take a role more like that of the pagan priest—in fact, even the term priest became the reference for what the New Testament had labeled a bishop (although the pre-Constantinian church had already begun to change the word’s meaning, as some early church writers openly admitted).

Since the practices of Catholicism, even in its nascent Augustinian form, contradicted many of the principles of the New Testament, people who studied only the New Testament would probably come away with a view of the church that contradicted the established beliefs. So the church came to oppose the Scriptures more and more. But preachers—priests—that knew nothing of the church’s teaching would probably not be too helpful either, so it became necessary to have something to take the place of the Scriptures. It was perhaps because of both this and the idea that the priesthood should again be above the people, that theological education entered the scene (seminaries as such came much later, but the education itself was present long before the Reformation era).

When the Protestant Reformation came on the scene, theological education was well established, and as the Reformation churches began to abandon some of the Anabaptist-type ideals that they had held at the outset of the Reformation (at which point some former Protestants left and started Anabaptist churches), seminaries retained an important position in Protestantism. Today a seminary education is, in some circles, viewed as almost the sole requirement for a position of leadership. Since have paid for this expensive education in the hope of preaching for a living, it makes since to pay pastors large salaries, which can easily make it more difficult to follow the New Testament precept that ministry should not be done “for filthy lucre” (1 Peter 5:2). Education also means that it makes sense to bring in pastors who were not members of a church until that church hired them, while the Scripture seems to imply that church leaders were ordained from the local congregation, even to the point that the apostles would refrain from giving a church a leader if that church had no one qualified for leadership (see the passage from Titus above: “If any be blameless...”).

But probably the most important effect of ministerial education is the gap that it makes between the clergy and the laity. In the New Testament pattern, ministers had the authority to make church rules to help church members succeed in the Christian life (Hebrews 13:17), and they had perhaps been given special attention by the apostles, to make sure that they were solid in the faith. But the members, to a certain degree at least, had access to the same authorities that the ministry did. They could read the Old Testament Scriptures, or, if they were unsure about a New Testament doctrine, they could probably communicate with either the apostles themselves or with other churches where the apostles had taught (and read the New Testament Scriptures as they became available).

In the medieval Catholic system, the Bible was forbidden, and the priest could establish himself as the religious authority for the people simply because the people were forbidden to compare what he was saying with the Scriptures. Thus the common people were discouraged from becoming very involved with religion. The New Testament ideal, where every church member was part of “an holy priesthood” (1 Peter 2:5), was replaced with the pre-Christian system, where the layman was supposed to access God through the prevailing religious authorities.

In the early part of the Protestant Reformation, prominent Reformers called for a return to the Scripture and the priesthood of all believers, and even today, most Protestants would probably profess to support these things, and would say that theologically uneducated believers are—to some degree at least—able to interpret the Scripture. But granting believers the right to study the Scripture for themselves downgrades the value of theological education, and there is bound to be some amount of conflict.

And this time around, the seminary again seems to be winning out over the common believer, as the layman’s ability to interpret Scripture becomes subservient to theologians’ supposedly greater ability.

Take, for example, the recent trends in Bible translation. Prior to the introduction of the NIV and The Living Bible in the latter half of the 20th century, most people still read the King James Version, a fairly literal translation; its two major competitors, the American Standard Version and the Revised Standard Version, were also fairly literal translations. With a literal translation, a layperson can read and interpret the words of God. But in the 1960s and 1970s, this began to change, with the introduction of the New International Version and Kenneth Taylor’s The Living Bible. Both of these translations—The Living Bible to a greater degree—abandoned the literal approach of the old translations in favor of an approach in which interpretation was inserted directly into the Biblical text. The producers of these translations attempted to clarify difficult passages by interpreting, rather than translating them, which meant that their readers no longer directly view the words of God in their inspired form. Man again approaches God through an intermediary, who holds the authority to interpret the Bible for the common person. The producers of the TLB admitted that their new “translation” was actually a paraphrase, but the producers of the NIV used a new phrase—dynamic equivalence—to refer to the NIV, thus avoiding the offensive term paraphrase (which, it was felt, kept the TLB from gaining adherents among preachers), and probably leaving many readers believing that they were actually still holding the unedited words of God.

Another example of the devaluation of the priesthood of all believers is found in the way seminary graduates use their knowledge of Greek and Hebrew. It is easy to understand that, after spending years working on learning these languages, pastors and teachers would want to disseminate the information they glean from the original language texts. But if the pastor is continually claiming, “The English translation is wrong here, and the Greek really says…”, and the congregation has no way of verifying his words, it’s also easy to see why the congregation might lose interest in studying the Bible. If the English translation is consistently wrong, what is the use of trying to do any Bible interpretation from it anyway?

However, if the pastor is using a literal—functional equivalence—translation (and I believe that all should), and consistently saying that that translation is wrong, then the pastor is actually probably the one who is wrong. With paraphrases and dynamic equivalence translations, the pastor might be right to mention the original languages, since these methods of translation were designed to allow the translator to inject his own doctrinal opinions—which were not inspired Scripture and therefore may well be wrong—into the text. The major literal translations however, were produced by teams of original language scholars who made it their business to represent the words of God in English, to put the exact meaning of the original text—rather than just their own interpretation of the text—into our language. These men were not ignoramuses blundering through the text and wildly guessing what it said; they were respected scholars, virtually all of whom were probably far more qualified to interpret the text than the average pastor.

The danger of losing the layman’s ability to interpret Scripture should be fairly obvious. If theologians become the Christian’s authority, then people who don’t want to obey a certain command of the Scripture can probably find a theologian who denies that command’s validity, and follow that theologian into disobedience to the Scriptures. Even worse, people who actually do desire to follow God could be swayed away from the Bible pattern by happening to come under the teaching of one of the many theologians that promotes false doctrine.

The priesthood of all believers, however, is not simply something that we comes without responsibility. The apathetic attitude that many believers take toward studying the Scripture cannot harmlessly coexist with a Biblical practice of the priesthood of all believers. If believers are to have the right to interpret Scripture, they must be willing both to diligently study the Scripture and to diligently obey what it says. They must be willing to follow the Scripture wherever it leads, and to submit themselves to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The priesthood of all believers is of no value if people simply seize on proof-texts that happen to seem to support their favorite doctrines; in that case, they might as well just choose which theologian to believe, saving themselves the trouble and time of even looking at the Scriptures. Forcing the Scriptures to support our beliefs will not help us in the end. But following the Scriptures and the God who wrote them will lead us to eternal life in heaven with Him.