THE HISTORIC EVANGELICAL VIEW recognizes in principle only one office in the church, the office of preaching. That is perhaps not quite an adequate way of designating it, since the office includes more than the preaching of the Word. In the evangelical tradition the Word is always coupled with the sacrament; so a more adequate name for the church's office would be the ministry of the means of grace. The practice of speaking of the office of preaching has perhaps had the result of restricting the meaning of the office; and it might easily be construed as implying a minimizing of the importance of the sacraments--such as sometimes has been manifest in Protestant groups. But whether the term is adequate or not, the concept of the ministry is clear enough in Reformation thought. The office includes both the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments. The former of these must not be understood in a too restricted sense; it is meant to include daily instruction, comfort, warning, counsel, correction, and punishment. In his De instituendis ministris Ecclesiae Luther speaks of the work of the office: "to teach, to preach and proclaim the Word of God, to baptize, to consecrate or administer the sacrament, to bind and loose sins, to pray for others, to sacrifice, and to judge all doctrines and spirits... But the first and highest of all, on which all else depends, is to teach the Word of God".1
The meaning of the office is thus the ministry of the Word. The Lutheran view of the office stands closely related to the content and nature of the Word. The Word is joined with the Holy Scriptures. They must therefore be the final norm for Christian preaching and doctrine. Yet the Word is not identical with what is said in the Bible. It neither is nor can be the divine word unless it is heard. The Word requires a living proclamation. For Luther the law and the letter are close to each other, while the gospel and the proclamation go together. The gospel "is properly not that which is written in books or encompassed in the letters; it is rather an oral proclamation, a living word, and a voice which speaks throughout the world and is uttered publicly".2 So to be the Word of God, Scripture must be taught and preached. By that fact the Word and the office of preaching are bound together. The office of preaching is a creation of the Word. But it is also a necessary channel by which the Word reaches human beings. In such a sense it can therefore be said that the office and the Word belong together, and the former is an attribute of the latter.
The fact is that according to the evangelical view there is but one office, whether it be called the office of preaching or the office of the ministry of the means of grace. Like Luther, we hold that early Christianity recognized no difference in principle between bishops and other clergy. Early Swedish church orders affirmed, for instance, that "bishop and priest were one and the same office, as is manifest from many passages in Paul's writings." But step by step a differentiation was gradually introduced, until the two were considered different categories. But the office of bishop is basically for the ministry of the Word. The division of ministries for particular services does not imply a surrender of the unity of the office. Both in Luther's writings and in the Lutheran confessions this oneness is repeatedly expressed with emphasis.
The point of view for which we are contending, in harmony with the historic view of our church, can be considered under the following heads:
1. The office consists in the proclamation of the Word and the administration of the sacraments.
2. There is basically only one office.
3. This office is established by God himself, instituted by Jesus Christ, supported and sustained by the Holy Spirit.At first glance it might appear that it is not in harmony with the Lutheran view to say that the ministry is ordained of God himself, and that it constitutes an analogy and a direct continuation of the apostolic office. Let us look more closely at that point. Luther criticized the Roman view of the priesthood, and affirmed the universal priesthood of believers. It has often been held that he thereby excluded the idea that the ministry is constituted by God as a special order in the church. That a special office of the ministry of the means of grace did nevertheless arise is explained by saying that this was not because God willed such a special order, but because the need for such an order was felt within the church and the congregation. The office does not rest on the esse of the church but on its bene esse. It is for the sake of good order that a special office is necessary and proper in the church; it is for that reason that the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments are committed to it, not because it is of divine order. But to hold such a position is to give up something that is vital to the Lutheran view. When Luther and the early Lutherans speak of the ministry they always mean a divine office clad, in a certain sense of the word, with divine authority, an order constituted by God. It is of course true that it can be said that in a sense the office exists for the sake of good order. God is the God of order. But the expression is misleading because it can so readily be construed to mean that the office proceeds from below upward, from men, from certain needs felt in the congregation; and for such reasons it may not be perceived that the office is basic to the nature of the church.
The concept of the universal priesthood of believers does not preclude the position that the ministry is ordained of God. When this view which is so inseparable from the evangelical concept of the church is formulated by Luther, it is directed particularly against the Roman Catholic view that ordination of the priest confers upon the man certain special religious qualifications which are indelible in character. Against this Luther insists that priest and layman are basically alike in judgment or in grace. The spiritual priesthood belongs to every Christian. It is conferred through baptism and faith. It is constituted by the fact that "we are all priests with Christ, that is to say, we are the children of Christ, the great High Priest".3 Therefore in the deepest sense there is no difference between the clergy and other Christians. But this does not imply the abolition of the ministry as such. Even according to Luther's thought there is indeed a distinction between the minister and the layman. The difference is not in the person but in the office. "It is only an external difference of the office, to which a member of the church is called".4 In relation to the office of the ministry the idea of the universal priesthood of believers means that every Christian faces the possibility of being called to the office, precisely because the needed authority does not belong to him as a person, nor is it conferred upon him by a sacramental ordination, but it belongs to the office itself. From this point of view it can be said that the Lutheran view of the ministry is higher than the Roman. The ministry is ordained of God as an instrument for his work, independent of the person's special religious qualifications, whether given through a sacramental ordination in the Roman Church or an experience of regeneration in a pietistic sense. The Lutheran view of the ministry rejects any presuppositions as to a certain spiritual status, Roman or pietistic. The concept of spiritual status is in part transformed by Luther, and in part broadened to include all Christians. All Christians belong to the priesthood. All Christians are bound to serve God. But they do not for that reason all hold the office of the ministry. The ministry is indeed looked upon as a service; but that is not to be understood as identifying service and office. Only by special divine order can a service be transformed into an office, Luther insists.5
The strong emphasis which is placed on the universal priesthood of believers is due in some measure to the claims made for the Roman priesthood. This is especially true as to the claim for the priestly sacrifice: that the priest is one who offers up a sacrifice. When Luther regards the priesthood as an office that involves sacrifice, he recognizes no other priest beside Christ himself. "For the title priest--that is, one who offers a sacrifice for sin and reconciles God--is given in the New Testament to no man except the only true priest, Jesus Christ".6 The fact that Luther nevertheless calls every Christian a priest, as the New Testament does, rests on the grounds that each Christian shares in the redemptive work of Christ. That the Christian is a priest means basically that through baptism and faith he participates in Christ, the High Priest.
The office of sacrifice is abolished in Christ and has no further place in the Christian church. For that reason it is wrong to base the office of the ministry on the concept of sacrifice. It should be noted in this connection that Luther rejects the idea of sacrifice as an act of man toward God with the aim of reconciling him; for that is to make sacrifice a meritorious work. In all our confessional writings we meet the same opposition to a concept of the ministry as resting on the offering of sacrifice. It is not unusual to find the ministry based on the pietistical idea that the priest's sacrifice is the offering of his own heart to God, and his primary function is to lead others into the kind of spiritual life he himself lives. The priest represents the congregation before God. By such reasoning he is easily made into a religious virtuoso, who, in what is almost a substitutionary way, offers his heart and soul to God.
This idea often crops out when the ministry is discussed. The trouble with such a theory is that it does not succeed in setting forth an evangelical view of sacrifice as the ministry is concerned with it. The difference between the heathen and the Christian cannot be understood by a juxtaposition of the sensuous and the spiritual. The difference is rather found in this that the former thinks of man's sacrifice to God, while the latter thinks of God's own sacrifice. It is in the sacrifice which God himself makes that the ministry of the Christian church finds, and must find, its basis. Luther is reluctant to use the word "priest" because in the Roman tradition the office of the ministry is coupled with an unevangelical concept of the sacrifice. There is only one priest. "But the servants of the church have other titles," Luther says; "they are called apostles, evangelists, bishops, presbyters, shepherds, etc. It is not by reason of sacrifices that they bear these titles, but because of preaching and other functions which must be sustained in the church".7 The offices of the ministry and the service of the church, about which Luther speaks and which go back to institution by Christ himself, do not exist that they may offer up Christ and merit forgiveness; their function is to snatch human beings from sin and the kingdom of the devil, to bring them to the kingdom of God and eternal life. The cord and net which are needed for that mission are the Word and the sacraments. In another context Luther says, "The office of preaching is a ministry which proceeds from Christ, not to Christ; and it comes to us, not from us".8
We see then that the reason for the ministry is found in God's own action for the salvation of man. Therefore when it is spoken of as a ministry of reconciliation, it is in complete harmony with what Luther means. The ministry is instituted in the ongoing of God's reconciling work. Its source lies in Christ's own high priestly office; as Luther expresses it, "By this you see that the proper office of the ministry is to preach the evangel, which is nothing else than the open proclamation of the grace of God and the forgiveness of sins . . . And this is the real New Testament office, that is, to have and to execute the commission of Christ to proclaim the forgiveness of sins. Such a ministry properly is Christ's own. It arises in him, and it issues forth from him".9 The real incumbent of that office is therefore Christ himself. Our confessional books express the same view when they say that one who holds this office speaks and acts as a representative of Christ. The institution of the office of preaching is therefore not to be looked for merely in some precise word of Jesus, but in the very fact of redemption. The matter of a particular word of Jesus in this connection is of subordinate importance; the inquiry as to such may actually be misleading. The important thing is the fact of redemption. Luther says, "It is certain and true that God has himself established and instituted the spiritual order with his own blood and his death." In this fact that the office properly belongs to Christ and is God's own office lies the basis for its essential oneness. This oneness does not of course preclude the plurality of services falling to the ministry.
Thus we see that the basis of the ministry lies in the very center of the Christian faith, in Christ's redemptive action. That that action reaches out to sinful man through the Word and sacraments supplies the function of the ministry. In these two, the Word and the sacraments, the office of the ministry finds its complete mission, says Luther.10 It is doubtless unnecessary to say here that this coupling of the Word and the sacraments with the redemptive efficacy of the means of grace does not imply that the efficacy is dependent on the person of the minister. The office of the ministry is not to "create and transubstantiate" but to "mediate and give," says Luther. Therefore the character of the ministry in Lutheran theology is properly spoken of as service, the service of God, the work in which God is himself the chief subject.
Since the nature and work of the ministry are thus determined, it follows necessarily that it is an inevitable constitutive of the church. The more common view is that the church is a sociological entity. The correlative idea as to how the church came to be carries with it a concept of the nature of the church and the ministry. The source is the Christian faith or a number of Christians. On these the church is built. The office is then instituted to assure the continuity of the church. It is to assure the future of the church by assuring an unfailing membership on which the church is built. According to this sociological view, the office is secondary to the church; and the church is secondary to the faith and the persons sharing it. Such a concept cannot be harmonized with the theological view of the nature of the church, as it is found in Luther, for instance. The theological view looks upon the church as primary, and the ministry is one of its inseparable constitutives; for the church is present wherever the Word is preached and the sacraments rightly administered. "'The office of the proclamation of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments has been instituted that we may come to this faith," the Augsburg Confession says. That is in effect to say that the office is antecedent to the faith.
The preceding discussion brings us to the point where two additional generalizations may be added to the three given earlier:
4. The ministry has its foundation in God's redemptive work in Christ and is, so to say, the fulcrum by which that work exercises its continuing effectiveness.
5. The ministry as a God-given order is one of the church's constitutive factors.What has been said as to the concept and foundation of the ministry is in entire agreement with the view found in the Lutheran confessions and the inclusive interpretation of Christianity which they present. But the development of Protestant theology modified this concept in two important directions, orthodoxy and pietism. The theology of orthodoxy continued to hold that the function of the ministry is the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments. But when this theology identified the Word with "pure doctrine," it followed that the work of the ministry was thought to be the teaching of this doctrine. The authority of the ministry was no longer found in the Word of God, in God himself, but in the objective, saving doctrine which men could set forth.11 It did not follow that the holding of the office was made dependent on special qualifications of personal or spiritual sort. The essential thing was that the doctrine was taught; this was the real function of the ministry. This clearly constituted a departure from the genuinely evangelical view. According to orthodoxy neither the office nor one who holds it has any authority except that which inheres in the saving doctrine. It is an important distortion when the message of the ministry is an objectively formulated doctrine rather than God himself and his Word.
Out of such a situation came the possibility for pietism's virtual surrender of the concept of the ministry. This arose from a mistaken understanding of the Lutheran interpretation of the meaning of the universal priesthood, with the result that the ministry was made dependent on the personal qualifications of the individual. Where orthodoxy had made the ministry dependent on the objective factor--correct doctrine, pietism made it dependent on a subjective factor--the regeneration of the individual. Both views dissipate the genuine Lutheran view according to which the ministry is a divine order whose right and authority are constituted neither by such objective or subjective factors, but by God himself, by his Word, apprehended only through faith. It is inevitably a fact that the church is concerned about the correctness of its doctrine; and its ministers have the same need for the grace of God and stand under the same judgment as all other Christians. This is implicit in the idea of the universal priesthood. But it is not such factors which make the ministry a divine order, or clothe it with divine authority. It is unfortunate that the misconceptions found in orthodoxy and pietism have played so large a roll in Lutheran discussions about the ministry.
There is similarly a mistaken way of conceiving the question as to who confers the minister's commission. In this connection two views are encountered. One says that the commission is given by the church, the other that it is given by Christ. According to the former, the church has the office at its disposal; it has the right and duty to provide incumbents, who are thereafter answerable only to the church. According to the other view, the commission comes directly from Christ, resting on his command. A very clear example of this is the view that the ministry is provided by an unbroken line of succession from Christ till now. There is also a conceivable compromise between these two extremes: the church has received authority from Christ to provide its ministry. The office is thus derived from Christ through the church. The church is the intermediary. The derivation from Christ may be obscured, so the inner call by the Spirit of Christ must be presupposed.
According to the Lutheran view, the office is given to the church; and the church has the right and duty to supply the office with incumbents and to keep watch over their service in it. The church can of course delegate that right. In this way Lutheran thought has usually justified the political leaders', the princes', designation and appointment of ministers. From one point of view, therefore, the commission comes from the church. But in evangelical thought this does not at all imply that Christ is not the giver of the commission; nor does it mean that the church stands as an intermediary between Christ and the appointee. The way in which Christ himself bestows the commission is precisely through the action of the church. To say the same thing in other words, faith sees that the call and commission given by the church are nothing else than Christ's own action. One is certainly very wide of the evangelical view if one holds that such a call must be completed through a purely personal, inner call which is viewed as coming directly from Christ's Spirit. To think in terms of an antithesis between an external call, coming from the church and only indirectly from Christ, and an inner, personal call, coming directly from Christ, is to operate in a mode of thinking which is alien to the evangelical Lutheran outlook. It is in harmony neither with Luther's view nor with the meaning of the confessional writings of the Lutheran church. According to their concept, the call is at the same time both external and inner, if we may use terms which are not quite true to the meaning. That the church has bestowed a commission is the same as to say, that Christ has bestowed it. If the church is the body of Christ, the call of the church is identical with the call of Christ, always presupposing the presence of faith.
We have thus characterized the ministry as an order given to the church by God, as a fulcrum serving the application of the redemptive work of Christ, and as a constitutive factor of the church. That is in effect to say that the ministry which from one point of view exists as a means for awakening Christian faith, exists at the same time as a divine office, only as an object of faith. It is to faith that the office is a reality. In this respect it is like the church itself. Of course against such a statement it can be said that the ministry is actually a manifest fact, evident before our eyes. To declare that it exists only as an object of faith is clearly to step over into another realm apart from visible reality and to make the whole discussion useless for the direction of the activity of the church as it is in our midst. Theological discussion of the ministry ought to concern itself with the ministry as it actually exists and manifestly carries on its work. How can it be said to be only an object of faith, when it occupies a manifest, visible place in an institution in society? Against such an objection it is enough to reply that it is precisely about this actual, manifest and visibly functioning office that we have been speaking throughout. This is precisely the office which the evangelical concept couples with faith. The distinction visible-invisible is no more relevant here than the juxtaposition of subjective-objective or the distinction between outer and inner.
The evangelical view of the ministry here presented is an expression of the viewpoint of faith. This fact is so fundamental that to separate the two would be to do violence to the evangelical concept of the ministry. The inevitable result would be to fall into the objective and institutional view of the ministry held by scholastic theology, both Romanist and Lutheran. The corrective for such an institutional concept is not to be found in such a rejection of the ministry as one sees in pietism but in taking seriously the viewpoint of faith and following it rigorously in our thought about the church and the ministry. It is of absolutely primary importance to make it clear that the church and the ministry are central concepts of faith.
1 WA 12:180.2. Concerning the Ministry (1523) AE 40:21.
2 WA 12:259.10. Sermons on the First Epistle of St. Peter (1522) AE 30:3.
3 WA 8:486.27. On the Misuse of the Mass (1521) AE 36:138.
4 WA 12:309.3. Sermons on the First Epistle of St. Peter (1522) AE 30:55.
5 WA 10I:122.9. Sermon on the Epistle for Christmas Day (1522).
6 EA 6:6. Sermon on the Epistle for Trinity XIII (Luke 10:23-37) (1533).
7 EA 6:6. EA 6:6. Sermon on the Epistle for Trinity XIII (Luke 10:23-37) (1533).
8 WA 10Iii:122.20. Sermon on the Epistle for Advent III (1522) Lenker 6:66.4.
9 EA 40:152 ff. Commentary on Psalm 110 (1535) AE 13:317.
10 EA 6:6. Sermon on the Epistle for Trinity XIII (Luke 10:23-37) (1533).
11 See Robert D. Preus, The Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism. Vol. 1 (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1970) 267-269 and 367 ff. [editors note]
18 October 1996
This article first appeared in THIS IS THE CHURCH edited by Anders Nygren (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press) 1952, and is in the public domain.
