A Dangerous Idea? Martin Luther, E. Y Mullins, And The Priesthood Of All Believers

By Mark Rogers

[Mark Rogers is a Ph.D. student in historical theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Ill.]

I. Introduction

Timothy George has written, “[Martin] Luther’s greatest contribution to Protestant ecclesiology was his doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Yet no element in his teaching is more misunderstood.”[1] What George calls misunderstanding has at times been explicit departure from Luther’s foundational doctrine of the universal priesthood. These misunderstandings and departures were widespread in certain segments of Southern Baptist theology in the twentieth century. For example, Herschel Hobbs, perhaps the most influential Southern Baptist during the last half of the twentieth century, explained two problems with Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. The first objection was related to infant baptism, and secondly Hobbs wrote, “[Luther’s] view that ‘every Christian is someone else’s priest, and we are all priests to one another’ ignores the idea that every Christian has free access to God. It is my view that this denies the principle of the competency of the soul in religion. In this respect Luther’s thinking was still influenced by his Catholic theology”[2]

Hobbs’s focus on soul competency and the priesthood of the individual believer is representative of a twentieth-century Baptist theology heavily influenced by E. Y Mullins (1860-1928). Mullins, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for twenty-nine years, was the most significant Southern Baptist theologian of the early twentieth century. His theological system, with the doctrines of soul competency and the priesthood of all believers at its core, set the course many Southern Baptists later followed. This article will explain in what manner E. Y Mullins’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers was similar to, and different from, Martin Luther’s understanding of the same doctrine.

In his recent book, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution—A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First, Alister McGrath describes Luther’s doctrine of the universal priesthood, saying he had a “democratizing agenda” which aimed to give every Christian a right to interpret the Bible for himself in a church with “no ‘spiritual’ authority, distinct from or superior to ordinary Christians.”[3] McGrath builds on this one-dimensional description of Luther’s doctrine to argue for the continuity of Luther’s reforms with the “fundamentally democratic nature of Protestant theology” in its subsequent development.[4] This article will argue that in addition to continuity, important discontinuity is evident between Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers and that of later Protestant theologians. E. Y Mullins is just one among many American Protestants who have departed in significant ways from Luther’s understanding of the universal priesthood, but will serve as the primary example. This article will first describe Luther’s doctrine, giving special attention to the progress and change observable in Luther’s writings between 1519 and 1535. McGrath’s argument draws entirely on Luther’s pre-1522 writings, and, as a result, fails to give an accurate and complete picture of Luther’s teaching on the priesthood of all believers, the right of private judgment, and the nature of the church. An examination of Luther’s post-Peasants’ War writings uncovers hierarchical and anti-democratic views in Luther’s theology, which are impossible to reconcile with democratic and individualistic tendencies in later Protestantism. After focusing on Luther, I will briefly describe Mullins’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. The purpose is to show the continuity with Luther’s doctrine, as well as the radical discontinuity between Mullins and Luther. I will conclude by pointing to the significance of the history of this doctrine for contemporary evangelicalism.

II. Martin Luther And The Priesthood Of All Believers

Eric W. Gritsch has claimed, “Luther’s doctrine of the common priesthood of all believers, developed particularly in his treatises of 1520, is one of the most revolutionary doctrines in the history of Christianity.”[5] In 1520, Luther published three works that called for a revolution to the medieval Catholic understanding of the church. To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation was published in August. In the book, Luther attacked the three walls the medieval Catholic church had built to protect its authority. All three walls related to the unique status, position, and authority of the pope: his power was above the temporal estate, only he could interpret the Scriptures, and only he could call a council.[6] These walls were based on the “chain of being” ontology of medieval Catholicism, which affirmed a major divide between clergy and laity.[7] The clergy was closer to God and was needed to help the lay people draw near to Christ. For Luther this was much more than just a political problem concerning the relationship between the spiritual and temporal estates. As Cyril Eastwood has explained, “It seemed to Luther that a massive barrier made up of Church, Priesthood and Sacraments, had been raised up between the believer and Christ.”[8]

Luther sought to demolish the barriers of the church, priesthood, and sacraments through the rest of 1520 by arguing that all Christians are priests. He wrote in To the Christian Nobility, “There is no true, basic difference between laymen and priests, princes and bishops, between religious and secular.”[9] He continually pointed to 2 Pet 2:9 as his main evidence for the common priesthood of believers, “You are a royal priesthood, a priestly realm.”[10] Luther argued that the princes of Germany were priests just as much as the pope. Therefore, if the pope departed from orthodoxy, his fellow priests, the nobility of the German nation, could and should call a council for the reform of the church.[11]

Luther returned to the argument that all Christians are priests several times in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, published in October 1520. In this second work, Luther attacked the sacramental system that was keeping Christians in spiritual captivity. Luther applied the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers in several ways. First, since all Christians were priests, all should take the Mass in both kinds. Second, lay people were not dependent on the priesthood for absolution from sins. Instead, since all Christians are priests and hold in common the power of the keys, Luther said, “I have no doubt but that every one is absolved from his secret sins when he has made confession, privately before any brother.”[12] Third, Luther argued there was no such thing as a special ordination or consecration that could set a Christian apart from the laity as a priest. Instead, all Christians were anointed by the Holy Spirit and made priests at their baptism.[13]

By breaking down the barriers that he saw between God and believers, Luther sought to restore the common Christian’s access to God. While Luther continued to hold to a distinction between official ministers and the common Christian, Brian Gerrish explains that it “must be understood as a distinction within the royal priesthood, within the one spiritual estate; and it says nothing about one’s standing before God or freedom of access to His presence.”[14] Luther, pointing to Rom 12:1, said that Christians are not dependent on a special priestly class to make sacrifices for them. Instead, all believers are priests and are called to offer their own bodies as holy sacrifices and to offer the sacrifice of thanksgiving to God.[15] The leveling of Christians into one, priestly estate had many practical implications. For example, soon after Luther published his ideas, priests and monks began to marry. Communion was given to both pastors and the congregation in both kinds, since all were one church and equally spiritual. Another implication of Luther’s revolutionary doctrine was that since all Christians were priests, all had the right and responsibility to read the Bible. In 1521 Luther translated the New Testament into vernacular German so that all Christians could carry out their priestly function of knowing and ministering the word of God to each other.

For Luther, the priesthood of all believers was derived from their union with Christ, the great High Priest. Paul Althaus explains the Christ-centeredness of Luther’s doctrine well, “The church is founded on Christ’s priesthood. Its inner structure is the priesthood of Christians for each other. The priesthood of Christians flows from the priesthood of Christ.”[16] Christians are united to Christ by faith at the point of regeneration. From then on, Luther says, “We are priests as he is Priest, sons as he is Son, kings as he is King.”[17] Just as Christ was both a priest and the sacrifice, “so all of us too as Christians are truly a holy priesthood and the sacrifice itself, as Paul elucidates in Romans 12 [v. 1], where he teaches that we should sacrifice our bodies as a priestly sacrifice.”[18] The emphasis in Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers is on Christ’s priestly work.

Luther’s understanding of the priestly functions of all Christians was also based in part on their union with Christ in his work. Like Christ, Christians were to intercede for one another, teach the word to one another, and bear one another’s burdens.[19] For Luther, the priesthood of all believers was much more than a teaching that all Christians could approach God without a human mediator. Instead, Christians were supposed to minister and act as priests for one another. In his 1523 work Concerning the Ministry, Luther listed the seven functions of the Christian priest: “To teach, to preach and proclaim the Word of God, to baptize, to consecrate or administer the Eucharist, to bind and loose sins, to pray for others, to sacrifice, and to judge of all doctrine and spirits.” All of these actions were to be done for one another within the body of Christ. All were important, Luther explained, but “the first and foremost of all on which everything else depends, is the teaching of the Word of God.”[20] Luther went on to show how Christians were to baptize with the word, consecrate the Eucharist with the word, bind and loose with the word, and carry out all of the other priestly functions based on the word and with the word.

In summary, Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers was, first, Christ-centered, with each individual believer deriving his status as a priest from his union to Christ through faith alone. Second, Luther’s doctrine was community-centered, with each believer serving as a priest to other believers, helping them draw near to God and maintain justifying faith throughout life. Gerrish rightly observes:

The individualistic interpretation of the common priesthood, according to which each man is his own, self-sufficient priest, misses the entire direction of Luther’s thinking. The priest faces toward his neighbor, and serves him in the things of God. To be sure, it is the privilege of the priest that he has free access to God. Luther can therefore state categorically that we need no other priest or mediator than Christ. . . . But it must, of course, be interpreted by Luther’s repeated insistence that to be a priest is to be a priest for others.[21]

Some Protestants after Luther have neglected or rejected the communal emphasis in Luther’s construction of the universal priesthood, but it lies at the heart of his writings on the subject. Third, Luther’s doctrine was word-centered. The Reformation principle of sola scriptura showed up clearly in Luther’s understanding of the priesthood of all believers. He wrote, “When we grant the Word to anyone, we cannot deny anything to him pertaining to the exercise of his priesthood.”[22] Therefore, we see that three main points of Evangelical theology come together in this one area of Luther’s doctrine: biblical authority, salvation by faith in Christ alone, and the priesthood of all believers.

With such a strong view of the ministry duties given to all Christians, the question arises, what place was there for a formal ministry in the theology of Luther? Part of the answer is that official ministers were to carry out the priestly functions on behalf of the congregation. The official ministry had a delegated authority from the common priesthood. Luther explains, “Through baptism ... we are all born simply as priests and clerics. Afterward, some are taken from the ranks of such born clerics and called or elected to these offices which they are to discharge on behalf of all of us” (emphasis mine).[23] The main purpose for this delegation of ministry, Luther says, is good order. If all Christians tried to carry out the offices of the priest, “there might be shameful confusion among the people of God, and a kind of Babylon in the church, where everything should be done in order.”[24]

This state of circumstances did not mean that official ministers alone should proclaim and minister the word. Luther made a distinction between the private and the public ministry of the word. All Christians should act as priests by ministering the word in private, meaning that they should teach and exhort with the word in their home and with their friends. On the other hand, only those who were officially recognized and set apart for the ministry should carry out the public ministry of the word in the congregational setting.[25] Luther explained, “The community rights demand that one, or as many as the community chooses, shall be chosen or approved who, in the name of all with these rights, shall perform these functions publicly. . . . Publicly one may not exercise a right without consent of the whole body or of the church.”[26] Luther said exceptions should be made in times of emergency, such as when a person was away from any church body.

As noted above, Luther’s understanding of how the priesthood of believers should work itself out in practice underwent change during the 1520s. This change was most evident in the way Luther gave increasing control to the civil and church authorities, and in his increasingly negative view of the ability of the common Christian to judge doctrine rightly. Gerrish points out that “Luther’s teaching on ministry and priesthood is presented in a variety of historical contexts: particularly, the polemic against Rome, the demand for evangelical pastors, and the threat of the radical reformers.”[27] Luther’s polemic against Rome, concentrated between 1521 and 1523, has been dealt with above.

The second historical context Gerrish identifies is concentrated in 1523. As Luther’s ideas started to take hold, many churches struggled to find Evangelical pastors to lead them. The system in the medieval Catholic Church had been for bishops to appoint priests over local parishes. As the whole system of the priesthood was overthrown, along with the established bishoprics, some method for obtaining pastoral leadership had to be decided. The solution many turned to was for local congregations to appoint their own pastors. In 1523, Christians from Leisnic in Electoral Saxony wrote to Luther asking him to write a biblical defense of their right to appoint their own pastor. Luther responded quickly publishing a pamphlet titled, That a Christian Assembly or Congregation Has the Right and Power to Judge All Teaching, and to Call, Appoint and Dismiss Teachers, Established and Proven by Scripture.[28] That year he wrote on the same topic in Concerning the Ministry, which was a response to similar problems Bohemian Christians were facing. In both documents, Luther based his argument on the fact that as priests, all Christians have the right and ability to judge the accuracy of doctrine.[29] Not only that, but each Christian has the right and duty to proclaim the word publicly when there are no orthodox ministers around. Since each individual Christian has the ability to judge doctrine, and the right to proclaim the word, “How much more then,” Luther argued, “does... a certain community as a whole have both right and command to commit by common vote such an office to one or more, to be exercised in its stead.”[30]

In summary, as of 1523 Luther had a high view of the common Christian’s ability to discern doctrine and appoint preachers. This led him to affirm a proto-congregationalism in which the congregation together had the authority to judge doctrine, and each individual Christian was responsible to proclaim right doctrine if others failed to do so. Alister McGrath explains that according to Luther, “The church is . . . held accountable to its members for its interpretation of its sacred text and is open to challenges at every point.”[31] McGrath’s statement would be true if he were talking only about Luther’s 1523 writings. However, events occurred soon after 1523 that altered Luther’s understanding of the common Christian, Congregationalism, and the role of the state in enforcing right doctrine and establishing a Christian ministry.

In 1524, Thomas Muntzer and other fanatical Zwickau prophets were calling for the peasants to rise up and use violence to crush those who oppressively ruled over them. Luther responded to this challenge in a pamphlet titled, Letter to the Princes of Saxony Concerning the Rebellious Spirit. In this open letter, Luther made a distinction between doctrinal deviation and violent revolution. He wrote, “There must be sects, and the Word of God must be under arms and fight. . . . Let the spirits collide and fight it out. If meanwhile some are led astray, all right, such is war. But when they want to do more than fight with Word, and begin to destroy and use force, then your Graces must intervene, whether it be ourselves or they who are guilty, and banish them from the country.”[32] According to this quotation, as of 1524 Luther still thought the civil authorities should allow religious sects to argue publicly for their views, and should only step in when sects became violent. He was still confident that the common Christian could rightly discern doctrine, and that the truth would win out in a free and open warfare of ideas.

The German Peasants’ War, a massive, violent uprising of peasants, miners, and lower-class urban dwellers, began in 1525. Perhaps as many as 100,000 people were soon dead. That summer Luther wrote a response to the uprising, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes, calling on the German princes to use the sword to put an end to the peasants’ rebellion. Gritsch has explained that after the Peasants’ War the “Congregationalism, so strongly emphasized by Luther [in 1523], had to give way to the state church.”[33] In 1523 Luther had interpreted 1 Cor 14:29-30 to mean that the entire congregation should weigh what is taught, and that a common Christian has the right to teach without an official call when he believes the truth is not being rightly taught.[34] In 1532 Luther wrote Infiltrating and Clandestine Preachers, which gave instruction to a magistrate in Wartburg about how to handle the Anabaptist “interlopers” infesting Germany. At this point Luther interpreted 1 Cor 14 completely differently:

Thus we read in St. Paul: “Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said,” etc. [I Cor. 14:29]. This of course is said only of the prophets, and of which ones should speak and which should weigh what was said. What is meant by “others”? The people? Of course not. It means the other prophets or those speaking with tongues who should help in the church with preaching and building up of the congregation, those who should judge and assist in seeing to it that the preaching is right.[35]

Luther had come to believe that the common Christian did not have the right and responsibility to judge doctrine and proclaim the word publicly in the absence of good teaching. Instead, he wrote that all teaching must be done by properly called and commissioned preachers. A proper call could only come through the established state church hierarchy, not the congregations themselves. Also, unlike in 1523, Luther no longer thought princes should allow the open engagement of ideas and the presence of non-violent sects. In 1532 Luther called on princes to press down all furtive and clandestine preaching in the name of proper order and the unity of the church. Luther’s view of the ability and role of the common priesthood had clearly changed. He wrote of the common German Christians as “common stupid folk” and “uncouth, undisciplined, shameless people.”[36]

According to Luther, post-15 24, the Apostle Paul was not calling the common Christians to teach and preach in the presence of error and to call and appoint pastors in the churches. Instead, Luther said, Paul was calling the congregation to listen submissively to the established ministry. As Gerrish points out, Luther’s focus had moved from the “question [of] how to obtain a sufficient supply of preachers, [to] how to check the growing band of eager, self-made preachers who [were] overrunning Saxony.”[37] As the question changed, so did Luther’s understanding of 1 Cor 14 and the priesthood of all believers. Understanding the changes Luther made after 1525 in how the priesthood of all believers should be practically worked out is essential to understanding Luther’s view. Many later Protestants, focusing exclusively on the pre-1525 writings of Luther, have presented an inaccurate description of Luther, which emphasizes the right of private interpretation, Congregationalism, and the ability of common Christians to discern right teaching on their own. All of these ideas would have been more nuanced, and possibly rejected, by Luther in 1532. Luther never gave up on the idea that believers, including official teachers, must be accountable to one another in their biblical interpretation, and that all Christians were priests toward one another. But after 1524, as he began to see the danger of uneducated and spiritually immature Christians making up their own theology, he emphasized accountability among official teachers, both to the orthodox fathers of the church and to spiritually mature lay people (usually nobles). Luther’s mature doctrine of the priesthood of all believers still held to the priesthood of every Christian, but his hierarchical ecclesiology and distrust of the common Christian’s ability was far from a “democratizing agenda.”

III. E. T. Mullins And The Priesthood Of All Believers

Southern Baptist leader Al Mohler asserts, “More than any other individual, E. Y. Mullins shaped the Southern Baptist mind during the first half of the twentieth century.”[38] Harold Bloom calls Mullins “the most neglected of major American theologians. . . the Calvin or Luther or Wesley of the Southern Baptists.”[39] Mullins graduated with the first undergraduate class at Texas A&M and went to study for the ministry at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) in Louisville, Kentucky. He studied there with the original faculty including James P. Boyce and John Broadus, from 1881 to 1885. After seminary Mullins pastored three churches. He first served a church in Kentucky, then moved to Lee Street Baptist Church in Baltimore, and then to the Baptist Church in Newton Centre, near Boston, Massachusetts. He became the fourth president of SBTS in 1899 after a major controversy over Baptist ecclesiology brought about the resignation of William Whitsitt. Mullins helped bring peace to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and led SBTS to unprecedented growth. Mullins exercised vast influence through his leadership and theology for the next twenty-nine years at the helm of the SBC’s first and largest seminary.[40] He started the theological journal The Review and Expositor and published several popular and influential books. He served as president of the SBC from 1921 to 1924 and as president of the Baptist World Alliance from 1923 to 1928. He chaired the committee that wrote the Baptist Faith and Message in 1925, a doctrinal statement the SBC still uses.[41] Through his denominational leadership and his influential theological writings, Mullins impacted the course of Southern Baptist life and thought for the rest of the twentieth century.

Mullins’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers was one of his most significant and enduring contributions to Southern Baptist thought. The best place in his corpus to find his understanding of the doctrine is The Axioms of Religion (1908). This was Mullins’s most popular work, and according to Fisher Humphreys, “It probably has done more than any other single volume to define Baptist identity in the twentieth century.”[42] In The Axioms, Mullins based his doctrine of the universal priesthood on the idea of the soul’s competency in religion. In fact, Mullins claimed that the one great foundational contribution of Baptists to Christianity is the idea of the soul’s competency in religion. Each Christian has the capacity to hear from God directly without any human mediators. And since all Christians are equally competent, there is no logical reason that any person would be dependent on another person for help in getting to God. Therefore all were priests; “the priesthood of all believers... is but the expression of the soul’s competency.” On this basis, Mullins rejected any systems of church government, sacraments, or the priesthood that would interfere with the soul’s immediate experience with God. He wrote, “Observe then that the idea of the competency of the soul in religion excludes at once all human interference, such as episcopacy and infant baptism, and every form of religion by proxy. Religion is a personal matter between the soul and God.”[43]

Mullins argued that all Baptist distinctives flow logically from the idea that each Christian is competent, under God, to carry out all matters of religious life. Soul competency led logically to democratic church government, the priesthood of all believers, the right of private judgment, and the separation of church and state. In each case, Mullins was jealous to maintain the integrity of religion as a personal experience between the individual and God, uninterrupted by bishops, priests, creedal enforcement, or government power.

According to Mullins, his individualistic understanding of the priesthood of all believers was far from an anarchist position, with each individual free to do whatever he wanted to do. In fact, he argued that the doctrine of soul competency and its outworking in Baptist theological distinctives promoted the Lordship of Christ more effectively than any other system. Since the competency of the Christian “is derived from the indwelling Christ,” Mullins argued, “man’s capacity for self-government in religion is nothing more than the authority of Christ exerted in and through the inner life of believers, with the understanding always, of course, that He regulates that inner life in accordance with His revealed Word.”[44] As Jesus exerts his Lordship, he makes all believers equally competent priests, and sets them free from all illegitimate forms of authority.[45] This Christ-centered principle is also how Mullins made his case for democratic church government. Democracy in a church made up of regenerate members is not mere majority rule. Instead, Mullins argued, “Democracy in church government is simply Christ Himself animating His own body through His Spirit. The decisions of the local congregation on ecclesiastical matters are the ‘consensus of the competent.’“[46]

IV. Similarities Between Luther And Mullins

Mullins’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers shared commonalities with that of Martin Luther. Mullins himself expressed his indebtedness to Luther and the other Reformers for their teaching of justification by faith and their discovery that the Bible taught that all Christians are priests. The first main point of similarity between Luther and Mullins was that they both expressed their understanding of the priesthood of believers in opposition to the Catholic Church. Both were firmly against the Catholic understanding of the sacraments and the priestly system. While Mullins was much more ecumenically open than Luther, both saw no room for compromise when it came to the tyrannical practices of the Roman Catholic Church. Because of Catholicism, Mullins explained, “The great elemental truth that all souls have an equal right to direct access to God passed out of human thought so far as the Roman Catholic Church was able to influence thought” during the middle ages.[47] For Mullins, Luther was a great hero who had taken down most of the barriers that the Catholic Church had built up between humanity and God: the sacramental system, the priesthood, the hierarchy, the church, and the pope. Mullins saw himself as carrying on the spirit of Luther in opposing Catholic error and extending his reforms against all vestiges of Catholicism still remaining in Protestant churches. These vestiges included infant baptism, episcopal church government, state churches, and sacramental views of the ordinances.[48]

A second similarity between Luther and Mullins was that they both promoted the idea that the Christian could have direct access to God without any human mediator. For both men, the dangers of Roman Catholic theology were not mainly ecclesiological, but soteriological. Their repeated assertions that all believers are priests were deeply connected with their conviction that a person is saved by faith in Christ alone, and not by the mediating work of any spiritual class of Christians. Mullins was self conscious in his continuity with Luther on this point, “In its deepest and essential meaning it [Luther’s battle] was a revolt against spiritual tyranny, it was the assertion of the fundamental truth of our religious axiom that all souls have an equal right to direct access to God.” This should not obscure the fact that Mullins also saw significant discontinuity between Luther and himself. For example, Mullins said that he and other Baptists “[had] carried the Reformation principle of justification by faith far beyond the dreams of Luther and the other reformers.”[49] This discontinuity will be dealt with at greater length in the section below. What is important for this section is that even though Mullins thought Baptist theology did so in a more complete way, both men sought to restore the believer’s direct access to God by faith.

A third similarity is that both Mullins and Luther believed that an official ministry was biblical and necessary. Luther believed that ministers were those called to carry out the ministry of the word for the common priesthood. Their ministry was delegated from the common priesthood for the sake of order. Later, Luther taught that the congregation must submit to the teaching of properly sanctioned pastors, and that visiting preachers should check with the parish pastor first before preaching publicly in an area.

Mullins, like Luther, also affirmed the role of pastors. His reasoning, though, was more pragmatic. Speaking of the priesthood of all believers, Mullins explained, “This... of course does not forbid the setting apart of ministers or officials to perform certain specified duties for the sake of convenience or expediency in the church.”[50] For Mullins, pastors had little authority. In fact, Walter Shurden has pointed out that Mullins was “so intent on establishing the equality of all believers, [that he] failed completely, in his chapter on Baptist ecclesiology [in The Axioms of Religion], to even discuss the role of the pastor.”[51] Mullins, a pastor himself early in ministry and a trainer of pastors for the final thirty years of his life, certainly believed in the importance of the pastoral office. It seems he struggled, though, to articulate a strong view of the pastorate in light of his radically democratized ecclesiology. Both Mullins and Luther affirmed the place of an official ministry, with Luther giving more special authority to pastors as they alone were entrusted with the public ministry of the word.

V. Differences Between Luther And Mullins

While there was significant continuity between Luther’s and Mullins’s doctrines of the universal priesthood, there was even more pronounced discontinuity. The fundamental difference between the two is that Mullins based his understanding of the priesthood of all believers on his belief in the competency of the soul. Whenever Luther wrote about the priesthood of all believers he pointed to 1 Pet 2:9 as the reason for his belief. Mullins almost always grounded his teaching on the competency of the soul. Mullins’s accent was on the individual’s ability to commune with God, while Luther placed a much stronger accent on the dependence of all Christians upon one another in a common priesthood. Mullins’s optimism concerning the competency of the common Christian in all religious matters contrasts sharply with Luther’s post-15 24 pessimism about common Christians’ ability to interpret the Bible and judge doctrine on their own. Fundamental differences between Luther and Mullins are evident in at least three ways.

First, Mullins emphasized competent individualism whereas Luther focused on the interdependent priesthood of all Christians. Mullins believed the Baptist principle of soul competency was consistent with the Western ideal of individualism. Al Mohler explains that ‘“soul competency’ was interpreted by Mullins to mean that each individual soul is independently competent to adjudicate all matters of religious importance” (emphasis mine).[52] Mullins had a strong emphasis on the right of the individual, as a priest, to go to God on his own. He did not talk about the responsibility of each Christian to serve as a priest for one’s neighbor. In fact, Mullins rarely talked about the importance of Christian community at all. At times he pointed to the image of the church as a body, but only used the image to teach about each member’s equality, never their interdependence.[53]

Mullins’s emphasis was much different than that of Luther’s community-centered understanding Paul Althaus summarizes Luther’s teaching this way:

The priesthood means: We stand before God, pray for others, intercede with and sacrifice ourselves to God and proclaim the word to one another. Luther never understands the priesthood of all believers merely in the “Protestant” sense of the Christian’s freedom to stand in a direct relationship to God without a human mediator. Rather he constantly emphasizes the Christian’s evangelical authority to come before God on behalf of the brethren and also of the world. The universal priesthood expresses not religious individualism but its exact opposite, the reality of the congregation as a community.[54]

When the communal focus of Luther’s teaching about the universal priesthood is understood, a clear discontinuity becomes evident between his doctrine and the individualism of Mullins’s view.

A second difference is that Luther and Mullins held different positions on the right of private judgment. In the early 1520s Luther believed that all Christians together had the right to judge doctrine and the ability to call their own pastor. After 1524, Luther’s view of the common Christian’s ability became much more negative. In 1532 he argued that civil and church leaders must defend right doctrine and protect their people from the presence of error, or else chaos would result. However, it would be wrong to say that Luther held to what is now often called the right of private judgment, even before 1525. Gerrish explains that while Luther did talk about private interpretation, he meant something very different from the modern connotation of a believer interpreting the Bible by himself, free of traditional or congregational restraints. Gerrish explains what Luther meant by private interpretation:

In general, every Christian is under the obligation to witness to God’s Word in the “private” sphere. The word “private” perhaps suggests to us something different than it did to Luther. Nowadays, when a Protestant speaks of the “right to private interpretation,” for example, he pictures the individual Christian alone with his Bible; and the meaning of the common priesthood has often been explained in this way. For Luther, on the other hand, the priesthood of all believers was being exercised privately when one brother mediated the Word of God to another in personal converse. In this context “private” means simply “non-official.”[55]

Mullins, on the other hand, argued, “Obedience to Christ is personal. Proxy obedience is not obedience. Hence every man should read and interpret the Scriptures for himself.”[56] Mullins held a much more consistently positive view of the individual Christian’s ability to interpret the Bible than did Luther. This led him to affirm repeatedly the right of private judgment as a necessary implication of the priesthood of all believers. Mullins believed this right of private judgment was a Reformation principle, stating, “Since the Reformation this axiom has found expression in nothing more than in the exercise of the individual’s right of private interpretation of the Scriptures.” And again, “The objective principle of the authoritative Scriptures asserts that every man has a right to read and interpret the Word of God for himself, under the guidance of the Spirit, untrammeled by human tradition.”[57]

There is some complexity to Mullins’s belief in the right of private judgment. The complexity mainly stems from his affirmation of creeds, or “restatements of doctrine,” as helpful. For example, he was the primary author of the Baptist Faith and Message in 1925. And in “Baptists and Creeds,” an unpublished essay recently discovered in his private papers, Mullins defended the use of creeds saying that the SBC was not a “free-lance club.” In the short essay, Mullins argued that “Baptists have always insisted upon their own right to declare their beliefs in a definite, formal way, and to protect themselves by refusing to support men in important places as teachers and preachers who do not agree with them.”[58] The essay is undated, but it appears Mullins wrote it in the 1920s as he began to see “deadly tendencies” at work against the gospel among Baptists.

So, at times, Mullins did affirm the use of creeds and confessions for some purposes. His belief in the right of private judgment, therefore, was not unqualified or absolute. However, when the entirety of his writings is taken into account it is clear Mullins held strongly to the right of private judgment. Creeds should not be binding. They were helpful public statements that any group of Baptists were free to make, but did not have authority over the individual conscience and should not restrict freedom of thought. Creeds were useful to a point, but if they were used to exert authority, they interfered with the direct lordship and guidance of Christ in the individual’s life. In the end, Mullins’s most lasting theological legacy for Baptists was his advocacy for “man’s capacity for self-government in religion.”[59]

A third area of disagreement between Luther and Mullins has to do with their views of church government. For Mullins, democratic church government was the only valid option, and flowed logically out of his view that all Christians have the ability to interpret the Bible for themselves. He argued, “Because the individual deals directly with his Lord and is immediately responsible to Him, the spiritual society must needs be a democracy. That is, the church is a community of autonomous individuals under the immediate lordship of Christ.”[60] A fundamental assumption underlying democratic church government was the concept of regenerate church membership, a pivotal Baptist distinctive. If each member had been regenerated and had a relationship with Christ, Christ would exercise his rule over the church by personally leading each individual through the system of congregational church government. Mullins believed that any form of episcopacy or oligarchy interfered with the priesthood of all believers. Mullins noted the difference between himself and Luther on this point. He lamented that “Luther turned over the government of the church to the temporal power,” and that even though Luther “admitted that the real church and real authority is the local congregation,” Luther “said in his characteristic fashion that the ‘wild Germans’ were not yet ready for Congregationalism.”[61] Luther’s and Mullins’s differing views on church polity stemmed from their different understandings of the priesthood of all believers and the competency of the common Christian. While there were additional differences between the two leaders, such as the proper subjects of baptism, the three listed above are sufficient to show the discontinuity between Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers and that of E. Y Mullins.

VI. Conclusion

This article has focused narrowly on just two theologians—albeit significant ones—at different points in the Protestant movement. However, this narrow study has shown that there are important differences in the way Protestants have understood the priesthood of all believers, the right of private judgment, and the competency of common Christians. Many twentieth-century evangelicals, like Mullins, have advocated a doctrine of the priesthood of all believers that is more democratic and individualistic than what Martin Luther advocated 400 years earlier. While there is important continuity between the two, it is incorrect to claim that the democratic and individualistic theology of twentieth-century theologians, like Mullins, was the result of a “democratizing agenda” set in motion by Luther.

Many additional, and more significant, formative factors were active on twentieth-century pastors and theologians, influencing them to diverge from Luther’s more community-focused and hierarchical formulation of the universal priesthood. Fisher Humphreys argues that Mullins “was intoxicated by personal freedom, even by personal rights—a category which owes more to the Enlightenment than to the New Testament—even to the loss of the indispensability of society and relationships for personal life.”[62] Mullins himself said that in addition to the Reformation principle of justification by faith, his “doctrine of the soul’s competency in religion stemmed from . . . the intellectual principle of the Renaissance” and “the Anglo-Saxon principle of individualism.”[63] Mullins’s individualistic focus was not merely an inevitable outgrowth of Luther’s “democratizing agenda.” The democratic, egalitarian, individualistic nature of much American evangelicalism in the twentieth century was not the result of the Reformation. Recent historians have demonstrated that unique democratizing impulses have been active in America influencing evangelicalism since the First Great Awakening,[64] and Gregory A. Wills has argued that the rising tide of modern subjectivism and individualism moved many evangelicals away from Puritan-like, “church-oriented evangelicalism” in the mid-nineteenth century, toward a pietistic “promotion of an individual spirituality” by the mid-twentieth century.[65]

The Enlightenment, American democracy, modern subjectivism: these factors, rather than Luther’s doctrine of the universal priesthood, moved much of American evangelical theology in a radically democratic, egalitarian, and individualistic direction. The result is that the priesthood of all believers, a doctrine that should build Christ-centered, Bible-saturated, interdependent community in the church, has, in many pockets of evangelicalism, morphed into a teaching that encourages radical individualism and undermines the significance of the church’s life together. Luther’s doctrine was not perfect. Few evangelicals will want to return to a reliance on a state church system or limitations on religious liberty. But a proper understanding of Luther’s teaching and this doctrine’s development in history could help churches recover a more biblical, Christ-centered view of the priesthood of all believers, and thereby a more biblical community life within the church.

Notes

1. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1988), 95.
2. Herschell H. Hobbs, You Are Chosen: The Priesthood of All Believers (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990), 14.
3. Alister McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution—A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 53.
4. Ibid., 232, 237-38.
5. Eric W. Gritsch, “Introduction to Church and Ministry,” in Luther’s Works (ed. Jaroslav J. Pelikan and Helmut T Lehmann; 55 vols.; St. Louis: Concordia, and Philadelphia: Fortress, 1955-1986), 39:xix (hereafter LW).
6. Martin Luther, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, in Three Treatises (2d ed.; rev. James Atkinson; trans. Charles M. Jacobs; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970), 11-12.
7. For a concise summary of this ontology, see John Witte, Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 106.
8. Cyril Eastwood, The Priesthood of All Believers: An Examination of the Doctrine from the Reformation to the Present Day (London: Epworth Press, 1960), 9.
9. Luther, Christian Nobility, 14.
10. For examples of his use of 2 Pet 2:9, see ibid., 21, 29; Luther, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, in Three Treatises (2d ed.; ed. and trans. A. T W. Steinhauser; rev. Frederick G. Ahrens and Abdel Ross Wentz; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970), 244; Luther, The Private Mass and the Consecration of Priests, inLI1{38:187; Luther, Concerning the Ministry, 1523, inLI1{40:21-22; Luther, Dr. Luther’s Retraction of the Error Forced Upon Him by the Most Highly Learned Priest of God, Sir Jerome Emser, Vicar in Meissen, 1521, in LW, 39:236.
11. Luther, Christian Nobility, 14, 21.
12. Luther, Babylonian Captivity, 214. See also Luther, The Keys, 1530, in LW, 40:321-78.
13. Luther, Babylonian Captivity, 244.
14. Brian Gerrish, “Priesthood and Ministry in the Theology of Luther,” CH 34 (1965): 411.
15. Luther, Dr. Luther’s Retraction of the Error, in LW, 39:235; see also Luther, The Private Mass, in LW, 38:187.
16. Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966), 313-14.
17. Luther, Concerning the Ministry, in LW, 40:20.
18. Luther, Dr. Luther’s Retraction of the Error, in LW, 39:235.
19. Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, 313-14.
20. Luther, Concerning the Ministry, in LW, 40:21.
21. Gerrish, “Priesthood and Ministry,” 410-11.
22. Luther, Concerning the Ministry, in LIT/40:23.
23. Luther, The Private Mass, in LW, 38:188. In another place Luther writes, “Therefore we are all priests, as many of us as are Christians. But the priests, as we call them, are ministers chosen from among us. All that they do is done in our name; the priesthood is nothing but a ministry” (The Babylonian Captivity, 244-45).
24. Luther, Concerning the Ministry, in LIT/40:33.
25. Gerrish summarizes Luther’s public/private distinction well. See block quote on pp. 131-32 below.
26. Luther, Concerning the Ministry, in LW, 40:33.
27. Gerrish, “Priesthood and Ministry,” 407-8.
28. Martin Luther, That a Christian Assembly or Congregation Has the Right and Power to Judge All Teaching, and to Call, Appoint and Dismiss Teachers, Established and Proven by Scripture, 1523, in LW, 39:301-14.
29. Ibid., 39:307; Luther, Concerning the Ministry, in LI1{40:36.
30. Luther, Concerning the Ministry, in LI1{40:36.
31. McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea, 53.
32. Martin Luther, Letter to the Princes of Saxony Concerning the Rebellious Spirit, 1524, in LW, 40:57.
33. Gritsch, “Introduction to Church and Ministry,” 304.
34. Luther’s early position is summarized in this quotation: “A Christian has so much power that he may and even should make an appearance and teach among Christians—without a call from men—when he becomes aware that there is a lack of teachers, provided he does it in a decent and becoming manner. This was clearly described by St. Paul in I Corinthians 14 [v. 30]” (That a Christian Assembly or Congregation Has the Right and Power to Judge All Teaching, in LW: 39:310).
35. Martin Luther, Infiltrating and Clandestine Preachers, 1532, in LW, 40:392.
36. Ibid., 40:393.
37. Gerrish, “Priesthood and Ministry,” 407.
38. R. Albert Mohler, introduction to The Axioms of Religion, by E. Y Mullins (ed. Timothy and Denise George; Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1997), 20. Mullins’s The Axioms of Religion: A Mew Interpretation of the Baptist Faith was published in Philadelphia by Griffith & Rowland Press in 1908 and has been reprinted many times.
39. Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 199.
40. For the most current and detailed analysis of Mullins’s presidency at SBTS, see Gregory A. Wills, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1859—2009 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 230-307.
41. The Baptist Faith and Message was revised in 1963 and in 2000.
42. Fisher Humphreys, “E. Y Mullins,” in Baptist Theologians (ed. Timothy George and David S. Dockery; Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1990), 335.
43. Mullins, Axioms, 65, 66.
44. Ibid., 65-66.
45. E. Y Mullins, Freedom and Authority in Religion (Philadelphia: Griffith & Rowland Press, 1913), 317.
46. Mullins, Axioms, 66.
47. Ibid., 101.
48. Mullins, “Baptist Theology in the New World Order,” in Axioms, 285.
49. Mullins, Axioms, 101, 67.
50. Ibid., 94.
51. Walter B. Shurden, “The Priesthood of All Believers and Pastoral Authority in Baptist Thought,” in Proclaiming the Baptist Vision: The Priesthood of All Believers (ed. Walter B. Shurden; Macon, Ga.: Smyth & Helwys, 1993), 147.
52. Mohler, “Introduction,” 15.
53. Mullins, Axioms, 118.
54. Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, 314.
55. Gerrish, “Priesthood and Ministry,” 416.
56. Mullins, “A True Denominationalism,” in Axioms, 279.
57. Mullins, Axioms, 102.
58. Mullins, “Baptists and Creeds,” in Axioms, 189.
59. Mullins, Axioms, 66.
60. Ibid., 117-18.
61. Ibid., 122-23.
62. Humphreys, “E. Y Mullins,” 346.
63. Mullins, Axioms, 67.
64. Nathan O. Hatch makes a convincing case that “the theme of democratization is central to understanding the development of American Christianity and that the years of the early republic are the most crucial in revealing that process” (The Democratization of American Christianity [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989], 3). Thomas Kidd argues that the American Revolution did not start the democratization process in American evangelicalism. A strong egalitarian impulse was present within evangelicalism from its beginnings in the mid-1740s (The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007], 289).
65. Gregory A. Wills, Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785-1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 139.