Sacerdotalism

“For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”

— 1 Timothy 2:5 (ESV)

Sacerdotalism is the belief that an ordained priesthood, not every believer alike, holds the mediatorial office of offering sacrifice and administering the sacraments. It names the sacramental systems of Roman Catholicism, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and high Anglicanism, in which the minister at the Lord’s Supper is held to act as a priest offering a sacrifice rather than as one who proclaims the Word.¹ Reformed theology rejects the position: Christ alone is the church’s priest and mediator, and every believer already has direct access to God through him, without a further human intermediary.¹

Confessional Witness

The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), a sibling document in the wider Reformed family, states the point directly under its chapter on worship:

“GOD ALONE IS TO BE INVOKED THROUGH THE MEDIATION OF CHRIST ALONE. In all crises and trials of our life we call upon him alone, and that by the mediation of our only mediator and intercessor, Jesus Christ…. For as the apostle says, ‘There is one God and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus’ (1 Tim. 2:5).”²

It draws the practical conclusion by name, ruling out any further mediating office between the believer and God:

“We do not adore, worship, or pray to the saints in heaven, or to other gods, and we do not acknowledge them as our intercessors or mediators before the Father in heaven. For God and Christ the Mediator are sufficient for us.”²

The same confession elsewhere grounds the priesthood of all believers: every Christian, not a separate ordained caste, shares Christ’s priesthood, though the confession still keeps that priesthood distinct from the church’s ordained ministry.³

The Second London Baptist Confession of 1689 has no chapter devoted to sacerdotalism by name, but its own account of church office leaves no room for a sacerdotal class. It names exactly two offices, both filled by the congregation’s own choice rather than conferred through an unbroken sacramental succession:

“The officers appointed by Christ to be chosen and set apart by the church … are bishops or elders, and deacons…. The way appointed by Christ for the calling of any person … unto the office of bishop or elder in a church, is, that he be chosen thereunto by the common suffrage of the church itself.”⁴

Biblical Basis

Paul grounds the case against sacerdotal mediation in Christ’s own singular office: “there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5). Hebrews makes the same point at length, contrasting Christ’s priesthood with the Levitical succession it fulfills and ends: because he “continues forever, he holds his priesthood permanently,” and “he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them” (Heb. 7:24-25). His sacrifice was offered “once for all” (Heb. 9:26; 10:11-14), unlike the Levitical priests who “were many in number, because they were prevented by death from continuing in office” (Heb. 7:23). On this basis Hebrews tells believers to “draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith,” using “the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh” (Heb. 10:19-22), and to “confidently draw near to the throne of grace” directly, rather than through a further human priest (Heb. 4:16).

A nineteenth-century Presbyterian handbook to Scripture states the conclusion: “Mediatorship between God and man through propitiatory sacrifice constitutes the central idea of priesthood…. We see, then, how false and mischievous is the idea that there can be true mediating priests under the New Testament dispensation. Christ appeared once for all ‘to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself’ (Heb. 9:25-28; 10:10-12), since which no further sacrifice is needed, or can be lawfully offered. Christ also opened to all believers through his blood a new and living way of access to God, through which they can come boldly to the throne of grace, having no need of human mediators.”⁵ The only sacrifices left for the New Testament church are the church’s own, non-atoning “spiritual sacrifices” of praise, obedience, and generosity (1 Pet. 2:5; Rom. 12:1; Heb. 13:15), offered by the whole body of believers, not a separate priestly class, through Christ their one high priest.⁵

Historical Development

The Lord’s Supper began as an ordinary meal. “Jesus and his disciples sat at a table when they celebrated the Supper, and the early Christians knew nothing of an altar.”⁶ The congregation’s own offerings were received “with prayers of thanksgiving,” and the meal itself came to be called a “pure sacrifice” (echoing Mal. 1:11, as the Didache already does), but in this early period “people thought in this connection only of a thank offering and not an expiatory offering.”⁷

Over the second and third centuries this changed. The Supper “increasingly acquired the character of a sacrifice offered not by the congregation but by the bishop,” and “when the Lord’s Supper turned into a sacrifice, the minister became a priest, and the table an altar.”⁶ Origen’s symbolic reading of the elements, shared by other Eastern fathers, gradually gave way to a “realistic doctrine of transformation.”⁸ Augustine held the older line for a time, teaching that bread and wine “are similitudes, signs, reminders of the body and blood of Christ,”⁹ and “for a long time Augustine’s teaching by its powerful influence held back the full development of a realist theory,” remaining dominant under the Carolingian theologians who followed him.¹⁰

The word “transubstantiation” itself first appears in the twelfth century, and the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) made the doctrine official teaching.¹⁰ Rome then held the Mass to be a priestly act only an ordained priest could perform: “the administration of the Eucharist … is above all priestly work and may never be performed by anyone other than an ordained priest,” and the sacrifice offered in the Mass was declared “the same as that accomplished on the cross,” repeated rather than merely remembered.¹¹ The pattern spread across the communions that kept an altar and a sacrificing priesthood: “In the Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox Churches, worship was controlled by this view. The Anglican (Episcopal) Church largely took it over and tends increasingly in that direction.”¹²

The Reformation reversed the development. Christ instituted “an official body of ministers (not priests!) to proclaim the Word of God,” and the Reformers restored Scripture, not an ordained priesthood administering the sacraments, as “the means of grace par excellence.” The result, as Bavinck puts it, is that “Christians, who accepted that Word with a believing heart, were liberated from sacerdotalism.”¹

Opposing Views

Roman Catholicism

Rome holds that the ordained priest, and not the congregation, offers the eucharistic sacrifice, and that this sacrifice is identical with Christ’s own sacrifice on the cross rather than merely a memorial of it. Cardinal Gousset states the position, quoted by Hodge as representative of Rome’s own teaching: “the mass is a sacrifice of the new law, in which the priest offers to God the body and blood of Jesus Christ under the form of bread and wine…. the eucharistic sacrifice is made by the hands of the priest, but Jesus Christ is the principal minister; He is at once priest and victim, offering himself to God the Father by the ministry of his priests.”¹³ Hodge summarizes the resulting doctrine of the priesthood itself: “Romanists represent ministers as true priests; mediators between God and the people, without whose intervention, no sinner can have access to God or obtain pardon or acceptance…. The words of consecration pronounced by other than sacerdotal lips, are inoperative.”¹⁴

Eastern Orthodoxy

The Eastern Orthodox Church shares the pattern of a sacrificing, ordained priesthood and an altar rather than a table, a development Bavinck traces to the same patristic shift that produced Rome’s doctrine.⁶ The two traditions still describe the change in the elements differently: the Eastern fathers spoke of metapoiēsis (transformation), where the medieval West developed the more precise doctrine of metousiōsis, transubstantiation.⁸

High Anglicanism

High-church Anglicanism inherited the same view of a sacrificing ministry rather than departing from it at the Reformation. Bavinck observes that the Anglican Church “largely took it over and tends increasingly in that direction,” in contrast to the Lutheran churches, which kept the altar as a matter of indifference rather than sacerdotal principle.¹² Berkhof describes the church-government claim behind the system, one high Anglicanism shares with Rome: bishops hold office as “the successors of the apostles,” constituted “a separate, independent, and self-perpetuating order,” in which “the community of believers has absolutely no share in the government of the Church.”¹⁵ Berkhof judges the claim historically and exegetically unsupportable: “the Bible does not warrant the existence of such a separate class of superior officers, who have the inherent right of ordination and jurisdiction.”¹⁵

Objections and Responses

Didn’t the Old Testament itself institute a priesthood, so that a New Testament priesthood only continues what God already ordained? The Old Testament priesthood was a type of Christ’s own priesthood, not a pattern for a further, ongoing human priesthood after his coming. “Mediatorship between God and man through propitiatory sacrifice constitutes the central idea of priesthood,” and Christ’s own once-for-all sacrifice fulfills and ends that office rather than handing it on: “no further sacrifice is needed, or can be lawfully offered.”⁵ Hebrews draws the same conclusion from the Levitical priesthood’s own limits: it required many successive priests “because they were prevented by death from continuing in office” (Heb. 7:23), a limitation Christ’s permanent, resurrected priesthood does not share.

Isn’t calling an ordained minister a “priest” simply an honorific term, not a claim that he mediates grace the way Christ does? The Reformers did not think so, which is why they deliberately described the office in different language. Christ instituted “an official body of ministers (not priests!) to proclaim the Word of God,”¹ precisely because the sacerdotal vocabulary carries the claim under dispute: that consecration by an ordained priest, not simply the Word received in faith, is what makes the sacrament effective. Where a tradition in fact teaches that “the words of consecration pronounced by other than sacerdotal lips, are inoperative,”¹⁴ the priestly title is doing exactly the theological work Reformed theology denies it should do.

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace”: “Rome insists that means are essential and tied to the sacramental power of the institutional church’s priesthood…. Apart from Christ, apart from the church, apart from the priest, and apart from the sacrament, accordingly, there is no salvation…. Christ also instituted an official body of ministers (not priests!) to proclaim the Word of God. Changed also was the medieval Roman understanding of grace as a sacerdotal power to a spiritual power of the Word…. Thus Christians, who accepted that Word with a believing heart, were liberated from sacerdotalism.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), chap. 5, “Of the Adoration, Worship and Invocation of God through the Only Mediator Jesus Christ.” ↩ ↩²
The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), chap. 18, “Of the Ministers of the Church, Their Institution and Duties.” ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” paras. 8-9. ↩
Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 597. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 22: “The Lord’s Supper is best served around a table, not an altar of sacrifice. Jesus and his disciples sat at a table when they celebrated the Supper, and the early Christians knew nothing of an altar…. when the Lord’s Supper turned into a sacrifice, the minister became a priest, and the table an altar. In the Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox Churches, worship was controlled by this view.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 22: the Lord’s Supper was called a “pure sacrifice,” as the Didache, appealing to Malachi 1:11, already calls it; “in the early period people thought in this connection only of a thank offering and not an expiatory offering.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 22: “The symbolic and spiritualistic view of Origen, also found in other Eastern fathers, gave way for the realistic doctrine of transformation (μεταποιησις, metapoiēsis), which later passed over into the doctrine of transubstantiation (μετουσιωσις, metousiōsis).” ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 22: “Bread and wine, says Augustine, are similitudes, signs, reminders of the body and blood of Christ.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 22: “For a long time Augustine’s teaching by its powerful influence held back the full development of a realist theory and was still dominant under the Carolingian theologians…. The word ‘transubstantiation’ occurred for the first time in the twelfth century, and the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) decreed that the body and blood of Christ ‘are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the appearance of bread and wine, the bread being transubstantiated into the body and the wine into blood by divine power.’” ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 22: “The administration of the Eucharist, therefore, is above all priestly work and may never be performed by anyone other than an ordained priest…. The sacrifice that the priest effects in the Mass is the same as that accomplished on the cross.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 22: “In the Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox Churches, worship was controlled by this view. The Anglican (Episcopal) Church largely took it over and tends increasingly in that direction. The Lutheran Church kept the altar, regarding the matter an adiaphoron.” ↩ ↩²
Cardinal Gousset, quoted in Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 684. ↩
Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:684. ↩ ↩²
Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 563-64. ↩ ↩²