The Ministry of the Priesthood of Jesus Christ: A Reformed View of the Atonement of Christ

The priestly ministry of Jesus Christ is the heart of the doctrine of salvation. It is also almost everywhere neglected. It is the corner-stone that carries the christological (the doctrine of Christ), soteriological (the doctrine of salvation) and eschatological (the doctrine of the future hope) weight of the Gospel. We begin with a general introduction to the priestly office of Jesus Christ.

The center of Christian faith is found in the two-fold aspect of Christ’s priesthood, in which through his incarnation he took on our human nature, and from within it healed it and made it holy in himself, and which he offers up to God in and through himself on our behalf. As Son of God, Christ represents God to us. He is the word of God, Emmanuel. As Son of Man, Christ represents humankind to God. He is the appropriate response to God from the body of the flesh. Christ’s priesthood in this way is determined by who Christ is in the personal union of his incarnate personhood, as wholly God and wholly human, and what God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, wills in and through him that we should be and do. It is this that is fulfilled in Christ. As the “Apostle and High Priest of our confession” (Heb. 3.1), Christ, in the unity of his personhood, brings God to us and us to God in a saving work of grace that restores to us the gift of communion with God in which we discover the fullness of our humanity. In this dual action of the one work of incarnation and atonement does our Lord’s priesthood consist.1 Because of its centrality, the whole approach to the understanding of Christian faith, as well as the church and ministry, needs to be thoroughly reframed in the light of the theological testimony to the priesthood of Jesus Christ exercised through his vicarious humanity.

Two points may be noted briefly. First, the church’s faith in this singular priesthood of Jesus Christ presupposes the incarnation, which in turn presupposes the doctrine of the Trinity, for it is only as God with us in a singular and unique way that Christ is also the human for God in a saving way. From beginning to end, salvation is God’s work. The Gospel stands or falls, then, on the singularity of Christ’s soteriological Sonship, which is, of course, the point made by the homoousios to patri of the Nicene Creed (‘of one substance with the Father’), still the only universally accepted creed of the whole church. Second, it is because Jesus is the human for God that the incarnation becomes wholly redemptive through his active obedience in which he offers us up to God in the flesh of his own humanity through his life of worship and filial love. Here we take very seriously the teaching that no one comes to the Father except through Jesus (John 14.6). By the priestly hand of Christ alone we are presented to God. This is not only a completed past event in the body of the flesh. This offering is the continuing priestly ministry of Christ in his ascended rule at the right hand of the Father, in which he intercedes for us.

The danger for orthodoxy is likely always to lie in thinking of the incarnation itself as the whole Gospel, which undercuts Christ’s ministry in our humanity in a docetic (the heresy that doesn’t take Christ’s humanity seriously) way.2 When the incarnation is not thought through in terms that include the priesthood of the humanity of Christ it means, in fact, the rejection of the atonement. It is not yet salvation just that God is in communion with us, and that God has acted in Christ for us, but that we should be in communion with God. For this, Christ must, from the side of our humanity, be our High Priest, offering by his own hand vicariously our human sacrificial response to God, confessing our sin and living the filial life that God requires, so that in and through him in his priestly humanity is both the holy word of God to us and the righteous response of humankind to God. This claim for the priesthood of Jesus Christ is no doubt large and controversial, yet the actuality of the Gospel rides on the back of its truth.

The notion of the priesthood of Jesus Christ reflects a cultural mapping of experience that is far removed from much modern Western Protestant experience, especially as the priesthood of Christ is given in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and even more distantly, in its setting in the priestly and soteriological understandings and practices of biblical Israel. This is not a problem unique to this topic. The connections between ancient metaphors and modern idioms and experiences are always more or less tenuous. Further, the claim that Christ’s priesthood entails the singular efficacy of his atonement strains the nerve of postmodernist inclusivism. Doubtless this strong appeal to what may appear to be an arcane, old-fashioned and unlamentedly ill-exercised biblical doctrine as the priestly ministry of Christ will strike an odd and even a wrong note in some ears, although in its defense one can cite a long and continuing tradition in Reformed dogmatics.

To begin with a few general notes. While the Gospels make no reference to the priesthood of Jesus, Christian tradition ascribes three offices to Jesus Christ—prophet, priest and king, intending to express in the unity of his person and work his identity as the Anointed One. The terms are functional and theological; they imply the person who bears them. Their inherent indirection also suggests that they have a metaphorical character. This leads us to anticipate, therefore, that they stand in both continuity and discontinuity with the Old Testament practices of prophesy, priesthood and kingship from which they are derived, as even with contemporary meanings taken from culture. In Christ these offices were not just fulfilled, but radically transformed or transcended. The offices were not just taken over by christology; neither was christology squeezed to fit into their shape. Rather, in Christ something new happened, as the old was redeployed in the service of the new reality in Jesus Christ. This is metaphorical theology at work. In this way, as T. W. Manson has noted, Christ is as prophet, both Teacher and Teaching, as priest, both Priest and Sacrifice, and as king, both Victor and Victory,3 in a way that profoundly redefines the terms in and through his own life and ministry.

Richard Nelson has recently shown that priesthood in Israel was a complex matter that from the distant perspective of Western Christianity can at best only be understood in a partial way.4 What is clear is that Israel’s priests were both ministers of God’s word and ministers of the altar of sacrifice.5 There was a Mosaic and an Aaronic aspect that becomes one in Christ’s priesthood. The priests ministered at the boundary between God and the community, between word of God and human response, bringing God to the people, and the people to God. Having access to holy space and holy tradition, priests acted both as insulators, protecting the people from God, and as connectors, mediating between the people and God, making religious life possible.6

In the New Testament, Christ’s priesthood means above all the word of God addressing us in the incarnate flesh of Jesus of Nazareth, and the human work of Jesus Christ in response in his dealing with the Father on our behalf, as our representative before God. Like the priests of Israel, Jesus our priest stands at the boundary between God and humankind. This is what Hebrews 3.1 means when it refers to him as the Apostle and High Priest of our profession. He is in himself God’s prophetic saving word toward humankind, and the perfect priestly and human obedience to that word. According to T. F. Torrance,

As Apostle Christ bears witness for God, that He is holy. As High Priest He acknowledges that witness and says Amen to it. Again as Apostle of God He confesses the mercy and grace of God, His will to pardon and reconcile. As High Priest He intercedes for men, and confesses them before the face of God… From the side of God He acts in the steadfastness of divine truth and love in judgment, from the side of man He acts in unswerving obedience to the Father.7

This priestly response, of course, is in act as well as word, and its consequence is the cross, in which he bears in his body the terrible cruelty of our separation from God, and offers the self-sacrifice in which priest and victim are identical, united in his person. His homologia or confession of our sin as Apostle and High Priest (3.1, 4.14, 10.23) as he enters within the veil of the holiness and judgment of God, is a substitutionary atonement, an offering on our behalf in which the sinless one confesses our sin before God. This is utterly an act of God’s grace and love, because Christ offers himself in unfailing obedience from and to the Father, with whom he is unbreakably linked, and in an unbreakable link with us, with whom he chose to join himself. Not only is God in Christ reconciling us to God, but also humankind is in Christ being reconciled to God in a unique and once for all union of word and action in which the Mosaic and Aaronic priesthoods of the Old Testament are united, fulfilled and transcended. Manson sums up Christ’s priesthood “as his complete self-dedication in unreserved obedience to God his father and in unlimited love and compassion toward (humankind).”8

Martin Luther operated with the two-fold christological offices of king and priest, and went on to outline the Christian life in terms of kingship and priesthood.9 John Calvin, in his Institutes, holding together the person and work of Christ, developed the three-fold office of prophet, priest and king, in that order, although the priestly office was usually given priority in the way the offices were developed.10 This was the framework by which he developed his christological soteriology. The emphasis is on his offices “for us,”11 which inevitably means a priestly aspect. This was carried into Scottish theology by John Knox, where especially the priestly ministry of Christ came to shape the whole understanding of worship and ministry.12 This Reformed use of the three-fold offices of Christ, and especially of his priestly office, as might be expected, has a biblical basis, but is best understood not as a pure biblical theology as such, but as a dogmatic conception, as a theologoumenon, that enables faith to grasp the person and work of Jesus in a helpful way.

The existence of the priesthood of Jesus as a significant biblical category, especially in Hebrews, 1 John 2.1f and Romans 8.34, though the whole New Testament doctrine of reconciliation depends upon it, its corollary in the royal and holy priesthood of the church in 1 Peter, and its persistence as a central christological category right up to the present day, suggests a dogmatic vitality that should not be lightly dismissed. It is quite reasonable to suggest that that which is biblical and of long-standing dogmatic usage can be critically re-appropriated and brought into service as a creative central metaphor for theology if it continues to be demanded by the objective force of the Gospel upon our minds.

In a summary way, the following three consequences arise. First, it is only on the basis of Christ’s priesthood that the reconciliation between God and the world can be reclaimed as the heart of the Gospel and the center of Christian life and ministry. Reclaimed: the atonement, it has been suggested, is an abandoned doctrine in mainline Protestantism today, forced to the margins in order to make way in the main for the discussion of the Christian’s moral and social responsibility.13 The major tension that has opened up within modern Protestantism can be charted by the modernist tendency to give the prophetic ministry of Christ prominence at the expense of his priestly and royal ministries. In this way, Protestant Christianity is in process of a remarkable though reductionist redefinition as it journeys en route to the fulfillment of Kant’s vision of a religion of ethical imperatives. It has been forgotten that social ministry is the fruit of atonement and faithfulness to Christ’s reign; and that salvation is not reducible to successful social ministry.

Second, a serious theological error lies buried within this modernist reordering of the understanding of Jesus Christ and his Gospel. This has little to do with a preference for justice over atonement. In the language of the three-fold offices of Christ used especially by Calvin, it needs to be understood that participation in his prophetic and royal offices—which is a valid part of Christian discipleship––is through a sharing in his priestly office. As T. F. Torrance rightly notes, until the parousia, Christ “exercises His Kingdom only through His Priesthood.”14 A sharing in Christ’s royal rule through a sharing in his priesthood now means a sharing in his glory only as a sharing in his suffering servanthood. The church on earth reigns with Christ and proclaims the word of God only as it goes the way of his cross. In this Torrance is following the teaching of an earlier Scottish theologian, William Milligan, who in 1898, wrote that “Christians are what they are by being in Christ as their Priest, by whom they draw near to God, and in whom the chief end of their being is accomplished. Knowledge of Him in that office thus precedes their full experience of Him in the other offices discharged by Him on their behalf. In the order of thought our Lord is Priest in heaven before He is Prophet or King. His prophetical and kingly offices are but the further issues of what He accomplishes as Priest.”15

There is no possibility within our humanity of an adequate response to the word of God or the reign of God, except as Christ makes that response for us. It is Christ as our priest who stands before God as the person of faith, the Mediator given by and as God, yet standing wholly within our humanity, who proclaims and answers God’s word, and who announces and lives God’s reign. It is to his answering and living that we are joined, making Christian faith, life and ministry possible. This is the vital aspect that makes practical theology both practical and theological, yet it is often omitted today, for two reasons. On the one hand, from the side of confessional orthodoxy, it is omitted because of the tendency so to emphasize the incarnation that the corresponding Godward response of Jesus Christ goes unnoticed. On the other hand, from the side of the pluralist critics of confessionalism, it is omitted because of the reluctance to acknowledge Christ’s singular Lordship as Mediator and priest.

Third, to construe Christian faith, ministry and life on any other basis than a sharing in Christ’s priesthood is to cast us back upon ourselves in order to make it practical. This is a pastoral as well as a soteriological Pelagianism that arises out of an idealist theology construed as a principal, that turns Jesus into a set of ideas that we must bring to application, and which thereby is inherently abstract. Rather than our sharing by the grace of the Holy Spirit in the priesthood of Christ, and thereby to share also in his prophetic and royal ministries, we are left to our own faith and work to make a Christ-principal manifest. At the last moment this makes the Gospel no Gospel at all, for it becomes our responsibility to make actual what is otherwise only a concept. In view of what it is that the priestly office of Christ fulfils in his dealing with the Father on our behalf, the reality of Christ’s work in that regard gives it a central place in practical theology.

A fundamental theological claim is made that points to the priesthood of Jesus Christ as the practical center of the Gospel, on which everything else in faith, life and ministry depend. Christ comes as the incarnate word of God who makes the response of faith, life and ministry in our place, not instrumentally in our humanity but as wholly human in a personal and vicarious manner.16 The Gospel is not a religious idea proclaimed, or even a cosmic drama conducted ‘above our heads,’ as Aulen’s Christus Victor really seems to suggest, but God’s personal act in Jesus Christ by which God comes as God’s word in an atoning incarnation and to which word Jesus our Brother responds. Further, the Gospel is our inclusion in the benefit of this twofold action through a sharing in his person, not by imputation but through relationship with Christ, in union with Christ. It is this dual movement in and through the hypostatic union (union of two natures in one person in doctrine of Christ) of the one person of Jesus Christ that forces us to think soteriologically about the incarnation, and relationally about soteriology, so to understand our salvation not only in terms of the act of God in Christ that deals with our sins, but also in terms of the act of God in Christ that offers to God from the side of our humanity the life of satisfaction through the worship and service that God desires, which is the life of communion with God. There is no Gospel for us, no atonement that brings us into communion with God and allows us to worship and serve God as God desires, without both the worldward and Godward movements of God in Christ, in which there is both a real and not just an apparent incarnation, and a worthy and acceptable response to God out of the heart and in the flesh of our humanity to which we are joined. In particular, there is no Gospel at the point where we are called to worship and serve God, without the vicarious humanity of Our Lord in and through which he gives to the Father the life of worship and service in which we, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, are blessed to participate. Without the priestly ministry of Jesus Christ in the body of the flesh there is no possibility for the faithful response to God from the side of humanity that God desires, and the Gospel is cut off from us at just that place where we are required by God to respond with worship and service.

The Gospel has to overcome not only our sin unto death but also our inability to offer to God the worship and service that God rightly commands. This is not merely moral and technical incompetence to be overcome by renewed effort. Neither is it a question of our becoming more religious. It is a mistake too to offer an account of the agency of the Holy Spirit at just this point when that means bypassing the vicarious priesthood of Christ. Christian faith teaches that between God and ourselves stands the need for an atonement, not only as the means of dealing with sin, guilt and death, but also as the means of our return to relationship with God and service of God, to life in communion with God. Too often, a theology of atonement has attended to the former without attending also to the latter, leaving us still to our own devices, whether in faith looking for the fruits of sanctification in order to have assurance, or in life and ministry looking to the success of our best efforts in order to have confidence that our work is blessed by God. The effect is to throw us back upon ourselves at the last moment, leaving both faith and ministry to be worked out in terms of our own response, with no role for Jesus Christ at just that point where we need him most with respect to the practice of faith and ministry. This is a drastic and ultimately fatal abridgement of the Gospel.

The priesthood of Christ is a theological metaphor that points in a decidedly non-literal yet Godly way to the meaning of our baptismal incorporation into Christ. It lifts us out of concern for our role in the management of salvation––often reducible to a dull causality––into the mystery of our adoption as children of God through our incorporation into Christ and our union with Christ. It presents itself on its own terms as the practical center of Christian faith, as that in which faith hopes, on which faith depends, and that makes faith possible in the first place. There is a sense, therefore, in which the priesthood of Christ is everything.

There are three important conclusions. First, Christ’s substitution is not just an act done for us two thousand years ago. Always standing as our Mediator, in his substitutionary priestly office he continues to be the One who stands between God and humankind, setting aside our obedience, worship and service, which always remain deeply inadequate, offering his own in our place. This soteriological displacement must be worked out in a thoroughgoing way. Second, he continually prays for us, interceding with the Father on our behalf (Heb. 6.20, 7.25-28, 8.1-6). He takes our prayer, for we do not know how to pray (Rom 8.26), and perfects it in himself, giving us his prayer in a ‘wonderful exchange.’17 Third, he sends us the Holy Spirit to join us to his worship and service, making us a royal priesthood, worshipping and serving God in and through Jesus Christ, to the glory of the Father. His priesthood becomes our priesthood by grace, and this is the theological basis for ecclesiology, in general, and for pastoral care, in particular. In the dispensation of the church, baptism is the sacrament of our substitution in which we die and rise with Christ, and thus is only administered once; the Lord’s Supper is the sacrament of our sharing in his continuing life, and thus is to be celebrated whenever the people of the Body gather. These words of John McLeod Cambell sum up the consequence: “Therefore Christ, as the Lord of our spirits and our life, devotes us to God and devotes us to men in the fellowship of his self-sacrifice.”18

The priesthood of Christ takes us into the center of the Gospel, not only at the point of atonement for sin, but also at the point of our sharing in the fellowship of Christ’s self-sacrifice, which is the sum of Christian life and ministry. It is Christ’s priestly ministry that enables us to hold salvation and discipleship together as Gospel. The great danger is always that at the last moment Gospel becomes its opposite, in which everything depends upon us—our faith, our decisions or works exercised as in a legal or commercial transaction. God in Christ acts in a two-fold way in the flesh of our humanity as our atoning priest, bringing God to us and us to God, to bridge the gulf which separated between what sin had made us, and what it was the desire of God’s love that we should become. The redemption of us who stand condemned in our sins is only truly and fully seen in its relation to the results contemplated, namely, our participation in eternal life through our adoption as children of God.

Christ has consecrated a way into the holy company of God through the purification of his blood enabling us, in the name of Christ, not only to worship God in truth but to draw near to God, crying, “Abba, Father.” We come to God only as God’s children, or not at all, and that alone in the power of the priestly Sonship of Jesus Christ, in his revealing of the Father as our Father, and in his offering of us in his own humanity to share in his divine Sonship.

Deeply influencing this conclusion are two vital aspects of Calvin’s theology: union with Christ and the wonderful exchange. The two concepts interpret one another. Christ, who has joined himself to us in his incarnation, joins us to himself through the Spirit, and by his continuing priestly intercession for us, makes us to share in his filial communion with the Father, effecting a wonderful exchange, a glorious substitution, taking to himself our sin, enmity and death, giving us what is his, his righteousness, love and eternal life, in sum, leading us to pray with Christ, “Our Father, who art in heaven…” This is salvation.

This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Jul/Aug 1997).