institutional church’s pretensions, both political and theological. Yet, as his later opposition to the fanatics demonstrates, he had no intention of putting the Bible into the hands of the laity simply for each believer to do with it as they would. His emphasis upon the fundamental perspicuity of scripture did not deny a role in the church for theological professionals nor did it insist that each person was as competent to discern the meaning of scripture as every-one else. Thus, the need for proper theological education was maintained by : Luther’s Reformation, then, was a combination of two separate and, to an extent, incompatible ideological emphases. On the one hand, the notions of individual conversion, justification through faith and the authority of a per- spicuous scripture, all served, potentially at least, to empower the laity: to place the individual, outside formal, institutional frameworks, in the theo-

doi:10.4324/9780203166505-20

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institutional church’s pretensions, both political and theological. Yet, as his later opposition to the fanatics demonstrates, he had no intention of putting the Bible into the hands of the laity simply for each believer to do with it as they would. His emphasis upon the fundamental perspicuity of scripture did not deny a role in the church for theological professionals nor did it insist that each person was as competent to discern the meaning of scripture as every-one else. Thus, the need for proper theological education was maintained by

Chapter

institutional church’s pretensions, both political and theological. Yet, as his later opposition to the fanatics demonstrates, he had no intention of putting the Bible into the hands of the laity simply for each believer to do with it as they would. His emphasis upon the fundamental perspicuity of scripture did not deny a role in the church for theological professionals nor did it insist that each person was as competent to discern the meaning of scripture as every-one else. Thus, the need for proper theological education was maintained by

ABSTRACT

Given the somewhat rhetorical and polemical purpose of Luther’s language concerning universal priesthood, it is hard to believe that the infrequency of the term in later Reformed Protestantism is at all significant from a theological perspective. John Calvin makes little of the language and, in connection with I Peter 2.9 makes only a passing reference to the idea, typically focusing his attention instead on the priesthood of Christ.18

Nevertheless, in Calvin, as in evangelical Protestantism in general, the foundations of the idea are all there: the centrality of assurance, the immediacy of the believer’s communion with God in Christ, the unmediated access of the believer to the Father through Christ and the corollaries in church practice (namely, the vernacular scriptures, an emphasis upon the clear preaching of the word and a focus upon the sacraments as acts of promise rather than physical channels binding believers to an institutional hierarchy possessing a monopoly on grace).