its influence they began offering up spiritual sacrifices by preaching about God and his purposes. Notice, God did not choose a few of those about 120 persons present to be a clergy or priesthood to do the preaching and the rest to be the listeners or laity, but “they all became filled with holy spirit and started to speak . . . about the magnificent things of God.”—Acts 2:4, 11.

16. How did Jesus prepare his followers for the duties of the general priesthood even before the day of Pentecost?

¹⁶ It is evident in many ways that the teaching of the general priesthood was understood and practiced in the early congregation. They were called upon to follow in the footsteps of their High Priest, Christ Jesus, and during his ministry on earth he not only performed the duties of the new high priest himself, but he made the priestly duties general by teaching his followers to do the same.—Luke 10:1-12.

17-19. How do we know that the missionary commission given by Jesus and recorded at Matthew 28:19 was not only for the eleven apostles?

¹⁷ Some call attention to the fact that when Jesus, for instance, gave the famous missionary commission, as recorded in Matthew 28:19, only the eleven apostles were present, and they therefore contend it was given to the apostles alone. But it is also understood that “upward of five hundred brothers” were there also. (1 Cor. 15:6) It is true that the apostles more than anybody else were busy establishing new congregations in many countries, but they were certainly not alone in that work. Everybody was helping. When Paul came to Rome for the first time, it was not to establish a congregation, for there was already a congregation there, and the brothers came out to meet him before he entered the city.—Rom. 1:8, 13; Acts 28:14-16.

¹⁸ The apostles themselves did not understand the missionary commandment to be for them alone. Notice Paul’s commending words to the brothers at Thessalonica: “The fact is, not only has the word of Jehovah sounded forth from you in Macedonia and Achaia, but in every place your faith toward God has spread abroad, so that we do not need to say anything.”—1 Thess. 1:8.

¹⁹ Titus and Timothy were teachers, but they were teachers of teachers; they were not ministers who were sent to teach a laity. Paul wrote Timothy: “The things you heard from me with the support of many witnesses, these things commit to faithful men, who, in turn, will be adequately qualified to teach others.” (2 Tim. 2:2) This is in harmony with what we read in Revelation 22:17: “The spirit and the bride keep on saying: ‘Come!’ And let anyone hearing say: ‘Come!’” When the Hebrews were slow in making progress to the point of actively participating in the general priesthood’s duties, Paul was disappointed: “For, indeed, although you ought to be teachers in view of the time, you again need someone to teach you from the beginning the elementary things of the sacred pronouncements of God.” No laity was tolerated in that congregation.—Heb. 5:12.

20. How does history confirm the general priesthood of the early church?

²⁰ History confirms the same. Danish professor Hal Koch says in his Church History: “Only in the days of the apostles and the decades immediately thereafter, do we hear of real missionaries, occupied with the dissemination of Christianity as their task and vocation. Otherwise, it was quite ordinary Christians, merchants, workmen, slaves and whatever social positions there were, who drew new members to the congregation.” There is no doubt about it: The general priesthood was a characteristic feature of the early Christian church; every member was a priest who considered it his duty to preach and teach about God inside and outside the congregation, and they were supported by the spirit of God poured out on them. There was no laity in that church. How did it, then, ever come about that the churches of Christendom today hardly know anything but a pulpit-preaching clergy and a passive laity?

A DEVILISH CHANGE

21. Did the congregational servants of the early church make up a priesthood?

²¹ Since the early Christian congregation was a working organization, it was necessary to appoint some of the members to special services. To be appointed to such service position, one had to be a mature, older man or so-called “elder” (Greek: presbýteros). From among the older men, congregation overseers (Greek: epískopoi) and their assistants or ministerial servants (Greek: diákonoi) were selected. Because of what we have just seen about the general priesthood within the early church, they were not appointed to make up a priesthood; they were simply the servants of their Christian brothers.—Acts 6:1-7; Titus 1:5; 1 Pet. 5:2, 3; Matt. 20:25-28.

22. How did congregational servants later get to make up a priesthood?

²² Paul, however, prophesied truthfully: “After my going away oppressive wolves will enter in among you and will not treat the flock with tenderness, and from among you yourselves men will rise and speak twisted things to draw away the disciples after themselves.” One of the sad consequences of this rise to oppressive power of selfish men was the complete loss of the general priesthood. According to church history, during the second century the servants in the congregations were slowly but surely elevated to form a special priesthood. The congregational overseers or epískopoi put on the garb of a bishop, the elders or presbýteroi were changed from just being the mature, older men from among whom the servants could be selected, to be in the office of a priest, and the ministerial servants or assistants were made our day’s deacons. Men took to themselves positions by which they became a hierarchy that for centuries exercised a harsh spiritual and secular rule, lording it over a laity.—Acts 20:29, 30.

23. (a) What makes the Catholic clergy an outstanding example of a so-called Christian clergy that has changed from the general to the special priesthood? (b) Why was this change devilish?

²³ The priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church is a striking example of this. Not only does this priesthood make up a distinct, separate class elevated over the laity in power, education and appearance, imitating the arrangement of a special priesthood, but it has built literal temple buildings with literal altars and dressed its members in special garments to distinguish them from the common church member. To make the return to the special priesthood complete, it claims to possess by special consecration the power to call Christ Jesus down on its altars at will, to sacrifice his literal flesh and blood in the Roman Catholic mass. The switch from the general back to the special priesthood could hardly have been more perfectly made, if a Christian appearance was still to be maintained. By depriving the members of the church of their right to be God’s active servants preaching his Word, by maiming them into a body of ignorant, often illiterate, churchgoers, the clergy quenched the spirit of God in the church and stripped it of its original dynamic force for spreading the good news and thus stripped it of the right kind of regeneration, by which the truth about God and Christ should conquer the world. That change was devilish.

The General Priesthood Today

“I shall pour out my spirit on every sort of flesh, and your sons and your daughters will certainly prophesy. As for your old men, dreams they will dream. As for your young men, visions they will see. And even on the menservants and on the maidservants in those days I shall pour out my spirit.”—Joel 2:28, 29.

1, 2. Who is taking the lead in Christendom’s present drive for reviving the general priesthood, and what are the motives?

FOR centuries theologians in Christendom have known that the church organizations they upheld by having a special priesthood were unchristian, unbiblical; but not until this twentieth century have they started doing something about it. Now they talk much about the “general priesthood.” Strange as it may seem, considering her hierarchical structure, it was the Roman Catholic Church that took the lead in Christendom’s present campaign to put back to work that same “laity” that it so carefully had kept inactive for centuries.

² Let it be noted, however, that her motives for doing so are not so much a desire to see a change in church organization back to the general priesthood of the early church as it is a dire necessity due to a fatal shortage of Roman Catholic men who want to become priests.a This shortage threatens to frustrate the Catholic bid for world power, and therefore the Catholic laity must now be made active. That is the reason for talking about the general priesthood in a church that otherwise could not be interested in reminding anybody of that old doctrine.

3. According to Pope Pius XII, is there one general apostolate for all Catholics to share in, and will the laity acquire equality with the priesthood by participating in the apostolate?

³ To the Second World Congress of the Lay Apostolate held at Rome, Italy, in 1957, Pope Pius XII explained that within the Catholic church there are two apostolates: a ‘hierarchical apostolate’ and an ‘apostolate of the laity.’ The pope raised the question: “Does the layman entrusted with the teaching of religion, by the very fact that he has received a mission canonica (an ecclesiastical mandate) to teach, and whose teaching may perhaps constitute his only professional activity, pass from the lay apostolate to the ‘hierarchical apostolate’?” The answer was No. The actual power to teach is vested in the pope and bishops alone. “All others, whether priests or laymen, collaborate in the measure in which ecclesiastical authority trusts them to teach accurately and to guide the faithful.”b

4. How general is the priesthood in which the Roman Catholic laity is called on to participate?

⁴ In other words, in spite of all the talking about the general priesthood, we should not expect to see the Catholic church from now on abolish her orders and supply her laity everywhere with Bibles and study aids, so that every Catholic can fulfill his duty as a Christian preaching the Word of God to others. According to Pope Pius XII, “all Christians are not called to the lay apostolate in the strict sense.”c Only a select specially trained minority of the laity will be used for this, and such top-rank lay ministers the church is willing to pay a salary of up to $12,000 a year.d That, it could be argued, does not leave much of the generality.

5. Why do you think the pope is speaking of the laity as sharing in the apostolate in a “less correct sense of the term”? What are they expected to do?

⁵ What, then, will all the millions of Catholics do who are not ‘trusted to teach accurately’ the Catholic faith, but who are nevertheless called on to share in the “general priesthood”? Whereas they are “not called to lay apostolate in the strict sense,” they are encouraged to participate in an “apostolate of prayer and of personal example as an apostolate in the wider and less correct sense of the term.” Why it is called an apostolate in a “less correct sense of the term” is evident when looked at more closely. For these millions of Catholics there is no offering up of spiritual sacrifices to God in the form of ‘fruits of lips making public declaration to his name’ to identify them with the early church, no privileges of service along the principles of the general priesthood. Their work in the world is, according to Pope Pius XII, to form Catholic cells in workshops, to enter into public, economic, social and political life, to join trade union movements and cooperative associations of producers and consumers as well as international organizations like UNESCO, so as “to impart to it the mark of Christ.”e

6. What does the Catholic program, referred to as practicing a general priesthood, remind one of, and what has it been used to in the past?

⁶ All this smacks more of infiltration as used by certain political movements than of the work performed by the hard-preaching members of the early Christian general priesthood. The most important branch of the Catholic layman movement is the so-called Catholic Action, a semireligious movement that has often been used by the church the same way the Nazis used their SA-troops in Germany under Hitler, as, for instance, when Catholic Action in the years just before and during World War II in the United States and other countries was used by the church violently to break up religious meetings of Jehovah’s witnesses because she did not like the facts told at such meetings.f

7. (a) How well does the Catholic laity respond to the call to participate in the lay apostolate of the church? (b) Can it truthfully be said that there is no general priesthood within the Catholic church? What is lacking?

⁷ In spite of all efforts, there are lamentations because of poor results. Said S. E. Mgr. Valerian Gracias, archbishop of Bombay: “How explain the apathy of the vast majority who with their intellectual and moral gifts could have been active and powerful participators in the apostolate of the hierarchy, but unfortunately are not? Each man today, in the language of St. Paul, is seeking his own and not what is Christ’s. There is no fire in their hearts, but only dying embers. Most Catholics entertain the notion that the Church is a kind of society to which one just belongs; the idea of the Church being a living organism is foreign to their minds.”g All this goes to prove that the so-called general priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church is nothing of the kind, and that God has not added his spirit to her efforts.—Acts 1:8.

8. Do the Greek Orthodox churches share in Christendom’s present discussion of the general priesthood?

⁸ The Greek Orthodox churches are almost as hierarchical in their structure as the Roman Catholic Church, but, contrary to the latter, they have abstained from talking about the general priesthood to any great extent.

PROTESTANTISM AND THE GENERAL PRIESTHOOD

9. (a) How was attention called to the general priesthood after it had disappeared for centuries? (b) How did Luther explain the general priesthood?

⁹ It was reformer Luther who brought the teaching of the general priesthood back into daylight. He was a keen Bible student and soon saw how far the Catholic church had removed herself from the early church by her special priesthood, and in his fight against the papacy he made diligent use of what he had found. “We were all consecrated to be priests at our baptism,” he emphasized, and he mocked the pope for thinking he could make priests out of already baptized Christians by an ordination ceremony. “That the pope or the bishop anoints, tonsures, ordains, consecrates and dresses a person differently from the laity,” he said, “may well make a hypocrite or a fool out of him, but it will never make him a Christian or a spiritual man.”h

10. (a) What did Luther consider the principal duty of the Christian? (b) What did Luther do after rediscovering the doctrine of the general priesthood? What were the results?

¹⁰ Then Luther, with great zeal, set out to practice the general priesthood in his newly formed church, teaching that the most important work of a Christian, a work that incorporates all the other priestly duties, is to “teach the Word of God.”i In this he suffered defeat, however. He had to learn that the common people had been spiritually so neglected by the Catholic church that the general priesthood and its duties were beyond their apprehension. Luther’s work in this respect was never followed up by his successors. It faded out.

11. Who else have tried to practice the general priesthood? With what results?

¹¹ Already such pre-Reformation movements as the Waldenses in Central Europe and the Lollards of Britain had tried to live up to the general priesthood. After the “reformation” a movement in Germany known as “Pietism” and our generation’s Oxford movement have to some extent tried to do the same, but all these efforts were evidently without the support of God’s holy spirit, because they all came to nothing, and even within the Lutheran church today the situation has not changed since Luther’s time: The doctrine of the Christian general priesthood is recognized in theory, but not practiced.

12. (a) How do some Protestant clergymen claim to have a general priesthood in their churches? What are the facts? (b) How is it evident that, for instance, the Lutheran State churches of Denmark and Sweden do not have a general priesthood?

¹² Nevertheless, many nonepiscopal Protestant clergymen, including Lutherans, claim they have the general priesthood and that their ministers are just servants taken out of the flock for a special task. In theory, it is said, any member of the congregation could function as such, just as the settlers in America chose the most suitable layman among them to be their minister, wherever they settled, until they could get a “real” minister, or just as sea captains are often considered ministers to their crew and passengers. The fact is, however, that the Protestant churches, including the Lutheran, have a special priesthood. The fact is that ordinarily nobody can preach or perform ceremonies in their churches without a special ordination. Normally, nobody gets ordained without special academic training, and they dress differently from the rest, at least when officiating. Any exceptions are so rare that they only emphasize the rule. In Protestant churches it is not as in the early church, where, according to Norwegian professor Hallesby, “all ceremonies of the church could be performed by any Christian.”j Therefore, honest Protestant ministers, whose churches teach the general priesthood, admit that they actually do have a special priesthood.k

FRUITLESS ATTEMPTS

13, 14. How do we know that Protestant Christendom is not content with its present situation relative to the general priesthood?

¹³ This so pitifully fell short of imitating the early Christians in living up to the doctrine of the general priesthood, that the knowledge of what ought to be done and the inability to do it could, of course, only prey on any church calling itself Christian. Therefore, when the World Council of Churches was founded in Amsterdam in 1948, it was equipped with a “Department on the Laity,” the aim of which is “to keep before the churches their responsibility for helping the laity to be the Church in the world.”l

¹⁴ In the reports from the assembly of the Council in Amsterdam we read: “We need to rethink what it means to speak of the Church as ‘a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people’ (1 Peter ii, 9), and as the ‘Body of Christ’ (Ephesians iv, 16) to which every member contributes in his measure.”a And in the reports from its assembly at Evanston, U.S.A., in 1954: “The phrase ‘the ministry of the laity’ expresses the privilege of the whole Church to share in Christ’s ministry to the world. We must understand anew the implication of the fact that we are all baptized; that, as Christ came to minister so must all Christians become ministers of His saving purpose.”b Finally, Protestantism is awakening to what it means to be a Christian, that it should have the general priesthood, that it does not have it, and that something ought to be done about it.

15. (a) How does the Protestant laity in general respond to the call for a general priesthood? (b) What does practicing the general priesthood require?

¹⁵ Just like the Catholic church, the Protestant clergymen everywhere complain about lack of progress in their efforts toward realizing the general priesthood. “Laymen who voluntarily and free of charge participate in the Christian preaching work are for example far fewer than some decades ago. Christians that participate by free, spontaneous testimony and in prayer are also on the decrease. It is often difficult to find people who are willing to take responsibility and carry burdens,” complains a Norwegian minister commenting on the situation in his country,c which brings to mind Romans 9:16: “So, then, it depends, not upon the one wishing nor upon the one running, but upon God.” What Christendom needs to be able to practice the general priesthood is nothing less than what it took in the early church—an outpouring of the spirit.

THE GENERAL PRIESTHOOD PRACTICED—A SIGN OF THE SPIRIT

16. What proves that Joel’s prophecy has been fulfilled on Jehovah’s witnesses?

¹⁶ When Peter on the day of Pentecost explained about the first outpouring of the holy spirit, he quoted the prophet Joel, saying: “‘And in the last days,’ God says, ‘I shall pour out some of my spirit upon every sort of flesh, and your sons and your daughters will prophesy and your young men will see visions and your old men will dream dreams; and even upon my men slaves and upon my women slaves I will pour out some of my spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.’” The outpouring of the spirit in Peter’s day was only temporary and a small-scale fulfillment of that prophecy. In these last days of this old system of things, the promised, final, lasting and full-scale outpouring of the spirit has been fulfilled on Jehovah’s witnesses and not on Christendom’s Catholic and Protestant churches. The proof is that Jehovah’s witnesses not only understand and