THE ORDER OF MELCHISEDECH A Defence of ... - Rore Sanctifica

Chapter II
The Protestant Position
The basis of Protestant teaching lies not in affirming the common priesthood of all the faithful but
in denying that there is a difference in essence between this common priesthood and the ministerial
priesthood conferred by the Sacrament of Order. For a Protestant, ordination is simply a public
ceremony in which an individual Christian is appointed to perform a particular function within the
Church. There is no question of the ordained man (or woman) receiving new powers which he did
not possess before. He is simply given the authority to exercise publicly an office for which he was
already qualified in virtue of the common priesthood of all believers. Martin Luther has explained
the Protestant position with admirable clarity:
All of us alike are priests, and we all have the same authority in regard to the word and the
sacraments, although no one has the right to administer them without the consent of the members of
his church, or by the call of the majority (because when something is common to all, no single
person is empowered to arrogate it to himself but should await the call of the Church). 1
Nor is it considered necessary for appointment to the ministry to be made by a bishop or even by an
ordained man. Cranmer taught explicitly that "if it so fortuned that all the bishops and priests of a
region were dead" then "the king of that region should make bishops and priests." 2 Over four
hundred years later a Congregational minister insisted that ''as a matter of propriety and order, the
pastor always presides at the Lord's Supper; but there is nothing in the New Testament to prevent a
church from celebrating the Sacrament in the absence of its pastor." 3
There is now considerable debate within the Anglican Communion as to whether laymen (and
women) should be allowed to preside at Holy Communion. Prebendary Peter Johnson, the president
of the Islington Conference (an association of Evangelical Anglicans), made the following request
in his presidential address in February 1975: "I want to ask . . . that we give very serious
consideration to the question of authorizing laymen to celebrate the Holy Communion." 4 In
February 1976 he followed this up by saying: "I have been asked to elaborate on the subject, and I
gladly do so. There is no indication in the New Testament as to who should be the celebrant at the
Eucharist . . . I would wish to see a lay person, recommended by the incumbent (or Rural Dean) and
also recommended by the P.C.C. as being acceptable to the congregation, duly authorized by the
bishop to administer the Holy Communion (i.e. to celebrate the Eucharist) in the absence of the
clergyman, and only in his home church." 5
In an essay opposing the appointment of "lay-presidents", an Anglican theologian, Douglas Davies,
lays stress on the fact that his opposition is in the interests of good order, and continues:
To say this is not to adopt the Catholic notion of priestly character, the doctrine that in his
ordination the priest receives specific power and authority from the ordaining bishop standing in a
proper episcopal succession, for the proper celebration of the Mass . . . To permit lay celebration is,
then, to allow disorder to enter the church community, to allow one not fully subject to the life of
minister to engage in the central activity of the gospel. Of course every believer has the right to do
these things if so called by the church and the Spirit, the one publicly, the other privately. 6
There is nothing novel in these views, which long predated the
English Reformation and are found in the heresies of the Lollard sect. One of the articles for which
John Browne and other heretics in Kent were condemned in 1511 was that "no power is given of
God to priests, of ministering Sacraments, saying Mass, or other private service more than to
laymen." 7
C In his magisterial work, The Question of Anglican Ordinations, Canon E. E. Estcourt has