The Salvation Army and the Priesthood of all
Believers
by Major Harold Hill
The “priesthood of all
believers”, usually and incorrectly attributed to Martin
Luther, is sometimes used to mean that anyone in the church
can do anything. This was directly contrary to Luther’s
teaching on good order in the Church. His concern was to
demolish the idea that there were two “stands” (or “walks”) of
life: the spiritual and the fleshly, the sacred and the
secular, that of the clergy and that of everyone else. Luther
did not deny that there was a need for leadership in the
Church – called to the ministry of Word and Sacrament – but
denied that such people were made ontologically different from
other Christians by ordination; they just had a different
role.
The “two stands” view,
described by Colin Bulley “as the priesthood of some
believers”, gradually became dominant in the church over the
first millennium.[1]
The process by which a priestly elite emerges, with a
mediatory role between God and the people, can be described as
“clericalisation”. The second view, “the priesthood of all
believers”, claims that all have equal access,
in John Dominic Crossan’s phrase, to “the brokerless Kingdom
of God”, and all have their part to play in it.
[2]
The Salvation Army has never
subscribed to the former doctrine but the kind of language
sometimes used of officership is entirely compatible with it.
On the one hand, William
Booth denied
that there was any “exclusive order of preachers” or that
ministry was
confined to a particular
class of individuals who constitute a sacred order specially
raised up and qualified… on the ground of their ancestors
having been specially set apart for it, and authorised to
communicate the same power to their successors, who are, they
again contend, empowered to pass on some special virtues to
those who listen to their teaching … I deny the existence of
any order exclusively possessing the right to publish the
salvation of God… I honour the Order of Preachers; I belong to
it myself… but as to his possessing any particular grace
because of his having gone through any form of Ordination, or
any other ceremonial whatever, I think that idea is a great
mistake.
And I want to say here,
once and for all, that no such notion is taught in any
authorised statement of Salvation Army doctrine or affirmed by
any responsible officer in the organisation… the duty in which
I glory is no more sacred, and only a few degrees removed in
importance, from that of the brother who opens the doors of
the Hall in which the preacher holds forth… As Soldiers of
Christ, the same duty places us all on one level.[3]
At the same time, Booth also
spoke of
officers as akin to a priesthood: “Indeed, the fact is ever
before us – like Priest, like People; like Captain, like
Corps.”[4]
The Officer
magazine claimed:
The ex-officer, no matter
what was the cause that resulted in his loss to our fighting
forces, is still a child of the Army. He entered the sacred
circle. He became one of us, sharing our joys and sorrows,
losses and crosses. He received the commission of a
divinely-appointed authority to proclaim Salvation, build up
men and women in their most holy faith, and help to win
someone to God. He received the spirit of officership, whereby
he mingled amongst us, for a season, as one of us, and go
where he likes, and do what he likes, the imprint of the life
he lived will remain. Time will not efface it; sin even will
not blot it out. So that in a sense which we ought ever to
remember, the ex-Officer still belongs to The Salvation Army.[5]
Does that sound like an
indelible mark and character conferred by ordination?
These incompatible views
about ministry have continued to be held in the Army ever
since. Major Oliver Clarke (R) aligned himself firmly with
Luther when he wrote in 1961:
Of recent years I have
noticed a growing tendency to pronounce what we call the
Benediction … in the pontifical manner: “The Blessing … be
with YOU all…”
We do not claim endowment
by apostolic succession in the sacerdotal sense. We believe in
“the priesthood of all believers”. It was against this
practice that the Founder remonstrated … when Commissioner
Jeffries, asked to pronounce the Benediction, merely said:
“The blessing of God Almighty be with us all.” Note, he even
did say us instead of you; but he gave the appearance of
administering something instead of invoking the same by saying
“May the blessing of Almighty God be with us all.”
We have already gone far
enough already for the good and safety of our Movement in the
direction of classifying officership as a higher ORDER. Does
this seem to be pedantic? To my view a vital issue is at
stake, namely: a Clericalism versus Laity; Ecclesiasticism
versus an Evangelical non-conforming Movement…[6]
By way of contrast,
Brigadier Bramwell Darbyshire, wrote:
In spite of all the stuff
about the priesthood of all believers, ordained and
commissioned officers are different from non-officer
Salvationists. They are not cleverer, wiser, more loved of God
than their fellows, but they are special, set apart for Jesus
in a way that involves sacrifice and often great inconvenience
to their families… No one is more grateful for the Army’s
dedicated lay staff than this old warrior; but let’s get it
right. They may be as much involved as officers, but there is
for an officer a sacramental dimension and if we lose sight of
this the Army is finished.[7]
Lt. Colonel Evelyn Haggett
in 2006,
basing her argument on God’s gift of priesthood to Aaron
(Numbers 18:7), saw officership as a “gift of ordination to a
sacramental life…” and found it “awesome to be called by God
to the priesthood.” Officers, she claimed, were “of the cloth”
like clergy and priests.[8]
For a Movement which does
not practise the sacraments, so ready to point out that the
very word is not found in Scripture, we seem increasingly
anxious to use it when it suits us – Priesthood returns by the
back door.
The Church’s history
illustrates that function always gravitates towards status,
and status validates its claims by asserting that it was all
God’s plan. As it institutionalises, the early zeal fades,
energies are expended on maintaining rather than advancing,
and the functionaries get delusions of grandeur. As a
spiritual wave peaks and plateaus, even declines, sometimes a
new movement strikes out, seeking to recapture the “first fine
careless rapture” of the founders. Some of these new ventures,
like the Montanists in the second century or the Albigensians
in the thirteenth, are discarded as heretical, while others,
like the followers of Benedict in the fifth century or
Mary
MacKillop in the
nineteenth, are retained as “orders”. Protestant sects follow
a similar trajectory; some like the Children of God relegated
to the status of cults and others like Methodism becoming
respectable denominations.
Most such movements begin by
emphasising the equality of believers and rejecting a priestly
class, but as they too institutionalise they also clericalise.
Bryan Wilson put it like this:
What does appear is that the dissenting
movements of Protestantism, which were lay movements, or
movements which gave greater place to laymen than the
traditional churches had ever conceded, pass, over the course
of time, under the control of full-time religious specialists…
Over time, movements which rebel against religious
specialization, against clerical privilege and control,
gradually come again under the control of a clerical class…
Professionalism is a part of the wider social process of
secular society, and so even in anti-clerical movements
professionals re-emerge. Their real power, when they do
re-emerge, however, is in their administrative control and the
fact of their full-time involvement, and not in their
liturgical functions, although these will be regarded as the
activity for which their authority is legitimated.[9]
Not just Protestants. The
Benedictines and the Franciscans also became clericalised.
Milton complained that “New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ
large.” Methodist lay-preachers, with Wesley dead, began
styling themselves ministers. A recent Methodist statement
admitted, “The challenge remains both to have an ordained
ministry… without promoting an indelible spiritual hierarchy”.[10]
The Salvation Army mirrored Methodist history, and moved more
quickly, while
its autocratic founder was still living, probably because its
military, hierarchical structure lent itself even more readily
to perceptions of status – though it did take us 100 years to
start “ordaining” our officers. The Army recapitulates the
history of the church in microcosm. My argument is not that
officership has become a sacerdotal priesthood in theory, but
that the end result is the same in practice.
What does that mean
in practice for the Salvation Army? Because we do not
practise the sacraments does that mean that there is no way in
which the officer can assume a mediatory, “pontifical” role
between the people and God? Sadly, it has happened.
While the officer’s leadership was emphasised in the early
Army, the importance of everyone else being able to
participate in as many ways as possible was equally stressed –
in speaking, pastoring, evangelising – and in exercising
leadership. That is what has been progressively lost.
Now, what is the problem?
Firstly, it is not what the
Founder – I mean, Jesus – evidently proposed.
Jesus and the community
which grew up after his death appear to have valued equality
in contrast to the priestly hierarchies of received religion.
Jesus said,
You know that foreign
rulers like to order their people around. And their leaders
have full power over everyone they rule. But don’t act like
them. If you want to be great, you must be the servant of all
the others. And if you want to be first, you must be the slave
of the rest. The Son of Man did not come to be a slave master,
but a slave who will give his life to ransom many people.[11]
But you are not to be
called “Rabbi”, for you have only one Master and you are all
brothers. And do not call anyone on earth “father”, for you
have only one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be
called “teacher”, for you have only one Teacher, the Christ.[12]
As Alfred Loisey observed,
Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God, and what we got was
the Church.
Secondly, clericalism
fosters a spirit incompatible with the “servanthood” Jesus
taught and modelled; it is inimical to the kind of community
Jesus appeared to call together. Salvation Army leaders have
been aware of this. Commissioner Brengle also wrote against
the “diotrephesian spirit”.[13]
“Every Diotrephesian,” he wrote, “‘loveth to have the
pre-eminence’ – not pre-eminence in goodness, Christlikeness,
brotherly love, humility, meekness, or holiness, but
pre-eminence in name, in fame, popular acclaim, in wealth, in
place, or authority. These it is that the members of the tribe
lust after, scheme, plot and plan, whisper and fawn and
flatter and backbite to obtain.”[14]
That’s just within officership. Further, a “class
distinction” between officers and non-officers has become so
entrenched as to be invisible to most officers but painfully
obtrusive to many soldiers – and non-Salvationist employees.
Although having a clerical
class does not inevitably lead to sacerdotalism, leadership is
always in that danger.
Yves Congar wrote that “Protestant communions,
starting from strict congregationalist premises and an
associational and community basis, are in practice as
clericalised as the Catholic Church… No doubt there are
sociological laws in virtue of which the most ‘charismatic’
religious communities, those most made ‘from below’, quite
soon become organisations with authority, traditions, a
‘church’ sociological structure.”[15]
Even in the contemporary
unstructured house-church movement, as Miroslav Volf notes,
“…a strongly hierarchical, informal system of paternal
relations often develops between the congregation and
charismatic delegates from the ascended Christ.”[16]
In fact, the real issue is power, and its exercise. Theology
is merely the mask.
Thirdly, clericalisation can
diminish the Church’s effectiveness in its mission. By
concentrating power and influence in the hands of a minority
it disempowers the majority of members of the Church. Congar
wrote of the end result of clericalism being that “the
faithful got into the habit of receiving without activity,
leaving to the clergy the charge of building up the Church –
like citizens who leave the making of their country to the
civil servants and officials, and the defence of it to the
military.”[17]
The Indian Jesuit Kurien Kunnumpuram claims that “the
clergy-laity divide and the consequent lack of power-sharing
in the Church are largely responsible for the apathy and
inertia that one notices in the bulk of the laity today.”[18]
Nazarene sociologist Kenneth E. Crow sums up: “Loyalty
declines when ability to influence decision and policies
declines. When institutionalization results in top-down
management, one of the consequences is member apathy and
withdrawal.”[19]
Theorising can be supported
by circumstantial evidence at the least. For example, Finke
and Stark link the decline in the growth of Methodism in the
USA in the nineteenth century with growing clericalism. “We
think it instructive that Methodists began to slump at
precisely the same time that their amateur clergy were
replaced by professionals who claimed episcopal authority over
their congregations.”[20]
A. D. Gilbert produces statistics showing how the decennial
increase of membership per minister in the Wesleyan Church in
Great Britain declined steadily from 93.7% in 1801 when there
were 334 ministers, to 12.6% in 1911 when there were 2,478
ministers. The reasons were of course various, but Gilbert
does suggest that it was partly that “maintaining themselves,
their families, and their homes, tended to divert preachers
from the business of itinerant evangelism still expected of
them by many laymen”. To that had to be added “the
increasingly complex task of running a massive national
association… The preachers more or less consistently displayed
a willingness to accept reduced recruitment and even schism as
a price for organisational consolidation under ministerial
leadership.”[21]
In New Zealand
the proportion of Salvationists to the general population
reached a peak of 1.5% of the population in 1895 and declined
slowly but steadily thereafter.[22]
By 1926 it was 0.91% and by 1956, 0.65%. In the 2001 census,
it was 0.33%.[23]
One interpretation of these figures is to say that as the
movement institutionalised, and officership clericalised, it
lost momentum. This was not the only process going on, nor was
there a direct cause and effect. It would be difficult to
establish whether clericalisation had led to a loss of zeal,
or loss of zeal had been compensated for by a growing
preoccupation with status, or whether each process fed the
other.
There is a paradox here: the
military system, quite apart from the fact that it fitted
Booth’s autocratic temperament, was designed for rapid
response, and is still officially justified in those terms.
The Army’s first period of rapid growth followed its
introduction. However the concomitant burgeoning of
hierarchical and bureaucratic attitudes came to exert a
counter-influence. The reason for success contained the seeds
of failure. The longer-term effects of autocracy and
“sectarian totalitarianism” were to lose the loyalty of many
of those hitherto enthusiastic, and to deter subsequent
generations, more habituated to free thought and democracy,
from joining.
Against this conclusion, the
centuries in which the Church clericalised it grew to become a
world religion – though the reasons for growth were not always
related to the Gospel! The Salvation Army’s growth today is in
the developing world where rank and status seem more
important. A host of historical, sociological and cultural,
even political, factors are involved. Possibly the Salvation
Army’s current growth in the third world is because those
societies, less individualistic, with a stronger culture of
“belonging” and traditional respect for authority, are more
susceptible to the attractions of firm and decisive
leadership.
Of the Western world however
the period of the Army’s apparent stagnation and decline has
coincided broadly with its increasing accommodation to the
“world”, its becoming more like a mainstream denomination and
its officers becoming indistinguishable from clergy. The
attitudes which produce clericalisation also produce decline.
So how can the priesthood of
all believers be sustained or revived in the Army? Our roots
might be rediscovered in two ways.
Firstly we can encourage the
kind of fresh initiative which has renewed the church in every
age. Our neo-primitive Salvationists, the 614
movement, represent our own home-grown sectarian reaction to
institutionalisation. The “War College” in Vancouver is a
“lay”-training facility. Alove, in the UK, is
essentially a “lay”-movement. Stephen Court’s MMCCXX
vision – a mission to see new outposts in 2,000 cities, in 200
countries, in 20 years, is quite independent of the Army’s
formal planning. Can the institution keep
its hands off long enough for these to reach their potential?
Can the Army give its children the independence, along with
the support, necessary for them to grow up and become its
adult friends? They too will clericalise, but not yet. Seldom
have new patches successfully taken on old wineskins: can
Protestantism learn the trick of retaining its “orders”?
Secondly, ways have to be
found to rejuvenate the leather of the old wineskin, the
“mainstream” Army. Historically, new movements have sometimes
managed to reinvigorate at least parts of the existing church
– the reformation’s stimulus to the counter-reformation and
the charismatic movement’s 3rd wave are examples.
Can neo-primitive Salvationism rub off on the rest of us?
Most commonly, an emphasis
on “Servant Leadership” is recommended to mitigate the
ill-effects of élitist clericalisation. However, mere
exhortations to “Servant Leadership”
can be used to legitimate a reality of another kind. Without
structural safeguards, all talk of servanthood too easily
becomes an instrument of spiritual abuse. But it is also true
that servant-leader behaviour flows only from servant-leader
attitudes, which have to be caught as well as taught, by the
example of what Paul called “working together”, by way of
contrast with “ruling over”.
No structural mechanisms will compensate if this
heart-attitude is lacking. Attention to both may help tilt the
balance towards the functional end of the status-function
continuum, and foster the recovery of the priesthood of all
believers among us.
To sum up, then, the
“priesthood of all believers” is a way of summarising the
belief that all believers have immediate access to God and
that all have a part to play in the life of the church. Both
of these are attenuated in the process of institutionalisation
as a clerical class gains ascendancy. To the extent that the
Salvation Army has followed this pattern, its spirituality and
effectiveness has been affected. Like other ecclesial bodies,
the Army is challenged to find a way of ensuring that the
function of leadership is not compromised by the accretion of
status.
Questions arising:
-
How might fresh initiatives be encouraged and given
permission while retained in association with the mainstream
Salvation Army?
-
What kind of structures could ensure the successful practice
of servant leadership?
-
How might servant leadership be modelled and inculcated?
-
How else might the old wineskins be renewed?
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