Theopedia

Priest

“For every high priest chosen from among men is appointed to act on behalf of men in relation to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins.”

— Hebrews 5:1

Definition

A priest is a man taken from among other men and appointed by God to represent them before him, offering sacrifices for sin and interceding on their behalf (Heb. 5:1-4). Under the Mosaic covenant this office belonged to Aaron and his sons, the tribe of Levi set apart to mediate Israel’s approach to God (Ex. 28-29). Hebrews reads that Aaronic priesthood as a shadow fulfilled in Christ, the great high priest whose single sacrifice ended the need for further ones (Heb. 10:1, 12), and every believer united to him shares derivatively in his priesthood.

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to the priestly office as its own topic. It names Christ “the Prophet, Priest, and King” among the offices of the Mediator, one of three functions Scripture ascribes to him at once and treated at length in Threefold Office of Christ.1 Its chapter on the law of God comes closer, stating that the ceremonial law given to Israel, which included the priesthood’s own institution, consisted of “several typical ordinances, partly of worship, prefiguring Christ, his graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits,” abrogated once he came.2

Biblical Basis

What Scripture means by a priest

The Old Testament word for the office, kohen, “always … denoted someone who occupied an honorable and responsible position,” and the New Testament’s hiereus carries the same weight.3 Where a prophet speaks for God to the people, a priest acts for the people before God: he has “the special privilege of approach to God, and of speaking and acting in behalf of the people.”3 Hebrews 5:1 states the office’s core functions directly: a priest is taken from among men, appointed by God, and active on their behalf in things pertaining to God, chiefly by offering sacrifice; the same chapter and Leviticus add intercession and pronouncing God’s blessing over the people (Heb. 7:25; Lev. 9:22).3 Charles Hodge states the same functions more compactly: a priest is “a man duly appointed to act for other men in things pertaining to God,” whose office is to “offer gifts and sacrifices for sins” and to make intercession, “not merely as one man may pray for another,” but on the strength of his own sacrifice and office.4 A. A. Hodge, following Patrick Fairbairn, draws four requirements out of the Aaronic pattern: a priest must be taken from among men to represent them, chosen by God rather than self-appointed, morally holy and consecrated, and given the standing to draw near to God, offer sacrifice, and intercede.5

The Aaronic priesthood

God set apart Aaron and his sons for this office at Sinai, consecrating them with specified garments and an ordination rite (Ex. 28-29; Lev. 8-9). The narrative of that ordination, followed immediately by Nadab and Abihu’s offering of “unauthorized fire” and their death for it (Lev. 10:1-2), reads as a single deliberately staged unit rather than bare ritual instruction, establishing both what set the priesthood apart and how seriously its holiness was to be guarded.6 Unlike Christ’s, the Aaronic priesthood was held by many men in succession, since death kept any one of them from continuing in office, and each first had to offer for his own sin before he could offer for the people’s (Heb. 7:23, 27).7 Its sacrifices were repeated continually for the same reason they could never finally succeed: they could not actually take away sin, only foreshadow the sacrifice that would (Heb. 10:1-4).7

A priesthood after the order of Melchizedek

Two centuries before Aaron, Melchizedek, king of Salem and “priest of God Most High,” blessed Abraham and received his tithe (Gen. 14:18-20). Because Melchizedek’s priesthood belonged to no tribe, no line of succession, and no record of death, it could typify what Aaron’s could not: an eternal priesthood joined to royal rule, the very combination Psalm 110:4 promises the coming king.8

Historical Development

Instituted at Sinai

The priesthood entered Israel’s life as a Mosaic institution, not a patriarchal one: before Sinai, the Genesis narrative shows the head of a family or clan, not a dedicated priestly class, offering sacrifice on its behalf (Melchizedek’s own kingship-priesthood is the exception, not the rule). Some scholarship has proposed that the ordination narrative in Leviticus 8-10 reflects a later, Second Temple-era conflict between priestly lines tracing themselves to Aaron and to Zadok, each pressing Lev. 10’s account of Nadab and Abihu to favor its own claim; Old Testament scholar John Goldingay judges that reading builds “substantial theories” on “little concrete evidence,” not a case strong enough to rest a settled history on.6

Ended in Christ

Hebrews argues that the entire Aaronic office was always a shadow of what it prefigured, so that once the substance came the shadow’s work was finished: “What the Aaronic priests were symbolically, Christ was really…. They were the shadow, He the substance.”9 Arguing against papal claims to Peter’s primacy from the Old Testament high priesthood, John Calvin makes the same point about where that office went once its time had run:

“Every one knows that the high priest was a type of Christ; now, the priesthood being transferred, that right must also be transferred. To whom, then, was it transferred? certainly not to the Pope… but to Christ, who, as he alone holds the office without vicar or successor, does not resign the honour to any other.”10

Opposing Views

The Roman Catholic ministerial priesthood

Rome teaches that the Aaronic priesthood was not ended but “translated” into a standing office within the church. The Council of Trent states it plainly:

“Sacrifice and priesthood are, by the ordinance of God, in such wise conjoined, as that both have existed in every law. Whereas, therefore, in the New Testament, the Catholic Church has received, from the institution of Christ, the holy visible sacrifice of the Eucharist; it must needs also be confessed, that there is, in that church, a new, visible, and external priesthood, into which the old has been translated,” with power given to the apostles and their successors “of consecrating, offering, and administering his body and blood, as also of forgiving and of retaining sins.”11

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t the New Testament church still need priests, ordained successors with the power to offer the Eucharistic sacrifice and to forgive or retain sins, the way Rome teaches? The Second Helvetic Confession states the Reformed answer directly:

“The priestly office and the ministerial office differ exceedingly from each other. The former is common to all Christians, the latter is not…. he remains eternally the only priest, and lest we should derogate aught from him, we give the name of priest to none of the class of ministers.”12

Charles Hodge presses the same point from the New Testament’s own vocabulary: the word hiereus is “never once applied” to an apostle, presbyter, or evangelist, although the New Testament’s authors were Jews “to whom nothing was more familiar than the word priest”; on a question this significant, “the silence of Scripture speaks volumes.”13 No priestly function, mediation or sacrifice, is ever attributed to a Christian minister in the New Testament.13 A. A. Hodge draws the positive conclusion: because the Aaronic priesthood’s purpose was fulfilled in Christ, any human priest offering repeated propitiatory sacrifice would be “an antichrist,” not a successor.14 What Rome reserves to an ordained caste, Scripture instead gives to every believer united to Christ: all who belong to him already have “boldness to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus” (Heb. 10:19), offering not expiatory sacrifices but “the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name” (Heb. 13:15).15

Related Doctrines

References

  1. A Confession of Faith (London, 1677; commonly known as the Second London Baptist Confession, adopted 1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 1. ↩

  2. A Confession of Faith (London, 1677; commonly known as the Second London Baptist Confession, adopted 1689), chap. 19, “Of the Law of God,” para. 3. ↩

  3. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 347. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 462-463. ↩

  5. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 24, “The Mediatorial Office of Christ,” Q. 14, drawing on Patrick Fairbairn, The Typology of Scripture, vol. 2, pt. 3, chap. 3. ↩

  6. John Goldingay, “Leviticus 8-10 as Narrative,” Themelios 50, no. 3 (2025): 460. ↩ ↩2

  7. A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 24, Q. 19. ↩ ↩2

  8. A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 24, Q. 20. ↩

  9. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:463. ↩

  10. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 6, sec. 2, 355. ↩

  11. Council of Trent, sess. 23, chap. 1, quoted in A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 24. ↩

  12. Second Helvetic Confession (1566), chap. 18, quoted in A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 24. ↩

  13. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:464-465. ↩ ↩2

  14. A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 24, Q. 21. ↩

  15. A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 24, Q. 22. ↩