Dear Lorrie,
You’re right. You can’t be debating with him all the time, but you can definitely run here and ask us to do it for you. I’m not joking at all. It’s very tiring, and you’d be better spending your time praying for him, right? After all, the Spirit converts, not us. People like myself tend to neglect prayer, but it certainly has its rightful place.
But, I can answer your question perfectly since I’ve been talking about this in six million threads lately! Including
this one,
this one, and
this one with a Lutheran. Check my posts, specifically posts
29,
30,
31, and
33. I’m going to liberally copy from those posts. To be honest, I’ve been cutting and pasting from that thread with the Lutheran man, but it seems like you don’t need any extra complications, so I’ll see if I can lay it out as clearly as possible.
The question is a question of authority. The Church had always held that a priest needed to be ordained with the Sacrament of Holy Orders. The Protestants at the time of the Reformation wanted to break with the Church, and thus needed an alternate theology to justify themselves. Realize that Protestants like Martin Luther still believed in the Real Presence (although he would later alter the position, but still believe in a different version of it). So, in order to break, they still needed to find a source of authority for the consecration. Remember: Lutherans were breaking from the authority of the Church, so they wouldn’t have bishops to consecrate priests. Also, the alternate theology on the priesthood of all believers was a way to
knock down the “wall” the Catholic Church had built which subjected temporal authority to spiritual authority. (That is a link to one of Luther’s writings,
Address to the Christian Nobility of a German Nation)
Luther:
First, if pressed by the temporal power, they have affirmed and maintained that the temporal power has no jurisdiction over them, but, on the contrary, that the spiritual power is above the temporal.
But this one really gets to the crux of it:
As for the unction by a pope or a bishop, tonsure, ordination, consecration, and clothes differing from those of laymen-all this may make a hypocrite or an anointed puppet, but never a Christian or a spiritual man. Thus we are all consecrated as, priests by baptism, as St. Peter says: 'Ye are a royal priesthood, a holy nation (i Pet. ii. 9); and in the book of Revelation: ‘and hast made us unto our God (by Thy blood) kings and priests’ (Rev. v. io). For, if we had not a higher consecration in us than pope or bishop can give, no priest could ever be made by the consecration of pope or bishop, nor could he say the mass or preach or absolve.
That is exactly the point: a special ordination
would mean that priests are special and set apart. Luther denies that Holy Orders really does anything because he needs to knock down the “first” of “three walls” that the “Romanists” have used to “protect themselves” (the first wall is referred to in my first quote).
The special ordination of priests, and the Catholic belief of the indelible mark that Holy Orders imparts on the recipient made the ordained set apart.
Enter the Priesthood of all Believers. This is certainly a Catholic belief, but the Protestants took this to mean something entirely different. The Protestants took the idea that “you are a royal priesthood” to mean that everyone has all the power and authority that the ordain priesthood does. Catholic teaching is that the baptismal, or common priesthood is something distinct from the ordained, ministerial priesthood.
The Catechism says:
1546 Christ, high priest and unique mediator, has made of the Church "a kingdom, priests for his God and Father."20 The whole community of believers is, as such, priestly. The faithful exercise their baptismal priesthood through their participation, each according to his own vocation, in Christ’s mission as priest, prophet, and king. Through the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation the faithful are "consecrated to be . . . a holy priesthood."21
(cont.)
