This essay will examine the biblical doctrine of priesthood and its correlation to a robust theology of culture. First, an examination of the Old Testament and New Testament passages that form a biblical theology of priesthood will be offered. Second, a survey of the relationship between Christ and culture will be explored. Third, a theory about people’s ultimate longing will be explained. Finally, several concluding exhortations about all believers’ role as Kingdom priests will be presented. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that believers together serve as Kingdom priests in culture by worshiping the Lord and mediating His presence to all people as they desperately long for His Kingdom.
I. Priesthood in the Scriptures
Priesthood is a theme that runs throughout the Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments. The Israelite priesthood was an institution whose members were given the particular responsibility of serving as mediators between the divine and human realms.[1] In fact, Merrill sees priesthood as the unifying thread of the entire Old Testament, concluding his epochal historiography saying:
The world of humanity, alienated from God by the fall, is still the object of his love and grace. The Old Testament tells the story of the implementation of his grace through the vehicle of an elect man (Abraham) who gave rise to an elect nation (Israel), a kingdom of priests whose task was to demonstrate microcosmically what it means to be the redeemed people of God and to be the mediator to the world of his saving revelation.[2]
With this principle in mind, we now turn our attention to three specific passages that are relevant to our study, beginning with the Sinai narrative in Exodus 19.
A. Exodus 19:6
Exodus 19 records the time when God established His covenant with Israel. The chapters that follow reveal the stipulations of this covenant. God’s initial intention was for Israel to be a kingdom of priests, for the entire Israelite community to mediate between Him and all people in the nations surrounding Israel. As the Pentateuch progresses, however, it becomes clear that Israel failed to keep her side of the covenant,[3] thus demonstrating that “any hope for the future would have to rest in the establishment of a new covenant.”[4] God desired that Israel would be a kingdom of priests, but their breach of the covenant necessitated their status as a kingdom with priests. The establishment of the Aaronic—and eventual Levitical—priesthood was God’s method of upholding the distinction between clean and unclean, between life and death, between order and chaos. Since the Israelite community at large had failed to perform this task, a smaller, elect group of individuals was charged with maintaining the distinctions God had specified. Priestly roles included teaching, law interpreting, purifying, giving of blessings, speaking for God, sacrificing, and supervising worship. In sum, the job of the priest was to bring God to the people and the people to God. That priests were set apart was no mere triviality, for the “priestly activities, symbolized in rituals involving sight, smell and sound, time, space, and status, taught Israel the healthy fear of being confronted with the presence of the holy God, the Creator of life and order.”[5] The Aaronic and Levitical priesthoods were limited, so God established a new covenant to fulfill His salvific purposes in the world, by way of the establishment of the church. Schreiner rightly affirms: “The church does not replace Israel, but [in this case] it does fulfill the promises made to Israel; and all those, Jews and Gentiles, who belong to the true Israel are now part of the new people of God.”[6] To understand how the people of God fulfill this promise, we must explore the New Testament counterparts of Exodus 19:6.
B. 1 Peter 2:5, 9
In Old Testament times, only the Aaronic and Levitical priests were allowed into the Tabernacle—and eventually, the Temple—to bring sacrifices on behalf of the Israelites. Now Peter reveals that the scope has broadened: all believers are priests. We have direct access to God,[7] and the spiritual sacrifices we bring are not to cover our sins, bur rather are praises to God, who has saved us and blessed us. To put it simply, the task of the people of God is to proclaim Him and His praises to all people. All that God does is for the purpose of His glory.[8] What, then, is the appropriate response of humanity? Fear of the Lord. Worship is utter reverence of Him and His ways, giving Him the due credit for creation and sustenance of the world. We ought to note the direct connection between the people of God as “a people for His possession” and their role as priests. It is because of God’s election as people for His possession that His people serve as priests. We also do well to note that the priests interceded on behalf of the community, representing them before God. Lastly, we see that this priesthood is a corporate—not simply individual—identity. Schreiner observes, “Western believers tend to individualize the notion of priesthood rather than seeing the community emphasis.”[9] But it is as a corporate whole that the people of God function as priests. John’s Revelation also affirms this corporate identity and reveals the ultimate destiny of the priesthood.
C. Revelation 1:6; 5:10; 20:6
John began his Revelation by writing a general prologue to the seven churches of Asia Minor, saying, “To Him who loves us and has set us free from our sins by His blood, and made us a kingdom, priests to His God and Father—the glory and dominion are His forever and ever.” Indeed, with his short introduction, John himself acted as priest by proclaiming the praise of Jesus, the risen Messiah. Mounce says, “The early church understood itself to be in the true succession of Israel and thus the inheritors of all of the blessings promised to their spiritual predecessors.”[10] The ultimate destiny of the priesthood in the end times will be their co-reigning with Christ on the earth. There priests will continue to do what they have already been doing, namely worshiping the Lord.
In short, Alexander concludes, “The restoration of the whole of creation from the consequences of human rebelliousness lies at the heart of God’s saving activity. While this begins and ends with God, he invites those who have been redeemed to share in his mission.”[11] This beautifully articulates the essence of priesthood, the restoration of all of creation in every cultural context. If we are to understand how we can be priests to all people, we must first understand culture and how it functions. To an analysis of culture we now turn.
II. An Overview of the Relationship Between Christ & Culture
Attempting to define culture is analogous to defining the universe itself. Virtually any definition will come up short since it will always exclude some facet of culture. This is largely due to the fact that every definition comes within a cultural context. Thus, the definition giver will only have the means to articulate a definition from within the culture he exists, and the definition receiver will only have the means to understand it from within the culture he exists. Nevertheless, Andy Crouch’s definition offers profound insight to our study: “Culture is what we [humans] make of the world.”[12] This definition houses two unique but equally integral ideas: (1) Culture is the collection of physical items that humans create and use as they interact with the world around them, and (2) Culture is the compendium of ideas that humans articulate and utilize as they make sense of what they experience. Sherlock has offered a longer definition:
The myriad ways in which human beings relate to one another in kinship groups across differences of age, gender and language, pass on customs and lore to the next generation, conduct their political affairs, despise, ignore, honour and betray one another, make war, peace and love, develop classical, popular and folk traditions in the fine and performing arts […] evoke a response of wonder. By culture here is meant the sum total of all these interactions in a particular setting.[13]
We must observe, too, that in the real world, culture is never “culture” (singular) but always “cultures” (plural). Every geo-political country comprises multifarious subcultures—subcultures of age, gender, ethnicity, and language, to name a few—and further subcultures within subcultures. The most basic unit of culture is the family, the sphere where language and food choices and ethnic heritage are initially and powerfully transmitted. Here we unearth a nugget of truth: the smaller the culture, the more meaningful influence every participant has within that culture.[14] Further, individuals are typically shaped most by the smallest cultures they participate in.
We must make one last detour before moving on to the interrelationships of cultural spheres. Crouch has proposed five exceptionally useful questions when analyzing cultural artifacts, the physical items that humans create and use as they interact with the world around them:
(1) What does this cultural artifact assume about the way the world is?
(2) What does this cultural artifact assume about the way the world should be?
(3) What does this cultural artifact make possible?
(4) What does this cultural artifact make impossible (or at least very difficult)?
(5) What new forms of culture are created in response to this artifact?[15]
Equipped with these questions, we can begin to analyze what exactly each artifact contributes to a culture. Naturally, not all cultural artifacts are created equal. Some hold extraordinary power over people, while others hold only minimal power. The reason for our digression: artifacts are a key component of culture, and we must understand how they function if we are to understand people in any cultural sphere. Now that we have discussed what culture is, we can assess how various spheres of culture relate to each other.
A. The Interrelationships of Cultural Spheres
Jacques Ellul has presented a masterful analysis of the interrelationships between all cultural spheres. Although his work oozes modernistic tendencies to a postmodern audience, much of his analysis remains valid. The universal thread that runs through every single sphere of society, claimed Ellul, is technique: “The term technique, as I use it, does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end. In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity.”[16] In other words, technique is the pursuit of the one most efficient way to accomplish any particular task on a large scale. In his magnum opus, Ellul traced the necessary linking of techniques, the chain of events set off by each new mechanism of efficiency. The spawning of business production led to the requirement of normalized, manufactured machine parts, which in turn led to the organizational technique of economic maintenance. Eventually, so many businesses had been established that the political sphere was forced to regulate certain business practices and business ethics, which led to the rise of political technique. In order to enforce these ethical practices, massive police forces were needed, thus leading to the rise of police techniques. Military forces were needed to protect the business and political enterprises of the nation, thus leading to militaristic technique. To facilitate such changes in business, political, police, and militaristic techniques, the educational sphere began teaching children that they were made for one task, one small piece in the machine of progress. Each student’s task was to find his or her niche. Mindful people became mindless technicians, manipulated by the propaganda found in each aforementioned sphere. Religious institutions were pared down to moralism generators to keep workers civil and functional. All the while, factory workers—who now lived in cities, those enormous factory-filled and factory-like environments of the world—became disheartened by their loss of personal identity and personal value in their work. This led to the rise of the technique of amusement, the means of distracting workers from their mindless vocations. Cinemas and sports arenas and bars became distraction houses, the places where workers could escape the current world and flee to a happier utopia.
Thus far Ellul’s analysis is spot on. His conclusion, however, underestimated human resilience, as the past five decades have demonstrated. Ellul concluded that humanity no longer had any control over technique, that technique had taken over as the undergirding paradigm of the world, and that no one could stop technique’s epistemological brainwashing.[17] Today, obviously, culture still highly values efficiency, but postmodernism has seen a shift back to localized, noncommercial living. For example, artisan craftsmanship and localized farming have re-emerged as valued enterprises. Quite simply, people have subconsciously begun to revolt against technique. Regardless of the precise extent to which this has taken place, the point to be made here is that cultural spheres—business, political, police, militaristic, educational, propagandistic, religious, amusement—are all intrinsically linked together. Changes in one sphere of culture necessarily bring changes in other spheres of culture. The same is true as we trace the ripple effect into each subculture and each subculture’s subcultures.
Now that we have examined the interrelationships between cultural spheres, we turn our discussion to why we—God’s kingdom of priests—must care about culture.
B. Why We Must Care About Culture
I trust that our discussion so far has already demonstrated why we must care about culture. People exist in cultures; we must care about people; therefore, we must care about cultures. If we are to begin to grasp the complexity of people in order to act as their priests, we must learn to asses how they have affected and been affected by the cultures in which they operate. Responsible priesthood necessitates a robust exegesis of culture. Few would disagree that we must at some level care about culture. The controversy surfaces, however, on exactly how Christ and culture relate. One’s answer to this question will dictate how she ministers to people in any culture. To this question we now turn.
C. The Relationship Between Christ & Culture
Richard Niebuhr’s paramount work, Christ and Culture, has generated considerable dialogue about this complicated question. Niebuhr proposed five different solutions to the relationship between Christ and culture. The first solution was “Christ against culture”—that Christ is entirely opposed to any human culture whatsoever and acts as its antithesis. The second solution was “Christ of culture”—that Christ is the apex of human culture, thus emphasizing that believers ought to blend in with their cultures at large. The third solution was “Christ above culture”—that Christ may be partially found in culture, but one cannot learn everything about Christ through culture alone. The fourth solution was “Christ and culture in paradox”—that Christ and culture exist in tension, and believers must live with their “dual citizenship” throughout their lives on earth. The fifth solution was “Christ transforms culture”—that Christ transforms individuals within a society and thus transforms their cultures, all the while orienting both to His coming Kingdom.
Niebuhr’s analysis is well articulated, his conclusion humble:
To make our decisions [on the relationship between Christ and culture] in faith is to make them in view of the fact that no single man or group or historical time is the church; but that there is a church of faith in which we do our partial, relative work and on which we can count. It is to make them in view of the fact that Christ is risen from the dead, and is not only the head of the church but the redeemer of the world.[18]
To summarize, Niebuhr did not make a dogmatic statement about which solution was correct. In fact, I suspect there are scenarios when each of these solutions would be valid. The argument ultimately comes down to this: believers must be in the world but not of the world. Emphasizing either at the expense of the other is simply wrong. Our task, then, is to be aware of the possibilities and to approach each new situation with prayerful humility about which ought to be employed that particular moment. In spite of not landing hard and fast on any one solution, Niebuhr regarded the fifth solution—“Christ transforms culture”—as the best starting point in viewing culture as an entity to be redeemed.[19] I cannot agree more with Niebuhr here. With this in mind, we now address how a culture changes.
D. How a Culture Changes
“Creativity cannot exist without order—a structure within which creation can happen. […] Creativity requires cosmos—it requires an ordered environment.”[20] Above we briefly described the interrelationships between several major spheres of society. These spheres comprise institutions, including economic institutions, political institutions, educational institutions, religious institutions, entertainment institutions, and recreational institutions, among others. Cultures change in one of two ways. First, they change when their leaders are persuaded that alteration is beneficial or needed. Second, they change when the majority within a particular sphere of society seeks to bring about a shift—either within or without that culture. Either way, the only way to change the tides in a particular culture is to influence its members one at a time. Plantinga has made a similar point:
All […] persons exist in families and other group systems that they influence and that influence them. Hence the progress of both good and evil is […] like waves of intertwined and self-replicating spirals. Where the waves meet, cultures form. A culture […] stands in the same relation to individual character as character does to thoughts and deeds. That is, character forms culture, which then forms character.[21]
Thus, we must now examine what it is that individuals are longing for, what it is that propels individuals to think what they think, to say what they say, and to do what they do. If we understand this, we have made significant progress on our quest for responsible priesthood.
III. Visions of the Kingdom
We now turn our attention to the presuppositions that guide persons in their daily thoughts, speech, and activities. “Worldviews are not just cognitive constructs… Real human beings, beings with ‘heart,’ are multidimensional; our lives possess physical, economic, psychological, political, spiritual, social and intellectual facets.”[22] While this is true, we still may distill these sundry facets down to a single core concept. To get our bearing, we must first consider that neither thinking nor belief is the guiding principle that leads people. The guiding principle is affection. What we love determines what we think about, what we talk about, and what we do. James K. A. Smith has said it best:
Human persons are not primarily or for the most part thinkers, or even believers. Instead, human persons are—fundamentally and primordially—lovers. […] It’s not what I think that shapes my life from the bottom up; it’s what I desire, what I love, that animates my passion. To be human is to be the kind of creature who is oriented by this kind of primal, ultimate love—even if we never really reflect on it.[23]
This guiding principle does not just apply to believers. Affection is the guiding principle of all people. Now we shift our focus to one simple question: What are people longing for?
A. What People are Longing For
People orient themselves under the assumption of their version of the Kingdom of God. That is, people orient their lives around whatever they consider to be the most ideal human flourishing, and often this operates at a subconscious level. Whether they know it or not, people are longing for the Kingdom. All they pursue seeks to see the Kingdom realized. For some people this externalizes as work, since ideal human flourishing is finding value in craftsmanship. For others this externalizes as power, since ideal human flourishing is finding value in influence over a particular stratum of society. For still others this externalizes as the collection of material wealth, since ideal human flourishing is finding value in life’s finest commodities. For still others this externalizes as fame, since ideal human flourishing is finding value in recognition by other people. For still others this externalizes as Christian worship, since ideal human flourishing is finding value in God and His re-creation of the world. Whatever the specific externalization of the vision of the Kingdom, the point to be made is that religious practices—those practices that invoke our affections—are prevalent in every culture and are guided by the doer’s affections. Human affections lead to religious practices, and religious practices lead to human affections. This functions as a constant feedback circuit.
By way of example, we now briefly examine the prevalent religious practice of 21st-Century America: entertainment. Neil Postman has traced the rise of the television as the archetype medium of entertainment, assessing how history somewhat inadvertently yielded to the television’s epistemic drive. His argument follows this line of thinking: With the development of telegraphy, suddenly the entire world became the context of news. By dramatically increasing the scope of the context of news, telegraphy diminished the potency that had formerly characterized local news.[24] Next, photography revised the perception of information. Just as the meaning of a word peeled out of the context of a sentence is distorted, a photograph in many ways strips away context and presents an unreal depiction of reality.[25] Combining the flaws of telegraphy and photography, television turned all public discourse into a form of entertainment; it has presented so much amusement that now everything that airs on television is perceived as show business. The driving leaders behind the television industry have taken what they believe viewers desire to be and portrayed that utopia on the screen. Following Postman’s line of thinking, I have elsewhere argued that social media has taken utopian individualism a step further: it has converted our lives into entertainment to be consumed by our online “friends.” Our purpose here, however, is simply to demonstrate that in America, entertainment sits on the throne of our hearts; it has taken control of our affections and has nestled in to stay. Our entertainment—be it in our movies or songs, our novels or theatres—illustrates our versions of the Kingdom, the pinnacle of human flourishing.
What has the Bible to say about Kingdom life? What does it comprise? What does it look like? Our path now curves to seek answers to these questions.
B. Eternal Life for Today
The Bible’s version of Kingdom life is summarized by the concept Jesus called eternal life. The key to our reception of eternal life is union with Christ, and this union enables us to participate in the divine Father-Son relationship.[26] Just as a marriage is a union between two individuals, so is our union with Christ. It is a deeply personal and intimate union, just like marriage. Believers reap the benefits of receiving the love between God the Father and God the Son by means of God the Spirit. The Holy Spirit enables us to take part in this relationship.[27] For this reason, John can properly speak of eternal life as being both a relationship with Jesus and also Jesus Himself.[28]
If salvation is relational, then what changed in me when I first came to know Jesus was not my thinking but my affection. I experienced the love of Jesus, love from Him to me and me back to Him—both channels an expression of His grace, given freely as a gift. My primary affection shifted from self to Savior, my primary desire from self-gratification to Kingdom-pursuit. All of this is not to imply, of course, that thinking is unrelated to salvation, for there is a dimension of faith that is intellectual. But Jesus proclaimed that the mark of His disciples would be their love—not their intellect.[29]
A beautiful dimension of eternal life is that it has a present component and a future component. John said, “The one who believes in the Son has eternal life, but the one who refuses to believe in the Son will not see life.”[30] So, “those identified with Christ by faith possess eternal life, the dynamic of which the faithful enter here and now.”[31] In his gospel, John recorded, “This is eternal life: that they may know You, the one true God, and the One You have sent—Jesus Christ.”[32] Eternal life is a present reality. It is not so much about a duration of life as it is a quality of life. In this sense, salvation does not begin when a person dies but begins at regeneration. It is not simply salvation from sin, from condemnation, and from hell, but also salvation to the Father, to new life, and to a present relationship with Christ. Some of these are present realities; some of these are future realities. To this tension Paul was referring when he used “already” and “not yet” themes and language in his epistles. We receive eternal life at regeneration, yet in the eschaton, eternal life will be fully realized as full, unhindered relationship between the Triune God and His people in a place with no suffering, tears, or pain.
Here we pause to ponder our calling as priests: to bring God to the people and the people to God. In salvation God has given us nothing less than Himself. This is the gospel we proclaim, the God whom we worship. To summarize, Kingdom life, eternal life, stems from a relationship with the King. Eternal life has profound implications for individuals and for the cultural spheres they compose, so our task as Kingdom priests is to aid in God’s re-creation of both. How? The answer to that query serves as our final heading.
IV. Living as Kingdom Priests
Though multitudinous applications can—and should—be drawn from our study on priesthood and a theology of culture, we will focus our attention on three priestly functions that we do well to cultivate: sacramental living, stewardship, and storytelling.
A. Sacramental Living as Priestly Function
“A sacrament, according to the Catechism in the Book of Common Prayer is, ‘an outward sign of an inward and spiritual grace,’ and ‘a means whereby we receive the same, and pledge to assure us thereof.’”[33] In other words, a sacrament is a physical sign of a deeper Spiritual reality. By sacramental living, I mean three things. First, we—the church, the very body of Jesus Christ—are an image of the coming Kingdom. God came to us by His incarnation, and this was a personal encounter. Now He is building His church of Kingdom-oriented people so that we as a community may serve as His ambassadors to the world. This, too, is to be a personal encounter. As we love one another, we physically demonstrate the love of God in and among us. Regardless of exactly how much we influence the cultures in which we live, regardless of exactly how much we image forth the coming Kingdom now, we are called to live as Kingdom people. Thus, the church is a sacramental institution, a physical body (sign) that holds a deeper Spiritual reality (the Holy Spirit Himself). In this way, we are a sacramental people.
Second, as priests we must learn to cherish the physical realm by valuing the sacraments. Much of Western Christendom has been infiltrated by Platonic dualism, by the notion that mind (soul) is good but body is bad. Plato claimed that the mind is to be esteemed while the body is to be overcome. This is the propaganda of classical philosophy, not the doctrine of classic orthodoxy. The truth is that body and soul are inseparable, and God has redeemed both.[34] We are not embodied souls but en-souled bodies. God does not value that which is immaterial over that which is material. If this is true, then we must learn to value the physical again. Our first order of business is the re-elevation of the sacraments that God established. Through the physical rite of baptism, believers are joined to Jesus Christ. God has given water immersion as a means of assurance that believers have died and been raised with Christ. Through the partaking of the elements at the Lord’s Supper, believers receive Jesus Christ. God has given bread and wine as a means of assurance that believers are continually being nourished by Jesus. Even the proclamation of the Word of God—though not strictly a sacrament—is sacramental. Through the audible words of Scripture, believers grow in knowledge of and relationship with Jesus Christ. All of these tangible signs, these palpable sacraments, are God’s gifts to us. Smith says,
Being a disciple of Jesus is […] a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly—who loves God and neighbor and is oriented to the world by the primacy of that love. We are made to be such people by our immersion in the material practices of Christian worship—through affective impact, over time, of sights and smell in water and wine.[35]
Indeed, these material practices are the outworking of our primary affection, discussed above. It is through physical religious practices that we affirm, experience, and even continue to learn of, the salvation that God has wrought in us and in the world.
Third, as priests we must help to recover the institution of work as worship, material craftsmanship as Spiritual exaltation. All creativity is from the Lord, all rationality is from the Lord—whether the human creature acknowledges this or not. By simply existing, by simply employing the faculties that the Lord has bestowed, humans worship their Creator. By this I do not mean that all people are believers in Jesus Christ and consciously worship Him; rather I mean that since God has created all people, they must, on some level, bring Him glory by doing what He has given them to do—work.[36] Before he died, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel spent several years of his life walking the streets of America, recording in his book Working what has been called an oral history of working life. Day after day, month after month, Terkel talked with people about what they do and how they feel about what they do. His conclusion was sobering: “Nora Watson may have said it most succinctly. ‘I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us, like the assembly line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people.’”[37] This is thoroughly illuminating. Many jobs, those industry-feeding, mindless jobs, do not satisfy the wanderlust, do not assuage the restlessness, do not indulge the curiosity. Jobs may solicit our physical strength and employ our mental energies, but they do not stimulate our imaginations.[38] Let us briefly broaden our scope: people long for a calling, and that is precisely what God has offered us. Consider that priesthood is not an eight-to-five job but a whole-life calling. People long to be priests. They long to be worshipers of their Creator. People long to find value in and bring value to the things they do. And only when work is done as worship, only when work emerges from the context of calling, can it be found truly valuable. To bring value to work, we must bring people to God. I conclude with Tozer’s fitting appeal:
Let us think of a Christian believer in whose life the twin wonders of repentance and new birth have been wrought. […] Of such a one it may be said that every act of his life is or can be as truly sacred as prayer or baptism or the Lord’s Supper. To say this is not to bring all acts down to one dead level; it is rather to lift every act up into a living kingdom and turn the whole life into a sacrament.[39]
B. Stewardship as Priestly Function
A second priestly function is the stewardship of culture and language. Stewardship is a careful recovery of culture-making. “Culture-making—unfolding the latent possibilities that have been folded into creation—is a vocation given to us as image bearers of God. Just as the Fall means not that we stop desiring but rather that our desire becomes disordered, so too sin does not mean that we stop being culture makers; rather, it means that we do this poorly, sinfully, unjustly.”[40] In His transcendent wisdom, God has bound certain things and separated others. We sin by separating what He has bound and binding what He has separated. Stewardship, then, is a reversal of our sin, a reordering of our priorities, a realignment of ourselves to the desires of God, a recalibration of our practices as worship to Him.
In Caring For Words in a Culture of Lies, McEntyre has masterfully captured a vision for stewarding language. “We need to mean what we say,” says McEntyre. “And for that purpose, we need to reclaim words that have been colonized and held hostage by commercial and political agencies that have riddled them with distorted meanings.”[41] I bemoan with McEntyre that words have lost their nuanced meanings from being shoved into spaces they were never meant to occupy. Words have been tried and fried, all the while losing their ethnic identities, their succulent flavors. We must learn to communicate with words, not just through them. We must listen for the sounds they make. We must learn their personalities. In short, we must stop treating words like utilitarian vehicles for discourse propagation. Our task is not just of recovery but of discovery. Words, when they suffer from disuse, may be lost. Indeed, the arrows that lie untouched tend to fall from the quiver. We must retrace our steps—the steps of our culture—and find those arrows lost. “Our task as stewards of the word begins and ends in love. Loving language means cherishing it for its beauty, precision, power to enhance understanding, power to name, power to heal. And it means using words as instruments of love.”[42] Stewardship of language can be no peripheral task: it is our lifeline.
C. Storytelling as Priestly Function
A third priestly function is storytelling as a means of mediating the Lord and echoing the coming Kingdom. Storytelling is the art of connecting people. It is examining the grime of reality. It is celebrating the joy of life. Storytelling comes in many forms—in writing and in photographs, in films and in fine arts, in songs and in performances. Storytelling is the act of making singular experiences into shared experiences. It is the non-material product of making something of the world. It is the expression of culture from its constituents or its observers. As priests, we serve as storytellers by honestly describing the depravity of humanity and the hope of the King and His coming Kingdom.
In conclusion, this essay has examined the biblical doctrine of priesthood and its correlation to a robust theology of culture. First, an examination of the Old Testament and New Testament passages that form a biblical theology of priesthood was offered. Second, a survey of the relationship between Christ and culture was explored. Third, a theory about people’s ultimate longing was explained. Finally, several exhortations about all believers’ role as Kingdom priests were presented. This paper has proposed that believers together serve as Kingdom priests in culture by worshiping the Lord and mediating His presence to all people as they desperately long for His Kingdom.
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Smith, James K. A. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009.
Terkel, Studs. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. New York, NY: The New Press, 2001.
Tozer, A. W. The Pursuit of God. Harrisburg, PA: Christian Publications, Inc., 1948.
Wilkens, Steve, and Mark L. Sanford. Hidden Worldviews: Eight Cultural Stories That Shape Our Lives. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009.
Endnotes
[1] Cf. R. K. Duke, “Priests, Priesthood,” in Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch, ed. T. Desmond Alexander and David W. Baker (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 646.
[2] Eugene Merrill, Kingdom of Priests (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 527; italics mine.
[3] Cf. Exod 32; Dt 31:29-32:6.
[4] John H. Sailhamer, The Pentateuch as Narrative: A Biblical-Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1992), 282.
[5] R. K. Duke, “Priests, Priesthood,” 654.
[6] Thomas R. Shreiner, “1, 2 Peter, Jude,” in The New American Commentary, edited by E. Ray Clendenen (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2003), 115.
[7] Heb 4:16.
[8] Cf. Ps 23:3; Eccl 3:14; Is 48:11.
[9] Schreiner, “1, 2 Peter, Jude,” 106.
[10] Robert H. Mounce, The Book of Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), 50.
[11] T. Desmond Alexander, From Paradise to the Promised Land: An Introduction to the Pentateuch (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 314.
[12] Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 23.
[13] Charles Sherlock, “The Doctrine of Humanity,” in Contours of Christian Theology, ed. Gerald Bray (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 129.
[14] Cf. Crouch, Culture Making, 46.
[15] Crouch, Culture Making, 29-30.
[16] Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1964), xxv.
[17] Ibid., 430-436.
[18] H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ And Culture (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1951), 256.
[19] Sherlock, “Doctrine of Humanity,” 139.
[20] Crouch, Culture Making, 22.
[21] Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), 70.
[22] Steve Wilkens and Mark L. Sanford, Hidden Worldviews: Eight Cultural Stories That Shape Our Lives (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 16.
[23] James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 41-51.
[24] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York, NY: Penguin, 2006), 67.
[25] Ibid., 73.
[26] Jn 17:21-26, esp. 26; 1 Jn 1:3.
[27] 1 Cor 12:13; Jn 6:63; 2 Pet 1:3-4.
[28] Jn 17:3; 1 Jn 5:20.
[29] Jn 13:35.
[30] Jn 3:36.
[31] Bruce Demarest, “The Cross and Salvation,” in Foundations of Evangelical Theology, ed. John S. Feinberg (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008), 332.
[32] Jn 17:3.
[33] Sherlock, “The Doctrine of Humanity,” 146.
[34] To clarify, body and soul cannot be separated without death ensuing.
[35] Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 33.
[36] Gen 1:28.
[37] Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (New York, NY: The New Press, 2001), xxiv.
[38] Obvious exceptions exist. The case has been overstated to make the point.
[39] A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God (Harrisburg, PA: Christian Publications, Inc., 1948), 121.
[40] Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 178.
[41] Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring For Words in a Culture of Lies (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 7.
[42] Ibid., 23.