In the previous post, the person I quoted invoked the Baptist doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers.” It’s a term I’ve never heard before, but which makes sense, if you follow the principles of the Protestant Reformation. Specifically the importance for people to go and read the Bible directly, circumventing priests as intermediaries between you and God. For another take on that concept though, I’m gonna paste in a few quotes about this idea from various sources.

James Luther Adams, Unitarian Universalist theologian, wrote in the 1950’s:

“The churches of the left wing of the Reformation held that the churches of the right wing had effected only half a reformation. … They demanded a church in which every member, under the power of the Spirit, would have the privilege and the responsibility of interpreting the Gospel and also of assisting to determine the policy of the church. The new church was to make way for a radical laicism — that is, for the priesthood and the prophethood of all believers.”

Oh, I also learned another new vocabulary word from this whole thing: sacerdotalism. It means “a belief that priests can act as mediators between human beings and God.” I’ve not seen anybody say this, but it seems like it relates to the whole idea of division of labor in a culture, which goes pretty damned far back and makes sense. One guy makes baskets and he trades his baskets for milk from the guy who raises goats. Somebody else knows about finding medicinal herbs and somebody else knows about myth and ritual and how to placate the gods. While I think this whole “priesthood of all believers” thing makes sense in one respect, sacerdotalism also makes sense.

Actually, I have another good way to maybe think about this. During my brief stint at art school, I had a few art history classes. One day, the realization struck me that before a certain time period, artists did not work according to an individual style. Everyone in a culture worked in styles and traditions which were culturally shared. One artist’s work may have been slightly different from anothers, but not substantially. Compare this with our current artistic situation, where the development of a “bold new individual style of expression” is pretty much the main force driving the whole thing. The way I understand this, then, is that people have become their own individual culture, basically. They work in an individual style, because it is their cultural style - the culture unique to them. Maybe this notion of the priesthood of all believers somehow ties into that. That cultural functions which we formerly externalized, are being drawn into the microcosmic realm of the self.

This, in turn reminds me of an interesting passage from Jungian psychologist Erich Von Neumann:

It is a known fact that the “functional” gods of religion eventually become functions of consciousness. Originally, consciousness did not possess enough free libido to perform any activity - plowing, harvesting, hunting, waging war, etc - of its own “free will,” and was obliged to invoke the help of the god who “understood” these things. By means of ceremonial invocation, the ego activated the “help of the god” and thus conducted the flow of libido from the unconscious to the conscious system. The progressive development of consciousness assimilates the functional gods, who go on living as qualities and capacities of the conscious individual who plows, harvests, hunts and wages war as and when he pleases.