If all believers are really priests, why is
it that some churches still don’t allow women to exercise the priestly role of
teaching the Bible publicly?
Martin Luther famously referred to a general priesthood in his 1520 tract To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. Luther did not actually coin the phrase “priesthood of all believers”, and the
idea itself obviously did not originate with Luther but rather with the writers
of the New Testament. Still, the fact remains that the doctrine we know by that
name has been a significant feature of Protestantism for almost 500 years.
This being the case, you’d figure any
questions about the status of women in a universal priesthood must have been
asked and answered hundreds of times.