Ask any Aaronic Priesthood holder what the priesthood is, and you'll get the canned "Sunday School Response" along the lines that the priesthood is the authority to act in God's name here on earth. Unfortunately, this definition is too often carried over into adulthood and is repeated in a knee-jerk fashion whenever the question is posed. This is the problem I have with that definition--we claim that the priesthood we hold ultimately comes from God. That being the case, by the foregoing definition God's priesthood is the authority for him to act in his name here on earth. That's completely circular, and doesn't tell us anything about what the priesthood is. I'm looking for a better definition that I can use to explain to young men what exactly they're receiving when they get ordained. My ultimate objective, I suppose, is to impress upon their minds the nature of the power they are receiving, and hopefully engender a greater respect for the authority of the priesthood. This, in turn, will hopefully influence them to try harder to live worthy of that priesthood.
A more complete definition of the priesthood would include various aspects, and looking at the miracles performed by the Savior during his ministry provides support for some of them: changing water to wine, calming the seas, healing the sick, and raising the dead, for instance. The eternally binding nature of our covenants and ordinances provides another. Finally, to give some boundaries to the definition, we would need to place it in the context of God's purpose for us as stated in Moses 1:39.
Thus, any definition of the priesthood should include language dealing with
--Power over the elements, including the power of creation and the power over life itself
--The authority to perform ordinances an enter into covenants with eternal significance
--A qualifier of the foregoing two issues being necessary for the immortality and eternal life of man. (I realize that this condition skirts dangerously close to my initial discomfort with the circular definition, but Moses 1:39 does define these goals as His work and His glory, so I think the two are mutually inclusive. Further, this would eliminate the How-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin?-type arguments.)
I'm not trying to come up with new doctrine here, I'm just trying to articulate a more rational definition of the priesthood that conveys its true weight and meaning. Maybe this has already been done in a conference talk that I haven't seen, so I would welcome being pointed in that direction.
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