The Sacraments

The Greek New Testament never uses a general word for these rites. The word that became the Western technical term entered by an accident of translation: mysterion, mystery, was rendered in the old Latin versions and in the Vulgate by sacramentum, as at Ephesians 5:32, where the union of Christ and the church is called a profound mystery, and at 1 Timothy 3:16 and Revelation 1:20. Sacramentum in ordinary Latin meant a soldier's oath of allegiance and also a sum deposited in a lawsuit as a pledge. Tertullian, writing in North Africa around the year 200, was using it of baptism, and the oath sense was audible: baptism as enlistment. The East kept the Greek and still calls them the holy mysteries, which is not a different rite under a different name but a different centre of gravity in the word itself.

Augustine supplied the definitions the West argued over for a millennium. In City of God 10.5, where he is defining sacrifice rather than sacrament, he says that a visible sacrifice is the sacrament, that is the sacred sign, sacrum signum, of an invisible sacrifice. The tighter formula students are usually handed, a sign of a sacred thing, signum rei sacrae, is a later scholastic refinement and not the wording of that chapter. In his tractates on John he gives the formula that Reformed and Lutheran and Catholic writers all quote: the word comes to the element and it becomes a sacrament, accedit verbum ad elementum, et fit sacramentum. The familiar English phrase, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, is not Augustine's own sentence but the catechism of the Book of Common Prayer summarising him, which is worth knowing before you attribute it.

Many Baptist, Anabaptist and Restorationist churches prefer the word ordinance, and the preference is deliberate rather than merely traditional. An ordinance is something Christ ordained and commanded, and the word puts the weight on obedience and on the rite as a sign of grace already received, rather than on the rite as an instrument through which grace is conveyed. The Second London Baptist Confession of 1689 calls baptism and the Supper ordinances of positive and sovereign institution. Notice, though, that the vocabulary is not a reliable guide to the theology: the Westminster Confession happily calls them both sacraments and ordinances, and a good many Baptists today use both words without meaning anything by the choice.

What actually turns on it is a question, not a word. Does the rite convey what it signifies, so that God is doing something through it, or does it signify and seal something God has done or will do elsewhere? And on what does its effect depend? Roman Catholic teaching answers with the phrase ex opere operato, from the work worked, defined at Trent's seventh session: the sacraments confer the grace they signify by virtue of Christ's own action in them, not by the holiness of the minister and not by being generated out of the recipient's faith. State that accurately, because it is constantly misrepresented. It is not a claim that the rite works mechanically on anyone at all; Trent and the Catechism both require that an adult recipient place no obstacle in the way, and the doctrine was hammered out against the Donatists, whose claim was that a sacrament administered by an unworthy priest was void.

The Protestant confessions answer differently and also differ among themselves. Lutherans hold that the sacraments truly offer and convey the forgiveness they promise, received by faith, and that the promise is objectively there whether or not it is believed. The Reformed confessions call them signs and seals, genuinely used by the Spirit as means of grace to those who believe, with the efficacy belonging to the Spirit rather than to the element or to the moment of administration; Westminster 28.6 makes the point sharply by saying that the grace is not tied to the moment of baptism. Those who prefer the word ordinance hold that the rite is a commanded sign and confession, and that God's grace is not conveyed by it. These are three positions, not one Protestant position, and a student who collapses them will misread three sets of confessions at once. Take 1 Peter 3:21 as a test. The BSB prints this water symbolizes the baptism that now saves you also, and a student who reads only that line may think the question closed in favour of sign language. The sacramental traditions answer that the sentence says baptism now saves, qualified by the clear conscience, and the Greek word behind symbolizes, antitypon, means a corresponding counterpart rather than a symbol. Ordinance traditions welcome the BSB's word. The English does not settle it, and the King James Version's the like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us shows how differently the clause can be put.

The number seven was not apostolic and nobody claims it was. It settled in the West in the twelfth century, and Peter Lombard's Sentences, written about 1150 and taught in every medieval university for four hundred years, is the book that fixed it: baptism, confirmation, the eucharist, penance, anointing of the sick, holy orders and matrimony. The Council of Florence restated the list in 1439 in its decree for the Armenians, and the Council of Trent, in the first canon of its seventh session in 1547, anathematised the claim that there are more or fewer than seven. Roman Catholic teaching holds that all seven were instituted by Christ, some by explicit command and some in the whole action of his ministry as the church came to recognise it, and that they cover the whole span of a Christian life from birth to death, with two, orders and matrimony, directed to the service of others.

Orthodox practice is to speak of seven mysteries too, and the history behind that is worth knowing because it is often assumed to be ancient. The number entered Orthodox catechisms from about the seventeenth century, under the influence of Western textbooks, and Orthodox theologians have never treated it as dogmatically fixed. Kallistos Ware, in The Orthodox Church, points out that the church has never authoritatively defined the number and that other actions, the monastic tonsure, the blessing of waters at Theophany, the burial service, have been called mysteries by Orthodox writers. The instinct behind the reticence is that the sacramental principle is not a list; the whole created order is capable of bearing God, and the seven are the chief instances rather than an exhaustive inventory.

The Protestant reduction to two was argued, not assumed. Luther's The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, published in 1520, is where it happens, and it happens in front of the reader: he opens by saying there are three, baptism, penance and the bread, and by the end has withdrawn penance because it has no divinely instituted visible sign of its own, leaving two. The criterion he uses is the one the Protestant confessions kept: a sacrament requires a command of Christ and a visible element attached to a promise of the gospel. Judged by that test, confirmation, marriage, orders and anointing are good things without being sacraments of the gospel.

Then some honest complications. Melanchthon, in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession XIII, says that if a sacrament is a rite with God's command and an attached promise of grace, then absolution belongs in the list alongside baptism and the Supper, and that ordination can be called a sacrament if it is understood as the ministry of the word. The Thirty-nine Articles, XXV, distinguish two sacraments of the gospel from five commonly called sacraments which are not to be counted as such, which is a more careful formula than a flat denial that they are anything. And at the far end of the Protestant range, the Religious Society of Friends and the Salvation Army practise no outward rites at all, holding that the realities the rites signify are given directly, which is a position the rest of Protestantism has never successfully argued against on its own principles.

So what divides the counts is a criterion rather than a list. If a sacrament must have dominical institution with an element and a promise, you will get two. If a sacrament is an act in which the church, as Christ's body, does what Christ does through her whole sacramental life, the number will be settled by recognition rather than by a test, and seven is a natural resting place rather than a deduction. Both criteria are coherent. Neither can be read off the surface of the New Testament, which names the two that everybody counts and describes the others without ever counting anything.

This is the point at which congregations divide, families divide, and people who agree about the gospel refuse each other's membership. Both cases are given here in full and from their own texts. Read both before judging either, and notice that the strongest form of each is not the form you will usually hear from its opponents.

The case for baptising the children of believers. The argument begins where the Bible begins, not in Acts. God takes Abraham and his offspring into covenant in Genesis 17:7, promising to be God to him and to his offspring after him, and commands a sign to be placed on infants at eight days old on the basis of their belonging, not on the basis of anything they have understood or done. That structure, a covenant community including the children of believers and marked with a sign, ran for two thousand years. The paedobaptist asks what would have to happen for it to stop, and answers: an explicit revocation, of which there is none. What the New Testament records instead is Acts 2:39, where Peter's first gospel invitation says the promise belongs to you and your children and to all who are far off. Colossians 2:11-12 sets the circumcision performed by Christ and not by human hands beside baptism in one breath. Five households are baptised in the New Testament, at Acts 10, 16:15, 16:33, 18:8 and 1 Corinthians 1:16, and the household was the unit of religion in that world. 1 Corinthians 7:14 calls the children of a believing parent holy, which is covenant vocabulary. Jesus takes children in his arms and says the kingdom of God belongs to such as these, Mark 10:14-16. Ephesians 6:1 and Colossians 3:20 address children directly inside letters written to be read to an assembled congregation, which paedobaptists take as evidence that children were counted among the members being instructed. And the argument from silence cuts the paedobaptist's way, they say: the New Testament records a furious controversy over whether Gentiles must be circumcised and records no controversy whatever over the exclusion of children from the covenant sign, which is inconceivable if a practice that old had just been abolished. Historically, Irenaeus around 180 writes of Christ sanctifying infants and children as well as the older; Tertullian argues against baptising infants in On Baptism 18 around 200, which proves the practice was there to argue against; Origen calls it a tradition received from the apostles; and a council at Carthage under Cyprian in 253 debates not whether infants should be baptised but whether it must wait until the eighth day. The Apostolic Tradition ascribed to Hippolytus, conventionally dated about 215, directs that the children be baptised first and that anyone unable to speak for himself be spoken for by his parents, though the date, authorship and provenance of that document are now heavily contested, chiefly since the commentary of Bradshaw, Johnson and Phillips in 2002. Joachim Jeremias assembled the case in Infant Baptism in the First Four Centuries.

The case for baptising believers only. The argument begins with what the New Testament actually narrates. Every baptism recorded in Acts follows hearing and believing: those who embraced his message were baptised, 2:41; when they believed Philip, they were baptised, both men and women, 8:12; the Ethiopian after Philip preaches to him; Cornelius after the Spirit falls; Lydia after the Lord opens her heart; many of the Corinthians who heard the message believed and were baptised, 18:8. Not one infant baptism is recorded, and the credobaptist notes that this is not an argument from silence but from the uniform shape of the evidence that exists. The meaning of the act requires it: Romans 6:3-4 makes baptism a burial with Christ into death and a rising to newness of life, Galatians 3:27 makes it a putting on of Christ, and Colossians 2:12, the paedobaptist's own text, completes its sentence with the words through your faith in the power of God. The covenantal argument is then met at its root. The new covenant is not structured like the old: Jeremiah 31:34 promises a community in which no one will teach his neighbor, saying Know the LORD, because they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest, and Hebrews 8:11 quotes it precisely to mark the difference, the point being that the clause the verse abolishes is the one addressed to somebody who does not yet know, so the sign of that covenant belongs to those who show its reality. The correspondence with circumcision is not simple either: circumcision was given to males by physical descent, and baptism is given to men and women on profession, so the two signs are not parallel in the way the argument requires, and Colossians 2:11 compares baptism to the circumcision of Christ rather than to the rite of Genesis 17 (the BSB footnote gives the Greek literally as in the cutting away of the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, which leaves open whether Christ's own circumcision or one he performs is meant). As to the households, four of the five carry language about the whole house hearing, believing or serving, at Acts 10:44 with 11:14, at 16:32 and 16:34, at 18:8 and at 1 Corinthians 16:15, and none of the five mentions an infant; Lydia's household at Acts 16:15 is the exception, where the text says only that she and her household were baptised after the Lord opened her heart, and careful credobaptists concede the point. Historically, Kurt Aland replied to Jeremias in Did the Early Church Baptize Infants? and argued that unambiguous evidence for the practice is absent before roughly 200 and that it spreads alongside the developing doctrine of original sin. The Second London Baptist Confession of 1689, chapter 29, states the position.

Two notes of honesty before the mode question, one owed to each side. Paedobaptists do not agree among themselves about what the baptism of an infant effects. Lutheran theology holds that baptism works forgiveness and regeneration and that infants can be given faith; the Reformed confessions treat it as a sign and seal of the covenant whose efficacy is not tied to the moment; Anglicans have held a range including both. That internal disagreement is a real cost to the position and the more careful paedobaptists say so. And credobaptists have to answer a question of their own: if only professing believers are baptised, what is the standing of the children of believers in the congregation, and does the practice of dedicating without baptising actually rest on a text? Many Baptist writers acknowledge that it does not and defend it on other grounds.

The mode. Baptizo in ordinary Greek means to dip or plunge, the burial imagery of Romans 6:4 fits immersion naturally, and Acts 8:38 has both men going down into the water. That is the strongest case and it is a good one. Against treating mode as essential, the Didache, an early Christian manual usually dated to the late first or early second century, instructs baptism in running water, then allows other water, then allows warm if cold is unavailable, and then says that if you have neither, pour water three times on the head in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. That is a community that clearly preferred immersion and clearly did not regard it as indispensable. Most traditions today hold mode to be significant and not of the essence. Baptists and the Orthodox both regard immersion as proper, for quite different reasons, which is one of the odder alignments in this subject.

The Orthodox practice is worth setting out on its own, because Western students often do not know it and it cuts across the Western argument. An Orthodox infant is baptised by triple immersion, then chrismated immediately with holy oil, and then given communion at the same liturgy. The whole of Christian initiation happens in one service, and there is no separate confirmation withheld until an age of reason. Orthodox writers point out that the Western separation of confirmation from baptism is the innovation, produced in the Latin West by the requirement that a bishop perform the anointing, and that the East has simply kept the older order. Whatever you conclude about infants and water, an argument conducted only between Geneva and Zurich and London has left out a great many Christians whose practice is older than all three.

Five accounts follow. They are given in the order in which they entered the argument, each from its own texts and in its own vocabulary, and none of them is written here as the foil for another. The texts they all work from are the same: the institution narratives at Matthew 26:26-28, Mark 14:22-24, Luke 22:19-20 and 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; the participation language of 1 Corinthians 10:16-17; the warnings of 1 Corinthians 11:27-29; and, more disputedly, the bread of life discourse of John 6:51-58.

Transubstantiation, as Catholic theology states it. By the consecration, the whole substance of the bread is changed into the substance of Christ's body and the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood, the appearances of bread and wine remaining; the Council of Trent, in the fourth chapter and second canon of its thirteenth session in 1551, says that the church suitably and properly calls this conversion transubstantiation. Every word of that needs its Aristotelian sense to be read rightly. Substance means what a thing most fundamentally is, not its chemistry; the accidents, what can be seen, tasted and measured, are unchanged, so no experiment could detect the change and none is claimed. The presence is sacramental rather than local: Christ is not shrunk, multiplied or divided, and Trent explicitly rejects a carnal or cannibalistic understanding. By concomitance the whole Christ, body, blood, soul and divinity, is received under either species. The texts are the four institution accounts, read as saying what they say; 1 Corinthians 10:16, where the cup is a participation in the blood; 1 Corinthians 11:27-29, where an unworthy communicant is guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord and eats and drinks judgment without recognizing the body, which Catholic theology takes to require that there be a body there to recognise; and John 6:53-56, where Jesus says that unless you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man you have no life in you, and that his flesh is real food. Catholic theologians insist the doctrine is not an explanation of the mechanism but a statement of what is the case, with a borrowed philosophical term used to exclude errors; Paul VI defended the term on exactly those grounds in Mysterium Fidei in 1965.

The Lutheran sacramental union. The body and blood of Christ are truly and substantially present, distributed and received with the bread and the wine, which remain bread and wine; the standard phrase is in, with and under, and the Formula of Concord, article VII, is the confessional statement. Lutherans reject transubstantiation, not because it claims too much presence but because it claims too much knowledge: the words of Christ say that the bread is his body, not that the bread has ceased to be bread, and to add the second is to put Aristotle where scripture is silent. They equally reject the reading that makes is mean signifies. Luther's ground at the Marburg colloquy in October 1529, where he chalked hoc est corpus meum on the table and would not be moved from it, was that the plain words of institution must govern, and that the arguments against them were philosophical arguments about what a body can do. Behind that lies a Christological claim, worked out in his Confession Concerning Christ's Supper of 1528: because the two natures are united in one person, the human nature shares in the divine majesty, so Christ's body is not confined to one place in the way the Reformed argument assumes. Lutherans also hold, from 1 Corinthians 11:27-29, that even the unworthy receive the body and blood, to their judgement, which is a genuine distinctive of the position. They reject the label consubstantiation as a scholastic misdescription of what they teach. Marburg is instructive about how narrow the gap felt and how wide it proved, since the two parties agreed on fourteen of the fifteen articles put before them and broke on the fifteenth.

The Reformed account of the spiritual presence, and Calvin is not Zwingli. Calvin, in Institutes 4.17, insists that believers truly partake of the body and blood of Christ, that the signs are not empty, and that what is signified is genuinely exhibited and given. He denies that Christ's body is locally present in the bread, because Christ's body is a real human body and is in heaven until he comes. His solution is pneumatological: the Holy Spirit is the bond, who does not bring Christ down but lifts believers up to him, so that the distance is no obstacle, which is why the old liturgical call to lift up your hearts is for Calvin a description of what actually happens. His central text is 1 Corinthians 10:16 and the word koinonia, a real participation. He attacked both flanks: he judged the Lutheran account to make Christ's humanity something other than human, and he complained, against accounts too thin for the text, that it is not enough to say believers receive only the Spirit's benefits while omitting the flesh and blood scripture names. The Heidelberg Catechism, questions 75 to 79, and the Belgic Confession 35 teach this, the Westminster Larger Catechism says the same at question 170, that the body and blood are spiritually present to the faith of the receiver, and Westminster 29.7 fixes the formula: worthy receivers really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually, receive and feed upon Christ crucified. The Consensus Tigurinus of 1549 reconciled Geneva with Zurich, and readers ever since have argued about how much Calvin conceded in it. Calvin himself wanted the Supper celebrated weekly and was overruled by the Genevan council, which left the Reformed churches with the infrequent practice he had argued against.

The memorial account. Its classic statement is Zwingli's, in his 1526 work on the Lord's Supper: the word is in this is my body is to be read as signifies, on the same principle as I am the gate, I am the true vine, and that rock was Christ in 1 Corinthians 10:4, all of which are Christ's own or Paul's own usage. John 6:63, the Spirit gives life; the flesh profits nothing, is taken to close off a carnal eating in the very chapter usually quoted for one. The BSB's capital S reads the Spirit there as the Holy Spirit, which Greek, having no capitals, does not itself show. Catholic and Lutheran readers answer that the flesh which profits nothing is flesh without the Spirit, not the flesh of Christ that 6:51 and 6:55 call the living bread and real food. The ascension is decisive: a true body is somewhere, Acts 3:21 says heaven must take him in until the time comes for the restoration of all things, and a body in many places at once is no longer a body. What the rite is, then, is what Christ said it was, a remembrance and a proclamation of his death until he comes, and a pledge of the covenant in which the church confesses its allegiance. Two honesties are owed here. Zwingli's own later writing is not the bare memorialism his name now denotes; in his Exposition of the Faith he affirms that Christ is truly present to the contemplation of faith and that the sacrament is no empty sign, and Zwingli specialists such as W. P. Stephens argue that the popular label caricatures him. And the churches most associated with this view often confess something warmer than it: the Second London Baptist Confession of 1689, chapter 30, borrows Westminster's language about really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, spiritually receiving and feeding upon Christ crucified. The view is the ordinary practice today of Baptist, Anabaptist, Restorationist and most independent congregations.

The Orthodox account, and its deliberate reticence. The East affirms without qualification that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. The Liturgy of St John Chrysostom asks it in the epiclesis, where the priest prays that God would send down his Holy Spirit and make this bread the precious body of his Christ and that which is in the cup the precious blood, changing them by his Holy Spirit. What the East declines to do is specify the mechanism. John of Damascus, in On the Orthodox Faith, answers the question how by saying it is enough to hear that it is by the Holy Spirit, and refuses to go further. Two structural differences follow. The consecration is located in the whole eucharistic prayer with the epiclesis at its heart, rather than in the words of institution alone, and this was a real point of controversy with the Latin West. And the Greek term metousiosis, the exact calque of transubstantiation, does appear in Orthodox usage, notably in the Confession of Dositheus adopted by the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672, but many later Orthodox theologians treat that confession as written under Latin pressure and the term as permissible shorthand rather than required doctrine. Two practical consequences a Western student notices at once: baptised infants are communicated from the start, and the gifts are reserved for communion outside the full liturgy, for the sick and the dying and, on the Wednesdays and Fridays of Great Lent, for whole congregations at the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, which communicates from Gifts consecrated the previous Sunday; what the East never developed is exposition and adoration apart from communion. The Orthodox position is therefore not a middle way between Rome and Wittenberg and Geneva. It is a refusal to accept the question in the form the Western argument asks it.

Start with what is agreed, because it is larger than the argument and almost nobody teaches it. All five accounts hold that Christ himself instituted the Supper on the night he was betrayed and commanded its repetition; that it is bread and a cup and not something else; that it proclaims his death; that it is a communion with him and with his people, so that a private sacrament is a contradiction; that it looks forward to his coming, which is what the anchor verse says; and that it may be received to one's harm, which is Paul's own warning and not a piece of sacramentalism. On baptism, all agree that it is commanded, that it is in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, that it is done once, that it marks entrance into the visible church, and that it is bound up with union with Christ, forgiveness and the gift of the Spirit. Nobody in this lesson thinks either rite is optional, and the churches that practise neither hold that the realities are given directly rather than that they do not matter.

What is not agreed is worth listing plainly. On baptism: who is a proper subject, whether the mode is essential, what the rite effects in an infant, and whether one tradition's baptism is recognised by another. On the Supper: the manner of Christ's presence, whether the elements change, whether unbelievers receive the body, who may preside, who may be admitted, and how often it should be done. One verse carries more of this than its size suggests. In 1 Corinthians 11:29 the BSB prints without recognizing the body, and omits the words of the Lord that the Byzantine and Received Text traditions add, as its footnote records. Catholic and Lutheran readers take the body to be Christ's sacramental body. Many Reformed and other readers take it to mean the church, the assembled body whose poor members were being shamed in 11:17-22, and some take it to include both. The BSB's English leaves the question as open as the Greek does. And behind the whole subject sits the question of sacrifice, which this lesson has not treated, where Trent's twenty-second session teaches that the Mass re-presents the one sacrifice of Calvary rather than repeating it, while Article XXXI of the Thirty-nine Articles calls the sacrifices of masses blasphemous fables. That is as sharp as sixteenth-century language gets, and the modern bilateral dialogues have found the distance smaller than the words suggest without making it disappear.

Those dialogues are part of the evidence a serious student should know about. The Faith and Order Commission's Lima text of 1982, Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, is the most widely studied convergence document of the twentieth century and was responded to officially by well over a hundred churches, including Rome. The Anglican and Roman Catholic commission's Windsor Statement on eucharistic doctrine of 1971, with its elucidation of 1979, is a second. Neither resolved anything, and reading them is still the fastest way to see what the real points of difficulty are, because they were written by people who had to state the other side's position to its face.

What you should be able to do now. Explain why the word sacrament is Latin and why the East says mysteries, and what question actually sits underneath the choice between sacrament and ordinance. Say why one church counts seven and another two without saying that either is being arbitrary, because neither is. State the paedobaptist and credobaptist cases in the form their own defenders use, name the texts each rests on, and name the internal difficulty each has to live with. And give five accounts of the Supper, from their own texts, in language their holders would accept.

One last instruction, which is pastoral rather than academic. You will at some point have to tell a family that your church cannot receive their baptism, or cannot admit them to the table. If you do it, do it knowing exactly what the other tradition believes and why, and say so out loud to them, because the difference between a conviction and an insult is usually whether the person holding it can state the other view accurately. Most of the damage done in this area is done by people who had never read a page of what they were rejecting.