Theopedia

Reformed sacramentology

“And he received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised.”

— Romans 4:11 (ESV)

Definition

A sacrament, often called an ordinance among Baptists, is a sign and seal that Christ himself instituted for his church, not a symbol the church chose on its own, through which God confirms the promises of the gospel to those who receive it in faith. The New Testament names two: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Neither conveys grace automatically to everyone who receives it, and neither is a bare token of church membership; each is made effectual only by the working of the Holy Spirit in the believer, the same Spirit who works through the preached word.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 London Baptist Confession states the general doctrine briefly:

Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are ordinances of positive and sovereign institution, appointed by the Lord Jesus, the only lawgiver, to be continued in his church to the end of the world. These holy appointments are to be administered by those only who are qualified and thereunto called, according to the commission of Christ.1

“Positive institution” means the two ordinances rest on Christ’s own direct appointment rather than on any natural fitness of water, bread, or wine to signify grace, or on the church’s own judgment about what would make a fitting sign; this is why the confession recognizes exactly two ordinances and not the larger number other traditions have added over time. The Westminster Larger Catechism, in the fuller wording the 2LBCF’s terser chapter presupposes, defines a sacrament as “a holy ordinance instituted by Christ in his church, to signify, seal, and exhibit unto those that are within the covenant of grace, the benefits of his mediation; to strengthen and increase their faith, and all other graces; to oblige them to obedience; to testify and cherish their love and communion one with another; and to distinguish them from those that are without.”2

On how the sign relates to the grace it signifies, the confession’s own chapter on the Lord’s Supper states the same “spiritual, not carnal” formula argued at length by Calvin and the Reformed confessions generally:

Worthy receivers, outwardly partaking of the visible elements in this ordinance, do then also inwardly by faith, really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually receive, and feed upon Christ crucified… the body and blood of Christ being then not corporally or carnally, but spiritually present to the faith of believers in that ordinance, as the elements themselves are to their outward senses.3

The practical implication is administrative as well as theological: because the ordinances are Christ’s own positive appointment rather than a general church prerogative, the confession restricts their administration to those “qualified and thereunto called” rather than leaving it open to any believer.1

Biblical Basis

The Reformed vocabulary of “sign and seal” comes from Paul’s description of Abraham’s circumcision: he “received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith” (Rom. 4:11), a pattern of an outward, divinely instituted mark confirming an inward, prior spiritual reality that Reformed theology treats as paradigmatic for both New Testament ordinances.4 Circumcision was itself God’s own positive institution, not a sign Abraham or his household devised (Gen. 17:11), the same positive-institution pattern baptism and the Lord’s Supper follow.

Both New Testament ordinances have the same kind of direct dominical institution. Christ commands baptism “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19), and Paul locates the Lord’s Supper’s authority in an act of Christ’s own on “the night when he was betrayed” (1 Cor. 11:23-26). Paul’s language for the Supper, that the bread and cup are a “participation” (κοινωνία) in Christ’s body and blood (1 Cor. 10:16-17), is the New Testament text the Reformed doctrine of a real, spiritual (as opposed to a merely commemorative) reception rests on. Baptism’s own continuity with circumcision as a covenant sign is stated directly in Colossians, where believers are described as having been “circumcised with a circumcision made without hands… buried with him in baptism” (Col. 2:11-12).

Historical Development

Patristic broadening and medieval fixation

The New Testament itself never uses the word “sacrament.” The term descends from the Latin translation of the Greek μυστηριον (mystērion), and the church fathers, following Augustine, used it in a broad sense covering any sacred sign, so that for centuries the number of “sacraments” remained unfixed.4 Peter Lombard (d. 1164) was the first to enumerate the now-familiar seven, though councils and theologians after him, including the Third Lateran Council of 1179, continued to use the term more loosely; only with the wide adoption of Lombard’s own Sentences as the standard theology textbook, and the Council of Florence’s fixing of the number at seven in 1439, did the sevenfold enumeration become settled Roman Catholic teaching, later codified at the Council of Trent.4 Transubstantiation developed on a similar timeline: first argued explicitly by Paschasius Radbertus, abbot of Corbie, in 831, opposed at the time by Ratramnus, named by the term transubstantiatio only later by Hildebert of Tours (d. 1134), and finally decreed an article of faith by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 at the instance of Innocent III.5

The Reformation’s divided answer

The Reformers agreed in reducing the sacraments to the two Christ himself instituted, but disagreed sharply among themselves on how the sign relates to the reality it signifies. Luther held that Christ’s body and blood are truly and corporeally present “in, with, and under” the bread and wine, received even by unbelievers to their own condemnation.6 Zwingli held the opposite: the elements were, in Charles Hodge’s phrase, “no more means of grace than the rainbow or the heaps of stone on the banks of the Jordan,” valuable for the truths they brought to mind rather than as channels of any divine communication.7 The two positions proved irreconcilable at the Marburg Colloquy in October 1529, and the Lutheran and Reformed branches of the Reformation confessed the Lord’s Supper differently from that point on, the Augsburg Confession following in June 1530.8 Calvin, writing from 1536 (the first edition of the Institutes) through the finished 1559 edition, staked out a mediating position: the bread and wine truly communicate the life-giving power of Christ’s body and blood, not because that body and blood are locally present, but because the Holy Spirit unites the believer to the Christ who is present in heaven.8

The Reformed consensus

Calvin’s own view did not immediately settle the Reformed side of the dispute; Zwingli’s followers in Zurich and Calvin’s own Geneva initially held distinguishable positions. Calvin resolved this in 1549 by drafting the Consensus Tigurinus with Zurich’s Heinrich Bullinger, uniting the Zwinglian and Calvinistic wings of Swiss Protestantism in a single doctrine of the Supper. That consensus, not either Reformer’s position taken alone, became the confessional standard across the Reformed churches: it prevails in the Second Helvetic Confession (1566), the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the Thirty-Nine Articles (1562), and the Westminster Confession (1646), all agreeing that Christ’s flesh and blood are present to believers “neither physical nor local, but only through the Holy Spirit.”9 The 1689 London Baptist Confession, following Westminster and Savoy on this point as on most others, inherited the same consensus formula in the “really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally” language quoted above.3

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic

Roman Catholic teaching holds seven sacraments, not two, and grounds baptism, confirmation, and holy orders in an “indelible character” imprinted on the recipient.4 For the Eucharist specifically, Rome teaches transubstantiation: the whole substance of the bread becomes Christ’s body and the whole substance of the wine his blood, with only the outward appearance of bread and wine remaining, so that the elements are to be reserved and adored as Christ’s own body.5 The sacraments are held to confer grace ex opere operato, “by the very fact of the action’s being performed,” provided the recipient interposes no positive obstacle, a formula that in Bavinck’s assessment “removes grace almost completely from guilt and the forgiveness of sins” and makes faith unnecessary to the sacrament’s own operation.4

Lutheran

Lutheran theology rejects transubstantiation but holds that Christ’s whole person, body and blood, is really and corporeally present “in, with, and under” the bread and wine (a view later writers labeled consubstantiation, though Lutherans themselves generally avoid the term), received by the mouth of every communicant, believer and unbeliever alike, though only the believer receives it to blessing rather than judgment.6 Lutheran theology grounds this in the communicatio idiomatum, the sharing of the divine and human natures’ properties in Christ’s one person, which Lutherans take to mean Christ’s human nature itself shares the divine nature’s omnipresence.6

Zwinglian and Socinian

The position historically associated with Zwingli, and continued in different terms by Socinians and Remonstrants, denies that the sacraments are means of grace at all, holding the elements to be mere signs and the ordinances themselves bare acts of commemoration and badges of profession, with no special presence of Christ attached to them.10 The Reformed confessions distinguish their own position from this one as sharply as from Rome’s or Luther’s: the sacraments are, on the Reformed account, genuinely “effectual means of grace,” not empty ceremonies, even though that efficacy depends wholly on the Spirit’s cooperating work rather than on any virtue in the sign itself.10

Objections and Responses

If the sacraments strengthen faith, doesn’t that make the Holy Spirit’s own work in the believer superfluous? Calvin records this objection in his own treatment of the sacraments and answers that faith, sacrament, and the Spirit’s illumination are not one blessing competing for credit but three distinct works of the same God: “the Lord teaches and trains us by his word; next, he confirms us by his sacraments; lastly, he illumines our mind by the light of his Holy Spirit,” so that crediting the sacraments with confirming faith takes nothing away from the Spirit, whose illumination is what makes the word and the sacrament effective on the heart in the first place.11 The sacraments carry no independent power of their own that could compete with the Spirit’s office; Calvin is explicit that there is no “secret efficacy perpetually inherent in them,” only Christ’s own appointment of them as instruments the Spirit is pleased to use.11

Doesn’t calling the sacraments “means of grace” reintroduce the Roman Catholic view the Reformers rejected? The Reformed confessions deny this by stating what the position is not, as carefully as what it is: not Rome’s view, in which the sacrament’s efficacy inheres in the rite itself; not the Lutheran view, in which grace is tied to the word’s presence in the sign regardless of the recipient’s faith; and not the Socinian or Zwinglian view, in which the sacraments convey nothing beyond what a badge or memorial conveys.10 What the Reformed confessions affirm instead is that the sacraments are efficacious, but only “through the attending operation of the Holy Ghost,” and only to those who receive them in faith, so that their power is never tied to the rite’s performance the way Rome’s ex opere operato formula ties it.7

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 28, “Of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.” ↩ ↩2

  2. The Westminster Larger Catechism (1647), Q. 162. ↩

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 30, “Of the Lord’s Supper,” para. 7. ↩ ↩2

  4. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  5. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 637. ↩ ↩2

  6. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 639. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. Charles Hodge, “Chapter XX. The Means of Grace,” in Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 496. ↩ ↩2

  8. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 640. ↩ ↩2

  9. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 641. ↩

  10. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 643. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  11. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 14, sec. 8, 497. ↩ ↩2