Sacraments

A sacrament, called an ordinance in Baptist usage, is a rite Christ himself instituted for his church: an outward, visible sign joined to an inward, spiritual grace which it signifies, seals, and, for those who receive it in faith, actually conveys.¹ Augustine defined it as “a visible sign of invisible grace, instituted for our justification.”² The word itself is post-biblical; the New Testament never uses it.³ Reformed and Baptist churches recognize only two such rites, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, while other traditions count as many as seven or reject the category altogether.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 London Baptist Confession does not use the word “sacrament” at all, speaking instead of “ordinances of positive and sovereign institution, appointed by the Lord Jesus, the only lawgiver.”⁴ Where the wider Reformed family does define the term, the Westminster Larger Catechism gives the fullest statement: a sacrament “signif[ies], seal[s], and exhibit[s]… the benefits of [Christ’s] mediation,” consisting of “an outward and sensible sign” joined to “an inward spiritual grace thereby signified.”¹ The confession’s restriction to exactly two ordinances rests on the sign-and-seal framework worked out in Reformed sacramentology.

Historical Development

The Latin word sacramentum originally meant a soldier’s oath of allegiance or a sum pledged in court, with no religious sense at all.⁵ The church fathers adopted it to translate the Greek mystērion, “a mystery,” applying it to baptism and the Lord’s Supper as rites carrying a hidden spiritual meaning.⁵ Because the Vulgate used the same Latin word for mystērion wherever it appeared, including Paul’s description of marriage as a “mystery” in reference to Christ and the church (Eph. 5:32), medieval theologians could appeal to that verse to argue that marriage itself was a sacrament, an inference Hodge calls absurd given the word’s real origin.⁵ That same latitude let the number of “sacraments” drift upward for centuries before the Roman church fixed it at seven, a count the Council of Trent later declared binding under pain of anathema.

The restriction to exactly two rites follows from an argument about what the word itself requires. Confirmation, penance, and extreme unction have no warrant in Scripture as divine institutions at all, and marriage and ordination, though genuinely instituted by God, are not of the same kind as baptism and the Lord’s Supper: they neither signify nor convey any inward grace, and so fail the definition itself rather than merely losing a vote among the Reformers.⁶

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic

The Council of Trent anathematized anyone who denied that Christ instituted exactly seven sacraments:

If any one saith that the sacraments of the New Law were not all instituted by Jesus Christ, our Lord, or that they are more or less than seven, to wit, Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction, Order, and Matrimony; or even that any one of these seven is not truly and properly a sacrament; let him be anathema.⁷

Confirmation, penance, extreme unction, holy orders, and marriage join baptism and the Eucharist on Rome’s list even though none of the five signifies or conveys any inward grace, the mark of a sacrament by Hodge’s own definition.

Church of England

The Thirty-Nine Articles take an intermediate position, naming two sacraments “of the Gospel” while keeping the other five at a lesser, non-sacramental status rather than dropping them outright:

There are two Sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel, that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord. Those five commonly called Sacraments, that is to say, Confirmation, Penance, Orders, Matrimony, and extreme Unction, are not to be counted for Sacraments of the Gospel… but yet have not like nature of Sacraments with Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, for that they have not any visible sign or ceremony ordained of God.⁸

Quakers and similar groups

At the opposite extreme from Rome’s seven, some groups recognize no sacraments at all. Archibald Alexander Hodge notes that baptism’s standing as a perpetual, binding ordinance “has been denied… by Quakers… on the ground of a false spiritualism,” citing Robert Barclay’s Apology as the position’s classic statement.⁹ Where the Reformed tradition holds that an inward grace is really, if instrumentally, joined to an outward sign, these groups dispense with the outward sign as unnecessary to a faith they hold to be entirely inward.

Related Doctrines

References

The Westminster Larger Catechism (1647), Q. 162. ↩ ↩²
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 41, “The Sacraments,” 589: “Sacramentum est invisibilis gratiae visibile signum, ad nostram justificationem institutum.” ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 590: “It is to be remembered that the term ‘sacrament’ does not occur in the Bible.” ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 28, “Of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper,” para. 1. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 588-589. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 590-591. ↩
Council of Trent, Seventh Session (1547), “Canons on the Sacraments in General,” canon 1, quoted in Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 599. ↩
The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (London, 1571), Art. 25, “Of the Sacraments.” ↩
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 42, “Baptism,” 603. ↩