A. K. Chidgzey

Generally speaking, a sacrament is a sacred ritual as part of living within the church community and sacramentalism is, within Catholic doctrine, the belief that partaking in these sacred rituals is essential for salvation. They are spiritually efficacious actions that literally partake some sort of spiritual power.

There are seven sacraments, which we will explore in this episode, but they are baptism, confirmation, communion (or the eucharist), penance (which is generally confession of sin and reconciliation into the church community), marriage, holy orders (or being ordained as a priest), and the anointing of the sick. Most Protestant traditions only practice baptism and communion and the Church of the East, which we mentioned in the episode on Nestorianism, replaces marriage and the anointing of the sick with making the sign of the cross and the use of what is called holy leaven, which is a dough that supposedly includes residue from the original bread from the actual Last Supper – kind of like a really old sourdough, and whether that is holy or not, I’m sure that would definitely make you feel something.

The word sacrament comes from the Latin sacramentum, which is derived from the Greek word mysterion, which is where we get the English word mystery.

One of the earliest to use this word in connection to Christian practice was John Chrysostrom, of the fourth century, when he called the eucharist a mystery.

We find the word mystery in a number of spots in the New Testament. Paul occasionally uses the word to refer to the Gospel itself, or generally to God’s desire for relationship, particularly the Gentiles. The author of Colossians says that the mystery is “Christ in you, the hope of glory” and the author of 1 Timothy says that the life, death, and glorification of Jesus is a great mystery: “He was revealed in flesh, vindicated in spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among gentiles, believed in throughout the world, take up in glory.”

So the word mystery was used by early Christians in connection to these ceremonial rituals that visibly expressed the gospel.

The Greek speaking east continued to use the word mysterion, but the Latin speaking west translated it into the word sacramentum, which was actually an oath that soldiers would take to remain obedient to their commander. It was a solemn, serious ritual, and so participating in this act was a reaffirmation of one’s commitment to Christ.

But the fourth century theologian, the great Saint Augustine of Hippo, further clarified this idea of mystery and sacrament by separating the act itself from the divinely imparted grace. And so could say that the sacrament is the outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace. And then this developed until it was believed that this outward sign and this inward transformation were inherently connected. The acts themselves became integral parts of church life, they were the conduits of God’s grace. By participating in baptism and the eucharist person receives God’s grace, but this expanded over time to those seven sacraments.

To be cut off from these sacraments was to be cut off from God’s grace, which was why excommunication was such a big deal.

In other words, to put it simply, the sacraments themselves were actually literally, spiritually doing something. They were mundane acts that were transformed into the means by which God could impart his power upon his people. And because of how significant this was, only ordained clergy could actually administer these sacraments.

Another way of thinking about it could be liminality. The word liminal generally refers to a threshold, and to say that something is liminal is to say that it is occupying both sides of that threshold. The teenage years are potentially a liminal space, that awkward period of time between childhood and adulthood. Or an airport, a location of transition. Abandoned buildings that once had a purpose that they no longer serve but are not worth pulling down. That feeling you get when you visit an historical location, where it seems like the distant past has merged with the present.

The idea of liminality can also refer to places or moments that are sacred, the threshold between the spiritual and the natural, between heaven and earth. In some traditions this is known as a thin place, where the veil that hides the supernatural world is pulled back.

This understanding is similar, if not essentially synonymous, with the idea of sacrament. The practice of the sacrament is a moment of liminality, a moment where heaven and earth mysteriously overlap.

The Catholic understanding of sacraments came under attack during the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther argued that the sacraments did impart spiritual power but insisted that they were only efficacious, that they only actually did anything, when they were accepted by the participant by faith. However, others thought that he had not gone far enough. They thought this concept of sacrament was more magic than spiritual, that it was superstition even.

The Baptists started using the term ordinance, rather than sacrament, referring to those rituals that Jesus himself ordained. Where the Catholic church practiced 7 sacraments, the Baptists insisted on only 2: Baptism and the eucharist, which became known as communion or just the Lord’s Supper. According to the Gospel accounts, these were ordained by Jesus. And the focus of those rituals was on obedience, and so they are human acts, not divine ones. They were stripped of anything that seemed too much like magic. They don’t impart anything particularly spiritual, but are just signs. The Holy Spirit is the one that imparts anything spiritual and cannot be limited to anything physical or anything human. They nevertheless maintained that baptism and communion were still sacred acts, rituals that still functioned as the external sign of an inward transformation, but theologically it is not the act of the ritual itself which is spiritually efficacious.

So let’s have a closer look at these sacraments, focusing in on baptism and the eucharist.

Baptism is the practice of using water to symbolize the act of purification and is usually the ritual that signifies one’s entry into the Christian community. This goes back to Jesus being baptized in the Jordan River by John the Baptist. By doing so, Jesus was participating in a common Jewish practice that developed in the post-exilic period, also known as the Second Temple Period, and was an act of purification and cleansing.

At the end of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus commissions his disciples to go and make disciples and to baptize them. So we see that right from the very beginning this ritual of baptism was very important.

Baptism symbolizes one’s participation in Jesus’ death and resurrection.

The very fact that Jesus was baptized and that he himself said it was the right thing to do suggests that there’s no actual spiritual power in the act of baptism itself, because if Jesus was sinless there was no need for him to be purified. That’d be like plugging your phone into a charger when the battery’s already at 100%. At best, you might keep the battery at full charge, at worst, it might explode. People might respond to that by saying that Jesus was baptized as an example for us to follow. But my response to that would be that that just proves that the efficacy and power of baptism is in the fact that it’s an outward symbol more than it is anything internal.

But then we have to consider what that symbol is. And it could conceivably symbolize one of two things. First, it could be the visible sign of something internal, as the sacraments have generally been understood, which then implies that that person needs to have a faith, and hence need to be of an age where they can make that decision for themselves – in other words, not a child. But on the other hand, second, baptism could conceivably be understood as something more corporate, more communal. If baptism is the ritual of initiation into a community, then it is less about that individual’s decision and more about the community at large. If we throw in the theological idea that salvation was entirely God’s initiative and a gift of absolute grace that had absolutely nothing to do with us, then I could see how it would be appropriate to baptize an infant, because from that perspective baptism has nothing to do with an individual’s action. I do see the merits of both positions, but I do lean more toward the first, that baptism is an outward, visible sign of an internal reality.

And I’m actually pretty glad, then, that I live in the 21^st century and not in the 16^th century, for a whole lot of reasons, but if I lived in the 16^th century and I believed that baptism should be reserved for adults, well, there’s a good chance I might have had weights strapped to my ankles and thrown into a lake. Which is what happened to the anabaptists, a term which means re-baptizer. They were a group of people in the Protestant reformation, known as the radical reformers, who insisted that baptism should be reserved for adults, and so they baptized themselves. They got the derogatory nickname of anabaptists and their punishment was to be…well…baptized by permanent immersion. By which I mean they were drowned. By other Protestants mostly who evidently had an ironic sense of humour.

The next sacrament is that of the eucharist. It’s also known as communion or the Lord’s Supper (all three terms are actually found in the New Testament) and the institution of the Lord’s Supper goes back to Jesus’ last meal that he had with his disciples before his arrest and subsequent execution. Jesus handed around a piece of bread and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.” And then he took a cup of wine, handed it around and said, “Drink, this is my blood, my blood of the covenant, which is poured for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me.” This is then reiterated by Paul indicating the important of this ritual in the early Christian community. The act of eating this bread and drinking the wine which represents Jesus’ body and blood is spiritual nourishment. As baptism is initiation into the community, the eucharist is the ongoing participation in that community. It is the act of receiving God’s grace and nourishing the soul. Jesus called himself the bread of life and commands his followers to eat that bread of life.

This was taken very literally. At first, by the opponents of Christianity, who thought these Christians were practicing cannibalism. What made it worse was that early Jesus followers starting calling this meal a love feast and they called one another brother and sister, so people started thinking that these Christians were not only cannibals but were incestuous.

By over time, theology developed, and people started to believe that the bread and the wine literally transformed into the physical body and blood of Jesus. This is called transubstantiation, and I plan on doing a whole episode on the eucharist one day, because it’s hard to do the topic justice in brief. But in the reformation, some started to think this then means that Jesus is being sacrificed over and over again, every time the eucharist takes place. This goes against the claim of Hebrews that says that Jesus’ sacrifice was once and for all.

Luther argued that since Jesus was already in everything, then he is already in the elements of the eucharist. Jesus is already present in, with, and under the bread and wine, so there’s need for this transformation. His view is called consubstantiation.

A man named Ulrich Zwingli took this even further, to say that the eucharist is no more than a sign. This is called memorialism. Jesus tells us to remember him when he partake in the supper. That’s the point: to remember. No more, no less. It is a symbolic act of remembrance.

This difference of opinion between Luther and Zwingli, and their followers, threatened to destroy the Protestant Reformation which had only really just begun. So along comes John Calvin who proposed a mediatory position, known as spiritual presence. The bread and wine do not literally transform into Jesus’ physicality, but nevertheless imparts spiritual blessing. It is not efficacious in terms of salvation, and rather than Jesus descending to us, the eucharist is above us to him. When we partake in this ritual, in faith, we draw near Christ and nourished.

I need a whole episode to really unpack all of that, but I do tend to lean more toward Calvin’s position on the eucharist, that it is more than a cognitive act of remembering, but that it is not transubstantiation. I don’t think the elements literally turn into the physical body and blood of Jesus because, perhaps rather simply, when Jesus initiated the eucharist, he was still alive. He hadn’t died and risen yet, so the disciples sitting around the table at the last supper just could not have been feasting on Jesus’ body. It could only have been symbolic. And if that first supper was symbolic, there’s no reason to think that every other supper that has happened since is not also symbolic.

So personally I tend to fall more into the Baptist category here, in that I lean more towards the two ordinances of baptism and communion, and I don’t think they are efficacious in terms of salvation. But perhaps I’m not entirely Baptist because I do actually think that they do…something. I think there is an element where communion in particular does provide some sort of spiritual nourishment that takes the act of taking communion beyond just a mental activity of remembering.

But I do also want to stress that these rituals do mean a great deal to a lot of people, and so I don’t necessarily want to dictate what these rituals mean specifically. Some of the power, I think, lies just in the fact that they mean a lot to people. If you draw comfort from these sacraments in whatever form that might take for you, then I genuinely think that is wonderful. If you were baptized as a baby and that is significant to you, I don’t want to take that away from you. I was baptized as a baby and that is very significant to me, even though I was also baptized as an adult.

The power of the ritual lies not in the ritual itself, but in the faith that the ritual inspires.

I do also actually quite like the word ‘sacrament’. It’s not really a word that gets used in Baptist churches very often, which is the tradition that I grew up in and currently practice, and though I understand, historically, why the Baptist church wanted to distance itself from words like sacrament and eucharist, which sound very Catholic, I think it’s a bit of a shame that we’ve lost the word sacrament, at least in terms of the mystery connotations.

I’ve also used that word, mystery, quite a lot in this podcast. I think we do need a word that refers to the distinction between finite creation and infinite divinity and how the two interact. Our conception of God will never be complete because by vey definition, God transcends all human cognition and capability. I believe that God has revealed himself, and has revealed himself ultimately in the person of Jesus and in his resurrection, and I do believe that we can know plenty about God and that knowledge will continue to increase, but it will always be dynamic, rather than static, relational, rather than clinical, and perpetually partial, provisional, incomplete, and rooted to and conditioned by our cultural and historical context. Our relationship with God and our knowledge of God is a mystery, it is sacramental.

Likewise, God’s relationship to the world, to creation, is a mystery. Now I don’t hold to a strong view of providence, that God causes every little everything, good and bad, and when it comes to things like miracles, I actually default to a skeptical naturalism. I think almost everything tends to have a natural explanation or is an accident of contingency. Personally I struggle to make sense of why God would create the laws that govern the universe but would then ignore or even violate those laws.

And yet… I also believe that God does interact with and within creation, within history, subtly directing the course and evolution of humanity toward its ultimate consummation in the eschatological future. I believe that God does speak today and I believe in miracles.

I know that that’s a contradiction and to be honest, I don’t know how to reconcile all that. Holding those two opposing beliefs, one that defaults to a naturalism and another that allows for the activity of God at the same time causes a bit of a tension. They don’t fit easily together. And I tend to think that that is precisely because my finite mind cannot comprehend the infinite. So there is a mystery here. That interaction between the natural and the supernatural is a mystery, it is sacramental.

Moreso, I think everything is sacramental. The Bible says that Christ is in all things and that God sustains all of life. I don’t think the distinction between the natural and the supernatural is as pronounced as it is often supposed. In fact, that distinction is actually an Enlightenment concept. But if God is present within creation, if his Spirit is moving, then everything is liminal, everything is sacramental. How that makes sense is a mystery, and I’m okay with leaving it as a mystery. For me there’s something sacred about that, I find it oddly reassuring.

Why can’t God be in everything we do? Why can’t everything we do be spiritual, be sacramental?

And…I’m actually going to leave it on that note.

The sacraments have been an important and central part of the Christian faith and the church since its inception, and generally refer to the mystery of God’s grace and presence in the world. When we partake in these acts we remember, we declare, and we preach the good news of Jesus. They are also symbolic of a much greater reality, that God is present not just in these rituals that we practice, but is present in everything we do.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, I hope you can experience God’s grace. You don’t need a little piece of cardboard flavoured bread and a swig of wine to experience the gospel. Know that God loves you and that God is for you.