How important are sacraments to us as Christians today, as Bible believing Protestants today? Because we would all agree, I think, that there are two sacraments that Christ did establish: baptism and did establish the Lord's Supper.
So, what do they mean? How important are they? The sacraments are a crucial part of how the church worships God. Yet in John Calvin's day, they had become terribly distorted. How did Calvin respond, and how can we apply today what he wrote then?
Hello, and welcome to Renewing Your Mind this Wednesday. In his series, "The Necessity of Reforming the Church," Dr. Godfrey offers practical guidance for understanding the sacraments and their significance to us. You can request lifetime digital access to this six-part series by donating at renewingyourmind.org, and we'll give you a digital study guide as well. Or, if you prefer to call or have questions, call 800-435-4343.
But for now, here's Dr. Godfrey. We're continuing to look at John Calvin's treatise on the necessity of reforming the church, and now we're coming to what he called the body of the church, which, of course, is the way in which the life lives out its life. You can't have too much of a life in this world, at least if you're only a soul without a body. And so, how does the soul live itself out in the body?
And Calvin, you remember, focused on two issues there. The sacraments and the government of the church, and in both of those, as we hear those articulated, we might think to ourselves, "That's weird. That's strange. Those are not the topics that would have much come to our minds." And I want to try to look with you in this session on the issue of the sacraments to see why they were important to Calvin and how they may remain significant. For us, so the sacraments.
Now, the fact that it should be important in Calvin's day is not hard to understand. Calvin lived in a church where the sacramental presence of the church was the most immediate contact that most Christians had with the church. The life of the church in Calvin's day and in the Middle Ages had revolved around the sacraments, and Rome had articulated by the heart of the Middle Ages that there were seven sacraments in the church, and the two obvious sacraments that we as Protestants still recognize from the Scripture are baptism and the Lord's Supper. But Rome had declared that five other activities of the church were also sacramental, and this is important because for Rome, grace operates through the sacraments. If you were to ask a Roman priest, "How do I experience grace?
How do I receive grace? Where do I find grace?" The answer was in the sacraments of the church. Therefore, it was important to know what activities of the church were sacraments and what weren't. This became a little complicated in the Middle Ages because there were so many ceremonies going on. How did you know which ones were genuinely sacramental and which ones weren't?
For example, to this day, pious Roman Catholics on entering the sanctuary of the church will go to a font of holy water and dip their fingers in the holy water and make the sign of the cross. And of course, they make the sign of the cross in the Western way. As opposed to the Eastern way, you know that, don't you? That difference. Westerners cross themselves this way, from left to right.
Easterners cross themselves this way, from right to left. And which way did the apostles do it? Because you want to do it the same way the apostles did it. And one of those two groups is wrong. It's a serious difference.
Well, maybe not too serious, but they make the sign of the cross. Is that a sacrament? You see, is that a sacrament? There's water. There's an activity.
Is there an automatic blessing that takes place? Catholics even call it blessing themselves.
So. Is this a sacrament?
Well, there was some discussion about that in the Middle Ages. They decided it's not a sacrament; it's a sacramental.
Well, that means it's kind of like a sacrament because there's kind of grace there, but not in the same guaranteed, almost automatic way. That is true of the sacraments of the church. John Calvin said that the danger of the Roman Catholic view of the sacraments is that they become superstitious, as if the sacraments alone were sufficient for salvation. And that's what a lot of Roman Catholics came to believe that the sacraments alone were sufficient for salvation. And so, since one of the sacraments was the Last Rites, as it was called, or Extreme Unction, now strangely, kind of renamed by the Roman Catholic Church, the sacrament of healing, which they bring only to the dying.
Anyway, I don't want to be too negatively Protestant. That sacrament is brought to the dying to remove their last sins and reconcile them to God and to the Church. And in a profound sense, it doesn't entirely matter. It's complicated, but it doesn't entirely matter if the person is conscious or not. The sacrament can have its effect; can bring the grace to accomplish the purpose, and so these sacraments were all grace bringers into the life of the church.
The foundational sacrament was always understood as baptism. Baptism was the entrance into the church, and to this day in Roman Catholic Church, you are not baptized in the sanctuary. You are baptized outside of the church, often in the foyer of the church, but sometimes even in a separate building. In the old days, called a baptistry. If you go to see some of the great sites in Italy, there's the church, and next to it is the baptistry.
And it's not that there were Baptists who were separated in their own building. It was the visual statement that you are not part of the church, you are not in the church till you've been baptized. And baptism was absolutely necessary to the teaching of most of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. If you were not baptized, you could not be saved.
Now there were a few exceptions to that. If you were converted and on your way to be baptized, but were martyred, you could probably still be saved by the baptism of desire. They said, but baptism was absolutely essential to salvation. And that's why, in a world of a very high infant mortality rate, midwives were allowed to baptize in extreme circumstances. Baptism was the only sacrament that did not have to be administered by a priest.
It should ideally be administered by a priest, but it doesn't have to be administered by a priest because it's so vital; it has to happen. And if somebody's dying, a non-priest can administer baptism.
So baptism is foundational, and then there are the other sacraments that bring graces. There's confirmation, where you're confirmed in the life of the church. There's the sacrament of penance, or we used to just call it confession, where you went to the priest and confessed your sins and had your sins. Forgiven, which they often talked about as being a kind of restoration of baptism, as baptism washed away sin, and then sin came flooding back in. Penance washed away the sin again.
Then there are the two sacraments that relate to particular parts of life. There's the sacrament of marriage. And that's why Roman Catholicism traditionally has had such strict rules about divorce, because marriage is a sacrament. Marriage, as a sacrament, brings the grace of union of the two people, and therefore, dividing those two is a violation of the sacramental grace of marriage. I'm going to get this straight.
Now we have baptism and confirmation and penance and marriage, and then there's ordination. Obviously, for most people, you either experience the sacrament of marriage or the sacrament of ordination. Since the Roman clergy are celibate, there's not both.
So. That's an additional sacrament, so that a priest actually receives in the sacrament grace to perform the work of the priesthood, setting him apart from the ordinary laity of the church. And then, as I mentioned briefly, extreme unction, the last rites of the church, that to wash away sin at the end.
So all of these sacraments were the very center. Of the life of the church and the great sacrament, of course, in a sense was the Lord's Supper, and so the regular experience of going to church was to see the miraculous work of the priest on the altar, changing bread into the very body and blood of Christ, offering Christ to God as a propitiatory sacrifice. Communion actually became kind of secondary and incidental. What was really critical is that you be present to see the miracle of the mass, to see the priest perform the miracle, to see the miracle of the altar take place, and so in many places in the Middle Ages, people stopped communing frequently. They just came to mass, watched the, as Calvin would have said, I wouldn't be this rude, but as Calvin said, the show, then left.
And this became so troubling that the Fourth Lateran Council in twelve fifteen had to adopt a rule that every Roman Catholic has to receive communion at least once a year during the Easter season.
So people weren't going to communion at all ever, and the rule then was adopted at least once a year. You have to actually receive. The sacrament, but here the whole center of worship became this work of the priest at the altar relative to the Lord's Supper, and this Calvin rightly saw was the very kind of body of the church. This is where religion hit the road. This is where religion touched most people.
It was in the sacramental ministry of the church, and Calvin says we have to think that through. We have to reevaluate. Is that right? Is that what's biblical? Is that what the Scripture, in fact, teaches?
And is the understanding of the sacraments as almost automatic ways of receiving grace a correct way of interpreting it? And you'll not be surprised to learn that Calvin said no. This is not right. In the first place, five of the seven sacraments are complete human inventions.
Now, marriage is not a human invention; that's a divine invention. But the idea that marriage is a sacrament is a human invention. Dying, we could say, is a human invention. But having last rites at the deathbed—that's a church human invention. And Calvin is saying this is to misunderstand.
What the sacraments are, and to expand them into areas where they don't belong. And Calvin, along with Luther, and of course all the the reformers, said when you look carefully at the Word of God, there are really only two sacraments established. And this then, of course, raises for us the question: exactly, what are we meaning then by the idea of a sacrament? What is a sacrament? And A very simple definition that Calvin and others used was, "It is a visible sign of invisible grace." So it is true that the idea of sacrament is linked to the idea of grace, but the question is, what is the linkage?
What is the relationship of sign to things signified? The sign of baptism is water. And water carries with it inherently something of the message of the sacrament, because water is inherently associated with washing and with drinking of the life that comes from water, the washing that comes from water.
So there is a connection between the sign and what it points to, what it stands for, with the Lord's supper. The sign clearly is the bread and the wine that are established by our Lord, and they point to the idea that the Lord must nourish His people. Baptism has a kind of once-for-all character to it; you're washed once at the beginning of your Christian experience, and then the Lord's Supper is the ongoing. Nurturing of the people of God through the sign of the Lord's Supper, and what Calvin wanted to say is, when the sacraments are rightly understood, they point to Christ and they draw to Christ. But when the sacraments are incorrectly understood, then they actually become a wall between us and Christ.
That's what he feared had happened in the Middle Ages, so that people didn't look at the ceremony of the Mass, or didn't look at the baptism of an infant, as testifying to Christ and to His work, but they just looked at the sacrament itself, and so they looked at the water of baptism and said that water saves. They looked at the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper and said that bread and wine nourishes us. And Calvin says, "No, it's more complicated than that. That's a misrepresentation because talking that way takes you away from Christ." Now, I would say if we try to follow Calvin's thinking into our own day, we would ask ourselves. How important are sacraments to us as Christians today, as Bible believing Protestants today?
Because we would all agree, I think, that there are two sacraments that Christ did establish: baptism and did establish the Lord's Supper.
You know, we have the Great Commission, the end of Matthew's Gospel, where Jesus sends his apostles out to baptize all nations. And we have the instructions in one Corinthians eleven, for example, of how to have the Lord's Supper in the Church of Christ. These are institutions that just are not only to be found in the Gospels as historical record, but they're clearly instituted as things the Church is to go on doing.
So, what do they mean? How important are they? Well, among Protestants today, we do find some discussion of baptism, but the discussion almost always is who ought to be baptized. Should we baptize only believers, or should we baptize believers and their children? And we can have sometimes very heated exchanges about that.
We go back and forth, and we quote different Bible verses and. We can have very strong feelings about that, and then the minute we convince ourselves, even if we haven't convinced anybody else, the minute we convince ourselves about who ought to be baptized, we hardly ever think about baptism again, do we? Baptism, Luther taught very clearly. I think Calvin teaches the same thing. Really, ought to be a continuing reality in the life of the Christian.
Who are you?
Well, one of the ways I answer that is to say I am baptized, and the reason that that is important is because it's a way of saying I've identified with Christ, I've taken the mark of Christ upon myself. I read a while back that Coptic Christians in Egypt tattoo themselves with a cross on their wrist, and they do that so they can't deny Christ.
Well, in a certain sense, baptism is like that. It's an indelible sign. It's a sign that Christ places on His own, and it's a sign that says these belong to me.
Well, then we say, well, wait a minute. Then aren't you saying that baptism saves you? No. What baptism says is, baptism is a promise. A visible promise from God, of His gospel.
And because we're weak, because we're frail, because sometimes we forget promises that are just made to our ears, God also makes promises to our eyes, and promises that we can feel, promises that we can embrace, and that's what baptism does for us. Luther, who who Wrestled with periods of spiritual doubt, and maybe even depression, would often repeat to himself, "I am baptized. I am baptized." Somebody said to him once, "How do you know you're a Christian?" He said, "I've been baptized." Well, that can be a good or a bad answer depending what you mean by it. If you mean I've had water sprinkled on me, so God is stuck with me, that's a bad answer. But if you mean God made a promise so personally to me that it touched me in the water of baptism, and when I am doubtful, I remember that that water came to me, and it reassures me with the promise of God that the promise is not only for others but for me.
I can hold on to that promise. Then I think that's a good answer to say I am baptized. God may be a promise; He won't break that promise. I hold on to that promise. In that sense, then baptism is not against faith, but it's for faith.
It's encouraging faith. It's building faith up. And I said all that very carefully, so as not to give way to the Baptists. It's not crucial that I remember my baptism. It's only crucial that I be baptized.
And so we won't get into the question of who ought to be baptized. Calvin and Luther were right about that, but we won't. I won't browbeat the Baptists because I love Baptists. I married a Baptist after she repented, and so baptism is a foundational promise and encouragement, and and the Lord's Supper then is the ongoing. Promise and encouragement.
What does what does the Lord's Supper say to us? The Lord's Supper says to us, "I need my whole life to be fed, encouraged with the body and blood of Christ, and the bread and the wine say, 'God gives to you the body and blood of Christ as your salvation.'" Now there are lots of debates about exactly what the Lord's Supper does and is, and we we don't have time to get into that. But the basic reality is what is crucial: that God is coming in the bread and wine with a promise that as surely as I eat this bread and wine, so surely are the body and blood of Christ my food to eternal life. And we need to be comforted in that. We need to be strengthened in that.
Now, again, we we have debates. How frequently should we do that? Should communion be weekly? Should it be quarterly, as the Holy Dutch do? Should it be annually, the way the strict Scottish Presbyterians do?
The Scripture doesn't really tell us, does it? It's a somewhat difficult business. If you do it every week, you can say, "Well, I have that promise every week." That seems like a good thing. On the other hand, sometimes we become kind of, you know, indifferent to things that are too frequent, and so we can have a fair discussion about how frequently we ought to have the Lord's Supper. But what's clear is that what the Lord's Supper is.
Is the promise of Christ's redeeming work in His body and blood coming to reinforce our faith, to encourage our faith, to reiterate the promise of God to us? And so, churches that stop communion altogether because it's too confusing or too difficult, or involves too much discipline, or they're just in time—these are really despising. The institutions of God, or there have been missionaries who've gone out and said, "Well, you know, baptism is so controversial in some countries. We'll just do away with baptism." Well, you see, then you're being wiser than God. Then you're despising the institutions of God.
If God says we need baptism and the Lord's supper, we ought to be very fearful of saying, "Well, you know, thanks very much, but I don't really need that." God knows our weakness. God knows our frailty. God knows how much we need to be rehearing His promises.
Now, are we in any danger of inventing sacraments on our own?
Well, I've carefully saved that question till right at the end of our time together, so I can escape without trouble. Or, I think if there's one sacrament we've tended to invent in our own time, it's the sacrament of music. In many churches, there's an awful lot of time spent singing to bring us close to God.
Now, I'm all in favor of singing. I think music can be very helpful and very powerful, but music is not a sacrament. It's not where God has planted His promise to bring grace to us. Music is not primarily God's movement to us, which is what sacraments do, but music is our movement to God, bringing our praise, our thanks, our glorification to Him. And again, we have to be careful not to confuse things, not to think that.
By my singing stuff, I really, really like. I have a transcendent experience of God. That's sacramental. No, we sing as an intelligent act of a rational soul to bring praise and glory to the Creator. And God, knowing our dangers in this area, gave us songs to sing.
And we should always at least start with the songs God inspired in the Psalter. And those will never become sacraments, but they'll always become great blessings. I was just talking to a Scotsman who grew up in a psalm singing church, who said, "My whole life, I've known the whole psalter." I thought, "Wow, wouldn't that be a blessing?" Have the whole psalter in one's mind and heart to just be able to apply, whenever the circumstances called for it.
So, add psalm singing to your list of new adventures in life.
Now it's an important part of the body of the church. I'm thankful that God knows we're weak. And lovingly condescends to remind us of His promises in baptism and the Lord's Supper; they are indelible promises God makes to us. You've been listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Wednesday. Dr.
Godfrey's series, The Necessity of Reforming the Church, is available for your continued study when you donate in support of this program. We'll provide digital access to the complete series and study guide in the Grow app from Lyonnir. Visit renewingyourmind.org to make your donation or request access to download. When you call eight hundred four three five forty three forty three. Thursday, Dr.
Robert Godfrey specifically asks about the role of the minister in the life of the church. What exactly is the function of a minister, or indeed the clergy, in the life of the church? Join us to find out here on Renewing Your Mind.
