Sacraments as God's Work
- Keith Stanglin
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Visible Signs of Invisible Grace: Sacraments for the “Low Church” (Part 5)
by Keith D. Stanglin
See Parts One, Two, Three, and Four of this series. These posts are adapted from my essay, “Visible Signs of Invisible Grace: Sacraments for the ‘Low Church,’” in Distinguishing the Church: Explorations in Word, Sacrament, and Discipline, ed. Greg Peters and Matt Jenson (Eugene: Pickwick, 2019), 69–92.
In my previous posts, I discussed the demotion of baptism and eucharist in Protestant Christianity, especially in its American evangelical expressions, and made a brief case for holding to a higher, sacramental view of these practices. I will wrap up this series in this final post on the topic.
One of the chief evangelical concerns with a high view of the sacraments is the concern that they would be thought of in terms of ex opere operato, that they are simply a work and, even worse, a work done regardless of faith. It should be clear that I am not advocating participation or efficacy of the sacraments apart from personal faith. But are the sacraments “works,” in the sense that the Apostle Paul opposed them to faith? Is grace to be conveyed as a result of human work? First, consider whether the eucharist is a work. God gave us this meal as a means of grace, to unite us with Christ’s death and resurrection. It is God who takes something ordinary and works something extraordinary through it. We are even served it. Is eating, chewing, drinking, and swallowing a work?
How about baptism? That “baptism for remission of sins” is thought by some evangelicals to reflect “works salvation” may be why I remember hearing an evangelical once refer to this high view of baptism as a “heresy.” (By the way, whatever one thinks now of “baptism for the remission of sins,” this concept was both important and undisputed enough to make it into the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Symbol [“I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins”], quoting of course from Acts 2:38, and so cannot be heresy in any commonly recognized sense of the word, but is, rather, orthodoxy. “Baptism not for the remission of sins,” in fact, would have greater claim to heresy on biblical-ecclesiastical-historical-dogmatic grounds.) Rather than a work of merit, baptism, as an objective moment of saving grace, is part of the response of faith. Remember, faith is not a work, but is opposed to the kind of works that Paul excludes from the causes of justification. Of all the responses of faith (not works of merit) in the conversion process—repentance, confession of faith, and baptism—baptism is the easiest and most passive of them all. The human is the active subject of the verbs to believe, repent, confess, but the passive recipient of baptism (one is baptized). That is, baptism is no more a human work than is verbal confession of faith or repentance, all integral to the conversion process.[1] It is hard to imagine something more passive than willingly being dunked under water by another person. If there is work involved in baptism—and there certainly is—then it is God who does it.
This point is plain in Colossians 2:11–14. Here baptism is passive from the human side; it is “the operation of God” (2:12). God is the one doing the working in baptism, and faith is the means from the human side. “Faith” (2:12) is a believing and baptizing moment. Titus 3:5 offers a similar picture of the work that God does in baptism. Renewal by the Holy Spirit takes place at baptism. Again, God is the one working, and therefore the one who receives all the glory for his grace.
Evangelicals and Protestants need to recover the biblical vision of a sacramental cosmos and of a God who works in, with, and through material substance. Think, for example, of the tree of life. God chose a particular tree whose fruit would impart life. The tree itself was not magic and presumably was not even a unique species, but chosen by God to convey life in the eating of it. God, not the human eater, is the worker.
The Holy Spirit, as the bond of charity within the Trinity, is the gift of God’s love to his people, through whom God’s love has been poured out into our hearts (Rom. 5:5). Perhaps what is needed is a more robust pneumatology in evangelical ecclesiology, one that allows and expects the Spirit to work in the church and to convey grace through the sacraments, as promised in Scripture. If, in the gathered assembly of God’s people in worship, the Holy Spirit can work directly on, and Christ can be present to, the human heart through the means of a drum set and an electric guitar, then surely the Spirit can mediate Christ’s direct presence for salvation and sanctification through the biblical means of water, bread, and cup, joined with the Word of gospel and grace.
As our hearts are restless until they find rest in God, the sacraments reflect the yearning of God to be present with his people. God is the one who invites us to the laver and to the table. God, through the Spirit, tabernacles with us so that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith. As is the Holy Spirit himself, the sacraments also are a down payment and seal of God’s promises and Christ’s presence for our redemption. Perhaps they are not strictly necessary means, but the sacraments are ordinary means of God’s justifying and sanctifying grace.
Finally, a practical-ecumenical suggestion: The criticism that comes from traditional Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches is that Christ is not present in the sacraments or ordinances of Protestant churches. If Protestants do not accept this criticism (as I do not), then it doesn’t help for evangelicals positively to insist that baptism has nothing whatsoever to do with the conversion process or that Christ is not present in the Lord’s Supper. Instead, for Orthodox and Roman Catholics who are willing to grant that the Spirit can work outside of their episcopal succession, biblical language would go a long way.[2] For those who are open to Protestant churches as being more than simply “ecclesial communities,” a higher view of sacraments can be a small step toward greater unity of thought and worship.[3] Evangelicals should be able to say, with the New Testament, that baptism is “for remission of sins” (Acts 2:38), without immediately having to qualify it as not for remission of sins. When speaking the words of institution, evangelicals ought to say, with the New Testament, that this “is” for us the body and blood of Jesus Christ, without immediately having to add the non-biblical word “represents.” Simply using biblical language, without being scandalized by it, would help get evangelicals within earshot of the historic Christian tradition’s and Scripture’s doctrine of the efficacy of the two sacraments. It also may enable evangelicals to gaze more clearly into the divine beauty to which these physical signs ultimately point.
***For an additional resource on the sacraments, see John Mark Hicks, Transforming Encounters: Baptism, Assembly, and the Lord's Supper, published by CCS imprint Regnum Media. The book is excellent for personal study as well as small group and Bible class studies.
[1] In recognition of this logic, some evangelicals reject any objective, external moment as coinciding with or functioning as a means of salvation. Notably, the Grace Evangelical Society rejects the “sinner’s prayer” because it makes a prayer into a condition for salvation, that is, a “work.” See pages at faithalone.org.
[2] I grant that, for Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics who insist that the true sacramental presence of Christ does not obtain outside of their bishops’ administration, this point may be a non-starter. In this case, a conversation about ministry is necessary first.
[3] “Ecclesial communities” is the language of Vatican II’s Unitatis redintegratio, which also recognizes the importance of dialogue on the sacraments. Unitatis redintegratio 22, in Decrees, 2:920: “For these reasons dialogue should include among its subjects the Lord’s supper and other sacraments, worship and the church’s ministry.”
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