Hello Everyone,
Just for the heck of it, I have decided to post an edited version of my “On Sacraments” posts that has been joined together. This version is easier to read and has been made more concise. I briefly pursued publication with it but to no avail. Here it is.
On Sacraments and the Evangelical
Somewhere and at some point, Protestants became uncomfortable with Biblical Sacraments. Blame who you would like; maybe it’s Zwingli’s fault but I believe one could point a prosecuting finger at a significant compromise behind the doors of evangelical thought. There is much contained in that statement and it is at this moment intentionally vague. What if I asserted that behind all of evangelicalism’s public crusades for family values and cries at the demise of the moral fabric of America was a deal between the contemporary Church and modernism over which Gnosticism presided? What if I said further that this compromise has sterilized one of the most vital resources the Church possesses for its nourishment and unity, that of the Sacraments? If this seems too large a stretch, bear with me as we uncover the contract.
When I say that a compromise has allowed modernism entrance into the Church, I don’t necessarily mean the more obvious examples such as Christian teens not believing in Biblical creation or the divine inspiration of Scripture. Rather, this is modernistic Christianity that I speak of and unfortunately, this worldview has not been confined to mainstream liberal Protestantism. In fact, the staunchest fundamentalist is susceptible to its precepts. So what is this idea?
As already stated, modernistic Christianity is essentially a compromise between the Church and modern culture. Even though modernism is opposed to religion in general, it has to admit that religion does often provide personal and therapeutic benefits to its parishioners. And since moderns are all about utility, therapy, and individuals, it has made an exception for religion as long as it stays within some clearly established boundaries. The compromise has happened because the Church in the West has largely accepted these boundaries.
The heart of modernism is that human reason and science are or should be the measure of truth and reality. All things that are real can be experienced by the senses or by scientific investigation. Anything that is outside the reach of those two mediums is either nonexistent or irrelevant to serious inquiry. Subsequently, religious truth would fall in the unreal and/or unnecessary categories. However, out of the goodness of their hearts, moderns have given us a set of conditions in which we can still play our little “faith games” if they mean that much to us. Generally, the conditions can be summed up as follows: you can pursue your personal faith and piety and participate in the customs of the Church until your heart is content, just do not dare declare that faith and liturgy actually accomplish anything or that anything objective is associated with them. To the modern, if religion is to exist, it must remain within the realm of the private, personal, and subjective. If it breaches into the objective, into the really real, then religion is something to be reckoned with. Moderns won’t tolerate this reckoning.
It is then quite easy to see how the very concept of a sacrament is utterly incompatible with modernistic Christianity. A sacrament is a tangible, objective sign of a spiritual reality that the Spirit accomplishes. But unfortunately, whether due to modernistic Christianity or maybe to a general suspicion of Catholic liturgy, or both, Protestants have shied away from asserting any objective reality associated with the sacraments. The Lord’s Supper is a memorial service; baptism is a wet testimony. In doing this, Protestants have compliantly fallen in line with the demands of modernistic Christianity by reducing the sacraments to personal and subjective acts of devotion. Sacraments are not seen as having any real efficacy; they don’t do really anything. Of course, it’s not the bread, wine, or water that do anything, it’s the Spirit through them, but moving right along.
As an ironic side note, with the removal of the objective spiritual realities of the Eucharist and baptism, comes a decreasing level of appreciation and respect for physical elements of worship. Take church architecture for instance. When walking through a medieval cathedral, one realizes that every brick and every pane of glass is meant to communicate the attributes of God, in essence, to preach a silent sermon. The priorities in the construction of a cathedral were not first practicality and utility, rather, it was understood that architecture, something objective and tangible, is not neutral. Medieval Christians believed that God was a perfectly holy God and that consequently, the place in which He was to be worshipped was to reflect His nature. They understood that we are not solely spiritual or intellectual beings and that merely believing in our hearts and minds that God was holy was not always enough. The place in which they worshipped God needed to invoke the proper responses to His nature, that of humble fear and reverence. This is true, as anyone, believer or unbeliever, who has ever walked into a century-old cathedral and felt the need to tip toe will tell you.
Contrast this understanding with the current understanding of many Protestants toward church architecture: Find the most recently vacated Home Depot and roll out the folding chairs.
Since many of us don’t view things sacramentally anymore, we don’t see something like the building in which we worship having any relevance to the worship that we offer. We are fearful of suggestions that through the Lord’s Supper, the nourishing grace of God is actually applied or that someone’s covenantal status is actually changed by baptism. We have submitted so thoroughly to modernism’s insistence that religion must remain private and subjective that we now consider the highest elements of Christianity to be the elements that are between God and the individual.
This is why I attached “Biblical” to the Sacraments that Protestants are uncomfortable with. Because of our individualistic and overly spiritual worldview, we have unwittingly instituted a set of alternative “grace-appliers”, pseudo-sacraments, if you will. I will approach that later but this provides a perfect platform on which to proceed to the next participant.
In addition to a modern suspicion of the historic, objective, and Biblical religion, there is another offender in the compromise by the name of Gnosticism. And even more unfortunate is the fact that this Gnostic Christianity has seen a revival (quite literally) and has been particularly successful in the last 200 years in evangelicalism. Put simply, Gnosticism is a belief system that believes that all things physical (bodies, pleasure, the earth, etc.) are inherently evil or inferior and all things spiritual are inherently good and superior. In addition, it states that truth and grace are not primarily received through the hearing the Word rightly preached or partaking of the Sacraments rightly administered, but rather through a mystical achievement of a “higher knowledge” that is bestowed by God himself onto the individual. To ascend to this higher level requires an abandonment of the “distractions” of the physical world and a sold out focus on “spiritual” things, since of course, a perfect God would never deal with the dirtiness of the physical world. In the Church, this idea went so far as to deny the humanity of Christ because obviously, what would be more impossible in this sort of spiritual=good/physical=bad universe than the Incarnation?
Connecting modernism with Gnosticism may seem rather difficult because they arrive from polar opposite views. Modernism sees only the physical; Gnosticism sees only the spiritual. However, they form an alliance against Biblical Christianity because of Jesus Christ and his Incarnation that just won’t be ignored. When it comes to dealing with the Gospel, there is nothing modernism loves more than Gnosticism. Gnosticism, though centuries old, just so happens to fulfill all of modernism’s stipulations on religion perfectly. Modernism says that religion must remain private and subjective; Gnosticism says that the only way to truly “get” religion is to focus on it privately and subjectively. Modernism says that religion must not enter into the realm of the physical and the objective; Gnosticism says that it is only compromised and tainted if it does. This is why Gnosticism is so human. Here we have a roughly two thousand year old philosophy still satisfying the desires of unregenerate man. The only thing connecting the two is the people who believe it. Though they approach religion from different perspectives and motives, they still end up promoting the same things. This is because they’re both vain philosophies that cannot deal with Jesus Christ.
Just as it was with modernism, the very concept of a sacrament goes completely against the grain of Gnosticism. To define a sacrament again, it is a physical element or act that through its partaking or exercise, the Spirit accomplishes a spiritual reality. Gnostic Christianity fundamentally denies the possibility of this because truth and grace are exhibited spiritually, privately and personally, as opposed to physically/spiritually, publicly, and corporately.
Bear in mind, though, that modern evangelicals do not generally have a problem with the Lord being especially present or with grace being applied through various means. You will often hear modern Protestants say such things as “the Lord’s presence just filled the sanctuary at my worship service”. But the assumption involved is that during the passion often involved in a contemporary service, God becomes more present in the music or the people than He was just by virtue of being omnipresent. In other words, He was already in the building because God is everywhere, but now that the lights are low, hands are raised, tears are falling, guitars are strummed, and the religious fervor is heavy, God must now be especially present in a different way than usual. I am not necessarily denying any of this, for God can reveal truths about himself or the person through song that can be quite moving to us. What I am pointing out is that many Protestants have turned the worship service into something that resembles a sacrament. However, it isn’t a real sacrament firstly because Christ did not institute it as such and secondly because a sacrament involves something physical accomplishing something spiritual by the power of the Spirit. It is here that I think we Protestants can often have an unhealthy double standard. We can be experiencing and declaring God’s special presence and special grace on us during the worship choruses but when Communion comes around, it is made quite clear that God has left the building. So cautious are we of avoiding the Roman error of transubstantiation or baptismal regeneration that we hop into the opposite and equally flawed ditch prepared for us by Gnostic super-spiritualism and Modernistic subjective religion. When we assert that the Sacraments are mere memorials or testimonies, we are guilty of heralding the compromise.
Really, what nails the coffin shut on Gnostic and Modernistic Christianity is the Incarnation. Christ himself is sacramental. God in man, Word in Flesh. His real perfect blood was spilt atoning for our sins and satisfying the wrath of God for His People. If Gnostic Christianity were true, there would not have had to be an Incarnation. Christians who believe that the Supper is merely a memorial service and deny the application of grace in its tangible partaking need to more thoroughly consider what the Eucharist is directly connected to. Yes, Christ said that it was to be done “in the remembrance of me”, but he also proclaimed that the bread was his body broken and that the cup was his blood poured out as the sign of the New Covenant. The Supper is the Gospel of Grace made real for us to taste and drink. Just as His blood covered our sins, so the elements gracefully nourish our spirits in a similar way that physical food nourishes our bodies.
The memorial view of the Supper is modern in that it admits, to the world’s approval, that the Eucharist is something accomplished only by the individual as what is often a quarterly act of personal devotions. It is also Gnostic in that, out of its anti-physical prejudice, strips Communion of its spiritual reality that Christ himself instituted and thus undermines the means by which we as physical people partake of the Gospel.
In conclusion, where do we go from here? First, we need to begin shedding the modern presuppositions that many of us have regarding the nature of religion and truth, to begin to see that there is a spiritual dimension to everything we do and cease dividing the world and religion into the sacred and secular, spiritual and physical/worldly. Finally, we need to honestly revel in the glory of the Incarnation, to give thanks that God in His grace, sent His Son into our world with hair, arms, skin, teeth, muscles, and bones in order to save His flock, for we would’ve been hopeless without a physical Christ whose physical blood was to be shed for us. We must return to the Scriptural view of the Sacraments in order to more properly understand the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
