The connection between the Word of God and something physical and tangible does not necessarily differentiate the ministry of the Word and the Sacrament for Martin Luther. But perhaps the function of the sacraments in the Christian life does differentiate them. The difficulty in most Protestant accounts of justification is a kind of monism of the auditory Word of God.1 The believer hears the Word of God and appropriates it by faith. Luther would not disagree with this, but he extends the principle to the sacraments as well. Sacraments are visible promises, and promises must be believed.
Christians retain their sinful nature, which tempts them into unbelief. As a result, when believers rely upon the ministry of the Word of God alone without the complement of the sacraments, doubts about individual appropriation of the gospel can creep in. How does one know with certainty that the divine Word was meant for him or that he has actually received it?
The typical Protestant response has been to attempt to demonstrate faith’s authenticity through supplementary signs of the Spirit’s interior work. The problem is that all these alleged signs of the Spirit’s work can be easily faked, either consciously or unconsciously. By contrast, Luther sees the sacraments as ways of redirecting the sinner away from his own subjective doubt and into the objectivity of the Gospel promise in the tangible means of grace. In one fascinating passage in The Sacrament: Against the Fanatics of 1526, Luther writes:
When I preach his [Christ’s] death, it is in a public sermon in the congregation, in which I am addressing myself to no one individually; who grasp it, grasps it. But when I distribute the sacrament, I designate it for the individual who is receiving it; I give him Christ’s body and blood that he may have forgiveness, obtained through his death and preached in the congregation. This is something more than the congregational sermon; for although the same thing is present in the sermon as in the sacrament, here there is the advantage that it is directed at definite individuals. In the sermon one does not point out or portray any particular person, but in the sacrament it is given to you and to me in particular, so that the sermon comes to be our own. For when I say: “This is the body, which is given for you, this is the blood which is poured out for you for he forgiveness of sins,” I am therefore commemorating him; I proclaim and announce his death. Only it is not done publicly in the congregation but is directed at you alone.2
In other words, the sermon may be a declaration of God’s love in Christ for all who hear it and be appropriated by faith. The risen Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, is really present in the sermon. The preacher’s proclamation of the Word of God is identical with the very will of God for the congregation (Lk. 10:16). Nevertheless, one might still speculate about God’s hidden will behind the sermon (in a Calvinist vein) or about his own subjective response to the sermon (in an Arminian vein).
The sacrament then goes on to provide physical, visible, and tangible access to Jesus’s intentions toward you. In the quotation above, Luther addressed the Lord’s Supper, wherein Christ gives the very flesh and blood he sacrificed for humanity’s redemption to the individual. One cannot be uncertain that Jesus died “for you” (pro me) if Christ gives his very sacrifice into the open mouth of each communicant in such a tangible and visible way. One could also point to a similar phenomenon in baptism. Incorporation into Jesus’s death and resurrection (Rom. 6) does not occur merely via the psychological event of faith, but at a tangible and concrete moment in a person’s life.
The difficulty with how other Protestant traditions conceptualize the sacraments is that they tend to pit them against justification by faith. Evangelical Protestants often view Sacraments as works (of one kind or another). As a result, they believe sacraments have only marginal value over and against faith’s appropriation of grace through the Word of God. Not surprisingly, many Protestants have profound difficulty explaining the biblical texts dealing with the sacraments, and they make them functionally superfluous.
But are there dangers in emphasizing the objective nature of the sacraments? The patristric principle of ex opere operato (“by the work effected”)3 was designed to safeguard the gratuity of grace conveyed in the sacraments. However, on a popular level, the Reformers noticed that it often resulted in a kind of covert works righteousness or a superstitious form of cheap grace. Medieval theologians were rightly concerned that if grace only came via participating in sacramental action, then participation would become a work done to obtain grace. This sounded very much like a kind of works righteousness that would contradict the principles of sola fide and sola gratia.
Moreover, many ordinary Christians saw the sacraments as a way of inoculating themselves against the consequences of sin without making any effort to live a life of faith. Superstitiously, they believed that this inoculation could be achieved simply by rote performance of a meaningless sacramental ritual. This perverted the sacraments into a site of “cheap grace.” However, Luther’s sacramental realism does not fall into this trap. Following the Augustinian distinction between validity and efficacy, Luther identifies the sacraments in themselves as valid visible forms of promise.4 To be efficacious, however, the visible promise must be appropriated by faith rather than a mechanical performance.5
- See discussion in: James F. White, The Sacraments in Protestant Practice and Faith (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999). ↩︎
- The Sacrament: Against the Fanatics (1526); LW 36:348-349. ↩︎
- This is the principle that valid sacraments always objectively convey grace due to the operation of the Holy Spirit without regard to the character of the presiding minister. However, the Roman Catholic Church also teaches that the recipient must be properly disposed to receive sacramental grace efficaciously. ↩︎
- The Private Mass and the Consecration of Priests (1533); LW 38:200-201. ↩︎
- The Sacrament: Against the Fanatics (1526); LW 36:350-351. ↩︎
From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).
Carl Roehling, 1539 Spandau Divine Service, 1913, from “Divine Service” Why Does Our Lord Gather Us For Worship,” St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church and School, accessed June 3, 2024, https://stjohnrandomlake.org/church/divine-service/; and The Bread of Life Icon, “ἐπιούσιος (e-pe-ü’-se-os): “Give us this day our epiousion bread”—Part I: Matthew 6 & The Living Bread of the Future Kingdom,”Holos Anthropos, accessed June 4, 2024, https://careofthewholeperson.org/the-life-of-words-hebrew-greek-word-studies/-e-pe-se-os-give-us-this-day-our-daily-bread.