Sacraments Archives - Page 3 of 6

June 5, 2024June 5, 2024

For You: Certain Salvation In The Sacraments

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

June 1, 2024June 2, 2024

The Royal Priesthood and the Authority of the Church

The Royal Priesthood possesses access to the truth of Scripture through the sacraments in a manner analogous to how the Son and the Spirit proceed from the Father. Just as the persons of the Trinity contain the same divine ousia, so likewise the Bible, the Lord’s Supper, and baptism all contain the same gospel message. Similarly, just as there is a Son and a Spirit as self-communications of the Father, so too there is a sacrament of the Spirit (baptism) and a sacrament of the Son (the Eucharist). Likewise, just as the Father is the fount of divinity and therefore the source of the Son and the Spirit from all eternity and as well as the sender of Son and Spirit in their missions within time, so too, the Bible authorizes baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Finally, just as the Son and the Spirit are the exegetes of the Father in eternity and in the history of redemption recorded in Scripture, they also serve as exegetes for the Royal Priesthood gathered around Word and Sacrament.

In baptism, the Spirit gives the Triune Name to believers so that they might call on the Lord in faith and repentance. Such faith and repentance invariably leads the believer to the Son and his work. Because the believer has called upon the Name of the Lord given in baptism for repentance, he now gains access to the Son’s sacrificed body and blood given in the Eucharist for the forgiveness of sins. Hence, faith and an encounter with Christ in the unilateral promise of the gospel through the public ministry of the Church gives the Royal Priesthood of believers an accurate perspective from which to read and understand the Bible. It also therefore provides a means of testing all teachers and ministers in the Church.¹

May 30, 2024May 30, 2024

Reconciliation through the Spirit in the Means of Grace

The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead works through the Word and Sacrament ministry of the Church to share the universal and objective “not guilty” verdict of the Father. This verdict comes through the message of the death and resurrection of the Messiah. Those who receive the proclamation of justification by faith secure the very presence of the risen Jesus in the power of the Spirit. As the great cosmic judge, the Son of Man, Jesus now mediates the same verdict and presence he proleptically shared with the eschatological Israel in his earthly ministry through the Church.

The Church is defined by the means of grace to which Jesus has attached his Name, that is, his presence. Therefore, to be in contact with the means of grace is to both be in contact with the risen Jesus, and his body/bride the Church. The Church and the Divine Service (Gottesdienst) is the replacement for the Temple (Eph. 2:19-22) and its service. This is because the Church and its Divine Service are now the body of Jesus, the true eschatological Temple in the flesh (Jn. 1:14). As the Son of Man, Jesus proleptically elected and worked justification in the midst of the outcastes of Israel. He told his hearers beforehand what verdict he would render on them in light of their belief or unbelief in his words of judgment and grace.¹

February 6, 2023February 22, 2023

Baptismal Identity and Creedal Faith

The correct perspective from which to view God and humanity is our baptism into Christ and His mystical body, the Church. The threefold divine name of the baptismal formula is indicative of our identity and narrative being as determined by the Triune God’s gracious action in history. Indeed, the Triune structure of the baptismal formula was the basis of the first post-biblical creeds and the multi-year catechetical instruction that early Christians underwent before receiving baptism. In order to be baptized into the Triune name, a catechumen had to first know the true meaning of the divine name. Indeed, to know the meaning of the Triune name is to know the full corpus of Christian doctrine.

For this reason, the best way to expound Christian doctrine is within the structure of the Creed, which speaks of the activity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and from the perspective of how that one Triune God delivers the gospel to us. The centrality of the Gospel promise is the flipside of the confession of the Triune God and His works. As St. Paul told the Church of Rome, faith in Christ necessarily gives rise to a confession of faith: “. . . if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved” (Rom. 10:9-10). Personal faith (fides qua creditor) is therefore grounded in the objective truths of the faith (fides quae creditor). Faith must publicly confess the truthfulness of all God has revealed in his Word as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As Jesus states: “So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 10:32-33).

From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).

Image from Matthew Zickler, “Concerning Rebaptism for Christians,” LCMS Resources, May 4, 2017, https://resources.lcms.org/reading-study/concerning-rebaptism-for-christians/.

April 11, 2022April 14, 2022

Must Christians Reject Modernism and Postmodernism?

Modernism presented Christian theology with both opportunities and challenges. At its best, Modernism consisted of the wreckage left over from the Christian Grand Narrative after much of it had been detonated by Enlightenment thinkers themselves. Because of this, in many instances Modernism helped Christians become more consistent with the basic principles of their religion. The secular concept of human rights is rooted in the inherent dignity of humanity based on the imago Dei (Gen. 9:6). Politically, the idea of human rights curbed abuses of authority by the church and crown. It did away with practices like torture and slavery that even Christian societies had normalized for centuries. Likewise, modern science grew out of Christian belief in a rational creator who had made a rational created order. Rational creatures made in God’s image could understand this order. On the other hand, the creation of the concept of the secular also significantly distorted Christian theology by mutilating its ability to articulate its claims in the public sphere, thereby forcing Christian theology into the straitjacket of either Liberalism or Fundamentalism.

Postmodernism, like Modernism, is full of opportunities and dangers for Christian theology. On the positive side, if appropriately understood, Postmodernism possesses the advantage of exposing secularity’s neutrality and right to arbitrate between what is real and unreal. In other words, Modernism and secularity are simply culturally constructed frameworks that served the very specific purpose of solving the problems created by the European wars of religion. Contrary to what is often believed, one does not simply strip away the religious window dressing of reality to find secular modernity lying underneath. Hence, Christians do not have to abide by the rules of secular modernity in asserting truth claims. They do not have to remove articles of the faith or assume a posture of methodological atheism/naturalism when dealing with the biblical texts as theological Liberals have done. They do not have to validate their belief in the articles of the faith on the basis of modernist standards of truth or rationality the way that many Fundamentalists have done. Neither do they have to invest secular politics with transcendent meaning and treat them as redemptive as both Liberals and Fundamentalists have done.

On the other hand, Postmodernism also represents a challenge and a problem for Christian theology. Postmodernism is not pure nihilism or subjectivism per se, as is often charged. Rather, it is a form of what we might call “provisionalism.” According to a provisionalist, there are no universal and eternal truths, only little and provisional truths. Truth is therefore always socially embedded, impermanent, and revisable. All Grand Narratives are suspect. Reality is only knowable in a fragmentary, linguistically pragmatic, and at times anti-realistic, fashion. As I will argue, this problematic for Christian theology because Christians insist on the eschatological finality of their message. Moreover, Christians must confess the truthfulness of Christianity’s Grand Narrative and insist on linguistic critical-realism.

In light of the aforementioned challenges and insights of the Postmodern project, the next chapter explores various proposals for Postmodern Christian theology in greater detail. In doing this, I will develop a critically realistic view of doctrine. The key to this approach is the Lutheran belief that the “finite is capable of the infinite” (finitum capax infiniti). If this is accurate – and Lutherans must confess that it is – then the seemingly embedded, historical, and provisional can serve as a medium for infinite, eternal, and universal truth.

From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).