The Tests of Hyper-Protestantism

 

I have addressed various aspects of the problem of Hyper-Protestantism in several essays over the last few years.  I distinguish Hyper-Protestantism from ordinary Protestantism as being that which goes beyond rejecting and opposing errors that are distinctly Roman and rejects things that are genuinely Catholic as well.  That which is distinctly Roman is taught, practiced, or otherwise held only by the Roman Church, that is to say, the communion under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Rome who is more commonly called the Pope.  That is genuinely Catholic which is the common heritage of all Churches that descended from the Apostolic Church in Jerusalem.  In the fifth century, St. Vincent of Lérins identified three tests of Catholicity that have been widely accepted ever since – Antiquity, Universality, and Consent.  The test of Antiquity means that to be considered truly Catholic something must have demonstrably been part of Christian faith and practice, at least implicitly, since the earliest centuries.  The test of Universality means that something that only ever caught on in one region of the Church or something that became dominant throughout the Church for a limited period before being finally rejected cannot be considered Catholic, but only that which can be found throughout all the ancient Churches in all places and times.  The word consent does not today ordinarily mean what it does in St. Vincent’s test.  The test of Consent is the official approbation of legitimate Church authority.  If something is taught throughout the writings of the Church Fathers, was defined and defended against error by the Church in council, especially an ecumenical council (at the time St. Vincent wrote the Council of Ephesus had just brought the number of these to three, the first two having been Nicaea I and Constantinople I in the previous century, by the  end of the fifth century Chalcedon became the fourth ecumenical council, and three others Constantinople II, Constantinople III, and Nicaea II were generally recognized before the Great Schism at the end of the first millennium), or can otherwise be shown to be “official” Church teaching or practice  it passes the test of Consent.

 

To give a specific example of the difference between that which is Roman and that which is Catholic look at the doctrine of Purgatory and the practice of praying for the faithful departed.

 

Purgatory is a Roman doctrine not a Catholic doctrine.  The Church of Rome teaches it dogmatically, but the other ancient Churches do not.  Since neither the Oriental Orthodox Churches (Coptic Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, etc.) which rejected the Definition of Chalcedon of 451 and so broke with the rest of the Church nor the Assyrian Church of the East which rejected the condemnation of Nestorius in 431 teach Purgatory, this demonstrates that it was not received doctrine prior to the fifth century.  Some specific Eastern Orthodox leaders have taught it, but the Eastern Orthodox Church as a whole has rejected it, and it was a bone of contention during the reunification talks at both the Second Council of Lyon (1274) and the Council of Florence (1438-1445).  Clearly, therefore, Purgatory was not accepted as doctrine by the Catholic Church prior to the Great Schism (1054).    In the Church Fathers, the closest thing to it is found in the writings of Origen and St. Gregory of Nyssa.  These, however, were talking about hell, which their doctrine of Apokatastasis (final universal reconciliation for all) required that they interpret as something similar to what Rome would later call Purgatory. Apokatastasis was formally rejected by the Church in the fifth ecumenical council in the sixth century.  The doctrine of Purgatory, therefore, is distinctly Roman and not genuinely Catholic. 

 

This is not the case with the practice of praying for the faithful departed, however.  It is attested to since the earliest centuries, and an example of it may very well be found in the New Testament itself in II Tim. 1:18.  It is practiced not only by the Church of Rome but by the ancient pre-Reformation Churches that reject Purgatory, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Assyrian Church of the East.  The sixteenth century Reformers who thought it to stand or fall with the doctrine of Purgatory were clearly mistaken. It passes at least the tests of Antiquity and Universality.

 

This brings us to the question of whether there are any tests that we can apply to Protestant doctrines, positions, customs and assertions to determine whether they are Hyper or not.  The answer is yes.  Since St. Vincent offered three tests of Catholicity, I shall identity and discuss three tests of Hyper-Protestantism although more could be listed.  The rejection of things that are Catholic by St. Vincent’s definition as well as those that are distinctly Roman is the definition of Hyper-Protestantism and not one of the tests.

 

The first test of Hyper-Protestantism is the test of Catachresis.  Catachresis means the misuse of terms.  The specific example that is involved in this test is the pejorative use of the word Catholic.  Or, to approach it from another angle, the use of the word Catholic to mean that which is Roman.  This second wording is, perhaps, the better of the two because it reveals how Hyper-Protestantism actually betrays a principle of the Reformation.  The Roman Church claims that St. Peter was given jurisdiction over the Apostles and therefore over the whole Apostolic Church and that this jurisdiction was passed on to his successors in the bishopric of Rome, making the bishop of Rome the universal Patriarch, and the Catholic or whole Church co-extensive with his jurisdiction.   In other words, the Roman Church claims herself to be the Catholic (whole) Church.  The Reformers disputed this claim in the sixteenth century, as did the other four of the ancient patriarchates when the East and West mutually excommunicated each other in 1054.  Since one of those patriarchates is that of Jerusalem, which clearly has the better right to be considered the Mother Church than Rome, and another of those patriarchates is Antioch, which St. Peter also held before that of Rome, and yet a third is Constantinople which itself had claimed universal jurisdiction in the sixth century to have its claims – and all claims of universal jurisdiction – rebutted by Gregory I of Rome, using the same arguments that would later be used against his successors – Rome’s position is built on a foundation of quicksand.  Hyper-Protestantism’s use of the word Catholic, however, conforms to Rome’s position, not that of the Reformers

 

The second test of Hyper-Protestantism is the test of Misprioritization.  This is the elevating of Protestant doctrines to a level of importance higher than the faith common to all Christians as confessed in the ancient Creeds.  There is a secondary type of misprioritization in which even lesser doctrines (eschatological schemes, specific understandings of predestination, and the sort) are elevated above the core truths of the Reformation.  It is the first type that we will focus on here. 

 

There are various ways in which this done.  A common one is to threat the doctrines of the Reformation as if they were incapable of being distorted through exaggeration into heresy.  By contrast, the defenders of orthodoxy in the early Church recognized that any truth could be distorted into heresy by exaggeration and that the path of orthodoxy was the path of balancing and harmonizing different truths.  In those days, the main contested truths had to do with theology proper, the doctrine of God, especially the doctrine of the Trinity, and Christology, the Person of Jesus Christ.  The true and living God is One.  He is also, in a way different from the way in which He is One, Three.  If the Oneness of God is exaggerated, you get Judaism, Islam, and Unitarianism.  If the Threeness of God is exaggerated, you get polytheism.  The orthodox truth lies in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which harmonized and balances the Oneness and Threeness of God.  If you exaggerate the deity of Jesus Christ, you get such things as Docetism, the idea that Jesus’ humanity was just an appearance and had no material substance, or Apollinarianism, the idea that the divine Logos took the place that is filled by the human mind in other men, making His humanity incomplete.  Conversely, Jesus’ humanity can be exaggerated to as to deny or diminish His deity in ways such as Adoptionism (the idea that He was a man who became God at some point such as His baptism) or Ebionism (the idea that He was merely the greatest of all prophets rather than God Incarnate).  The orthodox truth is that He is fully God and fully Man.  The fifth century demonstrated that this was susceptible of further distortions by exaggerating either His two natures (so as to make Him two Persons occupying the same body, the Son of God and the Son of Man, which is the heresy called Nestorianism) or the unity of His Person so as to deny His two natures (such as in Eutychianism in which Jesus’ humanity is swallowed up into His deity so that only the latter remains) requiring the clarification of the orthodox doctrine of the Hypostatic Union in the Definition of Chalcedon.

 

Now think about that.  If such truths as the Oneness of God, the Threeness of God, the deity of Jesus Christ and His humanity, the Unity of His Person and His two natures can and have been each distorted by exaggeration into heresy, would it not be elevating the doctrines of the Reformation far above these truths to pretend that they cannot be similarly distorted?  Furthermore, would it not be precisely this sort of distortion to say, for example, that Churches which confess the orthodox truths of the ancient Creeds are not expressions of Biblical Christianity because they do not affirm the Reformation doctrine of justification?  Especially if in making such a statement all the ancient Churches are lumped in with Rome even though the worst errors that the Reformers opposed with regards to justification (that the works of sinful human beings have merit in God’s eyes, that they can have merit above and beyond what is required by God, that the keys involve the right to distribute or even sell for a profit this supererogatory merit, etc.) are ones that Rome alone among the ancient Churches fell into.

 

The answer to both of these questions is yes.  Moreover, it needs to be recognized that the Reformation doctrines are particularly susceptible of being exaggerated and distorted into heresies because of the way they are formulated.  Keep in mind here that the Five Solae are not a sixteenth century formulation but a twentieth century formulation read back onto the sixteenth century.  It was first formulated by German Roman Catholic liberation theologian Johann Baptiste Metz in 1965 but caught on especially among Calvinists who found a five point summary of the Reformation appealing because it made Calvinism (famously summarized in five points, those articulated in the canons of the Synod of Dort in the second decade of the seventeenth century which responded to the five points of the Arminian Remonstrance) seem more normative of Protestantism in general. It should also be noted that one of the Five Solae, Sola Gratia, is not a Reformation distinctive but is a Catholic doctrine recognized as such universally since the (regional) Council of Carthage’s condemnation of Pelagianism was confirmed the third ecumenical council and that the Five Solae do not include the doctrine of assurance which was at least as important to the sixteenth century Reformation, especially the Lutheran side, as any of the Solae.  Nevertheless, Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide were both indisputably central to the Reformation.  Both doctrines, defined properly, are sound.  The Latin word Sola, however, and its English equivalent “alone” is not a word that usually marks a doctrine as having been carefully formulated with an eye to the balanced truth of orthodoxy.

 

Consider Sola Scriptura.  The expression was first used by Dr. Luther just prior to the Diet of Worms (1521) where he famously took his stand on the doctrine. As Dr. Luther used it, however, it did not mean anything remotely close to what later Protestants, especially the Hypers, have taken it to mean.  Dr. Luther taught the Sufficiency, Primacy and Supremacy of the Scriptures, not the idea that each Christian should get his faith and practice directly from the Bible and only from the Bible with no regards whatsoever to what previous Christians have said, thought, and done individually or as the Church.  The expression “Sola Scriptura”, however, especially when not used in a full sentence such as “The Scriptures alone are infallible”, easily suggests this idea of the go-it-alone Christian.  Ironically, it contradicts the very authority it is intended to uphold for Scriptures themselves, St. Paul’s second epistle to the Thessalonians specifically, contain the instruction “Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle” (2 Thess. 2:15).  The traditions, i.e., that which has been passed on or handed down, which they have been taught, are what Christians are instructed here to stand fast and hold, whether the transmission is oral (“by word”) or written (“our epistle”) which latter category is the Scripture, the very designation of which means that which is written.  Note that the Scripture in this verse of the Scriptures is very much not “alone.”  Far better than this expression for explaining the Reformation teaching would be to employ the expressions the Sufficiency, Primacy, and Supremacy of the Scriptures.  Either Primacy or Sufficiency would be a better summary of all that Dr. Luther and the Reformers intended than that most insufficient word “Alone”.   Article VI of our reformed Anglican Church is not entitled “The Scriptures Alone” but “Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation.” It asserts “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.” (1)

 

Sola Fide, understood correctly, is merely the doctrine St. Paul taught in the fourth chapter of Romans, that being righteous in the eyes of God is a gift God gives by His grace and that for it to be such it has to be by faith and not by works.  St. Paul did not contradict St. James who says that justification is by works but he explained St. James, who does not use the word “grace” in the relevant portion of his epistle, to not be talking about justification before God (Rom. 4:2).   The Reformers were right to re-emphasize St. Paul’s doctrine to correct the heavy over-emphasis on works in late Medieval Roman theology.  Note, however, that St. Paul was able to articulate this doctrine without using the word “alone”.  Note also, that when St. Paul identified the Gospel that he preached, he did not say that it was the doctrine of justification but that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and the testimony of eyewitnesses enumerated by the Apostle (1 Cor. 15:3ff).  Since this is included in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, confessed by all the ancient Churches, and is indeed, central to it, it cannot be legitimately said that the Church ever “lost” the Gospel as is claimed by the idea of restorationism which is common to all the heretical sects that evangelicals grew accustomed to calling cults towards the end of the last century.  Neither Dr. Luther and his associates nor the English Reformers (or the more responsible among the Swiss Reformers) were restorationists but the door which let restorationism and Hyper-Protestantism in was opened by referring to St. Paul’s doctrine of justification, re-articulated with the word alone, as being itself the Gospel.  (2)

 

 

The third test of Hyper-Protestantism is the test of Mendacity.  Hyper-Protestantism is willing to sacrifice truthfulness to the cause of opposing Rome. While some of the better known examples of this predate the internet, the internet meme has greatly exacerbated this tendency of Hyper-Protestantism.  In the last couple of months I have seen Hyper-Protestant memes attacking the Roman Church posted to social media on a daily basis.  I don’t remember a single one of them that did not make some irresponsible and easily rebuttable claim or another.

 

One of these, from a Baptist source, made the claim that the Scriptures do not teach that Mary is the New Eve, that this claim comes from late Medieval Scholasticism, and was invented for the purpose of supporting Rome’s doctrine about Mary being the Co-Redemptrix.  This was a particularly remarkable example because rather than mixing one or two errors into what was otherwise correct this meme did not get a single thing right. 

 

Mary is contrasted with Eve in this way by St. Justin Martyr in Dialogue With Trypho 100 and by St. Irenaeus of Lyon in Against Heresies 3.22.4.  These are both second century sources, written in approximately 150 and 180 respectively.  This identification of Mary with Eve was raised again by Tertullian, the first major theologian to write in Latin, in a treatise written against the Docetic arguments of the Marcionites and Valentinians in the first decade of the third century, On the Flesh of Christ, 17.  It was also one of several Marian themes that appear in the writings of Origen, the most important theologian of the early Alexandrian Church, who was about thirty years younger than Tertullian.  Origen, in whose writings the first extent use of the word Theotokos can be found, wrote about the Perpetual Virginity of Mary and explored the parallels between her and Eve in the commentaries and expository homilies he wrote and gave after his relocation to Caesarea Maritima in 231.  The theme of Mary as the New Eve is also prominent in the homilies of Origen’s most celebrated student, St. Gregory Thaumaturgos, who was born a couple of years after Tertullian wrote the work mentioned above and became Bishop of his native Neocaesarea later that century.  See, for example, the first three of the homilies in the collection Four Homilies, which three have the common topic of the Annunciation and the homily on “The Holy Mother of God, Ever Virgin” which is extent only in Armenian rather than Greek and in which the comparison/contrast between Eve and Mary opens the homily. In the centuries that follow this theme can be found in the extend works of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and basically all the major Church Fathers.  It was a common Patristic idea long before there was any such thing as Scholasticism.

 

Moreover, the idea is derived directly from the Scriptures.  In Genesis 3:15, the first promise of the Messiah in the Old Testament, the expression “the woman” appears.  In the context of Genesis 3, “the woman” has to be Eve.  The Seed of the woman, Who is prophesied to crush the head of the serpent, however, is Christ, so “the woman” of this verse also has to be Mary.  This one expression “the woman” has, therefore, double reference to Eve and to Mary.  We find this again in the twelfth chapter of Revelation.  The woman there is identified as Mary by the fact that she gives birth to Christ (vv. 4-5).  The chapter also, however, stresses the enmity between her and the dragon (vv. 4, 6, 13-17) and when it identifies the dragon the wording points directly back to Genesis 3 “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” (v. 9). Revelation 12, therefore, places this woman who gave birth to Christ, Mary, in the role of Eve, whose enemy is the serpent.  The identification of Mary with Eve is also the significance of Jesus’ addressing His mother as “Woman” in John 2:4 and 19:26. (3)  In Genesis, this is what Adam calls Eve when God first makes her (Gen. 2:24) and what she is called throughout the Creation/Fall narrative until after the curse, when her name Eve is used for the first time (Gen. 3:20).

 

Note that the New Testament basis for identifying Mary as the New Eve comes from the writings of St. John the Apostle.  This is itself significant because St. Irenaeus grew up under the teaching of St. Polycarp of Smyrna, himself a direct disciple of St. John.  St. Justin Martyr, while not among the direct disciples of St. John in this same way, incorporated Johannine themes into all his writings, wrote and set Dialogue with Trypho in Ephesus, the city where St. John had spent most of the latter part of his life, and is the earliest witness to the Johannine authorship of Revelation.  The earliest Church Fathers to speak of Mary as the New Eve were directly influenced by the Apostle whose New Testament writings provide the Scriptural basis for this idea.

 

Not only does this meme illustrate the lackadaisical attitude towards the truth, at least where Rome is concerned, on the part of Hyper-Protestants, (Luke Skywalker’s line from The Last Jedi, “Amazing, every word of what you just said was wrong” could have been addressed to it), it also illustrates the fittingness of the expression “Hyper-Protestant.”  By accusing an idea, which the slightest amount of real research would have revealed to date to the earliest centuries of Christianity, to have been ubiquitous among the Church Fathers, and to be based in Scripture itself, of having been developed late in Church history to support the least defensible of Rome’s Marian terminology, one never formally dogmatized and which Rome has recently taken steps to walk back, Hyper-Protestants go well beyond what the sixteenth century Reformers themselves had to say against Rome with regards to Mary, which really wasn’t all that much.  Indeed, most of the Reformers, certainly the Lutheran and English Reformers, but even the fathers of the Reformed tradition including Calvin himself, would have to be classified as rank Mariolators if we were to go by the standards of Hyper-Protestantism.

 

As noted earlier, this characteristic of Hyper-Protestantism predates the internet meme.  The late Jack T. Chick, the fundamentalist Baptist publisher from Los Angeles famous for his cartoon tracts – small, rectangular booklets, which tell a story in comic-book style that leads up to an evangelistic appeal – saw his credibility take several blows in the last decades of the twentieth century when he repeatedly published or distributed testimonies/exposes that proved incapable of withstanding serious scrutiny as to their truthfulness.  While not all of these pertained to the Roman Church, the most notorious example was his publication of the testimony of Alberto Rivera, who claimed to be an ex-Jesuit and on the basis of whose testimony, he accused the Roman Church of being behind everything from the creation of Islam to Nazi Germany to the decay of morals in the late twentieth century United States. 

 

Evangelist Ralph Woodrow wrote “It puzzles me how some can be so fanatical against one set of errors—or what they perceive to be errors—only to develop greater errors: becoming judgmental, hateful, and dishonest”.  Woodrow wrote this in the context of explaining why he had withdrawn his best-seller, Babylon Mystery Religion, widely distributed by Chick, from circulation.  His book had drawn its inspiration from The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop, a nineteenth century minister of the Scottish Free Church (Presbyterian) that tried to trace everything in Roman Catholicism that could not be found in the pages of Scripture (and much that could) back to Nimrod (who built the Tower of Babel/Babylon, the cult of whom Hislop claimed to be the original template of all paganism).  Woodrow, after prayerfully re-examining Hislop’s book and checking its sources, withdrew his own book and wrote The Babylon Connection? a book length rebuttal of his own previous book and his primary source.  A shorter version of his critique of Hislop’s methodology appeared in the Christian Research Journal.

 

With the Vincentian tests of antiquity, universality, and consent, something has to pass all three to be genuinely Catholic.  With these tests of Hyper-Protestantism, Catachresis, Misprioritization and Mendacity, passing any one of them indicates an infection.  Passing all three indicates that the theological disease has reached an advanced stage.

 

(1)   Article VI is quite lengthy, but the first sentence as quoted in the text of this essay is the full content of the Article as far as explaining the subject in the title goes.  The remainder of the Article is a clarification of what is meant by “Holy Scripture”.  Here too, the Article is worded so as to assert only what all Protestants can affirm and not the more extreme position which became more common starting in the seventeenth century.  The canonical books are listed for both Testaments, and the deutero-canonical books are also listed of which the Article merely says “And the other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.”  The more extreme version of Protestantism says that these books have no place in the Bible whatsoever, warns people against reading them, and says that they were added to the Bible by the Roman Church in the Council of Trent.

 

This, however, illustrates the third test of Hyper-Protestantism, the devaluing of truth.  It is common today for Roman Catholic apologists to accuse Protestants of taking books out of the Bible, and of Protestant apologists to accuse the Roman Catholic Church of adding them.  Neither of these is entirely right, although the Roman Catholic accusation is closer to the truth.  The deutero-canonical books are, for the most part, (2 Esdras, called “The Fourth Book of Esdras” in Article VI, is the exception) books found in the Septuagint, the Greek translation that the Church received as her Old Testament from the first century but which were never included in the canon recognized by rabbinic Judaism.  If the Roman Catholic Church had “added” them in the sixteenth century, we could expect that Churches that broke fellowship with Rome earlier wold not include them in their Bibles.  This is not the case.  Generally, the further back the schism, the more the deuterocanonical books you find in the Bibles of the other Churches.  The Eastern Orthodox Church which broke with the Roman Catholic in 1054 has 3 and 4 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, and Psalm 151 in its Bible.  The Oriental Orthodox Churches which broke with the Chalcedonian Churches in the fifth century has these and, in the case of those which use the Tewahedo Bible (Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Churches), Enoch and Jubilees.  The Assyrian Church of the East which uses the Syriac Peshitta as its Bible includes most of the same deutero-canon as the Roman Catholic Church plus Psalm 151 and the Prayer of Manasseh. 

 

What happened in the sixteenth century was that both the Roman Catholic Church and the early Reformers, shifted books from category to category in the Bible.  Dr. Luther left the deuterocanonical books in the Bible but shifted them out of the Old Testament and into a section unfortunately labelled “Apocrypha”, inaccurately using a term that the Church Fathers applied to a different set of writings altogether.  The same was done in the Authorized Bible in 1611 and Article VI reflects the thinking behind this.  The deuterocanonical books are not “canonical” in the sense of being the “canon” or “rule” by which doctrine is proved, but they are not “non-canonical” in the sense of not being included in the Bible altogether.  What the Roman Catholic Church did at Trent was to shift these books into the “canon” in the sense of doctrine-proving books.  The other ancient Churches, while regarding these books as part of the Old Testament, had never regarded them as being equally canonical in this sense.

(2)  Once something other than the Gospel preached by St. Paul, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and was buried and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures is identified as the Gospel, even if it be St. Paul’s own doctrine of justification, so as to make the claim that all the Churches that confess that Christ, the second person of the Trinity, incarnate as the God-Man, died for our sins, and was buried, and rose again don’t have the Gospel  if they don’t have that doctrine in its Reformation reformulation, the door is opened to making this same claim about another doctrine so as to exclude others who do also confess the doctrine of justification in its Reformation formulation. 

 

Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the Calvinist Baptist preacher of the nineteenth century, is frequently quoted as having said “Calvinism is the Gospel, and nothing else.”  Other Calvinists have identified the “doctrines of grace” as the Gospel.  These, however, are doctrines pertaining to predestination, a matter about which God keeps His own counsel and which is hardly of the essence of the kerygma His Church is charged with proclaiming to the world.  

 

Recently a Calvinist Baptist friend posted to social media an excerpt from John Wesley’s writings in which he referred to himself as “almost a Christian”.  My friend used to this to try and argue that Wesley was never a Christian and that the Gospel he preached – Wesley was an Arminian – was not the real Gospel.  I had to rebuke him and point out that it was quite clear, even from the excerpt from Wesley that he had included in his post, that the revivalist was talking about his life prior to Aldersgate (where, at a meeting of the Moravians in which Dr. Luther’s preface to Romans was being read, he testified “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”)

(3)   Jesus also addresses the Samaritan woman, the woman caught in adultery, and Mary Magdalen as “woman” but there was nothing unusual about these instances.  This was not rude in first century Palestine the way it is in the English-speaking world of our day, it was closer to addressing a woman as “ma’am” in our culture.  Jesus’ addressing His mother this way was unusual, however. St. John records Jesus doing so twice, at the very beginning of His ministry and the very end.  The first of these is at the wedding of Cana, where Jesus performed His first miracle.  St. John tells us that this occurred on “the third day” which was to the last of the four days in the previous chapter as the Sunday on which Jesus rose was “the third day” to the Friday on which He was crucified, making this the sixth day.  This, coming as it does at the start of a Gospel which begins by pointing back to Genesis and Creation, is evocative of the sixth day of Creation, the day in which God created man “male and female” and Adam named Eve “woman”.  At the end of His earthly ministry, Jesus’ addresses Mary as “woman” again and tells her to “behold thy son” as He instructs St. John to “behold thy mother”.  Here too is an allusion to the first woman who at the end of the Creation/Fall account in Genesis is given the name Eve because she is the “mother of all living.”   

Sacraments and Gospel Sacraments

In my last essay I resumed the series of essays on the Article of the Creed which I had begun in 2023.  I had left off with Article Nine - The Holy Catholick Church and picked it up again with Article Ten - Baptism and Forgiveness.  In this essay, I relegated a discussion of Sacraments, the broader category to which baptism belongs, to the twenty-sixth note.  Since this is a topic which deserves an essay of its own I shall now revisit it.

 

When God, in fulfilment of the promises of redemption that He had made since man first fell into sin (1) send His Only-Begotten Son to become Incarnate as a sinless Man and to defeat the enemies that held us captive and to atone for our sins by His death on the cross and then raised Him from the dead, even though Rome governed the ancient world at the time the lingua franca was Greek.  Therefore in the Church, the society which Jesus Christ had reconstituted out of ancient Israel, making it into a Catholic (of the “whole” world) society rather than an ethnic nation and placing His Apostles as the governing ministers over it, Greek was the original ecclesiastical language.  The New Testament, with the exception of a non-extent “Hebrew” (2) original of St. Matthew’s Gospel, was written in Greek.  The confessions of the basic faith that we now call Creeds from the Latin word for “believe” were originally called Symbols from the Greek word for “token” or “watchword.” (3)  The Church’s rites were originally called Mysteries, as they continue to be called in the Churches of the East. 

 

In referring to her rites as Mysteries the Church used this word in a way that was both similar to and yet the exact opposite of how Greek speaking pagans used it.  Mystery is the Greek word for secret.  In Greek paganism, the cults of certain divinities and heroes kept their teachings and rites hidden from those not initiated into the cult, and so these religions and their rites were called Mysteries.  When the Church borrowed this word for her own use, the similarity was in the fact that it designated her rites as it had the rites of the pagans.  The contrast, however, that the Church used the word to mean that in her rites those things which would otherwise be secret to man and known only to God are revealed and made known.  This is a continuation of how St. Paul uses the word in his epistles. (4) Therefore, we find in a work addressed to the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius in the middle of the second century providing a philosophical defense of Christianity, an account of the two most important rites of the Christian faith. (5)

 

The Latin Fathers referred to what the Greek Fathers called Mysteries as Sacraments.  This word, which is derived from the Latin word for holy and which if defined by its etymological components would literally mean “that which makes holy,” was used by the ancient Romans for vows and oaths, and specifically for the oath of allegiance that a Roman soldier was required to make to Caesar.  Tertullian, who was born around the time St. Justin Martyr wrote his First Apology, and who lived in Carthage, was the first theologian to write in Latin, and it was he who chose the word Sacrament as the Latin designation of the Church’s rites. (6)  He seems to have had the military use of the word in mind (7) and chose the word to indicate the rites through which Christians pledge allegiance to Christ.

The Church therefore, in designating her rites by these Greek and Latin words, gave to these words new meanings that while related to how they had been used previously, were nevertheless distinct in their ecclesiastical usage.  This terminology was established quite early. 

 

In the eleventh century, the Greek-speaking Eastern Church and the Latin-speaking Western Church formally entered into schism when the Western Patriarch of Rome, aka the Pope, and the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, formally excommunicated each other.  By the time the Reformation occurred in the sixteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church had come to dogmatically declare that there were seven Sacraments – Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Eucharist, Penance, Holy Matrimony, Holy Orders, and Extreme Unction.  The Eastern Orthodox Church, while she had made no dogmatic pronunciation as to the number of Mysteries – and she still has not to this day – acknowledged seven.  These, although there are a few differences with regards to names and practices, are the same as the seven Sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church.  The same seven are recognized by the Oriental Orthodox Churches which refused to accept the Definition of Chalcedon in the fifth century. (8)  The Assyrian Church of the East, which refused to accept the condemnation of Nestorius of Constantinople at the third ecumenical council earlier in the fifth century also recognizes seven Sacraments, but only five of these are identical to those of the other Churches.  Like the Eastern Orthodox their form of confirmation, Chrismation, takes place immediately after baptism, unlike the Eastern Orthodox they do not count it as a distinct Mystery, nor do they recognize Marriage as a Sacrament like the other Churches. Holy Leaven and the Sign of the Cross are the other their other two Sacraments.

 

In 1520, Dr. Martin Luther published his On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, a treatise on the Sacraments.  The title, of course, likens the Patriarch of Rome’s usurped universal jurisdiction over the Catholic Church to Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest of Israel in the Old Testament (9) and the work includes some of the best anti-papal invective from a man who was a true master of what Auberon Waugh dubbed the “vituperative arts.”   In his introductory letter he wrote “To begin. I must deny that there are seven Sacraments, and must lay it down, for the time being, that there are only three, baptism, penance, and the bread, and that by the Court of Rome all these have been brought into miserable bondage, and the Church despoiled of all her liberty.” (10)  Nine years later, in his Large Catechism, Dr. Luther included sections on two of these, Holy Baptism and the Sacrament of the Altar, and in the section on Holy Baptism wrote “And here you see that Baptism, both in its power and signification, comprehends also the third Sacrament, which has been called repentance as it is really nothing else than Baptism. For what else is repentance but an earnest attack upon the old man [that his lusts be restrained] and entering upon a new life? Therefore, if you live in repentance, you walk in Baptism, which not only signifies such a new life, but also produces, begins, and exercises it.” (11)  Later Lutheran theologians favoured the term Absolution over Penance for the same Sacrament.  John Calvin in his Institute of the Christian Religion argued that there were only two Sacraments, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. (12)  The Reformed Church has consistently held this position since.  

 

Before looking at the position our Anglican Church took, it is worth observing here that this dogmatic rejection of four or five of the previously acknowledged Sacraments is in a way untypical of Dr. Luther and Calvin.  The Reformation of which both men were prominent leaders was a response to Roman corruption.  The sixteenth century which saw the Reformation had begun with Rodrigo Borgia (father of, among others, the infamous Cesare and Lucretia) enthroned in Rome as Pope Alexander VI.  Dr. Luther’s first act as a Reformer was to oppose to the sale of indulgences in his 95 Theses of All Hallows’ Eve, 1517.  When it came to doctrinal controversy, therefore, the more conservative and responsible of the Reformers, into which category both Dr. Luther and Calvin belong, usually focused on errors that were distinctive to Rome in her corrupt condition.  These errors were novelties introduced after the East-West Schism such as Purgatory or the merit of human works.  They rarely opposed what was genuinely Catholic, that is, belonging to the whole ancient Church rather than just late Medieval Rome.  (13)  Here they dogmatically rejected as Sacraments four to five of the seven rites, universally acknowledged as such by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox Churches. 

 

In this case, appearances are slightly deceiving.  The tests of Catholicity are antiquity, universality, and consent. (14)  While the seven Sacraments pass the test of universality, the test of antiquity is another story.  The two Sacraments acknowledged by all Protestant Churches, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, are those most consistently and most universally accepted as Sacraments in the Church since the most ancient times, but there was nothing remotely resembling a consensus as to the number of Sacraments in the first millennium.  While the Fathers usually acknowledged other Sacraments than baptism and the Lord’s Supper, they did not have a set list as to what these other Sacraments were and did not limit themselves to the five other Sacraments that most of the ancient Churches came to recognize.  If the Protestant Reformers broke with the informal consensus of the Churches on the seven Sacraments by reducing the number to two to three, the Church Fathers tended to depart from that later consensus in the opposite direction by acknowledging Sacraments that totalled far more than seven in number. 

 

When it comes to the test of antiquity, therefore, the idea of the seven Sacraments can be said to fail the test but in a way that does not lend support to the reduction of the number to two or three by Dr. Luther and Calvin.  The Father whose writings exerted the most influence over the Reformers was undoubtedly St. Augustine of Hippo, but while St. Augustine nowhere in his writings provides a list of seven Sacraments, neither does he ever say that there are only two Sacraments.  To the contrary, all seven of the Sacraments that the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox Churches would later acknowledge are individually spoken of in his writings where he either calls them Sacraments or speaks of them in such a way as to leave no doubt that he thought of them as such (15), as are close to three hundred other things. (16)  In his Sacramental theology anything material could serve as a Sacrament by being a vessel for the revelation of God and the grace that accompanies the revelation of God.  In this his thinking was closer to Eastern Orthodoxy which unlike Rome does not dogmatically limit the Sacraments to the acknowledged seven.  He also clearly saw baptism and the Eucharist as special Sacraments, far more important than the others due to their institution by Christ Himself.  This is the part of his teachings on the matter that the Protestant Reformers picked up on.  The Anglican position, to which we shall shortly turn our attention, is more genuinely Augustinian than those of the continental Reformation.  

 

The fact that all of the ancient Churches came to acknowledge seven Sacraments and that with the exception of the Assyrian Church of the East, they were all the same seven Sacraments, demonstrates that while the list itself cannot pass the test of antiquity, the seeds that eventually bore such consistent fruit had to have been planted in antiquity.  This means that while the seven Sacraments fall slightly short of the full Catholicity they would have possessed had this consensus on the seven been arrived at in antiquity, the dogmatic manner in which Dr. Luther and Calvin rejected four or five of the seven is completely unjustifiable.  To be fair, however, what any ancient Church other than the Roman Catholic taught regarding the Sacraments was likely the farthest thing from their minds when they wrote.  One of the consequences of the schisms that divided the Greek speaking East from the Latin speaking West in the eleventh century and which had divided the Levant and further East from the European Church in the fifth century, was that there was very limited contact between these ancient Churches, something that did not change until centuries after the Reformation.  In the West, Peter Lombard had spelled out the idea of the seven Sacraments in the fourth book of his Sentences written around the middle of the twelfth century, (17) and Rome had acknowledged these with increasing degrees of dogmatism starting with the Fourth Lateran Council in the early thirteenth century.  To the Reformers in the sixteenth century, therefore, looking at it through a lens that obscured non-Western theology and theological history, the seven Sacraments appeared to be novel, something cooked up by the Scholastics and unknown to the Fathers.

 

In 1521, King Henry VIII, whose Parliament would later pass the 1534 Act of Supremacy rejecting the claims of any foreign powers to jurisdiction in England, including that of the Patriarch of Rome over the Church in England, wrote a rebuttal of Dr. Luther’s On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church which he entitled The Assertion of the Seven Sacraments.  After his death, although Archbishop Cranmer et al., were able to introduce reforms of a more Protestant nature into the Anglican Church during the short reign of Edward VI, Henry’s conservatism mercifully had a lingering influence on the English Reformers that is reflected in their more sober approach.  After the Church of England was temporarily brought back under papal jurisdiction during the reign of Mary Tudor, Queen Elizabeth I restored the previous reforms.  It was during her reign that most of the Anglican formularies took the shape in which they have been known ever since.  Among these was the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, modified from Archbishop Cranmer’s Forty-Two Articles.

 

Article XXV, “Of the Sacraments”, says the following:

 

SACRAMENTS ordained of Christ be not only badges or tokens of Christian men's profession, but rather they be certain sure witnesses, and effectual signs of grace, and God's good will towards us, by the which he doth work invisibly in us, and doth not only quicken, but also strengthen and confirm our Faith in him.

There are two Sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel, that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord.

Those five commonly called Sacraments, that is to say, Confirmation, Penance, Orders, Matrimony, and extreme Unction, are not to be counted for Sacraments of the Gospel, being such as have grown partly of the corrupt following of the Apostles, partly are states of life allowed in the Scriptures; but yet have not like nature of Sacraments with Baptism, and the Lord's Supper, for that they have not any visible sign or ceremony ordained of God.

The Sacraments were not ordained of Christ to be gazed upon, or to be carried about, but that we should duly use them. And in such only as worthily receive the same they have a wholesome effect or operation: but they that receive them unworthily purchase to themselves damnation, as Saint Paul saith.

 

This is a far more Augustinian approach to the Sacraments than that taken by either the Lutherans or the Reformed.  It avoids the dogmatism with which Dr. Luther and Calvin had proclaimed Confirmation, Orders, Matrimony, and extreme Unction, and in Calvin’s case Penance, not to be Sacraments.  St. Augustine had regarded all of these as Sacraments, albeit not all of them in the form in which they were known at the Reformation.  What the Roman Catholic Church called “extreme Unction”, for example, he would have known as the anointing of the sick, as it continued to be known in all the ancient Churches other than Rome because only Rome had perverted it from a rite the end of which was healing into a rite the end of which was preparation for imminent death.  Article XXV does, however, set baptism and the Lord’s Supper apart as being unique, and this too is Augustinian.

 

The expression the Article uses for baptism and the Lord’s Supper, “Sacraments of the Gospel,” is a particularly good one for explaining how the two are unique.  The Article derives this expression from what it asserts in the previous paragraph “There are two Sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel, that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord.”  There is a better reason than this, however, for saying that Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are uniquely Sacraments of the Gospel.  Indeed, that they are unique in the way specified can be challenged from Scripture.  Jesus gave to His Apostles both ordinary and extraordinary authority and power.  The ordinary authority is that vested in their office as governors of the Church and passed on to those they later admitted to that governance.  The extraordinary authority was that which was unique to them and which they could not transmit to others.  The anointing of the sick, instructions for which are given in the fifth chapter of the epistle of St. James, being a rite, exercises ordinary authority.  The Apostles also employed extraordinary authority in healing.  The instructions Jesus gave to the Apostles on their first commission included “Heal the sick” (18) and while the other things associated with this instruction suggest the use of extraordinary authority, that the ordinary authority exercised in the anointing of the sick was also included cannot be ruled out and if it was this is a record of Jesus establishing the anointing of the sick in the Gospel.

 

Indeed, to return briefly to what we deduced earlier from the fact that the ancient Churches had all, with the partial exception of the Assyrians, arrived at the same seven Sacraments, that while these cannot be found listed as such prior to the second millennium, the seeds that produced these lists must have been ancient, we do not have to look very far to find those seeds.  The reason the ancient Churches independently arrived at these seven out of the much larger number of Sacraments that can be found in the Fathers is that these seven are from the New Testament.  We have descriptive accounts of Confirmation in Acts 8 and 19, and it is listed a one of the basics of the faith in the sixth chapter of Hebrews.  The Gospels may not record Jesus telling His Apostles to ordain but they do record His ordination of them, and their ordination of others is documented in the book of Acts, and the St. Paul’s Pastoral Epistles include instructions with regards to ordination.  Jesus’s promise of the keys of the kingdom to St. Peter in Matthew 16, and to all the Apostles in Matthew 18 and after His Resurrection in John 20, mean that Absolution, which is the exercise of one of these keys and which was the original of what existed in a corrupted state in Medieval Roman theology as Penance was instituted by Christ in the Gospels which is why Dr. Luther retained it, restored to its primitive condition, as a Sacrament.  We noted the Scriptural origins of the Anointing of the Sick in the previous paragraph.  That marriage was instituted in Creation is one of the arguments Dr. Luther used against its being considered a Sacrament.  However, in the New Testament, Jesus declared its sanctity when challenged by the Pharisees asking about divorce and arguably sanctified it further by performing His first miracle at the Wedding in Cana.  It is the only one of the “commonly called Sacraments” that is actually called by the Greek counterpart of this word in the New Testament, and while St. Paul was probably using the word in the sense of “secret” rather than “rite,” he does immediately add “but I speak concerning Christ and his Church” (19), which making of the marriage union into a figure of the union between Christ and His Church essentially makes it into a visible sign of an invisible grace, the very Augustinian definition of a Sacrament. (20)  The seven Sacraments recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and five of which are among the seven recognized by the Assyrian Church of the East, are, therefore, distinguishable from other rites and ceremonies in that the New Testament speaks of them either prescriptively (Baptism, Communion, Absolution, Ordination, Anointing of the Sick) or descriptively in a way that establishes their importance (Confirmation, Marriage).  The singling out of Baptism and Communion from these, merely on the grounds that they were instituted by Christ Himself in the Gospels is much shakier, since this is also true of Absolution, and is possibly true of the Anointing of the Sick.

 

There is, however, something about baptism and the Eucharist that warrants their being distinguished from the others, and as “Sacraments of the Gospel”.  This is the fact that these two are visual depictions of the Gospel itself in a way that cannot be said of the others.  Absolution can be said to be a verbal proclamation of the promise of forgives in the Gospel (21) but not, at least in its essence, (22) a verbal depiction of the Gospel.   St. Augustine said of baptism “The word is added to the element, and there results the Sacrament, as if itself also a kind of visible word.” (23)  In context, St. Augustine was talking about how the Word of the Gospel, attached to the water of baptism, washes away sin when received in faith, and how the water, the vessel of the Word, visually depicts this washing.  The water of baptism always depicts the washing away of sins and when the mode of immersion is used, this depicts the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The main blessings of which baptism is the organon dotikon (giving instrument, the hand God uses to give) according to the New Testament, are the washing away of sins and union with Christ in His death and resurrection, and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are also the central and summary events of the Gospel. (24)  While immersion is not absolutely essential to the Sacrament – as early as the Didache, which is first to second century, the Church made allowance for other modes if insufficient water was available for immersion – when it is used, it depicts both of the main Gospel blessings associated with the Sacrament, and the Gospel events in which Christ procured those blessings. (25)  The Eucharist also contains a visual depiction of the Gospel.  The bread and wine are proclaimed to be the Body and Blood of Christ, broken and shed for us, and St. Paul declared of the Sacrament “For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come.” (26)

 

The laying on of hands and anointing of oil which are the visual parts of Confirmation, Ordination, and the Anointing of the Sick, do not depict the events of the Gospel like this.  Marriage depicts the union of Christ with his Church and while this union could not occur without the Gospel it is not itself the Gospel.  Absolution proclaims the forgiveness promised in the Gospel to the repentant but it does so verbally rather than visually.  Only Baptism and the Eucharist visually depict the events of the Gospel.  This is why they are uniquely Gospel Sacraments.  This is why the New Testament depicts these as God’s ordinary means, alongside the proclaimed word of the Gospel, of bestowing saving grace on believers. (27)

 

When the Church initially adopted the Greek word Mystery and the Latin word Sacrament these were at first basically synonyms for “rite” although modified slightly to be Church specific.  This is the broadest sense of the word and in this sense it is pointless to argue about how many there are.  The Church Fathers, especially St. Augustine of Hippo, developed a narrower theological meaning of Sacraments but did not narrow the number, St. Augustine himself identifying over three hundred throughout his entire corpus.  In the second millennium, all the ancient pre-Reformation Churches formally acknowledged seven Sacraments, for the most part the same seven Sacraments with only a slight variation on the part of the one Church that differed.  These seven can be distinguished from others by the fact that they are all either prescribed or otherwise treated as very important in the New Testament.  The Church of Rome in the second millennium perverted and corrupted a few of the Sacraments and Dr. Luther and John Calvin in exposing these perversions and corruptions unwisely argued that four or five of them were not Sacraments at all.  The English Church, while she followed Dr. Luther and Calvin in rejecting the Roman perversions and corruptions, did not follow them in dogmatically rejecting as Sacraments the others, but instead carefully worded her Confession so as to distinguish Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as Gospel Sacraments.  In this, she returned more closely to St. Augustine’s position than the Lutherans or Reformed.  More importantly, her decision to distinguish Baptism and the Lord’s Supper from other Sacraments as Gospel Sacraments is justified, less by the claim that they are the only two instituted by Christ than by the fact that these two are identified along with the proclaiming of the Gospel as means of grace and modes of the Gospel in the New Testament.

 

 

 

 

(1)   Gen. 3:15.

(2)   By “Hebrew”, the early Fathers who refer to this pre-Greek Gospel of Matthew, probably meant Aramaic.

(3)   Literally, the word meant “thrown together”, and came to have the meaning by which it was associated with the Christian rules of faith, by the practice of breaking a coin, a piece of pottery, or some such thing into two pieces when an agreement or contract was made, and giving both parties a piece so as to identify themselves as the parties to the agreement by bringing the pieces back together.  Its use as a designation of the Christian Creed is due to Christians using it to identify each other as belonging to the common faith.

(4)   See, for example, Rom. 16:25-26, 1 Cor. 15:51-52, Eph. 1:9-10, 3:3-9, Col. 1:25-27.

(5)   St. Justin Martyr, First Apology, 61 (baptism), 65-66 (Eucharist).

(6)   As the first theologian to write in Latin, the “Father of Latin Theology”, Tertullian was the one who chose the Latin terms used in discussion of many other theological topics, most notably the Trinity.

(7)    Tertullian, On Idolatry, 19.  In this chapter Tertullian contrasts the human (the oath to Caesar) with the divine (baptism) and argues that the oaths are mutually contradictory.  Although the Church as a whole did not accept this assessment she did adopt his terminology.  This work is usually dated to around the middle of the first decade of the third century, shortly after Tertullian wrote On Baptism and before he wrote Against Marcion, in both of which other works the word Sacrament is frequently used.

(8)   These are the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Syriac Orthodox or Jacobite Church.  In the twentieth century branches of the last two became autocephalous as the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church (the “Syrian” in the title refers to the liturgical language, this Church is based in India).

(9)   Just in case the title was too subtle, Dr. Luther wrote in the letter introducing the treatise “I now know and am sure that the Papacy is the kingdom of Babylon, and the power of Nimrod the mighty hunter.”

(10)                       Dr. Martin Luther, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, 1.18.

(11)                       Dr. Martin Luther, The Large Catechism, “Holy Baptism”, 74-75.  The reference to repentance or penance as “the third Sacrament” places it third after baptism and the Eucharist.  In On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church Dr. Luther had listed them in the order baptism, penance, Eucharist in his introductory letter, but his actual discussion of each went in the order Eucharist, baptism, penance.

(12)                       John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.19.

(13)                       The only other examples that stand out in which the Lutherans and Reformed rejected something that was genuinely Catholic are their adopting new models of ecclesiastical government in the place of the historic episcopacy that had governed all the ancient Churches since the Apostles (this was only true of the German Lutherans, the Scandinavian Lutherans retained the historic episcopacy) and the rejection of the Second Council of Nicaea, the seventh of the councils universally received as ecumenical prior to the Schism.  In the first case this was an adjustment to the situation in which they found themselves and not due to deliberate schism on their part (see William Palmer, A Treatise on the Church of Christ, Volume I, London: J. G. F. Rivington, 1834, pp. 361-382). 

(14)                       St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitory, 2.6.

(15)                       St. Augustine called marriage a Sacrament in Marriage and Concupiscence, 1.10.11.  In his Answer to Petilian the Donatist, 2.105.239 he referred to the “sacrament of chrism… which is indeed holy as among the class of visible signs, like baptism itself” which is a reference to confirmation as it is still practiced in the East.  He referred to ordination as a Sacrament in On the Good of Marriage 24.32.

(16)                       A comprehensive list would be tiresome. Representative of the sort of other things St. Augustine saw as Sacraments are the Sign of the Cross, (Sermon 81) the Lord’s Prayer, (Letter 130), and exorcism (Sermon 227, “On Holy Easter Sunday On the Sacraments of the Faithful”).

(17)                       Peter Lombard’s four books of Sentences are something between a glorified florilegium and a work of systematic theology.  St. Augustine was his primary Patristic source and, ironically, the development of Augustinian theology that led directly to the Reformation can be traced through St. Thomas Aquinas to Lombard.  John Calvin did his best to conceal his dependence on Lombard in his Institutes, but in the end failed.  In addition to the fact that his Institutes, like every Scholastic summa, follow the structure that Lombard gave to systematic theology, the Master of Sentences is one of Calvin’s most quoted sources, and his deep respect comes through despite the thin veil of contempt he tried to drape it with.

(18)                       Matt. 10:8.

(19)                       Eph. 5:23.

(20)                       St. Augustine, On the Catechizing of the Uninstructed, 26.

(21)                       See Francis Pieper’s discussion of this under the heading “The Means of Grace in the Form of Absolution” in Christian Dogmatics, Vol. 3. (St. Louis, Missouri: Concordia Publishing House, 1953), 189-203.  Pieper is in error in thinking that the potestas clavium was given to all believers rather than to the Apostles as the governing ministers of the Church.  This error, the opposite of the Patriarch of Rome’s error in claiming that it was given exclusively to St. Peter rather than all the Apostles, was originally Dr. Luther’s. Both errors contain an element of truth.  It is true that there is a resemblance between the believer informally sharing the Gospel with an unbeliever and the formal proclamation of Absolution, but it is also true that there is a difference.  Dr. Luther exaggerated the resemblance, the Roman Patriarch exaggerates the difference.

(22)                       Our priests, when proclaiming the Absolution after the General Confession, usually make an outward Sign of the Cross which does visually depict the central event of the Gospel, but this is merely a wholesome tradition, it is not essential to the Absolution itself.  It is not mentioned in connection to the Keys in the Gospels, nor is it even prescribed in the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer.

(23)                       St. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 80.3.

(24)                       1 Cor. 15:3-4.

(25)                       The Eastern Orthodox Church, the Assyrian Church of the East, and the Oriental Orthodox Churches all use triple immersion as their normative mode of baptism, even when administered in infancy which is usually the case.  While none of these regard the mode as essential, of the ancient Churches only the Roman Catholic departed from the primitive consensus as to immersion as the preferred mode. Although Dr. Luther expressed a preference for the mode of immersion, the Lutherans never made it their normative practice. When our Anglican Church threw off Rome’s shackles, Archbishop Cranmer did try to restore the primitive preference, including in the first (1549) edition of the Book of Common Prayer, the rubric “Then the prieste shall take the childe in his hands, and aske the name. And naming the childe, shall dyppe it in the water thryse, First dypping the ryght syde: Seconde the left syde: The thryd tyme dippyng the face towards the fonte: So it be diseretly and warely done, saying” although provision was made for pouring “if the childe be weake.”  In the 1552 edition, he retained the preference for immersion, but reduced it to a single dip, with the same provision for pouring.  This has been retained in all subsequent editions of the Book of Common Prayer, although in practice the pouring the rubric provides as an option has been normative over the immersion the rubric sets as the preference.  The usager faction among the non-jurors sought to restore the primitive triple immersion practice of the 1549 BCP in the early eighteenth century.

(26)                       1 Cor. 11:26.

(27)                      That the proclaimed word of the Gospel is the means of bestowing faith and through faith grace, is found in Rom. 10:12-15.  Earlier the same epistle depicts baptism as the means through which the believer is united to Jesus Christ in His death and resurrection (Rom. 6:3-5) and consistently is depicted by the New Testament as the means of someone becoming a believer (Matt. 28:19, Mk. 16:15-16, Gal. 3:26-27), just as the Lord’s Supper is depicted as the means whereby the new life bestowed in the new birth of baptism is fed with the food of Christ’s one sufficient sacrifice.  In John 6:53-58, part of a larger discourse in which Jesus Christ identifies Himself as the Bread of Life and in which faith is the means whereby the believer feeds on the Bread of Life, Jesus makes what His interlocutors had already found to be a hard saying (v. 52), harder by adding the concept of drinking His blood to that of eating His flesh.  Faith remains the organon leptikon (instrument of receiving) here, as it had been earlier in the discourse,  but the introduction of this new concept of drinking His blood, creates an allusion to the Eucharist as the organon dotikon that could only be missed by wilful blindness.  For 1 Jn. 5:6-8 as referring to the proclaimed Word, Baptism, and the Eucharist as the three modes of the Gospel see Kurt E. Marquart, The Saving Truth: Doctrine for Laypeople, Vol I of Truth, Salvatory and Churchly: Works of Kurt E. Marquart (Fort Wayne: Luther Academy, 2016), 84.