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.