Justification and Sacramental theology

Many Protestants today, perhaps most in the Reformed churches, believe that justification by faith is threatened by a high sacramental theology. The more efficacy you attribute to baptism, the less prominence you give to faith.

While it is true that certain kinds of sacramental theology might be a threat to faith (some forms of late medieval sacramental theology come to mind), the Reformers appear not to have felt much of this tension. Zwingli (perhaps) excepted, the Reformers to a man combined a strong view of sacramental efficacy with an insistence on justification by faith alone, and this combination found expression in some of the earliest confessional statements from the Reformation period. The link seems to be this: Faith is directed precisely to the promise that is sensibly apparent in the sacrament. No one trusts water to cleanse sin; but the water of baptism IS cleansing from God, and all one need do is believe that promise that comes with the water and be saved. No one trusts bread and wine to give them eternal life; but the bread and wine come TO ME with the sure word that through this food Jesus Christ is my food and drink. Therefore, receive the bread and wine, trust the promise, and live.

This places the sinner face to face with God, in the places He promised to meet us and receiving those things that He promised to use to communicate Himself. And we simply receive them, trusting that God does what He says, without searching for a back door into fellowship with God (bypassing Word, Sacrament, Church). Faith means trusting God's word, and turning the knob on the doors that he identifies. The backdoor is not an invention of the Reformers; it was a discovery of medievals to whom the front door was closed. The Reformers CLOSED the back door and opened wide the front. (And so, I come back, obsessively, to the priesthood of the plebs �Ewhich I think of with certain exaggeration as the key point of the Reformation.) If the back door is open again today, it's because the front door has been closed or is closing.

Far from being a threat to justification by faith, I am becoming more and more convinced that a strong view of sacramental efficacy is NECESSARY to maintain justification by faith. Can justification by faith survive the evacuation of the sacraments? The last few hundred years gives us little reason to think it likely.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, August 14, 2004 at 07:12 PM

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