sacramentalists or sacramentarians part 1…
[Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from Bullinger’s Decades and have been lightly adapted.]
Words matter. Richard Weaver wrote on the consequences of ideas, but even ideas are powerless unless communicated through words. Words have power. Think of the various political controversies and slogans over the past decade. Leave and Remain (in the UK), Black Lives Matter, racism, tradition, colonialism, history, victim, Trump, deep-state, group-think/echo-chamber…all these words evoke deep and passionate responses. Words matter.
And yet, words aren’t magical. Incantations have no inherent power. The words above evoke different responses in different audiences. Different people assign different meanings to those words. Even in witchcraft, whatever happens is happening because of something other than a direct relationship between words as causal and the effect produced.
So words have power, but words are not inherently powerful. In other words, words operate in another way than from the work of the work itself (ex opere operato). Or perhaps this is already to beg the question.
Bullinger begins this sermon with a lengthy–and, to most of us at least, seemingly arcane–discussion on signs in scripture. Quoting Augustine, he includes such gems as,
We generally call those things signs which signify something; we also consider words to be such signs.
And,
A sign is a thing other than what is laid before our senses; the sign makes something else come into our mind or thought, as by seeing smoke we believe there is fire.
Captain Obvious was a captain.
Or is there more going on? We moderns love to mock the Scholastics for their discussions on angels dancing on pinheads. Any discussion we don’t understand seems, well, arcane, cryptic, needlessly mysterious, pointlessly confusing, stupidly obscure.
But for Bullinger, careful distinctions through words were the difference between life and death, not only spiritually, but physically as well. For the first 100 years of the Reformation, what exactly was happening in the sacraments (both the mass, later called the Lord’s Supper, and baptism) was a battleground that had profound consequences. Rejection of the belief that the mass transformed bread and wine into Jesus’ actual body and blood resulted in execution by burning at the stake (for Protestants throughout Europe). Belief in the mass as that which transformed bread and wine into Jesus’ actual body and blood could result in exile or death (for the Roman Catholics in Britain).
Even between Protestants, what exactly the Lord’s Supper was and did or didn’t do marked profound differences between the Lutheran and Reformed branches of the Reformation, differences that still continue to this day. I once had a Lutheran pastor refuse to pray with me because of our differences over the Supper.
So while much of this sermon, one of Bullinger’s lengthiest in this series, seems either blindingly obvious or unnecessarily cumbersome, I can sympathize with a pastor absolutely desperate to help his people understand exactly what was happening in the sacraments.
What then does Bullinger think we need to know about signs and words?
1. Signs and words are given by God.
Now signs are given by God for this purpose, to teach and admonish us about things to come, or about things past. This is so the signs may represent certain things, a certain likeness of something else, to those who see them, or that the signs may seal the promises and words of God with some visible ceremony celebrated by men by God’s institution. In short, signs are given to exercise our faith and gather together those who are scattered into one assembly or company.
2. Signs and words aren’t magic.
Wherefore, in the pronouncing or speaking of the words of the Lord in the supper, there is no power or virtue either to call down the things signified, or to change the things present. These imaginations do rather seem more to maintain superstition than religion, as though the words, pronounced according to the form conceived, had power to call down out of heaven, to bring from one place to another, to restore health, to draw to, to put from, or to transform or change. St Augustine reckoned up among superstitious vanities those things which for remedies of diseases are tied or fastened about the body, which also medicine makes no account of, whether it be in charms, or certain signs called characters, or in hanging certain things about some parts of the body.
3. Signs and words represent the power of God but are not God themselves.
We acknowledge indeed that all the power of almighty God is attributed to the word of God, but who doesn’t understand that the word of God refers to the everlasting Son of God, which in scripture is called the Word of God? Who is such a dorhead that cannot rightly distinguish between the everlasting Word of God, which is the Son of God, second person in the reverend Trinity, and the word rehearsed, spoken, or pronounced by man? The everlasting Word of God remains in his own substance and nature a creator, and not a creature; it is not mingled, it is not grafted or incorporated into man’s voice.
4. Signs and words are connected to the things they signify.
Furthermore, I say that the sign and the thing signified are coupled together by God’s institution, because he that instituted the sacrament of baptism and the supper, instituted it not for this purpose, that with water we might wash away the filth of the body, as is our custom with daily baths, nor that we should take our fill of the bread and wine; but that under visible signs he might commend to us the mysteries of our redemption and his grace, and, to be short, of our salvation, by representing them to renew them, and by sealing them to confirm them. What I’m saying is that they are coupled together in a faithful contemplation, because they who partake of the sacraments religiously do not fasten their eyes on things we can physically perceive only, but instead on things spiritual, signified, and heavenly, so that the faithful have in themselves both sign and the thing signified coupled together.
Now, spoiler for next week, I think Bullinger needs to go farther with this than he does. I think Christianity as codified by the Reformed confessions goes farther than Bullinger does here. More to the point, I believe scripture requires us to go farther than he does here. But given his context and the crushing sacramentalism of the Roman Catholic church, I think we can extend charity for Bullinger for his overreaction. And, as far as what he does say goes, he does well. Even in this brief statement we see that the sacraments accomplish something. They do have a result. God’s word has an effect. In Bullinger’s explanation, we fix our eyes on spiritual realities, we glory in God’s grace and our redemption, and we are sealed in our salvation.
5. Signs and words must not be confused with what they represent.
By these examples shown out of scripture it is plain that the signs borrow the name of the things they represent and not their natures and substances…. By their confounding of the sign with the thing signified they bring in a servile weakness and (that I may use St Augustine’s words) ‘a carnal bondage’.
If I may be polemical for a moment, compare the rhetoric of sophisticated and highly educated converts to Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy in English-speaking countries with the degrading ritualism and bawdy superstition nearly universally found in Latin and Slavic countries. It’s all fine and well to hear someone who has grown up in a Protestant environment wax eloquent about the distinction between doulia (honour) and latria (and worship), but go to Mexico City or Athens and tell me what is happening there is not abject and servile worship. Visit rural towns in Latin America or the Russian Federation and tell me honestly what is happening there is not carnal bondage and the absolute worship of created things. If you want to see Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism as they really are, visit them in a country where they don’t have to compete with Protestantism.
And for those of us who remain smugly confident in our Evangelicalism, our Protestantism, our Reformed Confessionalism…dare we look at what we are? No, not our creeds and professions, not our ideals, but our realities? Rome threw at us some 500 years ago that breaking the union of the church would result in endless schisms. How often do we divide over minutiae? How often do we break fellowship over nuance rather than substance? How often is our High Calvinism an excuse for a coldness of heart regarding the lost? How often is our intellectualism a crutch to help us avoid dealing with ordinary men and women who couldn’t give a fig about the ideas we’re too lazy to help them understand? How often are our pastoral and theological discussions a chance to stroke our own egos rather than minister to the needs of the sheep Christ called us to serve in the first place?
Bullinger is wrong–or, at the very least, insufficient–on the sacraments, but at least he cares for his sheep. That much is evident. Do we?
Do we care for them enough to understand the ideas scripture urges us to know for their salvation? Do we care for them enough to digest for ourselves first what we desperately need, then prepare for them the food they so desperately need in a form they can receive?
In other words, do we love words for ourselves, or do we love words for the sheep? While perhaps Bullinger’s own error was to see the sacraments as less connected to the power of God than they really are, the larger error in Bullinger’s time was to see words as magical; in ours we see words as intellectual. God wants us to see his words as representing his Son and the power of his glory.
Next, on the virtue of the sacraments
