Category: Word/Sacrament

Craig Higgins’ doctoral dissertation some years ago is still very much a picture of modern presbyterian minimization of the sacraments for church life. In Higgins’ research “three-quarters of the students admit to having studied sacramental theology only a moderate amount or less. ” Whether  the modern evangelical culture has succeeded in drawing Christians far away from the external (means of grace) to the internal (piety and introspection), or whether this is a sign of the failure of the Reformed Presbyterian seminary these days to teach a Calvinian sacramentology, is still a debated matter. As always, it appears that both are at work in this unfortunate conclusion.

I have slowly been reading through Rev. Craig Higgins’ excellent dissertation on baptismal efficacy in the Reformed tradition. In my reading this morning I came across a Leithart quote worth mentioning:

In Reformed theology, baptism is the watery gateway to the church. Whoever is duly baptized is a member of the church, the royal priesthood, by virtue of the fact that he is baptized. He may prove himself a Hophni or a Samuel, but there is no doubt that he has been deputized to play a role in the worship of God. (“Efficacy” 3)

I encounter such constant and widespread lying about reality each day and meet with such skilled and systematic distortion of the truth that I’m always in danger of losing my grip on reality. The reality, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior. The reality is that prayer is my mother tongue and the eucharist my basic food. The reality is that baptism, not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am.

Performative signs & what it means to receive in faith

And therefore, when the faithful, believing theses words and not doubting that they are addressed by the Lord to themselves (that they were in fact spoken only to them is proved by phrases in the context such as, “is given for you, is shed for you, is the new covenant,” which are all entirely alien to those who lack faith), truly eat the body of Christ and drink his blood, there is no reason based on the authority of Scripture which compels us on that account to tie the body of Christ to the bread in a physical manner, and not rather to confess that when Christ is eaten by faith by believers these words are completely fulfilled. The godly man hears that Christ offered bread to his disciples and said, “Take, eat; this is my body,” and believes that this is spoken to himself as well. Does he not truly eat the body of Christ even though no change occurs in the bread that he eats? A prince hands over to a judge elect a rod as the symbol of judicial authority, adding these words: “Behold, I hearby commit to you the authority of a judge.” The latter, believing his prince and accepting the rod, is at the same time constituted a judge, although the rod in itself remains nothing but a rod. Similarly by the symbol of the keys a person may receive the rights of the household, the keys remaining in their own essence the same as they were before.

Source: Martin Bucer, “The Eucharist: the 1526 Apology,” Martin Bucer, Courtenay Reformation Classics IV, p. 330.

{HT: Mark Horne}

If you are an unbaptized person, you need to believe the Gospel and entrust yourself to Jesus, “migrating” from earth to heaven, from the fallen human society to Christ’s new society as soon as possible. If you are a baptized person who has abandoned the faith, you are guilty of treason within the Kingdom of God. You need to repent and believe the Gospel while you have time. If you are a baptized believer, you need to understand that your baptism has put you in a new situation. It may not look like much, but you have a birthright that you should never trade for all the treasures the world has to offer. Walk by what God says, by faith, rather than what you see.

You have crossed the border between heaven and earth.

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