Power of Sacraments

Summarizing the 16th-century Reformed formulations of Eucharistic theology, John Williamson Nevin ( The Mystical Presence: And the Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord’s Supper (Mercersburg Theology Study) , p. 51) says:

“The sacrament is made to carry with it an objective force so far as its principle design is concerned. It is not simply suggestive, commemorative or representational. It is not a sign, a picture, deriving its significance from the mind of the beholder. The virtue which it possesses is not put into it by the faith of the worshipper in the first place, to be taken out of it again by the same faith in the same form. It is not imagined of course in the case that the ordinance can have any virtue without faith; that it can confer grace in a purely mechanical way. All thought of the opus operatum , in this sense, is utterly repudiated. Still faith does not properly clothe the sacrament with its power. It is the condition of its efficacy for the communicant, but not the principle of the power itself. That belongs to the institution in its own nature. The signs are bound to what they represent not subjectively simply in the thought of the worshipper, but objectively by the force of a divine appointment . . . . The grace goes inseparably along with the signs and is truly present for all who are prepared to make it their own.”

This is, I think, a fair summary of the Reformation view, and I think it has both enormous strengths and a serious weakness.

As far as strengths, the position that Nevin summarizes clearly places the power of the sacraments not in anything that is done by the worshiper or even any receptive attitude on the worshiper’s part. It is not faith that makes the sign powerful, but the fact that God has chosen and designated these created things as vehicles of His presence in the Spirit. The power comes from God’s institution. That is exactly right: God , not the faith of the recipient, is determinative.

The weakness is the in the way Nevin treats the relation of grace and sacrament. Without explicitly stating it, he uses the word “grace” in a stipulated and strict sense: Grace is the gift that only those with genuine saving faith receive, and therefore there is no grace except for those “who are prepared to make it their own.” If we know that “grace” is being used strictly, that’s fine, but that’s not always the way the Bible uses the word. And in various senses we can, and must, speak of grace given to all who receive the sacrament. Insofar as “grace” simply means “gift,” then everyone who breathes is a recipient of grace, whether they acknowledge that God gives the breath or not. And everyone who receives the Supper receives a gift, regardless of whether they love or defy the Lord of the Supper. If they defy the Lord, the gift leaves them even more culpable; but they are more culpable precisely because they have received the gift and ungratefully neglected and despised it.

Nevin quotes Calvin against Westphal in a footnote on the same page, and this quotation highlights the issue: “[Westphal] pretends that the sacrament is made by the word, not by our faith. Were I to grant this, it does not enable him to prove that Christ is prostituted indiscriminately to dogs and swine that they may eat his flesh. God ceases not to send rain from heaven, though the moisture is not received by stones and rocks.” I focus on the last sentence. Calvin says that the gift available in the sacrament just rolls off of unbelievers in the say way that rain rolls off rocks and stones, and doesn’t produce fruit. What that misses is the fact that the rain is an expression of God’s love and an unmerited gift even to stones and rocks. Jesus says that we are to love enemies in imitation of our Father, and the symbol of the Father’s love of His enemies is the gift of rain on the just and unjust (Matthew 5:43-48). In Hebrews 6, rain on unfruitful ground is a symbol of those who receive enlightenment, taste the gift, become partakers of the Spirit, taste the good word and the powers of the age to come, but fall away. Again, rain signifies a gift, a gracious gift, refused and abused, not a non-gift.

Nevin’s (and many of the Reformers’) treatment of grace and sacrament is inconsistent with their proper emphasis on God as the source of the meaning and power of the sacrament. You can see Nevin’s difficulties in the twists and turns, the affirmations and hesitations in the latter part of the paragraph I quoted. Nevin seems to me to pull back into a kind of subjectivism when he says that every notion of opus operatum is rejected. It’s best rather to reject only certain notions of opus operatum , and to affirm others.

As I understand the New Testament, the differences of sacramental efficacy (means of grace, means of judgment) are not necessarily front-loaded, but definitely back-loaded. Paul says in 1 Corinthians that those who do not discern the body in the Supper are judged with sickness and even death if they partake, and he says that those who receive in faith participate in the body and blood of the Lord. So the Supper does have immediate effects on those who partake, depending on whether they are faithful or faithless. That’s one side. On the other side is Calvin’s image of sacramental grace as rain; we don’t know until later whether the rain has produced any fruit or not. It’s not necessarily immediately evident, and both fruitfulness and fruitlessness might take some time to appear. The difference does not necessarily come at the outset, at the moment of administration, but emerges in the course of time and particularly at the end. The sacrament’s power to save or condemn may come at the beginning; but more important is the end. What matters most is not protology but eschatology.