Topic

Sacraments

The rites, above all the Eucharist and Baptism, through which churches hold that God’s grace is given or signified, and what actually happens in them.

History

Roots

Every Christian church inherited two rites from the New Testament: washing with water in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19) and the meal Jesus told his disciples to repeat (1 Corinthians 11:23–26). The Greek church called such rites mysteria, mysteries. Latin writers, starting with Tertullian, used sacramentum, a word that also meant a soldier’s oath.

The Early Church spoke of both rites in strong terms. The Didache (late first or early second century) gives instructions for baptism in running water and a eucharistic prayer (chs. 7–10). Ignatius of Antioch (c. 110) attacked heretics who “confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ” (To the Smyrnaeans 7). Justin Martyr (c. 155) told the emperor that Christians receive the bread and cup “not as common bread and common drink” (First Apology 66). Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 350) told the newly baptised that “the seeming bread is not bread, though sensible to taste, but the Body of Christ” (Catechetical Lecture 22).

Baptism raised its own questions early. Tertullian thought delay was wiser, “principally, however, in the case of little children” (On Baptism 18), which shows infants were already being baptised. In the 250s Cyprian of Carthage and Pope Stephen quarrelled over whether people baptised by heretics needed baptising again.

Augustine gave the West its working definition. A sacrament is a sign joined to God’s word: “The word is added to the element, and there results the Sacrament, as if itself also a kind of visible word” (Tractate 80 on John). Against the Donatists, who held that sacraments performed by compromised clergy were void, he argued that the sacrament belongs to Christ, so its validity does not depend on the holiness of the minister (On Baptism, Against the Donatists; see Donatism, secondary). His teaching on original sin also gave infant baptism a sharper rationale: it washes away inherited guilt.

Causes of the medieval settlement

The Western debate over the Eucharist began in the ninth century, when two monks of Corbie, Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus, disagreed over whether Christ’s body on the altar is the same body born of Mary or present “in figure.” In the eleventh century Berengar of Tours denied any change in the bread and was made to recant twice, in 1059 and 1079 (Berengar of Tours, secondary). The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) settled the language: the bread and wine are “changed in substance, by God’s power, into his body and blood” (canon 1). Thomas Aquinas then gave Transubstantiation its classic philosophical form (Summa Theologiae III q. 75).

The number of sacraments was fixed in the same period. Peter Lombard’s Sentences (c. 1150) listed seven, and the Council of Florence wrote them into its Decree for the Armenians (1439): “baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, penance, extreme unction, orders and matrimony” (text). East and West also clashed over whether the bread should be leavened, one of the irritants behind the Great Schism of 1054.

The Reformation break

The Reformation turned the sacraments into the most divisive question among Protestants themselves. Martin Luther’s On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520, CCEL) cut the seven to two (with penance in an ambiguous place). It attacked three “captivities” of the Supper: withholding the cup from the laity, transubstantiation as a required doctrine, and the Mass as a sacrifice. Luther still held that Christ’s body and blood “are truly present” (Augsburg Confession X, 1530).

Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich read “this is my body” as “this signifies my body.” When Luther and Zwingli met at the Marburg Colloquy (1529), they agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles and split on the fifteenth, the presence of Christ (Marburg Colloquy, secondary). John Calvin tried to hold the middle: Christ is truly given and received, but by the Holy Spirit lifting believers to him rather than by his body being in the bread (Institutes IV.17).

The Anabaptist movement went further on baptism. The Schleitheim Confession (1527) restricted it to those who have “learned repentance and amendment of life” (art. 1; see Schleitheim Confession, secondary), and Menno Simons made Believer’s Baptism the mark of a church gathered out of the world. John Smyth carried the same conviction into the first English Baptist congregation in Amsterdam in 1609.

Rome answered at the Council of Trent. Session 7 (1547) anathematised anyone who said sacramental grace is “not conferred through the act performed” but by faith alone (canons). Session 13 (1551) defined the change in the Eucharist as “suitably and properly called Transubstantiation” (decree).

Influence

The Reformation settlements fixed the map that still holds. The Anglican Articles of Religion, shaped by Thomas Cranmer, called transubstantiation “repugnant to the plain words of Scripture” while keeping a strong language of feeding on Christ (Articles 25 and 28). The Westminster Confession (1646) gave the Reformed position: Christ is received “really, but spiritually” (ch. 29.7). In the East, the Synod of Jerusalem (1672) adopted the term metousiosis, a Greek counterpart to transubstantiation, against Calvinist influence (Synod of Jerusalem, secondary).

Later movements kept reopening the question. John Wesley urged frequent communion and called the Supper a “converting ordinance” (unverified as to exact source). The Oxford Movement from 1833 pushed Anglicans back toward a high view of the sacraments, and the Mercersburg theologians did the same for some American Reformed churches (Mercersburg theology, secondary). Revivalist and Pentecostal churches moved the other way, putting conversion and the Spirit’s baptism at the center and treating the rites as ordinances of obedience.

The Second Vatican Council reformed Catholic worship, allowed the vernacular, and called the liturgy “the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 10). The World Council of Churches’ Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (1982, the Lima text) mapped how far the churches agree and drew formal responses from most of them.

Key ideas and contributors

A sacrament is a sign that does something. The common Catholic and Orthodox view, and in a modified form the Lutheran one, is that sacraments are means of grace: God acts through them, not just alongside them. The Catholic Catechism calls them “efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us” (CCC 1131). Aquinas worked this out in terms of signs and causes (Summa III q. 60).

Christ acts, whoever the minister. From Augustine’s anti-Donatist argument came the medieval principle that a sacrament works ex opere operato, “by the work performed,” when rightly given and not blocked by the recipient. Trent made it binding for Catholics.

Word and faith come first. Luther kept the real presence and baptismal regeneration but insisted that a sacrament is God’s promise attached to a sign, and that it benefits only those who believe the promise. Calvin called sacraments seals: they confirm a promise already given in the preached word (Institutes IV.14).

Five views of the presence. On the Eucharist the main positions are:

Transubstantiation (Roman Catholic): the substance of bread and wine becomes Christ’s body and blood while the appearances remain.
The Orthodox Eucharistic Mystery (Eastern Orthodox): a real change brought about by the Holy Spirit in the epiclesis, with little interest in explaining how.
Sacramental Union (Lutheran): Christ’s body and blood are present “in, with and under” the bread and wine, received by all who eat.
Spiritual Presence (Reformed, much Anglican teaching): Christ is truly received by faith through the Spirit, not located in the elements.
Memorialism (Zwingli, most Baptists and many evangelicals): the Supper is a remembrance and a pledge; Christ is present as he is in any gathering of believers.

The texts behind the dispute are John 6:53–56, the words of institution (Matthew 26:26–28) and Paul’s warning against eating “without discerning the body” (1 Corinthians 11:27–29).

Baptism unites with Christ, or it signs that union. Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran churches teach that baptism regenerates (John 3:5, Titus 3:5, 1 Peter 3:21). Reformed churches treat it as the sign and seal of the covenant, the counterpart of circumcision (Colossians 2:11–12), which grounds their Infant Baptism. Baptists call both rites “ordinances,” acts of obedience that testify to grace already received (Romans 6:3–4).

Two, seven, or none. Catholics and Orthodox count seven, though the Orthodox have never treated the number as closed. Most Protestants count two, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, as the only rites Christ commanded. Quakers and the Salvation Army observe no outward sacraments at all, holding that the reality is inward.

Key controversies

How Christ is present. This is the longest-running dispute. Catholics and Lutherans read “this is my body” literally; the Reformed charge that a body must be in one place and that Christ’s is in heaven. Lutherans answer that the risen Christ is not bound that way. Memorialists say all the others read too much into a meal Jesus framed as remembrance (“do this in remembrance of me,” Luke 22:19). Within Catholicism, some mid-twentieth-century theologians proposed “transignification” in place of a change of substance; Paul VI rejected that in Mysterium Fidei (1965, text).

The Mass as sacrifice. The Reformers rejected the idea that the Mass offers Christ again for the living and the dead, citing his sacrifice “once for all” (Hebrews 10:10–14). Trent (session 22, 1562) replied that the Mass makes present the one sacrifice of the cross rather than repeating it. Ecumenical dialogue has narrowed the gap on paper, but the Catholic and Orthodox priesthood still depends on this point.

Who may be baptised. Credobaptists argue that every baptism in Acts follows a profession of faith (Acts 2:38–41). Paedobaptists point to household baptisms (Acts 16:33), the promise “for you and for your children” (Acts 2:39) and covenant continuity with circumcision. The argument is about more than age: it turns on whether the church is a covenant community including children or a gathered fellowship of believers. Mode is a secondary fight, with Baptists and the Orthodox insisting on immersion.

Baptismal regeneration. Does baptism save? Catholics, Orthodox and Lutherans say it ordinarily does; most evangelicals say it signifies a regeneration that comes by faith, and fear that the opposite view breeds nominal Christians who trust a rite. Churches of Christ, from the Restoration Movement, hold a believer’s baptism that is also necessary for salvation, which cuts across the usual lines.

Faith or the rite. Luther, and Protestants after him, objected that ex opere operato makes grace mechanical. Catholic theologians answer that it means only that the sacrament’s power comes from Christ, not from the minister or the recipient’s merit, and that unbelief still blocks its fruit. How far the two sides really differ remains a question in ecumenical talks.

Who may receive. Catholic and Orthodox churches limit communion to their own members, since sharing it signals full unity. Many Lutherans, Reformed and Baptists practise forms of closed or “close” communion; others invite all baptised believers. The same question turns inward when bishops debate withholding communion from Catholics who remarry without annulment or politicians who support abortion rights.

What believers actually think. A 2019 Pew survey found that 69% of American Catholics said the bread and wine “are symbols” of Christ’s body and blood (Pew Research). The finding fuelled the US bishops’ National Eucharistic Revival (2022–2025) and a wider argument about catechesis.

What remains unresolved

The churches agree that Christ commanded baptism and the Supper and that both matter. They disagree on whether God gives grace through these rites or chiefly confirms grace given through faith, and that disagreement surfaces in every other question here: presence, sacrifice, infants and who may come to the table. Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry showed real convergence on baptism and on the Eucharist as thanksgiving and memorial. It also showed that shared communion still waits on agreement about the church and its ministry, which no dialogue has yet reached.