The following article was written for a talk I was asked to give at the Reformation Heritage Conference at Wayside Presbyterian Church in Signal Mountain, TN, on October 26, 2024. It is posted here in its entirety. It deals with the doctrine of the sacraments in Reformation and post-Reformation thought.
One of the greatest successes of the 16th century reformation was not only that it initiated a recovery of the gospel message but that it also sought to recover the way in which that message applied to the whole of the Christian life. The Roman Catholic Church had turned Christian salvation into a sacerdotal process, one that depended entirely on the priests and the sacramental system that they controlled. According to their way of thinking, the Christian life was initiated by way of baptism—which was the first step in one’s justification; it progressed in and through the practice of penance, the receiving of the eucharist, confirmation, and either marriage or ordination; and it was consummated in the administering of last rites to ensure the baptized Christian of his or her place in heaven. These seven sacraments became the sum and substance of the Christian life for every Roman Catholic beginning in 1215 AD when the Fourth Lateran Council declared it to be binding doctrine for everyone.
In the eyes of men like John Calvin and many who followed after him in the Reformation and post-Reformation periods, however, this was not what the Bible taught. Calvin himself devoted a great deal of time and energy to refuting the Roman Catholic understanding of the sacraments and to recovering a more Biblical view. Indeed, a staggering 45% of book 4 of the Institutes—which is the longest book of them all—is dedicated to discussing the sacraments and to repudiating the errors of the Roman Catholic Church not only in regard to five of their seven sacraments that were falsely so called but also in regard to the remaining two that the Bible did prescribe: baptism and the Lord’s Supper.[1]
For Calvin and for the reformers after him, the Christian life could not be boiled down to a checklist of keeping the sacraments. It entailed a living, breathing relationship with the God of the universe that was initiated by God, made possible only through the life and death of the Son of God, and was secured by the Spirit of God taking up residence within the individual. This relationship was, to be sure, nurtured and strengthened in and through the sacraments. But it didn’t begin with the sacraments, as the Roman Church had been insisting. And it didn’t progress merely by the act of the sacraments being administered or applied. For Calvin and those who followed him, simply going through the motions wasn’t what a faithful administration of the sacraments was all about.
Baptism and the Lord’s Supper were a means of grace for the individual Christian only when they were received by faith. The mere administration of the sacraments didn’t do anything in and of itself apart from the Holy Spirit giving eyes to see and ears to hear and minds to understand. This is exactly what the Westminster Confession of Faith says in chapter 28, paragraph 6:
The efficacy of baptism is not tied to that moment of time wherein it is administered; yet notwithstanding, by the right use of this ordinance, the grace promised is not only offered, but really exhibited and conferred, by the Holy Ghost, to such (whether of age or infants) as that grace belongeth unto, according to the counsel of God’s own will, in His appointed time.
Grace is really and truly conferred in and through the sacraments—i.e., they really are means of grace—but only by way of the Holy Spirit and then only “to such as that grace belong[s].” In other words, apart from the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit in an individual’s life, the sacraments will never be means of grace, no matter how many times they are administered or received.
It is, thus, quite possible for someone to receive the sacraments and yet not have genuine saving faith. Simon the Magician, for example, was clearly baptized in Acts 8:9-24 but did not genuinely believe, as is overwhelmingly evident from Peter’s words to him in vv. 20-23. For someone like Simon whose “heart is not right before God,” who is “in the gall of bitterness” and “the bond of iniquity” and is, therefore, said to be “perishing,” baptism cannot be a means of grace. Simon needs the Holy Spirit to change his heart and to bring him to real and saving faith in Jesus Christ. Until and unless this happens, the sacraments will never help to grow him in grace. Calvin put it this way: “[The sacraments] avail and profit nothing unless [they are] received in faith. As with wine or oil or some other liquid, no matter how much you pour out, it will flow away and disappear unless the mouth of the vessel to receive it is open; moreover, the vessel will be splashed over on the outside, but will still remain void and empty.”[2]
The most that can be said about Simon the Magician, then, is that he is “splashed over on the outside” with grace while, on the inside, he remains “void and empty” of it. The “vessel” of his heart first needs to be opened before he can receive the grace that the sacraments pour out. If and when that happens, the sacraments become for him—and for us—in Calvin’s words, “mirrors in which we may contemplate the riches of God’s grace, which he lavishes upon us.”[3] And, it is only in this context, that the sacraments are a means of grace to grow us in grace and to strengthen our faith.
While this was one of the primary areas in which the Reformation sought to recover a Biblical view of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, it wasn’t the only area. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper were contentious issues in and of themselves in the 16th and 17th centuries. Debate over the Lord’s Supper alone was so contentious that it threatened to split the Reformation apart nearly from the beginning. While the reformers generally all agreed that the Roman Catholic Church’s view of the Supper was wrong, they disagreed on the question of how Christ Himself was present in the meal. Were it not for the herculean efforts of men like Martin Bucer and John Calvin in personally meeting with the leading figures of the Reformation and working for consensus on this doctrine, the Reformation may well have never taken hold in Europe.[4]
Baptism too was a contentious issue, although in a different way from the Lord’s Supper. Baptism wasn’t something that the mainline reformers tended to disagree about, as was the case with the Lord’s Supper. Most of the focus of debate in regard to baptism in the 16th and 17th centuries was aimed at the Roman Catholic Church—who saw baptism as a regenerating ordinance—and at the Anabaptists—who rejected the validity of Roman Catholic baptism and of all infant baptisms performed outside of the Roman Church.
Of these two, Anabaptism was seen as the more dangerous, probably because it arose from within the veil of reformed responses to Rome. Between 1642 and 1660 alone, for instance, it resulted in at least 125 different treatises being written on this topic—that’s about 7 books per year on baptism!—and it fostered approximately 79 public debates.[5] Anabaptism became such a contentious view from the outset of the Reformation that the town council of Zurich outlawed it in the early 16th century and declared it to be punishable by drowning “without mercy.” Ulrich Zwingli, one of the magisterial reformers from Zurich, wholly endorsed this position on capital punishment by calling for every Anabaptist to be “submerged permanently” beneath the surface of the water.[6]
Baptism
Calvin devotes relatively little space to baptism in comparison to the Lord’s Supper. Whereas the Institutes contains almost 100 pages on the topic of Communion, it only contains 57 pages on baptism. Although this represents a significant increase from the original 1536 edition of the Institutes, the ratio between them stays roughly the same—Calvin still devotes twice the space to the Lord’s Supper as he does to baptism (21 pages vs. 9 pages).[7] That, in and of itself, is confirmation of what we said earlier, namely, that baptism wasn’t nearly as contentious as was the Supper, especially within the reformed Church.
The first thing Calvin says about baptism is that it is a rite of washing or cleansing. But, contrary to what the Roman Catholic Church was teaching, this doesn’t mean that the baptismal water cleanses its recipients from their sins. Baptism doesn’t actually wash away anyone’s sins. Yes, it is true, as the apostle Paul tells us in 1 Peter 3:21, that “[b]aptism…saves [us].” But, as Calvin explained, this does not indicate “that our cleansing and salvation are accomplished by water, or that water contains in itself the power to cleanse, regenerate, and renew; nor that here is the cause of salvation, but only that in this sacrament are received the knowledge and certainty of such gifts.”[8] Baptism doesn’t save us; Christ does. But baptism does signify and confirm the salvation that Christ provides. In other words, baptism is meant to be a picture of the washing that Christ accomplishes on our behalf and that the Holy Spirit applies to us.
The Bible frequently blurs the lines of demarcation that exist between the sacraments and the things that they signify or represent. We see this in 1 Peter 3:21. The water of baptism doesn’t actually save anyone, but there is such a close relationship between the sign of baptism and the salvation which it signifies that the two things are spoken of interchangeably. The apostle Paul does the same thing in regard to the Lord’s Supper when he records the words of institution established by Christ, “This is my body,” and, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood” (1 Cor. 11:24-25). Jesus doesn’t need to say, “This bread represents my body” or, “This cup represents the new covenant in my blood.” We know that the bread is not actually His body (which is holding the bread) and that the cup is not itself the new covenant in His blood (it’s a cup, not a covenant). But there is such a close connection between each of these signs and the thing it signifies that Jesus can speak of the one in terms of the other. The bread is His body, and the cup is the new covenant.
We see the same thing in Genesis 17:10, when the Lord collapses the whole of the Abrahamic Covenant into the sacrament of circumcision: “This is my covenant…Every male among you shall be circumcised.” The Westminster Confession of Faith (27.2) refers to this relationship between the sacrament and the thing it signifies as a “sacramental union” and defines it this way: “There is in every sacrament a spiritual relation, or sacramental union, between the sign and the thing signified: whence it comes to pass, that the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other.”
Baptism is, therefore, a rite of washing or cleansing insofar as it represents and points to the washing that Jesus provides. That is one reason why Calvin believed that the Anabaptists were wrong in rejecting the validity of Roman Catholic baptism. The “Catabaptists,” as he called them, denied that he and others like him had been genuinely baptized “because we were baptized by impious and idolatrous men under the papal government.” But, as Calvin pointed out, as “[i]gnorant or even contemptuous as those who baptized us were of God and all piety, they did not baptize us into the fellowship of either their ignorance or sacrilege, but into faith in Jesus Christ, because it was not their own name but God’s that they invoked, and they baptized us into no other name.”[9] The Anabaptists, like the Donatists of the fourth century, erroneously located the efficacy of the sacrament of baptism in the worthiness of the minister rather than in God’s intention for the sacrament and the faith of the recipient.
But this was in no way the most troubling of the Anabaptist errors in regard to baptism. That designation was reserved for their denial of infant baptism. Listen to how Calvin describes this particular error of the Anabaptists:
But since in this age certain frantic spirits have grievously disturbed the church over infant baptism, and do not cease their agitation, I cannot refrain from adding an appendix [which, incidentally, is 63% of everything Calvin has to say on the topic of baptism] here to restrain their mad ravings….They attack infant baptism with an argument seemingly quite plausible, by boasting that it is not founded upon any institution of God, but has been introduced only through men’s presumption and depraved curiosity, and at last received into use rashly and with stupid complacency.[10]
Calvin responded to the Anabaptist rejection of infant baptism by arguing (1) that circumcision in the Old Testament and baptism in the New Testament are connected; (2) that the Abrahamic Covenant and the New Covenant are connected; (3) that children are “partakers” of the covenant alongside adults in the New Covenant, just as they clearly were in the Abrahamic Covenant; (4) that these connections are confirmed and exemplified in Jesus’s attitude toward the little children in the gospels; and (5) that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are different kinds of sacraments, such that discernment is stipulated for the Communion meal but is nowhere mentioned in regard to baptism.
What is interesting about the Reformation’s understanding of baptism is how much agreement there was among the leaders and how much continuity there was between the church fathers, medieval scholastics, and the reformers. Much of what Calvin said in response to Anabaptism—especially in regard to the link between circumcision and baptism—can also be found in Augustine, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and even the Council of Trent. Contrary to what the Anabaptists were saying, therefore, Calvin perceived that the Roman Catholic Church wasn’t simply defending infant baptism “only through…presumption and depraved curiosity,” as the Anabaptists had argued, but were looking at least in part to the Bible and the connections between circumcision and baptism that can be found there. Calvin and the magisterial reformers were not trying to jettison everything the Roman Church had believed. They were simply trying to reform Roman doctrine to be in accord with what the Bible taught wherever the teaching of the Bible demanded it.
Lord’s Supper
Martin Luther published The Babylonian Captivity of the Church in 1520 and, in it, he sharply critiqued the Roman Catholic Church’s understanding of the Lord’s Supper in three main areas: (1) their practice of giving laypeople only the bread while withholding the cup; (2) their view of the Mass as a re-sacrificing of Christ; and (3) their doctrine of transubstantiation, which taught that the substance of the bread and wine (but not their outward properties) were transformed into the substance of the body and blood of Christ when the words of consecration were uttered by the priest. Luther believed each of these things were contrary to the teaching of the Bible. And there was widespread agreement with Luther in the Reformation and post-Reformation periods in reference to all three of these areas.
In regard to the practice of withholding the cup, Calvin pointed to Jesus’s words in Matthew 26:27, which unambiguously state that everyone should be given the cup (“Drink of it, all of you”). Calvin also pointed to Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 11:23-29, which explicitly link Jesus’s commands about the Supper to both the bread and the cup.[11] For Paul, the two elements always go together. That’s why Paul says in v. 26, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” The two cannot be separated nor can they be combined into one. Luther summarized the whole argument when he said: “Each [gospel] writer attaches the mark of universality to the cup, not to the bread; as if the Spirit foresaw the schism that should come, and should forbid to some that communion in the cup that Christ would have common to all.”[12]
But the most forcible argument of all for Luther was the reason that Christ gives for why everyone who receives the Lord’s Supper should be given the cup. In Matthew 26:27-28, Jesus says: “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” The reason why “all” are to drink the cup is because it is Jesus’s blood of the covenant which is shed for the forgiveness of sins. And this meant, for Luther, that everyone for whom Jesus’s blood was shed was to receive the cup. The Roman Church’s practice of reserving the cup for the priests was, therefore, in direct violation of Jesus’s own instructions for the Supper.
The Roman Catholic view of the Mass as a re-sacrificing of Christ was, for Calvin, a much bigger deal. It was “the height of frightful abomination” and “a most pestilential error,” as he saw it, for anyone to teach that “the Mass is a sacrifice and offering to obtain forgiveness of sins.” As Calvin saw it, this doctrine “inflicts signal dishonor upon Christ, buries and oppresses his cross, consigns his death to oblivion, takes away the benefit which came to us from it, and weakens and destroys the Sacrament by which the memory of his death was bequeathed to us.”[13]
The Mass, according to Calvin, “inflicts…dishonor upon Christ” insofar as it seeks to undermine the eternal priesthood of Christ by maintaining the reality of an earthly priesthood consisting of mortal men who function as successors to Christ and vicars of Him. It “buries” or diminishes the cross of Christ by setting up an altar on which Christ is offered over and over again. But Jesus, according to the author of the epistle to the Hebrews, offered Himself once and for all, “a single offering” by which He “he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Heb. 10:10, 14). The Mass, as Calvin sees it, also overshadows the death of Christ by diverting our attention away from the cross, which was a one-time event in history, to a contemporary and ongoing event in our own day. We think less about what Christ did on Calvary two thousand years ago and more about what the priest is doing today in and through the sacrifice of the Mass. Similarly, Calvin said, it takes the emphasis off of what Christ has done for us and puts it on what we do in participating in Christ’s sacrifice. And, finally, according to Calvin, the Mass strips the Lord’s Supper of its true meaning as a meal of corporate communion within the body of Christ because it focuses more on what is taking place on the altar than on what is taking place in the pews.
Almost 90 years after Calvin, the Westminster Confession of Faith echoed the same ideas in its chapter on the Lord’s Supper (29.2):
In this sacrament, Christ is not offered up to His Father; nor any real sacrifice made at all for remission of sins of the quick or dead; but only a commemoration of that one offering up of Himself, by Himself, upon the cross, once for all: and a spiritual oblation of all possible praise unto God for the same: so that the Popish sacrifice of the mass (as they call it) is most abominably injurious to Christ’s one, only sacrifice, the alone propitiation for all the sins of His elect.
For the reformers and post-reformers alike, transubstantiation was a “fabrication,” a “fiction,” an “ignorant folly,” and a product of “crude imagination.”[14] It was, in the words of the Westminster Confession of Faith, “repugnant…to Scripture…to common sense and reason.” And, as Luther said, it was “so unsupported by the Scriptures, or by reason” or even by Aristotle’s philosophy that it was, therefore, “a most unfortunate structure raised on a most unfortunate foundation.”[15] Transubstantiation differentiated the substance of the bread and wine from the accidents (their outward properties) and said that what happened when the words of consecration (hoc est corpus meum) are pronounced by the priest was that the substance of the bread and wine was changed into the substance of the body and blood of Christ while the outward properties of bread and wine remained unchanged. That meant that the bread and wine would still look, feel, and taste like bread and wine but that it wouldn’t actually be bread and wine. It would be the body and blood of Christ. It’s no wonder that the words hoc est corpus soon became used as the words of incantation for every magic trick imaginable and eventually gave way, at some point, to the more familiar words hocus pocus.
But, as Calvin pointed out, this Roman Catholic doctrine would mean that Christ’s body could be touched by human hands, chewed by human teeth, and ingested and digested within the human body. And this would be true everywhere the Supper was administered. In other words, transubstantiation required Christ’s physical body to be present everywhere the Lord’s Supper was being administered at the same time. The same was actually true of Luther’s doctrine of consubstantiation as well, and Calvin rejected both doctrines with one fell swoop but did so—in the name of pursuing peace within the Reformed camp—without ever mentioning Luther’s name in connection with it. Christ cannot be physically present in the Lord’s Supper, Calvin said, because,
Christ’s body is limited by the general characteristics common to all human bodies, and is contained in heaven (where it was once for all received) until Christ return in judgment, so we deem it utterly unlawful to draw it back under these corruptible elements or to imagine it to be present everywhere.[16]
Christ’s physical body was a human body, which meant that it could only be present in one place at a time. And since the Bible said that Christ’s physical body was, beginning with the ascension, present in heaven, seated at the right hand of the Father on the throne of God, it could not be present on earth as well. What Christ does on earth after the ascension He does by way of His Holy Spirit. That would seem to be the point of passages like John 14:16-17, 25-26; John 16:7-15; Acts 1:1; Romans 8:9-11; and Ephesians 3:16-17.
Transubstantiation, however, also runs counter to common sense (as does consubstantiation). It is hard to understand how the bread and the wine that Jesus is holding could really and truly be His physical body and blood. The two things are wholly distinct from one another, Jesus’s body and the bread that His body is holding.
The Westminster Confession of Faith put it like this (29.6):
That doctrine which maintains a change of the substance of bread and wine into the substance of Christ’s body and blood (commonly called transubstantiation) by consecration of a priest, or by any other way, is repugnant, not to Scripture alone, but even to common sense and reason; overthroweth the nature of the sacrament, and hath been, and is the cause of manifold superstitions; yea, of gross idolatries.
Despite these areas of agreement within the Reformation and post-Reformation periods, however, there was, as we indicated previously, very little agreement in regard to how Christ was present in the Supper. If the substance of the bread and wine didn’t become the substance of the body and blood of Christ, then what did happen? What did Jesus mean when He said, “This is my body”?
Luther’s solution to the problem was the doctrine of consubstantiation. Luther believed that Christ’s body and blood were physically present in the Lord’s Supper, but they were present “in,” “by,” “with,” and “under” the bread and the wine. When someone ate of the bread or drank of the cup, they received bread and wine. But they received Christ’s body and blood along with the bread and wine. This is one reason why in most Lutheran and Episcopal churches the leftover wine is not poured down the drain. The blood of Christ is physically present in and with that leftover wine. It must be totally consumed by the priest, saved until the next communion, or poured out onto the ground. (If you look closely at a Lutheran or Episcopal church, you will see a sink of some kind behind the altar that leads directly outside so that the wine containing Christ’s blood can be spilled out onto the ground that God has made rather than into the manmade sewer system).
Calvin argued that this required Christ’s human body to be physically present everywhere around the world at the same time as the Lord’s Supper was being administered, which was not only illogical but untenable as well, because it destroyed the humanness of Christ’s human nature. Christ was no longer, under this way of thinking, the God-man but the God-superman. As Calvin saw it, the Bible instead taught that Christ’s human body and blood were present in heaven at the right hand of God. Christ was present on earth in the Supper, to be sure. But He was present spiritually, by way of His Holy Spirit, not corporeally. And those who partake of the sacrament do in fact feed upon Christ, but they feed upon Him spiritually by faith not corporeally by way of their mouths.
Thus, Calvin suggested, Christ is really present in the Lord’s Supper, but His humanity is not physically present in either of the elements. His humanity is in heaven, where it has been ever since the ascension. Christ is really present by way of His Holy Spirit. When we eat the bread and drink the cup, we enjoy real communion with Christ, but it is a spiritual communion.
It is precisely because of the real communion with Christ that Christians enjoy in and through the Lord’s Supper that Calvin believed it should be administered frequently. From the first edition of the Institutes in 1536 until the final edition in 1559, Calvin argued that Christians should receive the Supper at least weekly.[17] But that didn’t mean that Christians should enter into the Supper lightly. Self-examination was required, as Paul clearly stipulates in 1 Corinthians 11:28. This self-examination precluded children who were incapable of self-reflection due to their age and immaturity. And it required those who were capable of self-reflection to discern whether or not they were worthy of partaking of the Lord’s Supper. For Calvin, this didn’t mean that we had to be perfect but that we needed,
to offer our vileness and (so to speak) our unworthiness to [God] so that his mercy may make us worthy of him; to despair in ourselves so that we may be comforted in him; to abase ourselves so that we may be lifted up by him; [and] to accuse ourselves so that we may be justified by him.[18]
In other words, Christians were worthy of receiving the Lord’s Supper only when they realized how unworthy they were in and of themselves and cast themselves upon Christ, their only hope in life and death.
Conclusion
The Reformation rejected the idea that the sacraments were the sum and substance of the Christian life. Following Christ could not be reduced to checking the “rite” boxes (r-i-t-e, not r-i-g-h-t!). It was about being right in God’s sight and living accordingly. It was about an intimate relationship with the God of the universe. The sacraments, as the reformers rightly argued, were channels through which God could and would strengthen that relationship and grow us in grace. They were “visible words” that held forth the same Christ that was held forth in the preached word. But they held Him up to more of our senses: to our eyes and fingers and mouths and tongues, as well as to our ears and our minds. They were constant reminders—when administered frequently—that our sins, though they be as scarlet, are washed as white as snow (Is. 1:18); that though our sins be as numerous as the stars in the sky, God has put them as far from Him as the east is from the west; and that though our sins weigh us down with guilt and shame, Jesus has borne our guilt and shame to such a degree that God remembers them no more.
[1] W. Robert Godfrey, “Calvin, Worship, and the Sacraments,” in A Theological Guide to Calvin’s Institutes: Essays and Analysis, eds. David W. Hall and Peter A. Lillback (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2008), 372.
[2] Calvin, Institutes 4.14.17, p. 1292.
[3] Calvin, Institutes 4.14.6, p. 1281.
[4] See Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2009), 161-80.
[5] Paul Chang-Ha Lim, In Pursuit of Purity, Unity, and Liberty: Richard Baxter’s Puritan Ecclesiology in its Seventeenth-Century Context (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 55.
[6] Bruce Gordon, Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet (New Haven and London: Yale University, 2021), 190-191.
[7] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion: 1536 Edition, trans. and ed. Ford Lewis Battles (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986), 94-122.
[8] Calvin, Institutes 4.15.2, p. 1304.
[9] Calvin, Institutes 4.15.17, p. 1316.
[10] Calvin, Institutes 4.16.1, p. 1324.
[11] Calvin, Institutes 4.17.50, p. 1428.
[12] Martin Luther, On the Babylonish Captivity of the Church in First Principles of the Reformation, trans. and ed. Henry Wace and CA Buchheim (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1883), p. 148.
[13] Calvin, Institutes 4.18.1, pp. 1429-30.
[14] Calvin, Institutes 4.17.14-15, pp. 1374-7.
[15] Luther, On the Babylonish Captivity of the Church, p. 156.
[16] Calvin, Institutes 4.17.12, p. 1373.
[17] See Calvin, Institutes (1536), 113; Institutes 4.17.43, p. 1421.
[18] Calvin, Institutes 4.17.42, p. 1419.