The nature of a sacrament

The definition of a sacrament

The term ‘sacrament’ comes from the Latin sacramentum, which was the word used to translate the Greek biblical term musterion. The word musterion meant something hidden or secret. Paul uses it in this sense when he speaks of God's plan for our salvation as having been a hidden plan, a great musterion revealed only now in Jesus Christ (Ephesians 3:4).

The word ‘sacrament’ therefore came to mean this: the visible manifestation of an invisible divine reality. The invisible divine reality is, of course, God's saving action, God’s saving grace.

But since this definition could apply to a wide variety of sacred signs of God's saving presence, Peter Lombard in the twelfth century suggested that what distinguished a true sacrament from all other sacred signs was that it not only symbolised God's grace but actually conferred it. The term he used was ‘caused’: a true sacrament not only symbolises but also ‘causes’ grace. The point he was making was an important one – namely that a sacrament is a guaranteed offer of God's grace, one that will impart that grace to all who receive it with the proper dispositions. But the word ‘cause’ was to have most unfortunate effects on the theology of the sacraments since it led people to think of the sacraments as pumping a thing called ‘grace’ into people.

This in turn led at one time to an almost magical view of the sacraments. It was against such a view that the Protestant reformers reacted. They therefore preferred to speak of the sacraments as being signs that stir up the believer's faith, signs to which a word of promise had been attached by Christ, signs therefore that would enable believers to experience in a dramatic way the application to themselves of the saving word of the Gospel. As L Berkhof summed up the traditional Reformed perspective: ‘A sacrament is a holy ordinance instituted by Christ, in which by sensible signs the grace of God in Christ, and the benefits of the covenant of grace, are represented, sealed and applied to believers, and these in turn give expression to their faith and allegiance in God.’