The Sacraments

Protestants don’t see why Catholics who come to disagree with essential teachings of the Church don’t just leave. The answer is symbolized by the sanctuary lamp. They do not leave the Church because they know that the sacramental fire burns there on the ecclesiastical hearth. Even if they do not see by its light, they want to be warmed by its fire. The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is a magnet drawing lost sheep home and keeping would-be strays from the deathly snows outside. The Church’s biggest drawing card is not what she teaches, crucial as that is, but who is there. “He is here! Therefore I must be here.”

It has ceased to scandalize me, though it has not ceased to amaze me, that Almighty God suffers me to touch him, move him and eat him! Imagine! When I move my hand to my mouth with the Host, I move God through space. When I put him here, he is here. When I put him there, he is there. The Prime Mover lets me move him where I will. It is as amazing as the Incarnation itself, for it is the Incarnation, the continuation of the Incarnation.

I think I understand how the typical Protestant feels about sacramentalism not only because I was a Protestant but because it is a natural and universal feeling. The Catholic doctrine of the sacraments is shocking to everyone. It should be a shock to Catholics too. But familiarity breeds dullness.

To Protestants, sacraments must be one of two things: either mere symbols, reminders, like words; or else real magic. And the Catholic definition of a sacrament — a visible sign instituted by Christ to give grace, a sign that really effects what it symbolizes — sounds like magic. Catholic doctrine teaches that the sacraments work ex opere operato, i.e., objectively, though not impersonally and automatically like machines. They are gifts that come from without but must be freely received.

Protestants are usually much more comfortable with a merely symbolic view of sacraments, for their faith is primarily verbal, not sacramental. After all, it is the Bible that looms so large in the center of their horizon. They believe in creation and Incarnation and Resurrection only because they are in the Bible. The material events are surrounded by the holy words. The Catholic sensibility is the inside-out version of this: the words are surrounded by the holy facts. To the Catholic sensibility it is not primarily words but matter that is holy because God created it, incarnated himself in it, raised it from death, and took it to heaven with him in his ascension.

Orthodox Protestants believe these scriptural dogmas, of course, just as surely as Catholics do. But they do not, I think, feel the crude, even vulgar facticity of them as strongly. That’s why they do not merely disagree with but are profoundly shocked by the real presence and transubstantiation. Luther, by the way, taught the real presence and something much closer to transubstantiation than most Protestants believe, namely consubstantiation, the belief that Christ’s body and blood are really present in the Eucharist, but so are the bread and wine. Catholics believe the elements are changed; Lutherans believe they are added to.

Most Protestants believe the Eucharist only symbolizes Christ, though some, following Calvin, add that it is an occasion for special grace, a sign and a seal. But though I was a Calvinist for twenty one years, I do not remember any emphasis on that notion. Much more often, I heard the contrast between the Protestant “ spiritual “ interpretation and the Catholic “material “, “magical” one.

The basic objection Protestants have to sacramentalism is this: How can divine grace depend on matter, something passive and unfree? Isn’t it unfair for God’s grace to depend on anything other than his will and mine? I felt that objection strongly until I realized that the sheer fact that I have a body — this body, with this heredity, which came to me and still comes to me without my choice — is also “unfair”. One gets a healthy body, another does not. As one philosopher said, “Life isn’t fair.”

It’s the very nature of the material world we live in, the very fact of a material world at all, that is so “unfair” that it moved Ivan Karamazov to rebellion against God in that profoundest and most Christian novel, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. As he explains to his believing brother Alyosha, “It’s not God that I can’t accept, it’s this world of his” — a world in which bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. But it might be better than fair rather than less, gift rather than payment, grace rather than justice, “fair” as “beautiful” rather than “fair” as rational “ — like a sacrament.

In fact, the world is a sacrament. We receive God through every material reality (though not in the same special way as in the sacraments proper). The answer to the Protestant objection to the unfairness of the sacraments is that only a world of pure spirit would be perfectly fair. Only angels get exactly what they deserve individually.

Praise God, we get infinitely more than we deserve! The sacraments remind us that the whole world is a sacrament, a sacred thing, a gift; and the sacramental character of the world reminds us of the central sacrament, the Incarnation, continued among us in the seven sacraments of the Church, especially in the Eucharist. The sacramental view of the world and the Catholic doctrine of the sacraments illuminate each other like large and small mirrors.

Both the sacrament of the world and the sacrament of incarnation/ Eucharist also remind us that we too are sacramental, matter made holy by spirit. Our bodies are not corpses moved by ghosts, or cars steered by angels, but temples of the Holy Spirit. In our bodies, especially our faces, matter is transmuted into meaning. The eyes are the windows of the soul.

Protestants sometimes object to the sacraments by asking whether a baby’s eternal destiny is altered if the water of baptism does not quite reach his forehead before the church building falls on him and kills him, or whether a penitent who gets run over and killed by a truck while crossing the street on his way to a sacramental confession will suffer hell or a longer purgatory only because the truck happened to hit him before rather than after confession. The answer to such a question is: not necessarily. We do not know God’s plan unless he reveals it to us, and he has revealed the sacraments. But not only the sacraments. The early Church called the death of martyrs who had no opportunity for baptism “the baptism of blood”, and the intention (explicit or even implicit) to be baptized “the baptism of desire” (thus allowing good, God-seeking pagans into heaven). This Catholic doctrine of “back-door grace” seems shifty verbal trickery to many Protestants, but it is necessary to preserve two undeniable truths: first, that we are commanded to receive the sacraments and told that “unless you eat my body and drink my blood, you have no life in you” and, second, that God is just and merciful and does not deny grace to any who seek it.

Perhaps we Catholics are like the laborers who worked only an hour, in our Lord’s parable (Mt 20:1-16), and those without the sacraments like those who worked all day. It seems unfair that both groups got the same wages. So it seems unfair that we are given all this extra sacramental help, easier grace, so to speak. But the Lord of the vineyard replied to this objection: “Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with my own?” This reply scandalizes our sense of political justice. But it fits the nature of the world; and it is the world of nature, God’s creation, rather than politics, man’s creation, that declares the glory of God. The sacraments declare the same scandalous generosity.

We don’t deserve to be born or to be born again or to be baptized. We don’t deserve God’s sun or God’s Son. We don’t deserve delicious bread and wine or the Body and Blood of Christ. But we are given all this, and more. As Christopher Derrick put it, in a poem entitled “The Resurrection of the Body”:

He’s a terror that one:
Turns water into wine,
Wine into blood –
I wonder what He turns blood into?

Catholics often have a more-than-intellectual faith in the sacraments that Protestants do not understand. Thus they don’t see why Catholics who come to disagree with essential teachings of the Church don’t just leave. The answer is symbolized by the sanctuary lamp. They do not leave the Church because they know that the sacramental fire burns there on the ecclesiastical hearth. Even if they do not see by its light, they want to be warmed by its fire. The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is a magnet drawing lost sheep home and keeping would-be strays from the deathly snows outside. The Church’s biggest drawing card is not what she teaches, crucial as that is, but who is there. “He is here! Therefore I must be here.”

Respectfully asked...based on your post on here and thru the link you provided, please present the scriptures that support all the Sacraments based on this definition provided in the link you posted:

There are three basic elements that constitute a sacrament. First, it is an external, sensibly perceptible sign of sanctifying grace. There is something which is external, something which is sensible. You can either see it or hear it or taste it or touch it, whatever the case might be. Second, it is a sign which causes grace. In other words, they not only signify grace, but they actually cause or confer grace in the soul of the recipient. When you receive a sacrament, you receive an increase of sanctifying grace plus the actual grace that comes with the sacrament. Third, they are instituted by Christ. This is very important because it means that God wills to communicate Himself to us in and through definite outward signs. This means, obviously, that the Church did not invent the seven sacraments but received them from Her divine founder. We see, then, that the sacraments continue the work of Christ. The Church is the Mystical Christ. You can look at all the things that Jesus did: He fed people, He healed people, He forgave people, and so on. That is what the sacraments do; they continue the work of Christ through His Mystical Body, the Church.

Neither of you two ever answer my questions, why I don't know? I try to ask in a respectful manner but yet I here silence...please answer this time...

In Christ.

Respectfully asked...based on your post on here and thru the link you provided, please present the scriptures that support all the Sacraments based on this definition provided in the link you posted:

Neither of you two ever answer my questions, why I don't know? I try to ask in a respectful manner but yet I here silence...please answer this time...

Apologies if I have neglected to answer any of your questions. Both Salvation and I maintain'ping' lists; hence, we are pinged so frequently in the course of a day that we often miss many of these. Secondly, neither one of us is a theologian. We dabble in apologetics but certain questions may be more complex than we are capable of handling. Should you have a question, please feel free to freepmail me with a link to your post and I promise to respond, even if the answer is "I don't know but will get back to you", okay?

Now, insofar as your question on this thread, I will attempt to do my best to address it.

You referenced the following statement from one of Salvation's links.

There are three basic elements that constitute a sacrament. First, it is an external, sensibly perceptible sign of sanctifying grace. There is something which is external, something which is sensible. You can either see it or hear it or taste it or touch it, whatever the case might be. Second, it is a sign which causes grace. In other words, they not only signify grace, but they actually cause or confer grace in the soul of the recipient. When you receive a sacrament, you receive an increase of sanctifying grace plus the actual grace that comes with the sacrament. Third, they are instituted by Christ. This is very important because it means that God wills to communicate Himself to us in and through definite outward signs. This means, obviously, that the Church did not invent the seven sacraments but received them from Her divine founder.

Let's begin with the first Sacrament - Baptism

"Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born? Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and [of] the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." - John 3:3-5

The 2nd Sacrament is Penance

"And when he had said this, he breathed on [them], and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; [and] whose soever [sins] ye retain, they are retained." - John 20:22-23

The 3rd Sacrament is Holy Communion.

"I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying, How can this man give us [his] flesh to eat? Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him." - John 6:51-56

4th is the Sacrament of Confirmation.

We read in the Acts of the Apostles (viii, 14-17) that after the Samaritan converts had been baptized by Philip the deacon, the Apostles "sent unto them Peter and John, who, when they were come, prayed for them, that they might receive the Holy Ghost; for he was not yet come upon any of them, but they were only baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus; then they laid their hands upon them, and they received the Holy Ghost" read more .

The Sacrament of Matrimony

Holy Scripture affirms that man and woman were created for one another: "It is not good that the man should be alone." The woman, "flesh of his flesh," his equal, his nearest in all things, is given to him by God as a "helpmate"; she thus represents God from whom comes our help. "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh." The Lord himself shows that this signifies an unbreakable union of their two lives by recalling what the plan of the Creator had been "in the beginning": "So they are no longer two, but one flesh."

The Sacrament of Holy Orders

From Scripture we learn that the Apostles appointed others by an external rite (imposition of hands), conferring inward grace. The fact that grace is ascribed immediately to the external rite, shows that Christ must have thus ordained. The fact that cheirontonein, cheirotonia, which meant electing by show of hands, had acquired the technical meaning of ordination by imposition of hands before the middle of the third century, shows that appointment to the various orders was made by that external rite. We read of the deacons, how the Apostles "praying, imposed hands upon them" (Acts 6:6). In II Tim., i, 6 St. Paul reminds Timothy that he was made a bishop by the imposition of St. Paul's hands (cf. 1 Timothy 4:4), and Timothy is exhorted to appoint presbyters by the same rite (1 Timothy 5:22; cf. Acts 13:3; 14:22). read more.

The 7th Sacrament is Anointing of the Sick

"Is any man sick among you? Let him bring in the priests of the Church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith shall save [sosei] the sick man: and the Lord shall raise him up [egerei]: and if he be in sins, they shall be forgiven him." James 14, 15 read more.

I would suggest that you explore a more definitive and thorough explantion for all of these Sacraments. That would be found in:

Catechism of the Catholic Church

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