Devotional 145: The Ministers of Sacraments: Ordained Ministers Only

The Confession Read

There be only two sacraments ordained by Christ our Lord in the Gospel; that is to say, baptism, and the Supper of the Lord: neither of which may be dispensed by any, but by a minister of the Word lawfully ordained.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 27, Section 4

Introduction

A child is born into a household but once. The family gathers, the name is pronounced, the covenant people receive the little one among themselves, and from that single hour he belongs to them in a way that no later day can repeat. Yet that same child is fed at his father's table day after day, season after season, for the whole of his life; and no one ever supposes that the one birth has made the many meals unnecessary, or that the many meals could stand in the place of the one birth. Birth and bread: these are the two great necessities of every life, and neither can be exchanged for the other. The church of Jesus Christ is a household, and her Lord has ordered her life by the same simple wisdom. He has given His people two sacraments, and only two: one for their entrance into the family, and one for their nourishment within it. Baptism is the birth of the covenant, administered once, never repeated, because a man is not born a second time into the same house. The Supper of the Lord is the table of the covenant, spread again and again, because a man must be fed all his days or he will starve. Birth and bread: here is the whole shape of the sacramental life, and it is astonishing in its brevity. And then there is the second clause of the section before us, the one that sits quietly at the end and is too often passed over in silence. The Confession tells us that there are two sacraments, and then adds a second word: neither of them may be dispensed by any hand but that of a minister of the Word lawfully ordained. In an age when every man imagines himself competent to do every holy thing, and when the idea of a commissioned ministry seems almost an offense to democratic instinct, these words come as a needed correction and a great mercy. For a king who sends a herald gives that herald a commission and a seal; and a private citizen, however earnest and however eloquent, has no right to speak in the king's name. The two ordinances of Christ are not private devotions to be administered by anyone who feels moved to do so; they are the acts of the church, entrusted to the officers whom the Lord of the church has appointed. The herald is the precise figure. In the ancient world, a king who wished to publish a decree did not leave it to any passer-by to read aloud; he committed it to a herald who bore his commission, and the herald's authority lay wholly in the fact that he had been sent. So it is in the kingdom of Christ. The Lord has not scattered His sacraments abroad for anyone to seize; He has lodged them in the hands of men whom He has called, examined, and solemnly commissioned through the church. This is not a matter of clerical pride, for the minister who baptizes has nothing of his own to bestow: the water is Christ's, the grace is the Spirit's, and the man who pours the water is but a servant sent with a message. It is, rather, a matter of order, and of the very kindness of God, who will not have His people's assurance rest upon the uncommissioned zeal of whoever happens to be at hand, but upon an office He has appointed and a call He has made plain. This short section, then, sets two boundaries around the sacraments, boundaries which are really two gifts. It tells us how few the sacraments are, and it tells us whose hands may administer them. Both truths are pressed upon us by the same motive: the Lord would have His church rest in His wisdom, and not wander after the inventions of men.

Scripture Foundation

The first truth of this section, that there are two sacraments and no more, rests upon the simple fact that Christ instituted exactly these two, and delivered them to His church through appointed hands. The apostle Paul makes this chain of delivery plain in a passage that deserves to be read slowly. Writing to the Corinthians, he says of the Supper: "For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, That the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread" 1 Corinthians 11:23. Two verbs carry the entire weight of the sentence, and they are the verbs of transmission. Paul received of the Lord: the Greek is parelabon, I received, a word used of receiving a deposit or a tradition handed over from one keeper to another. And what he received he delivered: paredōka, I handed over, the very word used of a captain handing over a prisoner, or a father handing over an inheritance. The Supper did not originate with Paul, nor with the church at Corinth, nor with any council of men. It originated with Christ, who on the night of His betrayal took bread and gave it; and it reaches us only through the chain of those whom He commissioned to carry it. Paul's claim is the more striking because he had not been present at the first institution; he was, as he reminds the Galatians, an apostle not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ. Yet what he delivered to the churches he had received directly from the risen Lord, so that the Supper which the Corinthians kept was not the invention of a human founder but the ordinance of the living Christ, delivered through one whom He had sent. The same is true of baptism, which our Lord instituted in the great commission when He sent His disciples to teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Two ordinances, two institutions, two commands, and behind both of them the authority of the risen Christ. The same apostle, a few verses earlier in the same letter, had already struck the note of faithful transmission: "Now I praise you, brethren, that ye remember me in all things, and keep the ordinances, as I delivered them to you" 1 Corinthians 11:2. The word translated "ordinances" is paradoseis, the things handed over, the traditions, in the apostolic sense of authoritative deposits of the Lord's own appointment. The church of Christ is not at liberty to invent her sacraments, nor to multiply them, nor to subtract from them. She is a receiver, not an originator. She keeps what she has received, and she delivers to the next generation what was delivered to her. The number of the sacraments, therefore, is not a matter of human preference, as though the church had chosen two and might as easily have chosen five. The number is fixed by the institution of Christ, and the church's obedience lies precisely in keeping the count. But why two? Why not one, and why not seven? The answer is written into the very nature of the two ordinances, and into the two-fold necessity of the spiritual life which they serve. Our Lord said to Nicodemus, "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God" John 3:5. Here is the beginning of the Christian life: a birth, a washing, a once-for-all entrance into the kingdom. And the same Lord said to the multitude, "I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst" John 6:35. Here is the continuation of the Christian life: a feeding, a daily and repeated drawing of strength from the Lord Himself. Birth and bread: the one washing that admits us, and the one table that sustains us. Two sacraments answer to two needs, and the needs are as old as human life. A man is born once, and fed always. So the Christian is washed once, and fed always. The wisdom of Christ has so ordered the sacraments that they mirror the very structure of life under the covenant. This is why baptism is administered but once, while the Supper is spread again and again: the one corresponds to a birth, which cannot be repeated, and the other to a meal, which must be repeated as long as the body lives. A church that baptized a man twice would be saying that a man can be born twice; a church that never came to the table would be saying that a man can live without bread. Both are impossibilities, and the two sacraments, in their very rhythm, confess them. The second truth of this section, that only a lawfully ordained minister may administer the sacraments, is no less firmly grounded in Scripture. The epistle to the Hebrews sets down a principle that governs all holy office: "And no man taketh this honour unto himself, but he that is called of God, as was Aaron" Hebrews 5:4. The priesthood of the old covenant did not arise from a man's own ambition, but from a divine call; and the ministry of the new covenant, though it is not a priesthood of sacrifice, is no less an office to which a man must be called. The minister does not appoint himself. He is called, examined, and set apart; and the visible sign of that setting-apart is the ordinance of ordination. Paul writes to Timothy, "Neglect not the gift that is in thee, which was given thee by prophecy, with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery" 1 Timothy 4:14. The phrase is weighty: epithesis tōn cheirōn, the laying on of hands, was the church's appointed act by which a man was solemnly commissioned to the ministry. It was not a mere formality, nor a human invention, but the scriptural manner of transmitting office from one generation of ministers to the next. It marked a man out as one who had not run without being sent. And running without being sent is precisely the thing the Scripture forbids. Paul presses the logic home in the letter to the Romans: "And how shall they preach, except they be sent?" Romans 10:15. The Greek word is apostalōsin, from the same root as "apostle," one who is sent. There is an order in the kingdom of Christ, a lawful sending, and a man who ministers without that sending ministers without warrant. The sacraments, which are the visible word, belong to the same office that preaches the audible word; and that office is entered only by a lawful call and a lawful ordination. So the two clauses of our section hang together: the sacraments are Christ's, and the hands that serve them are Christ's appointed hands.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster divines wrote this section with two errors in their sights, one on either side of the truth, and they wrote it with a pastoral tenderness that is easy to miss until one remembers what was actually at stake in the England of their day. The first clause, "only two sacraments," was aimed, as the reader will already suspect, at the Church of Rome. Rome had multiplied the sacraments to seven, adding confirmation, penance, extreme unction, holy orders, and matrimony to the two appointed by Christ; and the divines knew that every addition to the Lord's ordinance was at the same time a subtraction from His authority. If the church may add five sacraments, she may add fifty; and if she may invent sacraments, she may invent anything. The "only" in this clause is therefore a sword, but it is also a comfort: it declares that the Christian's standing before God depends upon two simple, clear, Christ-appointed ordinances, and not upon a bewildering system of rites that a man could never be sure he had performed aright. But the divines were not merely anti-Roman. They lived in a time when the opposite error was rising with equal fury: the error of those enthusiasts and sectaries who, having broken with Rome's ceremonialism, ran headlong into a bare and formless liberty. Some claimed that the sacraments were mere signs and could be multiplied, diminished, or dispensed with at pleasure. Others, pressing further still, claimed that any believer, however unordained, might baptize and preside at the Lord's table, since every Christian was in some sense a priest. Against this anarchy the divines set down the second clause: "neither of which may be dispensed by any, but by a minister of the Word lawfully ordained." The sacraments are not private exercises of devotion, to be administered by a father at his own fireside or by a fervent brother who feels himself called; they are the acts of the gathered church, and the church acts through her appointed officers. Notice, then, the care with which the divines chose their words: they did not say "by a priest," nor "by a clergyman," but "by a minister of the Word lawfully ordained." The phrase ties the sacraments to the preaching office. In the Reformed understanding, there is no separate caste of sacramental priests, endowed with a mysterious power to consecrate that the preaching of the Word does not confer. The ministry of the Word and the ministry of the sacraments are one and the same office. The man who is lawfully called to preach the gospel is thereby called to administer the seals of the gospel; and the man who has no commission to preach has no commission to baptize or to preside at the table. The sacraments are the Word made visible, and they belong to the ministers of the Word. This is why the Reformed churches have always insisted upon an educated, examined, ordained ministry, and why they have always viewed the sacraments as public ordinances of the church rather than private rites of the individual. The phrase, read carefully, steers a middle course between two ancient errors. On the one side stands the sacerdotalism of Rome, which imagined a separate order of priests endowed with a power of consecration that the laity could never share; on the other stands the anarchy of the enthusiast, who imagined that no order at all was needed. The divines rejected both. The minister of the Word is not a priest, for he offers no sacrifice and claims no power of his own; but neither is he a mere convenience, for he holds an office that Christ appointed and that the church, at Christ's command, is bound to fill by lawful ordination. The office is real, but it is ministerial; the man is set apart, but he remains a servant. Both errors, the one that exalts the minister too high and the one that lowers him too low, are equally dangerous, and both are cut off by the single phrase, "a minister of the Word lawfully ordained." The word "lawfully" is the final guard. It is not enough that a man be pious, or gifted, or eager; he must be lawfully ordained, that is, set apart according to the scriptural order, with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery, in a way that the church can recognize and the Lord has appointed. The divines had in mind the disorders of their own civil-war years, when a hundred self-appointed preachers roamed the land, each claiming a call from heaven that no man could test. They answered with a principle both simple and severe: the call of God is ordinarily mediated through the church, and the outward sign of that call is lawful ordination. A man who will not submit to the order of the church gives small evidence that he has been called by the God who is the author of order. There is a deeper root for this clause than mere prudence. The Lord Jesus committed to His church the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and these keys are exercised in the ministry of the Word and in the exercise of discipline. The administration of the sacraments belongs to the same stewardship; for to admit a soul to the table, or to bring an infant to the font, is an act of the church's authority, an act of binding and of loosing, and it cannot be severed from the office that bears the keys. The divines were themselves engaged in the work of ordering the church's ministry even as they wrote, drafting a Directory for Public Worship and a Form of Church Government that set out the manner in which ministers were to be called, examined, and ordained. The clause before us is the doctrinal counterpart of that practical labor: order in the sacraments, because there is order in the kingdom.

Theological Depth

The divines did not invent these judgments; they received them from the long and deep tradition of Reformed theology, and it is worth hearing how the weightier minds of that tradition expounded the two clauses of our section. William Ames, whose Marrow of Divinity shaped the piety of the seventeenth-century Reformed churches, saw the number of the sacraments as a matter of divine institution and of the church's consequent limitation. Ames reasoned that the sacraments correspond to the two-fold necessity of the spiritual life: the beginning of that life, and its nourishment and growth. A sacrament, he argued, is a sign and seal of the covenant of grace; and since the covenant has two great works, to bring men in and to keep them, the Lord appointed two signs answerable to those works. Baptism, the sacrament of initiation, marks the washing away of sin and the entrance into the body; the Supper, the sacrament of nourishment, signifies the continual feeding of the soul upon Christ. Because the Lord appointed these two, and these two only, the church has no power to appoint more; and because the Lord appointed these two for the whole church, the church has no liberty to appoint fewer. The number is neither arbitrary nor expandable. It is a fact of the covenant, as fixed as the covenant itself. Students in the Netherlands, England, and New England studied it for generations. Robert Shaw, whose Exposition of the Confession remains a clear guide to its meaning, draws out the same truth from a slightly different angle. Shaw observes that the two sacraments answer to the two standing ordinances of the old covenant: circumcision admits, and the passover nourishes; and in the new covenant the same two necessities reappear under new signs. But Shaw's chief service to us here is his handling of the second clause. He insists that the administration of the sacraments is committed not to believers in general but to the officers of the church, and that this commitment is itself a matter of Christ's appointment. The minister does not administer the sacraments in his own name or by his own authority; he administers them as the servant of Christ and the steward of the mysteries of God, acting only under a commission which the church, at Christ's command, has conveyed to him through ordination. To seize the sacraments without that commission is not zeal but presumption, and presumption, however sincere, is still disobedience. Calvin, whom we have met again and again in these studies, addresses the question of lawful administration with characteristic vigor in the fourth book of the Institutes. He is emphatic on two points. First, that the Lord has given His church very few ceremonies, and these few very simple, because He would not burden His people or bind their consciences with a multitude of rites; the brevity of the two sacraments is a mark of the Lord's condescension, not of His poverty. A God who loved to multiply rites would have buried His people under them; a God who loves His children gives them few things to remember, and those few things simple, that even a child might grasp them and a dying man might keep hold of them. And second, that the administration of the sacraments belongs to the public ministry of the church, not to private persons. Calvin warns that when the sacraments are torn from the hands of the appointed ministry and administered by whomever pleases, they become occasions of schism and confusion, and the sacred is profaned by the disorderly. He would have the church rest in the order Christ has established, neither adding rites that He did not command nor entrusting His rites to hands that He did not send. A. A. Hodge, whose commentary on the Confession has accompanied us throughout this chapter, gathers the section into a single clean judgment. Hodge notes that the section has two members, and that each member corresponds to a distinct error of the day. Against Rome and the ritualists, the divines affirm that there are only two sacraments, because only two were instituted by Christ and only two are needed. Against the enthusiasts and the levelers, they affirm that the sacraments may be administered only by a lawfully ordained minister, because the sacraments are church acts and the church acts through her officers. Hodge closes with a point worth keeping: the efficacy of the sacraments depends, as the previous section established, upon the work of the Spirit and the word of institution, and not upon the worthiness of the administrator; but the order of the sacraments depends upon lawful administration. Efficacy is one thing, and order another. The Spirit is free, and may bless where He will; but the church is not free to dispense with the order that her Lord appointed. Beneath all this precision there beats a pastoral heart. The divines were not carving distinctions for their own sake, but for the peace of trembling consciences. A man who has been baptized by an unworthy minister needs to know that his baptism is nonetheless true; a man who doubts whether his minister was properly called needs a lawful order that he can recognize. The two clauses of this section, only two sacraments and only by a lawful minister, are two walls built around the believer's peace, keeping out the anxiety of a multiplied ritual on the one side and the confusion of a disordered ministry on the other. Here, as everywhere in the Confession, precision is the servant of comfort.

Puritan Application

Let us bring these truths home to the heart, for doctrine that does not descend into practice is but half-learned. First, learn to be content with the simplicity of Christ's appointments. There is something in fallen human nature that loves a multitude of ceremonies, that feels religion more real when it is burdened with rites and gestures and additions. But the Lord has given His church two sacraments, and two only, and He has given them because two are enough. When you feel the pull to add to the Lord's ordinance, to invent a new rite, to elevate a human custom to the dignity of a sacrament, to make the church's worship busier than Christ made it, resist that pull and rest in the simplicity of His wisdom. He who appointed only two knew what your soul needed, and He judged that these two were sufficient. To be content with them is a quiet act of faith. There is a liberty, and a peace, in a short liturgy of the soul; and the man who can rest in two ordinances has learned something of the freedom of the children of God. Second, honor the office of the ministry without idolizing the man who holds it. The second clause of this section teaches you to regard the sacraments as administered by a lawfully ordained minister; it does not teach you to rest your hope upon that minister's worthiness. The previous section has already freed you from that bondage: the efficacy of the sacrament lies in the Spirit and the word of Christ, not in the piety of the man who holds the cup. So honor the office, receive the ordinance with reverence, and give thanks to God for the men He has called to serve you, but do not let your faith lean upon a man. Your hope is in Christ, who alone is both the Author and the substance of every sacrament. Third, beware the sin of despising lawful order. Our age supposes that any earnest man may do any holy thing, and that zeal is a substitute for commission. But the Scripture is plain: no man takes this honor to himself, except he be called of God, as was Aaron. If you are not a lawfully ordained minister, do not presume to baptize, and do not presume to preside at the Lord's table, however sincere your intentions. The sacraments are not private devotions; they are the acts of the church, and to seize them without a commission is to confound the order that Christ Himself established. True zeal submits to the order of the house of God; it does not trample it. This is a hard word for an impatient age, but it is the word of the Lord, and the order of the Lord is better than our fervor. Fourth, prepare your heart to receive the sacraments worthily, and do not absent yourself from them out of a false humility. Because these two ordinances are the Lord's own appointment for your birth and your nourishment, they are means of grace to every believer who comes in faith. Some stay away from the table because they feel unworthy; but the worthy receiver of the previous section is not the man who has achieved some imaginary purity, but the man who comes in faith, renouncing his own righteousness and resting in Christ. Do not let the table of the Lord stand empty because you hesitate at the door. Come, as one already born of water and of the Spirit, to be fed with the bread of life. Fifth, and finally, let the shape of the two sacraments shape your daily walk. You were baptized once, and you are fed always. Let that once-for-all washing be a standing summons: you have died to sin and risen with Christ, and you are never to return to the grave from which you were raised. And let the recurring table be a daily rhythm: as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you show the Lord's death till He come. Baptism teaches you that your entrance into the family is settled, once and forever; the Supper teaches you that your nourishment within it is continual, and that you must be fed, and feed, until the Master returns. Birth and bread: carry them both with you, and you will walk as one who belongs to the household of God. And the day is coming when the sign shall give place to the substance, and the table of the church shall be exchanged for the marriage supper of the Lamb.

Prayer

O Lord our God, whose wisdom has ordered all things for the good of Thy church, we bless Thee for the simplicity and the sufficiency of Thy two sacraments. We thank Thee that Thou hast not left us to the inventions of men, nor burdened us with a multitude of rites, but hast appointed for us one washing for our entrance into Thy household, and one table for our continual nourishment within it. Grant us grace to be content with what Thou hast given, and to look for no other sign than the sign of Thy covenant, and no other food than the body and blood of Thy dear Son. We thank Thee, O Lord, for the ministry of Thy Word, and for the men whom Thou hast called and lawfully ordained to serve us in it. Keep them faithful, we pray, and keep us humble, that we may neither despise the office Thou hast established nor lean upon the man who holds it. Teach us to honor order without idolizing it, and to receive Thy sacraments with reverence and with faith. O blessed Spirit, who dost quicken all things, we pray that the outward sign may never be to us an empty shell. Work Thou in our hearts by the water of baptism, that we may die unto sin and live unto righteousness; and feed us, we beseech Thee, at the table of the Lord, that Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith, and we may grow up into Him in all things. Thou art the bread of life, O Christ; he that cometh unto Thee shall never hunger, and he that believeth on Thee shall never thirst. Come, Lord Jesus, and satisfy our souls with Thyself, until the day when we shall see Thee face to face, and the signs shall give place to the sight. In Thy name, and for Thy glory, we pray. Amen.