The Sacraments Give Us a Collective Identity
What It Means to Be in Christ
The sacraments, much like the issue of personal identity, are subject to debate and confusion. Numerous catechisms ask, “What is a sacrament?”—a question that leads some Christians to enter into intense theological and pastoral disputes and causes others to recoil in fear of appearing ignorant or of potentially offending those who hold divergent opinions. Still others apply their own personal understanding to these ancient rites while disregarding how Christians of past generations have understood and practiced them. If we wish to see clearly the connection between the sacraments and Christian identity, we must get clear on what the sacraments are. Before we are able to explore in detail what the sacraments teach us about being in-Christ persons, we must first understand how they are able to teach us—and indeed form us. The sacraments are sources of revelation—alongside though never instead of or above Scripture—means through which God communicates his love and goodness to his children. Let’s now consider additional though related features of the sacraments, features that help us see more clearly how baptism and Communion are able to declare what it means to be in Christ and to shape us into persons who become like him.
The Water and the Blood
Kevin P. Emmert
Today’s culture tells us the only way to gain significance and purpose is through a self-fabricated sense of identity. The Water and the Blood offers an alternative way through Christ, visible through the sacraments.
I pray that we come to understand more deeply the importance of listening to the historic church. The Christian faith is received or inherited, passed down from generation to generation, meaning that one does not come to faith in the crucified and risen Lord in isolation from others. This statement alone has profound implications for understanding Christian identity, both what it means to be in Christ and what union with him means for our existence as particular persons. We do not, and cannot, exist as autonomous beings capable of determining on our own what is true—either about God and his creation or about ourselves individually. To acquire an understanding of the truth, about any subject matter, requires us to be connected to others and to receive from them. This is true for, say, grasping a language or understanding mathematics, and it is no less true for coming to faith in Christ and attaining maturity in him. The Christian faith was “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), and the church, including all her members, is built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, with Christ being the cornerstone (Eph. 2:20).
The sacraments reinforce the truth that we belong to a collective, to Christ and his body. We are, to use another biblical metaphor, branches joined not just to the vine but also to other branches stemming from our Lord. To use sacramental language, we are baptized (or immersed) into Christ, and we commune with the triune God and one another by virtue of our union with the Son. The sacraments are also rites characteristic of the catholic or universal church, practices that reveal definitive qualities of who she is, what she believes, and what she does. The cumulative effect of these truths should therefore cause us to acknowledge that if we wish to understand more deeply who we are, and if we can do so only by understanding the “us” to which we belong, we would be wise to listen to Christians of previous generations on the issue of the sacraments.
The sacraments reinforce the truth that we belong to a collective, to Christ and his body.
It may not seem that the sacraments—especially as expounded by Christians of generations past—have much to teach us today about Christian identity, but that assumption says more about us moderns than it does about the sacraments themselves. One reason many of us fail to see the legitimacy of using the sacraments for answering questions pertaining to identity is that we do not understand just how profoundly both our personal and collective practices shape us and reveal who we are and what is most important to us.1 Another reason is that we have been conditioned, to some degree, by the pragmatism of modern secular culture, which is preoccupied with the plights of humanity, political issues, personal needs, and countless other problems that need to be solved, and many of us have adopted an anthropological outlook on life, presupposing that the issues we face can be addressed by programs and organizations—whether political, religious, or otherwise—and nowadays especially by technology.2 This mindset has affected the way we think about the ontology and mission of the church, corporate worship, and personal piety to such an extent that many of us inherently think that religion is primarily about us: what we can get out of it or how we can have enriching experiences in life. Thus, many of us innately suppose that the sacraments are primarily human acts—and, ironically, acts that have little to no power to shape us.
We should in no way dismiss or trivialize human agency in observing the sacraments—after all, Christ has commanded us to be baptized and to eat and drink in remembrance of him, and he has ordained them for our use. Yet many of us today need to return to or more firmly embrace the truth handed down by the historic church that the sacraments are principally divine gifts. The sacraments are, as we have already touched on, means of grace as well as visible words of the gospel through which God communicates his goodness in Christ to his people by his Spirit. Baptism and Communion enable us to experience the gospel in a multisensory manner and so strengthen our faith in and even bond with Christ, the main subject matter of the sacraments. Only when we come to understand the sacraments as expounded by the historic church— the us to which we as individual members belong—are we able to properly grasp what they teach us about being in-Christ persons and therefore what they mean for personal identity, meaning, and purpose.3
Notes:
- On the power of habits for identity and spiritual formation, see Dru Johnson, Human Rites: The Power of Rituals, Habits, and Sacraments (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2019).
- See James B. Torrance, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 70.
- I am under no illusion that Christians throughout history have held a monolithic understanding of the sacraments. The sacraments are an issue on which many Christians have disagreed, often vehemently so. This is true even among Protestants. Yet there is a general consensus that I wish to uphold. My attempt in this chapter is to highlight what Protestants have broadly agreed on. For instance, the most premier Protestant confessions affirm that the sacraments are pledges or signs, even though these features are understood variously. When it comes to particular matters, I embrace a more Reformed perspective, which I believe makes the most sense biblically and theologically.
This article is adapted from The Water and the Blood: How the Sacraments Shape Christian Identity by Kevin P. Emmert.
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