Podcast: How the Sacraments Help Us Know Who We Truly Are (Kevin Emmert)

September 09, 2024 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

How Baptism and the Lord’s Supper Stabilize Our Identity

In this episode, Kevin Emmert explains why the sacraments are so central to our lives as believers, what baptism and communion actually mean for us and do in us, and why their shaping power is more relevant than ever in a world obsessed with identity and self-expression.

The Water and the Blood

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.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:14 - Identity and the Sacraments

Matt Tully
Kevin, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Kevin Emmert
Thanks for having me. This is great.

Matt Tully
We’re going to talk a lot today about the sacraments—about baptism and the Lord’s Supper, these really foundational, important things that we do as Christians, but things that sometimes we don’t fully feel like we understand, we have questions about, and we maybe even are suspicious of certain ways of thinking about these things. We’re going to get into all of that in a bit. But one of the most interesting and helpful things that I think you do in this new book that you’ve written about the sacraments is that you connect them to the issue of identity. It’s a concept that I think has a lot of purchase today in our culture, a lot of conversation, both explicitly but also implicitly, around topics related to identity. Who we are and how we define ourselves. Do we make ourselves, in a certain sense, or is our identity given to us by others or by God? And so obviously that’s a big issue in the broader culture, but how would you summarize the broader culture’s approach to identity today? And then how do the sacraments start to connect to that in meaningful ways?

Kevin Emmert
Many people have written on the issue of identity in the last few years, especially on one of the themes that crops up time and again that authors and speakers are addressing, and that is of expressive individualism. It’s this idea that we as individuals, as solitary persons or beings, are completely in control of our destiny and therefore our identities. We can basically construct who we are. And a key characteristic of expressive individualism is this act of looking inward. In order to discover—it’s an act of self-discovery—in order to discover who I am, I’ve got to look within. I’ve got to take stock of my own feelings, my own thoughts, my desires.

Matt Tully
It’s like the message of every Disney movie over the last twenty years.

Kevin Emmert
Absolutely. Those are, in many ways, stories of self-actualization. And those aren’t altogether bad because Christians have this long history of wanting to take stock of our emotions, our interior life. But what’s unique today is that people are saying we don’t look around ourselves, per se, to discover who we are. It might be helpful to a degree to look to others. It might be helpful to look to various gurus and what not to help me discover who I am—

Matt Tully
To be a better me.

Kevin Emmert
To be a better me. But really, that act of discovery is one of looking inside oneself and then determining who that individual is—who I am—and then acting in accordance with that reality that I’ve discovered. So it’s one of looking inward and then expressing outwardly who I think I am, which really is to my own making. So that’s a common understanding of personal identity that we see nowadays. And it’s one that is anti-Christian in a lot of ways. It not only runs contrary to what we see all throughout history, where community really defines a person—a person is born into a family, and that identity is formed over time in the home but then also by the community at large, whether it’s Christian or not, and it’s lived out in a very specific way. So you’re expected to live in a certain manner, and you see yourself in a certain light. And there could be pros and cons to that, but that’s the way in which, generally, and a lot of authors and speakers are addressing this issue, they point out that’s how, in many ways, throughout history identity has been understood and lived out, whereas nowadays there’s this resistance of turning toward the outside world and to others and instead looking within to discover who we are.

Matt Tully
And advocates of that, and maybe even most of us as Americans today, there’s an immediate resistance to this idea of our identity is imposed on us from our family and from our community, from our country, because it feels so stifling. And we’ve got lots of examples from history of the ways in which these external identities really limited people’s choices and options in life. And so isn’t it kind of natural that there would be this desire for independence in the wake of all the ways in which humans were sort of limited in what their options were throughout history?

Kevin Emmert
That’s right. And I don’t want to paint this picture where modernity is totally bad. There are certainly aspects of our culture today that I think are helpful. And one of the luxuries that we have as moderns is we have certain liberties, rights, and choices that we can make in terms of career, education, future spouses, you name it. So these choices that we have nowadays that many people did not have throughout history or that some people today don’t even have within certain societies can be a good thing. So I want to recognize that there’s a delicate balance here.

Matt Tully
It’s not completely black and white.

Kevin Emmert
There are certain aspects of our modern culture that I think we can appreciate as Christians, and we need to think critically about those. And then there are other aspects, too, that we need to maybe even think suspiciously about to discern whether or not this is going to lead me to a life that is truly flourishing and one that God designed for me and for humanity, generally.

Matt Tully
And that’s one of the things that as people have thought about this expressive individualism that we see all around us in our society, people are starting to draw out some of the negative implications of that mindset. When there’s so much riding on us to define who we are, to establish our own identity, we start to see some of the distortions, some of the depression, the anxiety, and even just the inversion of God’s created order in terms of how our relationships work with each other—even how we view ourselves as men and women. So you want to connect the sacraments to this broader issue of identity. How do you do that? Give us a brief sketch of how these two ideas come into contact.

Kevin Emmert
One of the things that I highlight throughout the book is that the sacraments are events. They’re performed within a certain context, which is believers gathered in corporate worship of the triune God. So they are events in that sense that they are performed by a community, and they’re acts that reveal something about that particular community. So you think about customs, different practices worldwide across various cultures and societies. These customs, whatever they may be—practices, holidays, wardrobe, you name it—they all reveal something about a certain people group, but then they reinforce a certain collective identity on the collective group but also for the individuals as well. And so the sacraments are, like I said, they’re events, but they’re also rites that are indicative of they say something about the church—who she is. And I use that term she because the church is the bride of Christ. It’s not some amorphous—

Matt Tully
Institution.

Kevin Emmert
Institution. It is a living organism. The church is a collective; it’s the body of Christ. So the sacraments reveal who she is, what her beliefs are, what her actions are, what her mission is, and so on. So these customs or rites that have been handed down to us over 2,000 years, they are something that we participate in, and they reveal something about who we are. So I want us as Christians to realize that what we do week in and week out, or it could be quarterly or monthly—

Matt Tully
We’ll get to that.

Kevin Emmert
Whatever your tradition is—how often you celebrate those and participate in those—those have an identity-revealing aspect to them, and they actually help form us in specific ways, because that’s what customs and rights and practices do.

Matt Tully
When you talk about defining these as rites or customs or practices, it kind of makes me think of the word traditions. I think of holiday traditions with a family where you have these things that you do. They often have a lot of meaning and significance. They do speak to the identity of the family. This is just what our family does every Christmas. Is that another way to think about this—the role of the sacraments in the life of a Christian?

Kevin Emmert
Absolutely. They are traditions, and they’re practices of the great Christian tradition. A fair amount of Christians nowadays are wary of that term tradition because it can connote something that’s man-made—that it’s something that’s strictly a human activity, that may or may not be informed by Scripture, and it may not be something that God has desired for the church. But the sacraments clearly are because they’re ordained by Christ. And the word tradition literally means "something that is handed over." So these are rites, acts, whatever you want to call them that have been handed over to us by the great tradition, the church.

10:10 - Union with Christ and the Sacraments

Matt Tully
One of the things that you emphasize repeatedly throughout the book is how these customs, these rights, these practices of the sacraments—and again, we’ll get into them in more detail in a minute—how they fundamentally point to a core identity marker for us as Christians—that we are in Christ. We are united to Jesus in a very meaningful way. Unpack that a little bit, how the connection between the sacraments and the doctrine of union with Christ.

Kevin Emmert
In many ways, my book is about that doctrine of union with Christ. And one of the things that I want readers to understand from that very first page is that your primary identity as a person but specifically as a Christian is that you are in Christ. And that is a term that Paul specifically uses many times throughout his letters. So we are people who are in Christ, and the sacraments of baptism and communion help us, I believe, understand what that means. They give us in visible form, touchable, tangible form an understanding of what it means to be a person in Christ. And that’s because one way that theologians throughout history have described the sacraments is they signify a greater reality. Take baptism. The water represents something. It points to a grand reality. The water is distinct from that reality, but it’s related to it in that it points to it. And so what baptism does is it signifies and it points to this reality that we are immersed into Christ. Baptism means literally immersion, that all of who we are as people in Christ have been immersed into him.

Matt Tully
All the Baptists are cheering right now, just so you know.

Kevin Emmert
Good! So our whole existence as Christians has now been enveloped, submerged into Christ. We have taken on his identity. We have been clothed with him, as Paul says to the Galatians.

12:03 - The Power of Practicing the Sacraments

Matt Tully
We talked about the connection between the sacraments and issues of identity. And again, we’ll unpack this as we go, but another thing that you emphasize that you’ve already hit on a little bit is how the sacraments, like many other habits or traditions in our lives, they have the power to shape and form us just by virtue of making them a regular part of our lives. So I wonder if you can help us understand that. How does that actually happen? How do the sacraments shape and form us just by virtue of us doing them?

Kevin Emmert
There are several ways in which we could talk about this. Full disclosure: I’m an Anglican who has generally Reformed convictions in terms of certain theological trues and categories. And so I believe that God actually does something through the sacraments, that they’re not merely symbolic. I talked about how they signify a grand reality, but God actually uses these as instruments, as it were, to do something to the recipient. But even if you don’t take that particular theological perspective, I think that we must understand, as Christians collectively (no matter what our tradition is), that as we perform a particular ritual and as we participate in a certain event collectively, as the church, these rites, these customs, these practices have a profound effect on us because that’s just what happens when we participate in any kind of liturgical or shared community event. Rituals and traditions (whatever you want to call them) actually reinforce something about who we perceive ourselves to be. There are many people who’ve been writing and speaking on the power of habit and actions in recent years, that what we do has a profound effect on not only who we perceive ourselves to be but therefore how we live. So they’re definitely identity formative in that respect. They reinforce who we think we are. And the practices generally form us or deform us. There can be a malformative aspect to them, but in the case of the sacraments, they form us positively because they give us a picture of who Christ is and who we are in him. And as we come together as the gathered body in worship of the triune God, the identity that we have come to receive in Christ is reinforced more and more.

14:36 - Sacrament vs. Ordinance

Matt Tully
Let’s get into that then. You actually prefer the term sacrament rather than ordinance. And ordinance is probably a common term for maybe a lower church context where there’s a little less emphasis on formal liturgy and on sacramental theology. Why do you prefer the term sacrament? What are you getting at with that compared to something like ordinance?

Kevin Emmert
I think the term sacrament is more robust theologically. I think it has greater payoff than the term ordinance. I’m not opposed to the term ordinance. Even a great thinker like J. I. Packer offered the terminology covenanting ordinances. So these are ordinances, acts that have been ordained by Christ for us to keep and for us to perform. And if we understand them as functioning within the context of a covenantal relationship with God, then I think covenanting ordinances makes a lot of sense because it communicates this two-way street—we’re responding to God as the initiator, and he’s also doing something to us. But if we’re going to think about that bare term ordinance versus sacrament, ordinance, in my thinking and I think this is reflected in many of the traditions who prefer that term ordinance over sacrament, it communicates this idea that it’s primarily a human activity. It’s something of course ordained by Christ that I perform. It’s primarily my response to what God has done. And again, there is a human response. That’s critical. That is absolutely inextricably bound up into what baptism and communion are. However, I think when you read the New Testament carefully—and all of Scripture—when God commands his people to perform a certain rite or to keep a tradition, whatever that is, God is of course the initiator. He’s the one not only commanding the people group to do that—to live a certain way, to perform these rites—but he is also using that to do something. So when we think about the Lord’s Supper, Paul says that when we eat the bread, it’s a participation in the body of Christ. When we drink of the cup, it’s that participation and communion in the blood of Christ. There’s something going on. There’s this two-way street of where, yes, we’re acting, but also God is acting. There’s this mutual exchange or involvement. And so I think the word sacrament actually communicates that better because the Latin word sacramentum is basically a rendering of the Greek mysterion. So a sacrament is a holy thing, and the Greek mysterion is mystery. So these are holy mysteries. We can do our best to try to understand them fully, and we should try to, but at the end of the day, they are indeed holy mysteries that we will never fully comprehend because God is in our midst using these to do something to us and for us. And I think the word sacrament gets at that better than ordinance because sacrament connotes this idea that God is doing the work. He’s the primary agent.

17:42 - The Sacrament of Baptism

Matt Tully
Let’s turn to baptism then. If you had to simply define it for a young Christian who is kind of wondering, “What is this thing that you’re telling me I need to do now?” How would you simply define baptism, and how would you explain its importance for a Christian?

Kevin Emmert
That’s a great question. There’s so much to unpack about what baptism is. I mentioned earlier that baptism literally means immersion. And so when we read about the earliest Christians, say in the book of Acts and then when Paul talks about us being baptized into Christ, what they’re getting at is that we have been immersed into Christ. Our whole existence is now wrapped up into his. So Paul, for example, when he is writing to the Galatians there in chapter three, he says, “As many of you who were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” So there’s this image of us going under the water, coming up out of the water, and then being clothed. And for many of the earliest Christians there was this tradition of being baptized naked. They would strip off their clothes, they would go into the water, come up, and then they were given a white robe.

Matt Tully
It would be a different feel to a baptism service.

Kevin Emmert
Exactly. And I’m not advocating for that, but the symbolism is rich. You’re being stripped of your old identity. Your non-Christian self, the old self, as Paul says, and you’re given a new self in Christ. And that new self is not a generic new self. It’s not a new self that’s up to your own fashioning. You have no say whatsoever as to what that new self is. Christ determines who that is because that new self is to accord with who Christ is because we’re donned with Christ. We’re clothed with Christ. You think about a cloak being placed on somebody. That’s what’s being pictured for us in Paul’s letter there when he’s talking about how we have been clothed with Christ because we’ve been baptized into him. So we’ve received Christ’s identity. So fundamentally, that’s what it means to be baptized into Christ is we’ve been immersed into him. Our existence is now completely in him. And then there are different facets of that reality that we can unpack. So baptism is often in the New Testament connected with the forgiveness of sins. It represents our justification and sanctification. It also is tied to our receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit and being indwelled with him. And there’s even the language throughout the New Testament of being baptized with the Holy Spirit. There’s also a connection between baptism and holiness of life, that those who are baptized are called to live a certain way. And so there are various different facets of our baptismal identity that we’ve received, so I would want to tell a young Christian that you’re a baptized person. You are a person who no longer exists according to the patterns of this world, but you exist in Christ. And there are great benefits now that you have received as a person who lives in him. You’re a child of God. You’re literally adopted by the Father, and you’re to be made like Christ the Son.

Matt Tully
But what would you say to the Christian who says, “Yeah, I agree with all of that stuff. Those are the realities of being a Christian, and those come through faith in Jesus Christ. But why do I need to be actually physically baptized? Baptism is the symbol that points to all those things, and that’s wonderful. But is it really that important to actually participate in the symbol when I have the real thing already?”

Kevin Emmert
I think it is important. You look at the book of Acts, for example, and when Peter on the day of Pentecost is preaching to all the people there, after he finishes the people respond, “What must we do?” And he says, “Be baptized for the forgiveness of sins and to receive the Holy Spirit.” So even the way Peter himself talks about it, he implies and he suggests rather strongly that it’s an instrument, as it were, for receiving some kind of grace, remission of sins, and the Holy Spirit. And there are other New Testament books that do similar things, where they connect baptism with the washing of regeneration that we see in Titus. So baptism, yes, it is a symbol; it signifies something. But it’s also, within the New Testament, couched in language that suggests that it’s an instrument. God actually does something through it. And also in the book of Acts specifically, faith and baptism are meant to be tandem realities. They’re almost like two sides of the same coin.

Matt Tully
I was going to ask that. Even in passages like that in Scripture that we don’t always know what to do with, how does that fit with the idea of sola fide—that faith alone is the means through which God saves his people? How does that fit with this idea of baptism?

Kevin Emmert
As Protestants, if we’re looking at classic, major reformers—Calvin, Luther, etc.—they would want to champion and they do champion) justification by faith alone. And what they mean is faith is the means by which we apprehend Christ and we receive his benefits. But that doesn’t mean that God does not also use other means as conduits of grace. And so within the more generally Reformed tradition, you think about the Westminster Confession. There’s this language of the ordinary means of grace. So there are stalwart Reformation thinkers, and what I mean by that is people who are enlightened by Reformation truths and then live that out and carry it out in real time, day in and day out, over the years. They are very comfortable saying that God works through various means, that he’s not a God who just simply grants grace only one time in abstraction. But he does so many times over the course of our lives, and he does so in a concrete manner. So the Westminster Confession describes Scripture as a means of grace, prayer as a means of grace, and the sacraments are a means of grace. And then other traditions might want to expand that. But I think that’s a good picture of the ways in which God generally gives his grace to people. So when we sit down with Scripture, and faith is operative within us and the Spirit is active in our hearts and illuminating our minds into his truth, we receive grace. We come to know and experience our triune God better. And the same with prayer. And faith is critical here. If faith is not operative within the person, then prayer really does nothing. Scripture reading may not do anything at all. It might inform the mind, but does it transform the heart? Without faith, no. And I would say with the sacraments, it’s absolutely crucial that faith is operative. And so you take a Reformation figure like John Calvin, and he would say that in the sacraments, grace is truly offered. So you think about the Lord’s Supper. He would say grace is truly offered to the recipient, but that grace is not received by the individual if they do not have faith and the Spirit is not working in their heart. So there’s no either/or. I don’t think that we should think along either/or lines, that it’s either faith or the sacraments. It’s just that, yes, faith apprehends Christ and his benefits, and also one of the ways in which God has deemed it fitting for us to receive Christ’s benefits, so long as faith is operative within us, are through these means of grace.

25:00 - The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper

Matt Tully
That’s so helpful. Sometimes we can operate in an either/or frame, and we can also be worried about abuses of or the extremes of how someone might think about that. And we’ll kind of get into that in a minute, but let’s talk about the Lord’s Supper now briefly as well. What’s happening when we take communion?

Kevin Emmert
I think there are a lot of things that are going on in that moment. We’re gathering as a body—the body of Christ—to remember who he is. I think that’s one of the fundamental characteristics of this meal that we share.

Matt Tully
Those are Jesus’s words: “Do this in remembrance of me.”

Kevin Emmert
Absolutely. All Christians can agree on that, that this is a commemorative meal whereby we remember our Lord. But there’s significant disagreement over what that remembrance looks like. And I think a solid case can be made, and this has been made by scholars across different denominations and traditions, that the biblical concept of remembrance is not merely a mental recollection of past events, but it’s a bringing events of the past into the present so that those events of the past profoundly shape our present circumstances, including who we are. So you think about what the Lord’s supper is. It is a commemorative meal whereby we remember our Lord, but it’s analogous to the Lord’s Supper. And you think about the context in which Christ our Lord was instituting the Lord’s Supper—it was a Passover celebration. He wanted to celebrate that meal, that ritual, that tradition with his disciples, his friends.

Matt Tully
Something that God commanded Israel to do regularly every year. This was part of their calendar, so to speak.

Kevin Emmert
Absolutely. And so one of the things that the Israelites were doing when they celebrated the Passover year after year is they weren’t simply reminding themselves of what God did with that initial Exodus generation. They were doing that, but it was also a time for them to ratify in their own lives God’s promises to bind themselves more firmly to God, to remember who he is and what he had done for Israel. And so people who do not actually experience that exodus out of Egypt, they were participating in that great reality that happened long ago in a way that allowed for that reality to shape their present circumstances and indeed who they are as individuals. And so because that is the context in which Christ our Lord was instituting the Lord’s Supper, he was enacting a new exodus. And he was not only commemorating a past event, but he was saying, “I’m about to bring this new exodus. I’m about to establish a new covenant, and it is one in which, yes, you will remember what I’m doing, but, this is an event where you will be reminded year after year of who I am and who you are in me. And that remembering is going to form who you are.”

Matt Tully
So that leads to another very practical question that sometimes Christians have. How often should we be doing the Lord’s Supper? If the Passover meal was a once-a-year thing, we can see in the early church and we get a sense that it was happening a lot more frequently. They were celebrating the Lord’s Supper in the early church maybe weekly. In a lot of churches, though, and probably for people listening right now, they’re in a church where it’s done quarterly or it’s done maybe once a month. What do you think about that? Is there a defined answer to that question, or is that open to debate?

Kevin Emmert
I think the one defined answer is it comes from Jesus where he says, “As often as you do this . . . .” I think our answer to that can be open ended. I think we have a certain amount of liberty as Christians in how often we celebrate the Lord’s Supper or partake of communion. I do think there are advantages to taking it more frequently. We think about our reading of Scripture—we benefit from it greatly when we read it daily. Or you think about the sermon in the context of a worship service—people gather and they listen to a preacher preach the word of God week in and week out. It doesn’t become a rote—or it can become rote. It can become a mere human tradition, but it’s something that God uses to bless his people. And I don’t really find too many Christians arguing that weekly preaching is somehow a bad thing. Now, people do that with the Lord’s Supper. They’ll say, “Oh, it becomes rote and ritualistic.”

Matt Tully
“We want to keep it special.”

Kevin Emmert
Yeah, and I understand that. I understand their concerns there, but in my own experience—and again, I’m just sort of playing to experience here—I’ve never experienced that. Or even when there are Sundays when I partake of the elements and I take the bread and the wine (or for some, grape juice), even if I don’t think anything’s going on or if I don’t feel changed, I can trust that God is still using this. Just like my prayer life. There may be days or there could be weeks or months where I feel like nothing’s happening in my daily prayer life, or it doesn’t seem that God’s answering my prayers. But I have to trust that God is still active, even though I can’t sense it. So I don’t think that there’s a disadvantage necessarily to observing it weekly. I think there can be great benefit to it. You mentioned the early church. We read in Acts where the believers are gathering together and listening to the apostles teaching, they’re praying together, and breaking bread together. Many scholars have thought that could possibly be a reference to taking the Lord’s Supper. So in the New Testament itself we don’t really have an absolutely clear idea of how frequently Christians were partaking of that meal. But we do know that it was a significant, important meal. And one reason why I would advocate for weekly observance of the meal is to think, again, on what the nature of the sacrament is. What is the Lord’s Supper? And so if we turn to Paul specifically in that passage that I referenced earlier, he talks about it being a communion with the body and the blood of Christ. There’s some kind of koinonia—fellowship—in that meal. So we’re not simply remembering who Christ is. We’re doing that and we’re allowing who he is and what he did for us to shape us in real time in the present, but we’re also fellowshipping with him in this meal. Just as we feed on bread and drink the cup and our bodies are nourished, so we, by faith, receive Christ and his benefits. We commune with him. We’re strengthened by him, nourished by him, and become more like him day in and day out.

31:24 - What If My Experience of the Sacraments Doesn’t Feel Meaningful?

Matt Tully
That’s a good segue into a few specific questions or concerns that people might have with some of these things. One of them relates to the issue of overfamiliarity. So if the sacraments, whether it’s baptism or the Lord’s Supper, if they really have this meaning and significance that you’re saying they have—that they aren’t just reminding us of what God has done in the past, but they are, in a very real sense, a means of God’s grace today and participation in God’s grace today—if that’s true, why is it that so often I feel distracted when I’m partaking of the sacraments? When I’m watching a baptism, I’m wondering how warm the water is, or I’m thinking, “Oh! They just dripped a bunch of water on the ground!” Or when I’m getting the Lord’s Supper, I’m thinking I don’t want to drop this whole plate of juice (in my context). Sometimes it can feel like there isn’t a lot spiritually going on during those times, and we might actually feel a little more distracted than we normally would during a sermon. How would you respond to someone who says, “That’s my experience of the sacraments, so that doesn’t fit with the deep meaning that you seem to be putting in them”?

Kevin Emmert
I would want to respond saying that your experience does not solely define what’s going on. I mentioned prayer life or maybe Scripture reading—these things that we know are good, godly disciplines and practices. And just because we may not feel in the moment that something profound is happening, one, it doesn’t mean that there’s not something happening. Or if a person’s walking through an intense season in life where they’re suffering greatly, they may feel completely distant from God. But that might actually be a moment in which God is incredibly near, working in them in ways that they had no idea until maybe years later. So one thing I think might be helpful for us as Christians to think about is as we with the Lord’s Supper take the bread and the cup and we receive those with thanksgiving and humility, we can trust that God is working in our lives, even when we don’t feel like it. And the elements themselves are meager in most contexts today. In the early church, yes, it was probably, at least when Paul’s writing about it to the Corinthians, it was probably more of a meal. But throughout church history, it’s often not been a meal in the fullest sense. It’s a piece of bread, or for some a wafer, and then a little bit to drink. But I think that’s profound, actually, because what that communicates is that God can use the most mundane, seemingly insignificant things in our lives that he has granted special value to work something profound in us, even when we don’t realize.

33:59 - Have We Over Spiritualized the Sacraments?

Matt Tully
This connects to another question or objection that people might have. I’ve heard this articulated before that sometimes we can over spiritualize these sacraments and lose the original biblical context or background for them. So whether that’s baptism and thinking through the meaning that would have had back in the early church or even for Jesus when he was baptized, we miss the biblical, theological foundations for that. Or the Lord’s Supper, where we see this, as we mentioned already, the Passover background for Israel. But even with the early church, as you’ve already said, they were eating a whole meal together. And there was this shared community, this shared fellowship that was actually experienced over food on a regular basis with other Christians. So in distilling all that down to this theologized core, we have stripped the sacraments of their true value and purpose and context in the life of the church. Is there any truth to that sense? Or do you think that kind of misses the real value of them?

Kevin Emmert
I understand the concern with potentially over spiritualizing the sacraments. I do think that when you look at Scripture as a whole—not simply the New Testament, but Scripture as a whole—we need to understand that God uses physical means to communicate spiritual realities to people. You think about the flood and that God literally sends physical rain to judge humanity and to rid evil from the earth. Or you think about the sacrifices of the Old Testament and that God would use these to literally offer forgiveness. So it’s a physical activity of killing an animal, and the priest does what the priest does, and then forgiveness is offered to that Israelite person. So something spiritual is granted to that person. Yes, those sacrifices need to be repeated. And that’s one reason why Christ came; he’s the true and final sacrifice. He’s the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. But we think about Christ. He’s the Son of God. God is Spirit, but God the Son becomes human. He takes on human flesh. He’s a full human while remaining fully God. And so there we have sort of the spiritual and natural joined together in one person.

Matt Tully
The incarnation is almost the ultimate demonstration of this idea that we really can’t separate the spiritual from the physical.

Kevin Emmert
Absolutely. I thought you were going to say that the incarnation is the ultimate checkmate. But yeah, I think that the incarnation is truly the fundamental rationale for seeing the sacraments as instruments of grace. Yes, God takes these physical realities and does something spiritual through them. And we’re spiritual, physical beings. You think about who we are in our makeup. We have bodies, but we’re souls. And we will one day have resurrected bodies, but we are spiritual, physical people. And God chooses in his divine wisdom and his excellence to nourish us through spiritual, physical realities.

Matt Tully
Doesn’t this approach to the sacraments ultimately lead to ascribing to them some kind of automatic or almost magical power? How do we guard against that?

Kevin Emmert
I would say, and this is following many Reformation thinkers and Reformed theologians, that the water, the bread, the wine are what they are. They’re water, bread, and wine. So when you look at bread that’s being used in communion or the Lord’s Supper, it is bread. And I do not take the Catholic understanding of transubstantiation and affirm it. I don’t think that the bread has actually transformed into something different even though it still looks like bread. However, even though they are just water, bread, and wine (or for some, juice,), they’re not just that in another sense, because the word of God is added to them. So the reason that we can say that the sacraments are signs, symbols, and even seals of God’s grace is because God’s word is connected to them. The word of God (Scripture) grounds the sacraments. The word of God (Scripture) gives meaning to them. So the water is just water, but when we understand what that water symbolizes, what it points to, and what it seals, then it is something other than just water. Now, it’s not transformed into something else, but it is a symbol, it is a sign, and it’s a seal because God’s word is tied to it. And the bread and the wine, yes, they’re bread and wine. They’re not transformed literally into Christ’s physical body, but they are now signs and symbols of God’s grace and what he wants to do for the recipient. So I think when we have that sort of understanding, we need to realize that, yes, they’re water, bread, and wine, but they don’t, in and of themselves, convey something magically, because they are just that—water, bread, and wine. But they’re connected to the word of God, and so God uses these physical means to communicate something good to his people. But that communication happens only if there’s faith operative within the believer. So again, I love John Calvin. He’s one of my favorite theologians, and I wrote my doctoral dissertation on him. The way in which he talks about the sacraments and the Lord’s Supper specifically is that God’s grace is offered to the believer in the meal, but that grace is only received if the person has faith and the Spirit is active within him. Whereas the traditional Lutheran understanding is, well, no, God’s grace is so closely tied to it that even somebody who’s not born again could receive grace. And that was a major dispute between figures like Calvin and certain Lutheran theologians during his time. So I, because I’m more Reformed in my convictions, would say faith is absolutely necessary. You only receive what is promised and given in the sacraments if you have faith in Jesus Christ.

39:53 - The Sacraments Are Divine Gifts

Matt Tully
You write in the intro to the book, “Most of this book was written not in my office or in a study but at my family’s dining table. It was informed by family life and crafted at the center of family life, at the very spot where my family and I enjoy food, Scripture, prayer, and singing—together and with our guests.” As I read that beautiful little insight into how the book was made, it strikes me that it reveals a lot more about the book than just how and where it was made. It actually connects to a pretty fundamental way to how you view the sacraments and their place in the Christian life. Can you unpack that a little bit for us?

Kevin Emmert
Yeah, absolutely. The sacraments are gifts. They’re divine gifts. There’s something that God has given to us, and the church over the ages has handed them down to us. The great tradition has handed over these practices for us to continue on and to benefit from. And that’s all done within the context of a gathered body. Yes, we belong to a local church context where we gather week in and week out with other believers who profess faith in Jesus Christ and are filled with His Spirit, but we also belong to the church universal, as people would say. We’re connected to other saints, other Christians throughout the ages. Of course those across the world today, but extending all the way back thousands of years. So these gifts of God are given for the people of God, and they’re to benefit us. And I think one of the things that God wants to impress upon our hearts and minds is that these are not individualistic practices. Some people practice auto- or self-baptism. They think they can baptize themselves or take communion at home by themselves. And I don’t want to judge or pronounce any sort of condemnation on people that would do that, but that is not what Christ envisioned. That certainly would be foreign to New Testament believers. These are experiences that happen within the gathered body. And what that means for us today, as moderns who are wrestling with issues such as expressive individualism, is that we are not isolated persons. We don’t exist as solitary beings. We are connected to other people, and as Christians we’re connected to other Christians, but ultimately we’re connected to Christ. And it’s because we’re in Christ that we’re connected to other people and we experience God’s grace. So we can only experience Christ and his grace through the body. So that’s what I hope that people understand. Yes, I wrote this book at my family’s dining table. I had my family, specifically my children, in mind when I was writing this because I want them to understand more and more over the years what it means to be a person who is baptized into Christ and communes with him and his body. But also we are not isolated selves. And I want Christians today to know that you’re not a solitary person. You are joined to Christ. Your existence is in him and you commune with him.

Matt Tully
I just love the emphasis on the fact that these are gifts that God has given to us, and that’s the fundamental posture that we should have towards these things. Kevin, thank you so much for taking the time today to help us to understand a little bit better the real significance of baptism and the Lord’s table.

Kevin Emmert
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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