Sacerdotalism is not a view that the sacraments do something. Rather it is
“the belief that grace is imparted in a mechanical or magical fashion through the instrumentality of the sacraments. In other words, the sacraments dispense grace ex opere operato, the way a hot iron burns.” (Page 85)
We deceive ourselves if we think we can do without the sacraments altogether.
“We must remember in this discussion that sacraments are inescapable; if we do not accept the two sacraments established in the Word of God, then we will make up our own. Here, sign this card. Throw your stick in the fire on the last night of youth camp.” (Page 89)
This puts very clearly something I’ve been trying to articulate with clarity for some time.
“We must not think of ourselves as empty receptacles and the sacraments as filled decanters, full of spiritual juice, which are then poured into us. Rather than seeing the question of the sacraments as this kind of an ontological and metaphysical question, we have to see it as a covenantal and relational question. We are persons and we are communing with God, who is tri-personal, and we do so in the sacraments. They are therefore performative acts. A man might say the words ‘I do’ a million times during the course of his life, but when he says them in a church in front of witnesses with his bride across from him, the words are a performative act, and they change everything.” (Page 91)
Or this
“For a number of historical reasons, many evangelicals (in the grip of individualism) have come to believe, to use Steve Wilkins’ illustration, that grace is an invisible substance that flows to each individual Christian through an invisible hose as though we were all spiritual deep sea divers with the hose on our helmets running up to heaven. They believe that the receipt of grace has conditions, but no means down here on earth.” (Page 92)
If Sacraments are objective events – that derive their significance from the covenant they are a part of, rather than from anything ontological in them, then we have a category within which to understand false members:
“‘A baptized man can renounce Christ, turn persecutor of the Church, reject everything he once confessed, forget his baptism. Having once passed through the waters, however, his every action thereafter, including those that are wholly inconsistent with his baptismal identity, are actions of a baptized man.’ (quoting Leithart)
“Put another way, there is no such thing as a merely nominal Christian any more than we can find a man who is a nominal husband. There are many faithless husbands, but if a man is a husband at all, then he is as much a husband as faithful one… So there are no nominal Christians, but there are wicked and faithless Christians”. (Page 97)
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