C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 68 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Of all the commands Scripture gives the church, why do exactly two, baptism and the Lord’s supper, carry the weight of marking a true church? This session runs both ordinances through the program’s method: take the tradition apart, as Luther did, and rebuild only what deserves rebuilding. Listen for the moment the teachers insist that Rome’s position makes more sense from inside than most Protestants have ever bothered to learn, and for where Patton finally plants his own flag at the table.
The second session on the ministries begins with review: the five functions drawn from Acts 2, worship, instruction, fellowship, outreach, and inreach, the serving of physical needs the deacons carried, and Calvin’s two marks of a true local church, the preaching of the word and the practice of baptism and the supper. Then the method is restated: the program practices deconstruction, taking apart what we have received and rebuilding only what is worth rebuilding, exactly what Luther did at the Reformation. So the question is put honestly: Scripture commands many things; why have these two commands, out of all of them, carried the weight of defining a church for most of Christian history?
Two terms must be distinguished. Ordinance is the Protestant term, really a term framed against Rome’s sacramental system, for the two Christian rites commanded specifically by the Lord himself and handed to the church: baptism and the Lord’s supper. Sacrament travels a longer road: from the Greek word mysterion, mystery, into the Latin from which our word comes, and it tips your hand. Call these rites sacraments and you are saying something more is happening there, a mystery, a stronger accountability, the kind Paul describes when some who took the supper unworthily grew ill and some died. Augustine defined a sacrament as an outward sign of an inward grace, and in the early centuries the word was generous: Augustine could count even the making of the sign of the cross among the sacraments. Protestants may use the word without embarrassment; it simply discloses how much mystery they see.
The early church plainly practiced baptism and the supper from the beginning, and most believed, without ever articulating it, that Christ was somehow present in the bread and wine; the doctrine simply had not yet had its moment of definition. The list of seven sacraments was not fixed until the eleventh century, and it was Thomas Aquinas who articulated the mature theology: the sacraments confer the grace Christ won at the cross, entrusted to the church to give. Rome’s two most important remain baptism, which removes original sin, and the eucharist, the sacrifice of the mass, which covers venial sins, strengthens against sin, and can even benefit the dead, which is why more masses are always better.
The teachers refuse a lazy contrast. Protestants also practice matrimony, also confess sins to one another, also anoint the sick with oil as James 5 directs; we simply do not call these sacraments. And Rome is often misrepresented: the priest in the confessional does not forgive sins, he declares and confirms the forgiveness Christ gives. The real dividing line is elsewhere: who administers grace. On Rome’s account the church as institution administers God’s grace through the sacraments, and the sacraments work ex opere operato, by the work performed, so that a priest’s baptism removes an infant’s original sin regardless of anyone’s faith, by the authority vested in the church. That is the doctrine that made Tetzel possible, selling certificates of forgiveness in Luther’s day, though the teachers add the fairness Trent deserves: the counter reformation saw those abuses and worked to correct them, and no tradition should be defined by its abuses, any more than Protestantism should be defined by its endless splintering.
Where did the idea of administered grace come from? From Scripture, read a certain way. Peter walked on water by no power of his own; the disciples cast out demons and healed by the power of God, and after Acts 2, of the Spirit. God, on this reading, works through chosen representatives: Christ empowered twelve, not the whole crowd of five hundred, and said to Peter, upon this rock; the Roman church understands itself simply as the extension of the apostles, its roots traced to Peter. The teachers press the class to see the argument’s strength before judging it with two thousand years of hindsight. And they widen the frame: before the Reformation this was everyone’s tradition; all of us descend from the same catholic stream, practicing the same rites while understanding them with more mystery or less. What kills such rites in every tradition is folk theology: practicing traditions without knowing the reasons they carry, the pattern of Judges, where a generation wholly given to God is followed within three by one that does not know him, which is exactly why each generation must relearn what these things mean.
The Reformers re-evaluated the whole system and kept two ordinances, those commanded by Christ himself and clearly carried in the practice of the church through Acts and the epistles, as against single mentions like the anointing of James 5, which we still practice without ranking alongside them. On baptism the chart shows four views. Roman Catholic: baptism removes original sin, the inherited guilt of Adam, regardless of the faith of the subject; given once, never repeated, to infants and adults alike; argued from the administrative authority given the church and the support of pre-Reformation history. Lutheran: baptism imparts saving grace to the one who already believes, and so is necessary for salvation, argued from the way the Bible links faith and baptism in Acts 2:38 and Titus 3:5, with the caution that Lutheran does not always mean Luther, a transitional figure still in motion. Reformed: baptism is the initiation rite into the covenant community, the new circumcision, given to infants of believers as circumcision was, argued from salvation by faith alone, from the church’s inheritance of Israel’s place, and from the household baptisms of the New Testament. Baptist: baptism is a testimony to the salvation of the believing recipient, an outward sign that confers nothing, given only to those who believe, argued from faith alone, from the fact that baptism always symbolizes the faith of the one baptized, and from the reply that the baptized households are also said to have rejoiced in the Lord, which infants cannot do, leaving the household argument inconclusive.
Trent pronounced its anathema on anyone who calls baptism optional and unnecessary for salvation, and the teachers work hard to have it heard rightly. Trent was not answering the question every Protestant instantly asks, what of the person who believes and dies before reaching water; Rome had no categories for that question, because Rome was never focused on a moment of conversion but on a whole life of salvation and sanctification, inside which you are baptized because the Lord commanded and modeled it. Before Vatican II the line was hard: infants were baptized within days, instantly if death threatened, and for the unbaptized infant the church developed limbo, a place outside heaven, hell, and purgatory, since original sin bars a soul from purgatory, which handles only venial sins, and no mass can pray anyone out of limbo. The whole apparatus grew from the debate between Augustine and Pelagius over original sin, with Gregory, about a century after Augustine, more truly the father of purgatory. Vatican II in 1965 changed the face of Roman Catholicism toward inclusivism, though the teachers note that some congregations still teach the older line.
The Reformed and Baptist views agree the water confers nothing, so they argue over what it symbolizes, and the symbol decides the mode. If the primary picture is the washing away of sin, then sprinkling, pouring, any water will carry it, and the Reformed find that picture in baptism’s prehistory: when a Gentile became a proselyte to Judaism, three things were required, a sacrifice, circumcision, and a self administered washing, always in the middle voice, the convert washing his old life away as he entered a new community. Initiation and washing, they argue, has always been the meaning, and Paul’s use of baptism in Romans 6 is a preacher’s illustration, not a new definition. The Baptist answers from Romans 6 itself, which nearly all interpreters take as water baptism: do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Buried with him through baptism, raised as Christ was raised, to walk in newness of life; a picture of death, burial, and resurrection that only going under the water can paint. The teachers lower the temperature: neither side rebaptizes the other over mode, and the Reformed never insist on sprinkling; the dispute over the subjects of baptism, believers or their infants too, is the weightier one.
One grammatical observation carries a doctrine. Jewish proselyte washing was reflexive: you baptized yourself. What made John’s baptism startling, and Christian baptism after it, is that someone else does the baptizing: the New Testament speaks of baptism in the passive, you are baptized by another. The teachers draw the meaning out: you cannot baptize yourself into a community. The church baptizes you into it, and the act itself teaches that you are joining something larger than yourself, which is why some denominations bind baptism to church membership as a single act, while others keep them distinct; either way, what the rite signifies is your incorporation into the universal body of Christ.
The New Testament speaks of two baptisms, one the reality and one its sign. John announced the first: I baptize you with water for repentance, but one mightier is coming who will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire, and the risen Christ repeated it in Acts 1, you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now, fulfilled at Pentecost, the day the church was born. The clearest statement is 1 Corinthians 12:13: by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, Jew or Greek, slave or free. The picture in the word itself is immersion: to be baptized in the Spirit is to be plunged into him, filled, dipped, wholly identified with the body of Christ. Water baptism is the outward sign of that inward reality, the visible enactment of what the Spirit has already done.
Two texts often misread get careful handling. When the Pentecost crowd asks what to do and Peter answers repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins, some conclude baptism saves. The teachers answer with the analogy of Scripture, letting the whole testimony interpret the part: in that world, trust and baptism corresponded one to one, so Peter speaks of them together the way we might tell a seeker to trust Christ and pray to tell him so, where the prayer expresses the trust rather than accomplishing the salvation, just as Romans 10 joins confessing with the mouth to believing in the heart. And in the Great Commission the grammar itself teaches: make disciples is the main verb, and baptizing and teaching are the two participles that tell how, so baptism is not an extra after discipleship but the initiation of it, as teaching is its continuation.
What, then, does baptism mean? The teachers refuse to pick one: it carries all four. A sign of repentance, the washing away of sin and rebellion. A sign of commitment: the early church would not baptize until commitment was certain, and to be baptized was to declare yourself a follower, which is why Paul, facing the Corinthian factions, asks whether any were baptized in the name of Paul, and is glad he baptized only Crispus and Gaius, for whoseever name you are baptized into names whose disciple you are. The teachers cite Richard Averbeck’s observation that the early Christians could not conceive of a believer in the local church who was unbaptized: the nearness in time between trusting Christ and baptism shows that expressing the commitment was never optional; a person either trusted and was baptized, knowing what it would cost, or rejected the message. A sign of identification with Christ: the Romans 6 picture of death, burial, and resurrection. And a sign of initiation into the church, the outward sign of the Spirit’s baptism into the body. Two closing observations: our society, unlike theirs, no longer knows what baptism means, which argues for real discipleship between conversion and the water rather than a quick plunge; and God deliberately chose the common element, water, which every culture on earth encounters daily, rather than something exotic, so that the ordinary would carry the holy, felt cold and wet on the skin, a word preached to the senses. And scripturally, the teachers add, anyone can baptize: on the mission field, do not wait for an institution.
The second ordinance carries many names, each with a history: the breaking of bread in Acts 2; the eucharist, from the Greek for giving thanks; the table of the Lord and the cup of the Lord; the Lord’s supper; the mass, from the Latin dismissal, go, you are sent, a name with nothing sinister in it; and the last supper, a popular name with no biblical precedent as a title for the meal the church repeats. Four views map the possibilities, and this time the spectrum runs from a literal presence through a spiritual presence to a symbolic one.
The Roman view: in the mass, Christ’s sacrifice is continued, and by consecration the whole substance of the bread and wine is changed into the substance of his body and blood, transubstantiation, while the accidents, the taste, feel, and smell, remain unchanged; the elements confer forgiveness of venial sins, strength against sin, hope of resurrection, and grace even for the dead. Rome and, in large measure, Eastern Orthodoxy hold it, resting on the words themselves: this is my body. The teachers weigh it: the literalism proves too much, for Christ also said he is the door, the vine, and the bread of life, in John 10, 15, and 6; a continued sacrifice fails to reckon with a work finished once for all; and a body present on every altar borders on the old christological error of Eutychianism, communicating deity’s omnipresence to Christ’s humanity, the very mingling Chalcedon ruled out, and which would unfit him to be our truly human high priest. The Lutheran view, consubstantiation, keeps the presence while refusing the change: Christ’s body and blood are in, with, and under the bread, as heat is in hot iron without becoming it. Luther could not stomach a resacrifice, but neither could he surrender the words: at his famous meeting with Zwingli, the other great reformer, he wrote on the table between them, this is my body, and would not move, and the two never joined forces, to the Reformation’s lasting cost. The weaknesses, the teachers judge, are the same literalism and the same everywhere present body, unless one argues the resurrection body can be in many places, which they allow could be an argument.
The Reformed view holds a spiritual presence: the supper is a remembrance and a proclamation of Christ’s death in which Christ is really present, spiritually, and something of grace and mystery attends the partaking, though its critics note Scripture never explicitly names a sacramental grace conferred. The Zwinglian view, the memorial view proper, held by Baptists, Anabaptists, and many non denominational churches, sees remembrance and proclamation only, a symbolic act of an inward change with no mystery at all, exactly parallel to its view of baptism. Against it the teachers press the New Testament’s own weight: a practice kept sometimes daily, and the severity of 1 Corinthians 11, where taking the elements unworthily brought weakness, illness, and death, sits oddly on a bare symbol, and if it were merely a memorial, one could arguably remember Christ better other ways. Patton shows his hand: he stands in the Reformed camp, a spiritual presence, something more than a symbol and less than saving grace, and he marks the boundary of Protestant orthodoxy at the refusal of the continued sacrifice, noting that one author has argued the mass itself is what started the Reformation.
The closing principles gather what the supper does. It is an act of worship that communicates the death of Christ by vivid illustration. It symbolically confesses trust in the substitutionary atonement: taking the elements says that Christ died in your place. It uniquely confesses the unified body of Christ: a whole congregation partaking of one body together becomes, visibly, one body. And by 1 Corinthians 11:26 it uniquely proclaims the Lord’s death until he comes, an announcement with evangelistic reach built into the meal itself. The last slide sets the development in one line, an echo of progressive covenantalism: the people of God under the old covenant, Israel, with circumcision for initiation and Passover for commemoration; the people of God under the new covenant, the church, with baptism for initiation and the eucharist for commemoration, not a new program but the same covenant grown larger. The marks of a false church, the teachers announce with apologies, must move to the appendix for reading at home.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all nineteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What does calling the ordinances sacraments disclose about your view?
2. When was the list of seven sacraments fixed, and who articulated its mature theology?
3. What is the one real dividing line between Rome and the Protestants on these rites?
4. What common misrepresentation of the confessional do the teachers correct?
5. How does Rome argue its administered grace from Scripture?
6. What kills inherited rites in every tradition, on the teachers’ diagnosis?
7. What is the Reformed view of baptism?
8. Why do the teachers say Trent’s anathema is usually misheard?
9. Why did Rome develop limbo?
10. How does the symbol decide the mode of baptism?
11. What made John’s baptism, and Christian baptism after it, grammatically startling?
12. What is the clearest statement of Spirit baptism?
13. How do the teachers handle repent and be baptized in Acts 2:38?
14. What does the grammar of the Great Commission teach about baptism?
15. What is Richard Averbeck’s observation, as the teachers cite it?
16. Why do the teachers say Christ chose water rather than something exotic?
17. What christological problem do the teachers raise against a body present on every altar?
18. Where does Patton land on the Lord’s supper?
19. What does the closing covenant parallel display?
All nineteen correct. Lecture 6 is complete.
The teachers argued that our society no longer knows what baptism means, so the church must teach it. If you have been baptized, what did you understand it to mean at the time, and which of the four significances, repentance, commitment, identification, initiation, was missing from your understanding?
Where do you land on the spectrum at the table, literal, spiritual, or symbolic presence, and what actually happens in you when you take the bread and cup? Does the severity of 1 Corinthians 11 change how you will come to it next time?
Rome’s position, the teachers insisted, makes sense from inside its own definition of the church. Practice stating a view you reject at its strongest, the way this class did: what does that discipline do to how you hold your own?
Paul hands on what he received from the Lord in 1 Corinthians 11: the bread broken and the cup of the new covenant, taken in remembrance of him, so that as often as the church eats and drinks, it proclaims the Lord’s death until he comes.
The marks of a false church, bumped from tonight’s session, are assigned as the appendix reading, and the teachers ask the class to work through it at home. The chart of the four baptism views and the four supper views rewards memorizing: primary significance, symbolic emphasis, necessity, and subjects for the one, and the spectrum from literal to spiritual to symbolic presence for the other. The next session takes up the gifts of the church, and the debate every congregation must settle between cessationism and continuationism.