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Stone-Campbell Sacramental Theology
John Mark Hicks
The Stone-Campbell Movement (SCM), inclusive of Churches of Christ,practices three ordinances or sacraments:Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and the Lord’s Day. “Here, then,” Thomas Campbell wrote, “are the three grand comprehensive positive, ordinances of the gospel; namely, Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and the Lord’s Day” which are“designed to keep the blissful subject of our present and eternal salvation” before us “and one day every week [is] publicly set apart for” that “joyful” purpose.[1] Alexander Campbell called them the “positive institutions of the Christian system.” They are the “indispensable provisions of remedial mercy” and “not one of them can be dispensed with by any who desire the perfection of the Christian state and of the Christian character.”[2] Their remedial significance is rooted in the “death, burial and resurrection of Christ” which are the “grounds of justification and hope.”[3] In other words, they are gospel and “catholic” (universal) ordinances,[4] that is, “means of grace” through which “the hand of God” writes upon our hearts the character of his Son.[5]From its inception, the SCM has held that the gospel ordinances or sacramentsare Baptism, the Lord’s Supper and the Lord’s Day.
This is embedded in our corporate consciousness. At the centennial celebration of the Declaration and Address in 1909, Carey Morgan speaks as a veritable representative of the whole movement: “There are three such memorials: the Lord’s Supper, Baptism and the Lord’s Day. The Lord’s Supper is a memorial of his death, Baptism is a symbol of his burial, and the Lord’s Day celebrates his resurrection.”[6]
Theologically, within the SCM these gospel ordinances have been ordinarily understood along the following lines. Baptism is a means of grace through faith for justification as we participate in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Lord’s Supper is a means of grace through faith for sanctification as we remember and/or commune with the body and blood of Christ. The Lord’s Day is a means of grace through faith for communal worship as we celebrate the resurrection. In this sense, they are not only gospel ordinances (e.g., commands to be obeyed), but also sacramental means through which believers experience the grace of the gospel by the power of the Spirit. They are sacraments in the sense that they are concrete moments in space and time which not only signify the gospel but alsoby which the Father communicates justifying and sanctifying grace to believers through Jesusin the power of the Spirit.
Defining Sacrament
The “means of grace” language is problematic because it istoo overtly sacramental for some. Though this language is the SCM at its theological best, manyin the twentieth century have become more anthropocentric in orientation; more concerned about, as R. C. Bell put it, “human mechanics” than “divine dynamics.”[7] Our anti-sacramentalism owes more to Zwinglian Protestantism and/or Lockean epistemology than we might admit. Some have interpreted Baptismas more of a human act of obedience that crosses the boundary of lost and saved than a divine act of grace. Others have reducedBaptism primarily, perhaps merely, to a human testimonial (common among Evangelicals) such that it becomes a naked sign. Some have reduced the significance of the Lord’s Supper to cognitive reflection on the death of Jesus as if were merely a memorial. Some have reduced attendance on the Lord’s Day to a legal duty where we perform “five acts of worship” for God or to an occasion primarily for mutual edification rather than anything remotely connected with sacramental imagination. The Assembly has become something we do for God and/or something we do for each other rather than primarily something God does for us.
In recent books I have addressed these three ordinances.[8]My intentwas to renew a sacramental understanding within the SCM—to reorient our thinking from an anthropocentric tendency(mere human acts) to a more theocentric grounding.The sacraments are divine acts of grace through which God transforms believers into his image by the presence of Jesus in the power of the Spirit. Thus, a sacrament is an external symbol through which God acts to grace his people and by which his people participate in the gospel through faith.
Why use the term sacrament? Historically, this is not our language since the word does not appear in Scripture.[9]It is also subject to misunderstanding—debates over the sacraments have a long history—but even “ordinance”has similar problems.Sacramental language is historic shorthand for a theological idea (much likeeschatological is shorthand for all the events that will take place from the second coming of Christ to the appearance of a new heaven and new earth). It saves space. My definition is consistent with the substance of the historic church. It is not specifically Roman Catholic, Protestant (e.g., Lutheran, Anglican and Presbyterian) or Orthodox (“mysteries”) since their common meaning is that by faith God gives grace through material symbols. Differences between these various traditions emerge because other ideas are added to that basic one. Instead of repeating a lengthy set of words, the use of the term sacrament as technical shorthand conveys theintended meaning in the common language of the historic Christian faith. If anyone dislikes it, no one is bound to it. It is not necessary for Christian discourse. Ifthe terminology is offensive, when it appears in the text substitute this definition of sacrament: “by faith God gives the grace of JesusChrist through material symbols in the power of the Spirit by whom we participate in the future.”
Sacrament involves several ideas. First, a sacrament involves created materiality. Baptism utilizes the material element of water and the Lord’s Supper uses bread and wine. The concrete sign of the Assembly is the gathered community. As created embodied material beings, we are buried in water, eat/drink the Supper, and gather as a community.Second, a sacrament signifies something; it points to a reality beyond itself. Baptism signifies the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Table signifies the presence of Christ eating with his disciples as well as his body and blood, andtheAssembly signifies the heavenly assembly around the throne of God.
Third, a sacrament is a means of grace. The material elements do not merely represent, but they participate in the reality to which they point. They are not mere signs, but symbols that mediate the spiritual reality.The signs become symbols because God does something through them. Through Baptism we share in the death and resurrection of Jesus (Rom 6:3-4), through the Lord’s Supper we eat with Jesus at his table in his kingdom (Matt 26:30; Luke 22:15-18, 28-30) as well as nourished by his body and blood (John 6:51-58), and through assembling as a community, we enter the sanctuary of God (Heb 10:19-25; 12:22-24).Fourth, God accomplishes his sacramental work by the power of his Spirit. Through Baptism we experience new birth as we are born of the Spirit (John 3:5; cf. Titus 3:5), through eating with Christ we enjoy the communion of the Spirit at the Table (1 Cor 10:16; 2 Cor 13:14), and as an assembly we worship the Father in the Spirit through Jesus (John 4:24). The Spirit mediates the grace of God through Baptism, mediates the presence of Christ through the Table, and transports us into the heavenly assembly surrounding the throne of the Father.
Fifth, sacrament is the experience of the eschaton—a participation in the future reality of the kingdom of God. Through Baptism we already experience our own resurrection by participating in Jesus’ resurrection, through the Lord’s Supper we already eat at the future Messianic banquet by eating at the Lord’s Table, and through Assembly we already participate in the future eschatological gathering of the people of God around the throne (Rev 7:9-17).Sixth, God’s work through the sacrament is received by faith. Without faith there are no eyes to see or experience the spiritual reality to which the signs point and in which the symbols participate. Thus, through faith we are buried and raised with Christ in Baptism (Col 2:12), through faith we eat at the Lord’s Table (1 Cor 10:16-22), and through faith we draw near to God in the Assembly (Heb 10:22; cf. 11:6).
Alexander Campbell’s Sacramental Theology
Baptism. Alexander Campbell became the polemical champion of Kentucky Baptists through his debates with the Presbyterians Walker (1820) and McCalla (1823). In the latter debate Campbell pressed an argument against infant baptism based on the design of the ordinance. He strongly connected baptism with the joy of forgiveness. During the debate he addressed his Baptist friends on this point.
Tell them you make nothing essential to salvation but the blood of Christ, but that God has made baptism essential to their formal forgiveness in this life, to their admission into his kingdom on earth. Tell them that God had made it essential to their happiness that they should have a pledge on his part in this life, an assurance in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, of their actual pardon, of the remission of all their sins, and that this assurance is baptism. Tell the disciples to rise in haste and be baptized and wash away their sins, calling on the name of the Lord.[10]
Campbell believed that some Baptists had reduced baptism “to the level of a moral example, or a moral precept.” But Campbell invested baptism with soteriological significance. It is God’s “formal pledge” of the believer’s “personal acquittal or pardon.”[11] Baptism was no longer a mere sign for Campbell. In this wayCampbellmoved toward a Scottish Presbyterian (Calvinian) meaning for baptism though in the context ofbeliever’s baptism. Campbell alludes to Calvin’s own words by referring to baptism as a “proof and token” of the remission of sins. Baptism is God’s “sensible pledge”—an external testimony—of forgiveness, salvation and regeneration.[12]
In the wake of Walter Scott’s successful revivalistic preaching where baptism for the remission of sinswas subsituted for the mourner’s bench,[13]Campbell began a series of ten essays entitled the “Restoration of the Ancient Gospel.”[14]Campbell nowdescribes baptism as a means or instrument of grace. For example, “forgiveness is through immersion”[15] or baptism is “a certain act by, or in which their sins are forgiven.”[16] Baptism is a “medium through which the forgiveness of sins is imparted.”[17]Campbell is quite adamant about this point: “I do earnestly contend that God, through the blood of Christ, forgives our sins through immersion—through the very act, and in the very instant.”[18]Campbellmoved beyond any kind of Zwinglianism and embraced a high Calvinian understanding of the instrumentality of baptism as a means of grace. While not a “procuring” or “efficient cause,” baptism is an “instrumental cause.”[19]
The fundamental impulse of Campbell’s baptismal theology was the assurance of the forgiveness of sins. He rejected the frontier search for assurance through a subjective conversion experience. Instead of calling the sinner to “pray through” at the mourner’s bench, the early SCM called sinners to Jesus through “washing away their sins” in baptism which is God’s “sensible pledge” by which God assured believers of his gracious forgiveness. It is both an objective moment of assurance and a means of grace. Campbell, in essence, adopted a Calvinian understanding of the meaning of baptism, and he recognized this in an extended quote from Calvin at the conclusion of which he wondered whether his opponents would now call Calvin a “Campbellite.”[20]Accepting believer’s immersion, Campbell also embraced the sacramental meaningof baptism consistent with the historic church (Patristics, Luther, Calvin) unlike the Baptists who followed Zwingli’s rejection of any external act as a means of grace.
Lord’s Supper. Against the backdrop of Scottish Presbyterianism and Scottish Independency, “table” is a significant theological and liturgical term for Alexander Campbell. Scottish and American Presbyterian sacramental solemnities which involved the communicants sitting at real tables were often characterized by the intense practice of penitential spiritual disciplines, including meditation on Christ’s sufferings, self-examination and sorrow.[21]Campbell complained the Supper had become “religious penance, accompanied by morose piety...expressed in…sad countenances on sundry days of humiliation, fasting and preparation.”[22] The table habits of his contemporaries, according to Campbell, summon “mourners to the house of sorrow” and it is “as sad as a funeral parade.”[23] For Campbell himself, however, “table” was not only a real gathering around a table, but saturated with festive joy. Christ “did not assemble them to weep, and wail, and starve with him,” Campbell writes. “No, he commands them to rejoice always, and bids them eat and drink abundantly.” We assemble to “eat and drink with him” at his table.[24] The table is a moment when disciples are “honored with a seat at the King’s table” where they “eat in his presence” and “in honor of his love.”[25]
Yet, despite this language and a Reformed theological orientation which confessed the Supper as a “means of grace,” the dominant language of the early SCM is commemorative, even “simply commemorative.”[26] The problem here is not only Zwinglianism but, as Fikes has demonstrated, Lockean “common sense philosophy” which “hindered the vibrant practice of communion.”[27] The rational categories of Lockean epistemology did not permit the full vigor of a Calvinian understanding of the spiritual dynamic of the Supper to fully enrich Campbell’s understanding of the Supper. Only later when those categories were recognized and in some sense transcended, as with Robert Richardson and Robert Milligan, was a more sacramental theology possible.[28] It is present in Campbell, but his default mode of thinking tended to epistemologically delimit the meaning of the table. The Lord’s Supper is more of an “argument” for the gospel rather than the experience of divine communion.[29]
Without a vibrant sacramental theology of the table Churches of Christ lost the festive joy of the table envisioned by Campbell. A. B. Lipscomb, editor of the Gospel Advocate, published the September 30th, 1915 special issue on the Lord’s Supper in booklet form in 1917 (reprinted four times, the last in 1972).[30]The articles, consistent with 20th Churches of Christ as a whole, primarily characterized the Supper as commemorative (memorial, monumental) and declarative (testimonial, proclamation).[31] The former is more prominent than the latter but both are cognitive and anthropocentric categories. We remember and we proclaim. Through this cognitive process, we contemplate the death of Christ and when we do this together by eating and drinking we proclaim the Lord’s death. Where the idea of “spiritual nourishment” does arise, it is often understood as “faithful observance” of divine commandments and the same nourishment that all obedience entails.[32]
Nevertheless, others did insist on a spiritual dynamic, a means of grace, through eating and drinking at the Lord’s Table. James A. Harding identified Scripture reading, fellowship with the poor, the Lord’s Supper, and prayer as means of grace through which God “transform[s] poor, frail, sinful human being[s] into the likeness of Christ.”[33] E. A. Elam and E. G. Sewell, heirs to the emphases of the NashvilleBibleSchool, both used this language.[34] The spiritual dynamic is a healthy one in these writers. Sacramentality, then, in terms of the Lord’s Supper is present within the SCM but a minority voice.
Assembly.Typologically recalling the language of Leviticus 23, Campbell calls the day of “assembly” a “day of rest, of peace, of joy, a festival sacred to the Lord.”[35] The theological ground of this joy was the not only the celebration of creation, the resurrection of Jesus and outpouring of the Spirit on Pentecost,[36] but also the “deep and solemn conviction that the [assembly] is the house of God—the temple of the Holy Spirit—and that we are, especially and emphatically, in the presence of the Lord while we are engaged in his worship.” Every occasion of the “assemblies of the saints” is a “meeting with the Lord”—an experience of “Divine Presence.”[37]
The sanctification of the Lord’s Day meant, in part, that Christians assemble in the presence of God. As assembly, the “church must view herself” as the “habitation of God,” the “temple of God,” even “the gate of heaven.” Those assembled “must feel” themselves as “specially [sic] in the presence of the Lord, not as on other days or in other places.” The assembly must conduct itself as “if the Lord Jesus was personally present” since indeed the Lord “’is in the midst of them’ if they have met in his name and according to his word.”[38]
Gathering “in the name” of Christ is constitutive of the assembly. “Where this is wanting, or any other principle substituted in its place, the assembly, however designated, is not, nor can it be, a church of Christ.” But this is not simply about authority as if we assemble out of some kind of mere duty. Rather, believers assemble out of “their attachment to him, and love to his name.” The “love of Christ” must be the “grand prevailing principle which draws them together.” By this affection the assembled recognize the blessedness of Jesus’ “presence.”[39]