Part III: Sacrament vs. Ordinance: Guest Blogger, Tripp Hudgins (AngloBaptist). Check out Part I & Part II.
Alan generously asked me to participate in this blog series on Baptist sacramentality and immediately I said yes. I wanted to chime in. But it took me a while to figure out how I could share my thoughts. As a baptist, I think the testimony might be the best mode of communication in this instance. I hope you will all bear with me.
I was in seminary listening to a lecture on the Eucharistic Prayer, that traditional prayer that many denominations use when celebrating the Lord’s Supper. We were walking through some of the history, form, and theological function of the prayer and when we got to the epiclesis I had an epiphany. Really, one hopes for an epiphany at the epiclesis, but how often does that happen? And yet, there it was. Whammo!
The epiclesis is the part of the longer Eucharistic Prayer (aka anaphora) where the presider (priest or pastor, typically) prays for the Holy Spirit to be present in the elements at the table. I was listening with Baptist ears on as my Episcopal professor explained the historical use of this prayer. I was on the lookout for magical thinking, or mechanistic ballyhoo. None. Zilch. Nada. Then…Then it hit me.
Hold on! What are all the elements present at the table for communion? Bread, wine (or juice), a presider of some sort, and, well…the people. The gathered faithful, The Body of Christ, are present at the table of the Lord! Don’t baptists believe that the Holy Spirit transforms us? Don’t we believe that we are somehow renewed by the power of the Holy Spirit? Don’t we pray that God would be present in our hearts? Isn’t this the same thing? Is this baptist sacramentality?
It was like a bolt of lightening and after the lecture I approached my professor and asked her what she thought of my logic. She thought it had some merit and I left the class room thinking “Oh no. I’m a sacramental baptist.” This can’t be good. It’s like being a very short basketball player or a slow sprinter or something else oxymoronic, but it would not leave me alone. My friends in school teased me for having this epiphany…And I thought I might be the only one.
Then, I read Molly T. Marshall’s book, Joining the Dance: A Theology of The Spirit, where she too struggles with the place of the Holy Spirit in the life of the baptist congregation. She wrote about the epiclesis saying:
Baptists can helpfully appropriate this traditional prayer by inviting the Spirit to transform the congregation into a vital expression of the body of Christ. Hence, the epiclesis is not about the transformation of the elements, but of the communicants. (p. 89)
I was not alone after all. Baptists are exploring sacramental theology.
As Alan has shown us in his previous posts, this is not new to baptists when you look at the longer historical picture, but it is relatively new to us. We’ve been embroiled in other 
conversations and trying to turn faith into science for so long that sacramentality left the picture entirely. Scientific thinking about faith lands one in a lot of muddy water. Cognition instead of faith or mechanistic thinking instead of grace emerges and what one knows and what one does (or does not do more appropriately) is a sure sign of salvation. Ironically, this is just the theological trap we tried to avoid centuries ago.
We do need to get away from magical thinking, but this does not mean that we cannot find ways to say and show that the holy is present and transforms the ordinary. In fact, the most baptist thing one might say is that everything is holy now, everything is a sacrament, a way of God to communicate God’s presence to the world. If God is present in the Word…proclaimed, spoken, read, studied, and even sung, cannot God be present in the Body gathered and even (Dare we say it?) at the Table and our Baptism? I think so and I think such a rich understanding of the presence of the Holy Spirit can enliven a congregation.
So much of congregational life can slip into mere perfunctory performance. I mean to say that if you do “a” and “b” than “c” will happen. Omit the right prayers. Sing the right hymns. Paint the sanctuary just the right shade of blue and time the sermon (12 minutes?). Do these things and the Holy Spirit will come…somehow. It’ll be church. Right? Surely. But must we go out of our way to make certain never to day “God is here”?
God will be made known in the ordinary. Dare we refute this? And it won’t be because we make Him appear. No. Of course not. But we will proclaim God Present! That’s baptist. We will proclaim God’s power to transform lives. That’s baptist. And we need to embrace our ritual life to communicate what is already at work through the Trinity.
Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878 – 1969) spoke of the power of ritualizing such theology.
We cannot keep any spiritual thing in human life, even the spirit of courtesy, as a disembodied wraith. We ritualize it: we bow, we take off our hats, we shake hands, we rise when a lady enters. We have innumerable ways of expressing politeness in a ritual. Neither could they have kept so deep and beautiful a thing as the Christian life without such expression.
Indeed! We do need to communicate such deep beauty and words are not always enough. Does your congregation have a healing service? Do you lay hands on your beloved brother or sister in faith and pray for God through the power of the Holy Spirit to be present? Think about it. It’s a sacrament.
Ecumenical efforts, also, have encouraged many baptists such as Robert C. Walton (1905 – 85) to rediscover the communitarian impulse behind sacramental theology. We have learned from one another. We have learned also that the increasing focus on the autonomy of the individual that rightly gave rise to such Baptist distinctives as soul competency, have also served to undermine our initial theological impulse. So, Walton tried to rediscover a baptist sacramentality. He saw the onslaught of the atomizing nature of hyper-individualism invade the spiritual life of the baptist tradition. His hope was that by re-engaging the sacramental, we might recover a stronger sense of community, of The Body of Christ and not bodies of Christians…a singular priesthood of all believers.
This post is already too long. I know. I know that we have many objections as baptists to sacramental theology. I’m going to write a follow-up post to this one wherein I will discuss a need for embodied spirituality (read: ritual) in greater depth. My hope is that you will pray about this. Ask God to transform your life. Ask yourself what that means and how you might communicate the reality of such a transformation.
Thank you for your time. May God be praised!
Suggested Reading:
Promise and Presence: An Exploration of Sacramental Theology
by John E. Colwell
Gathering: A Spirituality And Theology of Worship in Free Church Tradition
by Christopher J. Ellis
Joining the Dance: A Theology of The Spirit
By Molly T. Marshall
Can These Bones Live? A Catholic Baptist Engagement with Ecclesiology, Hermeneutics, and Social Theory
by Barry Harvey
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