Sacraments, Ordinances, and Channels of Grace

Sacraments Are Catholic. Ordinances Are Biblical.

A sacrament is a ceremony that both symbolizes something and serves as a conduit for grace. Sacraments are "Christianized" substitutes for the Jewish religious practices that the Catholic hierarchy restored after God had fulfilled and abolished them. So sacraments are "good works" by which Catholics think they earn grace.

Earn grace is an oxymoron, of course, because grace means unmerited favor, and you cannot earn something that you cannot merit. In Romans and other epistles, Paul goes to great lengths to explain that faith and works, and grace and wages, are mutually exclusive pairs. By trying to mix the unmiscible, Catholicism

The only conduits of grace in the New Testament are faith (Ephesians 2:8), prayer (Jude 20), and hearing the Word (Romans 10:17). (Calvinist/Reformed may add the new birth, which they believe has to precede faith because they take "dead in trespasses" to be literal, not metaphorical.) These are neither symbols nor conduits. A purely symbolic ceremony such as baptism is called an ordinance, or sometimes, a tradition.

Many churches that descend from Rome retain Romish baggage such as infant baptism and words like "sacrament." If you carefully distinguish between sacraments and ordinances, it will be easier to discount Rome's works-based gospel.


Copyright 2020, Richard Wheeler (Permission granted for non-profit purposes; just give credit where credit is due.)