Church traditions and early Christian texts often use language I used to be wholly unfamiliar with growing up in an Evangelical Protestant context—entering their circles brings you to a lot of strange Latin phrases, jargon, and philosophical vocabulary. One of the first examples of this I encountered was the idea of “sacramental” theology.
The idea is so simple, but it changes everything: it’s the belief that physical things can have spiritual effects.
It’s what drove the woman to touch the corner of Christ’s robe, desperate for healing; it’s why early believers clamored for just Peter’s shadow to fall on them as he passed; it’s the reason pilgrims wait in lines for hours simply to touch the inside of the tomb we believe was Christ’s. Those things are physical—but they’re not “just” physical. There’s something more profound at work, acting through them, that make them sacramental; another tiny way our God reaches out to us.
I’m not really sure what we call this in Protestant circles—it’s not that we don’t believe that God works through physical means sometimes, but I don’t know if we assign it enough importance to really give it an umbrella term of its own. Sometimes they’re miracles. Sometimes they’re “the Holy Spirit ministering” through a special location or tradition (like “the laying on of hands”). Sometimes they’re just superstition.
Early Christian theologians believed they were a necessary product of the gospel.
A Sacramental Gospel
Two of my favorite early writers who touch on this idea of sacramentality are St. Anselm of Canterbury and St. John of Damascus. In his book Why God Became Man, Anselm goes into depth about what he calls the fittingness of Christ’s incarnation—why it is fitting, or that it just makes sense that God would descend to Earth in a human body in order to restore humanity. It’s an incredibly thorough work, but one of the most important takeaways for me was that Jesus coming in the flesh, in a physical manner, wasn’t just a notable or unique choice he made—it’s a vital part of the narrative. It blurred the black & white yes-or-no answer to the question “Did Jesus have to come as a human and die rather than redeeming us some other way?” Anselm’s massive treatise on this is going to be infinitely better than mine, but suffice to say: the physical aspect of Jesus’s life and death is so important and so fitting for his role in our salvation. Coming to understand that God’s physical nature mattered was absolutely revolutionary to me.
Complementing this is a work that remains one of my favorites to this day, for the sheer speed at which it totally changed my mind on a topic I’d never given much thought to before: St. John of Damascus’s Three Treatises on the Divine Images. His purpose in this work is to argue for why veneration of icons (images of Jesus and the Saints) 1) isn’t idolatry, and 2) is not only a desirable practice, but necessary. I’m not 100% with him on the necessary bit—but his exegesis of physical practices that became spiritual in Biblical Israel, and how they continued all the way to Christ, absolutely convinced me that the physical always has and always will be a core and crucial part of Christianity.
You have the narrative of the tabernacle, a physical place God dwelt; of the Bread of the Presence, a physical sign within the temple; of the clay snake, an image that brought God’s healing to the Israelites. The Biblical narrative is full of images of God coming closer and closer to his people through physical means; and so, looking at the fittingness of Christ becoming a physical being, and of the ways God uses physical things to represent and bring about his glory… it only made sense to me that Christ coming closer to us through his life, death, and resurrection would only increase that, not decrease it or remove it altogether.
Emmanuel: God Coming Closer
“The Sacraments,” capital-S, didn’t immediately follow from this idea alone (there’s a lot more to that full can of worms), but suddenly, the idea of God regularly using physical things to bring us closer to his spiritual nature didn’t seem so far-fetched—in fact, it seemed fitting.
So when John Calvin wrote about the Israelites’ practice of circumcision as a physical sign of God’s covenant, it only made sense that he connected it to our new covenant’s physical sign of baptism; and it only made sense that he, Martin Luther, and countless other Reformers still believed that God worked spiritually through that physical sign. This was not a sudden plunge into a radical view of baptism for me, either; but the more I learned about sacramental theology, and the more I read about the emphasis Christ places on baptism all throughout the New Testament, the less inclined I became to believe that God had given us something physical that somehow lacked any spiritual effect whatsoever.
I write this not as an explanation of St. Anselm or St. John or Baptismal theology—that would take far more than a blog post!—but instead as a demonstration of some of the paths my faith took in those first two years of university, with no other intentions besides following God’s truth to see where it led. These texts were dense, and the time their claims spent percolating in my own mind stretched long; there was no great turmoil or moment of reckoning here. I simply turned around one day and realized something profound: that I couldn’t believe that God—who so loved the world that he became man—had chosen to stop meeting men where He always had.
Our God is so great, so powerful, and so mysterious. Why couldn’t he endow the physical with the spiritual?
Or better yet—why wouldn’t he?
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