Samuel Renihan on Sacraments

Each Lord's Day at Kosmosdale Baptist Church, we are blessed to take the Lord's Supper at the end of the worship service. Thinking of baptism and the Lord's Supper together, many Christians would use the term "sacraments". Most times when I hear the word "sacraments", I cringe. None of the Baptist confessions use this term (though, admittedly, many of the framers and signers of these confessions did use it in their writings), and most Baptist catechisms, including the one we used in my household, do not use this term. I tend to prefer the term "ordinances" to speak of baptism and the Lord's Supper.

However, if everyone who used the term "sacraments" were as careful in their thinking as Samuel Renihan is, then I would be nothing but glad whenever I heard the term. Near the end of his book, The Mystery of Christ: His Covenant and His Kingdom, which I cannot recommend highly enough, Renihan offers a brief discussion of the sacraments. His entire discussion, found on pages 203-206, is helpful; I want to offer some brief excerpts below.

Defining the sacraments, Renihan writes: "a sacrament is a visible word... Sacraments are words in a visible mode." Renihan then describes how these 'visible words' functioned through various biblical covenants:

In the Covenant of Works, the trees made the promises of life and death visible. In the Noahic Covenant, the Rainbow makes the promise of preservation visible. In the Abrahamic Covenant, circumcision makes the promise of Canaan and the threat of punishment visible. In the Mosaic Covenant, the Passover and sacrifices made the promises of God [to Israel] visible. In the New Covenant, baptism and the Lord's Supper make the promises of the covenant visible.

Renihan notes: "Sacraments are not just God's Word to His people, but also His people's participation in the very promise made visible."

He then writes more specifically of the New Covenant sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper:

In the Lord's Supper, for example, God reminds us of His promise to forgive our sins through the sacrifice of Christ. And we remember and proclaim that death until He comes.

Baptism is a visible word, a representation, of new creation life through death.... the symbol of regeneration and union with Christ, baptism, is the visible initiation into the kingdom of Christ, the first blessing of integration into the local gathered kingdom of the saints. It is God's visible promise to His people, and the people's declaration of participation and trust in that promise.

The one point that I would add to what Renihan writes (a point to which I believe he would agree), is that the word "visible" is being used a synecdoche. The sacrament of baptism is visible to the entire congregation. However, for the participants in baptism and the Lord's Supper, more than their sight is engaged; the sacraments are a whole-body experience: the person being baptized being literally immersed in the water and the person taking the Lord's Supper literally taking the sacrament into himself. Both of the sacraments, then, display the entire-life transformation–body and soul–that the gospel brings about.