Thomas Joseph White, The Light of Christ (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2017), pp. 187-188.

The sacraments of the new covenant are sacred signs or symbols which are of divine origin and that act as “instrumental causes,” or channels, of grace. That is to say, sacraments are not only outward signs of inward graces. They also transmit or convey the grace that they symbolize, at least when the recipient accepts them worthily and is in a properly disposed state. The Catholic Church teaches that there are seven sacraments, each instituted by Christ either during his earthly life or after his resurrection during the apostolic age. We can find references to all of them in the New Testament.(1)

Here we should make some qualifications. Citations of scripture are not proof texts meant to compel a skeptical mind. That Christ directly instituted seven sacraments cannot be proven empirically because no one can go back two thousand years to verify that Christ rose from the dead, that he founded the Church, or that he instituted the sacraments. These are all truths of the Catholic faith that can be believed by grace alone, or disbelieved by the rejection of that grace. Intellectually speaking, however, such references act as signs that denote real historical continuity between the earliest life of the Catholic Church and her subsequent development in later ages. The seven sacraments are all of derivation from the apostolic age, but they also each have a subsequent historical development in form. We can look back, then, from later sacramental practices and see the initial seeds of these practices in the New Testament and the early Church. The sacrament of confession provides a good example. Christ clearly gives the apostles the power to “bind and loose” the sins of penitents, and the early Church understood the bishop to be the safeguard of communion, determining who was fit to receive communion and who was not. In the first centuries of the Church, then, the sacrament of penance was frequently administered only by bishops and accompanied by public penance. The penitent performed public acts of penance to show his or her disposition to receive communion in a worthy fashion. In the early medieval Church, however, it gradually became customary for the bishop to delegate the power of absolution to priests and to permit the penance to take place in purely private settings, a practice that endures to this day. Once one perceives the “history” of the sacrament, there is a clear account one can give of its developmental form, from the time of the early Church until today.

Some sacraments are contained virtually and implicitly in others. As noted above, the Gospels make overt references to Christ’s institution of baptism, the Eucharist, holy orders, and the sacrament of penance. Meanwhile, the sacrament of marriage is contained implicitly within the sacrament of baptism, for when two baptized Christians marry, they wed “in Christ” and so form a living image of Christ and the Church. The sacraments of confirmation and anointing of the sick, meanwhile, are referred to in Acts, seemingly in passing. When were they originally instituted? They are sacramental capacities transmitted implicitly by the power of holy orders and are reserved to bishops and priests. Consequently, we can say that they were instituted by Chirst when he established the apostolic college and the sacrament of holy orders. They are not later inventions of the medieval Church, since their usage was common from the earliest centuries of the Church.

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(1) On baptism, see Mt 28:19-20, which serves as an echo of Mt 3:13 and Jn 3:3-8. On confirmation, see Jn 20:22 and Acts 2:1-4, 8:15-17, 10:38, 19:5-6. On the Eucharist, see Lk 22:7-20, Mt 26:17-29, Mk 14:12-25, 1 Cor 11:23-26, and Jn 6. On reconciliation, see Mt 16:19., Jn 20:23, 2 Cor 5:18, Jas 5:16. On the anointing of the sick, see Mk 6:12-13 and Jas 5:14-15. The sacrament of holy orders is contained implicitly in the eucharistic institution narratives: “Do this in memory of me.” We also find subsequent references to it in Acts 1:8, 2:4 (where the apostles received the fullness of enlightenment); Jn 20:22-23; 1 Tm 1:6-7. The sacrament of matrimony is referred to in Mk 10:8, 1 Cor 7:39, and Eph 5:31-32.

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Return to Lesson 11: Are the Sacraments Biblical?