Sacraments and Human Nature

The term Sacrament derives from the Latin word sacramentum which means 'oath' or 'covenant,' a word used of soldiers and government officials in the Roman empire who swore an oath of allegiance to serve faithfully in their offices. The Latin word Sacrament, which itself is not found in Scripture, just as the words 'Trinity' and homoousios ('of one substance with the Father' in the Nicene Creed) are not found in Scripture, is first invoked in the postapostolic Church of the second century to describe the sacred rites instituted by Our Lord in the Gospels which convey divine grace and are therefore 'oaths of Christ,' covenanted means of grace which communicate divine life by the promise and power of Christ. Such Western Church Fathers as Tertullian, Saint Cyprian, and Saint Augustine freely use the word Sacrament to describe what are today reckoned as seven mystical rites conveying the grace of Jesus Christ. The original word for a sacrament as a means of divine grace, or as an effectual sign of grace causing what it symbolises, is 'mystery' or in Greek, musterion. Mystery is translated from Scripture as Sacrament by the Western Church, although in the Eastern Church to this day, the Sacraments are called the 'holy Mysteries.' Saint Paul himself uses the term musterion in reference to the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony -'Behold, I tell you of a great mystery, which is of Christ and the Church' (Ephesians 5.32). In union with the Eastern Tradition, the Book of Common Prayer refers to the Holy Eucharist as the Holy Mysteries par excellence (BCP, Page 83, Thanksgiving).

The Sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, ordained by Christ himself, as means whereby we receive the same, and pledges to assure us thereof. The principle of the Sacraments is found in the whole Bible, and in its fulness in the New Testament, that is, in the Incarnation of the Word of God, Jesus Christ. God becomes man so that man may become one with God. God assumes human nature in the Incarnation, all that pertains to man, human body, mind, soul, and spirit, so that human nature may be redeemed, sanctified and glorified by God to share in the divine life. The Sacraments are the extension of the Incarnation - they communicate the divine life of Christ to our human nature, and thus to our whole persons. We cannot be saved or redeemed or glorified apart from our own human nature as human beings. We must be regenerated and transformed, as human beings, into the children of God. And so God, in wonderful condescension and love, takes on our human nature and unites it to the Person of the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity.

God takes our human nature, divinises it, and gives it back to us in the Sacraments, so that we may, in our human nature, partake of God Himself. As the Fathers love to say: 'we become by grace, what God is by nature.'

The Incarnation and the Sacraments are two expressions of one reality: God the Son becomes man, and then takes that hypostatic union, human flesh united to the Divine Word, and conveys it to the members of his own Incarnate Mystical Body, the Church, in the Sacraments.

This is why the Catholic Tradition teaches that the pre-eminent Sacraments of Holy Baptism and the Holy Eucharist are 'generally necessary to salvation': Baptism as the Sacrament of New Birth mystically unites us to the crucified and risen Christ and regenerates our human nature into the nature of the Son of God (St John 3.3-7, Romans 6.1-11, Galatians 3.22-29). We become children of God and members of Christ's Body in Baptism.

The Holy Eucharist, the Sacrament of the Lord's Body and Blood, nourishes us with the human nature and divinity of Christ unto everlasting life (St John 6.53-59, 1 Corinthians 10.14-22, 11.23-34). Our Lord's Body and Blood are really given and eaten in the Lord's Supper after an heavenly and supernatural manner so that we may partake of Christ's human nature and be recreated by it.

Ours is a 'body religion,' the Church as the Body of Christ, a religion of the Incarnation, which is made a reality in us sacramentally.

Thus, man is a sacrament. Man is a composite being of body and soul, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual reality. Man's outward sign or reality is his body; man's inward and spiritual reality is his soul and spirit. Mankind is a living Sacrament: he simultaneously exists as both material and spiritual, physical and supernatural, united together in one cohesive entity. When the soul leaves the body, death occurs, which is for man an unnatural state not intended by God in His first creation of us. Man was created to be forever alive, forever immortal in a sacramental state. I often remark that any religious view or teaching which downplays the role of the body in the Christian dispensation is really gnostic or docetic; as such it rejects the essential goodness and role of the human body in salvation. The Church from the beginning has been attacked by these heresies of docetism (which held that Our Lord only appeared to man as a phantasm or ghost and had no real human nature) and gnosticism (which teaches that man is saved by cerebral intellectual knowledge, which frees the spirit from the prison of the body and of created matter, which thing is held to be itself evil). Man is a sacrament of body and soul. The Lord Jesus Christ is Himself the Great Sacrament: being God and man in One Divine Person with two natures, human and divine. Jesus is perfect God and perfect Man, perfectly both at once in the Incarnation. God becomes Incarnate, a Sacrament, to redeem and glorify man, a sacrament, and gives us His nature to be ours in Sacraments. The link between Jesus Christ and man, whom he came to save, is His own Incarnation, which is extended, given, and received in the Sacraments of the Holy Catholic Church.