In this episode Trent sits down with Anglican Stephen Boyce to discuss the case for seven sacraments.
Transcription:
Trent:
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trent. My guest today is Dr. Steven Boyce, and we are going to be talking about the case for the seven sacraments. So Dr. Boyce, welcome to the program.
Stephen:
Hey, thanks for having me on. It’s good to see you again. Looking forward to this discussion. It’s a very important one. I think that needs to be had between Anglicans and Catholics.
Trent:
Sure. And all other Christians because the sling is very important and this is definitely one of the fruits of the Reformation. Trying to understand, well, just how many of them are there? How does this entail with God’s plan of salvation? It’s interesting because you and I, we did the two on two debate not too long ago. Jimmy Aiken and I, and then who is Dr.
Stephen:
Samuel Neeson? Samuel Neeson in Malaysia.
Trent:
Yeah, Samuel Neeson. So Dr. Neeson, yourself and me and Jimmy, and we were debating about the issue of justification by faith alone. And what’s interesting here is that when you look amongst Protestants, so when you kind of drill down into some of the aspects of salvation, there could be some significant differences. And this is one of them. And you’ve got an interesting journey yourself because when I was doing preparation for our debate, I had seen that you had previously appeared on James White’s dividing line, and back then you were a Baptist, but now you’re an Anglican. What happened there?
Stephen:
So I did a PhD program at a Baptist seminary, and one of the major things that I was studying was the early church patristics, going back to a codex in Jerusalem called Codex H, which contained first Clement Epistle Barnabas letters of Ignatius, the full copy of the Diday. And so just kind of meditating through that. And I had to do a lot of translation. And in the translation work that I was doing, one of the major things I found was that the church I was practicing in was not anything like them. And so I was actually a Baptist pastor. I started pastoring as a senior pastor at 21 years old. I was very young and
Got burned out in four years, became a Southern Baptist pastor at another church. Did very, very well there. But there was a problem the whole time, there was just an issue with I was never content where I was. And the more I was studying the early church, the less comfortable I became in a place that loved me and I loved ’em. So it caused me to search. And then my wife and I decided, let’s just go visit at some churches. And we visited an Anglican church, and I had some friends that were Anglican in Texas, and so they kind of introduced me to that world. So it was a long journey in there, but it really was doing a PhD program on the early church fathers in a Baptist seminary that opened that door.
Trent:
Well, it’s interesting because a lot of Catholics will quote Cardinal Henry Newman, and I think sometimes they quote him incorrectly with the sentiment that Newman said, to be deep in history is deceased to be Protestant. I think sometimes they quote that to mean to be deep in history means you’ll automatically become Catholic. I don’t think that was quite the sentiment Newman was saying, because I think he would consider many of the Anglicans closer to himself rather than forms of Protestantism he’s discussing. But I think the sentiment, it really does show itself if you compare more low church Protestantism, things like the Baptist tradition and things like that. What do you think?
Stephen:
Oh, I agree. I am at the point in my life where I don’t even like to be Protestant in the connection because the,
Trent:
There’s another Anglican priest I know he goes by the handle barely Protestant, maybe that’s an Anglican thing.
Stephen:
Yeah. So that is Father James.
Trent:
Yes.
Stephen:
And he was just on my show on Saturday. So we just did a live stream on from Baptist to Anglicans. We were both independent. Baptist was a very small group of Baptists, very conservative, king James only kind of group. So we were in that together. So we actually just told our story together just a few days ago. He lives a rocks throw from me. He’s actually over in Anglican Church about 30 minutes from here. And so he and I hang out every now and then. But yeah, so he’s one of those people and he called himself barely Protestant, and I’m not even willing to go that far anymore. And the reason for that is because the Anglicanism that I’m ascribing to in my heart and mind and study is something that was earlier than the Protestant Reformation.
Going back to an some and looking back all the way to Augustine of Canterbury and some of the things that were going on there with the Celtic churches that were already in existence. To me there’s a deeper rooted Anglicanism than in the Protestant Reformation and prior to the Reformation. So to say that you’re a Protestant is actually subjecting yourself to a certain period of Anglicanism that is limited. And so the longer I’ve been in Anglican, I’ve realized Anglicanism is larger in scale of years than that period of time. And usually the ones that contend for the Protestant status are low church Anglicans or mid church at best. And we have fun debates. So
Trent:
Yes, no, it’s definitely something as a Catholic I can understand engaging those in more of the low and mid church tradition where a lot of times there’s just this kind of barrier and a difficulty to understand things that shouldn’t be as foreign, but you have just a radically different ecclesiology and that’s going to factor into how you understand the church as a whole, sacraments, other elements like that. So let’s jump into it right there. So what’s interesting when we talk about the sacraments, because there are Protestant apologists from low church traditions who will say, well, if you look at the history of the fathers and the councils, the idea of seven sacraments is actually really late. It’s an accretion. That’s not the common thing we find in the early church. And they’ll try to argue just for two sacraments. And most low church Protestants will say, well, there’s two sacraments. There’s baptism and the Lord Eucharist, which I’ll call the Lord’s Supper.
The others, they might say, oh, it’s great if the church is involved. It’s cool if you get married at our church or it’s nice to have a pastor here, but there’s no such thing as the sacrament of holy orders or the sacrament of matrimony. And that’s the big difference between the Catholic Protestant tradition. That’s where Anglicanism comes in in an interesting way historically, because you have in, I want to say it was 1521 in the 1520s King Henry VIII writing a response to Luther defending the seven sacraments. And with some collaboration, Thomas Moore is a little bit of a debate about how much he’s can do there, but King Henry VIII is writing this. He earns the title Defender of the Faith, which he loses later. And that’ll a whole different show to get into that. But even there, we see that this tradition amongst Anglicans and some of their Protestants in the holding well know there’s seven sacraments. Where’s kind of the common ground Catholics and Anglicans might have on this question.
Stephen:
Yeah, I think that King Henry VII is a beginning point because obviously he had those seven sacraments of defense Luther, whether he held three or two or some Lutheran say, I hold two and a half. It’s like, what? So penance is a half a sacrament or something, I don’t know. But he was harsh and it’s hard to get. I actually, Luther was harsh, you said? No, no, king Henry was very harsh on Luther. Well, Luther was harsh too, I guess on other issues. But the 16th
Trent:
Century was a harsh time.
Stephen:
It was tough time to live in. There was a lot of bloodshed and a lot of riding against people. But I think that King Henry VII was pretty pointed. And I mean, it was Pope Leo ii, I believe, who actually gave King Henry vii, that title defender the faith.
Trent:
Well, he dedicated the book to him. I think
Stephen:
He did. He most certainly did because, and this is the thing that people have to understand, and some of the Catholics that I have that are friends, they don’t realize that King Henry VIII wasn’t fully against everything in Rome. There was a fallout naturally, we don’t even have to debate that, but not everything that was being defended in Rome was automatically bad to a lot of the Anglicans at the very beginning of this. They were trying to find their grip, and this was not a debate for him. This was even up for discussion. The fact that Luther challenged this, the Catholic’s greatest defender of the seven sacraments at that time was not a Roman Catholic. It was King Henry viii. And he wrote a whole book. And it’s hard to get that book’s actually hard to get to find an English. Actually, Roman Catholic, Eric Ybarra is the one that actually sent me a document to read it in English, and I actually got to read through it just a few months ago. And it was phenomenal. But he was very hard on Luther, very hard on Luther and how he approached this. So
Trent:
There was, yeah, but the way Luther talks to people, he kind of has it coming.
Stephen:
Yeah, he sets himself up in a lot of ways. And because he was speaking very dogmatic about things that he was unsure of himself. And that’s the reason that Lutherans even have this debate. Did he hold a three or did he hold a two? Penance was one minute Luther saying one thing and the next minute he was saying another. And I would even argue that a lot of Lutherans are loose on penance compared to Martin Luther, but the fact that he was that flimsy with it is already the problem because he’s dogmatic one minute and then he’s not dogmatic the next. So that Lutherans today can’t even identify field to three or two. To me, that shows a problem.
Trent:
Right. Well, let’s talk then a little bit about the numbers of the sacraments. And I think a lot of people will have some misunderstandings here because even the very term sacrament mysterion in Greek, like all theological terms, it changes over time for the church to understand what this is. So I think some people, you have a very low church Protestant saying, well, where does the Bible say how many sacraments there are? Well, the Bible doesn’t talk about the hypostatic union, the Bible doesn’t talk about the Bible. So where does the Bible say how many, and this is a relevant analogy, where does the Bible say how many books are in the Bible? So the question then of you first have to define what a sacrament is, and eventually the church settled on the idea that a sacrament is something that imparts grace. So it is an outward sign of an inward reception of grace. And the church says that these seven sacraments are instituted by Christ because there could be other things that Christ instituted that are not sacraments, like foot washing for example, but the understanding that these things are instituted by Christ and they’re a means of imparting, sanctifying grace, the essence of understanding what a sacrament is. So do you think that, first off that if Protestants saying, oh, well, how many there are first, they need to get a firmer grasp on what a sacrament is versus say, an ordinance?
Stephen:
Well, I think that’s the problem. I think there’s been a major downplay on what is a sacrament. So their view has been devaluing it. So when you start dealing even with the major ones where you say, well, there’s at least two, we can find common ground there. But then you actually define do you believe in real presence? And then what do you mean by real presence? Right? And so when you actually even find the commonality, it’s not so common anymore. And that’s the problem because when I was a Baptist pastor, we didn’t use the word sacrament that was too Catholic. And so we would say, these are the Lord’s ordinances. These are things that we practice in relation to, we call it the Lord’s Supper,
Communion,
And then baptism. And then you get into baptism. Well, who do you baptize and what does baptism mean? Well, it’s just a symbol. It doesn’t do anything spiritual to the person. So you can all believe in baptism, but what you believe it’s doing is not the same. So functionally, theologically, you can affirm those things by term but mean them differently in both categories. And that’s the issue here is that I think at the time of the Protestant Reformation, we start seeing a devalue and a reductionist movement toward the sacraments, which loses its knowledge and its purpose and its function. And so we start seeing them brought down. Then you have Zwingli brings it in. It’s like, well, these are all the symbols to the point where Luther even had to get in and say you’re wrong. But see, that’s the downhill spiral is when you already diminished the number. Now you’ve left it all up for debate. And I know that’s where the Council of Trent came in and affirmed it, not because they didn’t believe it before that, but they had to confirm it because everybody else was debating. Now how many and which ones?
Trent:
It’s an interesting point you make about the idea. You might say, oh, well, Catholics and Protestants, we at least agree there are two sacraments. But if you define a sacrament as a way of being able to transmit sanctifying grace, for example, if you’re defining it what it actually does to the soul, the idea that baptism, for example, it actually cleanses us of original sin, it spiritually regenerates the person. Well, then there’s many Protestants, not all, but there are many Protestants. It’s only an ordinance. It’s just a covenant sign. So they don’t even really, so it’s interesting for those Protestants, I wonder, I might say to them, you really don’t believe in any sacraments. You believe in two ordinances. And if that’s the case, why don’t you just have more ordinances? Why wouldn’t you also just anoint with oil for confirmation or anoint your pasture anoints the sick? It’s clearly described in James chapter five that the elders of the church anoint people as sick. It’s so interesting that they’ll say, oh, there’s only two sacraments. So they treat them as ordinances, not sacraments. But then they’re just so hesitant to have any of these other aspects of the Christian life described in scripture as being ordinance is proper to the church.
Stephen:
Well, this is part of the radical reformation, right? So if Rome does it, it’s wrong. We’ve got to do the exact opposite. And if it even hints or smells or looks like anything that could be Roman, well then we have to remove it because that makes us look Catholic. And I’m just telling you from personal experience, I was trained in these institutions. I was pastoring. I had that belief myself. So if it has any superpowers sounding to it, then it’s wrong. We can’t have that. But yet these same Protestants believe that Jesus came and turned water to wine. They believe that God poured water out of a rock, that he stuck a tree stump in the water and turned bitter water to sweet, all of those things. But we can’t believe that God is taking something common and doing something divine and bringing unity between the divine and the common together and bringing grace through those means. We believe that in every other place in the scripture until it comes to our daily practice today with communion, their term, communion or baptism, it’s problematic because it’s inconsistent theology and how they believe God met his people in the Old Testament, how Jesus performed those kinds of things in the New Testament, but he’s not doing it today. To me, it was an inconsistent thing.
Trent:
I think part of it may stem. Do you think part of it stems from the fact that among these more low church Protestants that there is just a desire for, and the faith is reduced to invisible realities? There’s invisible regeneration, invisible election. What the church is, is the invisible bond between baptized Christians. There isn’t a visible, hierarchical, authoritative church. So the idea is that this more radical reformation thinks what authentic Christianity is, is that it’s basically just an invisible reality,
Stephen:
Which is ironic because it’s a mystic view, which in a result, they’re trying to be anti mystic,
But
Their view is mystic in that anything visible is a problem or can become an idol, or it’s something that, I had a guy just recently tell me, a Baptist pastor, he is like, well, you guys do. He’s like, you do the Lord’s sper every Sunday. He is like, doesn’t it lose its power? It’s like, no, but that’s the way they think. It’s like, well, if you do something too many times, then it becomes of no value yet. It’s like, do you not have the same order of service every week? Do you not take up offering every week? Do you not preach a sermon at the same time every week? Do you not have the same amount of hymn sung every week? It’s an inconsistent thing because the root of the issue is not these things. It’s there’s a greater agenda that we’re not going to be this, and if it looks like this, then we’re not going to practice it. Now at every heart of these Baptists, and the reason I can say this, I was one and I was in these institutions, I’ve taught in these institutions as a professor, and their main issue is this. Their main issue is this because it comes up all the time. That sounds Catholic.
And if it sounds Catholic, so when I started becoming an Anglican, I had people say, well, you’re Catholic. It’s like, no, I’m an Anglican. No, that’s Catholic. No, I’m an Anglican Anglicans practice this too. Not everything that has this look is Catholic. It can be Anglican, Lutheran or Orthodox. So it’s interesting, at the very root of these very low church Protestants, their agenda is not about let’s be biblically and historically sound. It’s let’s be everything that they’re not. And that, to me, it’s scary because I was entrapped in that. And then when I studied church history for the first time that nobody else taught, it shattered me. My world was shattered. People out there. And just like I went through trauma because I felt lied to, I felt manipulated. I felt like hidden information was there. I don’t think people intentionally did it. I think a lot of it was ignorance,
But
My whole world changed and I struggled for two years. I went into silence on a lot of things because I didn’t know who I was. It’s like, and then I took Eucharist for the first time with priests who were under succession, which I’m sure could be debated, but it changed my life. It changed my wife’s life. We’ve never been the same. We walked away from that altar. Different people.
Trent:
Yeah, because you’re trying to approach that reality. It’s so interesting what you say because it’s like there’s the hip protestants who want to do things like celebrate Lent or put ashes on their forehead on Ash Wednesday, and there’ll be other Protestants, friends of theirs who will just be aghast at that, even though there’s absolutely nothing you could get out of scripture to condemn something like that. And then if you say, well, I’m not condemning, I’m just saying it’s not in scripture, and I’m going to say, okay, so if you’re only going to do what is described in scripture, well, scripture doesn’t describe the weekly meetings that referencing weekly gathering and all the things that you do preaching a sermon. And it doesn’t describe that as being normative for the church. That’s fascinating. We say about the Lord’s supper, it’s like, well, we only do it a few times a year, so it’s special. Okay, why don’t you just have church once on Eastern, once on Christmas? They don’t do that.
Stephen:
Well, there are some that do, but
Oh, goodness.
But the interesting part about what you said earlier, I think is very important. You mentioned the canon as an argument. I use sacrament the same way because what we’re finding now is that Anglican churches are now, there’s a push for a low Anglican church, particularly coming from Australia, New Zealand, but now it’s hitting the US and it’s actually discouraging because this has become a very big point of contention because you’re either reformed Anglican or you are Anglo-Catholic.
And
It’s actually creating a, I think an unhealthy debate right now. But with that comes how many sacraments there are, because any Anglo Catholic holds the seven. And then the debate is, well, the 39 articles. And so both sides think the 39 articles agree with them. And what I’ve come to find, and I was like, you know what? I need to find that out because I was taught when I first came to Anglicanism, there’s only two and the 39 articles are expressing that in Article 25. But then I actually went through and read the homilies homily book one, book two with Kramer and John Jewel
And Jewel and his book two. I was like, if you don’t mind, I’ll read just this section. There’s actually a commentary that came in 1563 of this says, but in a general it talks about there’s categories. So you’ve got gospel, obviously the Eucharist and baptism and the others are ecclesiastical, so they’re practices for the church. But the commentary in 1563 says, but in a general acceptance of the name of a sacrament may be attributed to anything whereby a holy thing is signified. So it takes a moment with John Jewel, I think John Jewel wrote this section and he says, there’s two that are actually directly commanded by the Lord and that are salvific in the sense of that it has a forgiveness of sins to it. And then it explains how penance does too, but it works a little differently. But then it pauses and gives a commentary and says, it is acceptable to call anything with a signified holy item as a sacrament.
And so I read that. I was like, so John Jewel, and then you get into Hooker who was a disciple of John Jewel. Clearly Hooker had no problem with there being seven. He just wanted to always emphasize categories between seven being two, gospel, five ecclesiastical, and that they don’t have the same equality. Now there’s room for debate there between even Anglicans and Catholics, but they were never denying the other five. They just wanted to emphasize these were commissioned directly by the Lord. They have the forgiveness of sins in mind, and these are put into the church to aid the church in its everyday practices. So they saw ’em as two separate categories, but they never denied seven the way that some Anglicans are now saying, oh, no, no, no, no, they’re ... Read more on Catholic.com