Chapter II. The Ordinances Of The Church.
By the ordinances, we mean those outward rites which Christ has appointed to be administered in his church as visible signs of the saving truth of the gospel. They are signs, in that they vividly express this truth and confirm it to the believer.
In contrast with this characteristically Protestant view, the Romanist regards the ordinances as actually conferring grace and producing holiness. Instead of being the external manifestation of a preceding union with Christ, they are the physical means of constituting and maintaining this union. With the Romanist, in this particular, sacramentalists of every name substantially agree. The Papal Church holds to seven sacraments or ordinances:—ordination, confirmation, matrimony, extreme unction, penance, baptism, and the eucharist. The ordinances prescribed in the N. T., however, are two and only two, viz.:—Baptism and the Lord's Supper.
It will be well to distinguish from one another the three words: symbol, rite, and ordinance. 1. A symbol is the sign, or visible representation, of an invisible truth or idea; as for example, the lion is the symbol of strength and courage, the lamb is the symbol of gentleness, the olive branch of peace, the sceptre of dominion, the wedding ring of marriage, and the flag of country. Symbols may teach great lessons; as Jesus' cursing the barren fig tree taught the doom of unfruitful Judaism, and Jesus' washing of the disciples' feet taught his own coming down from heaven to purify and save, and the humble service required of his followers. 2. A rite is a symbol which is employed with regularity and sacred intent. Symbols became rites when thus used. Examples of authorized rites in the Christian Church are the laying on of hands in ordination, and the giving of the right hand of fellowship. 3. An ordinance is a symbolic rite which sets forth the central truths of the Christian faith, and which is of universal and perpetual obligation. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are rites which have become ordinances by the specific command of Christ and by their inner relation to the essential truths of his kingdom. No ordinance is a sacrament in the Romanist sense of conferring grace; but, as the sacramentum was the oath taken by the Roman soldier to obey his commander even unto death, so Baptism and the Lord's Supper are sacraments, in the sense of vows of allegiance to Christ our Master.
President H. G. Weston has recorded his objections to the observance of the so-called “Christian Year,” in words that we quote, as showing the danger attending the Romanist multiplication of ordinances. “1. The ‘Christian Year’ is not Christian. It makes everything of actions, and nothing of relations. Make a day holy that God has not made holy, and you thereby make all other days unholy. 2. It limits the Christian's view of Christ to the scenes and events of his earthly life. Salvation comes through spiritual relations to a living Lord. The ‘Christian Year’ makes Christ only a memory, and not a living, present, personal power. Life, not death, is the typical word of the N. T. Paul craved, not a knowledge of the fact of the resurrection, but of the power of it. The New Testament records busy themselves most of all with what Christ is doing now. 3. The appointments of the ‘Christian Year’ are not in accord with the N. T. These appointments lack the reality of spiritual life, and are contrary to the essential spirit of Christianity.” We may add that where the “Christian Year” is most generally and rigidly observed, there popular religion is most formal and destitute of spiritual power.
I. Baptism.
Christian Baptism is the immersion of a believer in water, in token of his previous entrance into the communion of Christ's death and resurrection,—or, in other words, in token of his regeneration through union with Christ.