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1. I also found this from the Council of Trent, Session VII, Canon I, “If any one saith, that the sacraments of the New Law were not all instituted by Jesus Christ, our Lord; or, that they are more, or less, than seven, to wit, Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction, Order, and Matrimony; or even that any one of these seven is not truly and properly a sacrament; let him be anathema.”

   I’d be really interested to know what you meant when you said that Rome admits that the 5 (what we would call) ecclesiastical sacraments were not instituted by Jesus.

   Reply ↓

   • Josiah:

     Trent, Session 21, chapter 1 (16 July 1562),

     For though Christ the Lord at the last supper instituted and delivered to the Apostles this venerable sacrament under the forms of bread and wine, yet that institution and administration do signify that all the faithful are by an enactment of the Lord to receive under both forms.

     Chapter 2:

     It declares furthermore, that in the dispensation of the sacraments…the Church may, according to circumstances, times and places, determine or change whatever she may judge most expedient for the benefit of those receiving them or for the veneration of the sacraments; and this power has always been hers (emphasis added).

     …Wherefore from the beginning of the Christian religion the use of both forms has not been infrequent, yet since that custom has already very widely changed, holy mother Church, cognizant of her authority in the administration of the sacraments, has induced by just and weighty reasons, approved this custom of communicating under either species and has decreed that it be considered the law, which may not be repudiated for changed at pleasure with the authority of the Church (emphasis added).

     For Rome, the sacraments of the new covenant were instituted by Christ but through the church. She recognizes a distinction between what Christ himself did directly and what the church, she claims, did with the authority he granted to her.

     Roman scholars regularly and freely recognize a distinction between “dominical” (Baptism and the Supper) and “ecclesiastical” sacraments. They must. There is simply no record of Christ instituting the five ecclesiastical sacraments.

     In the 9th century, when Radbertus and Ratramnus were arguing about the nature of the Supper, for all their disagreement, they both agreed that there are only two sacraments. Lombard listed 7 sacraments in the Sentences, which text was approved by the 4th Lateran in 1215 thus giving indirect sanction to the ecclesiastical sacraments. They were listed directly until 1274 at the Second Council of Lyons. It’s not until Trent, however, that Rome became explicit about the 5 ecclesiastical sacraments.

     I walk through some of this evidence here.

     As to popular Romanist apologists, I just don’t waste time with them.

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