So far in this series we have surveyed some significant voices in the interpretation of the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF), and we have considered one of the more important documents in its background, the Scots Confession. Now it remains to consider what the Confession says about the nature of the sacraments and baptism in particular.

The Confession on Sacraments as Signs

The first thing the Confession says about sacraments is that they are signs and seals. If we understand what, by sign and by seal, the divines intended and what we mean in receiving the Confession, much of the question about what we confess about baptism is resolved in principle.

We need not speculate about what the divines intended by signs and seals. They tell us explicitly in 27.2: “There is, in every sacrament, a spiritual relation, or sacramental union, between the sign and the thing signified: whence it comes to pass, that the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other” (emphasis added). This is how we understand, for example, 1 Peter 3:21: “Baptism, which is an antitype, now saves you, not the removal of dirt from the skin but the pledge of a good conscience toward God through the resurrection of Jesus Christ” (author’s translation). Peter is making an analogy between Christ’s ministry by the Holy Spirit, through Noah and his ministry through the Spirit, through the apostles and other ministers. He explained that “eight souls were saved through the water” (1 Pet 3:20, author’s translation). The water did not save anyone. Indeed, the purpose of the water was to execute judgment on the unbelieving world “that then was” (2 Pet 3:6 AV). The text does not say, as many take it, that the Lord delivered his church through the instrument of the water or by means thereof. No, the Lord graciously delivered his little church in the midst of the flood, from the flood. He saved them by means of the ark, a type of Christ, who would undergo the flood of judgment on the cross. Peter signals that it was not the water by qualifying what he intended: “not the removal of dirt from the skin but the pledge of a good conscience.” The water of baptism does not give us a good conscience. The gospel believed gives us a good conscience, and this is what Noah had. Again, this is not supposition. Scripture tells us explicitly how Noah was saved: “By faith (Πίστει) Noah, after he was warned about what was not yet seen and motivated by reverence, built an ark to deliver his family, through which he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes according to faith [κατὰ πίστιν]” (Heb 11:7, author’s translation). The instrument of Noah’s salvation, the source of his holy reverence and obedience, was faith. The object of his faith was Christ, who is the object of our faith also. The water was an “antitype”—that is, a symbol of something else. The flood itself was only a symbol.

This is what the Confession means when it says that there is a “spiritual relation” or a “sacramental union” between the sacramental sign and the thing signified. Augustine clarified this in his De doctrina christiana, on which he labored intermittently for about thirty years (c. AD 396–c. 427). In book 1.2 he said, “All teaching is either about things or signs; but things are learned about through signs.”¹ It is a basic tenet of Christianity to be able to distinguish between signs, which are not the thing signified, and the thing to which the sign refers.

When I was a boy, Mom and Dad would load us children into our giant Plymouth station wagon for a road trip from Omaha to southwest Kansas, and we learned to look for signs that we were getting close to Grandma and Grandpa’s farm. When we got to Dodge City, we knew that we were closer. There were the gasworks along the highway and the co-op in the distance. Those were signs, but they were not the destination. The mound in southwest Topeka, where folks first spotted the tornado in 1966, was not Papa and Grandma’s house, but it was a sign we were close.

Baptismal water, bread, and wine are not literally the things they signify. Were that true—if water, bread, and wine became (e.g., by transubstantiation) what they signify—they would no longer be signs. They would be the things signified, but according to the Confession, the elements do not become what they signify. The relation is not literal but sacramental—that is, figurative. The “names and effects” of baptism and the Supper are figuratively attributed to the signs, but that only indicates the closeness of the sign and seal to the things signified and promised. It does not make the signs into the things signified and promised.

The Confession tells us what they actually do:

• “represent Christ and His benefits”;
• “confirm our interest in him”;
• “put a visible difference between those that belong unto the Church and the rest of the world”;
• “engage them [recipients of the sacraments] to the service of God, in Christ, according to his Word” (WCF 27.1).

We should notice what the Confession does not say: confer necessarily to every recipient all the benefits signified by the sacrament.

In the first part of this essay, we observed that there is a school of thought that flatly claims the Confession means to teach that baptism necessarily regenerates recipients, and there is a school that is ambiguous that seems to suggest the possibility of baptismal regeneration but denies an ex opere view of baptism. This Latin phrase is associated most closely with the Roman Catholic view of baptism. The full expression is ex opere operato. It means, translated literally, “by the working it is worked.”²

Anyone who says that baptism necessarily confers on every recipient what it signifies is teaching an ex opere view of baptism. In contrast, the Confession says, “The grace which is exhibited in or by the sacraments rightly used, is not conferred by any power in them” (27.3).³

The Confession on Baptism

Whatever the Confession says about holy baptism or the Lord’s Supper cannot and does not contradict the general definition of a sacrament. Baptism is a subset, or a species, of sacrament. Thus, without even reading chapter 28 of the Confession, we can infer what its view of baptism.

• Baptism is a sign and not the thing signified (e.g., regeneration).
• Baptism represents Christ and his benefits but is not Christ and his benefits.
• Baptism confirms our interest in him but does not create that interest.
• Baptism puts a visible difference between those who belong to the church and the rest of the world.
• Baptism engages recipients of the sacraments to the service of God, in Christ, according to his Word.

There is a sacramental relation between the sign of baptism and the things signified by baptism.

We can test this approach by looking at what chapter 28 says about the nature and efficacy of baptism. In 28.1 baptism is said to be a “sacrament of the New Testament” instituted by Christ himself (thus, it is a dominical sacrament and not an ecclesiastical sacrament fabricated by the church). It is a “sign and seal of the covenant of grace.” As a sign it signifies, it points, and as a seal, it guarantees to the believer that what is received by the believer really is true; that by divine favor alone, the believer has been brought to new life, given true faith, and through faith granted justification, union with Christ, adoption, and sanctification. (See Westminster Shorter Catechism 30: “How doth the Spirit apply to us the redemption purchased by Christ? The Spirit applieth to us the redemption purchased by Christ, by working faith in us and thereby uniting us to Christ in our effectual calling.”)

Does baptism work by its working (ex opere)? The Confession says no. Rather, “grace and salvation are not so inseparably annexed unto it, as that no person can be regenerated, or saved, without it or, that all that are baptized are undoubtedly regenerated.” It is possible that someone might be shipwrecked and, in the mysterious providence of God, find himself with a Bible. The Spirit might use that reading of Scripture to bring him to new life and true faith even in the absence of a minister to administer baptism.

In WCF 28.5 the Confession denies the Roman Catholic doctrine that the sacraments necessarily grant what they signify. A person might be baptized as an infant and not come to faith for fifteen years or fifty. Tragically, it might be that person never comes to faith. Of course, we baptize the children of believers in the hope and expectation that our covenant God will bless the use of the signs and seals of the covenant of grace and bring our children to new life and true faith.

Thus, the Confession says in 28.6, “The efficacy of Baptism is not tied to that moment of time wherein it is administered.” Our sovereign God is free to bring his elect to new life and true faith in his own good time, and yet the sign is not empty or worthless. “The grace promised is not only offered, but really exhibited, and conferred” by the Holy Spirit upon those to whom it belongs “according to the counsel of God’s own will, in His appointed time.” I doubt the claim that “to exhibit” actually means “to confer.” First, in 28.6 “exhibited” and “conferred” are both used but not as synonyms. According to the Confession, in baptism, grace is exhibited and conferred, not “conveyed and conferred.” Our English verb “to exhibit” was a transliteration of the Latin verb exhibere, which was familiar to Reformed theologians in the context debates over the nature of the Lord’s Supper, where it was used to signal something other than “confer.”⁴ In other words, baptism is neither magic (sacerdotalism or priestly religion) nor an empty sign. It is a rich sign and seal to believers that all that has been promised is theirs in Christ by divine favor through faith alone. The efficacy of baptism is not contingent on the minister or the power inherent in the sacrament but relies entirely on the divine decree. The child of believers who is baptized as an infant, who comes to faith as a teen, is, in the providence of God, the fulfillment of the covenant promise made in baptism. By grace alone, through faith alone, that teen now has what was signified in baptism; and now, through faith, baptism seals to that young believer all the promises of the gospel.

Conclusion

Baptism is a wonderful and rich sign and a powerful seal of the promises of God to those who believe. Sacerdotalists will never be satisfied with anything less than turning the sign into the thing signified, and those with an impoverished view of the sacraments will fear that we are attributing too much to them. We are not. They are good news sacraments—that is, good news signs and good news seals, the good news made visible. They do what the good news does: announce to all who believe that Jesus has identified them with his death, washed them, granted them new life, true faith, and through faith complete salvation from the wrath to come and righteousness before God.

Notes

1. Augustine, Teaching Christianity (De doctrina christiana), trans. Edmund Hill, in The Works of St Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (New City Press, 1996), 110.
2. See, e.g., The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd edition (Libraria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), §1116: “Sacraments are ‘powers that come forth’ from the Body of Christ, which is ever-living and life-giving. They are actions of the Holy Spirit at work in his Body, the Church. They are ‘the masterworks of God’ in the new and everlasting covenant.” §1128: “This is the meaning of the Church’s affirmation that the sacraments act ex opere operato (literally: “by the very fact of the action’s being performed”), i.e., by virtue of the saving work of Christ, accomplished once for all. It follows that “the sacrament is not wrought by the righteousness of either the celebrant or the recipient, but by the power of God. From the moment that a sacrament is celebrated in accordance with the intention of the Church, the power of Christ and his Spirit acts in and through it, independently of the personal holiness of the minister. Nevertheless, the fruits of the sacraments also depend on the disposition of the one who receives them.”
3. We agree with Rome that the efficacy of the sacraments does not “depend upon the piety or intention of him that doth administer it” (WCF 27.3).
4. See, e.g., Leo F. Stelten, Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Latin (Hendrickson, 1995), under “exhibeo,” which gives the following glosses: “exhibit, show, display, present; return; deliver, offer; entertain; promise.” In the case of Philipp Melanchthon’s 1541 revision of the Augsburg Confession, in art. 10, the 1530 edition (Augustana Invariata) used the expression “vere adsint” (truly present) to describe the nature of the relations between Christ’s body and blood to the elements of the Supper. Concordia Triglotta: Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Concordia, 1917), 46. In his 1541 revision (Augustana Invariata), art. 10 says “vere exhibeantur,” which can be translated as “truly exhibited” or “truly offered,” but Melanchthon used exhibeo to say something distinct from “present.” It certainly did not mean “to confer.” Philip Schaff and David Schaff, eds., The Creeds of Christendom (repr., Baker Books, 1983), 3.13n3.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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