I say it’s time we added a fifty-first state
to America. My pick is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Let’s suppose that I feel so strongly about this that I decide it should happen,
design some procedure for granting statehood,
and even publicly declare it to be the case that Yooperland is the 51st state.
Why wouldn’t that work? And what does this have to do with the institution of the sacraments?
In this video,
we’re looking at the question of who can institute the sacraments and how that happens.
Let’s go back to the Yooperland scenario. I say that the Upper Peninsula should be its own state
and I’ve written up a procedure for that. Well, fine, but do I have the power, the authority to
make that a reality? No! And since I don’t have that power, nothing changes, nothing happens.
The argument at work here is the same sort of argument St. Thomas Aquinas uses in the Summa
Theologiae when he takes the question: Whether the sacraments are instituted by God alone?
Here’s Aquinas’s three-step argument:
The institutor of anything is he who gives it strength and power.
But the power of a sacrament is from God alone.
Therefore, God alone can institute a sacrament.
Let’s take that middle point: what is the power of a sacrament,
and why would it be the case that such power can come only from God?
As Aquinas says in the Summa, the sacraments aren’t just signs; they are signs that cause
grace. And they cause grace because they are instruments that God has chosen to use.
To explain what he means by “grace”, Aquinas says, “grace is nothing else than a participated
likeness of the Divine Nature, according to 2 Pet. 1:4: He has granted to us his precious and
very great promises, that through these you may . . . become partakers of the divine nature.”
Now, becoming a partaker of the divine nature, becoming a partaker in the eternal,
personal communion of knowledge and love that is God . . . that’s a rock too high for anyone to
reach on his own. But God, in his great love for us, has reached down and lifted us up to himself.
And he does this through the sacraments. This is why the sacraments are instruments.
God is always the ultimate cause of grace, and God has bound himself to the sacraments so that they
cause grace. So, while God is the principal cause of grace, the sacraments are instrumental causes,
instrumental causes God has designed to make us partakers in his own glorious nature.
Since the sacraments make us partakers of the divine nature, and since only God has the power
to make someone a partaker of the divine nature, the power of a sacrament is from God alone.
Understanding this is key to seeing why it is that only God can institute a sacrament.
To review the argument: the sacraments cause grace. Grace makes us partakers of
the divine nature. But only God can make us partakers of the divine nature. Therefore,
only God can institute a sacrament.
To see how God institutes the sacraments, we look to Our Lord Jesus Christ,
true God and true man. In instituting the sacraments, God used another instrument:
the humanity of Jesus Christ. It may sound odd to hear this language of Christ’s humanity being
an instrument of his divinity. We’ve got other videos that explain this.
In light of the mystery of the Incarnation, we can say that the humanity of Jesus Christ
is like an instrument joined to the Person of the Word. An instrument shares in what a
worker does with it like a saw shares in the work of a carpenter making a bench.
In the Incarnation, the Word joins a human nature to himself as an instrument—The Word was made
flesh. So when Our Lord acts in his human nature it is the Eternal Word himself—God—who is acting
in person; so what the Incarnate Son does in his humanity is done with divine power and authority.
This is the official teaching of the Catholic Church: God instituted the seven sacraments of
the New Covenant, working through the sacred humanity of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word.
For example, after his resurrection, Our Lord appears to the apostles, breathes on them,
and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven;
if you retain the sins of any, they are retained”. Here we see a moment in the
institution of the sacrament of confession, not in all its parts but in its essence.
It’s true that there is not a Scripture passage
for every sacrament’s institution where the specifics of each sacrament are laid out.
Considering this point, St. Thomas says that “though [the
things essential to each sacrament] are not all handed down by the Scriptures,
yet the Church holds them from the . . . tradition of the apostles,
according to the saying of the Apostle (1 Cor. 11:34): The rest I will set in order when I come.”
Scripture itself testifies that it does not contain every detail
about the revelation the apostles received from the Lord and passed on to the Church.
So, when Jesus instituted each sacrament, did he institute everything about a sacrament,
not just the essence but every detail involved? It seems reasonable to say that Christ instituted
the fundamental essence of each sacrament and the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit,
assisted in developing the specific details associated with each sacrament.
We might call Christ’s action here “General institution”:
each sacrament was instituted immediately by Christ in its essence and its general
structure, and the Church was sometimes involved for certain specific details.
Again, Christ institutes whatever is essential to a sacrament. There are, however,
elements involved with the celebration of a sacrament that are non-essential,
and can therefore be instituted and changed by someone other than
Christ. These elements don’t touch upon the essence of the sacrament.
So, if someone were to ask if the Church were able to change the sacraments, we could answer
that the Church could introduce some changes, for example, the specific words used for certain
sacraments like the anointing of the sick, or the Eucharist, or that the Church could change her
instructions for what color vestments the priest wears at Mass, but—again—these changes could
only happen within certain parameters such that it doesn’t affect the essence of what God instituted.
So, to recap: only God has the power and authority to institute the sacraments, which make us
partakers of the divine nature. God acted through the sacred humanity of Our Lord Jesus Christ to
institute the sacraments, Christ handed on what is essential in each sacrament to his apostles,
who in turn handed it on to us in the Church. In all of this, Christ Jesus remains at work in his
Church, working through the sacraments to draw us further into the mystery of his own divine life.
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