Sign & seal

This morning my PCA pastor gave an exposition and defense of the classic Presbyterian view of the sacraments as efficacious for the elect.

BTW, within certain boundaries of Evangelical orthodoxy, I’m pretty free about where I fellowship. There’s no one-to-one correspondence between what I believe and the church I happen to be attending at the time.

Back to the main point: it occurred to me, in listening to him, that there’s a common confusion over the nature of symbolism and how that cashes out in debate over the sacraments.

To say that what distinguishes a Baptist from a non-Baptist is that a Baptist regards a sacrament as “merely” symbolic whereas a non-Baptist believes there to be something over and above the symbol, is frankly oxymoronic.

In the nature of the case, a symbol entails a relation. A symbol is a symbol “of” something else. It stands for something other than itself.

There is no such thing as a “mere” symbol or a “nude sign.” Even Zwingli would be the first to admit that there is something beyond or behind the symbol itself—to which the symbol is a pointer, to which it corresponds.

So the nature of symbolism, per se, is not what differentiates a Baptist from a non-Baptist. Both sides agree that a sacrament implies a relation between the sign and the significate. Every symbol has its correlative.

The point at issue is not the existence of the relation, but the identity of the relation. The controversy is not whether a sacrament is a symbol “of” something, but whether it “does” something. Is it efficacious? Is it a means of salvation? That’s the bone of contention.