The word “sacrament” comes from the Latin sacramentum, which in the classical period of the language was used in two chief senses: (1) as a legal term to denote the sum of money deposited by two parties to a suit which was forfeited by the loser and appropriated to sacred uses; (2) as a military term to designate the oath of obedience taken by newly enlisted soldiers. Whether referring to an oath of obedience or to something set apart for a sacred purpose, it is evident that sacramentum would readily lend itself to describe such ordinances as Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. In the Greek New Testament, however, there is no word nor even any general idea corresponding to “sacrament,” nor does the earliest history of Christianity afford any trace of the application of the term to certain rites of the church. Pliny (circa 112 AD) describes the Christians of Bithynia as “binding themselves by a sacramentum to commit no kind of crime” (Epistles x.97), but scholars are now pretty generally agreed that Pliny here uses the word in its old Roman sense of an oath or solemn obligation, so that its occurrence in this passage is nothing more than an interesting coincidence.
It is in the writings of Tertullian (end of 2nd and beginning of 3rd century) that we find the first evidence of the adoption of the word as a technical term to designate Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and other rites of the Christian church. This Christian adoption of sacramentum may have been partly occasioned by the evident analogies which the word suggests with Baptism and the Lord’s Supper; but what appears to have chiefly determined its history in this direction was the fact that in the Old Latin versions (as afterward in the Vulgate) it had been employed to translate the Greek μυστήριον, mustḗrion, “a mystery” (e.g. Ephesians 5:32; 1 Timothy 3:16; Revelation 1:20; 17:7)—an association of ideas which was greatly fostered in the early church by the rapidly growing tendency to an assimilation of Christian worship with the mystery-practices of the Greek-Roman world.
Though especially employed to denote Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the name “sacraments” was for long used so loosely and vaguely that it was applied to facts and doctrines of Christianity as well as to its symbolic rites. Augustine’s definition of a sacrament as “the visible form of an invisible grace” so far limited its application. But we see how widely even a definition like this might be stretched when we find Hugo of Victor (12th century) enumerating as many as 30 sacraments that had been recognized in the church. The Council of Trent was more exact when it declared that visible forms are sacraments only when they represent an invisible grace and become its channels, and when it sought further to delimit the sacramental area by reenacting (1547) a decision of the Council of Florence (1439), in which for the first time the authority of the church was given to a suggestion of Peter Lombard (12th century) and other schoolmen that the number of the sacraments should be fixed at seven, namely, Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction, Orders, and Matrimony—a suggestion which was supported by certain fanciful analogies designed to show that seven was a sacred number.
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Author: International Std. Bible Encyclopedia
Keywords: Sacraments, Baptism, Marriage, Communion, Lord's supper, Eucharist, Holy Eucharist, sacramental
Source: James Orr (editor), The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, 5 volume set.
Page indexed by: inWORD Bible Software.