Holy Things, and the Counting of Them

Ask how many sacraments there are and you will get two answers, both given confidently, and a third from anyone who thinks the word itself is the problem. Rome and the East count seven. Most Protestants count two and often prefer to call them ordinances. This letter is about why the counts differ, where the word came from, and why this site does not think the count is ours to fix.

The word is not in the Bible

Sacrament is Latin. Sacramentum meant a pledge deposited in a temple during a lawsuit, and then, more commonly, the oath a Roman soldier swore to his commander. It is not a translation of anything; it is a Latin word pressed into service to carry a Greek one.

The Greek word is mysterion, mystery. And in the New Testament that word almost never means a rite. It means something God kept hidden and has now made known. "Now to him that is of power to stablish you according to my gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began," (Romans 16:25). "Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints:" (Colossians 1:26) and then, in the next breath, what the mystery turns out to be: "To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory:" (Colossians 1:27). Paul calls the gospel itself “the mystery of godliness” and then recites it, God manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, received up into glory (1 Timothy 3:16). Christ tells the disciples it is given to them to know “the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 13:11). And Paul calls himself and his fellow workers “stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Corinthians 4:1).

So the Greek word points at a revealed secret, and the Latin word points at an oath. They are not the same idea, and the shift from one to the other is where a good deal of the argument actually lives.

How marriage came to be counted

The clearest example is one verse. Paul quotes Genesis, that the two shall be one flesh, and then says: "This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church." (Ephesians 5:32)

The Greek there is mysterion. The Latin Bible rendered it sacramentum hoc magnum est, this is a great sacrament. Once the verse read that way in the West, marriage was a sacrament in the plainest sense of the text, and the reasoning that eventually produced a fixed list of seven had a starting point in Scripture that the Greek does not obviously give it.

That is not a charge of dishonesty against anyone. Translators render a word with the nearest word they have, and sacramentum was the nearest word Latin had. But it is a translation choice, made once, that a great deal was later built on, and a reader should know it was made.

The counts, and how unsettled they were

Seven was not fixed early. It hardens in the West in the twelfth century, and is defined at Trent in the sixteenth. The Eastern churches also speak of seven, though with less interest in the number as a boundary and a longer tradition of calling many things mysteries.

And the Protestant count was not settled either, which is easy to forget from this distance. Bellarmine, writing against the Reformers and quoting them closely, records that in a single book Luther said there is only one sacrament if we speak according to the use of Scripture; that the seven must be denied and three kept, baptism, the bread, and penance; that strictly speaking there are two, baptism and the bread; and, in the chapter on confirmation, that he does not condemn the seven but denies they can be proved from the Scriptures. Four positions, one book. (Bellarmine, On the Sacraments II.23, in our own translation.)

We report that not to score a point off Luther, who was working out in public something the church had taken a thousand years to formalise, but because it shows how recently and how unevenly the counting hardened on both sides.

What Scripture actually gives us

Two things Christ plainly commanded and gave, with words attached: baptism, and the bread and the cup. Both are treated in their own letters, Baptism in the Early Church and The Lord’s Table.

Beyond those, Scripture is full of holy things that it never numbers: marriage, the laying on of hands, the anointing of the sick with prayer, the confession of sin to one another, the setting apart of men for service. Each of those is commanded or commended somewhere. None of them comes with a count, and no writer in the New Testament shows the least interest in producing one.

Watch the word change hands

This page has said that sacrament is not a Bible word. That is worth slowing down for, because the whole argument about counting sits on top of it, and the steps are easy to follow once they are laid out.

Step one. What Paul actually wrote. He quotes Genesis on marriage, that "they two shall be one flesh" (Ephesians 5:31), and then says: "This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church" (Ephesians 5:32).

Step two. The word is mystērion, and Paul uses it everywhere. "Great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh" (1 Timothy 3:16). "This mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians 1:27). "Stewards of the mysteries of God" (1 Corinthians 4:1). It means something hidden that God has now disclosed. It is not a technical term for a rite, and it never numbers anything.

Step three. Latin had no good equivalent. The word the translators reached for was sacramentum, which in ordinary Latin meant a soldier's oath of enlistment, or money deposited with a court to bind a lawsuit. So Ephesians 5:32BH arrived in Latin as sacramentum hoc magnum est. Marriage is a great sacramentum. That is how the word entered Christian vocabulary: as a translation choice, not as a definition.

Step four. Here is a man doing it. Tertullian, around AD 200, arguing against heretics who despised the physical creation, writes: "it is enough for me that the works of the Creator are great mysteries [magna sacramenta] in the estimation of the apostle, although they are so vilely esteemed by the heretics. 'But I am speaking,' says he, 'of Christ and the Church.' This he says in explanation of the mystery, not for its disruption."

He is quoting Ephesians 5:32BH, and sacramenta is simply his Latin for Paul's Greek. Roughly a thousand years before anyone settles on seven, and about thirteen hundred before anyone insists on two.

What follows from it. The word arrived carrying a translation problem, not a number. And notice what the earliest men were using it to defend: not a list, but the claim that God works through physical things at all, water and bread and an ordinary marriage, against people who said matter was beneath Him. Irenaeus quotes the same verse while dismantling a Gnostic system that had made "this is a great mystery" mean something else entirely.

Deciding how many such things there are is a later question, and a smaller one than the fight the word was born in.

Why we do not fix the count

Because the New Testament does not, and because the argument over the number has done real damage while settling nothing. A church that counts two and one that counts seven still baptize, still break bread, still marry, still lay on hands, still anoint the sick. The practices are held in common far more than the arithmetic is.

What we will say is what Scripture says. These are things the Lord commanded and gave. They are not empty and they are not automatic. And marriage is a holy thing God made and Christ honored, whether or not anyone numbers it.

Two cautions, and they apply to both sides. Calling something a sacrament does not make it one, and refusing the word does not make the thing an empty sign. The Lord’s Table is more than a memorial whatever a church calls it, and baptism is God’s appointed way whatever the label on the shelf.

Where this lands

The word sacrament is a Latin loan carrying a Greek word for a revealed mystery, and the Greek word in Scripture usually means the gospel itself, not a rite. The count of seven hardened late in the West, and the Protestant count was unsettled enough that Luther gave four answers in one book. We hold the two Christ commanded, we honor the other holy things Scripture names without numbering them, and we leave the arithmetic to the people who want it. If that looks like indecision, read article 13: where Scripture plainly says a thing we say it and stand there, and where it does not, we would rather say so than invent a number.

Related: Words That Carry the Freight (this letter's word, mystērion and sacramentum, with seven others), Baptism in the Early Church, The Lord’s Table, Marriage, The One Word, Over and Over, What the Word Says, and What We Believe It Means. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of Christ are marked in purple. Bellarmine quoted from our own translation of De Controversiis, in the site library.