Creeping Sacramentalism

Professor Marcus Barth, son of famed Swiss Theologian Karl Barth and currently associate professor of New Testament at the University of Chicago's Federated Theological Faculty, gave U.S. Protestants something to think about last week.

"In America," he said, "one seems to be caught between the well-meant alternatives of moralism and positive thinking on the one hand and fundamentalism on the other. In Europe the preaching is on a deeper and more dogmatic level than here, but the churches are empty all too often. Here the preaching is close to the people, the churches are full, but the problem is whether the congregation hears anything in the sermon which its members have not already read in their morning newspapers and have already told themselves."

Barth, a minister of the Evangelist Reformed Church, also finds signs of creeping sacramentalism in the U.S. Speaking to ministers at Chicago Theological Seminary, he said: "I am alarmed to see exactly that kind of sacramentalist thinking increasingly adopted here which has done so much harm to the Protestant churches of Europe . . . The present emphasis on the sacraments in U.S. churches tends to glorify the churchgoer more than Christ." Barth cites four examples of sacramentalist tendencies: infant baptism, the tendency to entrust church decisions to officials and committees rather than congregations, Protestant leanings toward the Roman Catholic concept of the church as mediator of grace rather than as witness of grace. Furthermore, "we have largely the wrong idea of the Communion. In Biblical times the Lord's Supper was interpreted as an act by which God shows that he reaches out to the community. Today it seems to be an act in which we draw together against fellow Christians and the world in a ceremony for an exclusive inner circle."

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