In an attempt to develop an ethos of “real”, modern Christianity, churches sometimes wipe away liturgy and relegate communion to a once-a-month endeavour. But there’s a real danger that, far from improving the culture of a church, it actually creates division.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great Lutheran theologian, pastor and opponent of Nazism, suggested in his book The Cost of Discipleship that sacraments help church unity.

He warned of “the natural inclination to pose and discuss problems, which, once they flare up, only distract men’s minds from the pure and simple truth of the gospel”.

Peter J. Thuesen, a religious studies prof at Indiana University, suggests the problem comes down to a particular type of Reformation thinking. Roger Olson summarises his view thus:

[Swiss theologian Ulrich] Zwingli took the mystery out of Christianity by rejecting sacramentalism. That is what led to the usually sterile, dogmatic debates over predestination and the Bible (among other things) that ensued. His argument seems to be that insofar as Christianity retains a strong sense of mystery these kinds of debates over doctrine are at least not as volatile.

Conservative evangelicals tend to love sermons – John Stott famously wrote a book titled I Believe in Preaching – while charismatics have often extended their length to perhaps an hour long.

They see the sermon as by far the most important part of a service.

But, in fact, I’d suggest that that liturgy and sacraments are inherently evangelical and even more important than sermons for promoting orthodoxy.

We can have an iffy sermon, or one that’s pitched at too simple a level, but (Anglican) liturgy and the sacraments of baptism and communion have stood the test of time.

For Bonhoeffer, the sacraments have a special place.

He preferred that the “emergence of partisanship” was avoided altogether, seeing sacraments as unifying forces within Christian communities.

He said that while preaching is aimed at both Christians and non-Christians, the sacraments “belong exclusively to the Church. Hence the congregation is in a true sense a baptismal and eucharistic congregation, and only secondarily a preaching congregation”.

The significance of Bonhoeffer’s statement is that baptism and the eucharist both draw Christians back to the idea of what Jesus accomplished on the cross, and can be seen as part of Bonhoeffer’s relentless focus on the core message rather than theological side issues.

Preachers can go off on hobby horses – confidently proclaiming contentious views on predestination or headship or the millennium – but it’s the sacraments and liturgy that bring the congregation back to the core of Christianity.

Photo from here licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.