Two, three, or seven?

How many ordinances do Seventh-day Adventists observe?

I faced this question recently when I was filling out a survey on our beliefs and practices. (The man who sent the survey is writing a book comparing the different denominations in the United States.)

Off the top of my head, I answered "Two—baptism and Communion." But then I thought of marriage and ordination, both as surely warranted in Scripture as the two I had given, and I began to wonder whether I had given the correct answer—and, if it was correct, on what basis we make a distinction.

My mental perambulations took me first to the personnel involved in these services. While we require those officiating at baptism and Communion to be ordained, we recognize marriages per formed by secular authorities.

But if we make the distinction on the basis of the personnel involved, how can we exclude ordination from our list of ordinances? We, in fact, recognize baptisms performed by non-Adventist ministers. But when ministers of other denominations become Adventists and enter the ministry in our church, we ordain them. Our doing so seems to indicate that we place a higher value on ordination than on baptism. Yet we consider baptism an ordinance and place ordination outside that category.

Next I wondered if the terminology involved might throw some light on the matter. Three terms are commonly used to refer to these practices: rite, sacraments, and ordinances. Rite is broad, and has strong connotations of tradition and humanly originated practices. It does not offer any help in distinguishing between the special services we call ordinances and other traditional services of our church. ¹ And though other Protestants and even Ellen G. White (e.g., The Desire of Ages, pp. 655, 659) use the word sacrament, we have been uncomfortable with this term because of the strong links between it and Catholic theology and practice.

English versions of the Bible use the term with which we are more comfort able, ordinance, to translate the Hebrew word meaning "something prescribed," "decree," or "statute." I speculated that perhaps the defining characteristic of the practices we term ordinances is that we ask all church members to participate in them. To join our church, one must be baptized. And while many Adventists seem to regard Communion as optional, that has not always been the case. In the early years of our church, "absence from quarterly meeting [which included Communion] without report for nine months was ground for dismissal from the church." ²

The ordinances minister to the spiritual life of the believer. While marriage and ordination also minister to believers, they are not universal in scope. But every believer can receive the benefits baptism and Communion offer.

Wanting something more authoritative than top-of-my-head reasoning, however, I did a little reading—which soon convinced me that the Adventist position on the number of ordinances derives from the Reformation. Catholic theology viewed the grace that brings salvation as virtually a substance infused through the sacraments—and only through the sacraments. This saving grace could lie dormant in the person receiving the sacraments—who need not even be a believer—and then could be activated at a later time.

Protestants rejected the view that grace can be infused like a medicine. They understood grace as God's favor, and believed a person could lay hold of it only through faith. They objected to the Catholic view of the sacraments, which suggested that the grace received at the beginning of one's Christian experience was insufficient—that the grace received at baptism had to be supplemented with grace received through confirmation, Communion, penance, and extreme unction. ³

Protestants also objected to the Catholic view of tradition as authoritative.

They believed that "they should return to the clear institution of Christ: baptism and the Lord's Supper," ⁴ that the problem of the number of sacraments could be solved only "from the scriptural account of their institution in the con text of Christ's historical work of redemption." ⁵

They believed as well that grace comes by faith, and faith by hearing the Word of God. Since the ordinances of baptism and Communion are "a biblically sanctioned form of the Word, [they] are, in one sense, necessary; but..'. they... are not the only form of the Word." 6

The Catholic approach led to the sacraments' overshadowing the Word; Protestant theology taught that the Word must authenticate the sacraments, that without the Word, the sacraments were mere meaningless earthly elements. ⁷ The centrality of the altar and the mass in one of these two streams of Christianity and of the pulpit and the preaching of the Word in the other confirms these distinctions.

But we need to remember that the lines between these positions were drawn under extremely polemical conditions.

The issues are not so clear-cut as they may seem. At times, Luther and Melanchthon continued to call absolution a sacrament. ⁸ And, as we have noted, Scripture authorizes marriage and ordination.

Then there is the Seventh-day Adventist approach. Catholics have seven sacraments, Protestants accept two of those seven, and Adventists (and a few others) add to those two a third, unique ordinance: foot washing. More than just the first act of our celebration of the Lord's Supper, authoritative Adventist sources indicate that foot washing is an ordinance in its own right. ⁹

Do we consider it an ordinance because we believe that Scripture indicates that our Lord as certainly instituted this practice as either of the others? Or because we have validated it experientially (the "ordinance of humility")? Or because we reject anything that smacks of "once saved, always saved," and value the renewing and maintaining of our initial experience with the Lord (foot washing as a mini-baptism)? Or all of the above?

I can't yet tell you definitively how many ordinances there are, or what makes a religious rite an ordinance. But working at answering these questions has brought me some new insights into our theology, our practices, and our history. —David C. Jarnes.