K. Different Commitments: Sacramental Framework of Justification
III.
K. Different Commitments: Sacramental Framework of Justification
For Newman, the sacraments have instrumental value. Accordingly, “Justification comes through the Sacraments; is received by faith; consists in God’s inward presence; and lives in obedience.”955 Against the low-church Evangelicals of his day, whom he understood to be denigrating the importance of the sacraments,956 Newman contends that sacramental rites actually inculcate Christian faith.957
By contrast, Vermigli’s locus on justification contains scant attention to the role of the sacraments in mediating justifying grace. He first broaches the subject in proposition one of his Romans locus, in which he confronts the position of his Roman Catholic opponents with regard to the role of ceremonies.958 Martyr finds their position to be inconsistent with the New Testament for the way it ascribes “the forgiveness of sins and bestowing of grace to the sacraments, just as, in the Old Testament, they were attributed to circumcision.”959 “Indeed, we utterly deny that any sacraments bestow grace,” Martyr asserts. They do offer grace, but it is by “signification.”960 “For in sacraments and words, and in the visible signs, the promises of God made through Christ are set before us.”961
Operating with the above conviction, Vermigli repudiates the Roman Catholic doctrine of baptismal regeneration.962 He asserts that as Abraham was justified by faith before receiving the sign of circumcision, the Christian experience of justification is antecedent to the experience of baptism.963 For Vermigli, the sacrament of baptism has no more power to justify than do the virtues of love and hope.964 To insist on the mediation of baptism for justification, according to Peter Martyr, is to teach a position of meritorious works. “So great is the opposition between grace and works,” Martyr concludes, “that Paul says, ‘If of grace then it is not now of works, and if of works, then it is not of grace.’”965
Important differences exist between Newman and Vermigli on the sacraments, differences that are seemingly rooted in their respective backgrounds. In Newman’s case, the denigration of the sacraments, which he ascribed to the Evangelicals of his day, contradicted his articulation of their centrality.966 For Vermigli, after forty-two years as a Catholic priest, the notion of the sacraments functioning as instruments of grace beyond “signification” (i.e., functioning as the efficacious means by which one is enlivened by the Spirit) was tantamount to works righteousness.967