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It seems to me that one of the greatest dangers which now threaten Evangelical Christianity is the strange and almost inexplicable recrudescence of Sacramentarianism in this generation to which those Christian communities are contributing, however reluctantly and unconsciously, who say there is something more than commemorative symbols in the bread and wine of the Lord's table.
About the Zwinglian 'Sacramentarianism' Luther wrote at that time, 'God will mercifully do away with this scandal, so that it may not, like that of Munster, have to be done away with by force. Butzer, however, did not allow himself to be deterred or wearied.
But those who cannot understand sacramentarianism may dismiss it far too easily, for though there be here danger of a mechanical formulism, the sacraments themselves may become part of a spiritual discipline through which the lives of men and women are so profoundly changed as in the most clear case of conversion, manifesting often a spiritual beauty not to be found in any other conception of Christian discipleship.
Sacramentarianism and sacerdotalism had not then begun to afflict the Church of India. There were giants in those days, in Bengal, worthy of Carey and of the one work in which all were the servants of one Master. Let us look a little more closely at Henry Martyn's Pagoda.
But in the face of a cultivated England laughing at your creed of Jesus, the Christ, the Lord; and in the face of a strange and puerile recrudescence of sacerdotalism and sacramentarianism, which shoves a priest and a rite into the place where Christ should stand, it becomes us Nonconformists who believe that we know a more excellent way to stand shoulder to shoulder, and show that the unities that bind us are far more than the diversities that separate.
The precise form of error is clearly that she looked on the physical contact with the material garment as the vehicle of healing the very same thing which we find ever since running through the whole history of the Church, e.g. the exaltation of externals, rites, ordinances, sacraments, etc. Take two or three phases of it You get it formularised into a system in sacramentarianism.
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