Word: sacramentalism
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Theologically speaking, the Protestant Episcopal Church has always been a "closed Communion" faith, in contrast to the Disciples of Christ, to which Johnson belongs, and many other Protestant groups that welcome all baptized Christians to the altar. The Episcopal reasoning is that people should not receive the sacrament together if they do not agree on what it signifies. But observance of the confirmation rubric varies widely from church to church, and two Lambeth Conferences of Anglican Bishops (1920 and 1930) have stated that it does not "necessarily apply." Only about two-thirds of the nation...
...also troubled by the insistence on instant decision for Christ. As a young faculty friend of mine remarked to me at one of the Burr B sessions, "Dr. Graham makes a sacrament out of the decision for Christ." It becomes immediately apparent that there is no other way to religious commitment and any other pilgrimage is unacceptable. By any standards, this is a gross distortion of the nature of Christian commitment...
...insanity" is among the great mysteries and challenges of the Christian tradition-the belief that sex is not only the force by which man perpetuates himself on God's earth but also the symbol of his fall, and that it can be sanctified only in the sacrament of marriage...
...students regard their "gift" as a sacrament and as a means of expressing their faith. They argue that any religious phenomenon approved in the New Testament-St. Paul, in I Corinthians, regards it as a special gift to Christians like prophecy-clearly has a place in the life of the modern church. In practicing glossolalia, the students do not fall into any mystical seizures or trance; instead, onlookers report, they seem fully in control as they mutter or chant sentences that sometimes sound like Hebrew, sometimes like unkempt Swedish. "I don't care what language it is," says...
...retarded girl of about six, an old man with an ugly facial growth-received a blessing as dignified as the setting: 139-year-old St. Stephen's Episcopal Church. "This is no hocus-pocus," said St. Stephen's Rector Alfred Price from the pulpit. "This is a sacrament you are about to receive-the sacrament of healing...