How many sacraments?

“There have, of course, been both few and many sacraments identified in the history of Christian thought. Neither the scholastic seven nor the Reformation two should limit our perspectives. Writers of our own time have rightly argued that sacramental action diversifies, on the one hand, into many acts, and concentrates, on the other, into the one act of encountering Christ. Around the central few are grouped, quite properly, acts of the church, some of them acts of natural religion like marrying and burying, which in the context of the Gospel fellowship take on a sacramental character as proclamtations of Christ’s presence in the church. In identifying here four practices of worship, more or less universally maintained, which go back to apostolic use and formally place the Christ-event at the core of the community’s identity, we do not mean the figure to be hard and fast. This four is no more final than the four moments of the Christ-event or the four marks of the church’s identity. It is a heuristic four, which helps us trace the correspondence of the church’s formal acts and observances to the shape of the Christ-event. Bpatism and eucharist proclaim, uncontroversially, the Advent of Christ and his Passion. To mention the keeping of the Lord’s Day as a celebration of the resurrection in this context will appear a novelty, but only because the term ‘sacrament’ has usually been restricted to solemn acts, and excluded solemn observances, for no very good reason. The laying on of hands (which has appeared in sacramental tradition in at least three guises) belongs inseperably with the prophetic identification of vocation, with prayer and with the gift of Pentecost.”

(Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the roots of political theology (Cambridge, CUP, 1996)   p173)