BIBLICAL BLESSINGS TWO DIFFERENT UNIVERSES

 
“Blessing things” is one of those phrases that sits at the intersection of theology, anthropology, and daily habit. [This article was "inspired" by a family member who wanted her children's book bags "blessed" by the priest of an Episcopal church.  We decided to investigate how such a blasphemous practice emerged ed]

It can mean very different things depending on whether you’re standing in a Catholic liturgy with incense in your hand, reading a Puritan tract on “profane superstitions,” or listening to a grandmother whisper a prayer over her grandchildren’s lunch.

At its root, “to bless” comes from the old Latin benedicere—literally, “to speak well of.” In the Bible, blessing isn’t magic dust sprinkled on an object but a declaration of God’s favor, protection, or holiness. When Noah blesses his sons, or when Paul blesses God, it’s not about transferring power into objects but naming reality: God is the giver of life, fruitfulness, and peace.

But over time, Christians (and not only Christians—every culture has its rituals) began applying blessings to things: food, tools, houses, even weapons. This raised debates. Medieval Catholicism made a whole taxonomy of blessings—some for people, some for inanimate objects. The Reformers worried this veered toward superstition, preferring to emphasize that blessing belongs properly to God and His people, not to cups, knives, or rosaries. Baptists and other dissenters often refused object-blessing outright, seeing it as part of “priestcraft.” Yet, even they “blessed meals,” which is really shorthand for blessing God for providing them.

From an anthropological lens, “blessing things” functions as a way of sacralizing the ordinary. When a community blesses a harvest, a marriage bed, or even a smartphone (yes, priests have been asked to do this), it’s expressing: “this belongs under God’s order, not left in chaos.” It’s both comfort and boundary-marking.

Here’s the puzzle worth chewing on: Is blessing an act of transferring holiness, or is it an act of recognizing holiness already given? Old School Baptists like Gilbert Beebe would have thundered that the latter is true—that no human word can pour divine life into dead matter. And yet, human beings seem wired to want to bless their tools, their fields, their bread. It’s the instinct of wanting the ordinary world to shimmer with sacred light.

That opens a fascinating continuation: are blessings best understood as sacramental acts (real conveyance of grace) or as performative speech-acts (naming what God has already ordained)? Both positions carry centuries of history and tension with them.

If we zoom in historically, “blessing things” in the Catholic Church really starts as early as the 2nd–3rd centuries, but it wasn’t systematized until the medieval period.

Early Traces

• 2nd century: The Apostolic Tradition (https://www.stjohnsarlingtonva.org/Customer-Content/saintjohnsarlington/CMS/files/EFM/Apostolic_Tradition_by_Hippolytus.pdf attributed to Hippolytus of Rome, around 215 AD) contains prayers of blessing for oil, cheese, and olives. Already, you see the instinct: give thanks, ask God’s favor, mark the item as fitting for sacred use.

• 4th–5th centuries: After Constantine, bishops start blessing objects tied to worship—church buildings, altars, chalices, and vestments. This fits the era when "Christianity" was moving out of hiding and into public, monumental form.

Medieval Development

• 8th–9th centuries: The Carolingian liturgical books start codifying blessings for all sorts of things: weapons, fields, ships, candles, even beer. This is when blessings became an official “genre” of liturgical text.

• 10th–12th centuries: The Roman Pontifical and Ritual (the Church’s official service books) expand the categories. Priests and bishops are now expected to have set formulas for blessing water, bells, incense, and homes.

• High Middle Ages: Scholastic theologians like Thomas Aquinas classify blessings as sacramentals—not sacraments (like Baptism or Eucharist), but holy signs that dispose people to receive grace and remind them of God’s order. That distinction remains Catholic dogma.

After Trent (16th century)

The Council of Trent (1545–1563) defended blessings as sacramentals against Protestant criticisms. Protestants mocked the Church for blessing swords, stables, and sausages. But Catholics insisted these were not magical incantations, but ways of bringing ordinary life under God’s providence.

So: in germ, Catholic object-blessing began in the 2nd–3rd centuries. It grew with Constantine’s church-building era, and by the early medieval period, it had blossomed into a fully liturgical practice. By the High Middle Ages, the theology of sacramentals was nailed down: blessings weren’t sacraments, but they were an official part of Catholic life.

What’s fascinating is that the instinct to bless things—tools, fields, food—wasn’t originally Catholic. You can find it in Jewish berakhot (blessings over bread, wine, candles) and even in pagan Rome, where priests blessed fields or weapons. Catholicism essentially baptized that universal human impulse and organized it into its liturgy.

Alright, let’s trace how Protestants—and Baptists in particular—reacted to Catholic “blessing of things.”

Protestant Pushback

When the Reformation kicked in, Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli all took aim at Catholic sacramentals. Their complaint was that blessings had drifted from being thanksgivings to God into being quasi-magical rites.

• Luther: he kept a stripped-down version of blessing food and homes, but mocked the vast medieval catalog. His focus: blessing belongs in the proclamation of the gospel and in prayer, not in ritual acts on objects.

• Calvin: Much sharper. He argued that consecrating inanimate things implied they could mediate holiness, which, to him, smacked of idolatry.

English Puritan and Dissenting Strain

By the 17th century, Puritans in England had thrown almost all ritual blessings into the fire. Their instinct was: blessing is speech directed to God (as in “Bless the Lord, O my soul”), not a power directed at objects. They saw Catholic (and Anglican) use of blessing water, bells, or bread as “superstitious relics of Rome.”

Baptists and Their Radically Anti-Sacramental Stance

When Particular Baptists emerged in the 1600s, they inherited that Puritan suspicion.

• Early Baptist Confessions (like the 1644 and 1689) never mention blessing objects. They stick tightly to baptism and the Lord’s Supper as the only ordinances.

• The Baptist instinct was that blessing attaches to persons—the people of God, through Christ—not to stuff. So while they’d “bless God for food,” they would not bless food itself.

• Later, Old School Baptists (Beebe, Trott, Dudley) pushed the same line: the idea of priests blessing things was tied to “means systems” and “priestcraft.” To them, it was dangerous because it suggested grace could be mediated through human ritual.

The Tension

Yet, Baptists never shook the everyday language of “blessing.” They blessed meals, blessed children, blessed congregations. What they refused was the Catholic move of treating objects as carriers of sacred power.

So if the Catholic Church had steadily expanded the realm of blessing to objects from the 3rd century on, the Reformed, Puritan, and Baptist traditions reacted by drawing the circle smaller—keeping blessing as thanksgiving to God and benediction to His people, but not as ritual sanctification of things.

That means when you hear Old School Baptists railing against “blessing dead matter,” they’re really echoing a 300-year Protestant unease with Catholic sacramentals.

If by “blessing the meal” you mean praying over food before eating, then yes—it has biblical roots, though the language is often about giving thanks rather than “blessing” the food itself.

Old Testament background

• In Deuteronomy 8:10, Israel is told: “When you have eaten and are satisfied, bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.” Notice: the direction is upward—blessing God, not the food.

• Jewish practice developed around this. The berakhot (blessings) were short prayers of thanks before bread, wine, or other foods. Jesus, being Jewish, would have prayed these.

Jesus’ example

• Matthew 14:19 (feeding of the 5,000): “He looked up to heaven, said a blessing, broke the loaves and gave them…”

• Matthew 26:26 (Last Supper): “Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it…”
  In both cases, Jesus is blessing God while handling the food. Translators sometimes render it “gave thanks.”

Paul’s teaching

• 1 Timothy 4:4–5: “For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.” That’s as close as you get to a theology of blessing meals: food is sanctified not by ritual power, but by thanksgiving and the Word.

The distinction

Biblically, blessing a meal = thanking God for His provision. It isn’t conferring magical holiness onto bread or meat. The prayer acknowledges dependence and honors the Giver. That’s why Baptists and other Protestants stuck with praying at meals but rejected the Catholic idea of priestly consecration of ordinary objects.

So yes, blessing meals have a biblical basis, but in the form of thanksgiving directed to God. The food isn’t transformed—the act is about gratitude, recognition, and holiness flowing from God’s word.

A neat continuation to explore would be how this difference—blessing God vs. blessing things—became the hinge between Catholic sacramentalism and Baptist simplicity. Would you like me to sketch how Old School Baptists like Beebe argued against turning “blessing the meal” into “blessing dead matter”?

In Catholic practice today, objects like bookbags, cars, homes, and even pets can be “blessed” by a priest. These are considered sacramentals—holy signs that dispose people to God’s grace, not sacraments themselves. The idea is not that the bookbag is infused with supernatural power, but that its use is dedicated to God and its owner is reminded to live under His care. For example, in late summer, you’ll often see “Blessing of the Backpacks” services, especially for children returning to school.

How Catholics See It

• The Church teaches that blessings extend Christ’s lordship over all creation.

• The Book of Blessings (1984) has formulas for blessing food, homes, workplaces, tools, vehicles, and more.

• The theology is that God’s goodness permeates ordinary life, so no object is “too small” to be placed under His providence.

Protestant / Baptist Response

• Most Protestants—especially Old School Baptists—would reject blessing inanimate objects like bookbags.

• For them, “blessing” is either:

  1. Directed toward God (thanksgiving, praise), or

  2. Directed toward people (benediction, prayer for their well-being).

• Extending blessing to objects is usually seen as superstition, a remnant of Catholic priestcraft. Gilbert Beebe, for instance, would have called it “making merchandise of dead matter.”

Biblical Ground

There’s no passage in Scripture where someone blesses an object like a tool or container for personal use. The Bible has consecration of temple vessels, but that’s about worship, not everyday objects. What you do find is blessing God for providing things, and praying for His protection on people who use them.

So

• Catholic view → yes, objects can be blessed as sacramentals.

• Baptist/Old School view → no, only God and His people can be blessed; objects don’t receive holiness.

This leaves a fascinating fault line: is blessing transformative for things or a reminder for people? The Catholic and Baptist traditions draw that line very differently.