Charles Hodge on Ephesians 5:32

V. 32. Τὸ μυστήριον τοῦτο μέγα ἐστίν, this mystery is great. The word mystery does not refer to the passage in Gen. 2, 24, as though the apostle intended to say that that passage had a mystical sense which he had just unfolded by applying it to the relation between Christ and his church. It is the union between Christ and his people. the fact that they are one flesh, he declares to be a great mystery. The word μυστήριον is used here, as it is every where else, for something hidden, something beyond the reach of human knowledge. Whether its being thus hidden arises from its lying in the future, or because of being imperfectly revealed, or because it is in its own nature incomprehensible, must be determined by the connection. In this place the last is probably the idea intended. The thing itself is beyond our comprehension. The Vulgate renders this passage, sacramentum hoc magnum est. The Latin word sacramentum, besides its usual classical sense, ‘a sacred deposit,’ was often used to signify any thing sacred, or which had a hidden import. In this latter sense it agrees in meaning with the word μυστήριον, which also is used to designate something the meaning of which is hidden. Hence in the Vulgate it is often translated as it is here. In the Latin church the word sacramentum, however, gradually changed its meaning. Instead of being applied to every thing having a sacred or secret meaning, it was confined to those rites or acts which were assumed to have the power of conferring grace. This is the Romish idea of a sacrament. The Papal theologians taking the word in this sense here, and understanding the apostle to refer to marriage, quote this passage in proof that matrimony is a sacrament. The answer to this argument is obvious. In the first place, it is not marriage, but the union between Christ and his church, that Paul declares to be a μυστήριον, and the Vulgate a sacramentum. And in the second place, neither the Greek nor Latin term means a sacrament in the Romish sense of the word. The Vulgate translates 1 Tim. 3, 16, magnum est pietatis sacramentum, which no Romanist understands as teaching that the manifestation of God in the flesh is a sacrament in the ecclesiastical meaning of the term.