Leave a reply In short, the historic Reformed faith saw faith as the primary instrument of justification, the one essential thing that made all secondary instruments of that same justification (e.g. sermons and sacraments) worth anything at all. Those in the Reformed tradition who have sought to accommodate the anti-magisterial bent of the American system of theology have done this by means of making sacraments the means of secondary graces, instead of secondary means of grace. They got the adjective in the wrong place is all.