sacramentality renewed is an important contribution to the

“Sacramentality Renewed is an important contribution to the ecumenical body of writings on the renewal of sacramental faith and practice that have been published in recent years. Professor Larson-Miller’s book offers valuable insight not only into the fundamental role of the sacraments in the living of Christian faith but also into how the sacraments both signify and nourish the corporate nature of that life.”

— Louis WeilHodges-Haynes Professor of Liturgics EmeritusChurch Divinity School of the PacificBerkeley, California

“With an impressive command of recent literature across the ecumenical field, Lizette Larson-Miller has provided a timely and useful survey of the status quaestionis for sacramental theology today. While attentive to sources and questions in the Anglican community, the author’s astute identification of the key themes driving current theological inquiry into sacraments and sacramentality ensures informative and stimulating reading for a wide audience.”

— Bruce T. Morrill, SJVanderbilt University

“Lizette Larson-Miller’s insightful study of the renewal of sacramentality in the contemporary church is as wide-ranging in its thematic scope as it is in its engagement of contemporary conversation partners. From her liturgical perspective, Larson-Miller invites us to think anew about central theological doctrines, be it soteriology, the paschal mystery, real presence, or ecclesiology. Squarely rooted in her own Anglican tradition, she draws on scholarship from all strands of Christianity and so offers a truly ecumenical plea for the rediscovery of sacramentality. This is a much-needed study, which not only sums up the current state of the field but also offers a strong constructive proposal.”

— The Rev. Dr. Steffen LöselAssociate Professor of Systematic TheologyCandler School of TheologyEmory University

Sacramentality RenewedContemporary Conversations

in Sacramental Theology

Lizette Larson-Miller

A Michael Glazier Book

LITURGICAL PRESSCollegeville, Minnesota

www.litpress.org

A Michael Glazier Book published by Liturgical Press

Cover design by Jodi Hendrickson. Cover image: Wayfarers Chapel, Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

Unless otherwise indicated, excerpts from documents of the Second Vatican Coun-cil are from Vatican Council II: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations; The Basic Sixteen Documents, edited by Austin Flannery, OP, © 1996. Used with permission of Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, © 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

© 2016 by Order of Saint Benedict, Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, microfilm, microfiche, mechanical recording, photocopying, translation, or by any other means, known or yet unknown, for any purpose except brief quotations in reviews, without the previous written permission of Liturgical Press, Saint John’s Abbey, PO Box 7500, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321-7500. Printed in the United States of America.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Larson-Miller, Lizette.Title: Sacramentality renewed : contemporary conversations in sacramental theology / Lizette Larson-Miller.Description: Collegeville, Minnesota : Liturgical Press, 2016. | “A Michael Glazier book.”Identifiers: LCCN 2015038833| ISBN 9780814682739 | ISBN 9780814682982 (ebook)Subjects: LCSH: Sacraments—Catholic Church. | Catholic Church—Doctrines.Classification: LCC BX2200 .L3225 2016 | DDC 234/.16—dc23LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015038833

Finding words for sacramental reality became particularly enfleshed in ecumenical classrooms at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, when students from nonsacramental Christian traditions raised the question, “If not sacramentality, than what?” To all of these students in PhD and MA seminars and CDSP MDiv tutorials, thank you for the conversations and questions that became this book. Particular thanks go to Sharon Fennema, Jennifer Davidson, Marcia McFee, Walter Knowles, Ernest Morrow, Tyler Sampson, Terri Hobart, Michael Corrigan, Rhian Jeong, Stephen Shaver, Todd Oswald, Carl Bear, and Raggs Ragan.

vii

Contents

Introduction: Sacramentality Renewing ix

1. Sacramentality, Sacramental Theology, Sacraments: Words for Mystery 1

2. Creative Soteriology: Incarnation in Divine Sacramental Economy 39

3. Sacramentality and the Paschal Mystery: The Center of Our Faith 59

4. Real Presence 82

5. Real Absence 104

6. Sacramental Ecclesiology 127

7. With What Words? Concluding Reflections 155

Bibliography 177

Index of Persons 187

Index of Subjects 189

ix

IntroductionSacramentality Renewing

Most High Almighty Good Lord,Yours are the praises, the glory, the honor, and all blessings!To you alone, Most High, do they belong,And no one is worthy to mention you.

St. Francis of Assisi 1

Interest in sacramental theology has expanded exponentially over the last three decades, thanks to an ecumenical resurgence of energy

turning our attention to the broader theological context undergirding the liturgical movements of the last century. The confluence of those liturgical movements, often described as beginning in the nineteenth century,2 have borne ecumenical fruit in the renewed, reworked, re-translated, restored, and revisioned liturgies of many Western Christian churches, a liturgical renewal that is ongoing in subsequent waves and influences. The newest conversations in sacramental theology are a

1 From The Little Flowers of St. Francis, trans. Raphael Brown (New York: Dou-bleday, 1958).

2 While liturgical renewal and change have always been a part of Christian history, the liturgical movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is often preceded with the definite article “the” and capitalized. This movement was really the product of ferment and experimentation in twentieth-century European Bene-dictine monasteries which built on historical research and archeological discoveries of the nineteenth century. The beginning of the public nature of the movement is credited to Dom Lambert Beauduin, a monk of Mont César in Belgium. In a 1909 address, Beauduin called for “the full and active participation of all Christians in the Church’s life and ministry, particularly the liturgy.” See Keith F. Pecklers, “History of the Roman Liturgy from the Sixteenth until the Twentieth Centuries,” in Handbook for Liturgical Studies: Introduction to the Liturgy, vol. 1, ed. Anscar J. Chupungco (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997), 153–78.

x Sacramentality Renewed

necessary result of the development and practice of these liturgical patterns, as well as a natural maturation in exploring the theological and philosophical foundations of the liturgical movement and its li-turgical “products.”

In the academic teaching of Christian liturgy (whether called litur-gical studies, liturgics, liturgiology, worship studies, or other), much of the graduate-level emphasis of the past thirty years has been the shaping of the fairly standardized triad of liturgical studies: liturgical history, liturgical theology, and ritual studies.3 As the third branch, ritual studies, gained acceptance in the 1980s, the application of all three of these academic “sub-fields” to the lived experience of lit-urgy celebrated in parishes and other local worshiping communities gave rise to what might be considered the fourth branch of liturgical studies, “pastoral liturgy.”4 And all four of these sub-fields are, of ne-cessity, bound to a system of Christian theology as both source for and expression of that theology and are therefore, by their very nature, interdisciplinary.

This means that liturgical studies is first an academic field. Some-times it is freestanding, and elsewhere it is assigned to systematic theology departments; it is sometimes treated as an applied field in pastoral theology, and where that approach dominates, it is often found

3 The move from a solely philological study of texts and historical studies (again, primarily text-based) was relatively fast after the 1960s. Liturgical theol-ogy as a “new” field combining aspects of ceremonial rubrics and sacramental theology arrived in some places in the 1960s, in other schools in the 1970s and even the 1980s. Ritual studies was not widespread until the 1980s. In a number of Protestant schools, liturgy was taught a part of pastoral ministry, generally subsumed under homiletics as simply a context for that area. The recent arrival of worship studies as a field in its own right only dates from the 1990s in a number of schools, as exemplified by The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship founded in 1997. Representing the inheritance of the longer liturgical movement and its adaptation to Protestant concerns, the Calvin Institute describes itself as “an in-terdisciplinary study and ministry center that promotes the scholarly study of the theology, history, and practice of Christian worship and the renewal of worship in worshiping communities across North America and beyond.” http://worship .calvin.edu/about/mission.

4 In his presidential address to the North American Academy of Liturgy in 1983, Mark Searle introduced the concept of this new approach to the field of liturgical studies, “New Tasks, New Methods: The Emergence of Pastoral Liturgical Studies” Worship 57 (1983): 291–308.

Introduction xi

in the applied theology or pastoral ministry departments and “in the field” in parishes. But it is essentially interdisciplinary beyond that omnipresent duet. The doing of liturgy academically and pastorally needs the input, the resources, and the critiques of the fields of biblical studies, church history, ecclesiology, systematic theology, missiology, spirituality, ethics, and pastoral theology. It also has made tremendous use of, and is dependent on, the insights of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, philology, archeology, music, visual art, architectural studies, cultural studies, ethnography, ethnomusicology, homiletics, linguistics, theater, and psychology, to name some of the disciplines involved.

The practice of borrowing knowledge and methods from other disciplines and applying them to the study of liturgy is not a modern phenomenon. From the first century onward, Christianity used the concepts of other languages of understanding, most notably philoso-phy, cultural patterns, and the arts to help translate events and their theological reflections so that an ever-broadening circle of faithful fol-lowers of Jesus the Christ would be able to enter into the conversation.5 And while there are constants in the historical interdisciplinary con-versations engaging with liturgy in the broadest sense, the approaches to study, the changing circumstances of doing liturgy in new cultures and times, and especially the ever-expanding conversation partners in Christian liturgy means that liturgical studies is a constantly evolving field of study and experience. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the field of liturgical studies stands poised for an interdisci-plinary reshaping once again, which is reflected and encouraged by new developments in sacramental theology. All of this is to highlight the reality that a renewed and changed interest in sacramental theology is timely and necessary.

But what is sacramental theology, what is its relationship to the field and practice of liturgy mentioned above, and why does an

5 While all of the New Testament writings reflect their cultural contexts, their immediate polemical concerns, and the learning of their place and time, it is consistently the Apostle Paul who comes to mind as an example of someone who drew on both the Greek philosophical thinking of his time and his own faith and education in Judaism. Two recent books stress this: St. Paul among the Philosophers, ed. John D. Caputo and Linda Martin Alcoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); and Friedemann Richert, Platon und Christus: antike Wurzeln des Neuen Testaments (Darmstadt: WBG, 2011).

xii Sacramentality Renewed

archaic-sounding field matter today? That is the topic of this book. Sacramentality Renewed explores some of the contemporary conversa-tions in sacramental theology, both ecumenically and with an eye to their exercise and application in one part of Christianity, Anglican-ism, and particularly Anglicanism as lived in the Episcopal Church in the United States. Before turning to that particularity within the universality of Christian theological praxis, however, a review of what sacramental theology is and is not is important.

Sacramental theology is not simply the study of ecclesial sacra-ments, whether one prefers to number them two, seven, or four hun-dred, nor is it the same as liturgical theology, which is itself a polyvalent term.6 The term “sacramental theology” is growing as an umbrella term that covers all of this and more, but it is increasingly crossing paths and being used as a way of articulating the term “sacramentality” (or “sacramentology”).7 These terms are circling around the same expan-sive view of reality—that the Triune God of Christian understanding is the Creator of everything that is, continues to interact with all of creation, is present in that interaction in many ways, chose, in their second person, to become one in flesh with humanity and immersed in all creation, is desirous of an ongoing relationship with humanity and creation, inspires and enables that relationship through their third per-son in particular, and is, above all, love—love for us. The gap between Creator and created is real, and it is a gap mediated in many ways, but creation, or matter, is essential to this relationship because it is created good by God; it is the fundamental meeting place of humanity and divinity and the medium most helpful to human beings desirous of entering into a participatory relationship in ways more experientially engaging to humanity than nonmatter.8

6 Liturgical theology is discussed in some detail in chap. 1, but a good introduc-tion to its multivalence can be found in Kevin Irwin’s article “Liturgical Theology,” in The New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship, ed. Peter Fink (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990), 721–33.

7 “Sacramentology” seems to be the preferred term in much of the European continent, while sacramentality is more common in the British Isles and in North and South America.

8 This is often couched in the language of Christian anthropology, brought particularly to the center in the writings of Louis-Marie Chauvet: “The anthro-pological is the place of every possible theological.” Symbol and Sacrament: A

Introduction xiii

That general definition will have to suffice until chapter 1 explores terminology in more detail and is followed by subsequent chapters that look at particular dimensions of contemporary sacramentality and sacramental theology in recent conversations. It also needs to be said that this contribution to theology regarding the essential nature of sacramentality and the parallel concern of its urgent articulation is neither a definitive nor a comprehensive listing of twenty-first-century topics—there are many more avenues that could have been explored if time and space allowed. But here there are two primary dynamics motivating the choice of topics as narrowed down in this collection.

The first has to do with the particularity of one ecclesial expression within the universality of Christianity. From the broadest perspective, it is important to say that Christianity itself does not have a monopoly on sacramentality, nor are Christians the only ones to use the term.9 But trinitarian theology and the ongoing engagement of God in the life of the world are essential to Christian sacramentality and to the particular articulations of sacramentality through sacramental theol-ogy as explored in this book. This means that some Christians who do not hold to a belief in the ongoing interaction of God with God’s creation will therefore disagree with the explorations of sacramentality that follow and that what follows here will be more helpful to some ecclesial communities than to others—it is a selective listing of topics, intriguing for many reasons, including their catholic appeal, while at the same time it sets aside other important issues well covered by other theologians. On the other hand, what is here is also about ecclesial particularity—not exclusively for Anglican reflection—but taking into consideration the contemporary needs of Anglicans in North Amer-ica, with an eye to Anglicans, and other Christians, elsewhere.10 That starting point represents the second rationale of choice in topics.

Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, trans. Patrick Madigan and Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 152.

9 Most striking is the translation of the Hindu rite of samskara by the word “sacrament.” See the discussion in David Brown, God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 28–29.

10 The term “Anglican” here is not a political statement; it is, rather, the broadest term inclusive of members of the Anglican Communion in the United States and beyond. I do not wish to fall into the trap of Episcopal versus Anglican but, rather, to claim “Anglican” as the breadth of a communion’s identity and “Episcopal” as a local expression of a global communion.

xiv Sacramentality Renewed

While sacramental theology and conversations about sacramentality are increasingly ecumenical, the same theological emphases are not needed in each community. Context, current intra-ecclesial arguments, and changes in constituencies will draw out different theological em-phases from the “storehouse.”11 For example, one of the most import-ant voices in a renewed and energized sacramental theology is that of Louis-Marie Chauvet, a French Roman Catholic whose writing has had tremendous impact within his own ecclesial community and far beyond. For many in his own Roman Catholic constituency, Chauvet represents a breath of fresh air in rejecting an objectifying and instru-mentalist approach to the sacraments and their theology.

What for too long plagued the Western Christian understand-ing, and therefore practice of the sacraments, Chauvet argues, is the meta-physical notion that the (ideal) human subject exists prior to and outside the world of language (symbolism), that some level of immediate access to reality is available to humans. From this arises thought and practices that value the “inter-nal” over the “external”, the invisible over the visible, thereby mistaking language (the symbolic) for a mere instrument to be overcome so as to enter into the total presence of pure essence of reality. Nothing could be further from the truth!12

For Anglicans and others, Chauvet has had an impact in different ways, and different aspects of his writing have been mined as helpful, particularly in recent doctoral dissertations.13 A wonderful example of

11 See Gary Macy, Treasures from the Storeroom: Medieval Religion and the Eu-charist (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999).

12 Bruce Morrill, “Building on Chauvet’s Work: An Overview,” in Sacraments: Revelation of the Humanity of God; Engaging the Fundamental Theology of Louis-Marie Chauvet, ed. Philippe Bordeyne and Bruce T. Morrill (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2008), xviii–xix.

13 A few recent examples: Hans Gustafson, “A Philosophy of Pansacramental and Symbolic Mediation Between Theology and the Study of Spirituality” (Cla-remont Graduate School, 2012); Christopher Ganski, “Spirit and Flesh: On the Significance of the Reformed Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper for Pneumatology” (Marquette University, 2012); Jennifer Davidson, “The Narrative Practice of Memory as Identity in ‘Concerns & Celebrations and the Pastoral Prayer’: Con-structing a Liturgical Theology of Prayer” (GTU, 2011); Gifford Grobien, “‘Be Transformed by the Renewing of Your Minds’: Christian Worship as the Root of Righteousness and Ethical Formation” (University of Notre Dame, 2011).

Introduction xv

a different perspective is evident in the addition of new sacramental voices from what is classically known as the evangelical wing of Chris-tianity, most eloquently represented in the work of Hans Boersma.14 As sacramental theologians, Chauvet and Boersma draw on many of the same resources but often come to different conclusions because they emerge from and are speaking to different audiences. To put it simply, of the many choices of emphases in sacramental theology that might be used to balance the historical record of several hundred years or to correct an overemphasis that has become misleading or damaging or to challenge a prevailing and singular view blocking other voices, the fruits of the ecumenical venture in sacramental theology need to be presented with different weights. Not every theologian is writing to the same audience, and not every ecclesial community needs the same emphases in order to balance unhelpful trajectories. There is both a breadth of universality in contemporary sacramental theology from which many Christian communities can benefit, and there are particu-lar emphases that will be more helpful, in this case, to Anglicanism at this time and in this place (writ large), than in other communities.

That brings us to another issue of scope, particularly what this book is not. This is not a history of Anglican sacramental thought, helpful as that would be. There are many others who are more qualified to trace Richard Hooker’s defense of Anglican polity and its meaning for today,15 just as there are many authors who have revisited Thomas Cranmer’s sacramental interests and theology with a contemporary lens less polemical (or differently polemical) than previous decades.16

14 Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mys-tery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011); and his newer book, Embodiment and Virtue in Gregory of Nyssa: An Anagogical Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

15 Some examples: A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. Torrance Kirby (Leiden: Brill, 2008); A. J. Joyce, Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Michael Brydon, The Evolving Reputation of Richard Hooker: An Examination of Responses; 1600–1714 (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2006); Nigel Voak, Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology: A Study of Reason, Will, and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. W. J. Torrance Kirby (Dordrecht, Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2003).

16 See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Early Protestant Spirituality, ed. Scott H. Hendrix (New

xvi Sacramentality Renewed

And the continuity or discontinuity of the Anglican Divines and the Oxford Movement with the medieval church, the early church, the right church, and the wrong church has been studied and will continue to be mined in myriad helpful ways.17 This is not to discredit the impor-tance of tradition—the juxtaposition of Scripture, tradition, reason, and, more recently, experience, is a primary hallmark of an Anglican approach to theology. There are obvious echoes of historical devel-opment in the particular questiones disputatae to follow, but historical continuity is not the guiding principle of choice and articulation of these questions. Rather, the contemporary theological culture forms the first rationale for winnowing topics, and much of that is deduced from years of parish experience, conversations in parishes and theologi-cal colleges with those preparing to be theologians in the Anglican way, and personal conviction about a certain lack of theological reflection on liturgical practice, sacramental import, and liturgical catechesis. But the choices also reflect ecumenical priorities and shifts in theological emphases that are gaining international attention and input. In the end, this is the result of both/and—both the perceived needs of one eccle-sial community and the wisdom of a broad ecumenical conversation.

Along with this is the reality that the liturgical experience of many American Episcopalians has changed in the last two generations as a result of the Anglican Communion’s participation in the ecumenical liturgical movements of the twentieth century. This was brought home by a lunchtime conversation with a colleague several years ago. He described growing up in the Episcopal Church on the East Coast of

York: Paulist Press, 2009); Reformation Theologians, ed. Carter Lindberg (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002); Owen E. Cummings, Eucharistic Doctors: A Theological History (New York: Paulist Press, 2005); Arthur Middleton, Fathers and Anglicans: The Limits of Orthodoxy (Leominster: Gracewing, 2001).

17 See The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World; 1830–1930, ed. Stew-ard J. Brown and Peter Nockles (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012); James Pereiro, Ethos and the Oxford Movement: At the Heart of Tractarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); C. Brad Faught, The Oxford Movement: A Thematic History of the Tractarians and Their Times (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2003); Michael Chandler, An Introduction to the Oxford Movement (London: SPCK, 2003); Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Lancelot Andrewes, ed. David Scott (London: SPCK, 2002).

Introduction xvii

the United States where Holy Communion as the principal liturgy was, at the very most, a monthly event, and even then, not really central to the liturgical identity of individuals or communities. He compared that to his contemporary experiences traveling around the country, giving parish workshops in which finding a “morning prayer” parish was highly unlikely, and where the companion spirituality was almost always a eucharistic spirituality, even when not well-articulated.18

Finally, a clarification is needed of what it means to circle around an Anglican approach to sacramental theology. That may mean, quite literally, drawing on theologians who are themselves Anglican and therefore individuals writing from particular liturgical experiences and within a particular set of theological assumptions and challenges. But Anglicanism is not a “stand-alone” theology. Whether it leans on the often overused “via media” definition or the inescapable reality that Anglicans borrow many things—particularly theologies—Anglican theology is not only that which is written by self-described (and offi-cially sanctioned) Anglicans. Theologies, theologians, liturgical texts, ecclesiologies, art, music, and more are often borrowed by Anglicans and in that act of borrowing are drawn into the broad range of Anglican use and interpretation, becoming themselves “Anglican.” This is not a passive borrowing to compensate for a lack of content or creative thinking in Anglicanism. It is in the application of those borrowed theologies, or the juxtaposition of those theologies with others, or the contextualization of those theologies within a different ecclesiology that allows these borrowings to become Anglicized.19 And all of these, indigenous and not, are part of the contribution of Anglicanism. That is to say, Anglicanism is not a cipher, a black hole, or simply a well-dressed liturgical experiment. All of this is predicated on the belief that Anglicanism has theology, and, above all, has something to offer to ecumenical theological reflection as well as the need and grace to receive theological ideas.

18 With gratitude to the Rev. Dr. John Kater for the Anglican life-lessons learned at the faculty lunch table, CDSP, Berkeley, CA.

19 In a similar approach, Timothy Sedgwick says that what is distinctive about Anglicanism will not be “the essence of Christianity” but “the character of the Anglican tradition as it mediates Christian faith.” “The New Shape of Anglican Identity,” ATR 77 (1995): 195.

xviii Sacramentality Renewed

That mixture of Anglican, Roman Catholic, Evangelical Christian, Protestant, and Orthodox Christian sources will be evident in the following chapters that explore various facets of sacramentality and sacramental theology, beginning with an exploration of terminology in chapter 1, moving to the “root of the sacramental principle” that is the doctrine of the incarnation and its relationship with the Trinity, and creation, particularly in the contemporary conversations of “deep incarnation” in chapter 2. Chapter 3 focuses on sacramentality and the paschal mystery as passage and suffering, redemption and ethics, draw-ing on the insights from evolutionary theology to reflect on theories of atonement. Chapter 4 looks at real presence from differing methodol-ogies on both reality and presence and the vehicle of engagement with real presence that is participation in the divine. This is followed by its necessary “other hand” in chapter 5 on real absence as an essential part of real presence, timed with eschatology, the desire for God, and the work of ethical response. Chapter 6 situates the sacramentality of these theological elements in the church, reviewing different under-standings of church as well as the challenges and contributions of new sacramental ecclesiologies. The conclusion asks, “with what words?” will the conversation continue, knowing that the needs of different ecclesial communities require different words, some of them verbal and others temporal and spatial. None of these topics are insular or even capable of existing as freestanding, self-contained reflections; they are only separated for the sake of articulation and clarity in presentation.

1

Chapter One

Sacramentality, Sacramental Theology, Sacraments

Words for Mystery

Sacramentality is not a general principle that the world is full of “sacredness”:it is the very specific conviction that the world is fullof the life of a God whose nature is known in Christ and the Spirit.

Rowan Williams1

The former archbishop of Canterbury’s words above summarize well a growing consensus of the concept of sacramentality from

a Christian perspective. The conference papers for which his foreword was written began by looking at shifts in sacramental understandings in the decade between 1994 and 2004, the first date marked by the pub-lication of an important article summarizing the state of the question of sacramental theology2 and the latter date that of the publication of the 2003 conference in question. The conference, although weighted toward Anglican scholars, was ecumenical in representation, and the topics of sacramentality and sacramental theology were broached as ecumenical concerns.

Chief among those concerns was first a fear that “sacramental the-ology, as traditionally conceived, seems to feature less and less on

1 Rowan Williams, foreword to The Gestures of God: Explorations in Sacramen-tality, ed. Geoffrey Rowell and Christine Hall (London, New York: Continuum, 2004), xiii.

2 Regis A. Duffy, Kevin W. Irwin, and David N. Power, “Sacramental Theology: A Review of Literature,” Theological Studies 55 (1994): 657–705.

2 Sacramentality Renewed

academic teaching and research programmes in many parts of the world. Moreover, the sacramental reality of the Church seems more rarely taken as read, a fact that is observably affecting international ecumenical deliberations, as well as attitudes to leadership and au-thority in the Church at large.”3 The second concern was that “since 1994, the concepts of “sacrament” and “sacramental theology” have been drifting apart, not only because they are distinct from one another but because theology on the sacraments has hitherto been founded on a too institutionalized, even poorly developed, ecclesiology, while “sacramental theology” suggests a broader and more dynamic field.”4 The concern here is not so much that the two related fields of sac-raments and sacramental theology are drifting apart but rather what that means for sacramental theology and for the “dialogical character of sacramentality, not only as a relatively new phenomenon, but as an interdisciplinary field already transcending the locus of the theology of the sacraments.”5 This second concern was really how to grasp or map this series of connections as they slip away from dogmatics on the one hand (for sacraments themselves) and mix with ecumenical assump-tions of what the theology of church is and how God communicates with church and world on the other. Can theological concepts such as sacramentality and the discipline of sacramental theology simply slide from one ecclesial community to another without the “system” in which they were conceived, formed, and practiced? To what extent is sacramental theology bound by the context of ecclesiology (theol-ogy of church, rather than ecclesial polity) and a sacramental system? Is the expanding freedom of conversations regarding sacramentality evidence that this topic does transcend “the locus of the theology of the sacraments” and of sacramental theology writ large?

In the decade since the Windsor conference, there seems to be a growing engagement with research on sacramentality and sacramental theology based on the number of articles and books published on the topics. The application of this to academic teaching, however, is less discernible in the United States. This informal observation may, in the end, be more closely related to economic recession, a related reduction

3 Christine Hall, introduction to Rowell and Hall, The Gestures of God, xv–xvi.4 Ibid., xvii.5 Ibid., xviii.

Sacramentality, Sacramental Theology, Sacraments 3

of graduate-level theological schools, and the shrinking numerical size of many ecclesial communions, rather than to a deliberate theological decision. But in my most recent graduate-level teaching, sacramen-tal theology often seemed the orphaned child of theological studies, sometimes lost between the requirements of systematic theology on the one hand and liturgical studies on the other.6

From the vantage point of more than ten years out from this con-ference’s conversations, their projection of ongoing concerns regarding ecclesiology and their suggestion that sacramentality would continue to be a growing area of interest have proven true. But in addition to those concerns, the pastoral practice of liturgy, particularly in the shap-ing of new forms of sacramental liturgical actions without a parallel commitment to the study of ecclesiology and sacramental theology has grown by leaps and bounds and begs for a renewed focus of at-tention and research. It seems that Sven-Erik Brodd, in his summary of potential future work stemming from the Windsor conference, was right on target in saying that “the biblical referents and ecclesiological presuppositions that underpin traditional and emergent concepts of sacramental theology require further identification and exploration.”7 This seems a good invitation to begin mapping the contemporary field of sacramentality and sacramental theology.

It is often surprising to reflect on how much of our theology is based not only on philology but also specifically on etymology, and so we begin at the beginning with definitions of words and move from there to the breadth of sacramentality that includes sacramental theology, sacraments, liturgical theology, and other constituent parts as con-tributing to a system of expression in Christian theological reflection.

From Mystery to Sacrament

In his 2002 article, “From Sacramentality to Sacraments and Vice-Versa,” Kristiaan Depoortere traces the etymology of the apostle Paul’s key word, mysterion, through the earliest New Testament writings into early Greek patristics, before turning to the profound shift of trans-

6 Reflecting on the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California, which offered MA and PhD degrees in Liturgical Studies (ecumenically) in an interfaith setting.

7 Hall, introduction to Gestures of God, xviii.


lating from Greek into Latin. “St. Paul’s mysterion designates God’s hidden plan to save all persons, a plan determined from the beginning and kept secret until it was revealed fully in Christ.”8 After Christ’s ascension, this “eternal plan of salvation . . . becomes tangible and visible in the mysteries that are lived.”9 Depoortere sees in the writing of Origen, the early third-century theologian of Alexandrian fame, a first and fundamental clarification between mysterion, “understood as the threefold manifestation of the Word in Christ’s incarnation, in the Church and in the Scriptures” as connected to but distinct from “mys-teria—understood as Baptism, Eucharist and other Christian rituals.”10 This articulation seems to contain the germ of our contemporary dis-tinction between sacramentality and ecclesial sacraments, or between foundational sacraments such as Christ and the church understood as of a different character than ecclesial liturgical sacraments.11

As anyone who lives bilingually knows, translation changes mean-ings, even when attempted literally. When the Greek of early Christian writings met the mind of Tertullian in early third-century North Africa, a number of fundamental theological changes were set in motion be-cause of translation and inculturation. By the second century of this era, the Latin word sacramentum had two meanings. The first was a “more juridical [meaning] describing a pledge of sorts” that may have involved “a deposit or guarantee . . . left with the religious authorities to underline the seriousness of the forthcoming procedures at a trial.”12 The second was associated with military practices and described “an oath of loyalty. This would include gestures, such as a soldier placing his hand on a banner.”13 Depoortere sees the appeal that both of them must have had in translating mysterion because “common to both

8 Kristiaan Depoortere, “From Sacramentality to Sacraments and Vice-Versa,” in Contemporary Contours of a God Incarnate (Peeters: Leuven, 2001), 52. Depoor-tere draws his reader’s attention to First Corinthians 2:7-10; Romans 16:25-26; Colossians 1:26-27; 2:3; 4:3; Ephesians 1:9-10; 3:3-12; 5:32; and First Timothy 3:16.

9 Depoortere, “From Sacramentality to Sacraments and Vice-Versa,” 52.10 Ibid.11 See also the discussion on the historical naming and categorizing of sacra-

ments in David Brown, God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. 25–27.

12 Ibid.13 Ibid., 53.


meanings is the idea of guaranteed engagement realized procedurally through a number of sensible acts.”14 The influential Latin theological work of Tertullian, however, reveals his preference for stressing the sensible gestures, or “ritualistic meaning of sacramentum as visible signs of involvement that are guaranteed by God.”15 From the handing down of this understanding among Latin Christians, another important step is taken as the meaning of the Greek term is assumed into the Latin translation by Ambrose of Milan in the fourth century. Here, mysterium (the literal transliteration of mysterion) “points to the inner reality of the sacraments, [and] sacramentum denotes the outer celebration in the first place, while presuming the inner reality.”16 From mysterion as a comprehensive description of the revelation of God and the me-diation of that revelation in Christ, the church, and in Scriptures to mysterium as the inner reality of tangible (and real) outward ritual is both a narrowing of focus by the fourth century and oddly familiar to contemporary liturgical Christians (particularly Episcopalians in this translation of the meaning of sacraments).

What are the sacraments? The sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.17

In order to arrive at such a definition of sacraments, we must ac-knowledge that to speak of sacramental theology and sacramentality, it is not possible to completely sidestep sacraments, but to situate them within that complex, as well as “sacramentals” and “liturgics.” I will argue that, moving from the broadest to the narrowest in circles of related meaning, the language of Christian mystery in all its complexity might most helpfully begin for us with an introduction to contempo-rary sacramentality, moving from there to sacramental theology and its interaction with sacraments, sacramental, ethics, and liturgical studies.

14 Ibid.15 Ibid.16 Ibid.17 “An Outline of the Faith: Commonly Called the Catechism,” in The Book of

Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church, Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David, According to the Use of The Episcopal Church (hereafter BCP 1979) (New York: Church Publishing, 1979), 857.


This may be a helpful foundation before exploring particular aspects of this web of meaning in subsequent chapters.

Sacramentality

In his classic book, A Guide to the Sacraments, the late Anglican theologian John Macquarrie spent the first quarter of his study in what he called the “sacramental principle, which is as wide as the human spirit itself.”18 Like theologians before and after, Macquarrie sees in the so-called “natural theology of sacramentality”19 a human way of seeing God in all things, of making “the things of this world so transparent that in them and through them we know God’s presence and activity in our very midst, and so experience his grace.”20 The breadth of this level of sacramentality, beyond sacramental liturgical celebrations and beyond Christian limits (although often articulated by Christians), has deep roots in Anglicanism, imaginatively articulated in George Herbert’s poetic texts and the theological discourse of Archbishop William Temple in the early twentieth century. But it is also at the heart of much of the theology of Karl Rahner; it is an important part of Ignatian spirituality, and it is a feature in much mystical spirituality from the Middle Ages and present in the writings of the early church. It is, in other words, an interfaith and ecumenical concept of reality that has been articulated for centuries in different ways, including the contributions of many Christian voices. Temple’s phrase “a sacramental universe,” around which Macquarrie circles in his opening chapter, includes the idea that “Christianity is the most avowedly materialistic of all the great religions”21 and therefore uniquely placed to champion the cause of sacramentality. But Christian theology also recognizes that the ability of all creation to reveal the transcendent God is first and foremost through the initiative of God and then also because of the willingness of an immanent God to communicate that desire and allow it to be known in the human heart.

David Brown’s 2004 book God and Enchantment of Place begins with a description of sacramentality beyond Christianity because that

18 John Macquarrie, A Guide to the Sacraments (New York: Continuum, 1997), vii.19 Ibid., 1.20 Ibid.21 William Temple, Nature, Man and God (London: Macmillan, 1940), 478.


is, fundamentally, the Christian view of reality. Theological reality is “belief in a generous God. In his life, death, and resurrection Jesus Christ revealed a loving and merciful God who, while calling human beings back from sin, none the less fully endorsed our material world by himself becoming part of it.”22 Brown continues with the point that “if God is truly generous, would we not expect to find him at work everywhere and in such a way that all human beings could not only respond to him, however implicitly, but also develop insights from which even Christians could learn?”23 The “insights” of a sacramental worldview will lead, for Brown, to enchantment, an avenue that often comes through art, architecture, poetry, or other media already predis-posed to enable human beings to see more than meets the eye. These become expressions of experience “of the enchantment that comes from perceiving particular ways of God relating to human beings and their world.”24 For that matter, “Christianity has had a long history of seeing the world as God’s ‘second book,’” after Scripture, and therefore the places of encounter are many.25

Like other theologians working with the enormity and complexity of naming “sacramentality,” Brown also works against a vague “God is all things” approach (rather than “God in all things”)26 by launch-ing a number of traditional Christian theological concerns from the platform of sacramentality. In a particularly interesting chapter on icons and art, Brown looks at the Western Christian (and particularly Anglican) fascination with Eastern Christian icons as opposed to the more “indigenous” Western tradition of statues and religious painting, as a concrete example of the depth of meaning in Christian sacramen-tality. Working with two primary theologies, he first asks, “what kind of mediation the material offers in the encounter between God and our-selves,”27 a mediation that draws us beyond ourselves into the divine, or an experience that is “rather one of the divine invading the material order and transforming it”?28 The question of directional mediation

22 Brown, God and Enchantment of Place, 6.23 Ibid., 8.24 Ibid., 24.25 Ibid., 33.26 See quote of Rowan Williams at the top of this chapter.27 Brown, God and Enchantment of Place, 37.28 Ibid.


is then placed within a conversation of transcendence and imma-nence: “Transcendence does not mean absence; it is one of two ways of mediating presence. The difference is primarily directional, in how that presence makes itself felt, and thus secondarily, in the valuation attached to the world as such. Transcendence stresses the otherness of God, immanence the closeness, but both embody a relationship.”29

Material mediation as a means to draw us toward and into the “power to effect change” that is transcendence, or to perceive the divine drawing near to human form and materiality, is then joined to a theology of symbolic signification or sacramental reality. How does the icon “work” as a transcendent symbol? “The icon is a sacrament for the Christian East; more precisely it is the vehicle of a personal presence”30 because it participates as signifier in what is signified, namely, the “transcendent reality” that is God, or particularly the saints of God. But the icon does so by engaging “with transfiguration, and thus with how the viewer might be pulled into viewing and appreciat-ing an alternative reality” because it reflects “the fact that the beauty of the supernatural is of an altogether different kind and status from human artifact of even natural beauty.”31 In other words, “It is that very lack of reality which, it is held, will enable us to acknowledge an immaterial world beyond our own.”32 By means of the sacramental form and engagement of the icon, we are drawn “out of this world and into another. This is not to deny the icon’s sacramental character, but it is to observe that its mediation of the divine is very much of a participatory pull elsewhere rather than an endorsement of what is already before one’s eyes.”33

Three-dimensional sculptures of all kinds (human figures, crosses, and more), as well as the example of the growth of realism in Renais-sance paintings, bring us to a different mediational direction, which in Brown’s hands leads us through a complex philosophical and artistic history of the symbol of the body and ultimately to the incarnation, of God taking on human flesh, which celebrates the immanence of God and creation as “a sphere of divine grace simply in virtue of God being

29 Ibid., 40.30 Ibid.31 Ibid., 41.32 Ibid.33 Ibid., 43.


its source.”34 All of these art forms (such as the Armenian standing crosses, Katchk’ars, “blossoming with nature”35) are capable of being vehicles to discern “God coming towards us and our world . . . rather than overwhelming us with his otherness and so pulling us out of it.”36 In Neoplatonic thought, the Christianization of pre-Christian philosophy drew attention to the potential of the human body as a reflection of divine beauty.37 Continuing on this long historical tra-jectory has the potential to draw us into the “sacramentality of the universe,” to paraphrase William Temple, inviting us to experience the grace of God here and now, in an ever-changing and ongoing series of contemporary and culturally responsive art expressing the imma-nent and efficacious presence of God. The example of contrasting icons and statues (or paintings) reminds us that both immanence and transcendence are relational and necessary. “The danger in heeding only the transcendence is that an unbridgeable gap is created between ourselves and God; the danger in accepting only immanence is that the divine is reduced to something like ourselves, his reality in effect treated as equivalent to the totality of the world, so both are needed to complement each other.”38

This is just one example of how sacramentality is a complex and in-terdisciplinary field which includes sacramental theology, sacraments, sacramentals, and liturgical practices and far more than that, within and beyond theological disciplines. The elusive nature of the term “sacramentality” is its strength, in that it can lure Christians beyond the narrowness of ecclesial sacramental terminology to a broad context in which the other terms can find a home, both contextualized and relational and capable of development. The advantage of this invitation to imaginative theology is that it can then be turned back to ecclesial concerns with new insights. Kevin Irwin summarizes this saying,

34 Ibid., 44.35 Ibid., 55.36 Ibid.37 Ibid., 72. Brown draws here on the work of Marsilio Ficino (d. 1499) whose

translation work for the Medici family (especially in the Corpus Hemeticum) made for new meetings of philosophy and art in a dynamic period of history (Ficino, Letters, v. 51).

38 Ibid., 81.


When the term “sacramentality” is more adequately restored as reflective of one’s place in the universe, specifically the intrinsic relatedness of human persons to both the cosmos and to other beings in the world, then liturgy and (the seven) sacraments can be reappropriated as uniquely revelatory of the immanent and transcendent God we believe in—both incarnate (in all that implies) and of drawing us beyond here and now to eternal communion with that same God in eternity.39

Before turning to ecclesial sacraments, however, it would be best to move to the theological discipline that attempts to negotiate and link both sacramentality and sacraments, namely, sacramental theology.

Sacramental Theology

If theologia, words about, or study of, God, is a way to articulate and understand faith (fides quaerens intellectum)40 as St. Anselm’s motto summarizes, then words about God to understand the divine gift of faith, joined to the word “sacramental,” situate this branch of “the science of things divine”41 firmly under the umbrella of sacramentality. But narrowing the academic discipline of sacramental theology to a manageable list of content and method is not easy. Even in the 1994 summary of contemporary sacramental theology mentioned as a water-shed event at the Windsor conference on sacramentality, fifty pages of perspectives and resources were presented with apologies for its several gaps, including ecumenical resources published in the same general time period of 1980 to 1993.42 The difficulty of even naming the field because of its complexity began by moving from the more traditional

39 Kevin W. Irwin, “Liturgical Action: Sacramentality, Eschatology, and Ecol-ogy,” in Contemporary Sacramental Contours of a God Incarnate, Textes et Études Liturgiques/Studies in Liturgy 16, ed. Lieven Boeve and Lambert Leijssen (Leu-ven, Belgium: Peeters, 2001), 114.

40 Anselm of Bec’s phrase, “faith seeking understanding,” was the original title of his Proslogion (1077–78), written well before he arrived at Canterbury to become the archbishop. In his proofs of God, the phrase became the summary and motto of a series of steps proving the existence of God.

41 Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 3.8.11.42 “Though the interchange among Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant the-

ologies is important, the field is so large that it was decided to concentrate here on specifically Roman Catholic contributions even while recognizing that these


languages of “sacraments in general”43 to the interdisciplinary reality of even one trajectory of study.

To take but one example, one cannot study the sacraments of initiation without reference to the liturgical year and to the rites of the catechumenate . . . furthermore, along with histor-ical, liturgical, and theological considerations, this permits the study of sacraments as rituals, in which there is a considerable interaction of corporal, visual and verbal expressions, all having a relation to cultural experience and tradition.44

Ecumenically and denominationally, the field has been approached through the twin lenses of content and methodology, which enables the unwieldy complexity of the discipline to begin with at least a minimal ordering. Another approach might be to situate sacramental theology in the center of this study’s concerns, as all of those constituent con-cerns, sacramentality, sacraments, sacramentals, and liturgics, form the arenas of content and methodology which the field of sacramental theology attempts to explore.

Sacramental Theology on Sacramentality

Sacramental theology is a part of the broad field of systematic theol-ogy that attempts to give articulation to the human way of seeing God in all things, so that through that seeing, that discernment, “we know God’s presence and activity in our very midst, and so experience his grace.”45 This confirms the reality that Duffy, Irwin, and Power point out at the end of their long literature review, “Sacramental theology can no longer be done without an interdisciplinary approach.”46 But that interdisciplinarity, inclusive of the “insights provided by other sciences into rite and symbol, language forms and expressions, human communications, and liberative praxis”47 is also interdisciplinary and

have been enriched by contact with other traditions, Christian and Jewish.” Duffy, et al., “Sacramental Theology: A Review of Literature,” 657–705 (quote is 657n2).

43 Ibid., 658.44 Ibid.45 Macquarrie, Guide to the Sacraments, 1.46 Duffy, et al., “Sacramental Theology: A Review of Literature,” 705.47 Ibid.


systematic within “the science of things divine.” So sacramental the-ology, when facing the breadth of sacramentality, must be inclusive of Christology, pneumatology, trinitarian theology, ecclesiology, so-teriology, as well as the three strands of liturgical studies, liturgical history, theology, and ritual studies. Those “traditional” elements of systematic theology are expanded by the realities of contemporary human situations to name specific concerns that have, in the past, been ignored. So Duffy, Irwin, and Power named “the new” twenty years ago as needing to include at least both context and methodologies in:

(1) Development of the turn to the subject . . . (2) liberation theologies, with their particular concern for praxis; (3) theolo-gies which integrate the postmodernist critique of the Western metaphysical tradition and its influence on theology . . . (4) feminist critique and retrieval of sacramental celebration; (5) theologies coming from Africa and Asia relating sacraments simultaneously to culture and to liberation.48

Those contexualized methodologies (and their implicit contents) were the “new” of twenty years ago. Since that time, many other contexts and methodologies have been woven into the expanding conversa-tion, including ecology, renewed concerns in spirituality, missiology, religious experience (the mystical and mystery), queer theology, and a return to philosophy as conversation partner.

All of this means the new methodological approaches borrowed by or constructed from within sacramental theology mix and match with the expansion of contextual concerns and voices listed above. The turn to the subject and relationality (and the increasing use of the social sciences from the 1970s through the early twenty-first century), the turn and return to mystery, the renewed interest in the workings of symbol, and the more recent and influential return to philosophy, all of these result in a consideration of sacramental theology in which the traditional dictionary definition as a theology focused solely on the sacraments (the two or the seven) is clearly no longer sufficient.

48 Ibid., 665.


Sacramental Theology on the Sacraments

In spite of the expanding dimensions of sacramental theology, most scholars associate it first and foremost with an articulation and reflec-tion on the ecclesial sacraments; but even here, there are layers of in-tertwining theologies. The first definition would be actually naming the ecclesial sacraments. In Anglicanism, simply answering that question is not as obvious as it might appear, witnessed by the painful circularity of the “Anglican” section on the sacraments in the popular resource Wikipedia.49 Are there two or seven or nine or endless sacraments, and how might a theology of sacrament help answer that question? The Episcopal Catechism of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, already quoted above for its definition of a sacrament, goes on to say there are “two great sacraments given by Christ to his Church . . . Holy Baptism and the Holy Eucharist.”50 This is clearly in continuity with article 25 (of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion) which clarifies the distinction between sacraments of the Gospel and other sacraments. In this sixteenth-century document, baptism and the Supper of the Lord as “ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel,” are understood to be the two “great sacraments,” a statement reiterated in the 1801 American adaptation of the “Articles of Religion.”51 But the devel-oping history of the articles of religion, evolving from the hand of Thomas Cranmer to 1801 and beyond, were responses to the position of Anglicanism between Roman Catholicism on the one hand and continental Protestantism on the other. Both of these latter ecclesial communities have undergone radical change in the past sixty years, as has Anglicanism itself, so it is no wonder that the two dominical sacraments of baptism and Eucharist are sometimes mixed with the “other sacramental rites” of confirmation, ordination, holy matrimony, reconciliation of a penitent, and unction.52

49 “Anglican sacramental theology reflects its dual roots in the Catholic tradition and the Reformation.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacraments.

50 BCP 1979, 858.51 The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, 1563. The 1801 “Articles of Religion”

compiled for the Episcopal Church in the United States made necessary changes with regard to political structure and circumstances, but article 25 was not deemed necessary to be changed at that time. See pp. 867–76 in BCP 1979.

52 See pp. 860–61 in BCP 1979.


This is most apparent in the praenotanda, or theological introduc-tion, to the expanded rites of the Book of Common Prayer in the US Church, found in a series of volumes titled Enriching our Worship. There, for example, the ministration of the sick, and particularly the laying on of hands and anointing, are referred to as sacrament: “While all Christians stand between the fullness of the baptismal gift of grace and the final consummation of that grace—and thus all are in need of healing—the sacrament is usually offered in response to some par-ticular need or concern. The sacrament is particularly appropriate at times of discovery of illness, a turning point in an illness, a particular procedure, or at a time of great distress.”53

This shifting of language is not a reversal of a fixed truth but, rather, an evolution (the other sacramental rites are named just that, “other sacramental rites”) of the both/and perspective on ecclesial sacraments that has often given rise to the Anglican joke that “there are two sac-raments which number seven.”54 But beneath the rather confusing language of classifying sacraments is the theology of what makes a sacrament a sacrament (and conversely, why a particular ritual action might not be a sacrament). Sacramental theology, then, tries to get at the heart of where we might engage with liturgical actions that “are outward and visible signs” which in turn engage us in “inward and spiritual grace.” This theology asks, what does it mean that a particular ritual action “is given by Christ,” how do we know that, and what does it mean in light of the historical reality that the church was practicing some of these liturgical rites before the Scriptures were compiled and canonized? Even more complex, what does it mean to say that these ecclesial actions are “the sure and certain means by which we receive that grace”? And who is “we” who engage in these sacramental actions? How is the church, the Body of Christ, defined—who is in and who is not yet in? Of necessity, we have already engaged with biblical studies, ecclesiology, ritual studies, soteriology, and the theology of grace—the self-communication of God—before even exploring the particularities of two or seven or more actions that “maintain the genuine mystery of the sacraments as means by which divine grace is mediated to us in this world of space and time and matter.”55

53 Enriching our Worship 2: Ministry with the Sick or Dying; Burial of a Child (New York: Church Publishing, 2000), 21.

54 A quote from The Rev. Dr. Louis Weil, beloved by his generations of students.55 Macquarrie, Guide to the Sacraments, vii.


At another level of inquiry, the heart of so much sacramental the-ology on the sacraments are the questions surrounding the wonder of “how do they work?” What is efficacy, what do the sacraments do to us, and how are we transformed? Is it solely the work of God, grace, or do we need to do something in return? Anglicanism is a meeting place of inheritance from many different strands, some of which we may wish would simply go away, and others enticing but elusively beyond our control. And Anglicanism is not alone in inheriting opposing theolo-gies. All liturgical churches rooted in historical tradition have inherited a complex and conflicted family tree. We have at times tried to fit all the sacraments, two or seven, into the same box so that we could say the same things about each of them and prove their “sacrament-ness” in that way.56 The more recent trend is to treat the complexity of each sacrament on its own terms, eliminating “general sacramental theology in favor of the study of each sacrament in particular, looked at from an ecclesial and not merely personal perspective.”57 One of the exciting dimensions of contemporary sacramental theology is the ability to recognize the contexts of earlier assumptions and to name the shifts that have occurred. In sacramental theology on the sacraments, many of these shifts have been focused on the Holy Eucharist because it is at the heart of who we are as Christians, as the Body of Christ, and because the stakes are so high—Anglicans and other Christians would not fight over the Eucharist if it did not matter.

A few words on relationality as part of efficacious sacramental en-gagement may function as an example of this important shift, that is, a shift in methodology in theologizing on the sacraments that represents a major change in the field. Prior to the twentieth century, much of the thinking on sacramental encounter, or mediated grace, was focused on the enlightened subject-object dichotomy. In other words, “Knowledge was an interaction between an autonomous subject and a vorliegend object.”58 (Here vorliegend, drawing on the German-language work of

56 This would certainly have been the dominant approach to the scholastic theology of the sacraments, instituting a universal language on matter and form, minister and recipient, as well as origin and context, to form a sacramental the-ology of sacrament in general.

57 Regis Duffy, reflecting on the approach of a team of theologians in La pratique de la théologie, vol. 3 (Paris: Cerf, 1983), in “Sacramental Theology: A Review of Literature,” 661n21.

58 Depoortere, “From Sacramentality to Sacraments,” 55.


Edmund Husserl, means “present, existing, at issue, in hand.”59) This is rooted in the “scholastic metaphysical approach characterized as onto-theological and employing the causa-signum theory.”60 The point of this was the distance between the object, often the consecrated elements of the Eucharist, and the subject, here the recipient, and particularly how one related to the other. The challenges to this ap-proach in the twentieth century have been several. First, setting aside the fundamental problem of approaching the Body of Christ in the consecrated bread as an “object,” a thing, to begin with, there is the assumption that knowledge of an object could come without prejudice of experience or prior association. “Knowledge without prejudice does not exist; it is participation from within . . . one is always already implied.”61 The shift in context that is using this participatory way of knowing is the consequence “of a renewed anthropology, based on the symbolic and intersubjective”62 approach to sacramental theology. So rather than the scholastic approach to the “problem” in onto-theology, this shifts the conversation from the object as “containable and ob-jectifiable . . . placed before the subject for analysis and ultimate resolution [to be] solved,”63 to someone, or better, to a mystery, in which we participate. “A mystery . . . is not objectifiable and it does not disappear. Persons are a part of it as it embraces and encompasses a subject. Thus, persons cannot solve a mystery without being solved, cannot grasp anything without being grasped.”64 While this reflection is focused on the Eucharist and “how it works,” it involves the return in a broader sense to remembering that as God is not a thing, sacraments are not things. Sacraments are actions, encounters, between personal beings in communion. This is a shift that is profoundly ecumenical, often articulated most clearly from the Eastern Christian perspective.65

59 Cassell’s German-English, English-German Dictionary, ed. Harold Betteridge (New York: MacMillian, 1978), 698.

60 Depoortere, “From Sacramentality to Sacraments,” 55.61 Ibid.62 Ibid.63 Ibid.64 Ibid.65 John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church

(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997).


Another development in sacramental theology’s approach to ec-clesial sacraments is the ecumenical agreement that the Word is sac-ramental, and the sacraments are thoroughly infused with the Word. Whether through the polemics of the various Protestant reformations or a myopic focus on eucharistic mechanics, the Word of God as essen-tial dimension of sacrament was reduced to something quite separate from sacrament in recent centuries. Either in sola scriptura as both method and content in some traditions or by a perception of the Word as simply an optional prelude to the essential nature of the sacramental act, the understanding of the relationship between the two was often Word versus Sacrament. But the nineteenth- and twentieth-century rediscovery of critical biblical study by Protestant scholars soon spilled over into the Roman Catholic community; at the same time, the ecu-menical liturgical movement was inviting a breadth of Christians into finding or restoring their sacramental roots. Anglicanism stood in a helpful and mediating location, having maintained some of Christian-ity’s long tradition of sacramental structure and identity in spirituality and polity as well as a public and historically tested use of vernacular Scripture readings and preaching for four hundred years.66 The living example of churches that retained both Word and Sacrament in a unity, rather than the polemics of only one part of the tradition, certainly encouraged the ecumenical sharing of insights and balance that shaped the field of liturgy and theology in the 1950s and 1960s.67 When the first document of the Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, was promulgated in 1963, the crucial paragraph on Scripture was no longer a complete surprise but the natural evolution of several decades of ecumenical theological work.

Sacred scripture is of the greatest importance in the celebration of the liturgy. For from it are drawn the lessons which we read and which are explained in the homily; from it too come the psalms which are sung. It is from scripture that the petitions, prayers and hymns draw their inspiration and their force, and that actions and signs derive their meaning. Hence, in order to

66 See Timothy Sedgwick, “The New Shape of Anglican Identity,” ATR 77 (1995): 187–97.

67 See Louis Weil, “The Gospel in Anglicanism,” in The Study of Anglicanism, ed. Stephen Sykes and John Booty (London: SPCK, 1988), 51–76.


achieve the restoration, progress and adaptation of the sacred liturgy it is essential to promote that warm and lively appre-ciation of sacred scripture to which the venerable tradition of eastern and western rites gives testimony.68

In the decades since these words were written, one of the most promi-nent results has been the achievement of a shared, three-year lection-ary, bringing churches into communion in the Liturgy of the Word, if not at the table.

Theologically, a tremendous consensus has been emerging on the sacramental character of the Word and on the word at the heart of sacramental action. It is no longer Word versus Sacrament; rather, it is different ways of being Word or different ways of being Sacrament.69 As with many dimensions of sacramentality and sacramental theology already discussed in this chapter, the interdisciplinary contributions of many fields beyond theology have assisted in articulating the unity of Word and Sacrament. In this case, particularly linguistics, commu-nication studies, and semiotics have been valuable in articulating the sacramental rite as a language event. Several examples of the Word in Sacrament from different perspectives may help flesh this out. First, the liturgy itself is biblically patterned: “The whole history of worship among Christians might be regarded as a history of the way the book was understood and alive among the churches. Patterns of reading and preaching the parts of the book, of praying in the language of the book, of doing the signs of the book—these are the principal patterns of Christian worship.”70

Second, the quality and “style” of liturgical language shares with scriptural language a preference for metaphor and doxology rather

68 Sacrosanctum Concilium (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy), par. 24. Un-less otherwise indicated, all citations of Vatican II documents come from Vatican Council II: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations; The Basic Sixteen Documents, ed. Austin Flannery (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014).

69 “There is hardly a single Christian church which would today admit to an opposition between word and sacrament. These are no longer considered inde-pendent and different manners of divine self-communication but complementary realities incapable of accomplishing their task without reciprocal penetration.” Andrew D. Ciferni, “Word and Sacrament,” The New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship, ed. Peter Fink (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990), 1320.

70 Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 16.


than didactic description: “When seen as rhythm and conversation, language becomes an opening for change and transformation, rather than closure around ‘captured’ causes and meanings.”71 This means that evocative language is the language of those who respond to God’s love in the recognition that all words are inadequate, and these words are scriptural and sacramental.72 Third, the juxtaposition of sacramen-tal word and action “says a new thing”73 in ways that are always past, present, and above all, future, inviting us into grace to participate in what will fully be.

In an interesting way, the clarity of Armenian Orthodox sacramen-tal theology on the Word in Sacrament can offer a helpful ecumenical voice. In the Armenian and other Eastern sacramental prayer tradi-tions, “explicit reference to the “unfailing” or “infallible” Word of the Lord, which numerous prayers invoke as the ultimate authority and power justifying the sacramental action or claim” is at the heart of the contribution.74 A good example is the pre-communion prayer attributed to John Chrysostom:

You have made me, unworthy as I am, worthy to partake this day of your divine and awe-inspiring mystery, of your pure Body and precious Blood . . . be with me always according to your unfailing promise, that “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him.” You said it, loving Lord. Uphold the words of your divine, inviolable commandments.

71 Nathan Mitchell, “Rituality and the Retrieval of Sacrament as ‘Language Event,’” in Sacraments: Revelation of the Humanity of God; Engaging the Funda-mental Theology of Louis-Marie Chauvet, ed. Philippe Bordeyne and Bruce Morrill (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2008), 211.

72 In incorporating the theology of David Tracy, who reminds us of the “con-temporary need to retrieve the theological form of ‘the fragmentary,’” Nathan Mitchell writes that “the fragmentary biblico-theological speech of apocalyptic and apophasis is an antidote to modern theology’s amnesia concerning Christ’s cross and the hiddenness of God.” Mitchell, “Rituality and the Retrieval of Sac-rament as ‘Language Event,’” 215. Mitchell highlights the reality that evocative metaphorical scriptural and liturgical language both say something and always point beyond itself to what is “unsayable.”

73 Lathrop, Holy Things, 20.74 M. Daniel Findikyan, “The ‘Unfailing Word’ in Eastern Sacramental prayers,”

in Studia Liturgica Diversa: Essays in Honor of Paul F. Bradshaw (Portland, OR: The Pastoral Press, 2004), 180.


For you are the God of mercy and of compassion and of love toward mankind, and the giver of good things.75

The startling boldness of the statement is structured as a “scriptural embolism” inserted into a liturgical text which “forms the crux of a logical, juridical argument developed in sacramental prayers . . . and intended to give grounds for the particular supplications made by the prayer,”76 especially in the “institution narrative” of eucharistic prayers.

From the other perspective, the sacramental understanding of the word, the most obvious contribution of sacramental theology was to invite the church to step back and revisit the broader concept of sac-rament. If “sacrament” in this broadest sense is any action, or thing, or person that reveals and mediates God’s presence and draws people into an encounter with the divine, then the Word of God is clearly sac-ramental. But what do we mean by the “Word”? The Word “is revealed in the scriptures, and the scriptures draw us into an ongoing encoun-ter with the Word, for the eschaton is ‘not yet.’”77 Here Depoortere reminds his readers that the Word made flesh is revealed in Scripture but is not contained by Scripture—the Word is a personal being, not a book, but the book is symbol of the reality that is the person: “in the symbolic field the relationship between the signified and the signifier is characterized by a play between presence and absence, appearing and disappearing. A visible significant renders ‘present’ an invisible signifié.”78 A primary context of interpreting this Word in the word, and its sacramental efficacy, is in the renewed emphasis on liturgical preaching which also emerged in the twentieth century, particularly at the theological level of sacramental imagination (or, in the words of David Tracy, “analogical imagination”) that

emphasizes the presence of the God who is self-communicating love, the creation of human beings in the image of God (rest-less hearts seeking the divine), the mystery of the incarnation, grace as divinizing as well as forgiving, the mediating role of the church as sacrament of salvation in the world, and the “foretaste” of the reign of God that is present in the human

75 Ibid., 182.76 Ibid., 180–81.77 Depoortere, “From Sacramentality to Sacraments,” 56.78 Ibid.


community wherever God’s reign of justice, peace and love is fostered.79

Along with the necessary revisiting of liturgical history, theology, and ritual studies as they pertain to liturgical preaching, sacramental preaching also engages sacramental theology, asking how this preaching event is sacramental, or a sacrament? In a similar way, pastoral liturgy and ministry must ask “how do we actually do this” so that it is con-sistent with what we believe this to mean, a practical theology question which pertains to the preaching act also. In an article reflecting her experiences in both preaching and teaching liturgical preaching, Linda Clader talks about preaching at the Eucharist as this meeting place of words, the Word, and Sacrament:

Traditional ceremonial language has its impact on preaching by creating a specialized “dialect” with loaded, often highly metaphorical language which is familiar to the community through frequent repetition. Like the images and stories of the biblical record itself, the language of the liturgy can “bend” our preaching to tune itself to the worship tradition. . . . [T]he homily is a place in the liturgy where the daily, pastoral issues of the community can be brought together with the great story of our tradition, where the mundane can be blessed along with the homely elements of bread and wine. It is right and good that “normal” human conversation, as it is encapsulated in the preaching, be a participant in the sacred dialog.80

The ecclesial sacraments are still very much at the heart of much focus in sacramental theology, and while “word and sacraments together constitute the vehicle by which Christ communicates himself to his people,”81 there are two other introductory dimensions that need nam-ing before we move onto the specific theological developments in the broader field of sacramental studies.

79 Mary Catherine Hilkert, Naming Grace: Preaching and the Sacramental Imagina-tion (New York: Continuum, 1997), 15, citing David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 405–45.

80 Linda Clader, “The Formation of a Eucharistic Preacher,” in Preaching at the Double Feast: Homiletics for Eucharistic Worship (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2006), 199, 219.

81 Macquarrie, Guide to the Sacraments, 22.


Sacramental Theology and Christian Ethics

Ecclesial sacraments are not static, one-time events with no prece-dent or ongoing efficacy. Kristiaan Depoortere summarizes this with a threefold dimensionality of sacraments: they authenticate: “all previous practices of faith related to the sacrament that went before” because it has value and is part of the revelatory character of a sacrament; they perfect: “the sacramental act is an epiclesis . . . a performative word that effects what it affirms”; and they send forth: “every sacramental seal entails a mission.”82 It is this third dimension of sending forth in order to be someone different and to do something that brings sacraments, sacramental theology, and ethics together.

In both of his primary writings on sacramental theology,83 Louis- Marie Chauvet builds a visual image of the traditional relationship between Scripture, liturgy (or sacraments), and ethics, sometimes as a triangle, sometimes as a circle, and other times as an arch. The point of all of these diagrams is the interrelatedness of the three. Scripture represents “everything that pertains to the knowledge of God’s mystery revealed in Jesus Christ.” The Bible is the foundation, but in addition, “all the theological discourse of yesterday and today” as well as “cate-chesis . . . [which] belongs also to this pole of Christian identity” is dependent on “biblical revelation.”84 The sacraments, and liturgy in general, include all “the various forms of celebration which the church performs in memory of Jesus’ death and resurrection,” which can stretch to include prayer, ecclesial and individual. All of these are part of Chauvet’s “sacrament” paradigm, based on the category of “everything that pertains to the thankfulness which the church expresses to God.”85 The third, “ethical conduct,” is “the mark . . . by which Christians testify to the gospel by their actions.” This includes

82 Depoortere, “From Sacramentality to Sacraments,” 60.83 Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbole et sacrement: une relecture sacraemntelle de l’ex-

istence chrétienne (Paris: Cerf, 1987), English translation: Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, trans. Patrick Madigan and Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995); Les sacraments, Parole de Dieu au risque du corps (Paris: Édition de l’Atelier, 1993), English trans-lation: The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001).

84 Chauvet, The Sacraments, 29.85 Ibid., 30.


not only “interpersonal relationships but also collective problems.” Here, it is everything that “pertains to action in the name of the gospel (therefore also, and even primarily, in the name of humanity).”86 These three, “knowledge, gratitude, and action,”87 or “believing (kerygma), celebrating (leitourgia), and loving (ethics-diakonia),”88 form the es-sence, the essentials, of what it is to be Christian, which is also always to be Christians together, because

the church precedes the individual . . . in other words, it is not that women and men, in some way attached directly to Jesus Christ, would be Christians separately and by banding together would form the church. In order to be Christian, one must belong to the church. The church is primary.89

Because Christians are Christians together, the knowledge of Christ, celebrated in worship, must lead to action for the world in the name of Christ. Ethical actions and behavior are therefore part of sacramental theology.

Using the paschal mystery (understood to be not only the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ but also our entry into that transformative transition here and now), Timothy Sedgwick develops an appealing sacramental ethic based on this paschal identity for all Christians.90 Sedgwick says, “In worship the worshiper participates in the paschal mystery. The fundamental reality of life is not only revealed, but the worshiper is reconciled to that reality.”91 If we, as Christians, enter into dying and rising for others, then the eucharistic liturgy as a primary way in which we enter into that historical reality, once and for all and forever efficacious, must also be a primary realignment to the task of being Christ for and in the world. “The task of Christian ethics is to deepen the movement of faith. . . . Christian ethics is more broadly part of the task of the cure of souls, sustaining and

86 Ibid.,31.87 Ibid.88 Depoortere, “From Sacramentality to Sacraments,” 57.89 Chauvet, The Sacraments, 31.90 Timothy F. Sedgwick, Sacramental Ethics: Paschal Identity and the Christian

Life (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987).91 Ibid., 16.


nurturing individuals and the community in their faith.”92 From a different perspective, drawing on the paschal mystery as a vehicle for understanding sacramental ethics, Bruce Morrill reflects on Chauvet’s contributions by saying,

The Christ who comes to us in the sacraments is the one who lived a human solidarity unto death, revealing the difference in God that is the source of our salvation, crossing out the gods of human imagination and establishing a similitude between God and humans. . . . In celebrations of the paschal mystery “God is revealed as the one who, through the Spirit, ‘crosses God out’ in humanity, giving to the latter the possibility of becoming the ‘sacramental locus’ where God continues to be embodied.”93

As a primary, but not sole, image for the movement from Scrip-ture to sacrament to ethics, the paschal mystery also gets at the heart of a eucharistic issue so often at the center of sacramental theology. What changes in the eucharistic liturgy, what is transformed? In many ways the sharp historical division between Roman Catholicism, with an emphasis on the change in the bread and wine in order that the eucharistic celebration be efficacious and capable of effecting change versus the Protestant emphasis on the reception of communion, and, by extension, the change in the individual Christian as both the locus and point of the change, find common ground in sacramental ethics.94 The Eucharist, in its multiple efficacious transformations, transig-nifications, and transubstantiations, compels believing participants, transformed and conformed, to be Christ for the world. But the too facile equation of bread and wine transformed so that the partici-pants are transformed so that they can transform the world needs to be rooted in the real transformation of the church, corporately and

92 Ibid., 19.93 Bruce T. Morrill, “Building on Chauvet’s Work: An Overview,” in Bordeyne

and Morrill, Sacraments, xxii, quoting in part from Chauvet, The Sacraments, 167.94 The two approaches find much deeper ground than simply a denominational

difference of emphases. They also represent reliance on different philosophical systems, sometimes defined as the aesthetic versus the ethical in sacramentalism. “The difference can be highlighted by observing that whereas what matters under the platonic scheme is participated presence, for the aristotelian it is a matter of achieved effects.” Brown, God and Enchantment of Place, 31.


in its individual members and these salvific dimensions restored to the conversation. Here the expansion of sacramental transformation inclusive of all the bodies involved (the physical body of Jesus—now the glorified Body of Christ, the mystical body of the sacrament, and the real Body of Christ, the ecclesial body95), as well as the broadening base of sacraments rooted in Christ and the church, has opened the possibilities for ecumenical conversation and mutual learning based on the wealth of Christian tradition.

Sacramental Theology and the “Primordial Sacraments”: Christ and the Church

Rooted in sacramental language throughout Christian tradition, the overt emergence of language describing first Christ, and then the church, as sacraments is primarily a twentieth-century phenomenon. Whether described as primordial and foundational, perfect or primary, super-sacraments, ur-sacraments or extraordinary sacraments, these terms are used to distinguish Christ and the Church as distinct from the actions of the ecclesial sacraments but, at the same time, included within sacramentality. This inclusion means within a sacramental sys-tem that acknowledges Christ as both origin and context of all that is revelatory of the divine as well as the means of participation in the same, similar but derivative qualities can also be adapted to include the church as the Body of Christ. Prominent among the early voices articulating Christ as sacrament were three Anglicans: Charles Gore, Oliver Quick, and William Temple.96

95 The literature on the developments in articulating the interpretations of the phrase “the Body of Christ” is vast but centers on the profound historical shift that occurs in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the mystical body (eu-charistic) and real body (church) shift places as definitions, in which a “‘deadly dichotomy’ between the Eucharistic body and the ecclesial body became firmly rooted . . . and the essential bond that joined Eucharistic worship to the unity of the church disappeared.” Chauvet, The Sacraments, 139, quoting Henri de Lubac, Corpus mysticum: L’eucharistie et l’Église au Moyen Age, etude historique, Théologie 3 (Paris: Aubier, 1944), esp. pp. 280–83.

96 See David Brown’s discussion in God and Enchantment of Place, especially regarding Oliver Quick’s contributions (pp. 28–31). For Charles Gore, the best entrée to his “sacramental principle” is in his Body of Christ (London: John Murray, 1901), esp. pp. 39–40.


William Temple’s 1940 Gifford Lectures were mentioned above in the discussion on sacramentality, and his imagery on “a sacramental universe” probably fits best there. But in these same lectures he moved to the human desire for “a more definite revelation of God,” such as the one in which revelation came “in the person of Jesus Christ, his life, death and resurrection.”97 Even more than the paschal mystery, the event of the incarnation was, for Temple, the primary sacramental moment, the revelatory moment in which God is met. Drawing on the prologue of St. John’s Gospel, Temple explains that

the Logos, thought or speech, is the means by which a mind reveals itself to another. To say then that this eternally exists in relation to God and is itself Divine is to affirm of God that He is in His own nature self-revealing. The whole process of that revelation which has been going on through nature, through history and through prophets, comes to complete fulfillment in the Incarnation. . . . [O]nly in the life of Christ is this manifestation given. What we see in Him is what we should see in the history of the universe if we could apprehend that history in its completeness.98

This is, in many ways, an articulation and expansion of what it means to say that the sacraments are “given by Christ” or “instituted by Christ” by recognizing that they are in Christ, as is all divine revela-tion. Temple’s work, along with that of Oliver Quick, who wrote that “the life of Jesus Christ is seen as the perfect sacrament,”99 prefigured Edward Schillebeeckx’s important 1963 work, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God.100 Gathering together much of his own work of the previous decade, the timing of this book at the beginning of Vatican II articulated an important move toward a less juridical and compartmentalized understanding of the essential unity between the two natures of Christ and how God continues to communicate God’s

97 Macquarrie, Guide to the Sacraments, 33, in which he draws on the work of William Temple.

98 William Temple, Mens Creatrix (London: MacMillan & Co., 1961), 317–18. Although this edition was published in 1961, Temple completed the writing in London in 1916.

99 Oliver Quick, The Christian Sacraments (London: Nisbet, 1927), 105.100 Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, trans.

Paul Barnett (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963).


self (grace) through the church. For Schillebeeckx, Christ and the church are not sacraments of the same order as the ecclesial sacraments but part of a system—articulated by John Macquarrie in a similar way:

Christ is the sacrament of God; the church is the sacrament (body) of Christ; the seven sacraments are the sacraments of the church; the natural sacraments scattered around the world are, from a Christian point of view, approximations or pointers which find fulfillment in the sacraments of the gospel.101

If Christ is the source of all sacramental events, it is more than simply as external founder. In true sacramental sense, “there is nothing in them [the sacraments] that is not already in him [Christ]. . . . [T]he grace which the sacraments extend to us is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, present with us in the sacraments.”102 This implies two addi-tional theological presuppositions for Macquarrie. First, that Christ “is the true minister of every sacrament” the origin of the “church’s teach-ing that the validity of a sacrament does not depend on the worthiness or unworthiness of its human minister.”103 The second consideration is “that Jesus Christ is the content of the sacrament . . . in all of the sacraments, not just the eucharist, we are receiving Christ, receiving his grace, which means his presence in our lives.”104

A more cautious use of the term “sacrament” to talk about the church was also evolving throughout the twentieth century, in both Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism, most famously declared in the 1964 Vatican II document Lumen Gentium: “The church, in Christ, is a sacrament—a sign and instrument, that is, of communion with God and the unity of the entire human race” (LG 1). Lumen Gentium continued by articulating the link between Christ and Christ’s church: “The one mediator, Christ, established and constantly sustains here on earth his holy church, the community of faith, hope and charity, as a visible structure through which he communicates truth and grace to everyone” (LG 8).105

101 Macquarrie, Guide to the Sacraments, 37.102 Ibid., 37–38.103 Ibid., 38.104 Ibid.105 Ibid., par. 8.


Ecumenical conversations, however, have made greater use of the Pauline imagery of the Body of Christ than the institutionally based language of Lumen Gentium, undoubtedly because of its organic essen-tial unity between the head, Christ, and the members, the church.106 Whether described as the mystical body or the real body, the hands and feet of Christ on earth become sign and symbol of Christ’s pres-ence in all things, not separate from it but participating in all things. From William Temple’s 1916 work on the apostle Paul and the church (“The church will only manifest the whole power of Christ when it embraces all mankind”107) to recent evangelical Christian bloggings (“the church is like the rest of the sacraments, an effective sign—a notable outcropping—of what people already are by the Word’s work of creation and incarnation108), a consensus on the sacramentality of the church centers on the church acting as sacrament, not over and against the world or the unbaptized or other religions, but as a vehicle of revelation and presence through participation. This ecumenical conversation is inclusive of Eastern Christianity also, particularly in the writings of Alexander Schmemann. “The church is the sacrament of the kingdom—not because she possesses divinely instituted acts called ‘sacraments,’ but because first of all she is the possibility given to man to see in and through this world the ‘world to come,’ to see and to ‘live’ it in Christ.”109 Schmemann’s writing reminds us that sacramentality transcends temporality and spatial restrictions, even though the church institutional exists as a placed and timebound witness to eternity.

The most common pastoral entry to church as sacrament is not through theological speculation but through the Nicene Creed: “we believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.”110 These four marks of the church have received centuries of theological reflection, including the brief summaries in multiple catechisms, in which the

106 Although “the Body of Christ” image is found in several letters of Paul (or of the Pauline school), the starting place is generally the description of 1 Corin-thians 12:12-31.

107 Mens Creatrix, 334.108 From the blog of Pastor Nathan Colquhoun. He quotes from Robert Ca-

pion’s reflections on “The Church as Sacrament.” www.nathancolquhoun.com.109 Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy

(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1982). 110 BCP 1979, 359.


apostle Paul’s theology of the body is the descriptive for the mark of “one . . . Church.” “The Church is one, because it is one Body, under one Head, our Lord Jesus Christ.” The Holy Spirit figures into the mark of “holy” (“The Church is holy, because the Holy Spirit dwells in it, consecrates its members, and guides them to do God’s work”), and catholic as universal is “the whole Faith to all people, to the end of time.”111 Finally, apostolicity is both a matter of continuity with the Tradition and forward-looking in carrying out Christ’s mission.112 But it is the opening phrase in the Book of Common Prayer’s translation of the Nicene Creed that we will revisit later in the chapter on ecclesiol-ogy, “We believe in . . .”: what does it mean to recognize the church as something in which we believe, the same words used for each person of the Trinity? What does it mean the one baptism is acknowledged, and our resurrection from the dead professed, under the ecclesial category? What is the connection between the Trinity and the church implied in the very structure of the Creed?

Beyond liturgical actions, the primordial sacrament that is Christ and the sacramentality of the church return us to the etymology with which we began, mysterion as the systematic context of divine revelation and communication in the incarnation, the church, and in Scriptures. The contemporary conversations on the essential relationality between Christ, the church and the ecclesial sacraments will be visited with more detail in the chapters to follow.

Sacramental Theology and Sacramentals

The multifaceted conversation between sacramental theology and sacraments above reveals the rather porous boundaries for what is included in the definition of “sacrament” in the twenty-first century. Another ambiguous category is “sacramentals”—official actions of the church or of popular religiosity that still may be both corporate and essentially revelatory of the divine (and efficacious in their effects) but yet are not sacraments (whether dominical or ecclesial or both). When seven ecclesial sacraments were established in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, many material items and human interactions associated with

111 BCP 1979, 854.112 Ibid., 954.


the church became sacramentals—actions and things of a different ec-clesial order. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (published in English in 1994) describes a “sacramental” in the following way:

Holy Mother Church has, moreover, instituted sacramentals. These are sacred signs which bear a resemblance to the sacra-ments. They signify effects, particularly of a spiritual nature, which are obtained through the intercession of the Church. By them men are disposed to receive the chief effect of the sacraments, and various occasions in life are rendered holy.113

While the precision of language may not resonate with many Anglicans, the location of sacramentals within the realm of sacramentality, the ongoing relation to the official sacraments, and the marking of partic-ular events in the lives of human beings should find resonance among many Christians. In the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, the articulated difference between the “two great sacraments given by Christ to his Church” (baptism and the Holy Eucharist)114 and the “other sacramen-tal rites evolved in the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit”115 (confirmation, ordination, holy matrimony, reconciliation of a penitent, and unction) may mark the “dividing line” between sacrament and sacramental for some Anglicans.116 But certainly the most common experience of sacramental in Anglicanism is in the realm of blessings, dedications, and consecrations. The consecration of a church with its stepwise movement through the centers of sacramental activity uses the language of “sanctify,” “dedicate,” and “setting apart,”117 in addition to the primacy of ritual action; doing baptisms at the font to consecrate the font, and celebrating the Eucharist at the altar to sanctify it. The supplement of “church furnishings and ornaments” to be “dedicated,” found in the Book of Occasional Services 2003,118 continues in the same style, offering the items through a variety of intercessory language and

113 Part 2: “The Celebration of the Christian Mystery,” chap. 4: “Other Litur-gical Celebrations,” Article 1: # 1667. www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/.

114 BCP 1979, 858.115 Ibid., 860.116 The odd division between christologically originating sacraments and pneu-

matologically inspired sacramentals would be an interesting topic for discussion!117 BCP 1979, 566–79.118 Book of Occasional Services 2003 (New York: Church Publishing, 2004),

196–213.


praying that those who offer the things may be blessed through and by the use of the items now set aside, dedicated, blessed, or sanctified. The designation that some items are to be blessed by a bishop and others by priests is a subtle reminder that these sacramental activities are still within the ecclesial sphere of sacramentality.

Flowing from this ecclesial sphere are the lay blessings of partic-ular settings and relationships, such as the blessings offered to God at meals and the blessings of children by their parents, based on the entry of all the baptized into the priesthood of all believers. It is also in the sacramentals, whether they be things such as Advent wreaths, Christmas trees, Easter eggs or home altars, or actions, such as house blessings, prayers at home, or rituals for life’s transitions, that the re-lationship between the church universal and the domestic church of the household is made most manifest.

Sacramental Theology and Liturgy

Thus far we have situated sacramental theology in relation to sacramentality, to various aspects of the sacraments (including the extraordinary sacramental concepts of Christ and the church), to sacramental ethics, and to sacramentals. But how is this conversation directly related to liturgy in its theology and practice?

PhD programs in liturgical studies are few and far between, but a comparison of the degree descriptions at the three largest (and most comprehensive) programs in the United States yields three different perspectives on the relationship between liturgical studies and sacra-mental theology. The University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, describes the sub-field of liturgical theology as one that “attends to what Christians believe to be happening in their common prayer and sacraments (sacramental theology) and to the ways in which the worship tradition itself interacts within the broader language of Christian faith and practice (historical and systematic theology).”119 Here, sacramental theology is mentioned as directly linked to the study of the sacraments, rather than an integrative aspect of all three areas of study (history, the-ology, and ritual studies). The Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley,

119 PhD program in liturgical studies, University of Notre Dame, department of theological studies website: http://theology.nd.edu/graduate-programs/ph-d /areas-of-concentration/liturgical-studies/.


California, teaches liturgical studies through the same three sub-fields of history, theology, and ritual studies, but the introduction to the doc-toral program rationale does not mention sacramental theology at all: “The goal of this program is to promote the study and understanding of Christian worship as it is lived and expressed through the churches’ various traditions and cultures. It assumes that worship is at the heart of the theological enterprise, since it is both the primary context of the churches’ encounter with the mystery of the Triune God and a primary actualization of the ecclesial body.”120 Finally, The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, offers the PhD in liturgical studies/sacramental theology, but only under the ecclesiastical degrees of STB, STL, and STD is sacramental theology described: this program “fo-cuses primarily upon the theological understanding of liturgical services in light of their historical development. This concentration attends to these matters with a focus on issues in sacramental theology as these relate to the method and content of historical/systematic theology.”121 The results for the programs teaching the teachers are mixed, although individual courses in sacramental theology continue to be taught. What is clear is that liturgical theology is central in all the doctoral programs (in the three examples above and in other schools), and that may be the most fruitful place to begin.

Liturgical Theology

The understanding of liturgical theology has evolved in notable ways in just the past thirty years. The use of the word “liturgy” itself was not common until the twentieth century, although the return of the technical term in the English language dates from the eighteenth century.122 Instead of liturgy, the term “worship,” or simply the name of a particular service (“Holy Communion,” “Morning Prayer,” “Mass”), was used by most people. In the early years of the ecumenical liturgical renewal (in the second half of the twentieth century), the translitera-

120 GTU PhD program in liturgical studies, website: www.gtu.edu/academics /areas/liturgical-studies.

121 Graduate studies in liturgical studies/sacramental theology, CUA website: http://trs.cua.edu/academic/grad/.

122 See Lawrence J. Madden, “Liturgy,” in The New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship, ed. Peter Fink (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 740.


tion from the Greek term, leitourgia, was often translated as “the work of the people”123 and presented as the only translation possible. This theology drawn from etymology supported and encouraged the return of liturgical action as something that everyone present did, not simply the clergy for the laity. A return to a less politically charged etymology, however, has tempered that translation with the reality that its original usage at the time of the development of ritual in the new Christian Church, as well as the writing of what is now included in the New Testament, is more likely referring to official civic activities “done on behalf of the people.”124 In the New Testament itself, as well as early patristic writings, leitourgia often refers to the actions of Christ himself as high priest or to “the cultic celebration of the Christians who ‘made liturgy to the Lord,’” such as in Acts 13:2.125 The denominationally ex-clusive use of the word “liturgy” (in Eastern Orthodox circles referring to the eucharistic liturgy and in Anglican and Roman Catholic circles including a wide variety of liturgies) has for the most part disappeared, and the terms “liturgy” and “worship” are used by a wide variety of Christians (as well as by scholars in other religious traditions).

Liturgical theology is an apt phrase to represent the work of the ecumenical liturgical movement. It was promoted as a way to articulate “the problem of the relationship between worship and theology” which in 1963 Alexander Schmemann defined as “the theological agenda of our time.”126 Even a cursory overview of the work on liturgical theology in these past fifty years reveals a dynamic and slippery field continuing to struggle with the relationship between theology and liturgy as well as weave in the changing landscape of sacramental theology. For several decades, scholars were fascinated with the meaning and continued use of an out-of-context fifth-century phrase, legem credendi lex statuat

123 The emphasis on the liturgy as what all the participants were doing was used extensively, even as a book title. See, for example, Frank C. Senn, The People’s Work: A Social History of the Liturgy (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2006), 1.

124 Anscar J. Chupungco, “A Definition of Liturgy,” Handbook for Liturgical Stud-ies: Introduction to the Liturgy, vol. 1 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997), 3–4.

125 Ibid., 3. Chupungco draws on the work of Salvatore Marsili’s article “Liturgia,” Anamnesis 1 (1974): 33–44.

126 “Theology and Liturgical Tradition,” in Worship in Scripture and Tradition, ed. Massey H. Shepherd (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 165, cited in Kevin Irwin, Liturgical Theology: A Primer (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990), 7.


supplicandi. Taken from a series of statements responding to liturgical questions, this phrase of Prosper of Aquitaine (written between 435 and 442) was a retort to Pelagianism by “proving” the necessity of grace based on the Good Friday intercessions of the church for var-ious groups of people.127 In twentieth-century liturgical debates, the phrase was reinvented as lex orandi, lex credendi, a somewhat misleading shorthand now interpreted to mean “the law of faith (equals) the law of prayer,” or “we pray what we believe and believe what we pray.” While these twentieth-century phrases are legitimate ways of doing and summarizing liturgical theology, they are not directly related to the fifth-century contextualized concerns or theology of Prosper of Aquitaine.

The fascination with the fifth-century phrase (and its twentieth- century versions) created a fourfold delineation of liturgical theology that remained in place for several decades as a helpful way to classify and understand some of the dynamics in the relationship between liturgy and theology. Although articulated differently by different theo-logians, they can be characterized most succinctly by highlighting their differences. (1) “A theology drawn from the liturgy,”128 which, when simplified by many writers, meant the liturgy as the source of theology, or “primary theology.”129 The strength of this approach is the emphasis on the unity of corporate prayer and Christian life, the liturgy as truly “source and summit” of all that the church is and does. The weakness is its potential to canonize the liturgy without a critique, leaning toward a “kind of liturgical fundamentalism which would implicitly endorse the theological insight and weight of the church’s existing euchology.”130 (2) “Theology informing the liturgy” in which doctrine articulated in councils, confessions, creeds, and catechisms is used as the basis to either shape liturgical texts or to critique liturgy and assure its ortho-

127 See Irwin, Liturgical Theology: A Primer, 11–17. Also, for more recent work, see Maxwell E. Johnson, Praying and Believing in Early Christianity: The Interplay between Christian Worship and Doctrine (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2013).

128 See Irwin, Liturgical Theology: A Primer, 66–67.129 This was a favorite phrase of Aidan Kavanagh’s (and of his students who

developed this approach) in which the liturgy is seen as the primary arena of articulating and forming theology (via the famous “Mrs. Murphy”). See Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology (New York: Pueblo Books, 1984).

130 Irwin, Liturgical Theology: A Primer, 47.


doxy in orthopraxis. This approach might be pushed to represent the opposite end of the spectrum from the first category. While examples of this dynamic can be drawn from all periods of liturgical history, this approach is often identified with Protestant theologians who tended to see liturgy as necessarily and inherently catechetical, a means of edifying by teaching right faith. Geoffrey Wainwright championed this approach in his 1980 book, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine and Life; A Systematic Theology,131 and his students have con-tinued this approach to liturgical theology. The disadvantage of this approach is that liturgy’s role as the means of God’s glorification and our sanctification through prophetic, evocative, and apophatic language and actions may be subsumed to a didactic event that oversimplifies the multiplicity of possible theologies. (3) “A theology of liturgy”132 is less clearly defined by its opposite, as were the first two categories. This more complex approach to liturgical theology involves the liturgy as a source of theology but in the deep structure of both liturgy and central theological truths.

One way to concretize this is to see the liturgy as a ritual enactment of the transhistorical event of Christ’s dying and rising. As an act of memory, liturgy includes the manifestation of this unique saving act through word and gesture, myth and symbol, narrative and ritual. . . . Christ as mediator and the Spirit as sanctifier are experienced in liturgy in such a way that the assembly is progressively and continually transformed into the image and likeness of God. Our participation in liturgy enacts the Church.133

This approach, although a bit vague as to its distinctiveness, represents a more inclusive and comprehensive approach to the relationship between liturgy and theology and forms the basis for later theological reflection in the 1990s and into the first decade of the twenty-first cen-tury. (4) Lastly, a liturgical theology named “doxological theology”134

131 Geoffrey Wainwright, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine, and Life: A Systematic Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

132 See Irwin, Liturgical Theology: A Primer, 64–66.133 Ibid., 66–67.134 See Irwin, Liturgical Theology: A Primer, 67–68.


emerged in the 1980s135 but certainly preceded that historical period by centuries. Doxological theology was rooted in the early church and Eastern emphasis on both liturgy and theology as acts of doxology, actions or undertakings praising God in different ways. “What is op-erative in this approach to theology is the important notion of mystery. Through both theology and liturgy the mystery of God is acknowl-edged and experienced.”136 For some theologians, this was a concerted move away from the rationalism and minimalism of modernity (and earlier “isms”) toward the restoration of faith as both motivation and goal in the doing of theology.

Since the 1980s, many new developments have made their impact on the field of liturgical theology. The first is the recognition that artificially separating theology informing liturgy and liturgy shaping theology is neither helpful nor realistic. No one really comes to the liturgy as a blank slate, whether they be participant or professional theologian. And just as theology, even by means of minimal catechesis or experience, always informs liturgical participation, liturgy is always dancing with systematic theology, informing the lives of participants through music, preaching, and actions often in far more profound ways than through written doctrinal statements.

Another huge shift in the field, recognized and named already in the 1980s, is the impact of the growing field of ritual studies and how it affects understandings of liturgical theology. Kevin Irwin named it “actual celebrations as a theological source,”137 and the interdis-ciplinary contributions of ethnography have assisted in giving new language and tools to studying actual liturgical events, rather than the texts of liturgies in books.138 This has reminded liturgists that the settings, sounds, sights, participants, and cultural assumptions inform understanding of liturgy often more than official texts. This has been particularly helpful as scholars and practitioners from churches who do not follow a historically informed and set order of service enter into

135 Most notably in the title of Geoffrey Wainwright’s book listed above, as well as the work of Kevin Irwin and others.

136 Irwin, Liturgical Theology: A Primer, 67–68.137 Ibid., 68.138 This is well exemplified in the work of Mary McGann in her book, A Pre-

cious Fountain: Music in the Worship of an African-American Catholic Community (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2004).


the conversation. These newer voices are contributing to the expansion of methodologies for studying liturgy without using official texts to study or compare with earlier versions.139

Finally, an important theological shift is worth mentioning at this point to assist in the chapters which follow this introductory overview. Liturgical renewal, like any renewal, often reacts to what has preceded it. The liturgical movement of the twentieth century responded to an overemphasis on a transcendent God, on a clerically focused church, and to an inaccessible liturgy. Part of the reaction was to emphasize the immanence of God, the priesthood of all believers, and an accessible and user-friendly liturgy, all of which made sense in many ways. But fifty years into the renewed liturgies of the liturgical movement, the pendulum is swinging back to the middle on several issues, most cen-trally for the proposals in this book, the move from liturgy as something that “we” do to a space in which God acts on us. In other words, the horizontal dimension of liturgy, with its primary focus on community and the actions of the whole community, has been more recently bal-anced with a return to the recognition that there is the centrality of the divine-human relationship, not simply the human-human relationship, and that the primary “actor” is not the gathered community but the triune God, to whom the community responds. “Worship has therefore to be seen as more than just a matter of strengthening the community for mission and service. At its heart lies the adoration of God, basking in his presence in and for its own sake.”140 This return to the central-ity of God has influenced a number of second-generation liturgical renewals but is still a poorly articulated theology at the popular level.

Sacramental Theology and Liturgics

So what has all of this reflection on liturgical theology to do with sacramental theology? The common Anglican term “liturgics,” is a somewhat idiosyncratic word meant to cover the historical develop-ment of liturgy and sacraments with an eye to their inheritance in the

139 Here, see the work of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, particularly in the writings of John Witvlit. Also the work of Lester Ruth, Jennifer Davidson, Sharon Fennema, and many others represent one of the most dynamic areas of the field of liturgical studies.

140 Brown, God and Enchantment of Place, 20.


prayer book. In other words, how do the liturgies of today relate to tradition, and what do they mean to us in light of current practice and continuity with tradition? Because Anglican liturgics focused first on sacramental liturgy and second on sacramentals (or “pastoral offices”), this is certainly a form of sacramental theology.

Another approach is through the return of the emphasis on “mys-tery” mentioned above.

Reflection in sacramental theology is inseparable from liturgical research. . . . [A]fter centuries of parallel maintenance (sacra-mental and liturgical), the liturgical movement returned to the category of “mystery.” This category, more global than that of “sacrament,” allowed for rediscovering liturgy as ritual action, the church’s becoming a body under the ecclesial motif of “mys-tery,” and the work of grace implied in the sacramental order.141

The return to mystery is itself a reaction to the myopic focus on sacra-mental efficacy in the centuries preceding the liturgical movement, “to the detriment of the union between efficaciousness and effectiveness of the sacramental celebration in the church.”142 This meant returning “to the category of symbol” as one “that attempts to integrate better the dimension of relationships and therefore to greatly facilitate the consideration of the ecclesial dimension”143 and to moving away from sacramental liturgy as a single event, divorced from what precedes and what follows it in the lives of individuals and the community. Symbolic mediation and lifelong efficaciousness balance the focus on sacramen-tal effect and situate sacramental theology in the doing of liturgy, thus restoring attention to their inseparable workings.

All of this restores the necessity of ecclesial contextualization, theo-logical interdisciplinarity, and the expansiveness of sacramentality in reflecting on the systematic web of these various sub-fields in liturgy and theology. This introduction to some of the current thinking and approaches in terms of titles and relationships may help as we move into more specific dynamisms in current sacramental theologizing, beginning with the central theological arena of the incarnation and its implications for sacramental theology.

141 Patrick Prétot, “The Sacraments as ‘Celebrations of the Church’: Liturgy’s Impact on Sacramental Theology,” in Bordeyne and Morrill, Sacraments, 27.

142 Ibid., drawing on the work of Henri de Lubac, Corpus mysticum (see above, 25n95).

143 Ibid.