Practical Sacramental Theology

At the Intersection of Liturgy and Ethics

Bruce T. Morrill

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781725297180, 9781725297197
• eBook ISBN: 9781725297203
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

What motivates practice of the liturgy and sacramental rites of the church? Does the worship of God begin and end within each ritual enactment, or does the truth and value of sacramental celebration reside in the broader context of Christian life in church and society? For more than two decades, prominent Jesuit sacramental-liturgical theologian Bruce Morrill has explored the promise and problems inherent in the Second Vatican Council's call to renew liturgy's basic purpose--namely, the glorification of God and the sanctification of people. Morrill's fundamental argument is that this ancient Christian principle is of a piece, that divine glory and human holiness are, so to speak, two sides of a single coin. The value of liturgy and sacraments is depleted, if not lost, unless they function within a holistic practice of faith that seeks the upbuilding of ethical lives, personal and social. With numerous real-life examples plus references to current sociological studies, the chapters address both modern challenges to and biblical and traditional resources for the celebration of sacramental rites today.

Part I

Theorizing Practice

1

Contemporary Sacramental-Liturgical Theology

The Dialectic of Meaning and Performance1

A Half-Century’s Review

With apologies for such a prosaic entrée to this presentation, I wish to begin by commenting on its title—specifically, first, on my placing the term Dialectic at the center of the title for the opening plenary address of an annual meeting thematically focused on Sacrament(s). If you would allow me a bit of conjecture, I could imagine that in the period surrounding the Second Vatican Council—say, the 1950s through early 1970s—theologians might well have mused over the joining of sacrament and dialectic as a sort of category mistake. After all, had not the methodological boundary lines among classroom theologians achieved a certain fixity opposing dialectical thought from sacramental and/or analogical imagination? While such sophisticated analysis of the two paradigms’ paragons, Barth and Rahner, as performed by David Tracy2 would come to find more in common between each Karl’s utterly modern project than seemed evident to their average readers, still, conventional thought among American Catholic theologians and popular writers has asserted the analogical or sacramental imagination as a defining characteristic of Catholic thought and practice.3

But that reference to practice leads to a second comment about my title for a presentation whose charge is to assess, at least in this American context, the state of the sacramental-theological question fifty years after the beginning of Vatican II. For there has been a dialectical tension concerning the subject matter of sacrament itself within the American Catholic theological academy during the past five decades. Put bluntly, although it is now a waning phenomenon in this new century, over the better part of the period after Vatican II systematic theologians, perhaps more on doctoral faculties, tended to consider liturgical theology an inferior intellectual enterprise, at times even to the point of scorn.

There, I’ve said it! And I say it as one whose academic-theological career earlier found itself in the crosshairs of such attitudes, sometimes articulated, other times thinly veiled. The tension—perhaps dialectical—has been primarily due to systematic theologians’ pride in pursuing pure thought, doctrine founded upon argument (rather than mystery), fides quaerens intellectum, but a faith identified first and foremost with concepts. In the late 1970s, Johann Baptist Metz attacked this notion of faith as an idea, as some transcendental apperception, countering that faith is fundamentally a praxis, a praxis of mysticism and ethics whose irreducible elements of memory, narrative, and solidarity comprise the contours of a “practical fundamental theology.”4 Still, among systematic theologians, not only much of the old guard, but now, I fear, even some of the new, political and liberation theologies’ goal that praxis-thinking fundamentally pervade academic theology found an uneven reception.5 Rather, Metz’s work, for example, largely stands as another concept to study, another method, among others, to consider, perhaps for which to be responsible on a doctoral comps reading list. While the reasons for this resistance to prioritizing praxis in thought no doubt rest in ideological causes situated in each of theology’s three publics—academy, church, and society6—my task here, of course, is to address what about sacraments seemed (perhaps still seems) so threatening to “real” or “serious” systematic theology.

It would not seem too risky to suggest that one of the primary reasons the subject matter of sacraments and liturgy would strike the men who received their theological doctorates in the 1950s through the 1970s as minimally worthy of concerted theological discipline was the fact that in their seminary training the sacraments were the subject of canon law in a doctrinal theology course, with some further Thomistic treatment through the tenets of transubstantiation, matter, and form.7 Sacraments were effectively a matter of practical power, that is, clerical power, which bore with it the responsibility for teaching their validity, whether catechetically to Catholics or apologetically to others.8 The rites themselves, on the other hand and in practical detail, comprised the domain of liturgists characteristically consumed with rubrics, often combining legal precision with imposed aesthetics, such that the old joke about the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist9 could persist at least into my own time in the 1990s.

Be that as it may, the methodological tension over the relevance, if not necessity, of actual (ritual) practice to academic theology even persisted among those specializing in sacraments. The experiential turn in American Catholic sacramental theology took its cues from the early Schillebeeckx and consistent Rahner, focusing phenomenologically on human-developmental qualities of encounter and event but still not attending closely to ritual texts and dynamics. In a 1984 issue of the journal Worship, liturgical theologian John Baldovin concluded his appreciative review of two then-newly published books on the sacraments, including Bernard Cooke’s still widely read Sacraments & Sacramentality, as follows:

My fundamental criticism of both books will not seem strange coming from a student of the liturgy. I was unable to find in either text a single quotation or reference to the reformed rites of the Roman Catholic Church or to their general instructions or praenotanda. Until sacramental theology begins to take the actual celebration of the sacraments seriously as a starting point it will be guilty of the accusation leveled by Louis Boyer against eucharistic theology twenty years ago: here we have theologies about the sacraments, not theologies of the sacraments.10

If sacramental theology as a systematic effort was predominantly phenomenological in pursuing how and why sacraments are anthropologically basic and ecclesiologically essential,11 liturgical theology addressed the rites largely through historical and textual work. In a 1994 essay, Methodist liturgical scholar James White noted that of the fifty-four PhDs the liturgical studies program at Notre Dame had produced since its founding in 1966, all but five were “historical in subject matter.”12 White’s comments point to two distinctions about twentieth-century liturgical studies in general contrast to Catholic sacramental theology; namely, its ecumenical commitments and text-centered historical work.

Those salient features of liturgical theology had some methodological problems of their own. The laudable ecumenical impulses of liturgical scholars across the gamut of Western mainstream denominations, all of whom held the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy as their charter document,13 often consorted with the modern tendency to construct a master narrative based on the myth of some indubitable ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Theorizing Practice
• Part II: Sacramental Rites in Performative Perspective
• Part III: Liturgy and Ethics, Scripture and Tradition
• Part IV: Once More, Theory and Practice
• Bibliography