Christian Theologies of the Sacraments

A Comparative Introduction

Justin S. Holcomb, David A. Johnson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780814770634
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Rituels et pratiques chrétiens

Delves into the ancient debate regarding the nature and purpose of the seven sacraments What are the sacraments? For centuries, this question has elicited a lively discussion and among theologians, and a variety of answers that do anything but outline a unified belief concerning these fundamental ritual structures. In this extremely cohesive and well-crafted volume, a group of renowned scholars map the theologies of sacraments offered by key Christian figures from the Early Church through the twenty-first century. Together, they provide a guide to the variety of views about sacraments found throughout Christianity, showcasing the variety of approaches to understanding the sacraments across the Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox faith traditions. Chapters explore the theologies of thinkers from Basil to Aquinas, Martin Luther to Gustavo Gutiérrez. Rather than attempting to distill their voices into a single view, the book addresses many of the questions that theologians have tackled over the two thousand year history of Christianity. In doing so, it paves the way for developing theologies of sacraments for present and future contexts. The text places each theology of the sacraments into its proper sociohistorical context, illuminating how the church has used the sacraments to define itself and its congregations over time. The definitive resource on theologies of the sacraments, this volume is a must-read for students, theologians, and spiritually interested readers alike.

Part I

Patristic and Medieval

1

Patristic and Medieval Theologies of Sacraments

Ryan M. Reeves

Introduction

It takes hubris to attempt a history of the patristic and medieval views of the sacraments. Here be dragons. Scholarly debates over theologians, or on the major turning points over the centuries, can bewilder as much as they can clarify. The risk is creating genealogies that stretch over fourteen hundred years, giving the impression that doctrine is driven by great figures adding their perspective at regular intervals. Still the fear of anachronism need not paralyze us. We must begin somewhere, and color is best to add to a portrait only after the broad strokes are applied.

Christian history is marked by a commitment to the sacraments and their importance in the life of the church. We look in vain for influential examples of theologians in the patristic and medieval eras who place little emphasis on the rites of the church—especially in the initiation of Christians in Baptism and the spiritual feeding of Christians in the Eucharist. For centuries, a church without sacraments is either oxymoronic or so inconceivable that theologians devote none of their writings to refuting Christians who denigrate the role of the sacraments in the church.

Still the patristic and medieval eras were woven into the fabric of the wider theological controversies of various stages in time. Just as it would be improper to describe them as being unconcerned with the sacraments, it also would be improper to describe their reflections using modern rubric of a “theology of the sacraments.” The modern desire for such precision was not the virtue (or vice) of earlier centuries. There were tensions over issues related to sacramental power, grace, and practice, but these should not be confused with controversies over a standard theological framework that was enshrined from the very beginning.

Our task in this introduction, therefore, is to sketch the broad contours of these eras on the subject of the sacraments. The period runs from the murky days just after the passing of the disciples (approx. AD 100) until the period just before the dawn of the Reformation (AD 1500). Though these centuries share a commitment to the bedrock necessity of the sacraments, they differ in the way they explore certain facets of the church’s teaching and practice in their own day.

The Earliest Church and the Sacraments

The earliest language of the sacraments nearly always reverts to the earliest phase associated with the life of the church: the mysteries (τὰ μυστήρια). These mysteries should be confused not with something exotic or strange, but rather with the inner life of God as revealed in Christ. The mysteries are wrapped up in the Gospel and salvation through the cross, as they were lived out in the life of the church in the witness of redemption.

In general, the witness of the earliest patristic writers on the sacraments, then, was both fervent and imprecise. The fervor of devotion to the sacraments from the earliest witnesses is overwhelming from the sources that describe early Christian life. The church affirmed in particular the unity of the church in the life of the Eucharist, as it was the definitive mark of grace upon a church that had been graced with the presence of the Spirit.1

The imprecision of the patristic witness, though, is often underappreciated. This is due largely to the hefty debates in medieval and Reformation contexts on the sacraments, which occasionally create an echo chamber of their own concerns. In the first centuries of the church, however, controversies related to the grammar of the faith—how the sacraments will be taught to the laity and practiced by the clergy—had not arisen to any significant level. For this reason later Christian writers of such depth as Basil the Great (AD 330–79) still do not have specific language about what constitutes a “sacrament,” preferring instead to reflect on the broader “mysteries” of the faith.2 Basil as frequently refers to the Gospel itself as a mystery as he does the Eucharist, and he does not refer to Baptism or other rituals in this same way. This case serves as a microcosm of the kind of careful reflection needed by modern readers of patristic writers: the lack of sophistication in Basil’s writings should not force us to conclude he held no real conviction about the sacraments themselves.

Augustine and the Sacraments

The patristic teachings on the sacraments were crowned by the teachings of Augustine.3 Augustine was born into the context of the intense faith of North Africa, a church context that rarely spoke of compromise.4 Augustine was a precocious child, uniquely gifted in the art of rhetoric. He was also a Manichean heretic during his youth and early adulthood, finding the materialism of the Manichean faith preferable to the spiritual faith of Christianity. When he did find faith, Augustine brought with him the arsenal of his rhetorical education, and given his unique position during several key early controversies, he shaped the vocabulary of the church that was emerging in the Western Latin half of the Christian world.

In Augustine, the very nature of the sacraments find their definitive early expression. Augustine wove the concept of the sacraments, not merely into the rites of the church, but into the fabric of the Christian life itself. As with earlier writings on the sacraments, Augustine’s theology is hard to categorize according to modern standards. He, too, shares the earlier flexibility in sacramental language. There is no single definition, for example, of Augustine’s idea of what constitutes a sacrament (sacramentum). But the driving force behind Augustine’s teachings is his commitment to the mystery of God’s grace in the life of the church and his commitment to the life-giving love of God through the rites of the church.

The crux of Augustine’s teachings on the sacraments is his thinking on the difference between a sign and the thing signified. His writings on this difference became more than a theological trope: they became the grammar of sacramental teaching in the West.5 In this language Augustine managed to do justice to the outward life of creation, for example in the bread and wine, while also distinguishing the inward grace of God that nourishes, cleanses, and draws the Christian into the life of God. The intention here is not to separate the two, as one might see today in the difference between an advertisement (sign) and the offer of a product for purchase (thing signified). Augustine has in mind more of an intimate relationship that we see between sex and love: the physical union and the expression of love are intertwined, though we can speak of them each separately.

In this conceptualization of the sacraments, Augustine provided the West with a language that could develop a “sacramentalist” view of the entire world, rather than merely function within the rites of the church. The entirety of creation is seen as the sign of God’s work that is united to the grace of God in the soul. From Augustine, then, there arose a deeper reflection on the sacraments that rested upon a simple yet compelling theological structure.

The Sacraments during the Medieval Period

Moving out of the patristic age there arose the period we today call the Early Middle Ages, an age that spans from Late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages (ca. 500–1000). Historians have not always been kind to this period of time. The number of myths surrounding this time, dubbed by Petrarch as the “Dark Ages,” can bewilder: heroic sagas, unwashed peasants, and plague-infested cities are common in popular novels and movies—almost to the point of canonization. These enduring myths prove the point that good slogans die slowly. It was the Renaissance, too, that categorized one thousand years of church history as being a “middle age” between the glories of the classical and Renaissance periods.

If there is anything dark about this period, it is the relative lack of theological material compared with the patristic and scholastic periods. The fall of the Western half of the Roman Empire between AD 410 and 476 drove European kingdoms to sprout up across the West. The most pivotal of these was the Carolingian dynasty, springing out of the Merovingian dynasty, which would eventually come to dominate much of modern Germany and France. The Gothic and Visigothic tribes swept down into the Mediterranean regions, and not a few became devotees to the Arian faith, putting them at odds with later Nicene Christians who proselytized in these same regions. Much of Northern Europe was still pagan. The Vikings of the Scandinavian regions began their expansion of raids and resettlements, while the burgeoning kingdoms within the Anglo-Saxon regions of modern Britain began to form their own identity. During this same time, too, there arose the rapid expansion of Islam, which quickly took North Africa and broke into the lands of modern Spain, making their way to the Pyrenees, just south of France. These were hot-blooded times.

Still the Early Middle Ages were not irrelevant to sacramental theology. This period provided the West with the documents that began, in time, to shape the formation of scholastic theology: sourcebooks on theological topics. These were perhaps the most important texts when it comes to shaping later theological method. Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636), for example, compiled his Etymologiae, an extensive sourcebook of anything Isidore felt was worth preserving for the Latin-speaking world, from geography, food, and medicine to the structure of education (Trivium and Quadrivium), a list of church offices and rules, and finally lengthy descriptions of patristic writers on theological subjects.

What these sourcebooks managed, intentionally or not, was to press home the reality that a great deal of time had passed since the patristic age. The passage of time brought with it the need for reflection on how the church maintained its fidelity to the biblical and patristic witness—and more importantly how it resolved tensions within patristic writings. A great concern of men like Isidore was to stifle sloppy thinking and half-remembered sources. What these patristic writings created, though, was a collection of the primary sources and quotations, on which the majority of subsequent theological debate would rest.

The Sacraments and Scholasticism

One of the most notable changes in the life of the Western ch...