T&T Clark Handbook of Sacraments and Sacramentality 9780567687647, 9780567687661, 9780567687654

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part one Foundations
CHAPTER ONE Ritual and Sacrament as Bodily Practice (Frank C. Senn)
CHAPTER TWO The Bible and the Christian Sacraments (Gordon W. Lathrop)
CHAPTER THREE Early Christian Foundations for Current Sacramental Thought: A Brief Overview (Karen B. Westerfield Tucker)
CHAPTER FOUR Sacramentality as Contemporary Theological Context: The Web of Sacraments, Liturgical Theology, and Sacramentality
Part two Constructive Essays
Section A Sacramentality
CHAPTER FIVE The Future of the Past: Thoughts on the Sacramentality of Time (J. Neil Alexander)
CHAPTER SIX Locating God: The Significance of Space for Sacramental Theology (James T. Hadley)
CHAPTER SEVEN Elemental Signs of the Sacramental: Sacramentality, Visual Arts, and the Earth (Jyoti Sahi)
CHAPTER EIGHT Sacramentality and Music (Dorothea Haspelmath-Finatti)
CHAPTER NINE The Sacramentality of the Word and the Holiness of Preaching (Lisa M. Weaver)
CHAPTER TEN Gathered Church Sacramentality: Loss and Recovery (Philip E. Thompson)
Section B Particular Sacraments
Christian Initiation
CHAPTER ELEVEN Christian Initiation (Ruth A. Meyers)
CHAPTER TWELVE One Baptism, Many Churches (Joyce Ann Zimmerman)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN White, Wet Devils: Baptism, Race, and the Struggle for Baptismal Solidarity (Andrew Wymer)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Sacrament of Reconciliation (Julia Gatta)
Eucharist/Lord’s Supper
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Ecumenism and Roman Catholic Eucharist (Timothy Brunk)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Healing Eucharist: Excavating the Table’s Delusion and Redemption in White Dominant Church (Marcia W. Mount
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Blessed Are Those Who Hunger and Thirst for Justice: Overlapping and Indecenting Eucharistic Desire, Now and
Marriage and Other Sacramental Acts
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The Sacramentality of Marriage in the Western Church: An Overview (Kimberly Bracken Long)
CHAPTER NINETEEN Taking Lessons from the Liturgy: The Reception of the Second Vatican Council in the Rites of Marriage (Jaya
CHAPTER TWENTY Sacramentality in Anointing of the Sick (Bruce T. Morrill)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Footwashing as a Christian Liturgy: A Challenge to Question What We Mean by “Sacrament” (Thomas O’Loughl
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO The Ecosacramentality of the Funeral (Benjamin M. Stewart)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE The Sacramentality of Orders: The Contribution of Sacramental Theology to the Pressing Ecumenical Question
Section C Themes
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Sacraments in a Post-Christian Society (Joris Geldhof)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Sacraments and Sacramentality: Toward a Postcolonial Pluriverse with a Decolonial Thrust (Kristine Suna
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Gender, Sacraments, and Sacramentality (Susan A. Ross)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Sacraments and Queer Theory (W. Scott Haldeman)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Sacramentality and Comparative Theology: Rethinking Transcendence in Immanence (Sebastian Madathummur
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Radical and Sacramental: A Theology for Sacraments in an Age of Pluralism (Glenn P. Ambrose)
CHAPTER THIRTY Disability, Human Difference, and the Sacramentality of Access (Rebecca F. Spurrier)
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Sacraments in Migration and Migration in Sacraments (Peter C. Phan)
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO Science and Sacraments ( E. Byron Anderson)
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Sacramental Theology and Worship Technology in the Wake of a Pandemic (James W. Farwell and Martha
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Sacramentality, Sacraments, and Integral Ecology in Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ (Kevin W. Irwin)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE Sacraments and Creation: Ecology—A Conversation with First Peoples (Carmel Pilcher and Donato Kivi
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX Sacraments and the Earth: The Poor, the Clouds, and the Extinction of Animals (Cláudio Carvalhaes)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN Sacraments and Mission: The Unfolding Purpose of God for the World ( Thomas H. Schattauer)
Contributors
Bibliography
Topical Index
name Index

Citation preview

i

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF SACRAMENTS AND SACRAMENTALITY

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Forthcoming titles in this series include T&T Clark Handbook of Christology, edited by Darren O. Sumner and Chris Tilling T&T Clark Handbook of Election, edited by Edwin Chr. van Driel T&T Clark Handbook of Modern Theology, edited by Philip G. Ziegler and R. David Nelson T&T Clark Handbook of the Doctrine of Creation, edited by Jason Goroncy T&T Clark Handbook of Theology and the Arts, edited by Imogen Adkins and Stephen M. Garrett T&T Clark Handbook of Intercultural Theology and Mission Studies, edited by John G. Flett and Dorottya Nagy T&T Clark Handbook of Biblical Thomism, edited by Matthew Levering, Piotr Roszak and Jörgen Vijgen T&T Clark Handbook of Suffering and the Problem of Evil, edited by Matthias Grebe and Johannes Grössl Titles already published include T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and Climate Change, edited by Ernst M. Conradie and Hilda P. Koster T&T Clark Handbook of Political Theology, edited by Rubén Rosario Rodríguez T&T Clark Handbook of Pneumatology, edited by Daniel Castelo and Kenneth M. Loyer T&T Clark Handbook of Ecclesiology, edited by Kimlyn J. Bender and D. Stephen Long T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and the Modern Sciences, edited by John P. Slattery T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Ethics, edited by Tobias Winright T&T Clark Handbook of John Owen, edited by Crawford Gribben and John W. Tweeddale T&T Clark Handbook of Theological Anthropology, edited by Mary Ann Hinsdale and Stephen Okey

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T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF SACRAMENTS AND SACRAMENTALITY

Edited by Martha Moore-Keish and James W. Farwell

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T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © James W. Farwell and Martha Moore-Keish and contributors, 2023 James W. Farwell and Martha Moore-Keish have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © mammuth/Getty All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Farwell, James W., editor. | Moore-Keish, Martha L., editor. Title: T&T Clark handbook of sacraments and sacramentality / edited by James Farwell and Martha Moore-Keish. Description: London ; New York : T&T Clark, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022027076 (print) | LCCN 2022027077 (ebook) | ISBN 9780567687647 (hardback) | ISBN 9780567708168 (paperback) | ISBN 9780567687654 (pdf) | ISBN 9780567687678 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Sacraments. | Sacramentals. Classification: LCC BV800 .T24 2022 (print) | LCC BV800 (ebook) | DDC 234/.16–dc23/eng/20221012 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027076 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027077 ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-8764-7 ePDF: 978-0-5676-8765-4 eBook: 978-0-5676-8767-8 Series: T&T Clark Handbooks Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.blo​omsb​ury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

A cknowledgments  

ix

Introduction  James W. Farwell and Martha Moore-Keish

1

Part One  Foundations 1 Ritual and Sacrament as Bodily Practice  Frank C. Senn

9

2 The Bible and the Christian Sacraments  Gordon W. Lathrop

23

3 Early Christian Foundations for Current Sacramental Thought: A Brief Overview  Karen B. Westerfield Tucker

39

4 Sacramentality as Contemporary Theological Context: The Web of Sacraments, Liturgical Theology, and Sacramentality Today  Lizette Larson-Miller

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Part Two  Constructive Essays Section A  Sacramentality 

67

5 The Future of the Past: Thoughts on the Sacramentality of Time  J. Neil Alexander

69

6 Locating God: The Significance of Space for Sacramental Theology  James T. Hadley

81

7 Elemental Signs of the Sacramental: Sacramentality, Visual Arts, and the Earth  95 Jyoti Sahi 8 Sacramentality and Music  Dorothea Haspelmath-Finatti

112

9 The Sacramentality of the Word and the Holiness of Preaching  Lisa M. Weaver

126

10 Gathered Church Sacramentality: Loss and Recovery  Philip E. Thompson

140

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Contents

Section B  Particular Sacraments 

153

Christian Initiation 

155

11 Christian Initiation  Ruth A. Meyers

157

12 One Baptism, Many Churches  Joyce Ann Zimmerman

175

13 White, Wet Devils: Baptism, Race, and the Struggle for Baptismal Solidarity  188 Andrew Wymer 14 The Sacrament of Reconciliation  Julia Gatta

205

Eucharist/Lord’s Supper

219

15 Ecumenism and Roman Catholic Eucharist  Timothy Brunk

221

16 Healing Eucharist: Excavating the Table’s Delusion and Redemption in White Dominant Church  Marcia W. Mount Shoop

236

17 Blessed Are Those Who Hunger and Thirst for Justice: Overlapping and Indecenting Eucharistic Desire, Now and After the Covid-19 Pandemic  Ángel F. Méndez Montoya

250

Marriage and Other Sacramental Acts

263

18 The Sacramentality of Marriage in the Western Church: An Overview  Kimberly Bracken Long

265

19 Taking Lessons from the Liturgy: The Reception of the Second Vatican Council in the Rites of Marriage  Jaya Therese Vasupurathukaran 20 Sacramentality in Anointing of the Sick  Bruce T. Morrill 21 Footwashing as a Christian Liturgy: A Challenge to Question What We Mean by “Sacrament”  Thomas O’Loughlin 22 The Ecosacramentality of the Funeral  Benjamin M. Stewart

279 293

307 317

Contents

23 The Sacramentality of Orders: The Contribution of Sacramental Theology to the Pressing Ecumenical Question of the Recognition of Each Other’s Ministry  James F. Puglisi

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329

Section C  Themes 

343

24 Sacraments in a Post-Christian Society  Joris Geldhof

345

25 Sacraments and Sacramentality: Toward a Postcolonial Pluriverse with a Decolonial Thrust  Kristine Suna-Koro

358

26 Gender, Sacraments, and Sacramentality  Susan A. Ross

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27 Sacraments and Queer Theory  W. Scott Haldeman

392

28 Sacramentality and Comparative Theology: Rethinking Transcendence in Immanence  Sebastian Madathummuriyil

407

29 Radical and Sacramental: A Theology for Sacraments in an Age of Pluralism  421 Glenn P. Ambrose 30 Disability, Human Difference, and the Sacramentality of Access  Rebecca F. Spurrier

436

31 Sacraments in Migration and Migration in Sacraments  Peter C. Phan

451

32 Science and Sacraments  E. Byron Anderson

464

33 Sacramental Theology and Worship Technology in the Wake of a Pandemic  478 James W. Farwell and Martha Moore-Keish 34 Sacramentality, Sacraments, and Integral Ecology in Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’  Kevin W. Irwin 35 Sacraments and Creation: Ecology—A Conversation with First Peoples  Carmel Pilcher and Donato Kivi 36 Sacraments and the Earth: The Poor, the Clouds, and the Extinction of Animals  Cláudio Carvalhaes

489 502

518

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Contents

37 Sacraments and Mission: The Unfolding Purpose of God for the World  Thomas H. Schattauer

532

L ist

549

of

C ontributors  

B ibliography  

559

T opical I ndex  

565

N ame I ndex  

570

ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Every book is a collaborative effort, and we have many people to thank for helping this one come to final form. We are grateful to Anna Turton, senior commissioning editor for Theology at T&T Clark, for the initial invitation to edit this volume, and for her patience and good humor as it came together. Thanks also to Sophie Beardsworth and the production team for tending to all the details of transforming the raw manuscript into a published volume. We are grateful to Amanda Bourne of Virginia Theological Seminary for indexing the handbook, and for the faculty development grant from Columbia Theological Seminary that compensated her for that meticulous labor. Both of us thank our institutions, Columbia Theological Seminary and Virginia Theological Seminary, for supporting our scholarly lives and enabling us to do this work. We also thank two professional organizations, the North American Academy of Liturgy (NAAL) and Societas Liturgica, for bringing together scholars of liturgy and sacraments in ways that enable this kind of scholarship to flourish. Above all, we are grateful to the many contributors to this book—thirty-nine in all—who have offered their voices to this chorus of perspectives on sacraments and sacramentality today. Unless otherwise indicated, scripture quotations are from The New Revised Standard Version Bible, © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

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Introduction JAMES W. FARWELL AND MARTHA MOORE-KEISH

Since the early church, Christians have regularly engaged in certain ritual acts to mark their lives in Christ, as communities and as individuals. These ritual acts, or elements of them, have come to be known as “sacraments,” and they have been interpreted and practiced in a wide variety of ways across time and around the world. This volume introduces students and scholars to the contemporary field of sacramental theology, with basic essays orienting readers to the biblical and historical foundations and a survey of the state of the discipline. These foundational essays are followed by a collection of constructive essays representing major themes, practices, and approaches to sacraments and sacramentality in the contemporary world, and thinking about some fresh questions with which sacramentality theology engages.

WHAT ARE SACRAMENTS? WHAT IS SACRAMENTALITY? To begin with, it will be helpful to offer working definitions of these terms. In using the word sacrament we presume fourth-century bishop Augustine of Hippo’s basic definition: a “visible sign of an invisible grace,” or “a sign of a sacred thing.”1 In most cases, Christians interpret sacraments in terms of two directions at once: from God to us, and from us to God. We take certain material elements (such as bread, wine, water, oil), and surround them with stories and ritual actions so that they draw us into relationship with the risen Christ, by the power of the Spirit. And at the same time, in and through these signs, God (in Christ, by the Spirit) draws near to us. As Lizettte Larson-Miller notes, “St. Leo the Great (Bishop of Rome 440–461) … write[s]‌that ‘what is visible in our redeemer has now passed into the Mysteries,’2 ‘mysteries’ meaning the sacramental actions of the church.” Sacraments are signs and symbolic actions that Christians perform in order to point to and participate in God’s triune life, for the sake of the world. Even as contributors to this volume generally affirm the Augustinian definition of sacrament, they offer diverse interpretations of what ought to count as a sacrament, how helpful the term is, and how broadly it might be stretched. Philip E. Thompson, for instance, speaking of “gathered church sacramentality,” raises an important caution about the term “sacrament” at all, even as he traces evidence of “surprising sacramental

Augustine, Letters 138:1. Quoted in Gordon Lathrop’s essay “The Bible and the Christian Sacraments.” “Quod redemptoris nostri conspicuum fuit, in sacramenta transivit.” Sermon 74:2. See Larson-Miller’s chapter in this volume. 1 2

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T&T Clark Handbook of Sacraments and Sacramentality

vitality,” particularly among Baptists in the UK and North America. Thomas O’Loughlin, in his investigation of footwashing, also discusses the historical problems with the term “sacrament,” leading to his provocative proposal: “We could say that as the eucharist is the sacrament of our relationship of thankfulness to the Father, so footwashing is the sacrament of our committing to God to act on our recognition that the church is ever in need of reform (ecclesia semper reformanda) to the vision of Jesus if it is to be his witness.”3 Ben Stewart, in reflecting on funeral rites, finds it unhelpful to argue about whether the funeral should be called a sacrament, but proposes that it is “foundational to all of sacramental life.” Finally, Carmel Pilcher and Donato Kivi, in their essay “Sacraments and Creation: Ecology—a Conversation with First Peoples,” suggest that it is helpful to consider all of creation itself as a sacrament. This volume from the outset foregrounds the significance of sacraments as embodied ritual action rather than a secondary subheading of systematic theology. As Frank C. Senn says in his opening essay, following acknowledgment of the diversity of acts that have been considered as sacraments, “[Frederic] Van der Meer comments, ‘Their common characteristic is that they are all of some spiritual importance and are externally visible.’4 But their other common characteristic is that these sacramenta are all applied to or performed by the body.” So the essays variously seek to attend to bodies in all of their diverse particularity and lived experience, moving through space and time in ways that witness to and mediate (and sometimes also obscure) the divine. Rebecca Spurrier, for instance, invites reflection on sacramental practice with disabled bodies, noting that “while our songs and prayers communicate the unity of the people of God; in this moment our actual practices communicate the complexities of shared embodiment.” Andrew Wymer and Marcia Mount Shoop delve into the distorted sacramental practices that have perpetuated systemic racism, particularly against Black bodies, and both of them also lift up possibilities of sacramental practice that might more fully embody healing and wholeness. Sacramentality is a more general term than sacrament, and it refers to the character of the created world as it witnesses to and mediates God’s presence. As Larson-Miller says in her essay, “Sacramentality is … a worldview which sees the unity of time and space in the continuing presence of God, in God’s desire to meet us again and again, and in how the body of Christ, Christ the head and all the baptized, encounters the living God in the union of all time and space in the sacraments.”5 Sacramentality is not restricted to certain ecclesial actions like baptism and eucharist; nor is it necessarily restricted to Christian symbolic activity alone. On the particularity of Christian understanding of sacramentality, however, our contributors again demonstrate some diversity. Larson-Miller quotes Rowan Williams with the caution, “Sacramentality is not a general principle that the world is full of ‘sacredness’: it is the very specific conviction that the world is full of the life of a God whose nature is known in Christ and the Spirit.”6 On the other hand, Glenn Ambrose argues in his essay “Radical and Sacramental: A Theology for Sacraments in an Age of

S ee Thomas O’Loughlin’s chapter in this volume. Frederic van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop: The Life and Work of a Father of the Church, trans. B. Battershaw and G. R. Lamb (London: Sheed and Ward, 1961), 20–81. 5 See Larson-Miller’s chapter in this volume. 6 Rowan Williams, foreword to The Gestures of God: Explorations in Sacramentality, ed. Geoffrey Rowell and Christine Hall (London: Continuum, 2004), xiii. 3 4

Introduction

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Pluralism” that we can see evidence of what Christians call “sacramentality” in a variety of religious traditions, even if it goes by different names. Whether sacramentality has a specifically Christian meaning, or whether it is a term that has resonance across religious traditions, we invite the reader to consider.

WHY A VOLUME ON SACRAMENTS AND SACRAMENTALITY NOW? Since their earliest days, Christian communities have practiced and reflected on central symbolic acts such as washing and eating together, whether or not they termed them “sacraments.” This volume thus addresses matters of enduring significance to Christian communities, adding new voices to the ongoing conversation about what it means for us to gather, to break bread and share the cup, to anoint, to bless, to welcome, to glimpse the work of God in the midst of ordinary things. Although some Christians have always reflected on sacramental practices, recent decades have witnessed a flourishing of reflection on sacraments in a wide variety of fields, including politics, economics, gender and sexuality studies, and ecology. This is related to increased attention to the significance of material reality in general, and embodiment in particular, in many different disciplines. As Western thought has increasingly moved away from dualisms that divide matter and spirit, body and mind, we are recognizing ever more deeply the way that physical reality and “spiritual reality” are mutually implicating. Our embodied practices ineluctably shape our perception of the world in which we live and move, and the world in turn shapes our bodies (for good and for ill), and thus we need to pay attention. We are coming to a new appreciation of the way that our relationship to God also depends on our bodies, and on our engagement with physical things. As John Calvin wisely put it in the sixteenth century, God “according to his infinite kindness, so tempers himself to our capacity” that we are able to encounter God through visible and tangible things.7 In addition to increased attention to physicality in many fields of study, recent years have made us more than ever aware of human finitude and vulnerability, as the world has grappled with the public health crisis of the coronavirus. Sacraments as material signs are deeply important to the way we work with finitude, the way we acknowledge and live into our vulnerability. Sacraments share with us both our physicality and vulnerability. When physical contact became dangerous, when touching one another and breathing together itself jeopardized human health, questions about the meaning and practice of sacraments emerged with new force. Though we did not anticipate this development when we first began working on the volume, several of the essays reflect on new understandings of sacraments in light of pandemic conditions. Finally, there have been significant shifts in demographics in religious practice in the past few decades, particularly in the United States and Europe. On the one hand, more people identify as religiously unaffiliated (the “nones”), while on the other hand, more people participate in multiple religious traditions. The greater porosity in movement across religious traditions, as well as the growth of communities that are either “spiritual but not religious” or opposed to religion altogether, invite us to think about sacraments

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1960), IV.xiv.3, p. 1278. 7

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T&T Clark Handbook of Sacraments and Sacramentality

and sacramentality with attention to a wider range of conversation partners. This volume was thus shaped by an ecumenical and interreligious sensibility from the beginning. In this handbook, we seek to draw together some of the diversity of constructive voices in one place, so that scholars both emerging and established may appreciate the depth and breadth of the work being done. In this way, we hope to stimulate new conversations, bringing together dialogue partners who may not have known each other before. In attending both to recent events and to enduring questions, we hope that this collection of essays will be both of the moment and of lasting significance.

OVERVIEW OF THE VOLUME This volume is intended for multiple audiences. For students and emerging scholars, it offers basic orientation to the field of sacramental studies. The introductory essays enable someone entering the field to understand major themes and historical developments, while the later essays offer more specific directions for deeper engagement. Each essay concludes with a brief list of resources for further reading, to direct scholars toward next steps. Established scholars and teachers will find, especially in the later sections of the volume, an emphasis on contemporary constructive approaches in sacramental theology from a wide variety of Christian traditions, with attention to themes such as race, gender, interreligious engagement, and ecological concerns. This volume deliberately focuses on developments since the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), rather than offering a primarily historical approach. We hope that this array of fresh perspectives will be useful both in the classroom and in stimulating further theological reflection. As noted earlier, the authors and editors of this volume share the basic assumption that sacraments are “signs and symbolic actions that Christians perform in order to point to and participate in God’s triune life, for the sake of the world.” Two points here deserve further attention at the outset: sacraments are signs and symbolic actions that Christians perform; and sacramental action is for the sake of the world. In both cases, the world is the horizon of sacramental action. The first point emphasizes that sacramental actions are fundamentally bodily actions; these bodies may be individual or, most commonly, corporate, or both; and the meaning of these sacramental actions (participation in the life of the triune God) emerges in the doing. The opening essay by Frank C. Senn seeks to emphasize this point, focusing on embodied practices and how they come to have meaning in their contexts. Further, the meaning of sacramental action emerges through the performance of the whole liturgical ordo, not just through isolated actions or elements. In this way, sacraments operate within rituals, and rituals are a world-making enterprise. Ritual operates, as Roy Rappaport put, through the repetition of “more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances” from which the sense of social relations, cosmic order, moral behavior, and more emerges.8 For Christians, this is not the world as it is but the world as God is redeeming and recreating it—something God is doing even now, even through the sacraments. This leads immediately to the second point: sacramental action is not just for the sake of those most visibly participating but for the sake of the whole world. Sacraments are thus deeply connected to the missio Dei, the action of the triune God, both Sent and Sending,

Roy Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 27. 8

Introduction

5

in the world. As Thomas Schattauer notes in his concluding essay, “all people and the whole creation are understood as the object of God’s unfolding purpose disclosed in the sacraments and manifest in the church’s mission.” We hope that this volume demonstrates in multiple ways how the sacraments witness to God’s saving purpose for all people and the whole created world. Including the opening essay on ritual and sacrament as bodily practice, Part One contains four foundational essays, offering broad introduction to the field of sacramental theology. These will be particularly appropriate for scholars and students entering this field of study. Essays by Gordon W. Lathrop and Karen B. Westerfield Tucker attend to biblical and historical foundations, respectively, for understanding sacramental practices and interpretations across Christianity. The final foundational essay, by Lizette LarsonMiller, presents the “state of the question,” a broad look at contemporary themes and issues in sacramental theology and practice. Part Two of the volume is dedicated to a series of constructive essays, organized into three subsections. The first subsection, on sacramentality, begins with essays by J. Neil Alexander and James T. Hadley on time and space—elements long understood as foundational to what Christians mean by “sacramental” reality. We then turn attention to three embodied expressions that have sometimes been interpreted as sacramental: the visual arts (explored by artist Jyoti Sahi), music (by Dorothea Haspelmath-Finatti), and the word read and proclaimed (by Lisa M. Weaver). This section concludes with an essay by Philip E. Thompson on understanding sacramentality in a free church tradition, which has often been excluded from consideration in the field of sacramental theology. The second subsection of constructive essays includes attention to practices that have most commonly been termed “sacraments” in Christian traditions. Ruth A. Meyers offers a comprehensive overview of rites of Christian initiation (including attention to rites of confirmation), followed by ecumenical implications of baptism (by Joyce Ann Zimmerman) and the particular explorations of baptism and race (by Andrew Wymer). Julia Gatta then provides a thorough, ecumenically informed overview of confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation in Christian traditions, attending both to historical and to contemporary pastoral concerns. Three essays address different angles on the eucharist/ Lord’s Supper: Timothy Brunk probing current discussions of eucharistic sharing with non-Catholics in Roman Catholic teaching; Marcia W. Mount Shoop examining systemic racism in eucharistic practice from within the Presbyterian tradition; and Ángel F. Méndez Montoya exploring the eucharist in light of queer theologies in the time of Covid-19. On the topic of marriage, we include two quite different perspectives: from Presbyterian scholar Kimberly Bracken Long, an overview of Christian marriage in Western history, leading to particular attention to contemporary Protestant marriage liturgies; and from Catholic scholar Jaya Therese Vasupurathukaran, a comparison of the recent revisions to marriage rites in two streams within the Catholic tradition, namely, Roman and Syro-Malabar Rites, representative of Western and Eastern Churches. Jesuit priest and theologian Bruce T. Morrill addresses sacramentality in anointing of the sick, with particular attention to revisions to the theology and practice of this sacrament in the Roman Catholic Church since Vatican II. Following are essays by Thomas O’Loughlin and Benjamin M. Stewart, on the practices of footwashing and funeral rites, which are rarely deemed “sacraments” but have much in common with other sacramental actions. In the concluding essay in this subsection, James F. Puglisi offers a profound discussion of “the sacramentality of orders,” seeking a new approach to the tricky ecumenical topic of ordination, from the point of view of sacramental theology rather than dogma.

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T&T Clark Handbook of Sacraments and Sacramentality

In the final subsection Joris Geldhof reflects on what sacraments mean in the context of secularization and post-Christian society. This section of constructive essays also features scholars who are working on sacraments in conversation with contemporary academic disciplines that are beginning to inform sacramental theology and practice in new and exciting ways, including postcolonial theory (Kristine Suna-Koro), gender studies and queer theory (Susan A. Ross and W. Scott Haldeman), comparative theology and theology of religious diversity (Sebastian Madathummuriyil and Glenn P. Ambrose), and disability studies (Rebecca F. Spurrier). Many essays engage issues that threaten the health of people and the planet in our time, including global migration (Peter C. Phan). Contributors in this section are doing work in conversation with the current pope’s focus on creation, in conversation with indigenous peoples, and in conversation with contemporary quantum theory (E. Byron Anderson) and virtual technology (James W. Farwell and Martha Moore-Keish). Also included are essays on how sacramental practices might be in deeper conversation with the doctrine of creation (Kevin W. Irwin, Carmel Pilcher, and Donato Kivi), and with contemporary scientific perspectives, both of which are fertile areas of research among current sacramental scholars, and climate change and global poverty (Cláudio Carvalhaes). This section, and the volume as a whole, concludes with a consideration of sacraments in relation to God’s mission of reconciliation in the whole world (Thomas H. Schattauer).

STYLISTIC MATTERS As editors, we have opted for diversity rather than uniformity when it comes to the use of particular terms and stylistic decisions. For instance, some authors choose to capitalize Baptism and Eucharist, while others leave these terms in lower case. In addition, some authors have made more extensive use of notes, but footnotes on the whole are not elaborative. At least two stylistic matters are common to the essays. Unless otherwise specified, the biblical translation used is the New Revised Standard Version. And each essay concludes with a list for further reading, so that readers can pursue in greater depth topics that interest them.

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PART ONE

Foundations

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CHAPTER ONE

Ritual and Sacrament as Bodily Practice FRANK C. SENN

There are no rituals without bodies to perform them and no sacraments without bodies to receive them. In the twenty-first century the body in sacramental ritual has received new attention.1 Sacraments have been differently enumerated in different Christian traditions. The Western medieval church defined a system of seven sacramenta that were affirmed by the Council of Trent: Holy Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Communion, Holy Orders, Holy Matrimony, Penance, and the Anointing of the Sick. Generally, the Protestant churches accepted only Baptism and Communion as dominically instituted and using an earthly sign. The other five medieval sacraments are regarded as church ordinances. St. Augustine of Hippo, however, who gave us the basic description of a sacrament as “an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace,” had a much longer list. Frederic van der Meer observed that in addition to Baptism and Eucharist, Augustine mentions as sacramenta the sign of the cross, salt, exorcism, the bowing of the head, the transmission of the symbolum (creed), the taking off of shoes and other rites of the catechumenate, the enrollment of competentes, the Resurrection Vigil (with its lights), the octave of Easter (the week in which the newly baptized wore their white robes), penance (with its sign of ashes), the penitential garment (sackcloth), the laying on of hands, reconciliation (with its sign of the kiss of peace), the great fasts, spiritual songs, the Lord’s Prayer, and other things. Van der Meer comments, “Their common characteristic is that they are all of some spiritual importance and are externally visible.”2 But their other common characteristic is that these sacramenta are all applied to or performed by the body. Even those items that are recited words use the body’s diaphragm, breath, larynx, and lips. Bishop Wilhelm Stählin (1883–1975), a pioneer in the psychology of religion and a leader of the liturgical movement in German Protestantism, wrote that “The mysterium is the divine mystery of God assuming a body; it is present and works out too in bodily

See William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Teresa Berger, Fragments of Real Presence: Liturgical Traditions at the Hands of Women (New York: Crossroad, 2005); Lee Palmer Wandell, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Andrea Bieler and Luise Schottroff, The Eucharist: Bodies, Bread, and Resurrection (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007); Frank C. Senn, Eucharistic Body (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2017). 2 Frederic van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop: The Life and Work of a Father of the Church, trans. B. Battershaw and G. R. Lamb (London: Sheed and Ward, 1961), 20–81. 1

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reality.”3 That is, “If God has assumed flesh and blood, then all our bodies are united with the divine mystery.”4 Consequently, we cannot regard our bodies as “an indifferent bit of Nature.” But neither can we ignore the basic fact of our biology as we explore ritual and sacraments in relation to the body. Philosopher Mark Johnson proposed that the body in its fullest manifestation is five things simultaneously.5 It is a functioning biological organism that interacts with its environment. It experiences the surrounding world through sensorimotor perception. It participates in intersubjective relations with other subjects, and it communicates through cultural artifacts, institutions, and rituals that shape the body. Johnson proposes that the body is simultaneously a biological, ecological, phenomenological, social, and cultural entity. Each of these meanings can be isolated for analysis in separate fields of study (e.g., biological sciences, environmental sciences, behavioral sciences, social sciences, cultural studies), but finally it is one body that not only has meanings but is meaning in itself. We will use Johnson’s categories to explore the meaning of the body in relation to ritual and sacraments.

THE BIOLOGICAL BODY The body is a physical entity, a flesh-and-blood creature living in the world. The Yahwist creation story in Genesis 2 connects the creation of the human body with the cosmos. It speaks of a stream rising up from the earth and watering the surface of the ground before the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (Gen. 2:5-6). Biochemistry shows that human bodies are composed of the same elements as our planet earth, which are the same elements as those of the sun, our grandparent star from which earth and the other planets of the solar system separated, which in turn was formed as a result of the explosion that flared forth the universe. Life formed from cells that emerged from clusters of molecules in ocean depths. A recent theory proposes that the earliest forms of life were the thermophilic bacteria that absorbed heavy metal particles as a food source. Some form of awareness appeared in these one-celled organisms that enabled them to discern what would enter the cell through its membranes and what would not. Over several billion years ago plants were produced in the seas and seeds that got into rock crevices produced trees and vegetation growing on land. Animal life forms also emerged in the seas and then on dry ground as reptiles crawled ashore, birds soared through the air, furry creatures walked on four limbs, and finally a creature walked erect on land. Yet the body of Homo erectus still contains 65 percent or more of water (H2O). Human beings are not so far removed from the water of life that we can survive without consuming it. Living in the heat and light of the sun our furless bodies become dry and our skin needs moisturizing. Our biological need for water within and oil on the surface of the skin makes these elements prime candidates to serve as sacred signs (sacramenta) by which we relate to the Creator. Wilhelm Stählin, The Mystery of God: The Presence of God with Men, trans. R. Birch Hoyle (St. Louis: Concordia, 1964), 190. 4 Ibid., 191. 5 Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 274–8. 3

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The human body consumes and absorbs the chemical elements of earth and breaks them down for food that fuels the body’s movements. The body gets the nutrients it needs by consuming both plants and animals. The body is also an electromagnetic field that gets recharged by connecting directly to earth’s electromagnetic surface, especially when one stands barefoot on the ground. Being barefoot or without shoes became an important religious act (see Moses removing his shoes in the presence of the burning bush in Genesis 3) and plays a role in the worship practices of many world religions. Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker suggested in their story of The Journey of the Universe that “To commune may be one of the deepest tendencies in the universe.”6 Communion occurs between the bodies of the sun, our planet, and its moon caused by the gravitational relationship of earth with its sun and the pull of earth’s moon (which helps to stabilize earth’s orbit). Another form of communion is the collaboration of life forms with the oceans, the atmosphere, and continents to shape the environment in which both life and its environment thrive. A third form of communion is the photosynthesis by which life feeds off the sun and transforms food into flesh. “Der Mensch ist was er isst” [“The human is what he eats”], said the materialist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. He went on to say that “Eating and drinking is the mystery of the Lord’s Supper;—eating and drinking is, in fact, in itself a religious act; at least ought to be.”7 As the first cells already discerned what was good or bad for them, so the decisionmaking human brain sends messages via the spinal cord (the central nervous system) to peripheral nerves throughout the body that control the muscles and internal organs. Neurons connect the central nervous system with the parts of the body that interact with the outside world, such as the sensory nervous system with its five sense organs (eyes, ears, tongue, skin, and nose). Information received through the senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch is sent to the brain for processing and the part of the brain called the reptilian brain decides how to react, for example, by sending a message to the muscles to move toward or away from what is being sensed or remain still (the basis of the fight, flight, or freeze syndrome). Biologists have learned that the origin of life is also the origin of death since our molecules and cells are constantly dying off and being replaced by new ones. Sexual reproduction is necessary for the survival of the species.8 It is not surprising that rites of childbirth and burial are central to religious practice and meaning. Neuroscience has explored how the brain responds to the human need to make sense of the world in which we live with its cycles of birth and death through myth-making, and the ritualization of these mythic narratives by which we internalize and socialize the stories. A leader in this research was Eugene d’Aquili, MD, PhD (1940–98), who founded biogenetic structuralism, a way of studying the neurophysiology underlying human behavior. With his colleagues Charles D. Laughlin, Jr. and John McManus, he concentrated on religious behaviors and mapped the ways in which different parts of the brain are involved in religious experience. In an important early article in The Spectrum of Ritual, d’Aquili and Laughlin discuss how ritual accomplishes two biological feats. First, it coordinates the

Brian Thomas Schwimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 51–6. 7 Cited in Carl E. and LaVonneBraaten, The Living Temple: A Practical Theology of the Body and the Foods of the Earth (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 48. 8 Tyler Volk, Death and Dorion Sagan, Sex (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2009). Two books in one cover. 6

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neural systems and functions of ritual participants to overcome social distance and allow for group-coordinated action. Second, it effects socialization within the individual so that the younger members learn how to behave in the social group.9 In later work d’Aquili and Andrew Newberg used a brain imaging technology called Single-Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT), which measures blood flow in the brain, to determine what parts of the brain are affected by states of meditation and ritual acts. On human subjects (Buddhist monks, Franciscan nuns) they were able to detect what brain activities were closed off during meditation. The crucial brain structure in this process is the parietal lobe, which has the neurological structures for the causal and binary operators and also the centers for language that are needed in the generation of myths.10 Newberg and d’Aquili concluded that rituals enable beliefs to be experienced by the body in the performance of ceremonies.11 Here the premotor area of the brain is important for controlling movement. The Attention Association Area (AAA) of the prefrontal cortex focuses our attention so that we do not act out all of our thoughts but are selective in our focus. There is actually an evolutionary basis to this particular impulse: the selection of actions such as running, jumping, fighting, stalking, and so on that helped our primitive ancestors to hone necessary survival skills. Rituals involving chanting, drumming, and dancing may act out a hunt or a battle. Such rituals make a strong emotional impact. But the profound cognitive resonance provided by the myth is needed to produce the full emotional impact of the ritual. Story and enactment, word and sacrament, are inseparable.

THE ECOLOGICAL BODY The body as an organism within nature functions in interaction with its natural environment. In fact, Johnson holds that the body’s meaning as an organism is expanded by its “coupling” with its environment.12 The environment provides the nutrients needed by the body for its thriving. God is manifested through various earthly elements that our bodies require for survival and flourishing. As related to sacraments, the body born again in Baptism and nourished in Holy Communion needs water, food, and drink. Sacramental theology has not given sufficient attention to the biological body. Nor has it given attention to the natural elements that hydrate and nourish the biological body. The Protestant theologian Paul Tillich (1886–1965) introduced an emphasis on the sacramental elements as natural symbols in a collection of essays from his earlier period in Germany, The Protestant Era, in which he proposed a necessary correlation between Protestant prophetic principle and Catholic sacramental substance.13 Tillich proposed a realistic understanding of nature as the basis for sacramental realism. Both a sacral–magical understanding and a symbolic–romantic understanding of nature are inadequate. He suggested that “The power and meaning of nature must

Eugene D’Aquili and Charles Laughlin, “The Neurobiology of Myth and Ritual,” in The Spectrum of Ritual, ed. Eugene d’Aquili, Charles Laughlin, and John McManus (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 152–82. 10 Andrew Newberg, Eugene d’Aquili, and Vince Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (New York: Ballantine, 2001), 63. D’Aquili died before this book was completed. 11 Ibid., 91. 12 Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, 113–34. 13 Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, trans. with a concluding essay by James Luther Adams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), x–xvi. His original proposed title was “The End of the Protestant Era.” 9

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be sought within and through its objective physical structures.”14 By this Tillich did not mean that nature should be treated as an object to be analyzed and measured. He would not give mathematical certainty the last word about nature. Rejecting René Descartes’s duality of cogitation and extension (“thought” and its “extension”), Tillich suggested that “The power of nature must be found in a sphere prior to the cleavage of our world into subjectivity and objectivity.”15 It would have to be a time when human beings and nature coexisted in a symbiotic relationship, an idea that has been promoted in the Gaia theory that has emerged in the environmental movement. We are part of the natural world—the biosphere—not separate from it. Tillich’s method of looking for a realistic rather than a symbolic or ritualistic interpretation of nature held great promise for the development of sacramental theology that has not been much explored. It was a prescient recognition that human beings are a part of nature and have the capacity to respond to the divine presence apprehended in, with, and through natural objects. Some critics thought that Tillich’s understanding of sacramentality threatened to engulf the particularities of Baptism and the Eucharist in a universe of symbolism. But Tillich avoided this by emphasizing the indispensable role of the natural elements to which the word is applied. As important as the words of institution are, there is no sacrament without water, bread, and wine. Tillich’s insight was that the particularities of the Christian sacraments cannot be separated from the way in which God relates to his people through earthly means. “Without water there would be no baptism,” he wrote.16 Yes, Martin Luther said that the Word makes the sacrament. But there is a dialectic here that cannot be broken. For Tillich water is not just a symbol or an element available for use in a ritual. Rather, “A special character or quality, a power of its own, is attributed to water. By virtue of this natural power, water is suited to become the bearer of a sacral power and thus also to become a sacramental element.”17 Its natural qualities are cleansing, destroying, and life spawning. The same may be said of the bread and wine of Holy Communion as satisfying hunger and thirst. Rejecting either a symbolic or a ritual interpretation of the sacrament that focuses on the relationship of the elements to the presence or absence of the body and blood of Christ, Tillich asserted that “The realistic interpretation … can explain bread and wine as representing the natural powers that nourish the body and support in the human body the highest possibility of nature.”18 In other words, a natural quality resides in the bread and wine that make these elements suitable for sacramental use even before the words of institution are applied. Tillich also brought a natural, realistic interpretation to the efficacy of the Word. The words do not just supply a symbolic interpretation or fulfill a ritual requirement. “The word as breath, as sound, as something heard, is a natural phenomenon.”19 Two elements that are important in the Christian ritual and sacramental repertoire are oil used in initiation and healing rites and ashes used in penance. These can also be treated using Tillich’s realistic interpretation. The body, like a machine, needs lubrication for its proper functioning. To keep individual parts moving internally without producing much friction, the body produces a protein called lubricin. Externally the body’s sebaceous

Ibid., 101. Ibid., 102. 16 Ibid., 95. 17 Ibid., 96. 18 Ibid., 98. 19 Ibid., 100–1. 14 15

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glands produce sebum, an oily, waxy substance that coats, moisturizes, and protects the skin. Exposure to the sun and wind can dry the skin by absorbing its natural moisturizers. Ancient people learned that massaging oils into the skin and joints helps to relieve stiffness and improves blood circulation. Since humans are social animals, we thrive on connecting with one another through touch, just as other animals do. By having another person apply oil to the body, massage was born. The use of oil in Anointing and the laying on of hands became sacramental uses. The imposition of ashes as a sign of penitence also became a sacramental use. Ash is a chemical transformation of matter by fire that represents the destruction of material elements. But ashes also provide enrichment of the soil so new life can spring forth. Ashes can also be used for cleansing purposes. Ashes applied on the head in penance signify the death of the old self and the cleansing of life through penitential disciplines so that a changed person emerges. Ashes were used in ancient public penitential acts and continue to be used on Ash Wednesday as a sign of penitence and a reminder of our mortality. Although natural objects have inherent sacramental meanings, this is experienced in particular objects. Historian of religion Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) offered a sacramental view of natural objects when he taught that they do not cease being natural objects when they manifest the sacred. The burning bush remained a bush (Exodus 3). On the other hand, a hierophany occurs when the sacred is revealed in or through a particular tree or stone or mountain or spring.20 In the same way, Martin Luther held that bread and wine do not cease to be bread and wine when they convey the real presence of Christ. In his critique of transubstantiation in The Babylonian Captivity (1520), Luther wrote that “it is real bread and real wine, in which Christ’s real flesh and real blood are present in no other way and to no less a degree than the others assert them to be under the accidents.”21 But as Luther later wrote in Against the Fanatics (1527), this does not mean that “I shall eat and drink him in all the taverns, from all kinds of bowls, glasses, and tankards! … Because it is one thing if God is present, and another if he is present for you. He is present for you when he adds his Word and binds himself, saying, ‘Here you are to find me.’ ”22 The Word reveals the particular element as a sacrament; its benefits are received by faith.

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL BODY The biological body connects with its environment by experiencing sensations and by being in motion. Our breathing, sensate, moving body is more than the biological machine whose systems can be diagrammed and analyzed in anatomy textbooks and that feeds on earth’s minerals and hydrates with earth’s waters. To be able to relate to its environment through its senses and motor actions, the mind and the body must work in tandem. Phenomenology as a philosophical movement had to move away from Descartes’s dualism of a material body and an immaterial mind. For Descartes the mind cast the body “out there” as an object to be studied along with other objects. This laid the foundation

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 116–18. 21 Martin Luther, “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” in Luther’s Works, American Edition, 36, trans. A. T. W. Steinhäuser and revised by Frederick C. Ahrens and Abdel Ross Wentz (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1959), 29. 22 Luther, “That These Words of Christ, ‘This Is My Body,’: Etc., Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics,” in Luther’s Works, American Edition, 37, trans. Robert H. Fischer (Philadelphia, PA: Muhlenberg, 1961), 67–8. 20

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for modern objective sciences. Their investigations and experiments yielded much of the knowledge and technologies we have come to depend on. As ecophilosopher David Abram notes, “Yet these sciences consistently overlook our ordinary, everyday experience of the world around us. Our direct experience is necessarily subjective, necessarily relative to our own position or place in the midst of things, to our particular desires, tastes, and concerns.”23 As long as we regard the body as an object constructed of systems to be dissected and analyzed, we will not understand the phenomenon of living embodiment. The German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1937), regarded as the father of phenomenology, proposed that we relate to the world not as object to object but as one subject to another subject. This creates the intersubjective world of life, the Lebenswelt, or “life-world.” As Abram explains, “The life-world is the world of our immediately lived experience, as we live it, prior to all thoughts about it.”24 Detailing how we experience the world was the work of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1986), regarded by some as the philosopher of the body. MerleauPonty said that if we want to experience the world we must first “return to our senses.” That is, we must first experience our bodies as a “necessary condition” for perceiving things. We can perceive things from different angles and thereby form different impressions of the same object. What is not variable is “the permanence of my own body.”25 I can walk around a chair and look at it from different perspectives; I cannot walk around my body. I can walk away from the chair; I cannot walk away from my body. My body is the fixed point from which I perceive all other things. Things always appear to us as a perspective because of the relative stability of our bodies vis-à-vis other things. Merleau-Ponty proposed that there are two ways in which we perceive things: through sensations and movement. He noted that our sense organs are all on the exterior of the body. Thus, one’s living body is involved in all experiences of things in the world. “If I have sensations, then all experience is sensation.”26 We also encounter the sacramental elements through the senses. The various elements of water and oil, bread and wine can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched. Our experiences of these natural elements provide meanings for interpreting the sacraments. For example, we can experience water as calming, purifying, life-giving, or destructive. Oil can be experienced as soothing, bread as filling, wine as inebriating, and so on. We should note that Baptism and Anointing in the ancient church were performed on naked bodies and that upon emerging from the baptismal pool the candidate was dressed in a white robe before being led into the Eucharistic assembly for first communion. The Eastern churches have more or less maintained this practice, especially with infant and child candidates. Liturgy has embraced the symbolism of nakedness and enclothement, especially in rites of Christian initiation.27 In the ancient church, Baptism was by full immersion in the pool. Anointing of the whole body occurred before or after the water bath in different liturgical traditions. Nudity and enclothement are also experiences that can be felt by the body. In various societies people wear less or more clothing depending

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage, 1996), 32. 24 Ibid., 40. 25 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012), 93. 26 Ibid., 13. 27 Frank C. Senn, Embodied Liturgy: Lessons in Christian Ritual (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2016), 53–89. 23

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on climate and working conditions.28 Nakedness can be experienced variously as pride or shame, beauty or humility, sexuality or holiness, depending on the social context. Christian interpretations of the rituals of Baptism drew upon these felt experiences. Cyril of Jerusalem compared stripping off clothes for the Anointing and water bath with stripping off the old nature, identifying with Christ hanging naked on the cross, and mirroring our first parent, Adam, “who stood naked in Paradise and was not ashamed.”29 Theodore of Mopsuestia said of the white baptismal robe, “This is a sign of the world of shining splendor and the way of life to which you have already passed in symbol”30—a reference to Mt. 13:43, “Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” I can focus on one sense organ at a time to the exclusion of the others and gain different perceptions of the elements through how I hear, see, smell, taste, and touch them.31 I gain a perception of the loaf and cup as a whole through the unity of the senses through movement as I walk toward the elements in a procession of the whole assembly approaching the font or the communion station.32 Merleau-Ponty’s concept of motricité was important to his project.33 Movement is another way of perceiving. If I cannot see something I can change my position or move toward it. Merleau-Ponty observed that we are in motion from the moment we are born as we surge forward from the womb into the world. We come to know phenomena through movement. We are always sensing and we are always in motion. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, a student of both dance and philosophy, who wrote a doctoral dissertation on The Phenomenology of Dance (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1963), carried forward Merleau-Ponty’s notion of motricity in The Primacy of Movement. Joining together interdisciplinary inquiry into movement from the perspectives of mind, brain, phenomenology, evolutionary biology, and choreography, she proposed that from the beginning of human evolution and of each individual’s life, our “kinetic spontaneity” defines our aliveness and becomes the way we make sense of the world and ourselves. “We literally discover ourselves in movement. … In our spontaneity of movement, we discover arms that extend, spines that bend, knees that flex, mouths that shut, and so on.”34 As a phenomenologist, Sheets-Johnstone explores how the movements of our bodies feel to us. We feel our moving bodies creating space within us as we extend, twist, or lean to experience the meaning of things.35 Dance choreographs such movements and postures. Liturgies have included dancing in different times and places,36 and especially in some African churches.37 Yoga practitioners experience the body in postures (asanas) and in flowing movement (vinyasas) from one posture to the next.38 Ritual worship offers a

Simon Peter was naked while working on his boat when the risen Jesus appeared on the shore of the lake in Jn 21:7. He dressed to be in the presence of the Lord. 29 Cyril of Jerusalem, Sermon 2, in Edward Yarnold, The Awe Inspiring Rites of Initiation: Baptismal Homilies of the Fourth Century (London: St. Paul, 1971), 74–5. 30 Theodore of Mopsuestia, Baptismal Homily III, in Yarnold, 207. 31 See the sensory meditation on the bread and wine in Senn, Embodied Liturgy, 146–7. 32 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 243. 33 Ibid., 128–48. 34 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement, expanded second ed. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011), 136. 35 Ibid., 144. 36 See Marilyn Daniels, The History of Dance in Christianity (New York: Paulist, 1980). 37 See Elochukwa E. Uzukwu, Worship as Body Language, Introduction to Christian Worship: An African Orientation (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, A Pueblo Book, 1997), 4–6, 295–6, 302–5. 38 Yoga sequences in Senn, Embodied Liturgy, were used in a course of that title taught in Indonesia in 2014. 28

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variety of postures and movements: standing, sitting, kneeling, turning, and prostration; and processions into and out of the worship space, to the font or the altar, outdoors on special days, at weddings and funerals, as well as on pilgrimages and in penitential processions. Alexander Schmemann wrote that liturgy is best understood as a “journey of the Church into the dimension of the Kingdom.”39 Liturgical worship puts bodies into motion.40

THE SOCIAL BODY What impact does society make on the human body? Phenomenology, with its emphasis on subjective perception, may seem to have little to contribute to our understanding of the social body. But for Merleau-Ponty our relationships with other living bodies are not secondary to our embodied subjectivity. Drawing on Husserl’s notion of intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty made use of his emphasis on motricity to show how we reach out to people and things that are of interest to us. Indeed, a living, behaving body is a projective being; it projects itself to and through the world. As I surge forward in the world I perceive that others are also doing so. I may see someone doing something that is of interest to me and I reach out to that person to communicate about it. In fact, “we have learned in individual perception not to conceive of our perspectival views as independent of each other; we know that they slip into each other and are gathered together in the thing.”41 MerleauPonty worked through the many details of this gathering together. We learn from the experience of moving toward others and we develop psychologically and socially through interactions with them. He sees community not as a totalizing social system but as a “coming together” of people who are each uniquely different but who are attracted to one another through behavior and conversations. An opposite social theory is provided by Michel Foucault (1926–1984), who held that the body and its behavior are “constituted” by societal norms and coercive practices. Foucault was proposing his theory of the social construction of the body just about the time of Merleau-Ponty’s untimely death from cancer. So Merleau-Ponty could not respond to Foucault’s “social constructionism.” In The History of Sexuality, volume 1, Foucault gives an example of “the machinery of power” in the nineteenth century that put an identifying “implant” into the body. “Science” constructed the bodily identity of “homosexuals” and “perverts.” From a category of forbidden acts, the person who performed same-sex acts became a “homosexual”—a person defined as such in his very being. “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”42 The psychiatric categories of perversion were catalogued, not to be suppressed but to be “implanted in bodies” by the “machinery of power” to establish “a natural order of disorder.”43 In the light of these and other examples, Foucault argued that society “constitutes” who we are even in our bodies. Society’s categories “inscribe” and “differentiate” our bodies.

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 26. 40 Senn, Embodied Liturgy, 321–47. 41 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 369. 42 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 43. 43 Ibid., 44. 39

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Adding to the complexity of the social construction of the body, Gail Weiss argues that we have not one but several body images that are informed by social structures and cultural values regarding sex, race, gender, ethnicity, social class, and religion, among others.44 These different images embodied within one person can be in conflict with one another and even be self-destructive. The social body, like society itself, also holds historical memory. Just as our bodies hold the memory of personal traumas,45 so our bodies hold the memories of historical traumas, especially those related to our race or ethnicity.46 Socialization of the young has traditionally occurred through an elaborate ritual process of initiation. Patterns of initiation are among the oldest systems of instruction and incorporation we know in human societies and world religions. In modern Western or Westernized societies initiation processes occur in highly developed educational processes that extend from childhood through young adulthood. In traditional societies initiation usually occurs at puberty. Mircea Eliade proposed that these rites involve a death to childhood and rebirth into adulthood. In fact, he regards ritual death to the old life and transformation into new life as the basic idea in all rites of initiation. “In philosophical terms, initiation is equivalent to a basic change in existential condition: the novice emerges from his ordeal endowed with a totally different being from that which he possessed before his initiation: he has become another.”47 Most cultures tend to develop different initiation processes for boys and girls because their instruction differs according to the gender roles they will play in the social group. The boys usually learn the lore of the spirit world and the girls usually learn the lore of the natural world.48 Initiation rites include ordeals performed by and on the body, such as a vision quest in the bush and branding or circumcision.49 In initiations among many indigenous peoples, such as tribes in Melanesia and New Guinea, boys received the sexual virility, hunting skills, and warrior prowess of the elders through the implantation of the elder’s semen in their young bodies.50 The idea that the life force originates in the head and is transmitted by semen is one of the oldest beliefs of the human race. Ethnographer Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957) compared the structure of the rites of passage to taking a journey: there is a leave-taking from the old status, a crossing of the threshold (the liminal state of transition), and an incorporation into the new status.51 Anthropologist Victor Turner (1920–1983) focused on the liminal, “betwixt and between” state of the ritual process. This is where not only change and transformation take place but also communitas is formed among the initiates. (Turner uses the Latin

Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (London: Routledge, 2013). See Besser van der Kolk, MD, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Viking, 2014). 46 Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Minds (Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017), calls on African Americans, white supremacists, and police to recognize that racism resides in the body and not just in the head. 47 Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 8. 48 Ibid., 41–7. 49 Ibid., 21–40. 50 James Neill, Origins and Roles of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 26–56. These initiatory homosexual practices were unreported by Western anthropologists either out of embarrassment or because they were secret rites not shared with outsiders. 51 Arnold Van Gennep, Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 44 45

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communitas rather than “community” to distinguish it from a geographic unit.)52 Those who go through the ordeal together come to depend on each other just as the social group will depend on the neophytes to inject new vitality into their society. We know from military experience that those who go through basic training form a tight bond that becomes important in warfare and often lasts a lifetime. The initiates also experience a reversal of accustomed social roles in the liminal situation of the initiatory process, which Turner expresses in a series of binary oppositions, among which are equality/ inequality, nakedness or uniform clothing/distinctions of clothing, minimalization of sex distinctions/maximalization of sex distinctions, humility/just pride of position, sacred instruction/technical knowledge, and so on.53 The liminal state provides a sense of communitas over against the social structure even though the social structure provides for this anti-structure experience in its initiatory processes. The community of faith into which the baptized are initiated is itself called to be a liminal communitas over against the worldly structures in which Christians otherwise live. As Adam Seligman and his colleagues propose, “ritual creates a subjunctive, an ‘as if ’ or ‘could be,’ universe.”54 In sacramental ritual participants enact a world they know is unlike the world they inhabit outside the ritual. Aidan Kavanagh held that in liturgy we gather out of the world to do the world aright.55 Turner saw the Christian catechumenate and monastic novitiate as forms of liminality producing communitas. In the ancient church those who desired to become Christians were enrolled as catechumens, assigned mentors (sponsors), engaged in ascetic practices (fasting), practiced ministry (almsgiving, serving the sick and the poor), joined the community in prayer, and received basic instruction in the gospels. After an appropriate period of time their lives were examined and they were declared “competent” to go through the final preparations for Baptism during Lent. It was a tough ordeal: a forty-day fast with abstinence from all sexual activity. In Milan and in Hippo, every week during Lent there was a physical inspection (scrutinium) combined with exorcism to rid the body of any traces of the demonic while the competentes stood barefoot on a tunic made of goatskin representing their sins that they trod underfoot. On the Sundays in Lent the catechumens received the four gospels, the creed, and the Lord’s Prayer. On Palm Sunday they had to recite back the catechetical texts. Bishop Ambrose of Milan compared the preparation of the candidates for Baptism to the conditioning of the athlete.56 Bishop Augustine of Hippo regarded the competentes as recruits for Christ undergoing basic training.57 The catechumenate with all its rigors aimed at nothing less than the remaking of the human body. Peter Brown referenced Ambrose’s preaching about the transformation of the body with all its lusts into the image of the glorious body of Christ, which was unscarred by the double taint of a sexual origin by his virgin birth and lack of sexual impulses in his life of celibacy. Christ’s body provided a

Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 96. Ibid., 106. 54 Adam Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Pruett, and Bennett Simon, Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7. The authors juxtapose this “as if ” aspect of ritual to the modern (pietistic) view that there must be a “sincere” correlation between ritual and the “as is” world if ritual is to be authentic. 55 Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology (New York: Pueblo, 1984). 56 Garry Wills, Font of Life: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Mystery of Baptism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 87. 57 Van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop, 358. 52 53

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model for the ideals of virginity and celibacy.58 Christian iconography and Renaissance art placed before worshippers representations of Christ’s naked body at his birth, Baptism, crucifixion, burial, and resurrection.59 As Danuel Lé proposed, the naked body of Christ provides an atonement model for a commercially engendered body-obsessed culture that has contributed to body shame.60 In the rites of initiation the image of Christ’s body is inscribed in the bodies of the baptized with the sign of the cross and Anointing. As we know from embodied mind theory, the sacraments will not make an impact on our minds without making an impact on our bodies. Lakoff and Johnson show that categories and concepts are inseparable from bodily experiences.61

THE CULTURAL BODY Culture embraces all the patterns of life, including language, use of tools and artifacts, and institutions.62 Liturgy as the public expression of a social group reflects in its celebrations not only the cultures of the world that the members of the assembly bring to the gathering but also the beliefs, rituals, and values that constitute a liturgical culture. Here I look at the formative influence a cultural institution and its practices had on the rites of Christian initiation as concerns the body: the Roman public baths. Certainly the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River exerted a powerful influence on the baptismal practices of the early Christians, as we see from the icons of Jesus’s Baptism by John. But Christianity flourished in the urban world of the Roman Empire, which had highly developed bathing practices in well-engineered public pools that existed across the vast empire from Syria in the east to Britain in the west. Garrett G. Fagan, who accounts for “bathing in public in the Roman world” in Latin literature and architectural remains, describes Roman bathing ritual as “complicated, combining what in modern terms would be considered a visit to the gymnasium, bathroom, and massage parlor.”63 The bather arrived, undressed, was anointed with oils, and exercised by playing ball games. Once a sweat was worked up he entered the bathing rooms, which included pools of various temperatures from hot to cold. At some point the bather enjoyed a body scrape with an instrument called a strigiles to remove the oil, sweat, and dirt that had accumulated while exercising. After some time in the pool the bather might send a slave outside to one of the food vendors to bring in a snack while socializing with other patrons. When he was ready to depart, the bather was dried off, might pay for a massage with perfumed oils, and go home. If he was having a dinner party that night, he might collect his dinner guests before departing. Public baths were usually, but not always, segregated by sex. There is no doubt that the Christians of antiquity were well acquainted with the culture of public bathing. Bishops ordered their candidates for Holy Baptism at the Easter Vigil

Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 20th anniversary ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 350–1. 59 Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion, second ed., revised and expanded (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 60 Daniel Lé, The Naked Christ: An Atonement Model for a Body Obsessed Culture (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012). 61 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 19. 62 See Anscar J. Chupungco, OSB, “Reenvisioning ‘Liturgy and the Components of Culture,’ ” in Worship and Culture: Foreign Country or Homeland, ed. Gláucia Vasconcelos Wilkey (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 68–75. 63 Garrett G. Fagan, Bathing in Public in the Roman World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 10–11. 58

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to go to the baths on the day of Holy Thursday (before the beginning of the Triduum) so they would be clean for their Baptism. Augustine relates in his Confessions that when accompanying his father to the baths at age sixteen, his father “saw the signs of active virility coming to life in me and this was enough to make him relish the thought of having grandchildren.”64 The stimulus of sensual actions performed on naked male bodies in Christian baptisms surely must have produced the same physical response in some young men. Christian piety in the eastern Mediterranean, which held to the ritual taboos of the discharge of blood and semen, would have prevented menstruating women and men who had ejaculated the night before from receiving Communion, which would also have postponed their baptisms since the full rites of Christian initiation culminated in first communion. Augustine and his later disciple Gregory the Great (pope 590–604) were less concerned about these bodily conditions in relation to the sacraments. For them it was the will rather than the body that kept one from God.65 The shape of Christian initiation that we see in the church orders and the mystagogical homilies of the fourth and fifth centuries (allowing for variations of regional churches) parallel the bodily rituals of public bathing: disrobing, pre-baptismal anointing of the whole body, water bath, emergence from the pool, vesting in a new white robe, postbaptismal anointing on the forehead, laying on of hands by the bishop, greeting of peace, and participation in the Eucharist with first communion (with additional cups of water and milk and honey for the neophytes). Church orders specify that children were baptized first, then the men, then the women. (The Apostolic Constitutions III.16 specifies that a female deacon should anoint and immerse the women.66) The outline of Christian initiation presented here follows all the actions performed on the body. These bodily actions continued down through the centuries even though there was increasingly less nakedness, less body anointing, less water in smaller fonts, and smaller portions of food and drink at the Eucharistic feast. Our practice of the sacraments in the modern West has become practically disembodied and our corporate ritual actions are less connected bodily. We have seen how our biological bodies, created of earthly matter, that give birth and die, perform neurologically engendered myths and rituals that give meaning to these cosmic realities. Our earthly environment provides material elements that appropriately serve as sacramenta that are applied to or consumed by our earthly bodies. We sense our reception of these sacramental elements and respond in thought and actions. Felt experiences of reception of these elements are shared with others whose interactions and communal meanings make us who we are. We enact these meanings through customs, gestures, and actions in a series of complex ritual practices. I write this chapter in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has resulted in social distancing, the closing of church buildings around the world, and virtual communication. As our churches cautiously reopen, sacramental practices will be affected because of reduced body connections. The experience of social distancing has reinforced the fact that sacramental rituals require real, not virtual, body contact. Sacraments will return to their fullness of meaning when applied to living bodies that engage in bodily interactions.

Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Classics, 1961), II.3, 45. Brown, The Body and Society, 433–4. 66 E. C. Whitaker, Documents of the Baptismal Liturgy, revised and expanded by Maxwell E. Johnson (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, A Pueblo Book, 2003), 36. 64 65

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FURTHER READING Lé, Dan. The Naked Christ: An Atonement Model for a Body Obsessed Culture. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012. Morrill, Bruce T., ed. Bodies of Worship: Explorations in Theory and Practice. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999. Newberg, Andrew and Eugene d’Aquili with Vince Rause. Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. New York: Ballantine, 2001. Seligman, Adam B., Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Senn, Frank C. Embodied Liturgy: Lessons in Christian Ritual. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2016. Uzukwu, Elochukwu E. Worship as Body Language. Introduction to Christian Worship: An African Orientation. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, A Pueblo Book, 1997.

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CHAPTER TWO

The Bible and the Christian Sacraments GORDON W. LATHROP

There are, of course, no sacraments in the Bible and no sacramental theology. At least, those words are not used. The category “sacraments,” of immense importance to Christian life, Christian theology, and Christian ecclesiology, has come into existence after the books of the Bible were written.1 Direct discussion of “sacramentality” does not occur in the scriptures. But making these statements can be misleading. In fact, many biblical texts and much of the whole variety of biblical meanings are hugely important to what Christians intend by the word “sacraments.” If a sacrament is, as Augustine said in the fourth century, “a sign of a sacred thing,”2 then the Bible is full of such signs. Indeed, some of these signs are not simply signposts, pointing toward something else, but actually instruments to enable participation in the things they signify; they are effective symbols. This participation in the thing symbolized is found, for example, in Melchizedek’s bread and wine, in which Abraham can eat and drink the blessing, or the water of Hagar’s well where Hagar can drink her salvation. More: the Old Testament makes ample narrative use of material things that point to and carry the promise of God, as in the serpent on a pole in the wilderness or the ark of the covenant in the tabernacle. And many of the stories of the Hebrew scriptures—especially stories about these material things, again stories about Melchizedek’s bread and wine or Hagar’s well, but also those about crossing the sea, eating the manna, drinking from the rock, and ultimately keeping the Passover, for example—were taken by early Christian preachers and theologians to be images that could be richly repurposed to speak of God’s action in baptism or in the eucharist. Even more: the Christian practices of the washing that gathers people into Christ and the meal that proclaims his death and resurrection have their earliest witness and their earliest images for meaning in the New Testament books. So also does the practice of communal forgiveness and reconciliation, the practice of the laying on of hands and prayer for the appointment of leaders, and the practice of prayer and anointing for Barnabas Lindars, The Theology of the Letter to the Hebrews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 51–4; cf. Richard Bauckham, “Sacraments and the Gospel of John,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, ed. Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 85. 2 Augustine, Letters 138:1. 1

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healing, all of which are also matters that some Christian communities have counted among the sacraments. It is the New Testament—and especially Paul—that gives us the word “mystery” for the heart of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, a word that later comes to be used in the Eastern churches to denote what the Western churches call “sacraments.” And, in a way that recalls the effective signs of the Hebrew scriptures, the Gospel according to John has many “signs/σημεῖα” that need to be thought about next to the Christian sacraments. It follows that a handbook on the sacraments quite rightly includes reflection on the Bible among its basic foundations. In this chapter we will proceed by first considering what can be said about the origins and early meanings of baptism and eucharist from the texts of the New Testament. On this ground, we will turn to see the many important ways the Old Testament also uses concrete, tangible signs in its narratives and in the preaching of its prophets and how this use has mattered and continues to matter for Christian sacramental meaning. Then we will think about how other practices that later Christians have regarded as sacraments are reflected in the writings of the New Testament and how, in some New Testament books, the “word” itself is sacramental. Finally, we will think about “sign” and “mystery,” two biblical terms that have mattered for ongoing Christian sacramental theology.

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE ORIGINS OF BAPTISM AND EUCHARIST It is clear from passages like 1 Cor. 10:1-4 that baptism and eucharist were already being practiced in Christian communities in the middle of the first century ce. It is also clear, in that very text, that Paul was already using Old Testament narratives and symbols to interpret the meaning of these ritual practices and that he had admonitions about that meaning and practice to address at least the church in Corinth. For Paul, the “ancestors” had been “baptized into Moses” and they had all eaten and drunk “spiritual food and drink”; thus, by using these analogues from the story of crossing the sea “under the cloud,” eating the manna, and drinking from the rock, contemporary Christians who were evidently themselves practicing baptism and a sacred meal could be exhorted and warned. It is not clear, however, how either practice actually began. The traditional way of answering this question has pointed to New Testament narratives of “institution,” stories that have been taken to mean that Jesus himself began—instituted—and commanded his followers to observe the practice of baptism and the supper. The passage about mission at the end of Matthew (28:16-20) and sometimes the parallel passage in the longer, probably not original ending of Mark (16:15-16) are usually taken to be the “institution narratives” of baptism. The passage about the Lord’s supper in the Pauline account in 1 Corinthians (11:17-34) along with parallel passages included in the passion narratives of all three Synoptic Gospels (Mk 14:22-25; Mt. 26:26-29; Lk. 22:14-20) are taken to play a similar role in relation to the eucharist. But, while the theological weight of ideas of institution is important to Christian faith by calling attention to the trust that baptism and eucharist do come from Jesus Christ—indeed, that they correspond to his crucified and risen identity as that identity is present in the Christian assembly—ascribing the beginning of baptism and eucharist to the historical Jesus is not supported by the actual text of the New Testament.

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According to that text, Jesus was certainly baptized by John. The embarrassment this event sometimes seems to cause (cf. Mt. 3:13-15) is one assurance of its historicity; so is its multiple attestation, narrated in the three Synoptics and implied in John. But in the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus nowhere himself baptizes, and the command to baptize belongs to accounts of the appearance of the risen one, not to accounts of the life of Jesus. And while the Fourth Gospel does say “he spent some time there with them and baptized” (Jn 3:32) and does quote others as saying “Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John” (Jn 4:1), the text quickly corrects itself: “although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized” (4:2). It would be better to note that Christian baptism was preceded by John’s baptism of repentance, just as John’s baptism was preceded by many other Jewish rites of washing or immersion, including the ablutions of priests before their service, the mikveh to cleanse from ritual impurity, and especially the washings that were intended to prepare for the last times, washings that may have been practiced by the community at Qumran or by Bannus (“the bather,” as he was called), the tutor of Josephus.3 The difference between John’s baptism and these washings—a difference strongly maintained by the subsequent Christian practice—is that John’s washing was not self-administered. There was a “baptizer,” as both John’s cognomen and the several New Testament narratives make clear. John’s baptism most likely was meant to be an image of God coming to wash the people and a down payment on that hoped-for divine washing (see Isa. 4:2-6 and Ezek. 36:24-28; cf. 16:1-14). Christian baptism, then, seems to have begun as a reworking and reinterpretation of the baths that preceded it, especially the baptism of John. Christian baptism was the result of a ritual development in which there is no particular need to look for a “founder”;4 one looks in the New Testament instead for a transformation of meaning. Christians came to see that when Jesus was baptized and when he underwent the “baptism” of his own death and resurrection (Mk 10:38-39; cf. Lk. 12:50), baptism was itself “baptized.” As both Eastern theologians and Martin Luther have said, “the water was itself washed.”5 The meaning of the old eschatological washing was transformed. Now that meaning included already bringing the person baptized into God’s new age for which the washing previously had functioned as preparation. And the meaning involved making the baptized person part of a people who bear witness to that new age. One way to show that transformation was narratively: in the Synoptic Gospels, when Jesus was baptized the heavens were opened, the triune God was revealed, the voice of God heard, and the Spirit poured out like the dove at the end of the flood; all of these events, and especially the last, would be taken to belong to the dawning of the kingdom of God, the coming of God’s end times. Alternatively, in Paul (Rom. 6:3-11) to be baptized is to be immersed into Jesus’ death so as to be under both the promise and the present reality of his resurrection, the very beginning of the new age. Thus Mark shows itself to be, in this as in many other ways, deeply influenced by

Gordon W. Lathrop, “Baptism in the New Testament and Its Cultural Settings,” in Worship and Culture in Dialogue, ed. S. Anita Stauffer (Geneva: Lutheran World Federation, 1994), 24–31; cf. Lars Hartman, “Baptism,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1992), I: 583–4. 4 Edward Schillebeeckx, “Towards a Rediscovery of the Christian Sacraments: Ritualizing Religious Elements of Daily Life,” in Ordo: Bath, Word, Prayer, Table, ed. Dirk G. Lange and Dwight W. Vogel (Akron: OSL Publications, 2005), 18. 5 Benjamin Stewart, A Watered Garden: Christian Worship and Earth’s Ecology (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2011), 34. 3

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Paul.6 Echoing Paul’s letter to the Romans, the Gospel according to Mark (and following Mark, Luke!) presents Jesus’ death as a “baptism,” a baptism in which the disciples will also share (Mk 10:38-39; Lk. 12:50). Yet another way the transformation of meaning is signified is that Christian baptism is “into Christ” (Gal. 3:27; Rom. 6:3), or “in the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 2:38), or, echoing the narrative of the baptism of Jesus, “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt. 29:19). Christian baptism thus gathers its subjects into the presence and power of the crucified and risen Lord—his “name”—and into the very revelation of the triune life of God. To paraphrase Augustine,7 Jesus Christ comes to the water and so there is a sacrament. That transformation of the eschatological meaning of the earlier washings constitutes the “institution” to which the New Testament bears witness: in Jesus Christ, in his death and resurrection, and the Spirit poured out from him, God’s end times have dawned; by baptism into him people are made partakers in and witnesses to those end times. Then the many other ways that the New Testament discusses the meanings of baptism, while testimony to diverse understandings of baptism in primitive Christianity, can also be seen to be further developments from this basic meaning. Baptism involves all people, men and women, Jew and Greek, being clothed in Christ; it is the end of divisions (Gal. 3:27-28). Baptism is the coming of the eschatological promise of the forgiveness of sins (Acts 2:38-41). It is the making of a new people of priests, an extension of Israel, a new people exercising the vocation of Israel among the nations (1 Pet. 1:22–2:10; cf. Exod. 19:5-6). It is rescue from the darkness and transfer to the kingdom of Christ, in whom there is forgiveness of sins (Col. 1:13-14). It is rebirth and renewal through the outpoured Holy Spirit (Tit. 3:5-6). It is preparing the community for the marriage with God (Eph. 5:26; cf. Ezek. 16:1-14). And more. In the Fourth Gospel, for example, baptism is very likely imaged by the man born blind being sent to wash in the pool Siloam and coming back seeing: so we are washed in Christ into “enlightenment” or “illumination” (Jn 9:7). And baptism is entering into the kingdom of God by being born of water and Spirit, the very water and Spirit poured out from the crucified (Jn 3:5; cf. 7:37-39; 19:30,34). All these passages can be taken as images for participation through water and the word in the remaking of the world found in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And all of these texts mean to urge baptizing communities to teach, practice, and live out of such a meaning. As Paul makes clear, such an understanding of baptism has lifelong ethical implications: “these things … were written down to instruct us, on whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor. 10:11). Something similar can be said about eucharist. Here, too, the Christian ritual seems to have involved a continuation and revaluing of existing practices. And the primary eucharistic texts seem to be aimed at encouraging such a profound revaluing as ongoing reform in the churches. We know that Hellenistic Jewish meals used the available GrecoRoman cultural patterns for communal eating, inserting and reinforcing Jewish identity by replacing, for example, libations to the gods with prayers of thanksgiving and beseeching to the biblical God over a shared cup.8 We also know from the multiple attestations in the

Gordon W. Lathrop, The Four Gospels on Sunday: The New Testament and the Reform of Christian Worship (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2012), 23–4. 7 Augustine, In Johannis Evangelium 80:4. 8 See Dennis E. Smith, “Greco-Roman Meal Customs,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, IV: 650–3; and Dennis E. Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003). See also Lathrop, The Four Gospels on Sunday, 39–59. 6

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Gospels that the ministry of the historical Jesus seems to have involved significant meals,9 perhaps even using the eating with outsiders and sinners as a prophetic sign for the coming kingdom of God.10 Furthermore, current scholarship has demonstrated that social life in Greco-Roman cities at the time of Christian origins was significantly marked by various interest groups and religious societies, constituted most commonly as supper clubs.11 It follows that we should note that early Christian communities came into existence as meal societies or supper clubs. Indeed, when one starts to notice, meals and counsel for meal practice are everywhere in the New Testament.12 The counsel that such meal practice ought to “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26)—thus, proclaim both the death and resurrection of Jesus and so bear witness to the inauguration of the new age—is especially important to Paul. The testimony of such a faithfully practiced meal to the self-giving of Jesus “for you” and as “the new covenant in my blood,” a testimony made in the words about the bread at the outset of the meal and in the description of the “cup of blessing” at the end (1 Cor. 10:16; 11:23, 25), gives Paul the grounds to criticize the Corinthian factionalism and social exclusion of the poor as not corresponding to the gift of Christ. Once again, calling a Christian community to the deeper Christocentric meaning of the ritual practice involves calling that community to reform. Paul passes on the Lord’s “do this.” That is, he evidences and urges a Christian use of the Jewish pattern of marking the meal with a blessing of bread at the beginning and a “sympotic” prayer (i.e., a prayer at the “symposium,” a prayer with the shared cup) of thanksgiving and beseeching after supper, and he calls for these acts to be done in remembrance—in ἀνάμνησις—of Jesus. This command, interpreted by what Paul calls “giving thanks” (1 Cor. 11:24; cf. Lk. 22:1720) and “blessing” (1 Cor. 10:16), has given the churches the grounds for richly diverse eucharistic praying through the ages, another way that the transformation and deepening of meal meaning has been expressed. Paul says he has this earliest account of the Lord’s supper “from the Lord” (1 Cor. 11:23). Since Paul was not present “on the night when Jesus was betrayed,” it is most likely that Paul means he has this deepest meaning of the church’s meal and the command to “do this in remembrance” of the crucified Lord by revelation from the risen one, either directly (as in Gal. 1:12) or perhaps mediated through a Christian prophet (cf. 1 Cor. 14:37). Others argue that Paul is here making use of a communal traditional memory of an event that occurred before Jesus was killed and that he is passing that memory on. The problem with this understanding is that Paul does such reporting of oral traditions about the historical Jesus nowhere else in his writings and he himself says he has this account of the meal “from the Lord.” In any case, it is most likely that also the revaluation of meal practice and meal meaning in the Christian communities, the revaluation that became the eucharist, was—just like baptism—anchored in the gift of the risen Christ.13 Also with the

John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1998), 423–44; Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 104–5. 10 Rick Fabian, Signs of Life: Worship for a Just and Loving People (New York: Church Publishing, 2019), 1–17. 11 See Philip A. Harland, Associations, Synagogues, and Congregations: Claiming a Place in Ancient Mediterranean Society (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003); see also Gordon W. Lathrop, Saving Images: The Presence of the Bible in Christian Liturgy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2017), 57–8. 12 Hal Taussig, In the Beginning Was the Meal: Social Experimentation and Early Christian Identity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2009), 36–53. 13 See Lathrop, The Four Gospels on Sunday, 49–50. 9

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eucharist, the crucified and risen Christ, in the power of the Spirit, comes to the meal and so there is a sacrament. When we understand that the Gospels are written to tell us who it is that is present now in the assembly14—that they are written about “Jesus then becoming Jesus now”15—it becomes clear that the Synoptic accounts of the Last Supper—and, indeed, the accounts of all the meals of Jesus—are also intended to deepen and reform the meal practice of the churches, to call those communities to encounter the presence and the gift of the crucified risen one now in this meal. The author of Mark may very well have learned from Paul about the transformed meaning of the supper and, on that grounds, have turned the entire content of the meal account included in his passion narrative into an account of the bread and cup that proclaim Jesus’ death, with no mention of any other food (Mk 14:22-25). Matthew, as in so many other places, follows Mark exactly, with the sole addition that the cup’s “blood of the covenant” is poured out “for the forgiveness of sins” (Mt. 26:28). Luke still includes the full meal, at least in the longer text of the parallel passage (see Lk. 22:19b-20), but it is Luke that brings a saying about Jesus serving into the supper itself (22:27). Furthermore, Luke gives us, in the Emmaus account (24:13-35), an image of the risen Christ coming to and thus transforming a meal shared by disciples, making that meal with its associated proclamation of the content of the scriptures into the very word-and-table event of encountering the risen one that the church would later recognize as its regular Sunday practice. Both Mark and Luke, thus, take Paul’s reforming critique seriously. And while John’s Gospel has no Last Supper account in the same way as the Synoptics, the footwashing enacted by Jesus in the place where the supper narrative would be accomplishes something very similar. Indeed, the Johannine account may be a dramatization of the Lukan word about serving. This slave service of Jesus, an image of his self-giving death, is what Christians are called to see and encounter in the meal they share, finding it also forming their life and turning them in love toward their neighbor (Jn 13:14-15). It is quite likely that the author of the Fourth Gospel wished for the community to see the meaning of baptism also expressed in this image (Jn 13:8-10). Thus the sacraments have been “instituted” by the transformation of preexisting rites to become concrete participations in the presence and gift of the crucified and risen Christ gathering the assembly into the life of the triune God and into God’s new age. Just as with baptism, the New Testament expresses this transformation by using yet other images for the church’s meal in Christ. These diverse images give evidence to the growth of diverse meanings alive in the supper in primitive Christianity, but they also can be seen as developments from Paul’s original concern that the meal in the churches be received from the Lord and be understood as proclaiming his death and resurrection. In the late first or early second century ce, the meaning of the eucharist is expressed, among many other images, by the risen one coming in to eat with the Christians in Laodicea who open the door (Rev. 3:20; cf. Lk. 12:36), by the “marriage supper of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:9), and by the eating from the tree of life (Rev. 2:7; 22:14). But already in the Gospels, eucharistic meaning hovers nearby with the Synoptic bread and fish in the wilderness (cf. Mk 6:30-44; 8:1-10) and the Synoptic meals with sinners (cf. Lk. 15:2), in the parables of banquets (cf. Mt. 22:1-14), in the petition for daily bread (Lk. 11:3; Mt. 6:11),16 in the cup that Jesus drinks and that the disciples will also drink (Mk 10:38-39), and in the Fabian, Signs of Life, viii. Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, 32. 16 See Lathrop, The Four Gospels on Sunday, 45–6. 14 15

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Johannine explication of the loaves (Jn 6:25-65). Indeed, according to the Gospels, the church’s eucharistic meal is the place where the Lord serves (cf. Lk. 12:37) and where the leaders of the assembly are themselves to serve (cf. Mt. 24:45-51).

SIGNS IN THE OLD TESTAMENT We have already seen that the New Testament makes use of imagery from the Hebrew scriptures to interpret baptism and the eucharist. But the very idea of a sacrament, the material “sign of a sacred thing,” is already massively supported by texts in the Old Testament. When one actually pays attention, it is astonishing how material the Hebrew scriptures are, how much important stuff there is in the accounts in these books—and this is true in many kinds of texts: in the sources of the Pentateuch called J and E and P, in Deuteronomic texts, in the stories of Elijah and Elisha, in the Psalms, and certainly in the prophets. In all of these, God’s judgments and God’s promises are not uncommonly signed by the presence and use of a material thing.17 The dove brings an olive branch to Noah (Gen. 8:11). The rainbow recalls the covenant of God (9:12-17). Melchizedek brings bread and wine to Abram (14:18). The smoking pot and the flaming torch pass through the divided animals (15:17). Hagar finds a spring or well (16:7; 21:19). Abraham and his male descendants are circumcised (17:11). The three men eat with Abraham and Sarah and promise a child (18:8). A ram is caught in the thicket (22:13). Rebekah draws and gives water to the servant of Abraham and his camels (24:19). Jacob sleeps with a stone as his pillow and then sets it up as a pillar (28:10-22; 35:14). Joseph gives food and forgiveness to his brothers (45:1-15). And this survey only covers Genesis—and only some of the concrete signs in Genesis at that. Among these things, the rainbow and circumcision are literally called “sign (’oth) of the covenant”—and we will see that word ’oth again in the prophets. But all of these things communicate God’s promise or blessing or care for Abraham’s people. Indeed, like the water in Hagar’s or Rebekah’s wells or the bread and wine in Melchizedek’s hands, some of these things are material participations in the promise. The sacred thing they signify is itself quite concrete: rescue and life. Such concrete presence of promise, narrated in the scripture, goes on. Think of the burning bush (Exod. 3:1-12), of the “signs and wonders” done in Egypt (7:3), beginning with the signs of the staff, the hand, and the blood (4:1-9). Think of the blood on the doorposts and lintels (12:13), of the unleavened bread as a sign (13:9, 16), of the manna and the quail and the water from the rock (17:6). Think of the waters of Marah made sweet by throwing in a tree (15:22-25). Think of the blood of the covenant thrown upon the people and the elders beholding God on the mountain and then eating and drinking (24:8, 11). Think of the tables of the law and the ark. Think of the sabbath itself as a sign (31:13, 17). And that is only part of Exodus. Then there is Elijah’s bread for the widow (1 Kgs 17:5, 8) and the bread and water that sustain Elijah himself as he goes to Horeb to meet God (1 Kgs 19:6, 8); there is Elisha’s use of the Jordan to cleanse Naaman (2 Kgs 5:14) or, in the deuterocanonical books, Raphael’s fish for Tobias and Sarah (Tob. 8:1-3). All of these things manifest and signify God’s power and promise. Many of them enable the people actually to participate in the presence of that promise. And some of

See R. W. L. Moberly, “Sacramentality and the Old Testament,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, ed. Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 7–21. 17

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them—the sabbath; the unleavened bread—continue to enable the people of the Jews to so participate, into our own time. Christians have used these stories and signs to speak of the sacraments, in profound metaphoric language. For Christians, baptism enacts the survival from the flood and the coming of the dove. Baptism brings us across the sea as a people to dance on the safe side, to eat the manna and drink from the rock. Baptism circumcises our hearts. Baptism paints the blood of the Lamb of God on the lintels of our bodies. Baptism washes us along with Naaman. And the eucharist is eating and drinking with the holy three and finding there the promise of life. Eucharist gives us Melchizedek’s food of blessing, the blood of the covenant, Joseph’s food of forgiveness, food and drink to sustain us as we meet God, the widow’s unfailing jar and jug, Raphael’s fish. All of these and more. Indeed, especially the story of the exodus has given Christians a connected narrative that demonstrates the connection of the sacraments as making the church, through water, word, and the repeated meal, to be a people of priests, bearing witness to God’s life-giving mercy for the sake of all the world. Baptism and eucharist so interpreted can be seen as a single thing. There are, however, dangers in this use of the Old Testament images. Christians have sometimes thought that such “typological” reading of the Old Testament18 implies that God caused these events to occur in order to prefigure the sacraments. Such a proposal easily leads to anti-Jewish thought and practice, easily indicates that the interpreter presumes to know the mind of God better than anyone else, and easily implies that the plain sense of the scriptures does not really matter. Rather, it is better to understand that Christians, in using the Old Testament images to interpret the sacraments, are reading figurally by “reading backward” from the Christian writings to the images of the Hebrew scriptures,19 that they are borrowing a reborn imagery, and that the plain sense of the scriptures is often already not so much an event as a narrated event, an event already become a symbol for God’s promise and God’s mercy.20 Such a use testifies to the Christian trust in the continuity of faith in the God of all the scriptures, while it avoids anti-Semitism. It also immeasurably enriches the Christian sense of the meaning of the sacraments. Yet another way the Hebrew scriptures enrich a biblical understanding of Christian sacraments can be found in the prophetic use of the “sign,” the ’oth. As we have seen, the narrative of the Pentateuch contains many concrete things, some of which are called “signs.” Indeed, the whole event of the exodus is seen as accompanied and even enabled by “signs and wonders” that God enacts for the salvation of the people (Exod. 7:3; cf. Neh. 9:10; Jer. 32:20-21). But the “sign” is sometimes used slightly differently among the prophets. Here, the prophet is directed to make or to point to a concrete object or event that then functions as a sort of oracle of the coming action of God. That action can be salvific. It can also be an event of God’s judgment and wrath. These signs are not mere illustrations: “in the symbol was also given the thing symbolized,”21 a small participation in the things that were surely coming. Thus Ezekiel’s sign of the brick and iron wall (Ezek. 4:1-3) or Jeremiah’s loincloth (Jer. 13:1-11) both point to and already participate in the siege or the destruction of Jerusalem. They are a form of visible preaching that already contains the judgment of God. On the other hand, the fact of a young woman

S ee especially Jean Danielou, The Bible and the Liturgy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956). Richard B. Hays, Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014), 15. 20 Lathrop, Saving Images, 43–7. 21 C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 141. 18 19

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bearing a child she calls “God is with us” (Isa. 7:14) is ambiguous; Isaiah uses the sign to proclaim both hope and disaster. Jeremiah’s purchase of the field (Jer. 32:6-15), however, is an astonishing proclamation of hope—“Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land”—in the midst of the currently occurring siege, in the face of certain destruction, defeat, and exile. If the extraordinary meal practice of Jesus, his eating and drinking with outsiders and sinners, is to be traced to the actual life of the historical Jesus, some scholars—as we have seen—have thought that such meal practice should be understood as a prophetic “sign.” Jesus, then, was visibly preaching and enacting the near approach of the kingdom of God and the sense that this kingdom and its promised feast were first of all given to sinners, to the poor and the rejected. Whether or not this is so, the continued presence of the Lord’s supper in the church is indeed a sign. For us now, in the midst of whatever disasters, the eucharist is rightly read like Jeremiah’s field: taste and see that in the mercy of God the world shall again thrive.

OTHER SACRAMENTAL SIGNS IN THE NEW TESTAMENT Besides baptism and the eucharist—or baptism and eucharist regarded as a single thing, like the people coming through the sea to eat and drink from God’s liberating mercy— yet other ecclesial practices are already evidenced in the New Testament. Some of those practices have been regarded as sacraments, especially in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox communities. It is not the concern of this chapter to explore the number of sacraments, though it is fascinating to note that theologians through history who have wished to so count have often fallen back on numbers that have biblical resonance: up to forty were counted by Hugh of St. Victor, 1096–1141,22 for example, and forty is a biblical number for wholeness; at least three were counted in early Lutheranism, for another example, and three recalls those three visitors to Abraham or the three disciples on the mount of Transfiguration or the three days of the paschal mystery; and seven, the most common number through Christian history, echoes the days of creation, not to mention the possible presence of what seems to be seven “signs” in the Fourth Gospel and seven lamps and seven churches in the Apocalypse. But all such numbers represent the play of biblically influenced imaginations, not a serious rooting of sacramental practice in biblical beginnings. Let the number be few or many; the number will not lead us to deeper meaning. Rather, we ask: what are the enacted signs that Christians trust to convey God’s grace reliably? Many sign-like actions can indeed be found in the New Testament. The “cup of water” (Mk 9:41; Mt. 10:42) given to the thirsty in the name of Christ seems to carry much of the meaning of the kingdom of God as it is in Christ. The best robe put on the prodigal (Lk. 15:22), the clothing worn by the healed demoniac (“sitting there, clothed and in his right mind,” Mk 5:15), and the white garment worn by the young man in the tomb (Mk 16:5; is it the same young man who ran away naked in the garden, 14:51?) may all reflect an early Christian practice of clothing the newly baptized, and the clothing itself may signify the reality that in baptism we put on Christ (Gal. 3:27; cf. Col. 3:9-10). The gift of a new name (Rev. 2:17; cf. 3:12) participates and signals a refreshed and grace-filled Hugh of St. Victor, De Sacramentis Christianae Fidei.

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identity. Reflection on these strong signs might help us to have a much more concrete view—a more sacramental view—of God’s grace in our world than we usually entertain. But the five sacramental signs, besides baptism and eucharist, that have had central attention in East and West have been confirmation, absolution (or penance), anointing of the sick, ordination, and marriage. All five can be discussed biblically, with some reference to New Testament texts and with the interpretive use of Old Testament images. Of course, confirmation was originally not separate from baptism. It continues to be part of baptism in Orthodoxy and among the Oriental churches, and it is returning to its role as part of any baptism in the Christian West. It plays that role with diverse ceremonial forms: laying on of hands and prayer for the gifts of the Spirit in the candidates, for example, or one or the other anointing with oil, before or after the washing with water. One cannot harmonize these practices; they all have existed independently and they all represent one or another way in which the water bath has been joined with prayer for the Spirit. These diverse ritual practices thus call up diverse scriptural references. Anointing with oil after the bath may recall the ritual appointment of priests (Exod. 40:12-15; Lev. 8:6-13), with the sense that the baptized are made a priestly people (1 Pet. 2:9; cf. Exod. 19:6). Or it may reflect the idea that the baptized people are, like Jerusalem of old, wed to God; washing and anointing make up the preparation of the bride (Ezek. 16:1-14). Anointing before the bath may carry with it the old idea that the candidate will do battle in the font with the ancient enemy and so is “oiled” like ancient athletes were or, better still, anointed like David was just before the battle with Goliath (see 1 Sam. 16:13; 17:4151 and the deuterocanonical Psalm 151). This latter understanding seems to have been quite alive in the Syrian Christian baptismal room at Dura Europos.23 Before all of these possible biblical resonances, however, oil may have been used in baptism simply as an elaboration of the title Christos, anointed one, as people were baptized “into Christ.” And both anointing and prayer for the Spirit may have been meant to indicate the presence in the church of the reality signed by the Gospel-book narrative of the descent of the dove at the baptism of Jesus. In that paradigmatic baptism, washing and the Spirit were already combined. Indeed, the coming of the Spirit marks the transformation of the baptism of John into the sacramental presence of the end times now. We do not know whether the references to “anointing” in Paul (2 Cor. 1:21) and in the Johannine literature (1 Jn. 2:20, 27) are metaphorical or reflect an early practice of baptismal anointing in the first and early second centuries. We do know, however, that the odd passage in Acts 8:14-17 about the Christians in Samaria, who “had only been baptized in the name of Jesus,” needing the Apostles Peter and John to lay hands on them in order that they might receive the Holy Spirit, was used in the Western church as a proof text for the Western practice of post-baptismal “confirmation” administered by the bishop, in a time when bishops had come to be regarded as successors of the apostles. Whatever the original meaning and purpose of this text, it ought not be used as if it provides the “institution” of confirmation. Also in the West, where baptism was ultimately broken into separate parts, prayer for the Spirit at baptism first reflected the story of the baptism of Jesus: to be baptized into him is to be baptized into the Spirit that came upon him and flows from him. To be baptized into him is, however, also to be incorporated into the church, as the involvement of the bishop in the West was originally intended to express.

Dominic Serra, “The Baptistry at Dura Europos: The Wall Paintings in the Context of Syrian Baptismal Theology,” Ephemerides Liturgicae 120 (2006): 72–5. 23

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Northern European Protestant practice, of course, turned confirmation into a rite of passage from childhood into adulthood. That being the case, biblical passages about raising and educating children were seen as the most cogent. But as that passage rite has faded away in many places and as baptismal meaning has undergone a significant recovery, Protestants have increasingly joined Roman Catholics in restoring prayer for the Spirit or anointing with oil to the baptismal rite itself and have joined in seeing what remains of a confirmation process developed instead as a process for baptismal formation and renewal, not only for young adults but also for others. Similarly, no “institution narrative” can be found in the New Testament for the other four primary sacramental signs practiced in the churches. Just as with baptism and eucharist, we do well instead to consider the preexisting rites that were transformed into those Christian ritual practices that many Christians have called sacraments. Again, “the word comes to the element and so there is a sacrament,”24 and I think that the preexisting human rites can be considered the “element.” Christians did not invent marriage. They also did not invent healing prayer for the sick or the ritual appointment of leaders. Absolution or the forgiveness of sins may have the strongest claim to a strictly Christian origin, but even there human reconciliation rituals have a wider sway than only among Christians. For the investigation into these transformations and the resultant Christian meaning, passages of the New Testament and the liturgical rebirth of images from the Old Testament scriptures are of very great importance. Take ordination. There certainly are passages in the later parts of the New Testament that indicate that some leaders of the assemblies were appointed by the laying on of hands with prayer. Especially this is so in the deutero-Pauline Pastoral Epistles (see 1 Tim. 4:14; 5:22 and 2 Tim. 1:6), though it is also present in Acts (6:6). But other writings, including the earlier 2 Cor. 8:19 (cf. Acts 14:23), speak of “appointment” to office, using the verb χειροτονέω, which, in first-century Greek, meant “to elect or choose by raising hands.” In the New Testament this appointment may be made by the churches (2 Cor. 8:19) or, in the later Acts, by the apostles (Acts 14:23). Nothing clear about the earliest processes or rituals of appointment to office can be gathered from these texts or from these verbs. Especially the verb χειροτονέω continued to be used in Christian churches, though later it not infrequently stood for the whole process of election to office and ritual prayer, coming to mean in the ritual both raising one’s hands in prayer and laying hands on the candidates for ordination.25 But none of this is specifically Christian. Leaders everywhere may be elected by raising hands or appointed by an indicating touch. The specifically Christian content of such appointment may be suggested by the language of the Timothy letters: “the gift (τὸ χάρισμα) of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands” (2 Tim. 1:6), where that gift surely means the presence of the Spirit, echoing the image of Moses laying hands on Joshua to appoint him and so fill him with “the spirit of wisdom” (Deut. 34:9; cf. Num. 27:23). But a far more important transformation of leadership in the New Testament churches, however it was appointed, involved the call to assembly service (Mk 10:42-45; Mt. 24:45-51; Lk. 22:24-27), to working for the common good (1 Cor. 12:4-11), and to conformity with the serving love of Christ (Jn 13:14). Such leadership was to be radically unlike that found “among the Gentiles.” Indeed, the very Spirit that the Pauline writer of 2 Timothy sees as given in Christian ritual appointment Augustine, In Johannis Evangelium 80:4. Paul Bradshaw, “Ordination. 1. Early Christianity,” in The New SCM Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship, ed. Paul Bradshaw (London: SCM Press, 2002), 343. 24 25

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breathes something of this hoped-for transformation, this envisioned difference: it is “a spirit of power and of love and of self-control” (2 Tim. 1:7). The Spirit that poured out on humankind many different gifts, some for leadership, all for “building up the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:12), was to be regarded as a mark of “the last days” (Acts 2:17, quoting Joel 2:28). Or take anointing the sick for healing. Oil used for healing was a widespread ancient human practice. So was prayer, to whatever deity or deities, for healing. But the New Testament shows Jesus as a healer and tells of him sending the twelve to heal. Indeed, by the Markan report, “they … anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them” (Mk 6:13). Christians took the healing of the sick to be a sign of the arriving new age, reflecting in their eyes the promises of the prophets: Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God …” Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped, then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. (Isa. 35:3-6) So, the Letter of James counseled, “Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord” (Jas 5:14). We do know that Christians came to be widely known—and sometimes reviled—for their care for the sick.26 But “in the name of the Lord” is what matters. For Christians, whether or not they accomplished miraculous healings and cures, like those imaged in the Gospels, the tangible connection of the wretched and the ill to the community around the crucified and risen one, the connection to the presence of “the Lord,” was already wholeness. Something similar can be said of absolution. Rites of reconciliation and mutual forgiveness are widespread in human cultures, some of them quite profound.27 But in Christianity they have become a central theme. Forgiveness from God now, in our times, came in the early Christian movement to be seen as a major characteristic of the arriving reign of God. Jesus, according to the Gospels, signed that reign by enacting forgiveness and the meal of forgiveness: “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them” (Lk. 15:2). And, in surprise at Jesus doing such forgiving, the question was raised, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mk 2:7). The followers of Jesus were to live out the same forgiveness they were receiving from God; such is the eschatological spirituality of the Lord’s Prayer (Mt. 6:12; Lk. 11:4) and the meaning of several parables (cf. Mt. 18:2135). Furthermore, the Gospels image Jesus as charging the leaders of the community with a ministry of forgiveness: the “office of the keys” in Matthew (16:19; 18:18) or, in the Fourth Gospel, the mission conjoined with the gift of the Holy Spirit by the crucified and risen one: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (Jn 20:22-23). Absolution, too, is to be considered a sign of the new age in Christ. And, if the risen Christ in Matthew directs the community to baptize, the risen Christ in John directs that it forgive sins. Marriage, of course, is a universal human phenomenon, taking many different cultural forms. The early Christian tradition certainly had its criticisms of families, imagining that the life of the community bearing witness to the new age in Christ would be marked by

S ee Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). See, for example, Thomas G. Christensen, An African Tree of Life (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015).

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a “hundredfold … brothers and sisters, mothers and children” (Mk 10:30; cf. 3:34-35) and that some Christians would not marry as part of their witness (Mt. 19:12; 1 Cor. 7:6). But through the first century of the Christian movement a variety of directions and hopes regarding marriage developed, some of them reflecting current social mores, with the hope that Christians would not offend others but set a moral example (see, e.g., the late-first-century “tables of duties” in 1 Pet. 2:13–3:12 and Eph. 5:21–6:9). The earliest such instructions that we have, however, including the earliest counsel against divorce (1 Corinthians 7), are found in Paul’s insistence that sexual ethics among Christians needs to be aware that “the appointed time has grown very short … for the present form of this world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7:29, 31). Everyone, according to Paul, should live “as if not.” But none of this meant that Christians did not honor marriage. On the contrary. Following the example of some of the prophetic writings (cf. Isa. 62:1-5; Ezek. 16:114), the coming of the Lord to heal and restore could be described metaphorically as a marriage (Rev. 19:7). So, too, could the relationship of Christ and the church (Eph. 5:2133). And the Fourth Gospel images what the “hour” of Jesus will mean by telling of the changing of water into wine at a wedding (Jn 2:1-11). All of these examples are imagespeech for God and for Christ, using marriage or a wedding as metaphors. In Ephesians, the “great mystery” (Eph. 5:32; τὸ μυστήριον … μέγα) that two become one flesh is spoken of Christ and the church. Still Ephesians heads its table of duties with the line “be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ” (5:21) and seeks to discuss what that genuine and universal Christian principle looks like in marriage, even if, in doing so, the author uses a patriarchal social structure that we find time-bound. Marriage between Christians needs to sign the mutual forgiveness, mutual support, and gracious hospitality that belong to the communal understanding of the new age—that belong to life in Christ—whether or not such marriage is considered a sacrament. That the word μυστήριον in the Greek of Ephesians was translated sacramentum in the Latin versions contributed to the widely shared understanding that marriage is indeed a sacrament, even though such a definition was not the intention of the author. Christians still disagree about which of these signs are to be counted among the sacraments. Texts from the New Testament will not solve this disagreement. What the New Testament can help us see is that all seven of these signs—baptism and eucharist most centrally, absolution perhaps following close behind—show forth the grace and mercy of God for the life of the world. All seven demonstrate human ritual practices that have been transformed in Christ to bear witness to God’s action and to enable us to encounter that saving action reliably. And, when we think about that cup of cold water, the Bible may show us yet other signs as well. Perhaps Hugh of St. Victor was right about forty!

SIGN, MYSTERY, WORD, AND SACRAMENT But when we look in the New Testament for “signs,” we must come to the Fourth Gospel. Beginning with the Cana wedding and its changing of water into wine, the miracles of Jesus are called signs in John. Two of them are even numbered as “the first of his signs” (2:11) and “the second sign that Jesus did after coming from Judea to Galilee” (4:54). So great is this accent on the signs of Jesus that lead people to believe in him (2:11; 23) that some scholars have called the first part of the Gospel “the Book of Signs,”28

Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, 297–389.

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in which signs and discourses are juxtaposed in order to set out who Jesus is. Others have argued that the final part of the Gospel, “the Book of Glory,” is made up of the one great sign of the death and resurrection of Jesus juxtaposed to the one great discourse, often called “the Farewell Discourse,” both setting out the meaning of the passion.29 “Sign” in this Gospel, however, is less like the prophetic signs we have considered and their possible continuation in the meals of the historical Jesus than like the “signs and wonders” of the book of Exodus, whereby God delivered Israel through the hand of Moses. Much of the Gospel according to John is filled with references to the stories of the exodus, and these Johannine signs can be seen as yet another such reference. But, as the prologue to the Gospel says, “the law … was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (1:18). The signs in John are full of that grace and truth. That does not mean that the Johannine signs are yet what we would call sacraments. But they do matter for the meaning of the sacraments and were probably intended to do so by the original author, as he or she reflected on the ecclesial practices that were central to Christian assemblies and were beginning to be what was later called “sacraments.” In a remarkable discussion of such sacramental references, called “The Johannine Sacramentary,” Raymond Brown lists the passages he thinks ought especially be regarded as so intended by the author.30 For Brown, these include the baptismal references and baptismal meanings present in the talk with Nicodemus about being born of water and the Spirit (Jn 3:1-10), the water for the Samaritan woman at the well (4:7-15), Jesus himself as the source of living water (7:37-39), the healing of the man born blind by his immersion in the pool called “Sent” (9:1-12), the footwashing story (“one who has bathed,” 13:10), and possibly the great catch of fish (21:4-8). They also include the eucharistic references and eucharistic meanings present in the water into wine narrative at Cana (2:1-11), the discourse on the manna and the bread of life (6), the discourse about the vine and the branches (15:1-11), and possibly the bread and fish meal beside the sea (21:9-14). Brown further regards the important account of water and blood flowing from the side of Christ (19:34) as significant for both baptism and eucharist. Thus baptism flows from the cross of Christ, is the new birth and the source of water flowing within without fail, gives illumination and new sight, and provides the primary bath that need only be renewed by mutual service. Baptism may also be the way that the great diversity of fish is caught in the church’s net. And eucharist also flows from the cross of Christ, gives the new wine of God’s marriage with the earth, wine that replaces the water of the law, is the very flesh of the bread of life himself, and grafts its participants into the tree of life. Eucharist may also be regarded as the eschatological fish feast, the place where the chaos monster is conquered and given away as food, as in Ps. 74:14.31 Thus, this late Gospel provides us with a strikingly creative use of biblical images, calling us to a yet deeper understanding of baptismal and eucharistic meaning. In the Fourth Gospel, signs are the miracles Jesus did before the church came into existence. Now, we have the Gospel book, and it is written about the signs so that we might believe (20:30-31)—“blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (20:29). Lathrop, Saving Images, 68. Raymond E. Brown, “The Johannine Sacramentary,” in New Testament Essays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, [1965] 1968), 106–7. 31 Lathrop, Saving Images, 40. 29 30

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And we have the sacraments, the continuing presence of the water and the blood from his side. As Raymond Brown quotes G. Fitzer saying, “The miracle is to be understood as the sign of the presence of God in Christ. The sacrament is to be understood as the sign of the presence of Christ in the church.”32 But among the signs of the presence of Christ in the church, according to some of the books of the New Testament, is the very biblical and apostolic word itself. Recent studies have discussed “the sacramentality of the word,”33 and in doing so they have explored themes that were already present in the Gospels. The Gospel according to Mark makes the book itself read in assembly—in the “house”—to be a means of that assembly seeing the risen Christ.34 Following Mark, all the other Gospels have conclusions in which the risen one is present in the church, with the promise of continuing presence, in Matthew where “two or three are gathered” in Christ’s name (Mt. 18:20) and, finally, in the teaching and baptizing church “to the end of the age” (28:20); in Luke through word and meal (Lk. 24:30-32); and especially in John, in the repeated Sunday gathering (Jn 20:19, 26) and, not least, through the book of the Gospel itself, full of Jesus’ signs (Jn 20:30-31). One could argue that this understanding of the book was learned from Paul. Paul’s letters can be seen, especially in their initial greetings and in the ritual character of their conclusions, with benedictions and the kiss of peace following the reading of the letter in the church, as presenting the apostle as a sign of the risen Lord and the letter itself as a sign of the apostle. Already in the New Testament, the word is sacramental. It is no surprise, then, that the seer of the Apocalypse, following the example of the story of Ezekiel (3:1), is commanded to eat the book and then speak (Rev. 10:8-11). That very presence of the crucified and risen Christ, empowered by the Spirit and revealed as sent by God, the sign of the last days, is sometimes, in the New Testament, called μυστήριον, the “mystery” or even the “mysteries” of God. That is especially so in Paul (1 Cor. 2:1, 7; 4:1; Rom. 16:25), but it is also true of the deutero-Pauline writings (see Col. 1:25-27), where Paul is shown as making the mystery known. That mystery is articulated in Colossians as “Christ in [or among] you, the hope of glory.” In Mark— and in parallel places in Matthew and Luke—this very truth, the Gospel proclaimed by Paul that is made the “secret” of the earliest Gospel book, is called the “secret” or the “mystery” of the kingdom of God (Mk 4:11). While the Bible does not call the sacraments “mysteries,” given the New Testament use of that word, it is no wonder that later Christian language, especially in the Christian East, would adopt that word to speak of baptism, eucharist, and the other ecclesially recognized signs of the grace of God and the presence of Christ in the church.35 “Christ among you,” the very sign of the kingdom of God, is what all of the sacraments are about, their transformed meaning. Indeed, Jesus Christ, crucified and risen and present in the church, is—as has been importantly argued36—the primal or basic sacrament, the Ursakrament. We can argue that this mystery is the deepest reading found in the contribution the Bible makes to our understanding of the Christian sacraments.

aymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John, 2 vols. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 530. R See John F. Baldovin, “The Sacramentality of the Word: An Ecumenical Approach,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 53:2 (Spring 2018): 224–44. 34 Lathrop, Saving Images, 61–91. 35 Gunther Bornkamm, “μυστήριον,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. G. W. Bromiley, vol. 4 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967), 827. 36 Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963). 32 33

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FURTHER READING Baldovin, John F. “The Sacramentality of the Word: An Ecumenical Approach.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 53:2 (Spring 2018): 224–44. Brown, Raymond E. “The Johannine Sacramentary.” In New Testament Essays, 77–107. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, [1965] 1968. Schillebeeckx, Edward. “Towards a Rediscovery of the Christian Sacraments: Ritualizing Religious Elements of Daily Life.” In Ordo: Bath, Word, Prayer, Table, edited by Dirk G. Lange and Dwight W. Vogel, 6–34. Akron: OSL Publications, 2005. Serra, Dominic. “The Baptistry at Dura Europos: The Wall Paintings in the Context of Syrian Baptismal Theology.” Ephemerides Liturgicae 120 (2006): 67–78. Smith, Dennis E. From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003. Stewart, Benjamin. A Watered Garden: Christian Worship and Earth’s Ecology. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2011.

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CHAPTER THREE

Early Christian Foundations for Current Sacramental Thought: A Brief Overview KAREN B. WESTERFIELD TUCKER

In each generation, the interpretation of Christian scripture, praxis of Christian communities past and present, theological and philosophical reflection by influential ancestors, social and cultural contextual factors, and emerging insights all contribute in some manner to the formulation of sacramental theologies and related practices. Despite sharing this approach, Christian communities in each time and place often differ in their understanding of sacraments and sacramentals, and some prefer other language to that of “sacrament.” This overview of the first five centuries highlights certain figures and communities (principally from the Christian West) whose significant contributions to the discourse on sacraments and sacramentality in their own day continued to have an influence on later thinking, and especially during the renewal of interest in Christian sacraments from the late nineteenth century (thanks to the Ecumenical and Liturgical Movements) into the twenty-first century.

MUSTÉRION/MYSTERIUM AND SACRAMENTUM Similar to the authors/redactors whose texts contributed to the making of the New Testament, other early Christian writers used the language of hiddenness, secret, or “mystery” (Greek mustérion, pl. mustéria) when discussing the salvific work of God throughout the ages and the disclosure of God’s self in and by Christ. Notably, mustérion is not used in the New Testament in discussions related to baptism or the Lord’s Supper. The term “sacrament” (sacramentum) became in this period a common Latin translation of mustérion, though some writers used both sacramentum and the Latinized mysterium but carefully distinguished the Christian mysteria from those of the pagan mystery cults. Sacramentum in the Roman context carried multiple political and legal meanings, among them a deposit of money made during legal proceedings and an oath of allegiance. For soldiers in the Roman military, physical signs such as tattoos (sacramenta militia) accompanied the oath. Tertullian (d.c. 220), a lawyer and the son of a soldier from Carthage, is often credited as the first to use sacramentum and did so in several senses: as an oath (On Idolatry 19); as pertaining to the “rule of faith” (regula fidei) revealed by

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Christ (Of Patience 12, which describes charity as the “highest sacrament of the faith”); as a sign (On Baptism 8); and as a symbolic religious rite linked with supernatural, including sanctifying, effects (e.g., baptism and eucharist in Against Marcion 1.14; 4.34; On Baptism 1 and 4). The legal connotations of sacramentum and its definition as a sign persisted as Western Christian writers after Tertullian increasingly took up the term, even as its association as an oath declined. The Christian East largely avoided such connections by the continued use of mustérion. Western authors in later periods who investigated early Christian sources sometimes recovered the term mustérion, adding aspects of its cosmic theological dimensions to their explication of sacraments.

IRENAEUS OF LYONS Most writers in the first centuries did not offer systematic or protracted statements on sacraments, but rather included reference to them while addressing other issues such as the substance of the faith, the unity of the church, and/or the distinctions of Christian life and practice from non-Christians and the persons or groups considered heretical. For example, Irenaeus of Lyons (d.c. 202) clarified his position on sacraments against the variant scriptural interpretations and dualism of gnostics who defined matter as evil and thereby rejected the possibility of material creation’s salvation. Contrary to the gnostics, true believers affirmed the apostolic teaching (the “truth”) of one creation made by one God, Christ’s incarnation and resurrection, the redemption of creation, and the Holy Spirit’s ongoing work of renewal in and through the church. “The Father plans and commands, the Son carries out the plan, the Spirit supports and enables the process, and human beings progress daily and move toward the perfect, drawing near to the Uncreated One” (Against Heresies [AH] 4.38.3). The rule of faith, both known and ritually received by those who underwent baptism for remission of sin and new birth, was to be kept without deviation (AH 1.9.4; Proof of the Apostolic Teaching 3 and 6). Irenaeus claimed that the eucharistic meal itself was proof par excellence of the goodness of the physical realities of God’s creation. Before his passion, the flesh-andblood Jesus, the Son of God incarnate, spoke of the earthly elements of bread and mixed wine as his body and blood given for the sake of the church as his body. The church in response makes an offering of thanksgiving from God’s own creation, which, reckoned by God as a pure sacrifice and given God’s invocation, comes to consist of both material and spiritual realities, so that the bread is no longer common bread, and those who partake of it have the hope of resurrection to eternal life (AH 4.18.4-5). According to Irenaeus, the ritual elements are comparable to Jesus himself, who was both body and spirit. For this reason, Irenaeus argued that his opponents’ doctrine contradicted their own eucharistic practice: if creation came to be through someone other than the Father and if material creation is evil, then offering material elements as a thanksgiving is an insult and a hypocrisy (AH 4.18.4; 5.2.2-3). Additionally, persons holding such a position are outside of the true church and therefore deny themselves the opportunity to receive God’s salvation (cf. AH 3.24.1-2).

CYPRIAN A generation after Irenaeus, Cyprian of Carthage (martyred 258) built upon the foundations laid by his predecessor Tertullian and affirmed with him the validity of

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a martyr’s baptism with blood. Contrary to Tertullian’s preference to delay infant baptism until the candidate could knowledgably profess Christ, Cyprian urged its practice as soon as possible. He argued that God offers grace to persons of any age, and an infant, though without intentional or actual sin, nevertheless carries the “contagion” of Adamic sin (Letter 64.4-5). Cyprian’s more substantial comments on baptism address transgressions, in particular “rightly” baptized persons who—sometimes under threat of persecution—renounced by word or action the apostolic faith, and those persons baptized by schismatic clergy (e.g., Novatianists and Marcionites), who later desired incorporation into the church. The former went through the usual penitential process for excommunicated sinners within the context of community, which aimed at eventual full restoration to eucharistic participation as a sign of ecclesial reconciliation and unity. The latter, according to Cyprian, had not received baptism for the forgiveness of sin and reception of the Holy Spirit (even with the use of a similar liturgical formulation for baptism) because sectarian clergy could not bestow what they themselves lacked. Those not with the bishop (and the bishops united to each other) were outside the true church in which all sacraments properly resided (Letter 66.8; 69.2). Therefore, persons coming to the church under these conditions required a valid baptism. Here Cyprian and certain other African leaders took a different approach from the majority of bishops (including Stephen of Rome) who affirmed, as would the Council of Arles in 314, that a baptism was valid if done with water and in the name and faith of the Trinity. A recipient of sectarian baptism needed only the imposition of hands for reception of the Holy Spirit and then entered the church to partake of the eucharist for restoration. Despite his minority opinion on this matter, Cyprian’s considered connections between sacraments, church (as the body of Christ), and salvation nonetheless influenced later writers.

FOURTH-CENTURY WRITERS EAST AND WEST The church gained the status of a religio licita within the Roman Empire in 313 thanks to the Edict of Milan promulgated by Emperors Licinius and Constantine. The latter, as much for political reasons, sought to establish a Christian doctrinal consensus, and in 325 called the First (Ecumenical) Council of Nicaea to address issues of orthodoxy, especially trinitarian theology in light of subordinationist Christologies circulated by Arius, his followers, and others. The Council of Constantinople (381) furthered these conversations, considering questions of the divinity of the Holy Spirit and concluding that Father, Son, and Spirit are together “worshipped and glorified.” For the fourthcentury “mystagogues” of the East and West who interpreted initiatory practices in sermons preached before and/or after baptism, understandings of the relationships of the divine life necessarily correlated with the possibilities and extent of human participation in the divine mysteries. Cyril of Jerusalem (d.c. 387), Ambrose of Milan (d. 397), John Chrysostom (d. 407), and Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428) described the use in their churches of the threefold trinitarian formula (cf. Mt. 28:19) with triple immersion for baptism, the latter, according to Cyril, representing Christ’s three days in the tomb (Mystagogical Catechesis 2.4). Cyril and Ambrose indicated that the priest delivered the trinitarian formulation as a profession of faith in question-and-response format; Antiochene writers John and Theodore each specified that the priest says, “N. is baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” John posited that this formulation proves Father, Son, and Spirit are three distinct hypostases yet

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one in substance (Baptismal Homily 2.26). Theodore, biblical scholar and exegete in the Antiochene school, agreed and added that the Three, together in existence from eternity and the cause of all things, collectively produce baptism’s effects in the present and future (Baptismal Homily 3.14-21) and fulfill what is performed at the eucharist (Baptismal Homily 5.6-7, 23). To those who trust in divine mercy, these actions and gifts of the Trinity incorporate into the divine life and grant participation in the divine nature (Baptismal Homily 5.25; cf. Cyril, Mystagogical Catechesis 4.3). Theodore’s orthodoxy is sometimes questioned because he wrote that Christ “assumed” humanity rather than “became” flesh (cf. Jn 1:14), which Nestorians gave a decidedly unorthodox reading; nevertheless, Theodore’s language can be viewed as in line with the later Chalcedonian (451) definition of the union of Christ’s divine and human natures. Fourth-century writers in general considered a sacrament a sign that, to yield greater understanding, could be connected with associated literary and hermeneutical concepts, among them “figure” and “symbol” as well as “type” (e.g., persons, events, or statements from the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the work of Christ) and “antitype” (the “fulfillment” of the type in Christ, the church, and/or Christian experience). New Testament and earlier Christian writers had employed these devices; in this period they were more fully developed for the purpose of showing God’s plan of salvation in human history from its origin to its “culmination” in greater realities. The waters of creation, the flood, the Red Sea, Naaman’s cure, the Jordan River, and the pool of Bethesda all served as figures or types for baptism as did manna in the desert, Melchizedek, and Jesus’ meals with his disciples for the eucharist. Cyril, for example, considered the dove of Song of Solomon 5:12, Noah’s dove, and the descent of the dove at Christ’s baptism as types of the Holy Spirit at Christian baptism (Catechesis 17.9-10; Mystagogical Catechesis 3.4). Ambrose employed types and figures in his sermons on the Mysteries and the Sacraments (the latter now generally agreed as his authorship), wherein he seems to differentiate between mysterium and sacramentum (cf. On the Mysteries 1.2), the former the invisible and deeper realities of God’s salvation attested in scripture, and the latter the visible, sensible, material rites and practices that manifest the purpose of God’s saving action and mystery. The eternal invisible (what is done) far surpasses the visible and transient (On the Sacraments 1.10; cf. 2 Cor. 4:18). Thus, according to Ambrose, for baptism the mystery is Christ’s passion (On the Sacraments 2.6, 23; 6.7), and, for the Milanese post-baptismal footwashing, humility, grace, and holiness (On the Sacraments 3.4-7). That water and wine become Christ’s body and blood is through the power and mystery of the “heavenly word” (On the Sacraments 4:19). Latin translations of the biblical text in the early period distinguished between mysterium and sacramentum as both terms substituted for the Greek mustérion, though not consistently or in a standardized fashion, thereby reflecting the theology of the translator(s) or that of an earlier Latin copy and influencing theological readings of the text. The Vulgate, produced by Jerome in the late fourth and early fifth centuries and which soon became the definitive Latin version, mostly utilized mysterium but supplied sacramentum in a few instances, notably at Eph. 5:32 in reference to two becoming one flesh (as had some earlier translations). Three other instances in Ephesians (1:9; 3:3; 3:9) hint that Jerome considered sacramentum to mean that which was hidden but now revealed in part by Christ (without cultic reference), what Ambrose seems to have rendered more consistently as mysterium.

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AUGUSTINE Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) inherited these variable definitions of mysterium and sacramentum, and he was influenced in his interpretation of them by the thought of Christian North Africa (the place of his birth and episcopal residence) and African biblical translations, Platonism, and Ambrose (who baptized him in Milan), and by the Manichaeans (to whom he was attracted in his youth) and Donatists with whom he debated. Augustine followed Ambrose by assigning cultic connections to the term sacramentum and so spoke of numerous sacraments both in the Old Testament (e.g., Sabbath, circumcision, unleavened bread) and the New (e.g., Easter, Pentecost, salt, the sign of the cross, penance, the Lord’s Prayer, spiritual songs), all of which revealed God’s saving plan and spiritual realities. Israel’s sacraments under the law were fulfilled by the coming of Christ and abolished precisely because they were fulfilled (Answer to Faustus 19.13-14). Thus Israel’s sacraments function as types to the antitypes of the Christian dispensation. Augustine also used sacramentum in a narrower sense; instead of many sacraments, there are now fewer properly administered by the church: those simple and excellent according to the teaching of Christ and the apostles that reveal the mystery of Christ incarnate, especially the sacraments of baptism and Christ’s body and blood (On Christian Teaching 3.9.13; cf. Letter 54.1-2; Tractate on the Gospel of John 15.8). Augustine’s approach to sacraments rested on his extensive theory of signs (signa) first explored in On the Teacher (De Magistro, c. 389), and then developed and expanded in On Christian Teaching (De Doctrina Christiana, especially Books 2-4), completed approximately thirty years later. Augustine posited that nothing can be learned or taught without the use of signs, principal among them words. Signs “cause something else to come to mind as a consequence of itself ” (On Christian Teaching 2.1.1.1; 1.2.2.5; cf. On the Teacher 3.6; 10.29-31), and thereby are revelatory. Signs that pertain to divine things are sacraments (Letter 138.7). There is a visible, physical aspect to these sacred signs, and the signs themselves reveal another thing to be understood that offers spiritual fruit (Sermon 272). Signa become sacraments when they have a likeness to the other thing, the res, the inner reality, that they signify, and because of this likeness the sacraments “generally receive the name of the realities themselves” (Letter 98.9). Faith, said Augustine, longs for these invisible things, these mysteries of God in accord with the truth of God (Letter 25.1). Sacraments are signs to which God’s word has been added; they are “visible words” received in faith corporately and individually (Answer to Faustus 19.16). Both the material element and the word are needed for a sacrament; thus baptism requires both water and the word that is spoken through and in the church (Tractates on the Gospel of John 15.4.2, 80.3.1). The presence of the word of God in sacraments makes them holy regardless of the aberrance of the minister or the recipient (On Baptism against the Donatists 3.10.15). Augustine’s definitions of sign and sacrament were used extensively during the Middle Ages as were his less systematically organized and defined theologies for baptism, eucharist, and other churchly sacraments. His use of “likeness” to speak catechetically of the eucharist as in a “certain way” the body and blood of Christ (cf. Letter 98.9) would be refined and developed by theologians after him who would consider “real presence” in the language of metaphysics. In writing for the context of his Christian community, Augustine, as had previous theologians, relied on the thinking of others shaped by their respective social, cultural, and liturgical situations. Augustine’s literary output, along with that of Tertullian, Irenaeus, Cyprian, the fourth-century mystagogues, and others among

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the great cloud of witnesses, still influences thinking (directly and/or indirectly) about mysteria and sacramenta today.

FURTHER READING Baldovin, John F. “The Empire Baptized.” In The Oxford History of Christian Worship, edited by Geoffrey Wainwright and Karen B. Westerfield Tucker, 77–130. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Boersma, Hans, and Matthew Levering, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Bradshaw, Paul F., and Maxwell E. Johnson. The Eucharistic Liturgies: Their Evolution and Interpretation. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press/Pueblo, 2012. Fitzgerald, Allan D., gen. ed. Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999. Johnson, Maxwell E. “The Apostolic Tradition.” In The Oxford History of Christian Worship, edited by Geoffrey Wainwright and Karen B. Westerfield Tucker, 32–75. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Johnson, Maxwell E. The Rites of Christian Initiation: Their Evolution and Interpretation. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press/Pueblo, 1999.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Sacramentality as Contemporary Theological Context: The Web of Sacraments, Liturgical Theology, and Sacramentality Today LIZETTE LARSON-MILLER

As part of the foundational section for a three-part study on sacraments and sacramentality, this essay reviews the “state of the question” for a field of study rooted in both systematic theology and the ritual practices of liturgy. Sacramentality, under which may be found the academic study of sacraments and liturgical theology, is a dynamic and multidisciplinary field that has had a surprising turn toward ecumenical convergence in the past twenty-five years. This essay will review the shifts from what were previously considered distinct areas of research and methodologies: on the one hand sacraments and sacramental theology with their systematic and philosophical foundations, and on the other hand, the actual implications for the practice of liturgy, often referred to as pastoral liturgy, moving in the end to the growing synthesis under the umbrella of sacramentality today.

TRADITION AS THE LIFE-GIVING EMBODIMENT OF BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS Teresa Berger, in her study on Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History, offers an important (and often misunderstood) articulation of the distinction between history and tradition. Tradition is not just about things that happened in the past, but how those writings, actions, and revelations continue to give life to the church today. Tradition is dynamic and rooted, and our ongoing use of it is both as “authorizing claims to the

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past”1 and the standard against which human reason and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit push for truth toward the fullness of the reign of God. This understanding matters because of the two preceding chapters in this volume on biblical and historical foundations. Those foundations remain viable and alive, always pregnant with the revelatory power of new understandings. They are not simply words and actions that took place long ago and far away. And this reality—that which was done by God in the past, what was written about the actions of God and the human response and understanding of those actions—all of this is not of a separate reality from the lives of worshiping Christians today. Understanding then and now, there and here, as one continuous reality is at the heart of a sacramental worldview of God’s eternal presence in our midst. This is a foundational theology of the churches’ celebration of ecclesial sacraments. And this unity of not just past and present, but also of the fulfillment of all things yet to be, is first and foremost because the center of Christian faith is the Triune God whom we worship and adore, God who is the Word made flesh, Jesus the Christ, God with us. As foundational as scripture and history are, we worship neither scripture nor history—we worship God. But how do events and words of two thousand years ago remain alive and efficacious today? How can a past event be present in a contemporary liturgical celebration? It was this heart of Christian faith that led St. Leo the Great (Bishop of Rome 440–461) to write that “what is visible in our redeemer has now passed into the Mysteries,”2 “mysteries” meaning the sacramental actions of the church. The visible, tangible encounter with Christ transcends all space and time ever since the historical event of the ascension, guided by divine initiative, human faith, and the context of sacramentality. Sacramentality is thus a worldview that sees the unity of time and space in the continuing presence of God, in God’s desire to meet us again and again, and in how the body of Christ, Christ the head and all the baptized, encounters the living God in the union of all time and space in the sacraments. Sacramentality and sacraments are part of a symbolic world where what is seen points to and participates in what is unseen, what was, and is, and is to come. How these central actions of the church have been studied and understood has changed over the centuries, and a resurgence of study in recent decades has expanded our understanding of the relationships between what were often considered unrelated subfields of theology. As the web of interdisciplinary study expands, so do the implications for the centrality of sacramentality for all theological study. In order to review the “state of the question” of sacramentality and sacraments in the early twenty-first century, this essay will first review some key components of the field in their contemporary dynamism, before moving to three conversations representative of the multiple interdisciplinary topics currently expanding sacramental theology, ecumenically and within particular traditions.

THE ELEMENTS OF SACRAMENTALITY To begin this overview of sacraments and sacramentality, it may be helpful to review the terms and fields that fall under the umbrella of sacramentality.

Teresa Berger, Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History: Lifting a Veil on Liturgy’s Past (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 4. 2 “Quod redemptoris nostri conspicuum fuit, in sacramenta transivit.” Sermon 74:2. 1

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Sacramentality “Sacramentality is not a general principle that the world is full of ‘sacredness’: it is the very specific conviction that the world is full of the life of a God whose nature is known in Christ and the Spirit.”3 The world is “full of the life of … God,” a God who through divine will has been manifest since the beginning of time, but particularly in creation, the incarnation, and the resurrection. Sacramentality is thus this discernable ongoing presence of God and a human way of seeing God in all things, of God 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.”4 What is key here is that sacramentality is first a profession of faith in a God who is always present and active in our lives, as well as a way of understanding all creation as infused with God and capable of revealing that God. This has ramifications for many aspects of theology, but particularly for two primary issues. The first is that created materiality is most often the vehicle through which God chooses to be met and revealed. William Temple, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, described Christianity as “the most avowedly materialistic of all the great religions.”5 This first point challenges a perspective of Christianity that is opposed to understanding physical reality as fundamentally good, seeing salvation as only a spiritual or intellectual reality devoid of matter. Throughout Christian history, various forms of gnostic thinking have pushed back against the goodness of creation and the material means chosen by God as revelatory of God’s economy. Gnosticism is alive and well in many contemporary proposals of spirituality, but it is primarily associated with a theological approach followed by those claiming to be Christian, those claiming Judaism, and those claiming neither in the first century of the common era. Above all, the different approaches to gnostic thought challenged the idea that God was the creator of the material world (often arguing for creation by a lesser god, or demiurge, who created the evil of physical creation opposed to the spiritual goodness of the real God).6 For our purposes, the three levels of gnostic challenges to Christian theology countered by sacramentality are, first, the goodness of creation (and the intrinsic worth of materiality);7 second, the incarnation of God (if materiality is evil, how could God become human? How could Christ be “truly human” as well as truly divine?);8 and third, the implications for Christian human beings (is salvation a goal focused on getting out of the body and the physical world?).9 All three of these arenas of sacramentality have direct and deep implications not only for the ritual and liturgical celebrations of sacraments but also for the whole life of worship of God to which Christians are called. The second point of sacramentality is that it is far broader than “the sacraments.” Sacramentality is first not even the sole possession of Christians. David Brown writes that Rowan Williams, foreword to The Gestures of God: Explorations in Sacramentality, ed. Geoffrey Rowell and Christine Hall (London: Continuum, 2004), xiii. 4 John Macquarrie, A Guide to the Sacraments (New York: Continuum, 1997), 1. 5 William Temple, Nature, Man and God (London: Macmillan, 1940), 478. 6 A helpful resource is Andrew Philip Smith’s A Dictionary of Gnosticism (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2009). 7 See Gerald Hiestand, “And Behold It Was Very Good: St. Irenaeus’ Doctrine of Creation,” Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology 6 (2019): 1–27. 8 See Willem Styfhals, “Gnosis, Modernity and Divine Incarnation,” Bijdragen, International Journal for Philosophy and Theology 73 (2012): 190–211. 9 See Adam G. Cooper, Life in the Flesh: An Anti-gnostic Spiritual Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 3

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understanding this breadth of sacramentality is itself Christian because 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, nonetheless fully endorsed our material world by himself becoming part of it.”10 Rooted as Christians in this perspective, 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?”11 For Brown and others, this means particularly the worlds of art, architecture, poetry, and other media, which, while often outside of ecclesial oversight, are already predisposed to enable human beings to see more than meets the eye, enabling all people to perceive the multiplicity of ways in which God relates “to human beings and their world.”12 The elusive nature of the term “sacramentality” is its strength in that it can open our eyes to see more than what is bound up in ecclesial sacramental terminology, leading to both a broader and more open context, as well as guarding against any tendency to assume that the sacraments are things that humans control. Kevin Irwin describes this well, saying, 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 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.13

Sacramental Theology The very breadth of meaning in the worldview that is sacramentality impacts the study of sacramental theology by expanding its concentration beyond negotiating the direct links between sacramentality and sacraments. First, theologia, words about God, logic about God, the study of God, is a way to articulate and understand faith (fides quaerens intellectum).14 St. Anselm’s motto summarized a way to understand the divine gift of faith, and when joined to the word “sacramental” situates this branch of “the science of things divine”15 under the umbrella of sacramentality. Across the ecumenical spectrum, 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. Certainly sacramental theology finds a home in the broad field of systematic theology, attempting to articulate the human way of seeing God in all things, so that through this discernment, we come to know God in David Brown, God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 6. 11 Ibid., 8. 12 Ibid., 24. 13 Kevin W. Irwin, “Liturgical Action: Sacramentality, Eschatology, and Ecology,” in Contemporary Sacramental Contours of a God Incarnate, Textes et Ėtudes Liturgiques/Studies in Liturgy 16, ed. Lieven Boeve and Lambert Leijssen (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 114. 14 Anselm of Bec’s phrase, “faith seeking understanding,” was the original title of his Proslogion (1077–8), written well before he arrived at Canterbury to become the archbishop. The phrase became the summary and motto of a series of steps proving the existence of God. 15 Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 3.8.11. 10

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the system, or economy, of divine actions and words and relationships. But, as already mentioned in the introduction to this essay, the web of implications for studying a particular focus in sacramental theology necessarily draws in other areas, making the interdisciplinarity complex and essential. While the traditional foci of systematic theology (inclusive of Christology, pneumatology, trinitarian theology, ecclesiology, soteriology) remain important, sacramental theology adds to these the three “branches” of liturgical studies: liturgical history, liturgical theology, and ritual studies. As the interdisciplinarity expands though, sacramental theology also includes more recent recognitions of realities that have always been there, taking seriously the relationships of many cultures with theology and religious practice, liberation theologies, and the critiques (and gifts) of feminist theology, queer theology, ecology and the environment, renewed concerns in spirituality, missiology, religious experience (the mystical and mystery), and philosophy, while maintaining the importance of being scripturally grounded. In addition to the conversation partners mentioned above, an important realignment has taken place between sacramental theology and Christian ethics in the last century. Living sacramentally as an ethical stance was central in many of the early church writings (and beyond), but the connection was not dominant for several centuries as liturgy and moral theology were seen as distinct. The restored relationship has been a central element in much sacramental theology of the twentieth century, primarily due to the interdisciplinarity mentioned above. One of the most important voices in the second half of the twentieth century has been Louis-Marie Chauvet, who builds a visual image of the essential relationship between scripture, liturgy (particularly sacraments), and ethics. For Chauvet, 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 “catechesis … [which] belongs also to this pole of Christian identity” is dependent on “biblical revelation.”16 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, both 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.”17 The third part of this essential triad is ethics, or more to the point “ethical conduct,” which is “the mark … by which Christians testify to the gospel by their actions.” This includes 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).”18 These three, “knowledge, gratitude, and action,”19 form the essence, the essentials, of what it is to be Christian, which is also always to be understood as being Christians together. Chauvet’s last point brings us to an important dimension of sacramental theology in this introduction of contemporary issues. Sacramental theology is inseparable from ecclesiology, a theology of and by the church, the body of Christ. Chauvet summarized his reflections by writing,

Louis-Marie Chauvet, The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001), 29. 17 Ibid., 30. 18 Ibid., 31. 19 Ibid. 16

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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.20 The priority of the corporate nature of the body of Christ over the individual is a fundamental cultural challenge for the church in many parts of the world today. This is not simply an issue of the rights of the individual but rather a worldview based in “ontological individualism” with the conviction that “the individual has a primary reality whereas society is a second-order, derived or artificial construct.”21 This “subjectification of reality,”22 as M. Francis Mannion calls it, changes priorities and realities. Mannion draws on Christopher Lasch in tracing several of the implications for Christian life and ecclesiology in this anti-sacramental worldview. He notes particularly that the narcissistic individual created in the process becomes “the minimal self ” existing in survival state, shunning commitment to relationships and public life. As a result, personal energy is focused on the relentless pursuit of selfish needs, and the public world is scorned as meaningless and humanly irrelevant. Congruent with this pattern, there emerges what Lasch calls the “therapeutic sensibility,” in which psychology and psychiatry replace the social institutions and modes that traditionally mediated personal growth and maturation.23 Sacramentality is, then, not only a worldview in which God is seen and experienced as present and active in the world, yesterday, today, and tomorrow, but through sacramental theology this related web of sacramental concepts is about the “we” of Christianity, the primary reality born of the birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and glorification of Jesus the Christ.

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.24 These “outward and visible signs” are actions of the church, rooted in the ministry of Christ and his immediate disciples, having varied in number, ritual, and articulated effect through the centuries of Christian liturgical practice. It is these actions that are often the first focus of what many active Christians (and theologians) think of when they hear “sacramental theology.” But having moved from the broad worldview that is sacramentality, through sacramental theology that both bridges sacramentality and

Ibid. Robert N. Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 334; cited in M. Francis Mannion, “Liturgy and the Present Crisis of Culture,” Worship 62 (1988): 102. 22 M. Francis Mannion, “Liturgy and the Present Crisis of Culture,” Worship 62 (1988): 98–123. 23 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Warner Books, 1979), 33. 24 “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 BCP1979) (New York: Church Publishing, 1979), 857. 20 21

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sacraments and engages with a wider engagement of other disciplines, we place ecclesial sacraments as one (albeit central) aspect of sacramentality. Beginning with the writings of the New Testament, particularly of the apostle Paul, it is helpful to look at etymology from the Greek idea of mysterion to the Latin sacramentum. Kristiaan Depoortere writes that “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.”25 After Christ’s ascension, this “eternal plan of salvation … becomes tangible and visible in the mysteries that are lived.”26 In the sub-apostolic writings of the early church a distinction begins to be articulated between mysterion, “understood as the threefold manifestation of the Word in Christ’s incarnation, in the Church and in the Scriptures” and “mysteria—understood as Baptism, Eucharist and other Christian rituals.”27 It is in the linguistic translation of these concepts that distinctions both remain and shift, with long-lasting implications for Western Christianity. Tertullian, writing at the beginning of the third century, translates (and therefore interprets) mysterion as sacramentum based on two preexisting cultural understandings of that Latin term. The first was a “more juridical [meaning] describing a pledge of sorts” involving “a deposit or guarantee … left with the religious authorities to underline the seriousness of the forthcoming procedures at a trial.”28 The second was associated with military practices and described as “an oath of loyalty. This would include gestures, such as a soldier placing his hand on a banner.”29 These definitions made sense in translation because they both involved a committed engagement expressed in outward actions. But perhaps it is St. Ambrose, fourth-century bishop of Milan, who articulates best the Latin language terminology adapted from the Greek. For him mysterium (the literal transliteration of the Greek mysterion) “points to the inner reality of the sacraments, [and] sacramentum denotes the outer celebration in the first place, while presuming the inner reality.”30 Ambrose arrives at a distinct narrowing of meaning—from mysterion as a comprehensive description of the revelation of God through the mediation of Christ, the Church, and in Scriptures to mysterium as the inner and ultimate reality of tangible outward ritual. Here are the roots of the contemporary definition of sacraments with which this section began. The point in rehearsing these elements of translation is the development of a theology focused on the two dimensions of sacraments: the outward expression (the necessity of created elements and physicality for human engagement), and what these outward symbols point to and participate in, a breadth of spiritual truths (St. Paul’s mysterion). Sacraments become articulated as vehicles of grace, windows linking earthly and heavenly, or better, actions facilitating the encounter between God and God’s people because of this symbolic mediation of the meeting within and between created matter and the Creator. While other conversations around ecclesial sacraments continue in contemporary conversations (such as how many actions of the church fit this composite contemporary description and who is the “we” of the church), the center of sacramental theology with regard to

Kristiaan Depoortere, “From Sacramentality to Sacraments and Vice-Versa,” in Contemporary Contours of a God Incarnate, edited by Lieven Boeve and Lambert Leijssen (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 52. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 53. 30 Ibid. 25

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sacraments primarily tries to get at the heart of what it means to say that these actions are given by Christ and are “sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.” What do sacraments do, and if they “always work,”31 what does that mean? Ecumenically there has been a return to the conversation about sacramental efficacy, including the contributions of new voices. How are we changed, or are we, through our participation in a sacrament, and how do we know? Part of the concern of many theologians is the popular conversation limiting sacramental efficacy to how we feel. Is the affective perception—if participation makes me feel good, it worked—the only mark of an effective sacramental encounter? Thomas Talley’s line quoted above, “sacraments always work,” is part of his writing on the anointing of the sick, which might serve as a brief example of a restored sense of ecclesial sacraments as efficacious because of the presence and action of God, and the faithful response of the church (recalling that “the church is primary,” rather than individuals). In reflecting on the particularly egregious focus in many churches regarding the sacrament of the anointing as necessarily resulting in a guaranteed tangible effect of physical healing on the individual, Talley writes, Even allowing for wide variation in the quality of rites and the manner of their celebration, we need to remind ourselves that sacraments always “work,” and that therefore what is claimed for them must be articulated within that certainty. That is to say, sacramental and liturgical realities are always and only that, and we do the theology of the liturgy no service by extravagant claims of extrinsic effects. Too many communities have already been brought to despair by the discovery that, having rearranged the furniture of the sanctuary and instituted an offertory procession, they still don’t love one another. And, while one is ashamed to say it, there are those who have been told that sacraments and prayer in true faith would remove a malignant tumor, and so have learned from its continued growth the insufficiency of their faith, and have died in despair. And this because liturgy was confounded with charism.32 The efficacy is thus not dependent on a result, especially a result for the individual alone. Charismatic, extraordinary healings are gifts of God, but not always the same thing as the sacramental action of the church. Talley, therefore, draws his readers to the sacramental effect. The sacrament is more than a struggle against illness. It is the sign of the conquest of death. It seeks not to palliate, to lull, to console, but to reveal, in the light of the gospel, the meaning of sickness, and to consecrate it as sign. For sickness itself is already a sign, rich with ambiguity, revealing both our problems and our resources. As Jacques Sarano says, “Sickness is the sign of that which we are, but it is this in two ways … The one reduces us to what we are (and nothing more); the other calls us to what we are (and nothing less).”33 Of necessity in reflecting on just a few questions, we have already engaged with biblical studies, ecclesiology, ritual studies, soteriology, and the theology of grace—the self-communication of God—and just touched on the theology of actions that “maintain

homas Talley, “Healing: Sacrament or Charism?” Worship 46 (1972): 520. T Talley, “Healing: Sacrament or Charism?,” 520. 33 Ibid., 526. Talley cites Jacques Sarano, The Meaning of the Body (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1966), 158. 31 32

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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.”34

Sacramentals Not all ecclesial communities use the term “sacramentals” to talk about things and actions and people, which are revelatory of the divine (and efficacious in their effects) but are not deemed official sacraments of the church. But this realm of sacramentality has increased in practice and attention in recent decades, often sitting at the porous boundary between culture and official church practices. Sacramentals may better be described as popular religiosity, or piety, or devotions by, within, and beyond the church. For many denominations and communities, actions like blessings, dedications, and consecrations fall into this category, as well as rituals linked to the sanctoral cycle, life cycles, and the domestic church. The widespread use of Advent candles, Christmas trees, Easter eggs, and home altars is well known, but other areas such as alternative rites with the dying and the dead, practices around backyard weddings, graduating high school, buying a house, or moving to a nursing home are occasions that many feel need to continue or be augmented with rituals old and new. In recent times of the pandemic, the domestic church, restricted from physically gathering together for liturgy, engaged and created a whole new family of household rituals, ranging from the observance of Holy Week and Sunday worship at home to an ongoing experimentation associated with virtual prayer and worship online. The ecclesial link is most clearly described in the Roman Catholic Catechism (1994), in which sacramentals are described as sacred signs which bear a resemblance to the sacraments. They signify effects, particularly of a spiritual nature, which are obtained through the intercession of the Church. By them [all] are disposed to receive the chief effect of the sacraments, and various occasions in life are rendered holy.35 In other Christian communities, such as Anglicanism, the reservation of some blessings to bishops and priests is a reminder that these sacramental activities are still within the ecclesial sphere of sacramentality. But approaching ritual actions from another angle, many sociologists and scholars of religion and spirituality have pointed out the seemingly contradictory movements of post-Christians (or non-Christians) who have left the church (or have no interest in joining) but claim to be “spiritual.” While remaining outside the body of Christ remains an impossibility for practicing Christians because of the corporate nature of the body of Christ, what should be catching the eye of active Christians is the desire of many for rituals that express and create community outside of the official practices of the church.36 Here, things like the slow food movement, the commitment to community gatherings, “new monasticism,” and the practices raised above seem a part of the spectrum of popular religiosity, and perhaps a tool of missiology often overlooked.

John Macquarrie, A Guide to the Sacraments (New York: Continuum, 1997), vii. Part 2: “The Celebration of the Christian Mystery,” chap. 4: “Other Liturgical Celebrations,” Article 1: #1667. https://www.vati​can.va/arch​ive/ENG0​015/__P58.HTM. Accessed August 16, 2022. 36 See Elizabeth Drescher, Choosing Our Religion: The Spiritual Lives of America’s Nones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 34 35

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Liturgy Liturgy may be the first category that people think of when they hear sacraments and sacramentality conversations, but what liturgy includes is not agreed on by all. There has been an ecumenical divide—lessening now—over where liturgy belongs as an academic field, and therefore what it is, how it is important, and how it is linked to other fields. The clearest division is between those who see liturgical studies as a part of sacramental theology, and list liturgical courses within a larger umbrella of systematic theology, and those who see liturgy as a pastoral ministerial issue, and list the courses together with homiletics and pastoral ministry. The danger is that liturgy as an academic field or practice remains marooned in only one of those categories. Liturgy cannot be a field of study that focuses only on what it means or on its historical pedigree, without concern about context and practice. On the other hand, liturgy cannot be simply about how to do a particular rite, with no systematic understanding of what it draws from and what it means in an economy of theological understanding. It might, therefore, be best to back up and talk about liturgy beyond its academic presentation in liturgical history, liturgical theology, and ritual studies before returning to those strands of approach. The English language transliteration of “liturgy” is drawn from the Greek leitourgia, used in the New Testament to refer 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.”37 In spite of its usage in the New Testament and early church writings, however, the term has not been a common word throughout Western Christian history. For large stretches of Christian history, many Christian communities used the name of a particular rite (“Holy Communion,” Morning Prayer,” “mass,” “preaching service,” etc.) rather than a general term. With the very conscious return of the term “liturgy” through the liturgical movements of the twentieth century came the etymological translation and interpretation “the work of the people,”38 often presented as the only translation possible. This theology drawn from etymology supported and encouraged a return to understanding liturgical action as something that everyone present actually did, not simply the clergy for the laity.39 But more recently, a return to a more correct and less politically charged translation has recognized that the original usage at the time of the development of ritual in the new Christian church is more likely referring to official civic activities “done on behalf of the people.” This understanding of a corporate action done for others has, in turn, encouraged new theological and pastoral emphases, particularly restoring the essential connection between the theology of liturgy leading to ethical action. Approaches to how we understand liturgical celebration—public gatherings of the body of Christ—began as fundamentally philological research, the study of language. This made sense, as for many people both the historical research and the contemporary study

Anscar J Chupungco, “A Definition of Liturgy,” in Handbook for Liturgical Studies: Introduction to the Liturgy, vol. I (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997), 3. Chupungco draws on Salvatore Marsili’s article “Liturgia,” Anamnesis 1 (1974): 33–44. 38 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. 39 Here the importance of countering a long history of clericalism in the church and its liturgical life led to a less than exact translation from the Greek. See especially Louis Weil, Baptismal Ecclesiology, Uncovering a Paradigm (Dublin: Columba Press, 2006), 27–8. 37

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were about the words of liturgy, what was written (and to a lesser extent, what was done as written in the rubrics) in texts.40 But the philological focus was often at the exclusion of other aspects of liturgy. Historically many scholars believed the only reliable record of liturgy was the liturgical texts themselves, but contemporary scholars have shown how even ancient editors changed liturgical texts to adapt to new understandings (theologically, culturally, politically), so that what were once believed to be unchanging texts were now on shakier ground. In the mid-twentieth century a number of scholars advocated for an expansion of text-based liturgical study, using a comparative analysis of different texts and finding what was common among the various texts, or what appeared to point to a common source for a number of later versions of the same liturgy.41 Yet another approach moved away from the emphasis on the words of the liturgy altogether, finding theological interpretation in the structure of liturgical rite. In the English language, the most wellknown of the advocates for discerning meaning from the shape of the liturgy was Gregory Dix,42 who offered an alternative method still developing today. In addition, a host of other approaches to both historical words and liturgical shapes have enriched our understanding of liturgy’s development and reception, including the theology of liturgical architecture (how ritual and building shape and influence each other), the artwork and vestments that interpreted scripture and liturgy for many Christians through the centuries, the sounds and smells of liturgical music and ceremony, and the inculturation of liturgy, in which the liturgy changed and adapted to both reflect and influence culture around it. Many of these approaches fall under the subtitle of “ritual studies,” which increasingly uses the language not only of the social sciences but also of the hard sciences to understand what ritual and corporate embodied actions do to us as individuals and community. All of these are part of the ecclesial, ritual celebrations of liturgy within the world of sacramentality. This latter point is important because remembering sacramentality as a worldview that understands God as present and active in the world has helped correct a late-twentieth-century imbalance that tended to understand liturgy as something that humans alone did, rather than a space in which God acts on us, and we respond.

Liturgical Theology The definition of liturgy itself and its shifting placement as a field of study brings us to the field of liturgical theology. The distinction between liturgical and sacramental theologies under the umbrella of sacramentality is not a fixed division of tasks—many topics could be explored in either category or moved between what may be artificial differences for the sake of clarity. But liturgical theology, theology from, about, and into liturgical celebration, gives us an opportunity to explore several remaining aspects. The first is, in a sense, putting liturgy in its place. In contemporary conversations, the terms liturgy and worship are often used interchangeably, but there is a difference, particularly in breadth. Liturgy is one way to worship; in other words, worship is the See Paul F. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 41 The central scholar in this comparative approach to liturgical texts was Anton Baumstark, Comparative Liturgy (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1958). 42 Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre Press, 1945). A newer printing of this volume and a newer edition with updated commentary is available (the latter edited by Simon Jones, from Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015). 40

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umbrella term, liturgy a subset. Worship (Weoröscipe), a word inherited from early English, appears in the ninth century with the meaning “deserving of or being held in high esteem.”43 The use of the word seems to have been primarily directed at individuals with rank and honor, but eventually describes the honor due to God (and the places of worship where that honor was given to God).44 In light of this, narrowing the breadth of ways in which humanity worships God to ritual and liturgical actions alone obscures the richness of the meaning of worship as an all-encompassing stance in the life of a Christian. What Andrew McGowan and others have articulated is that “worship” as a specific act of ritual or type of corporate prayer is only one manifestation of the broader meaning of the term. Worship is overall about “obedience or service, not gatherings, nor beliefs, nor song, nor ritual, except within that wider whole.”45 Worship then is “the orientation of all forms of human activity, including the liturgical or ritual, toward a particular allegiance.”46 Our lives as Christians are lives of worship, “embodied life and ethics,”47 which encompass all aspects of how we live after death, having died in Christ, rather than particular events or types of events that we might call “worship styles” in contemporary circles. A life of worship—a worshipful life—is an active and conscious way of being before God inclusive of liturgical celebrations. Probably the central conversation in the contemporary development of liturgical theology is the articulation of the relationship between theology and liturgy, what Alexander Schmemann defined as “the theological agenda of our time.”48 Of the multiple historical sources mined for insights, a phrase from a series of statements responding to liturgical questions written by Prosper of Aquitaine (between 435 and 442) became key. In his writing, Prosper uses the intercessions of Good Friday to defend the necessity of grace against the Pelagian Christians (who were often understood to stress their own actions as efficacious toward salvation, rather than the grace of God). The phrase in question, often taken completely out of context, was ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi, “that the law of supplication establishes the law of belief.”49 The point that Prosper appears to be making is that because the church prays for God’s grace that leads to salvation, the liturgy of the church shapes and informs the theology of the necessity of grace. Prosper of Aquitaine’s context and words, however, are reworked into a free-standing twentieth-century version, often written as lex orandi, lex credendi, translated as “the law of belief [is] the law of prayer,” or paraphrased as “we pray what we believe and believe what we pray.” There is nothing wrong with either of these phrases as bumper stickers for contemporary liturgical theology; both offer an alignment between what Christians believe and how they pray. The only problematic issue is that they are not the same context or concept as the fifth century original. But what do they say and mean in See Louis Weil, “Worship,” in The Study of Liturgy and Worship, ed. Juliette Day and Benjamin Gordon-Taylor (London: SPCK, 2013), 3. 44 Ibid. 45 Andrew B. McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014), 3. 46 Ibid., 4. 47 Ibid. 48 Alexander Schmemann, “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. 49 There are numerous publications on Prosper of Aquitaine’s phrase; for a recent summary, see Maxwell E. Johnson, Praying and Believing in Early Christianity: The Interplay between Christian Worship and Doctrine (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2013). 43

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these contemporary settings? In the 1980s and 1990s, four interpretations were drawn from the modern phrases as ways to understand the dynamic of liturgical theology. The first was “a theology drawn from the liturgy,”50 which often meant that the liturgical rites and celebrations were themselves the source of theology, or functioned as “primary theology.”51 The strength of this approach is the emphasis on the unity of corporate prayer and Christian life. 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.”52 The second is summarized as “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 ensure its orthodoxy in orthopraxis. This articulation can represent the opposite end of the spectrum in relation to 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 inherently catechetical and existing for the sake of edification in right belief.53 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. These two descriptions of the relationship between liturgy and theology at the center of theological conversations in the 1980s and 1990s were supplemented by two more articulations that would form the nucleus of the next generation of theologizing. First was “a theology of liturgy.” This was a more complex approach to liturgical theology that involved the liturgy as a source of theology, but less in the details of liturgical performance and more in the deep structure of both liturgical and 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.54 The fourth articulation of liturgical theology is often labeled “doxological theology,” emerging in the 1980s in Western Christian conversation but rooted in Eastern Christian theology for centuries. Here the emphasis is on the reality that both liturgy and theology are acts of doxology, actions or undertakings praising God, simply using different methods. “What is operative in this approach to theology is the important notion of mystery. Through both theology and liturgy the mystery of God is acknowledged and experienced.”55 For some theologians, this was a concerted move away from the rationalism and minimalism of modernity toward the restoration of faith as both motivation and goal in the doing of theology.

See Irwin, Liturgical Theology, 66–7. See Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology (New York: Pueblo Books, 1984). 52 Irwin, Liturgical Theology, 47. 53 See Geoffrey Wainwright, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine and Life; A Systematic Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 54 Irwin, Liturgical Theology, 67–8. 55 Ibid. 50 51

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Since the 1980s much has shifted, especially the understanding of the first two perspectives. The neat division of liturgy shaping theology or theology shaping liturgy is now recognized as faulty.56 Neither liturgy nor theology live in a vacuum from each other, so the historical and contemporary shaping of liturgy by theology and vice versa are part of a shared dynamic, rather than opposed. These insights are partially the result of the diminishment of an historical animosity between Roman Catholic and Reformed Protestant theologies, moving toward an increasing embrace of sacramental and liturgical insights across the Christian perspective. In addition, the recognition that cultural context often impacted the theology of liturgical participants more than official texts has elevated the subfield of pastoral liturgy.57 Recalling that “pastoral” means appropriate for this place, this time, these people, liturgical theology that takes seriously inculturation and context must engage not only with historical development, contemporary meanings of liturgical words and actions, and official church teachings but also with the particularities of cultural, linguistic, and pastoral realities in understanding what it means to pray as we believe and believe as we pray.58

THE THEOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF CHANGES IN THE FIELD OF SACRAMENTALITY In reviewing the web of concepts and definitions in the fields of sacramentality and sacraments above, several content shifts, as well as contextual and methodological changes over the past seventy years are already noticeable. What may also be helpful in linking the biblical and historical roots of sacramentality with the specifics of theological and cultural applications of sacramental understanding to come in the following chapters is to look at just three of the substantial theoretical shifts in the field that have had lasting implications.

The Commonality and Specificity of Ecclesial Sacraments How many sacraments are there? It depends on when the question is asked and who is asked, but it is important to note the impact that the twelfth- and thirteenth-century definitions had in the development of seven sacraments for centuries to follow. The specific actions of the church that counted as sacraments did not seem to be a particular concern for many in the early church. Augustine of Hippo is famously noted for having about four hundred things, actions, or times that met his varied definitions of sacrament, including the Lord’s Prayer, the sign of the cross, and the Easter Vigil. His simplest definition was that a “sacrament was a sign of a sacred reality.”59 His more elaborate definitions of how sacraments work were often linked to teaching catechumens on the topic.60 But as the Western (Latin-speaking) church sought to clearly define what a sacrament of the church was, the movement shifted toward establishing a common list of attributes

This is particularly evident in Kevin Irwin’s work, in which he develops and expands his own earlier work. See Context and Text: A Method for Liturgical Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018). 57 See Mark Searle’s presidential address at the North American Academy of Liturgy, “New Tasks, New Methods: The Emergence of Pastoral Liturgical Studies,” Worship 57 (1983): 291–308. 58 A helpful articulation from the 1990s is the Lutheran World Federation’s “Nairobi Statement on Worship and Culture,” https://wors​hip.cal​vin.edu/resour​ces/resou​rce-libr​ary/nair​obi-statem​ent-on-wors​hip-and-cult​ ure-full-text. 59 Augustine of Hippo, De civitate Dei (CCL 47:277, 25-26). 60 https://www.newadv​ent.org/fath​ers/1303.htm. Accessed August 16, 2022. 56

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into which several actions would fit. Part of the urgency toward precision was the aftermath of the eucharistic controversies of the ninth and the eleventh centuries, as well as the anti-sacramental challenges of various Western European groups labeled as heretical in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.61 We know how important numerology was in limiting the sacraments (eventually) to the number seven, but here our interest is in the dynamic of fitting the sacraments so defined into a common framework of requirements. Peter the Lombard, teaching and writing in Paris in the mid-twelfth century, articulated key theological attributes of sacraments in his writing and teaching. His definitive work Sententiae (c. 1155) is seen by contemporary scholars as “the invention of systematic theology.”62 Central to his writing was the clarification that sacraments worked, that they did something, so that “the rite itself (sacramentum tantum) not only resembled or pointed to the inner reality (res) but also contained and conveyed that inner reality (res et sacramentum).”63 We will return to this theological statement in the next section, but here in this statement is the inheritance of Bishop Ambrose’s articulation of the interior reality (the mysterium, now the res) and the external signs and actions (the sacramentum). Having settled on this essential description of sacrament, Peter the Lombard then explored how many actions could flesh out, or signify, this theological definition. It was in the following century, however, in the hands of Peter Lombard’s successors such as Thomas Aquinas, that the language of Aristotelian philosophy including metaphysics (in a modified version) would give a helpful terminology to those theologians trying to fit seven actions into a common framework. So the use of substance (what is “essence,” or the “basic entity of a thing”) and accident (that which “cannot exist by itself but only as part of some substance”) to talk about the change in substance but not in “accidental” appearance (transubstantiation in the eucharistic elements) developed over a couple of centuries as a way to talk about the transformation of elements in Eucharist. Also the terminology of matter (the required physical “stuff ” of a sacrament) and form (the words joined to the matter that conferred the joining of the sacramentum and the mysterium or res) were concepts borrowed by the rediscovered and translated ancient philosophical system that gave certainty to the university theologians (scholastics) of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in particular.64 This may seem a long way from contemporary theologies of sacraments, but the arguments of matter and form, accident and substance, and particularly the squeezing of all seven actions into the same set of definitions, continued to impact theological reflection on the sacraments. Whether defending the seven sacraments and their categorization as absolute in the Council of Trent, or arguing against the seven sacraments for many Protestant reformers (some arriving at two dominical or biblical sacraments, others with

Good histories of the Cathars (cathari) and Albigensians in Western Europe and the Roman Catholic attempts to defeat them can be found in many resources, see particularly Stephen O’Shea, The Friar of Carcassonne: Revolt against the Inquisition in the Last Days of the Cathars (New York: Walker, 2001) and Michael Costen, The Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). 62 Thomas Finn, “The Sacramental World in the Sentences of Peter Lombard,” Theological Studies 69 (2008): 568. 63 Ibid. 64 The work of scholastic sacramental theology has been carefully and articulately presented in several important newer works (or embedded in larger collections) from different ecumenical perspectives. See The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, ed. Hans Boersma (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Lucy E. C. Wooding, Scholasticism Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Thomas Aquinas, ed. John Inglis (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006); Kevin Irwin, The Sacraments: Historical Foundation and Liturgical Theology (New York: Paulist, 2016). 61

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a type of both/and—two main sacraments and five others—and still others understanding sacraments devoid of the tension of how a past event could be present in a liturgical event because they do not function within that symbolic power), the numbering and defining characteristics arrived at by the thirteenth century remain as a point of continuance or controversy. The renaissance of theology that was part of the liturgical movements of the twentieth century invited a reimagining of sacramental understanding based on historical research and sacramental theology. Especially in the ressourcement of scriptural and patristic studies (by French Roman Catholic scholars in particular, but joined by others) what became known as Nouvelle Théologie was actually a return to pre-scholastic theologies and texts of the first 1,200 years of Christian thinking.65 Part of this was a turn to the riches of Eastern Christianity as well as overlooked Latin Christian theological works. All of it was a desire to see beyond a mechanistic and static certainty in the way sacraments worked, plus an overemphasis on the actions of the priest, and a loss of the broader context of sacraments as immersing their participants in Christ. Out of this loosening of the rigidity of seven ecclesial sacraments alone came the language of describing Christ and the Church as primordial and foundational sacraments.66 Distinct from the actions of the ecclesial sacraments, these theological descriptions acknowledged Christ as both origin and context of all that is revelatory of the divine as well as the means of participation in the same. One of the insights that came from this developing system of sacraments was first and foremost about communication and encounter with the Triune God. John Macquarrie describes this expansion of thinking about theology of sacraments and Christ as sacrament in this 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.67 The twentieth- and twenty-first-century ecumenical embrace of this expansive theology built on the image of Christ as the primordial sacrament by turning to the church as foundational sacrament, particularly through the Pauline imagery of the body of Christ, rather than a more institutional model of church, which had been common. Exploring the history of the three bodies of Christ: the historical physical body, the “real” body of Christ (originally used for the Church then shifting to a eucharistic species definition), and the “mystical” body of Christ (originally the eucharistic species, shifting to the Church), captured a breadth of ecumenical enthusiasm. This included newer articulations of Eastern Christian theology, especially 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 the world the ‘world to come,’ to see and to ‘live’ it in Christ.”68 For a good overview, see Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 66 Culminating in the work of Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, trans. Paul Barnett (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963). Before Schillebeeckx there were a number of notable Anglican voices arguing in similar ways, including Charles Gore, Oliver Quick, and William Temple. See McQuarrie, Guide to the Sacraments. 67 Macquarrie, Guide to the Sacraments, 101. 68 Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1982), 113. 65

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From this ancient tradition we could expand the conversation all the way to recent evangelical 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 incarnation.”69

The “New Ontology,” What Is Real and What Is Presence The inclusion of the early church language of the “mysteries” as well as sacraments as grace (the self-communication of God) through particular encounters between humanity and God has led to a more fruitful expansion of sacramental theological language in the past 100 years. The presumption of looking first (and for some theologians, only) at issues such as matter and form, substance and accident, had created the popular understanding that sacraments were about receiving some-thing, rather than encountering some-one. In order to get around the logjam that resulted, especially with regard to the Eucharist, sacramental theology has had to return to defining what is “real” and what is “presence.” Part of this necessity is that philosophy is no longer always a prerequisite for many studying theology in contemporary seminaries and graduate schools, but it is also a concern that even understanding the expansive underlying philosophical assumptions, helpful as they are, may have taken the place of theology in the textbooks and discussions of an earlier generation. Turning to the theology of real presence first, one must begin with the reality that God is always present. God chooses, and has promised, to be present always; this is not something that humans create by saying particular words over particular objects. But, it also does not mean that the dominical command to “do this in memory of me” is irrelevant or that there are not different modes of presence. Between these are theological understandings that remind us not to “see” the eucharistic elements as things but as the means for a particular encounter between the Church—the body of Christ—and God who is subject. The importance of remembering that God is not an object (even or especially in the eucharistic elements) is essential for several reasons, including preventing the objectification of the sacramentalized Word made flesh, and then misconceiving that this objectified presence could somehow be controlled, possessed, or complete in our presence or by our doing. Second, by recognizing ourselves as subjects before and in communication with God, we are always called to be more fully human in recognizing our “own subjectivity.” This means that in the encounter “one is jolted into the recognition of the freedom of the other visà-vis oneself, an experience that can arouse love, fear or both love and fear at the same time.”70 We are transformed by participating in this encounter in multiple ways, including being drawn into the fullness of humanity, while also reminded that God is not a possession; rather, God is a freely given but transcendent gift, the “presence of a mystery which is inexhaustible.”71

From the blog of Pastor Nathan Colquhoun. He quotes from Robert Capon’s reflections on “The Church as Sacrament,” https://www.nath​anco​lquh​oun.com/2010/05/14/the-chu​rch-as-sacram​ent-by-rob​ert-capon. Accessed August 16, 2022. 70 Joseph Bracken, “Intersubjectivity and a Theology of Presence,” in A Sacramental Life: A Festschrift Honoring Bernard Cooke, ed. Michael Horace Barnes and William P. Roberts (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2003), 59–60. 71 Teresa Berger, Fragments of Real Presence: Liturgical Traditions in the Hands of Women (New York: Crossroad, 2005), 15. 69

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Regarding what is “real” in sacramental discourse brings us back to the essential center, which is the incarnation. Richard Hooker articulated his sacramental theology rooted in the incarnation in this way: As our natural life consists in the union of the body with the soul, so our supernatural life consists in the union of our souls with God. Since there is no union of God with man without Christ as intermediary between the two it seems necessary that we now consider how God is in Christ, how Christ is in us, and how the sacraments serve to make us partakers of Christ.72 This sequential reality of participation is of necessity physical and spiritual for Hooker: “Does anyone really doubt that from the flesh of Christ our bodies receive that life that will make them glorious and that they are already part of His blessed body?”73 But four hundred years later, the demise of focus on metaphysics as well as ecumenical disagreements left sacramental theology searching for words to understand this reality. One of the surprising ecumenical convergences is the return to sacramental ontology (ontology here being “an outlook on reality”74) by means of participation in God as the center of sacramental reality. First, Hans Boersma and others remind their own evangelical Protestant constituency (and other Christians) of the essential difference between sign and symbol. Signs do not necessarily participate in the reality signified, but symbols (of which sacraments are classic examples) not only point to the reality signified but participate in that same reality (“sacraments actually participate in the mysterious reality to which they point”75). But perhaps even more helpful is to articulate the contrast between the theologically relational languages of covenant and sacrament, and champion the latter: There is, I believe, a great deal of value in highlighting this covenantal relationship [that God created the world]. But the insistence on a sacramental link between God and the world goes well beyond the mere insistence that God has created the world and by creating it has declared it to be good … [A]‌sacramental ontology insists that not only does the created world point to God as its source and “point of reference,” but that it also subsists or participates in God. A participatory or sacramental ontology will look to passages such as Acts 17:28 (“for in him we live and move and have our being”) and will conclude that our being participates in the being of God.76 Here the understanding of sacramentality with which we began (first a profession of faith in a God who is always present and active in our lives, as well as a way of understanding all creation as infused with God and capable of revealing that God) has reoriented and renewed the language of presence and reality.

Richard Hooker, “The Sacraments: What Are They? Who Created Them? What Is Their Power?” in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. and trans. Philip B. Secor, vol. 5 (London: SPCK, 2003), 188. 73 Ibid., 213. 74 Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 2011), 10. 75 Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie, 23. 76 Ibid., 24. 72

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The Word/Words as Sacramental The restoration of encounter between human and divine subjects has been a helpful sacramental turn, but even more so have been the multiple insights into expansions of word in and as sacrament. From the unfortunate assumption that Protestants had the Word and Catholics had the sacraments, the conversation has come a long way. Already in 1990, Andrew Ciferni wrote, “there is hardly a single Christian church which would today admit to an opposition between word and sacrament. These are no longer considered independent and different manners of divine self-communication but complementary realities incapable of accomplishing their task without reciprocal penetration.”77 Since then scholars in linguistics, communication studies, and semiotics have been particularly valuable in articulating the sacramental rite as an efficacious language event. Drawing on communication theories, sacramental theologians remind us that speech and language are fundamental realities that link God and humanity together; “God’s very self has been conceived as a speech-act, a Word, a call, a summons to answer and respond,”78 while for humans “language is … the defining mystery of humankind, the mystery through which the identity and presence of the human become historically visible and explicit.”79 Chauvet adds that “language is not an instrument but a mediation; it is in language that humans as subjects come to be.”80 Part of renewing the understanding of the creating word then is to revitalize the understanding of symbols so that they are entered into as more than a sign or reminder but rather dynamic “transactions that disclose and embody relationships.”81 In the ecclesial sacraments, symbols par excellence, our whole being encounters “the presence of a living person, Jesus the Christ, sharing himself with his sisters and brothers.”82 And this personal encounter, like all real communication, “is constitutive of any truly human experience … any significant experience.”83 This trajectory of insights reconfirms the subject–subject encounter of divine and human in the ecclesial sacraments—an encounter of transformative divine self-communication in which God is always doing something, always self-communicating God’s real self through the language of multiple metaphors, and often the “wrong words” of liturgy.84 Shaver’s “wrong words” are pointing to the necessity of metaphors that do not “fit,” or the power of the creative word. “Whether spoken, acted, or painted, drawing bread close to body and wine to blood must continue to shock, even as it establishes a more integrated account of reality.”85 These three examples of fruitful directions in sacramentality reveal a glimpse of how new theological directions (often “old” theological directions revisited) and expanding

Andrew D. Ciferni, “Word and Sacrament,” in The New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship, ed. Peter Fink (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990), 1320. 78 Nathan Mitchell, Real Presence: The Work of Eucharist (Chicago: Liturgical Training Publications, 1998), 91. 79 Ibid., drawing on George Steiner, Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1967), x. 80 Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, trans. Patrick Madigan and Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 87. 81 Ibid., 98. 82 Bruce T. Morrill, Encountering Christ in the Eucharist: The Paschal Mystery in People, Word, and Sacrament (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2012), 8. 83 Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 87. 84 Stephen Shaver, “The Word Made Flesh: Toward a Sacramental Theology of Language,” in Proceedings of the North American Academy of Liturgy 2014, 131–2. 85 David Brown, God and Mystery in Words: Experience through Metaphor and Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 20, cited in Shaver, “The Word Made Flesh,” 129. 77

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interdisciplinarity realign, correct, or expand our understanding of sacraments, sacramental theology, and liturgy. The ecumenical expansion of voices is itself not only because these newer voices offer rich insights but because in articulating a different understanding for their own constituencies, they often return to focused and clear language, which proves helpful to many beyond their own ecclesial communities.

FURTHER READING Boersma, Hans. Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011. Chauvet, Louis-Marie. The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001. Depoortere, Kristiaan. “From Sacramentality to Sacraments and Vice-Versa.” In Contemporary Sacramental Contours of a God Incarnate. Lieven Boeve and Lambert Leijssen, eds. Leuven: Peeters, 2001. Irwin, Kevin W. Context and Text: A Method for Liturgical Theology. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018. Larson-Miller, Lizette. Sacramentality Renewed: Contemporary Conversations in Sacramental Theology. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2016.

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Constructive Essays

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CHAPTER FIVE

The Future of the Past: Thoughts on the Sacramentality of Time J. NEIL ALEXANDER

Christian faith takes time seriously. Not unlike our Jewish progenitors, we are highly sensitive to our history and profoundly aware that it is in time that God acts. Much of the scriptural record is written with a strong consciousness of time. Consequently, over the centuries, biblical scholars and other theologians have written copiously about the nature and experience of time: what is time? Is it merely temporal, or does it possess elements that cannot be easily metered or definitively measured? Are the songs of the psalmist or the declarations of the prophets relevant beyond their time? Are nodal events of the Christian narrative—the birth of Jesus, his teaching and witness, and his death, resurrection, and ascension—merely events on a timeline, or do these events-in-time go beyond our capacity to bind them to a historical narrative? Does the church’s witness to Jesus transcend time and, if so, what constructs of time are employed to shift the narrative out of the past? These questions represent only a small handful of the myriad questions about time that surface from the claim that Christianity is historical. Theologians have labored to explore and bring precision to our understanding of time, not simply as it relates to the practice of Christian faith but as a constituent part of the nature of the faith itself. Remembering discrete events of the Jesus story, events understood to be “for our salvation,” creates a historical framework for recalling those events that very often truncate their full impact by framing them in past tense. The issue, of course, is not whether these are generative moments in the historical past that need to be remembered but whether such events may be captured by frameworks of time that carry them into the present and beyond, thus maintaining and propelling their generative power. Such questions, as important as they are, are in large part antecedent to the question of the sacramentality of time and will inform any such inquiry. Inevitably, echoes of the massive literature on time will seep into the flow of the present essay, but the goal here is to address more directly the sacramental aspects of the church’s experience of time and pose some suggestions about the expressions of time in Christian practice that present as sacrament, as sacramental, or very nearly so. The focus here, then, is less on a Christian theological understanding of time, but rather how time is experienced in the lives of those who practice the faith in communities shaped by liturgy and sacraments. In any authentic

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way, liturgy and sacraments do not exist apart from the doing of them, and all doing takes place in time. The liturgical texts are the scripts, guides, and records, and often they are our best window into how rites may have unfolded in times past, but the texts are not the liturgy. The liturgy is the living, active enactment of holy things, amidst a web of holy relationships, often transpiring in places recognized as holy. It is nearly impossible to have a useful conversation about sacraments until some basic agreement is reached about what exactly we are talking about. The use of the term “sacrament” will conjure up a particular field of meaning depending upon one’s ecclesial tradition, philosophical orientation, and theological conviction. A singular definition of sacrament for all times and places has never been achieved. Consequently, we have repeatedly infused sacramental terminology with new meanings and we will continue to do so. This complicates our work at some level, but it also frees us to imagine new constructs of sacramental theology and identify fresh dimensions of sacramentality that heretofore have existed outside traditional frameworks. Therefore, the definition of sacrament, and the meaning of sacramentality, will shift in the course of this essay and will be clarified along the way. Before proceeding, it seems important also to clarify the meaning that is intended when speaking of the liturgy in this context. The use of liturgy here means the broad whole of the rites and rituals that shape the prayer of communities when gathered and give outline and definition to the prayers of the faithful when practicing prayer alone. When communities gather it is most often for rites of word and sacrament, normatively a Sunday celebration of the Holy Eucharist that includes the proclamation and preaching of the scriptures and intercessory prayer. Even when praying alone, or in small groups apart from the public assembly, the liturgy will shape what one does, perhaps unconsciously, often simply as the reflection of what feels comfortable having been formed by the repeated actions of the assembly’s work. This is the primary usage one will encounter here, but not the full extent of the use of liturgy in this context. The personal prayers of the faithful are also shaped by the rites and rituals of established patterns of daily prayer— the liturgy of the hours or daily offices—and a variety of practices of devotion and prayer that are in the broadest sense liturgical, because the roots of the practice, or perhaps the prayers or ritual structures being used or adapted, have their origin in the public rites of the church at prayer. Thus, in this context, liturgy should suggest to the reader the most generous span of ritual practices that originate in the public prayer of the church, and not one limited by local, linguistic, or tradition-bound constraints. The task before us is to consider the sacrament or sacramentality of time. Thus, we must wrestle with the question of materiality since time, although measured, experienced, and familiar, occupies no tangible materiality. Through most of the church’s history, it would be inconceivable to speak of sacrament without at once engaging questions about its materiality. To disregard the question of the material expressions of a sacrament, and the agency attached thereto, would have puzzled theologians of earlier times. The role of the material is most easily defined, perhaps, with respect to the bread and wine of the Eucharist, or the water and chrism of Holy Baptism, but is no less a matter of interest with respect to the oil of anointing, the laying on of hands in various rites, or even the material bodies of two persons joining in marriage. One might consider, for example, one or more of the philosophical understandings of the sign-value or symbol-embodiment of the material of the sacrament. Such inquiries will most often focus on the physical aspect (element) and in what manner the material of the sacrament points to a particular meaning or benefit, often, but not always consistently, referred to as “signs.” Similarly,

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others will push further and suggest that the material of the sacrament is more than a mere sign because it not only points to a particular meaning or benefit but, in fact, embodies and delivers it. This latter use will sometimes be said to be “symbolic,” not in the sense of the symbol “standing for” but understanding symbol not only to point beyond itself but also to “hold within itself ” the desired benefit. Alternatively, others are less concerned with a full exposition of sign and symbol and find satisfaction in a theological explanation of material detachment that elevates subjective spiritual experience. While in such instances the material element of the sacrament is rarely, if ever, missing altogether, its role in the larger sacramental action is severely diminished and serves simply as a reminder of the spiritual meaning and benefit that the believer captures in the action of faith. The material element, in this view, possesses no intrinsic role in the efficacy of the sacrament but is something of a sacred memento, a reminder of the occasion. Yet another construct simply responds to a liturgical invitation to participate with the material of the sacraments, leaving the deep meanings to be discovered by the faithful repetition of the doing of it. In this view, the emphasis is on the frequent and faithful participation in the sacramental rite, often with a high view of the function of the material elements, but stopping short of insisting on particular understandings of what is happening or defining too closely the anticipated experience of the participants. The point, quite simply, is the faithful doing of it, at times understood to be “in obedience,” and incorporated according to the needs of an individual believer. Therefore, it is nearly impossible to speak meaningfully of sacrament without straightaway considering the material that makes the sacrament visible. Through the centuries, theologians have spoken of the sacraments as visible words, or more dynamically as the Word made visible.1 “Visible Words” is most helpfully understood as an outgrowth of a theology of the incarnation of the Word of God in Jesus. The material of humanity—flesh and blood—is central to the incarnation of God in Jesus, thus the Word that is made visible is understood to be the incarnate Word. This joining of Word to the material has often been understood in quite objective ways to suggest a constructed reality created apart from any experiential engagement on the part of the recipient. This differs considerably from the historicized associations of holy communion with the events of Holy Week, particularly the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples, or perhaps the mental images one associates with the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan with respect to holy baptism. Capturing such moments in an imagined historical context makes it difficult to see that sacramental life is particularly dependent upon the theological intensity of the incarnation. Alternatively, still other traditions do not dismiss the physical existence of the sacramental material but interpret it much more subjectively, assigning minimal importance to the material of the sacrament, emphasizing instead the spiritual encounter generated by the believer’s faith and practice. Complementary, and often interwoven with the various strands noted, is an understanding of visible word that is expressed in the language of promise. Thus, when a material object is attached to a promise—of forgiveness, grace, salvation, eternal life—then the sacrament exists. The promise is, ultimately, the Word of the incarnate One, however verbally expressed, and it embodies what it claims to be and delivers what it says it is. The word of promise is precisely that, a promise, and its

Augustine, In Johannis Evangelium. Tractate LXXX.3 (CChr, Series Latina, 1954).

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efficacy can be trusted apart from the faith of the recipient, while holding in tension that the promise is to be accepted and believed so that the full benefit may be appropriated in the faith of the receiver. Another aspect to be considered is the predictability of the promised outcome of the sacramental action. Whether the action of the sacrament is conceived of more passively or more actively with respect to the response of faith, in all cases there is an anticipated benefit that is assumed to be procured by participation in the sacramental action. A definable outcome, whether partially or fully conceived, is essential. This sense of the predictable, often unconscious, is nonetheless an essential dimension of sacramental practice. In holy baptism, for example, the anticipated benefit varies from one theological tradition to another. In some the benefit is anticipated to be full regeneration, new life, and new identity: “to put on Christ” to the fullest extent possible. In other traditions, the benefit of holy baptism is understood to be the means by which one is inserted into the covenant of grace whereby one takes one’s place within a particular ecclesial framework. In other ecclesial contexts, holy baptism may simply represent an act of personal allegiance to Christ who is understood to have saved one quite apart from the ritual act that is undertaken solely “in obedience to his command.” These are but three of a number of outcomes that various traditions associate with holy baptism and ritualize in their rites. The point here is only to observe that sacraments have anticipated outcomes, benefits that differ, and this comes with a high degree of predictability. There are, of course, many variations on these three ways of understanding the relationship between the Word and the material of the sacrament, as well as entirely different constructs that arrive at similar conclusions. What is important here is simply to observe that with any consideration of sacraments or sacramentality one must acknowledge materiality as a constituent element. This is particularly important to hold in mind as we turn to explore the sacramentality of time, which has no discernable objective materiality but which in the experience of Christian prayer, liturgical and personal, bears powerfully the Word incarnate, thus indicating the possibility of time being a sacrament or, at a minimum, bearing a strong sense of sacramentality. The lack of any physical materiality would, in most circumstances, simply eliminate any attempt to conceive of time as a sacrament. With respect to time, what is the visible element, the physical materiality, that makes time a sacrament? Without such a visible element, to what is the Word attached? Is there a declared promise? What is the anticipated benefit that results? The predictable patterns of such movements in time—the promise of them, one might say—certainly depend upon relentless inevitability and anticipated outcomes. The sun rises and sets, the moon waxes and wanes, the stars travel steadily through their courses. These movements take place in time, convey absolute predictability, procure certain definable outcomes, and bestow measurable benefits. Possessing these characteristics, one might certainly inquire, then, about whether the natural movements of the day might lead us to consider time a sacrament, or acknowledge its sacramentality. Observations about the daily movements of sun, moon, and stars naturally morph into the examination of weeks, seasons, and years. Ancient communities that observed lunar cycles nearly universally organized their life into seven-day weeks. Weeks were further organized into months, and months into years, but always holding to the week as the basic unit of an unceasingly renewing cycle of time. The tendency to assign spiritual meaning to such naturally occurring cycles and seasonal patterns, meaning that demands to be named in public ritual, is particularly characteristic of Christian practice. From the beginning the nascent Christian community maintained a consciousness of time rooted

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in the practice of its Jewish forbears—a seven-day week that framed patterns of work and rest that reflected the biblical accounts of creation and rest, work and sabbath. The day began not at the rising of the sun but at sundown when the moon was first visible in the sky. Weeks combined to shape lunar months that combined to create seasons for seedtime and harvest, for repentance, renewal, and celebration. It was a rich pattern, highly sensitive to the daily and weekly renewal of life as represented by the observable movements of the moon. Setting aside six days for work and one for sabbath rest has likewise perdured in Christian practice, although debates about the seventh day, the first day, the eschatological eighth day—from Sabbath to Sunday—will in later centuries muddy the clarity of the inheritance. This is not the place to get into the extensive documentation of sabbath-keeping in Christian history or the priority of Sunday in Christian practice but simply to note that the resolute rhythm of the week and the relentlessness of Sunday are foundational to the practice of sacred time. Not all observable phenomena, however, relate to the cycles of the moon. It was not lost on ancient peoples that the sun, too, had its cyclical aspects that could be accurately measured. In the course of the year it was noted that daylight hours can be very short and the nighttime hours can be very long. At other times the days and nights appear to be of equal length. Solstices and equinoxes, the solar phenomena that roughly divide the year into quarters and define the seasons we know as winter, spring, summer, and fall, or more naturally, fallow time, seed time, growth, and harvest, constitute a predictable solar pattern with defined outcomes and benefits. Solar timekeeping among the Romans also influenced the early Christians. Whether the watchmen on the battlement announcing the midpoint of the night (midnight), or the proverbial rooster anticipating the first light of dawn, the Romans shaped their time by the observable movements and cycles of the sun. The solstices and equinoxes of the solar year became important markers not only for political organization and market cycles but for religious purposes as well. Although perhaps not as categorical as once thought, there is little doubt that the early Christians in Rome were influenced by, or at least tacitly in dialogue with, the solar observances of pagan Rome. The promise of longer days and the terrors of longer nights were accompanied by the dread of winter, the potential of spring, the anxiety of the summer, and the celebration of harvest. Such seasons of life, ritualized in the civil and political life of the city, were a tempting backdrop for Christian witness, adaptation, and revision. Given the observable, predictable characteristics of lunar and solar timekeeping, and the associated outcomes and benefits, the temptation to see time as a sacrament manifest through these natural occurrences is palpable. These two ancient patterns of timekeeping—the lunar and the solar—are deeply embedded in Christian practice and continue to wield control over our experience of sacred time. Still today, the two principal parts of our annual organization of sacred time are lunar—Easter—and solar—Christmas. The movable date of Easter is controlled by the spring lunar cycle whereas the fixed date of Christmas stands in relation to the solar winter solstice.2 Although perhaps more clearly rooted in the lunar cycle, but ultimately no less influenced by the solar, Christian practice

Whether the rather late (mid-fourth century) designation of December 25 as the date of Christmas came about as a Christian witness in response to various pagan celebrations or whether it was determined on the basis of calculations from other dates important to the tradition are matters of dispute. See J. Neil Alexander, Waiting for the Coming: The Liturgical Meaning of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany (Washington, DC: Pastoral Press, 1994), 44–57. See also Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson, The Origins of Feasts, Fasts, and Seasons in Early Christianity (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011), 123–30. 2

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finds its heart and soul in the seven-day week and the unrelenting regularity of Sundays. Just as most Jewish liturgists would claim that the fundamental rhythm of Jewish life is a weekly pattern shaped by sabbath-keeping, most Christian liturgists would make a similar claim that the drumbeat of Christian life is also weekly and moves always in relation to the Sunday celebration of resurrection. This does not diminish patterns of daily prayer nor deny that liturgical weeks combine to form liturgical seasons that are punctuated by feasts, fasts, and festivals. It simply affirms that the daily, seasonal, and annual shape of sacred time, however important those times may be in forming in us patterns of prayer, storytelling, and commemoration, are always secondary to the driving pulse of Sunday celebration. The weekly observance of Sunday, with its public witness of the death and resurrection of Jesus as its primal theme, is so deeply embedded in the tradition that it has led some scholars to muse about the emergence of annual cycles of liturgical seasons over against so strong a weekly pattern.3 Against this background, we now turn more directly to how we might understand time as a sacrament or, second, how we might consider the sacramentality of time. It was observed earlier that materiality is an essential characteristic of most definitions of sacrament. The material is the concrete, visible, tangible expression of the promise of the sacrament and in many traditions will be understood to play some part in the delivery of the anticipated benefit(s) the sacrament is expected to bestow. This approach limits sacrament to those ritualizations in which a material element, or a strong sense of materiality, is available to carry, or perhaps transfer, the intended outcome. If, then, time is to be understood as a sacrament, or bearer of sacramentality, another framework that allows for a nonmaterial approach is required. Understanding sacrament as “gift” is a way forward. It is not unusual in the history of sacramental theology to speak of the “gift” of the sacrament.4 Catechists and preachers will often refer to the gift of baptism, the gift of communion, or the gift of marriage. By such usage, traditional definitions of sacrament are honored because the gift denotes the benefit received, the outcome anticipated, and it does so in ways that are understood to be predictable. While the gift may have a clear material expression, the full extent of the gift and its meaning is not limited to its material expression and thus manifests, arguably, a broad range of meanings, particularly for the receiver of the gift. Reflecting on the gift of baptism, for example, one might begin by affirming the promise of forgiveness, new life, and being grafted onto the vine of Christ as the benefits of the sacrament by means of the action of the Holy Spirit acting through water and the Word. The gift, however, is far richer than simply the ritual transaction. If an infant is being baptized, one might note that a human infant inhabits a time when few living beings are more helpless, when one must be cared for in every way imaginable, and when the only way to the sacrament of belonging is being carried to it by another. The gift in all this is coming eventually to acknowledge that in the time of one’s infancy, when absolutely everything in life was unearned, unbought, unmerited, and one lives in full and unmitigated dependence upon another, God called you by name. Or, as the child grows more deeply into the faith, she or

Cyrille Vogel is infamous among scholars of liturgical time for his suggestion that what is astonishing about the Christian year is not that it developed so slowly but that it developed at all, since every celebration of the eucharist is celebration of the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord. Introduction aux sources de l’histoire du culte chrétien au moyen âge (Spoletto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 1966), 264, n. 77. 4 See also J. Neil Alexander, “Of Sacraments and Sundays,” in Common Prayer: Reflections on Episcopal Worship, ed. J. S. Pagano and A. E. Richter (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019), 16–19. 3

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he learns something of the radicality of the grace of God, and begins to shape a baptismal spirituality upon which to lean in difficult times, and thus the gift of baptism begins to encompass far broader horizons of meaning than what might be “attached” to the materiality of Word, water, and chrism. These examples intend to point not to the gift of the sacrament of baptism itself but to the gift of the time, in the case of infants much later in life, when the gifts of the sacrament are fully realized. Might we expand our definition broadly enough to conceive of that moment of realization sacramentally? Similarly, in the material elements of the sacrament of holy communion, certain benefits are anticipated: among them the forgiveness of sins, fellowship with the Risen One in the power of the Spirit, and being fed and sustained, materially and spiritually, by the risen life of Christ. Although the gift of communion would include all of this, it is not limited to this. Another gift of communion might well be the bonds of affection shared with other communicants, fellow travelers over time into the deep mystery of life in Christ. It is not unusual for eucharistic Christians who receive the bread of holy communion to manifest deep convictions about bread for the world and discover in time a passion for justice that is a gift of communion. Coming to such life-changing discoveries takes time, often many years, but that time is a gift all its own, and is therefore at least sacramental, if not, in fact, a sacrament. Considering sacrament as gift honors the long tradition of visible words while at once expanding our field of vision with respect to the meaning and depth of sacramental practice. Understood this way, it is entirely possible to consider the sacrament of time and to consider innumerable moments of the times of our lives as possessing a sacramental quality, and there are some obvious gifts to be named. Time means that it is possible to situate the moment of a particular encounter with God or a discernible experience of the holy. Such an encounter happens in time, is its own gift, bestows an evident benefit, and thus bears a sacramental nature. It is not unusual, for example, for a sacramental person to name the time (and place) of their baptism into Christ. The time becomes an annual day of remembrance, renewal, and recommitment. When possible (note, with the term “when,” the time reference), a return to the place of that life-altering encounter feels a bit like a pilgrimage. (The time to return may be every bit as much a gift as the return itself.) For two persons joined together in marriage, the anniversary celebrates the time of their commitment and honors the benefits of love and companionship that continue in time to be the gifts of life together. (The longevity of the relationship may be the gift as much as anything else.) For a person in public ministry, the anniversary of ordination is not limited to recalling the rite of the laying on of hands and prayer but is expanded to include other times: the first time one presides at holy communion, the first time one baptizes a convert to the faith, or the first time one commends the dying or buries the dead. (Prayer and the laying on of hands made one an ordained, public servant of the gospel. The other rites, in time, made one more fully a pastor and priest.) All of these are times that acquire a rich sense of sacramentality and through which the presence of the divine is acknowledged. Some such times may be experienced so strongly as to suggest that the time itself is the gift, and thus one might properly speak of the sacrament of time. This understanding of the sacrament of time expands the field of vision of traditional definitions of sacraments. It affirms that the times of our lives, made holy not only by prayer but also by an acute awareness of the gift(s) of time, will take on sacramental aspects and at times feel very much like a sacrament. A resonant example is surely longterm friendship that has fermented over many years, been enriched by the passage of time, is aware of the changes and chances of life, and proceeds unafraid of the ravages of

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age or the inevitability of death. Such friendship may have its tangible elements, but the sheer length of time for knowing and living is itself the gift, and consequently a sacrament or, at the very least, richly sacramental. Earlier we made the claim that the week, punctuated by the public witness of Sunday worship, frames the fundamental rhythm of Christian practice. It is within this endlessly repetitious structure that Christian discipleship is formed and resurrection sacraments are celebrated. Over time, for those who are faithful to it, the steady beat of the weekly rhythm will itself take on a sacramental quality that anticipates Sunday’s public witness to death and resurrection and infuses the interim days of work and rest with a deeper sense of purpose. Profound longing and expectation is then worked out in the tasks and relationships of daily life, thus inviting a deepening reflection on the times of our lives that is richly sacramental, a gift received. The sacrament of Sunday—not just what we may find ourselves doing on Sunday with Word, water, bread, and wine—but Sunday itself, is always in dialogue and often in a sort of time-sensitive tension with the liturgical year. For example, we keep the Sundays of Advent and on them we celebrate the sacraments of resurrection. We proclaim readings that turn on the fulcrum between the first and second advents of the Redeemer, lessons about the fullness of time, the end of the age, and the ultimate fulfillment of all things in Christ. From the second advent we pivot to the story of the first advent, the announcements of angels, the obedience of Mary, the longing of human hearts over a very long time for the coming in flesh of the One whose name is Savior. The whole of the Advent proclamation is framed with reference to time—from the end of the age and after it, to beginning in Bethlehem and before it—the experience of Advent often feels sacramental as we move through its shortening days and lengthening nights toward the birth of Light at Christmas. Yet, might there be more? In what sense might we speak of the sacrament of Advent? Quite apart from Advent’s time-framed themes, the time of Advent is its own gift. If sacraments have a subversive, countercultural aspect to their nature, is it ever more visible than during the days of Advent? When the pace of so much of life picks up near the end of the academic term or the civil year, and together with the secularized madness of Christmas just ahead, Advent shouts, “wait!” (Slow down, pull back, pace yourself, make room, make time, and stop if necessary.) Liturgically, Advent is a season of preparation and reflection. Might we also engage it more broadly as the sacrament of waiting? A time that is less about waiting for Christmas and the celebrations of the Nativity and Incarnation, but more intimately focused on waiting for God, waiting for the coming in fresh and unexpected ways. Waiting that is not simply commemorative but waiting that is active, watchful, and animated. Waiting for its own sake. Imagine the potential outcomes. Savor the benefits. Lent is also an interesting example of this principle. In broad strokes we have inherited a forty-day pre-Easter season with competing claims upon our imaginations and our practice. On the one hand, Lent is a season of penitence and fasting, a time for selfreflection, repentance, and renewal. This aspect of Lent is rooted in the imitation of the forty-day wilderness experience of Jesus when he withdrew to the desert, was tempted by the evil one, fasted, prayed, and readied himself for all that was before him. That our own fasting and prayer, self-examination and repentance have something of a sacramental depth is clear when holding in mind such parallels with the experience of Jesus. Lent was also a time when converts to the faith were enduring their final preparation for Easter baptism. The scrutinies of life and motive, together with instructions for holy living, formed the core of that preparation, but it was not an entirely joyless process. Overlaid

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upon the fasting and prayer was the joyful expectation of Easter, the anticipation of being numbered among the newly risen ones, and marked safe from the floodwaters of the font. They could hardly wait to smell the pungent odor of the perfume of grace. Their bodies ached for the sensation of fullness, of being satiated on the bread of life. They were eager to move in new ways as the hands and feet of the body of Christ. This aspect of Lent clearly feels richly sacramental. But what about the time of Lent itself? There are forty days that we often refer to as a journey. Between the wilderness and Easter there is a lot of ground to cover. Where are we headed? What shall we take with us on the journey and, perhaps more to the point, what shall we leave behind? Who will guide our expedition? Repentance and prayer? Yes. Reconnect and renew the promises of holy baptism? Yes. The sacrament of Lent—the journey as gift—promises to take us places we have not been, to confront temptations we have not known, and to experience graces we have not enjoyed. Lent, as we ritualize it in the fellowship of the church, is richly sacramental. The sacrament of Lent—a journey through extended time to places not fully known—is another sort of gift, a sacrament, then, of inexhaustible depth and richness. It is a journey that might well be given over to mending fences, for refreshing tired relationships, or for circling back round to wellmeant commitments. The sacrament of Lent may be the gift of detachment, not from the community of faith but from all those things that distract us, blemish our identity, or impair our belovedness. The benefit of the sacrament of Lent, the gift that is the journey over time, may be to discover again the lessons of the wilderness or the deep joys of holy baptism, the sacrament of our belonging. This journey, however, is not only territory to cover but time to inhabit with acute attention. In like manner, each of the seasons of the church’s year of grace, each fast, feast, or festival, has these two dimensions. First, the day itself, the Word we hear and the sacraments we celebrate with their invitation to us to remember in present tense. Second, the time itself that we receive as a gift, on its own terms, expanding the horizons of our sacramental imaginations, and summoning us toward God’s future where the limitations of materiality are shattered, and where the promise that future pledges are no less real or compelling. It is about stretching beyond the seasons, pushing past our public rituals, and loosening the constraints so that we are liberated to explore the full measure of the time we are given.5 We have all the time there is. This anticipates the next point of our inquiry: the tension between past and future, between history and eschatology. We often describe our sense of time in terms of past, present, and future, and the hardest of the three to conceive or define is the present. The past is easy. It is done, and we look back upon it to see what we might discover, how we might interpret it, and what it might teach us. We are convinced that having lived through our own small segment of the past it has formed and shaped us not only in ways that we can see but also in ways to which we are blind and that remain a mystery to us. The future, by contrast, is elusive because we can only anticipate its coming, catch the occasional glimpse, and imagine what we might discover. Put in theological terms, we know the future only by promise. Complicating all this is the present. We often say, “the present moment,” but how long is that? How much of the present must be used up before it becomes the past? How long can we linger in the present before we find ourselves For a complementary view, see Bruce T. Morrill, “Time, Absence, and Otherness: Divine-Human Paradoxes Bonding Liturgy and Ethics,” in Sacraments: Revelation of the Humanity of God, ed. Philippe Bordeyne and Bruce T. Morrill (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2008), 137–52. 5

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in a future that is slipping quickly into the past? This essay began with the claim that Christianity is an historical religion comprising mostly the stories of real people with names, who lived in real places that can be charted on a map, and whose existence can be plotted on a timeline. That’s true whether we are talking about the Bible, the history of the church, or the present-day witness of the people of God that took place yesterday. It is impossible to talk seriously about Christian life, witness, or practice without talking about the past. The divine–human intersections through time, or the mighty acts of God in history, if you prefer, are indispensable reference points at the heart of our identity. But is that all? What would be the point of a religion that can be apprehended only in past tense?6 Such ruminations about sacred time must be careful. Our past as the people of God informs, guides, enlightens, and teaches us, but thereby we must not imply that God is only accessible in past tense. Preachers and teachers often cast their words so carefully in past tense that one might wonder if God’s interaction with the world might be over and done with, or worse yet, that God might be dead. That something of divine consequence, perhaps salvific, happened way back when is important, but does its saving power have present effect, and will it continue to have such saving effect next week or a century from now? The person in the pew, and particularly seekers new to the faith, might be forgiven for wondering about the relevance of all these things that happened “back then.” Time becomes sacramental when moments of eternal significance are unlocked, set free from the past, and given free course to rush toward God’s future. The past that has a future begins to take the shape of a sacrament—it has outcomes and benefits in a framework of predictability—or at the very least possesses sacramental characteristics. Only when the past has a future does the present moment capture ultimate meaning. This is why eschatology is so critical, not just for theological understanding but in order to navigate our history so that our rituals have a powerful present. Eschatology, of course, is often defined as the theological study of last things, of the end of time, the divine consummation of all things in Christ, of the fullness of time. It is all that, but it is a horrible mistake to relegate eschatology to the end of the theological syllabus and treat it as an afterthought concerned largely with things unknown. In sacramental and ritual studies, eschatology, as complex and elusive as it may be, essentially points us to the fact that God has a future that is full, rich, and inviting. To the degree that we can conceive it, the ultimate consummation of all things in Christ is not a threat against the end but a promise that stimulates a confident longing for the future that gives meaning to the present. This stands in stark contrast to our tendency to “historicize” the various elements of the Christian story as it unfolds in the course of the liturgical year. This is not the venue to delve deeply into various ways the tension between history and eschatology has evolved through the centuries but simply to observe that the development of the liturgical year and the manner in which many of the rites and rituals are observed have a strong tendency to suggest a past tense narrative that fails to adequately manifest its full eschatological depth, for the present moment, and endlessly accessible in the future. For example, in some traditions it has been customary on Maundy Thursday to reenact Jesus washing the feet of the disciples by staging a tableau in which the highest-ranking member of the clergy present takes the role of Jesus and exactly twelve men, usually

Note Robert Taft, SJ, “Historicism Revisited,” in Beyond East and West: Problems in Liturgical Understanding (Washington, DC: Pastoral Press, 1984), 15–30. 6

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office holders in the church, submit to having their feet washed. The congregation sits passively and watches. The consequence of the action is to historicize the story, frame it in past tense, and narrow the field of vision to a dusty upper room centuries ago. It is not that the spiritual imaginations of the people cannot grasp a contemporary relevance of the action, but such an approach certainly makes it more difficult. Alternatively, consider a rite for footwashing that is not clergy centric, that is open to all, and that ritualizes the servant ministry of all the baptized, to each other, and for the world. Such a rite not only remembers the action of Jesus with his disciples but also enables each person present to move beyond watching and contemplating toward full participation and engagement, and hopefully, a more profound encounter with the demands of the moment. The ritualization of Christmas can also be overcome by the tension between history and eschatology. That tension is rooted in the two contrasting themes of the feast, the Nativity of Jesus and the Incarnation of God. Few other places in scripture stimulate our imaginations quite as vividly as the birth narratives in Luke and Matthew. Our endless fascination with angels and shepherds, with stars and Magi, is shaped into Christmas pageants, embedded in carols and hymns, and fabricated into creches of every sort. There is nothing, of course, patently wrong with any of that as long as we are aware of its limitations and the tendency in it all to diminish our field of vision with respect to the fullest possible meaning of the birth of Jesus. If we fail to see that the angels’ “fear not” to the shepherds rocked their world and should unsettle ours as well, in the present moment and until the second advent at the end of the age, then we are stuck in the historical narrative and miss the eschatological consequences of Christmas. Jesus, then, is a porcelain baby in a makeshift creche and not yet the Word made flesh, inextinguishable light, full of grace and truth, from before time and forever. Living into this tension between history and eschatology raises our consciousness and opens up the possibility of experiencing time sacramentally. It reminds us that God’s activity in history is not the end of the story but a means by which we engage the present moment, as fleeting as it may be, and trust that we can reengage over and over for a lifetime. When we balance history and eschatology we realize that we are not on an altogether linear journey that began in the past and continues confidently into the future. Instead we discover both past and future rushing toward us, colliding in the present moment, as a gift with discernible benefits, and thus a sacrament, or at least a purveyor of uncommonly rich sacramentality. We began with the assertion that Christian faith takes time seriously. The interactions between God and God’s people took place in time. The life and ministry of Jesus, his death and resurrection, took place in time. The promise of the Risen One to come again will be manifest in time. Christian witness takes place in time. Persons make commitments to living in Christ in time. Communities of believers celebrate the sacraments of the resurrection in time. The eternal reign of Christ, now and for all the ages to come, happens in time. That the times of our lives, lived in Christ, are possessed of a deep sacramentality seems well beyond dispute. That taking time seriously as an act of faith includes more than a worshipful acknowledgment of all that God has done in the past but also includes seizing the eschatological significance of God’s future for the present moment. That living deeply into the time that God has given us not only means keeping the feasts and fasts of the tradition, but pushing the boundaries of those rites to explore time itself, receive it in all its forms as a gift, perhaps even as a sacrament that bears God to us and us to God.

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FURTHER READING Alexander, J. Neil. Celebrating Liturgical Time: Days, Weeks, and Seasons. New York: Church Publishing, 2014. Bordeyne, Philippe, and Bruce T. Morrill, eds. Sacraments: Revelation of the Humanity of God. Engaging the Fundamental Theology of Louis Marie Chauvet. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2008. Bradshaw, Paul F., and Maxwell E. Johnson. The Origins of Feasts, Fasts, and Seasons in Early Christianity. Alcuin Club Collection No. 86. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011. Fraser, J. T. Time: The Familiar Stranger. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Morrill, Bruce T. Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory: Political and Liturgical Theology in Dialogue. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000. O’Donnell, Emma. Remembering the Future: The Experience of Time in Jewish and Christian Liturgy. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2015.

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CHAPTER SIX

Locating God: The Significance of Space for Sacramental Theology JAMES T. HADLEY

Martin Heidegger’s 1951 Darmstadt Lectures, later published as Building, Dwelling, Thinking, are considered to be a seminal moment in reuniting questions of existence to space and architecture. Heidegger elaborates what his mentor Edmund Husserl already began exploring in his phenomenology, namely, that space and the built environment are abstractions of Being (Dasein) through which humanity comes into existence. For both philosophers, a plethora of existential states emerge at the intersection of human life and the physical conditions of the world, such as within/without, freedom/boundary, horizon/ possibility, and found/lost. If humans are fundamentally spaced-beings whose thoughts and life-options are manifestations of concrete spatial structures, it was obvious that a whole line of inquiry regarding space would be necessary to understand humanity. The unfolding of this philosophical premise throughout disciplines led to what academia calls the “spatial turn.” Beginning in the 1880s scholars of history, religion, psychology, and philosophy began to reflect upon the nature of beings situated in space and proposed theories of spatial experience. The urban planner Edward Soja characterizes the investigative focus of the spatial turn succinctly, writing that humans “are just as much spatial as temporal beings,” and that “our existential spatiality and temporality are essentially or ontologically coequal, equivalent in explanatory power and behavioural significance, interwoven in a mutual formative relation.”1 Soja’s explanation suggests that there is ontological connectivity between space (as concept), the natural world (as given), the person (as subject), and architecture (as expression). Should something of the ontological makeup of one of these elements be discovered there will necessarily be imprints found in the others. As influential as the spatial turn has been, Christian theology has proved itself slow in grappling with the relationship between Being, humanity, and space, leaving John Inge to comment that “the importance of place itself in human experience, is scarcely commented on in theology.”2 Surprisingly, this lack of attention is seen in liturgical dward W. Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 16. E John Inge, A Christian Theology of Place (New York: Routledge, 2003), 53.

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and sacramental theology too. It is especially true in liturgical approaches to church architecture, which since the beginning of the twentieth-century liturgical renewal tend to focus upon the church building’s ritual functions. The building consequently is often depicted as a passive container. Such a view is compounded when space is characterized as an inert “coordinate” of a homogenous Cartesian void in which the world sits.3 Presented in this way space and by extension the church building simply remain the context of the liturgical act. Moreover, because space is wrongly understood as a neutral abstraction, the building too has no specific theological character or intrinsic value outside of the meanings ascribed to it through use. The impact of this spatial misunderstanding has no doubt been heightened by contemporary liturgy’s emphasis upon the priority of the Body of Christ in worship. Here one senses a reaction to a liturgical past when buildings supposedly appeared more important than the believers assembled in them, or functioned as selfreferential architectural systems rather than supporting worship. Indeed some scholarship even argues that the biblical narrative itself only gives space a relative value.4 As a result of these perspectives, it is often asserted in contemporary writings that space-as-context is a philosophical, biblical, and theological necessity. Ironically, while contemporary liturgical scholarship may have ubiquitously adopted the Eliadian language of “sacred space” when speaking about places of worship, it has done so evading a theologically specific sense of sacred presence in space in favor of neutralized context. Theophanic, epiphanic, or other such interweaving of the divine and space, and its consequences for humanity, is generally excluded. In this way theologians have unwittingly played a role in the Weberian disenchantment (Entzauberung) of the world and concrete realities in which we exist. The spatial turn suggests something more can be said not only regarding the church building but also, and a priori, regarding the potentiality of space as a medium of encounter with the divine. A new sense of spatiality and its explicit ontological relationship with Being and humanity calls for rethinking the boundaries and functioning of encounters with God that can only take place in place.5 Here we run up against the language of sacrament, as the term traditionally suggests a physically mediated encounter with God, the result of which is a decisive being present to the life of grace. If, as the scientist and Anglican priest Arthur Peacocke suggests, that sacramentality is grounded “in the very stuff of the world,”6 and we take seriously the ontological relationships between Being and space articulated by Heidegger, it would seem impossible not to affirm that space by necessity has some rapport with sacrament. How then should we describe the sacramentality of space in light of the contemporary spatial turn?

THE CHRISTIC AND COSMIC NATURE OF SPACE For pre-Enlightenment and pre-Reformation theology the willingness to see in the structures of the cosmos the action and presence of God was largely non-problematic,

Crispino Valenziano, “Liturgical Architecture,” in Handbook for Liturgical Studies, vol. 5, ed. Anscar Chupungco (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), 381. 4 James Hadley, “Early Christian Perceptions of Sacred Space,” Material Culture Review 80:81(2015): 99–201. 5 Here the term “place” is being used in its ordinary sense as the world in which we live. Many scholars, including Martin Heidegger, will make the distinction between space, as an abstract concept, and place, as our physical surroundings that are perceived and defined by human experience. This distinction will be explored further in the chapter. 6 Arthur Peacocke, “Nature as Sacrament,” Third Millennium 2 (2000): 2. 3

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unlike today with our bifurcated realms of religion and science. The gracing of the cosmos and of human life was understood to be interior to the physical universe rather than solely the external imputation of some unseen spiritual force. For theologians like the medieval bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste, known for his experiments with light, the world as experienced rendered knowledge about God. For Grosseteste the “everything of the Trinity” had a “manifestative quality” that disclosed information, not primarily about the perceivable world but the inner life of the Trinity.7 The same was true for patristic theologians. Augustine in his De musica saw in the temporal structures of the universe and mathematical junctures of music evidence of what he called the eternal problem solver. To be sure the whole of patristic and medieval theology was concerned not to conflate God with creation in simple equivalence. But this was a concern about reduction; the sum of the natural world is not equal to God. Yet safeguarding God’s otherness did not conversely imply a radical duality between cosmos and the divine. Should we want to define a relationship between sacrament and space it begins to take shape precisely in God’s internal-to-creation nature. In this regard the fundamental patristic understanding of the doctrine of the Incarnation is paramount. Jeremy Seeley’s assertion that many theologians have failed to understand the consequences of the doctrine for developing a theology of space is correct.8 The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed makes clear that the Father is the maker of all things in the sense of ultimate cause, but it is through Jesus Christ that the cosmos is made. Both in the Latin (per quem omnia facta sunt) and Greek (δι’ οὗ τὰ πάντα ἐγένετο) the preposition usage suggests that Jesus is the protagonist, the doer of creation, what is traditionally termed the efficient cause. Interestingly however, theologians have also understood the second person of the Trinity to be not only the efficient cause but the formal cause as well. This is to say, Jesus is not simply the doer of creation, but he is also the originating and organizing principle of creation—its Logos. Wynand de Beer suggests that patristic theologians understood Jesus as the Divine Logos to be the wisdom of God, which gives rise to the cosmos by ordering its functioning, and sustaining its being.9 The entire world, therefore, is founded upon the divine thoughts of the Father, but the Divine Logos, as the term implies, is the “word” by which God speaks his thoughts into being. God expresses the world-idea not simply through the Divine Logos but in him, so that where creation is, there the Word is. Yet for many early Christian thinkers there was the added conundrum that the Divine Logos could not simply be the formal cause of creation because what exists is not solely concept but concept expressed materially. Because the existence of an abstract formless material substance was usually doubted, reality could not be the result of indiscriminate raw matter being joined to a conceptual form. Instead form and matter somehow by necessity inhered together. In order to explain how the Logos related materially to creation then, persons such as Justin Martyr spoke of the spermatikos logoi. To his way of thinking, the Logos was both the efficient and material cause of creation simultaneously.

Sicilia Panti, “Robert Grosseteste’s Cosmology of Light and Light-Metaphors: A Symbolic Model of Sacred Space?” in Bishop Robert Grosseteste and Lincoln Cathedral, ed. Nicholas Temple, John Shannon Hendrix, and Christian Frost (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 71. 8 Jeremy Sheehy, “Sacred Space and the Incarnation,” in Sacred Space: House of God, Gate of Heaven, ed. Philip North and John North (London: Continuum, 2007), 15. 9 Wynand de Beer, “The Cosmic Role of the Logos, as Conceived from Heraclitus until Eriugena,” Philosophy and Theology 27:1 (2015): 13–14. 7

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This meant that every existing thing had an actual resemblance or correspondence to the Divine Logos in that they shared materially in the divine character being composed of seed-words and therefore reflecting something of God. The result of this internal-to-creation relationship is that in the Son, the Father sees the world, and inversely, in the world the Father sees the Son, because the Logos itself is progressively within creation in ever fuller ways. In this conception of the cosmos, the Logos at the origin of creation is pre-sent(ed) before its definitive manifestation in the flesh as Jesus of Nazareth. The notion of a progressive incarnation perhaps sounds strange to the Western theological tradition but is shot through the orthodox sense of Christology and soteriology. It has long been affirmed in the Christian tradition that the material universe is not simply a stand-apart product of God; rather, creation is an incarnational process of the Divine Logos. It is because of this internal-to-creation progressive incarnation that theologians like St. Athanasius and St. Basil contend that it is Jesus the uncreated incarnated Logos who “speaks” through creation, and in the events of both the Old and New Testament.10 What is interesting from this perspective is that the goodness of creation is not an imputed moral status as a product of God. Instead, creation is innately good because it exists as a material act of God’s presencing oriented toward cosmological flourishing. If it is accepted that creation is an incarnational reality by which the Logos is present within creation, then some level of pan-sacramentalism must be accepted, as the whole of creation stands as a potential encounter with God. Though John Inge has highlighted the “severe difficulties” with pan-sacramentalism, arguing that such a view ultimately makes God just one being among others, as discussed above no conflation or ontological collapse between God and the world is intended or anticipated.11 In short, the Logos is present in degrees and modes, a difference of clarity and intensity. It is not a question of presence or absence. This paradigm applies as well to sacraments. Defining sacramental interaction is not a question of grace “here” yet “not there” but a question of clarity and intensity, which is itself an interplay of sacramental object and reception.12 Here an important insight comes to the fore. The Western Christian imagination has no problem conceiving of the unfolding of God’s revelation in time, based upon ever clearer manifestations and proclamations, but we have tremendous trouble in accepting the incarnation unfolding in space in ever clearer ways and the ramifications of this fact. Yet from the side of creation there is no encounter with God possible outside the remit of space. Approaching creation as a Christic reality breaks down this problem, both by ending in part the false duality of material/spiritual replaced by a view of the cosmos as a spiritual reality that appears materially, and by understanding that spatiality is the very work of the Logos at the source of creation and a prequel to Incarnation itself. It is to the further specification of this second point that we now turn. A structural sense of space set in action at the original creation has beautiful symmetry with modern physics. Both in quantum mechanics and relativity the origin of the cosmos unfolds as an almost instantaneous disk-like expansion. It is thought that in this expansion space–time proceeded in wavelike fashion from a superdense core creating what physicist

J ohn S. Romanides, “Christ in the Old Testament and the Ecumenical Councils,” Theologia 67:100 (1996): 10. John Inge, A Christian Theology of Place (New York: Ashgate, 2003), 66. 12 Adam Seligman, “Christian Utopias and Christian Salvation: A General Introduction,” in Order and Transcendence: The Role of Utopias and the Dynamics of Civilizations, ed. Adam Seligman (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 16–18. 10 11

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Brian Green aptly calls “the fabric of the cosmos.” At this level it seems that space is not a physical absolute, as Descartes and Newton argued, but an ordering force that carries in it many of the mathematical and mechanical laws of the cosmos that make possible the emergence of the material world. As such it acts as the necessary substrate out of which material entities condense and come into being. Yet it is not a historical happening per se, as this ordering force operates in every moment and in every location. Indeed, the edge of the cosmos beyond which space–time does not exist is the boundary of being as we know it. Contemporary scientific modeling of the cosmos in this way aligns surprisingly well with Stoic concepts of the Logos Christianized in Origen and Maximus the Confessor. At hand is a primordial conceptual ordering of creation that is co-implicated in the presence of material being without which “nothing came into being that has come into being” (Jn 1:3). At the same time, beyond space as a structural ordering there is the oddity that the principles of space also become physical reality, giving rise to individuation and therefore emplacement. This is to say, immaterial ordering in the cosmos moves, it seems by necessity, to the concrete. Through the substrate of these space principles energy condenses into matter, giving rise to subatomic particles, atoms, galaxies, planets, organic life, and even human persons. From our perspective this material context of life is generally what we experience as daily space, that is, the phenomenon of extension, movement, distance, and place. However, even this physical emergence of space that we experience as a realm of wandering movement with fixed points, all that seemingly exists outside of me, is not what it seems. As the philosopher Jan Patočka explored, individuation means that against all appearances of distinct objects being in an abstract space they are in fact of space. Empty abstract space in which I assume planets rotate and through which I walk is an illusion.13 At the level of human life, space is not a stage upon which history and the person act but is the medium of existing itself. Humans do not exist and then add themselves to the spaces of life but come into existence through being emplaced as manifestations of spatialized consciousness. In its most radical articulation, being occurs not against the backdrop of space and place but as space and place. The individuated human body exists as an articulation of primordial spatial ordering and its concrete present presentation. It is a fulfilled incarnation of space. For this reason Patočka argues that the localization of the body in space bestows meaning upon the world and ourselves.14 It is only when we enter certain spaces in life, both physical and existential, that possibilities open up and a person can move from being a mere individuated living-body to a truly existing pilgrim-body striving to fulfill a projected possibility—a life’s work—a property unique to human being. With little modification this contemporary scientific/philosophical understanding of space comports with the Christian understanding of the Logos. As noted above, numerous theologians have traced out the way that the Divine Logos is substantiated in creation. The incarnational process explored in the writings of St. Athanasius parallels the scientifically observed development of space from ordering principles to material individuation. In his On the Incarnation and Against the Heretics Athanasius emphasizes that the Logos advances its own incarnation in space “until the fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4) sees the historical embodiment of the Word. Yet, even at this juncture the

Jan Patočka, Lo spazio e la sua problematica (Milan: Mimesis, 2014), 42. Jan Patočka, Body, Community, Language, World (Chicago: Open Court, 1998), 34.

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Incarnation is not complete until the Word becomes fully co-spatial with the body by the process of living out the will of God. It is this point that Anglican theologian John Macquarrie so persuasively developed in Jesus Christ in Modern Thought. Macquarrie argues that the Logos is not an instantaneous temporal happening but an evolutionary event of time and space. Even in the traditional sense of the Incarnation, within the hypostasis of the Logos and Jesus of Nazareth there was a coming-to-be as the divine nature was constricted and the human nature expanded to form a unity. Macquarrie’s point, to use the categories of Patočka, is that the Incarnation was not simply the spatial individuation of a living-body but the movement of Jesus into a truly existing pilgrim-body striving to fulfil a projected life’s work that was internal to both natures as spatialized consciousness. For Macquarrie the spatial individuation of the Logos into the person of Jesus suggests that the association of the divine and human exists eternally in God. By consequence he affirms the idea of an eternal humanity of God with all its attendant categories of existence. The result of this line of logic is that God’s revelation of God’s self is never an abstraction but by necessity takes form, which is the concrete experience of space and all that fills it. Indeed for numerous theologians like Teilhard de Chardin, the full expression of the Logos in time and space as the Christ makes Christ the omega point, the fullness of space and time, past, present, and future. Macquarrie concludes similarly that the Logos is the world-event in which Jesus Christ is delineated from the cosmos “by degree, not by kind.”15 Understanding the relationship of the Godhead to creation in this way suggests that spiritual realities are not immaterial but are substantial, in the technical sense, presenting themselves as a sensible subject that offers itself as an intelligible reality in the material world. Only in this real presence can it be said with sense “in God we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

SACRAMENTALITY OF SPACE What begins to emerge from the above investigation is a tightly intertwined logic regarding the Christic nature of the cosmos and space from which we can draw further specifications regarding the sacramentality of space. To this end an obvious question presents itself. If the scientific account of the spatial unfolding of the cosmos is so close to the Christian conception of the Logos, are we in fact speaking of one reality? The answer must be negative to the extent that God cannot simply be reducible to material processes. At the same time, process theology has emphasized the fact that a theological matrix indifferent to the makeup of the physical universe, or a conception of God that is as well, is no longer sustainable in modernity. To this extent the coming-to-be of creation through spatialization must not only be an operation in the realm of God’s providence but an actualization of the divine as well. Implicit in this theological perspective is an understanding of God’s internal-to-nature that is unapologetically physicalist, albeit always in matter of degrees and modes. It also means that quantum explanations of space are divinely shaped, so that we touch upon something that is beyond common definitions of sacramentality or sacraments. Spatialization is not a material object with an added imputed spiritual action effecting internally in the human subject what it signifies outwardly. Rather, coming-to-be in space is internal reality coming to outward manifestation, nonorganic or human—what is, becoming more fully what is. To sustain such a view, a completely different account of

John Macquarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought (London: SCM, 1990), 392.

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sacramental structure is necessitated, which foresees sacraments as coming-to-be events rather than mundane magical objects that outwardly transform human consciousness. Some sacramental theologians, most notably Louis-Marie Chauvet in his work Symbol and Sacrament, have already explored such approaches based upon Heidegger’s category of Dasein. Imperative to sustaining a sense of sacraments as events (and the pan-sacramental nature of the cosmos) is understanding that sacraments are not objects but systems of realities. As understood by Connor Sweeney, this means that there is no immediate selfpresence, no “thinglyness,” but rather a mediated nexus of being, truth, and language.16 In a framework such as this, spatialization appears as an ur-structure, or ur-sacramentality, by which the cosmos or person not simply comes into contact with God post facto but is constituted in Logos and continually comes into being in God, making sense of the statement that even before the womb we are known and chosen (Jer. 1:5). If spatiality has a sacramental character generally by virtue of it putting us into being, it also receives its sacramental character more specifically because of its salvific telos. Traditional understandings of sacraments describe them as outward means of an inward and invisible grace. Very simply stated, the nature and purpose of a sacrament is to work in a person their salvation; in the case of baptism and the Eucharist the material objects of water, bread, and wine are said to mediate this grace; in the case of confirmation and ordination, the laying on of hands; in marriage, the exchange of vows. Whether churches agree upon such functional mechanics it generally remains uncontested that the goal of sacraments is the bringing about of salvation through the material. Space shares this teleology and in some ways renders the concept of sacramental telos more obvious. We see this fact in outline above in the claim that spatiality is the instantiation of the Logos, both as the general flow of our cosmos from which being springs, and as a movement toward individuation. It is not simply that spatiality is intimately connected to the incarnation of the Logos in Jesus of Nazareth alone, for it is also directed toward our own incarnation. In this Christic pattern the creative activity of God has moved the whole of creation toward fullness of being since the beginning. The salvific will of God might be said to be the “pre-programming” of space that is to fulfill its purpose in carrying us toward God as if a great ocean wave toward the coast. Indeed, the perception is quite orthodox, for if the cosmos is Christic then it must obviously have a soteriological function as well. While theology may more easily speak of a teliotic arc of history moving us toward God, so too does the arc of space. Indeed even before theories of relativity, time without embodiment was quite meaningless, as time is the measurement or duration of movement, itself a perception of space. Jean-Luc Marion is wrong therefore to claim Christianity has no absolute revelation of God in space, and as a consequence no real sense of the sacramentality of space.17 The Letter to the Hebrews speaks of the replacement of the Jerusalem Temple specifically for this reason. It is not that the story is the mitigation of space having revelatory character, as if the Temple was spatial and Jesus is not. Rather, the salvific end of spatiality is realized in the full comingto-be of the Christ who is spatialized divinity. By an odd dualism, the Logos of creation leads to the completed incarnation of the Logos who experiences the saving power of God. In Jesus, God is subject to his own creation (1 Cor. 15:28). Creation brings Jesus to God, and the fullness of creation, the Connor Sweeney, Sacramental Presence after Heidegger (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015), 51, 54. Sarah Morice-Brubaker, The Place of the Spirit: Toward a Trinitarian Theology of Location (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013), 99. 16 17

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glorified Jesus, brings us to God, thereby actualizing creation’s originating fullness—a revelation of the glory of God by sharing in God’s saving love. Of course scripture tells us our drawing close to God in this state of affairs is only first fruits, shadows, foretastes, and guarantees of salvation. So we await the fullness of complete sanctification, toward which spatialization moves us, when the whole of the cosmos reaches its salvific end in Jesus the Christ and is presented to the Father—when God will be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28). Until then the salvific directionality of space effects its transparent action of moving us toward God. In contrast to the view of sacraments as objects, what we confront as space is not so much a symbol, a material mediation of an occasional imputed grace, but a consistent opening to salvation itself and therefore a consistently graced possibility of our being and coming-to-be.

SACRAMENTALITY OF LIVED-SPACE Until this point space and its attendant theological connections has been explored in its most comprehensive and fundamental form: space as a deep structure of reality. Regular apprehension of large-scale space and sacramentality, however, is not usually held in conceptual sight, as it is not a seen stratum of daily physical experience. Rather, our individuation in the cosmos means that our body-based perspective apprehends space and sacramentality at a lower scale where we have a localized perspective on the world derived from the fact that materiality gives rise to concrete circumstances. As explored by Patočka, space itself stops being an abstraction and through qualitative concrete structures becomes a complex of relationships.18 Here space appears as the interplay of Euclidean geometry, natural geography, and the built environment, as an objective world outside of me. At the same time, argues the neuroscientist and philosopher Edoardo Fugali, what emerges through our embodied relationship to space is the human sense of place—I am in Italy, in my home, in my office. Essentially the body serves as a universal principle of sensibility with the capacity to self-reflect upon the experience of space and create a sense of orientation.19 Our natural impression is to be an onlooker, but in fact we are inscribed into a physical dialectic with our material surroundings. It is left to explore this daily sense of lived-space and its sacramental status.

The Church Building Although the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl first began describing the formative process of the physical world upon the cognitive structures of persons, it was Heidegger who explicitly connected Being to everyday lived-space and to architecture. In his essay Building, Dwelling, Thinking he recalls that the verb to build is etymologically connected to the verb to be.20 The quintessential experience of humanity, Heidegger argues, is the intersection of being and building, what he calls “placedness” or dwelling. For Heidegger humans come to be out of immersion in our sensorial worlds. We are products of our environments. However, because we also seek to be placed, to have an orientation in the world, and to experience an inextricable togetherness, we also transform our

Patočka, Lo Spazio, 42. Edoardo Fugali, Corpo (Bologna: Mulino, 2016), 132. 20 Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Visual Culture: Spaces of Visual Culture, ed. Joanne Morra (New York: Routledge, 2006), 72. 18 19

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environments to create an “at homeness.” He conceptually delineates the physical world into three zones, therefore: undifferentiated space with its experience of void that signals the possibility of becoming; place, which is space infilled with life, that is, our natural and humanly constructed surroundings as daily lived; and architecture, which is an artifact and expression of the human longing for dwelling. A building is a composition of space that, prescinding from any particular function, is a human act of dwelling. Heidegger writes, “Genuine buildings give form to dwelling in its presencing and house this presence. Building thus characterized is a distinctive letting-dwell.”21 Thus, within Heidegger’s philosophical framework, architecture holds a privileged role in the material disposition of human life. Aside from the natural environment, architecture is the everyday experience of space that conducts and channels human life. But unlike the landscape, the buildingscape is specifically related to the human quest to dwell. Our architectonic surroundings are not incidentally present but subject us to our being and our exploration of embodiment. It was Gaston Bachelard who fully mined the insight of this later point in his work The Poetics of Space writing, “Inhabited space transcends geometrical space,” explaining that “a house that has been experienced is not an inert box.”22 To this end Bachelard suggests buildings have “immensity” so that they are not mere containers but bring to life human dreaming. Although not systematically explored by Bachelard, dreaming does not mean some inconsequential flight of fancy but an openness of the human spirit to life. The essential nature of architecture brought to light by these authors had a broad impact not only upon philosophy but also architectural practice. In a now classical work, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, the architectural theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz proposed an approach to building specifically oriented toward constructing human and cultural identity. It is the interplay of human construction and environmental distinction that gives rise to what he referred to as “spirit of place,” or a defining synergy of a people and their surroundings that enables “dwelling.” Even in the building of churches the impact was felt. Initiated by the German architect Rudolf Schwartz, church buildings in the wake of Heidegger began to be conceived as pure volumes so that walls defined a perimeter, creating a spatial void in which human occupants found “presence.” For a variety of reasons, however, notions of architecture’s sacramentality were not forthcoming and in fact dissipated mostly due to liturgical theology’s interest in the Christian community as the locus of God’s presence. And yet, if architecture’s relation to space and human being is a key feature of life, we must also reconsider the sacramental character of the church building. Until the number of sacraments was set at seven beginning at the Second Council of Lyon (1274), many medieval theologians considered the Dedication of a Church to be a sacrament. Hugh of St. Victor contended it was the first sacrament among others—a type of ur-sacrament (De Sacramentis 4:I). For Hugh, space was the antecedent to the human body. That the Dedication of a Church as a sacrament seemed to be based upon two factors. First, the rite established the building as a place of encounter with God in a unique way. For example, a contemporary of Hugh, Abbot Suger speaks of the material church as a spiritual location that transcends the earthly. Second, the building through its dedication became a spatial form of the revelation of God that transforms the person.

Ibid., 75. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, rpt. 1994), 47.

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Because of this relationship to divine action it was common to see the building as an image of the Christian with grace active in both. Medieval theologians accepted therefore that there was some qualitative shift in the nature of a church building before and after its dedication so that it was not simply the event of the dedication that was a sacrament. After, the building maintained a sacramental character. The clear implication was that the building had the capacity to place one into contact with the divine through its sacral character. Hence, canon law forbade the materials of a consecrated building being used for another purpose. Moreover, spiritual experiences were reported to be provoked by church environments as well as miraculous healing through contact. Systematic explanations of the relationship between the divine and buildings are by and large lacking in medieval material, but descriptions of churches provide clear evidence the church building mediated salvific transcendence, thereby obtaining a sacramental character at its broadest. Past conceptions of the sacramentality of church buildings are in fact not so far afield from contemporary theology. While some Christians may want to bracket claims of miraculous occurrences as a type of proof of God’s presence and therefore the exceptional nature of a building, the dual consideration of the building in and of itself and of its relationship to persons in the context of a rite is highly suggestive. If, according to Heidegger, the particular nature of a building is the “letting dwell” of the human person, it could be said that a church building is the location that this “dwelling” nature is hyperrealized in creation. This is the case in part because the Christian community acknowledges the Christological implications for the cosmos by setting aside through ritual a place that reveals God’s presencing. In the act of dedicating a church, the life of the building, its space, is bent toward its cosmic role in which the whole of creation is to praise God and dwell in the house of the Lord forever (Psalm 24). Reflecting this idea, Maximus the Confessor states that every church building is a miniature of the cosmos. And yet, even previous to the actions of the Christian community, there is also a sense of spatial objectivity implicated in the dedication. The Logos-ordered creation has fulfilled its spatial end by bringing together and putting “in place” the redeemed of the Lord in a definitive yet incomplete manner. In this gathering together, both saved place and saved persons await the final constitution of the fabric of the cosmos. A church building has therefore an intensified teleological agency. According to Mark Wynn, this directive power should not be misconstrued as God “shunting” human beings around. “Place does not act by, as it were, ‘pushing’ human agents into behaving one way or another.”23 Instead, when we speak of the unique role of the church building it is because it is a place that is defined by the story of God’s saving work. As described by Wynn, such storied places are those in which morally congruent behaviors emerge in the human person in line with the character of a place. This conception helps account then for the subjective development of the person, the emergence into full being as discussed by Patočka, Heidegger, Bachelard, Schultz, and others. Patočka writes that within space we “attempt to gain clarity concerning our situation, to accept the situation and, by that clarity, to transform it.”24 The relationship between being and space in this sense remains not simply an ontological truism but also evokes and implicates an ethical and moral identity, a life project directed toward the good. In this way the telos of both space Mark Wynn, Faith and Place: An Essay in Embodied Religious Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 79. 24 Patočka, Body, 160. 23

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and person becomes congruous, and the church building becomes a formative structure physically and morally. Its storied presence as a sign of God’s saving presence is made explicit not only in its dedication but also in its ongoing use so that the location becomes a lived-space that is existentially dense. Thus the Christian tradition speaks of a dedicated church in terms of experiential immensity: “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God and gate of heaven.”25 “Elect [this building] for Thy dwelling place; make it the abode of Thy glory. Adorn it with Thy divine and supernatural gifts.”26

The Natural and Built Environment The church building is obviously a very specific form of architectural space. Needless to say the bulk of our daily lives unfold in the lived-space of natural and humanly constructed environments. For the phenomenologist and historian of religion Mircea Eliade, the majority of this lived-space is “profane.” In limited instances the divine is coterminous with space, but by and large space is either neutral or ambiguous. The American Congregationalist theologian Jesse Appleton articulated a different spatial characterization, arguing that God is in heaven and on earth in every place as immensity. Teilhard de Chardin conceived of the world in similar fashion, offering a sacramental metaphor. In his work Mass on the World, he notes that just as the Eucharist is transformed into the Body of Christ so too is the world in which we live. “The world is the final, and the real, Host into which Christ gradually descends.”27 As described by de Chardin, a communion-logic defines the village, neighborhood, city, along with humanity and nature. To this extent the lived-world in its totality exhibits a sacramental character in that it nurtures and sustains not only human life but also social communion and solidarity. Although conceived of in various ways, these three authors suggest that something that we would define as a sacramental character marks the breadth of everyday space. Some concepts already explored are immediately applicable in this sense. According to Heidegger, any built space serves as a psycho-physical template that sets up epistemological categories in humans, as already noted above. For Patočka this includes the natural environment as well. In many ways however, this feature of space belongs to a type of primordial ontology that operates passively. But considering the full social contexts in which we live, our environments receive fuller sacramental explanation, considering them as the places of human acting. To this extent, the concept of the pilgrim-body comes to the fore once again. The environments in which we live are the places where we work out the fullness of our being, not simply individually but in the whole eventfulness of society. The difficulty according to Patočka is that we live in the illusion that our actions and social flourishing are set against the backdrop of indifferent places; a building is any building, a town any town, a woods any woods, a river any river. We mistakenly think that human events could happen anywhere rather than specifically being tied to a place. Instead, Patočka perceives that our histories and lives are not only placed generically speaking but are shaped specifically by place. Independent of Patočka but expressing the same themes, Vítor Westhelle has given a compelling account of this tension from the perspective of theology. The history of

The Archbishops’ Council, “Dedication Festival,” in Common Worship: Times and Seasons (London: Church House Publishing, 2006), 525–6. 26 “The Inauguration of a Church,” in Great Euchologion ([Gr.] Venice: Phoenix, 1891), 315. 27 Ursula King, ed., Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Writings (New York: Orbis, 2005), 17. 25

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salvation, he suggests, has considered God’s creation to be a “neutral infrastructure beneath the drama of salvation.”28 As infrastructure, space becomes a place of “wandering with no goal or value to guide the sojourner.”29 Rather, he notes, human experiences even if temporally past cannot be dissociated from places of their occurrence. If we want to affirm God’s action in time, we must also affirm God’s action in place and understand the environment as an agent in the drama of salvation as well. To this end, we can say, for example, that God’s deliverance of the Israelites through the Red Sea is place dependent. It is both Moses and the Red Sea that are contingent agents and signs of God’s action. Why God chose the agency of the Red Sea is no clearer than why he chose Moses. Nor is it any clearer how history conspired to raise up Moses than it was for the Red Sea to form. But the experience of salvation would have been fundamentally different if the means of deliverance were also different. The experience of salvation therefore is contextual and necessarily has a place that leaves its own mark upon lived experience. Of course, this is true not simply in biblical narrative but also in the history of humanity and the Christian community. Much of the strength of Westhelle’s work rests upon his development of this fact. The Kingdom of God, he notes, is not simply otherworldly or figurative. Rather, what is called the Kingdom is instantiated in the concrete facts of this world and takes place being “topologically nearby.”30 Interestingly, as Timothy Gorringe has convincingly shown, God’s activity in the world is presented to view when the world is shaped not simply in terms of ethical behavior among humans but when a communion of being and flourishing has been established in natural and humanly constructed environments.31 The contrary to the Kingdom, he argues, is obvious—places of environmental disaster, the land theft of colonialism, the spaces of war, urban decay, poverty, racism, and sexism. But the opposite, the flourishing of both biological life and the built environment, is also possible to see in places of beauty, tranquility, and justice. It is not so difficult to comprehend the Kingdom in place, Westhelle suggests, because of the fact that God’s presence (or seeming absence) in the world is apparent in the “boundaries we avoid, and the margins we protect ourselves from.”32 The conception of the sacramentality of lived-space we daily inhabit therefore is absolutely realistic. It does not deny that our lives taken as social history are a dialectic emerging out of and collapsing into problematic or desolate places. In so doing it avoids what Mary Grey calls being “mind-bogglingly optimistic” about processes of the world.33 But it is also the case that our lived-spaces are telos-oriented, meaning that the realization of the Kingdom is in the here and now taking place. The revolutionary faith of Christianity is that the story of humanity, comprising persons, nature, and architectural surroundings, is promised new things and our world leads us toward divine fulfillment. Our lived-space is inexorably bound up in our redemption, moving us toward salvation,

Vítor Westhelle, Eschatology and Space: The Lost Dimension in Theology Past and Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 12–13. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 78. 31 Timothy Gorringe, A Theology of the Built Environment: Justice, Empowerment, Redemption (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 18–20. 32 Westhelle, Eschatology, 27. 33 Mary Grey, “Cosmic Communion,” in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on People and Planet, ed. Celia DeaneDrummond (New York: Routledge, 2006), 113. 28

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but also being redeemed itself, thus giving expression to the notion that “all things work together for the good of those who believe” (Rom. 8:28).

CONCLUSION If space is a lost dimension in theology, this chapter has attempted to set out a global, if attenuated, approach to the question. Theology’s ambivalence and even hostility toward the “spatial turn” represented in figures such as Paul Tillich is neither wholesale nor necessary. Indeed a full theological accounting of salvation and the sacraments cannot deflect nor deny the essential role of space in what Michel Foucault has called our epoch of space. This is not simply a question of trend but of secular viewpoints recalling to the church its own essential theological and conceptual blind spots. From a Christian perspective, space is not simply an inert context of human life or God’s acting. It is instead part of the project of the Incarnation as it throws creation into being. Nor is space a problematic of the Incarnation to be overcome; it is the nature of incarnation itself and endures as such. Whether space is conceived in its most abstract of scientific definitions, as architecture, or as our daily worlds of action and movement, space has a teliotic action; by its nature it is a passage, a crossing, a sign that comports us toward the Kingdom. Because of its power to bring us to Being it cannot but be sacramental in nature. Indeed a comprehensive sacramental theology must be profoundly connected with space. At the same time, the concept of sacrament and sacramentality has been knowingly and purposefully left broad in its relationship to space. In part, the fundamental character of space as a reality that embodies the divine fulfills in rough outline classic conceptions of sacramentality. Further precision would require specification of the sense of space being investigated and considerations of related theological themes such as grace, a process beyond the scope of this chapter’s synthetic construction. In the end the question of the sacramentality of space is an eschatological question. What is it Christians think God wills to save? Today the danger is that spiritualizing trends in theology and the influence of scientific narrative portray the end of the cosmos as a physical collapse into nothingness or a purely spiritual ending to an emplaced history. This influence is implicit in spiritualist accounts of the resurrection, which deny Christ’s body was physically raised, or which suggest that humanity endures as a memory in the mind of God. Christian tradition to the contrary has always understood the end of the cosmos to be the recreation of our world itself, when the Kingdom transforms every place and the Logos brings all of creation to the fullness of its being. Otherwise, indicates Rudolf Otto, one dwells in an inherently inconsistent divine ethic, where the Incarnation and cosmos are ultimately for naught, and where Christian transformation of the world is radically anatomized occurrences without ultimate purpose.34 Writ large it suggests that the cosmos in its fullness is not actually the object of salvation. The eschatology of Jürgen Moltmann adds a needed corrective, insisting that everything that happens between “promise and fulfilment” is redeemed in its particularity.35 What is historically real is redeemed, including our senses of place. What will be saved is being saved now. Our works of the Kingdom now are the building blocks of the eschaton. Every action to Rudolf Otto, The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man: A Study in the History of Religion (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, rpt. 2009), 62. 35 Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. James Leitch (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 78–9. 34

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save the natural environment, shelter the homeless, and restore land to the displaced is the unfinished Kingdom. Not strangely then, the ultimate sense of place is preserved in scripture’s image of the future, “I saw a new heaven and new earth” (Rev. 21:2)—and it is this new sense of place that the church celebrates in its sacraments praying, “In that new world where the fullness of your peace will be revealed, gather people of every race, language, and way of life, to share in the one eternal banquet with Jesus Christ the Lord.”36

FURTHER READING Casey, E. Getting Back into Place: Towards a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Jones, L. The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Lilburne, G. A Sense of Place: A Christian Theology of the Land. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1989. Mackenzie, I. The Dynamism of Space: A Theological Study into the Nature of Space. Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1995. Schemmann, A. The World as Sacrament. London: Darton Longman and Todd, 1965.

The Archbishops’ Council, New Patterns for Worship (London: Church House, 2008), 300.

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Elemental Signs of the Sacramental: Sacramentality, Visual Arts, and the Earth JYOTI SAHI

Moses said, “I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.” When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here am I.” Then he said “Do not come near; put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” (Exod. 3:3-5) A certain heathen asked Rabbi Joshua ben Karhah: “Why did the Holy One, blessed be he, speak out of a thorn bush?” He said to him: Had it been out of a carob, or out of a sycamore, you would ask the same question… Well then: Why out of a thorn bush? To teach you that there is no space free of the Divine Presence, not even a thorn bush.1

SACRAMENT AND SACRAMENTALITY The active public ministry of Jesus begins with his encounter and dialogue with John the Baptist in the wilderness of Judea. John in the desert said, Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees: every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. (Mt. 3:10-12) In this vivid image of Baptism, which has inspired so many artists, we find the seed of the gospel understanding of sacrament. The basic sacraments of the church are embodied in elemental symbols. Here we see the imaginative use of water and fire and the image of the heavens opening as Jesus emerges from the waters of the river Jordan, with the divine voice and the descent of the Spirit like a bird. Later, Jesus institutes the sacrament of the Eucharist, through the breaking of bread and the drinking of wine, which he gives to his

N. N. Glatzer, ed., Hammer on the Rock: A Midrash Reader (New York: Schocken Books, 1962), 36.

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disciples as a memory of his own self-offering and bodily sacrifice. Here the fruits of the earth and work of human hands are consecrated in the person of Jesus. The sacramental is not “otherworldly.” It is rooted in a sense of the sacred in everyday experience of the body and the elemental in nature. It is in that context that the sacramental is closely linked to the aesthetic, and to the creative imagination. Art itself becomes sacramental, and the aphorism “the artist is not a special sort of person, but every person is a special sort of artist” also implies that every person is a priest. The priest is one who makes the ordinary and everyday into something sacred. This is also the concern of art—that the ordinary and time bound in everyday experience is an entry point into a spiritual world that is timeless. The sacramental is not only the connection between the elemental and the eternal; it is also the link between what is visible and tangible and what is unseen and unheard. It is like the ladder that links heaven and earth. That connection is also the in-between reality that has been termed the spiritual in art, which is the sacramental. The “invisible” dimension in art is its spiritual significance. It is for this reason that art can never just be concerned with the literal. The spiritual reality of what we see and touch with our bodies cannot be represented literally. The human physical senses are vessels that contain but do not define the living waters that have their source in timeless reality. This dimension of reality can only be referred to as “no-thing”—what in Indian thought has been called sunya, or emptiness that is also fullness. It is the space between things. This is the abstract relation of things that subsumes the literal truth of any objective thing. However, this spiritual “no-thing,” the significance underlying the objective world as we experience it with our senses, does not discount the literal significance of the natural world that we experience around us. According to the Zen Buddhist masters, the tangible world is like a finger pointing to the moon. The finger is not the moon, but it draws our attention to the moon. The image of the moon becomes a symbol of something intangible within our psyche. This inner reality that reflects the outer moon impacts our feelings, and even the cycles of our body. This effect of an external object on our inner self-consciousness has been called an inner landscape, or “inscape.” The poetic work of art spans an inner world and an outer phenomenon. Thus we can say that the image is concerned with both the visible and the invisible. Starting from this premise, we can also address the question of the sacramental in culture. The elemental in nature is found everywhere. Water, fire, earth, and air are components of our natural environment as experienced in all places and climates. All cultures respond to this universal elemental reality. And yet every culture is unique, as distinctive as the natural world to which a culture responds. A universal, globalized culture would be an offense to what we respect as the diversity of human communities, and the uniqueness of each individual. The sacramental life of a community is built around elemental symbols. The philosophical phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard has shown that though we find in cultures around the world the effort to categorize objective reality in terms of fundamental elements, scientific thought no longer sees these imaginative elements as the building blocks of the universe. However, the elements, which have played such a central role in the poetic world of the imagination, help in understanding the relation between a subjective inner consciousness and the external objective world we experience with our physical senses. Simon Schama, in his voluminous study of the natural elements as perceived by the creative imagination of artists, quotes the surrealist Magritte, who argued that we experience the landscape “as being outside ourselves even though it is only a mental representation of what

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we experience on the inside.”2 Bachelard referred to this capacity to experience external phenomena through the “material imagination.”3 The human imagination is in dialogue with material elements. Matter is not just the objective “thing” (water, fire, earth, or air), but it is the substance or depth of what appears in nature. I understand sacramentality as a reaching toward the inner soul of the material world, where the human spirit not only sees the world in depth through the power of the creative imagination but is also transformed by the elemental in the discovery of a cosmic consciousness. In this process we not only contemplate the outer world but also perceive that the elements themselves have a creative energy to uncover and shape what is deepest in our own self-understanding. I suggest that we make a distinction between sacraments, which are institutionalized rites, and sacramentality. Whereas sacraments are the evolving way by which a particular faith evokes its own unique understanding of the process of salvation, sacramentality constitutes a system of material signs that is more basic and human. Sacramentality is a dialogue, mutually energizing and transforming, between an inner self-consciousness and the outer objective world. An inner awareness of the elemental has the power to make us whole and in harmony with the life of the cosmos. It is here that the natural has a salvific power to reveal our innermost dreams and spiritual aspirations. The elemental, as I am approaching it as an artist, is a creative dialogue with materials that constitute the life and energy of the outer world that inspires my imagination. It is in that sense that this elemental world is sacramental, having the power to bring together what is innermost in myself and the outer reality of the materials I see and touch, taste and smell, and this has the sacramental power to transform me.

IMPERMANENT AND PROVISIONAL STRUCTURES IN FOLK CULTURE The elements (maha bhutas) as understood in traditional Indic cultures are the spiritual realities that constitute the material world in which we live. They are not discrete or permanent states. Fire and water are mutually in a process of exchange, interacting with earth and air. These are like four poles supporting the four directions of space. The image created in this way, of a temporary cover made from natural materials, serves a sacramental function. This house outside human habitation is a transitional common ground, where culture and nature meet. One example of such a meeting place is the pandal. In a number of village folk rituals that I observe in the countryside near where I live, there is the tradition of constructing a pandal, a temporary shelter, out of organic, locally available building materials. The provisional nature of this sacred space reminds the individual that a dwelling place is like the body: it has a limited life span and eventually has to disintegrate and return to the land. In my own reflections on the sacramental in the everyday world of a community rooted in a deep respect for the land, I find in this image of the pandal and other temporary ritual structures a truth that we need to rediscover, as we think of the sacramental as connecting human culture to the natural environment. The pandal is typically made on special occasions as a kind of porch that offers shade and an outdoor space for guests to be welcomed. Such shelters are important for family and Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 12. Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (Dallas, TX: Pegasus Foundation, 1983), 1–18. 2 3

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community celebrations linked to a birth, naming ceremony or initiation rites, marriage or death. This temporary shelter is made using poles cut from bamboo or local trees, and covered with rice straw or matting woven from the fronds of coconut palms, or palmyra. The tall grasses that grow wild, used to make soft brooms to sweep village homes, are also handy material for building such temporary spaces. These provisional natural structures are places where we also find symbols of the sacred. The sacred is associated not only with the cultural but also with the natural and wild. The symbols found in the liminal spaces, which form adjuncts to the living space of a traditional dwelling, link the human habitation with the landscape around the home. Indian cultures produce liminal and temporary threshold designs, known in South India as rangoli or kolam. They are often in the form of mandala patterns, outlined with white paste, (either lime or a paste of rice flour) and the spaces between filled with powdered earth colors or petals and leaves. These patterns that are made on the freshly plastered floor of the sacred space where rites of passage are performed indicate the cosmic order that is conceived of as the great circle of Creation. Provisional structures like the pandal are made across different communities in a variety of ways. Among some indigenous communities, a hut (known as a guda) is made near the home when needed. It is a place where a girl coming of age is isolated along with two companions during a period of purification.4 Such separated temporary houses are also used during rites of passage, as when a young individual is given the sacred thread. In traditional societies such places might serve to help the individual realize a sense of transition from one stage of life to another. After a time of isolation, the individual is reintegrated with the community by a shared feast in which all participate.5 Another form of a temporary structure is the outhouse where the body of the deceased person is laid to rest on a transportable bier made of disposable bamboo, or other natural materials. Often in village communities a person nearing death is placed outside the family home, indicating a time of transition. We might recall that St. Francis just before he died asked to be laid on the earth; this “transitus” is still commemorated by Franciscan communities.6 In traditional Indian societies, after reverently greeting the body of the departed person, the body is carried from the outer shelter beside the home to the place of final rest, to be consumed by elemental forces, and made one with mother earth. In the Christian village where my family has settled, such natural shelters are made near many homes to house figures of the crib scene at Christmas time. Jesus, we are told, was born and laid in a crib where straw is placed for the domestic animals to eat, and sheltered in such an attached outhouse, where the elemental world is to be found in natural materials. Following folk customs, the floor of this temporary shelter is sown with seeds during Advent that then sprout in time for the Christmas celebration. Similar traditions of sprouting seeds used later in the fields are to be found in other local folk celebrations that are practiced by the wider farming community. The in-between, liminal place that is neither in the familiar home nor exposed to nature in the wild is a temporary resting place. The construction of such an open structure

Such purification ceremonies were traditionally practiced among kattu nayaka and jaina kuruba communities in Wayanad in South India. 5 See R. Hogger, The Sacred Thread: The Development of Personality according to Hindu Traditions and Jungian Psychology (Delhi: Vajra Books, 2017). 6 “St. Francis told the brothers to take him off the bed, strip him naked, and lay him for a while on the bare floor” (Raymond 1938, p. 345). 4

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links the public domain of the village street with an inner, private world of the family. Conversely, this porch offers a transition between the protected domain of the homestead and the wider world. In the sacred architecture of the church or temple this open but sheltered space is where the laity assembles, as distinct from the priestly sanctum where the sacred mystery is preserved. In that sense, ritually speaking, this is liminal space, like the dream world that lies on the threshold between the sacred and the profane. Perhaps such a shelter represents also a transition characterizing the human culture of the migrant, shifting community who were understood in the biblical tradition as “sojourners,” never in possession of the land, a pilgrim people searching for “a promised land.” The wanderers carried the ark of the covenant as they traveled, a symbol of the sacred that protected and guided them through the wilderness. It was only much later that it was permanently housed in the temple in Jerusalem. The tabernacle of the primitive Hebrew tribes was also similar to the tent, which could be transported. In fact the “booths” that are constructed during the Feast of the Tabernacles are a reminder that God is moving with a migrant people, always dependent on a provisional home; that is the gift of the divine. Typically, after the completion of the ritual for which the temporary space like a pandal has been prepared and invested with different symbols of life and earth’s blessings, the ground patterns over which people freely step are finally swept clean, to show that along with the temporary nature of the sacred space, the symbols of creation are allowed to return to the elemental matrix from which they have been made.

THE LANDSCAPE AS SACRAMENTAL The geopolitical nature of cultures shows that there is a vital connection between the land that human communities inhabit and the social memories that have become embedded in a natural habitat. The Greek word oikos meant an inhabited environment. A landscape is not just an empty phenomenon; it has been profoundly affected by those who live in the landscape and is continually being changed through its interaction with human beings. Festivals and myths that enshrine times and rhythms in nature, as they are experienced by the human communities that have for generations lived with a natural environment, are part of the way that an outer world is perceived by a culture. Community celebrations map the way in which local features in the landscape have become part of a culture. The landscape becomes holy at the point where it reminds the individual of a shared history as an encounter with a material reality. The rhythm of the seasons that determine the agricultural cycle and its patterns of growth and decay, and the way in which natural rhythms determine lifestyles and traditional occupations is another factor linking the natural environment and human economy. Human beings have worked in the landscape, and conversely the landscape has shaped human livelihoods and culture. This employment in fruitful work, followed by periods of rest and leisure, is enmeshed in the way that nature operates in relation to human cultures. The connection between the patterns that have evolved in natural growth, and human cultivation and livelihoods, is expressed in poetic utterances like hymns and rituals that articulate the interwoven reality of nature and culture. In Western visual arts, for example, illuminated liturgical calendars like medieval “Books of Hours” employed imagery that is linked to nature’s seasonal moods. In Indian art “Ragamala” paintings also link nature’s moods through the times of day and night and the seasons of the year to the play of the divine, in the form of the young Krishna.

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The landscape becomes the backdrop of the infancy narratives and youthful exploits of Krishna, before he assumed his role as a king.7 Storytelling is situated in the natural space that becomes like a stage for playing out historical events, making every place meaningful.8 The forms of the landscape evoke a story of the divine present in every place, which takes on the nature of a holy land. The landscape itself is read like a storybook or scroll. The different moods of the landscape evoke incidents that are enshrined in the narrative that is celebrated through the liturgical year. In the same way the life of Christ is also linked to the year of recurring feasts that recall salvation history, through which the events of the gospel are relived in the context of the local life of the community. Thus, we live not only in the present but also in the memories of our cultural past.

LANDSCAPE FORMS THAT BECOME ANICONIC SYMBOLS In Indian imagery the contemplative is shown meditating beneath a particular tree or beside a river. Experiencing the voice that is articulated through the land makes the place where we stand “holy” and gives rise to the built forms that we make as a dwelling place not only for our own shelter but also for a Divine Presence. This Presence has been represented through aniconic symbols such as a pillar, or a circular platform where worshippers can gather. The image of the feet of the Divine Presence is again a symbol that a place is holy, because a spiritual experience has been embodied in this place. Here nature and culture move in harmony together, like a dance. Culture is not understood as the will to subdue and exploit nature for human development or greed. Rather there is a cosmic covenant that includes both nature and culture. It is this cosmic covenant that is the essence of the sacramental. The concerns of ecology have always been essential to the spirit of worship whose impulse comes from a sense of wonder and the praise of God’s creation. The destruction of nature by human greed, which seeks to control or subvert nature, constitutes the breaking point between a sense of the sacred and what we identify as merely secular. Like the division that became apparent in Western views of the spiritual as distinct from the secular material world, these divides have contributed to a clericalization of the sacred. There are other divisions, such as the distinction drawn between myth and history, science and art, the objective and the subjective, that underlie a modern worldview that in many ways is the cause of ecological disaster and an approach to human development that is unsustainable.

THE PRIMORDIAL IN THE EVERYDAY Viewing the world as sacramental, we discover that what we experience as an objective reality is at one with an inner experience of the sacred, which is holy because it sees life as a whole. This is also the mystery of a divine energy incarnated into or embodied within

Ragamala paintings: a “garland of musical modes” depicted as a series of Indian miniature paintings in medieval India, starting from sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the South Indian Deccan and later in North India. 8 See Diana Eck, India: A Sacred Geography (New York: Harmony Books, Random House, Inc., 2012). 7

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the local and temporal. Here the transcendent penetrates, and infuses the sensual as an immanent Presence (1 John 1:1-3). In primal or folk cultures, ordinary and everyday objects of use are made into metaphors of a reality that is spiritual. Common household items in the village, like the earthen pot in which water or edible items are stored, or the grinding stone that is a common feature in the village courtyard, or even implements used in the agricultural work of farmers or craftspeople, besides having a practical use are given a spiritual significance. The instrument used in the daily work of the community living close to the land is thought of as aniconic, serving a divine function, as well as being a secular object. The earthen pot or lamp serves as an icon of a Divine Presence in the everyday. The familiar grinding stone is an abstract form representing the interplay of the vertical and the horizontal. The egg-like stone used to crush grain or spices rests vertically in the block of stone in which it is rotated. The hollowed “mother” stone in which the “baby” seed-like stone used for grinding is placed serves as a reminder that the preparation of daily food in the household has a cosmic significance. The aniconic derives its significance in daily life from an invisible power that links the use of an object to an eternal and archetypal process working in the whole of creation. The visible and tangible object gives form to what sacramentalizes the ordinary. The great South Indian mystical poet Basavanna exclaims, The pot is a god, The winnowing fan is a god. The stone in the street is a god. The comb is a god. The bowstring is also a god. The bushel is a god and the spouted cup is a god. Gods, gods, there are so many there’s no place left for a foot.        There is only one god. He is our Lord of the Meeting Rivers.9 What is seen and touched is not opposed to the unseen and intangible—rather, both are discovered through the unitive experience that we know as the sacramental. Art is the expression of what Bachelard called the “material imagination.” This poetic reverie is embodied—it is not different from what a scientist tries to view and understand with the rational and discursive mind.

A WORLD OF THE IMAGINATION The imagination is not “imaginary”—it is not the mere fantasy of an inventive mind. Rather, it is a real encounter with the very substance of truth, through the incarnated features of that reality discernible through an aesthetic intuition. Here art and science are the cultural manifestations of a single human consciousness that transcends the polarities of dialectical thought processes. Bachelard writes that the way we think about the reality

Poem in A. K. Ramanujan, trans., Speaking of Siva (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), 84.

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of space is always analogical, using the poetic power of the imagination and intuition.10 This is true for both the artist and the scientist. Space and time may be the essential constituents of an objective reality that we experience through our senses, but the concepts that undergird our ability to conceptualize a space–time continuum are essentially symbolic. What Corbin referred to as the “mundus imaginalis” represented the very structure of the way in which we conceive of the reality of the world.11 Here we go beyond the merely descriptive or literal facts, to grasp the mystery of a spiritual dimension. The image has a life of its own. It is not just something that we make. It is more like a gift that we receive. The image comes to us as though from nowhere. It is not the skill of the artist that enables the image to have a power to give shape to a collective consciousness. There is something gratuitous about the image—the artist or craftsperson is merely a conduit, a midwife so to say, in the process of birthing the image. In that sense the truly creative image surprises the human maker as much as it is thought to be the work of inspiration by the community as a whole. It is this gratuitous quality of the image that transcends time, being meaningful to people who do not know even the culture from which the image came into being. Eastern aesthetics has recognized the sacramental in the image; the murthi or realized image comes through creation as a divine revelation. In traditional societies there was no distinction drawn between the artist and craftsperson. Thomas Merton retells this story of the woodcarver from The Way of Chuang Tzu: The Prince of Lu said to the master carver: “What is your secret?” Khing replied: “I am only a workman: I have no secret. There is only this: When I began to think about the work you commanded I guarded my spirit, did not expend it On trifles that were not to the point … What happened? My own collected thought Encountered the hidden potential in the wood; From this live encounter came the work Which you ascribe to the spirits”12 The image gives voice to the voiceless. It articulates what is deepest in the human spirit. In that sense it is also the hope that belongs to the whole community, and is not the personal expression of any individual. This gives the work of art a universality so that it speaks to all people through all ages. There is a certain kenosis that is an essential aspect of the universal in art. This has been related in Eastern aesthetics to a form of emptiness, of a willingness to receive in humility.

S ee G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, [1958] 1964). See Henri Corbin, Alone with Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ’Arabi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969). 12 Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu (London: Unwin Books, 1970), 110. 10 11

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The mind must become empty in order to receive. This emptiness might be related to silence, to a contemplative state of mind that does not want to impose what is egocentric onto the image that belongs to all. Some may explain this as a form coming from the unconscious, or subconscious. But it is important to also recognize that the image gives consciousness. Another way of understanding the image is that it transforms consciousness.13 The artist Cezanne repeatedly returned to the motif of the bathers.14 For him the naked body plunging into water represented an imaginal immersion into the natural world. He also spoke of “swimming through air,” feeling with his sensitive body the movement of the wind through the branches of trees. What he could not see he could apprehend through forms that he found in the landscape.

THE RHYTHM OF FESTIVALS AND THE CYCLES OF THE SEASONS Elements of fire and water, to be noted in the hot and dry season of summer, followed by the rainy monsoon time or again air and earth, which are symbolized by the flight of the bird or the movement of the serpent, are important ways of understanding the visual forms that characterize the landscape as expressed through poetic metaphors. At the base of all sacramental life is the elemental. Every sacrament, including the system of Samskaras, links the physical and material with a spiritual awakening. Public festivals are a way of demonstrating the connection between culture and the cycles of nature. The rhythms of nature that alternate between elements such as fire and heat with a season of rain and cloud, which fertilizes the earth, so that growth and organic fruitfulness transforms the land, are all reflected in the way that seasons transform the life of communities. The sacramental life of the individual is reflected in the rhythms created by the interaction of the elements. These are characterized as times of movement, followed by periods of rest or repose. In human consciousness we have the rhythm of action and contemplation, physical work with the material world as against an inner world of playful dreaming. The elements that we experience as material states governing the quality of things indicate an inner ethical perception of the human mind, concerned with the harmonious way in which we should relate to our natural environment. Conflicting realities such as creation and destruction, or gravity and resistance as opposed to freedom and grace in the rhythms of nature, are seen as an ethical order standing in contrast to nature’s chaos. Such an ethical viewpoint indicates a human understanding of natural processes. Sacramentality is very much related to the rhythms of nature, and our response to the patterns created by our life working with things. Objects of use become symbols of our inner self-consciousness. The poet Kabir talks about kneading clay to make a pot, and then realizes that the clay itself speaks to its maker, reminding the potter that one day the body will again return to clay. Another symbol of working with natural materials is that of the weaver. The weaving of a fine piece of cloth reminds the weaver that the body itself is woven over a period of

S ee A. Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (Frogmore, St Albans: Paladin, [1967] 1970). Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) wrote to Zola in 1858: “Zola the swimmer / strikes fearlessly / Through the limpid water / His sensitive arms / Are spread joyously / In the limpid waters” (Kendall 1988, p. 20). 13 14

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time when the fetus is in the womb, and limbs are knit together as the child develops, the skin being like a soft and perfectly fashioned fabric. Kabir concludes, Where do you come from? Where are you going? Get the news from your body!15 The covenantal relation between the material and spiritual is reflected in the marriage that is both elemental and societal. In South Asian folk culture it is believed that the neem (margosa) tree, which is a tree of healing, is married to the sacred fig tree (pipal or bodhi tree), which is the Tree of Wisdom, under which the Buddha gained enlightenment. The idea is that where families come together and marriages between individuals are arranged and solemnized, or where birth and death are sacramentalized, the web of the everyday in life reflects the coming together of sky and earth, land and water, fruit and seed from which new life comes after it is buried in the soil. In this way also the temporary meeting place of the village pandal is constructed for a period of celebration, as when the agricultural god of the earth, known as Ganesha, is fashioned out of clay from the bed of the village pond. Traditionally this figure of the elephant-headed god is installed beneath a naturally constructed shelter made of grass and woven leaves decorated with fruits and the pithy stems of the plantain with its drop-like flower and rich cluster of bananas, signifying the plentiful harvest. A season of songs, dramas, and other cultural events takes place for a set number of days, after which the figure of Ganesha is carried back to the pond from which, often, the clay was first collected; there the god of the fields, and agricultural plenty is immersed to dissolve back into the clay bed from which the village potter first made the figure of this Lord of Culture. Culture, like nature, has its cycles of becoming, followed by dissolution and returning to the substance from which all things are fashioned. It is here that the festival of life gains its meaning.

THE BODY AS A SACRAMENTAL SPACE In many folk cultures, the very act of dancing and feasting together takes place often around an open air bonfire, creating a joyous space, where the human body becomes itself the dwelling place for the divine. The spiritual cannot be confined to the built structures that we designate as places of worship, whether they are conceived of as a temple, church, mosque, or gurudwara (“the doorway of the Guru”). Mystical poets like Kabir have insisted that it is in the human heart that the Creator of the Universe is enshrined. When I first experienced the celebration of an Indian indigenous community or Adivasis,16 in the tribal belt of Eastern India, I was struck by the way that dancing was not just a form of exhibiting the grace of the youthful body but was rather a participation in a shared movement of the spirit. I was told that the community dance was a form of forgetting the body, of losing the self in a community experience of physical participation in the whole rhythm that is engendered by the beating of the drum.

L. Hess, Bodies of Song (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015), 39. Adivasi: those who resided in a place from the beginning, similar to the term “aboriginal.”

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The drum is itself an expression of a sacramental rhythm, which is like the beating heart of the body.17 The beating of the mother’s heart that the baby in the womb is conscious of is this primal rhythm that is the creative pulse of the whole universe. The individual person, drawn into the dance, is transformed by an unselfconscious impulse to move with others and the whole landscape in unison, where the separate person becomes at one with the All, immersed in a sense of the land of which culture is a part. This joyous celebration is at once physical and cosmic. The dancer is no longer looking outward at the external audience, as the dance is not a spectacle, but is introverted into what becomes a profoundly personal incorporation into a body experience that goes beyond the individual person, including everyone and everything. Here the sacramental is expressed in the dance, and the gestures of participation in the rhythms of life. These basic physical movements can also be related to the movement that we find elaborated in the ritual movement known as parikrama.18 This physical movement of the graceful body, which circumambulates a sanctified place, precedes many dance sequences. I have often seen acts of folk worship that begin with a gesture of bowing, or even prostrating before a holy tree or rock, which represent aniconic symbols of a living holy Presence. Such an act of greeting is the point of entry into a hallowed space, followed by the worshipper moving in a clockwise path around the material objects that act as markers of that space. Such spaces are often referred to as being “not made by human hands,” arising from the earth itself like the termite mound that emerges from the land from its own natural power. Visible signs of divine energy that are recognized in natural forms are marked with powders such as white ash (vibhuthi) or red powder (kum-kum) together with the golden turmeric powder; these colors indicate that significant aniconic forms found in nature point to an energy that is invisible to the human eye. Material objects can also define a sacred space and are recognized as sacramental. Cotton threads are wound round the trunk of a tree or evocative lump of rock to show that this form has been ordained in some way by giving it a sacred thread, like a young initiate is given the sacred thread when entering the adult stage of life. The shade beneath the trees of a holy grove or under a cluster of overhanging rocks constitutes a primordial sense of shelter or spiritual protection. As in the story of the woodcarver, prior to making an image, the artist or craftsperson “sees” in natural forms the image that the creative imagination is able to release for the edification of the whole community. What is finally revealed in the image made by human hands is first evoked from nature. The “idol” or material object is not taken literally to constitute the Divine Presence. The murthi is not an “idol” in that sense. Rather it is a recognition of what lies immanent in all natural forms. The murthi itself, like the natural shelter that enshrines it, is temporal, falling into disuse once its function as a marker is no longer significant.

The Adivasi drum called Mandar drum is made of clay with leather diaphragms on either side. It is played horizontally. The resounding taut surfaces covering the open ends of the Maadal are made from animal skin. Mythically it is related to the reclining human body. 18 Parikrama: circumambulate, generally in a clockwise direction. In folk culture, we find sacred trees, termite mounds, or stones are circumambulated as a sign of devotion. This gesture is an important aspect of temple worship, and also pilgrim paths. 17

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THE SACRAMENTAL LANGUAGE OF PHYSICAL GESTURES Body gestures and elemental signs are part of a nonverbal way of consecrating what is held to be sacred. Such gestures lead naturally to the visible sign that is more universal and understandable than the written word, especially when that word is in a language not intelligible to folk believers, who do not belong to the dominant group whose communication is through written texts representing a formalized canon of ritual rubrics. Spontaneous body language goes beyond a literal understanding of the body as a visible and tangible object. The anointing of a sacred object with oil or other liquid substance is an important act of sacramentality; the very process of touching and bathing are primary forms of blessing or sanctifying. The word for worship in Indian languages is puja, which is thought to be a term coming from the act of anointing a sacred object, touching or smearing a stone or hallowed ground in front of a shrine, with a semiliquid substance using the hands. It is suggested that this word comes from a non-Sanskritic term meaning “to spread,” or make ready a space, like spreading wet clay or cow dung on the ground, in order to prepare it for an important action. Such preparations are made for the threshing floor on which the crop of grain is spread, or on the ground where a dance is to be performed.

A LAMP LIT UNDER A TREE A vivid memory that I have from my childhood is of a large tree under which there was a low platform with a little village shrine. Passing this tree at night, on the way to my home, I remember seeing an earthen lamp, that someone had lit in the shrine, leaving it to burn silently in the darkness. This earthen lamp (deepa), shone out in the darkness with the overshadowing branches of the tree creating a kind of cave like space in which the flame of the lamp was burning like a golden seed, kindled among the dark roots of the tree. I was, as a child, mystified as to who had come to light this lamp, which illumined the ground beneath the shadowy tree, filling this mysterious space with its inviting presence. It seemed to me that the flame was like a golden eye, looking at me. This childhood memory has remained with me, with a sense both of awe, but also of something very beautiful and inviting in the dark presence of the tree, apparently untouched by human hands, and speaking to my imagination. Later I was to discover this elemental voice, that comes from the primordial feeling for the earth, water, fire and an intuition of a perennial space that is both what we can offer to our Faith in a power that embraces, and transcends nature, but which is also discovered as a Presence at the very heart of nature. It is this seed of the Divine, symbolized by a simple lamp made from clay, and in which the wick is a loosely rolled cotton strand dipped into the vegetable oil used in the household for cooking, that links the everyday world of the home to the whole of Creation.

THE RITUAL GESTURE OF AARATHI The primordial act of worship arises out of a series of physical gestures. In that sense, one might trace the process of making an object holy to the way in which the hands caress and fashion objects that shape the material reality that we find in the phenomenal world in the local environment, creating a vessel in which the spiritual can be contained. In this way the act of worship makes visible the invisible.

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The Indian concept of prasad or the gift of the sacred has been an essential part of many forms of Indian worship. Prasad is often in the form of something to eat, though it can also be a flower, or something given by the guru as a blessing, and it is linked to another important ritual sign of worship known as aarathi. The gesture of aarathi is the circular waving of lights and also the offering of fruits of the earth, like incense, flowers, purified ash, colored powders and spices, or even water and earth. These natural elements are arranged in a tray and offered in front of the door of a shrine. Aarathi can also be done in the home, by moving the tray in a clockwise circular gesture, as a way of blessing those who are in the house. This rotating gesture using elements from nature is a way of sanctifying a space in imitation of the circling of planets or stars in outer space. The human body is a microcosm, which is able to act out through its gestures a cosmic covenant. In the transitional space between culture and nature, the ritual gesture of aarathi plays a significant role. Gesture represents a body language that predates the spoken word. The physical sign of encircling or encompassing is a gesture of embracing, as well as revealing. A philosophical approach to body language understands this gesture as both welcoming and protecting. The tray is offered as a way of welcoming those who enter the home; community guests are greeted together with the unseen presences that bless the human dwelling. Here both outer and inner worlds meet. The aarathi ritual is enacted as a way of not only inviting but also warding off what might be dangerous. The gesture also reveals what is contained within the sanctum of the home. The flame of the lamp circling before the door of the shrine is meant to show what lies hidden within the mysterious darkness.19 In an effort to incorporate this ancient folk idiom of Indian ritual into the Indian Christian rite of worship, aarathi has sometimes been introduced into the liturgy of the Eucharist. The question has been raised as to the precise meaning of such a physical sign in the context of Christian worship. Does the gesture invite what is made present through the words of consecration, or is the gesture itself a sacramental showing of a reality that this physical movement evokes, rather as the finger pointing reminds the looker of the presence of the moon? The language of the body, as we witness it in ritual dance, is itself sacramental. Worship patterns in primal or folk cultures involve the whole body, with all our physical senses. There is a spontaneity and informality in a devotional worship that springs from the heart and finds expression through bodily gestures and elements that are derived from the local landscape. In fact the body is compared to a field, over which the human consciousness watches, in the sense that the spirit “oversees” the body. The folk shrine is termed “the protector of the field” (‘kshetrapala’), and is constructed out in the open near where people work the land, harvesting the fruits of the earth. We see these shrines constructed by shady trees, sometimes grouped to form a small grove, or built over termite mounds, which are thought to be sacred, and emerging from the vitality of the land itself, unplanned by any human intervention. In fact it is these naturally formed termite mounds that take the shape of a conical, and ridged tumulus, that is the model for the temple superstructure as it developed especially in the southern part of India, where such natural formations are found, and revered by agricultural communities as embodying the mother earth. “The riveting flame magnetizes Dante to accompany Beatrice’s lead as he gazes into her eyes. Beatrice’s eyes, ‘Her holy eyes aflame’ provide the guiding light for the pilgrim.” See foreword (xiv) by Joanne H. Stroud to Gaston Bachelard’s book The Flame of a Candle (Dallas, TX: Dallas Institute, 1988), xiv. 19

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“DARSHAN”: TO SEE THE PRESENCE OF THE DIVINE In the Indian ritual of worship, following on the gesture of aarathi, there is the culminating moment of darshan, which is when the worshipper is finally given the grace of seeing the divine. Diana Eck, in her monograph on darshan, remarks, “ ‘seeing’ in this religious sense is not an act which is initiated by the worshiper. Rather, the deity presents itself to be seen in its image.”20 In the shamanistic dance of Northern Kerala known as Theyyam, the dancer is elaborately adorned with natural materials and then as a final gesture is asked to look into a mirror. In the process the dancer “meditates upon the reflection and experiences a moment when transformed from a person to a medium of divinity.”21 The word darshan implies the moment of seeing, but it is also a way of recognizing the physical presence of the worshipper, when a sacramental act is being performed.22 The worshipper goes to the temple for the darshan of the Deity. The “sat sangh,” or gathering of those searching for Truth (sat), is also a form of darshan. Here we may understand such a gathering as related to a form of dialogue, in which to see is also to be seen. The mutual relation of “the meeting of eyes” has a sacramental dimension. Such a congregational way of physically participating in an act of worship goes beyond a passive listening to the word, actively incorporating the senses of touch and sight with the body’s participation in a spiritual Presence that is an epiphany, a sacramental sign. Seeing is in that way related to tasting, as prasad is related to darshan, both being signs of divine grace. This means participation, to be involved in a sacramental expression of community, reaches beyond an individual act of self-expression. The whole community is involved in a festival, coming together with those who share a common culture, in a shared sacramental communion of seekers after Truth, or sat sangh. The way in which the sacred is visually demonstrated involves the importance of the door, an opening that we look through, and which acts as an entry point for the sacramental mystery to be revealed to those who come to see, and not only hear, the Divine Presence. The importance given to the curtain, or veil which covers the sanctuary, is not just a symbol of separating the Holy from the profane. It is also a sign that the mystery lies hidden and has to be uncovered. Sacramentality is a recognition of the mystery of the Sacred revealed through nature. It is an act of seeing through the door of an enclosed space, of passing beyond what is thought of as the ordinary and every day, to discover the eternal in the present. The act of bathing, of being immersed in the healing power of water, is to be found in many cultures. Indian pilgrims travel long distances to be immersed in the waters of a particular holy place. Such pilgrimages are called tirtha yatra or the journey (yatra) to a particular source, most notably the confluence of waters (tirtha) that is identified as a ford, or a meeting point, where the traveler is able to reach out, and cross over to a further shore. Diana Eck shows that the link between the need for receiving prasad and darshan

Diana Eck, Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited, [1998] 2007), 7. 21 B. Nambiar, The Mirror Idol (Delhi: Art Heritage, 2012), 31. 22 Darshan: Sanskrit term indicating the act of seeing. In temple worship it is the sacramental moment of seeing the Divine Image, when the door of the sanctum sanctorum is opened at the time of aarathi, and the image is revealed, when the priest waves the burning flame of the lamp in front of the image, which is in the dark womb house (garbha griha). It is also a term applied to the six systems of philosophical speculation corresponding in Indian thought to what in Western Christianity might be called theologies. 20

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lies at the heart of the longing to go on pilgrimage. She writes, “The same impulse for the darshan of the image which is at the center of the temple cultus also provides the impetus for pilgrimage.”23

PILGRIMAGE AS A PASSAGE THROUGH THE LANDSCAPE Pilgrimage could be described as a cultural movement—a rite of passage within but also reaching out beyond a given culture. Essentially the pilgrim crosses over boundaries—the limited horizon of a particular place of belonging—to discover what is beyond the “here and now.” This may be a search for cultural roots, but it is also a search for a spiritual transcendence beyond a particular given cultural tradition, to find the very source from which all cultures have evolved. In the Vedic tradition of India, the Himalayan range of mountains represents an ascent to the land of the gods.24 In the biblical world the desert is not only a space of transition but also a meeting with a divine purpose that leads the people to a final discovery of what it means to be a people of God. You shall declare before the Lord your God: “My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down to Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous. … So the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” (Deut. 26:5-11) It is in this context of the liberation of an oppressed and marginalized wandering people that we come to understand the concept of a “pilgrim,” or journeying community, participating in a shared search in the hope of a promised land. Once again we see that essential to a sense of the sacramental is the notion of a spiritual quest, which renders the present as only provisional, a stepping stone on a path that leads to a wholeness of which life is only a path leading to the unknown and as yet unseen. Faith is the essence of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Heb. 11:1) Kenneth Clark writes that the journey is seen as a cultural celebration of the gift of the land.25 Going back to primordial times, a wandering people “sing” the land. The land and its features become a litany. For Eastern thought, as much as for the spiritual vision of the Middle East and also the Western Celtic image of the wayfarer, the pilgrim path is itself thought of as a sacramental way in search of the ultimate treasure, which is a symbol of life as itself a journey. In Indian poetic thought we find the “interior landscape” related to a search for the Beloved, playing on the interlocking themes of absence and presence, a sense of loss and a search for union and fulfillment.26

Eck, Darsan, 63. See E. B. Havell, Himalayas in Indian Art (Delhi: Book Faith India, [1924] 2000). 25 See Kenneth Clark, Landscape Into Art (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961). Kenneth Clark discusses the “Landscape of Symbols” beginning with the garden, but going on to the depiction of the Journey of the Magi by Benozzo Gozzoli where he discusses the ritual procession in the late Gothic landscape, bringing together a narrative of wandering through the landscape, and a spiritual quest. 26 See A. K. Ramanujan, trans., The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994). 23 24

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JESUS AND THE WAY OF LIGHT A whole understanding of the mission of the Early Church is based on the theme of Jesus sending his disciples out to publish the “good news” of the Kingdom of God. This concept of the Church as itself a mission has often been interpreted as being like a military campaign to conquer and subdue, rather than a commission to carry tidings of joy and peace. The very word “missionary” has come to carry negative and imperialistic connotations. But “sending messengers out” has very different implications: communicating, giving the hope of liberation, rather than oppression. An ecclesiology that visualizes a going forth to the ends of the earth has to be understood as a pilgrimage, rather than an imperial campaign. The disciples are sent into the surrounding country in order to give peace and also to receive welcome and hospitality. Here the “way” is dialogical—it is about discovering a new community of believers through dialogue and sharing. It is this aspect of bringing good news that needs to inform a cultural exchange. It is here that sacramentality becomes a sign of crossing over boundaries, rather than containing, and preserving what is thought to be a sacred domain. Unfortunately sacred places and festivals can easily turn into sites of contention. A number of world religions have advanced their claim to universality by taking over what is held to be sacred by others, and appropriating their holy signs and symbols. Jerusalem and Benares, both ancient holy cities, where pilgrims have been drawn to find the roots of their cultural heritage, have also been the meeting places for different cultural streams, each trying to dominate and possess what is holy. In Indian thought, places where people gather to immerse in a sense of the holy have been called sangam, or the meeting of streams of water. Such irrigated and fertile common lands can also be the focus for ancient struggles. The Abrahamic faiths all look to Jerusalem as a center where a new order of creation will be revealed. Varanasi (Benares) on the holy river Ganges has been a place of fording or crossing over from West to East of the Indian subcontinent. It was here that the Lord Buddha gathered his first disciples at Sarnath, and set the Wheel of the Law in motion by delivering his famous “Fire Sermon.” But here also the followers of Shiva believe the axis of the Universe emerged out of the primal waters, revealing Shiva as the Lord of the Cosmos. Later Muslim rulers constructed a great mosque on the ruins of what Hindus believe was their greatest temple to the Cosmic Lord of the Universe. Finally, Indian Christians have also occupied a space in this ancient city that was a major railway junction for the British colonial system.27 By recognizing that what is sacramental is a shared “common land,” we can come to this space in a spirit of dialogue, and mutual respect. It is in this sense that the sacramental is also secular. It is a spiritual realization that we are all responsible for the land on which we live, and for the livelihoods of those who depend on the land for their future fulfillment. The essential creative tension facing the poetic imagination is that the image can be reified and turned into an objective fact. In a number of shrines in Indian places of worship, we find the mirror as a symbol of the Presence. The mirror reflects—we learn to see ourselves in the mirror. The image in the mirror is provisional, affecting the mind like a passing dream. An important concept is related to the image in Jainism: “If one holds a red flower before a glass (mirror), the glass will be red: if one holds up a dark blue flower the glass

As an artist, I was involved in the designing of the first Cathedral of Benares from 1990 to 1992, based on the concept of a Cosmic Mandala representing the sacred city by the holy river. 27

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will be dark blue. Similarly, the mind is changed by the presence of an image.”28 In that sense the image is understood as being like the open space of the pandal, reflecting nature, but essentially transitory. Like a theophany, it breaks through the outward gazing mind to reveal an interior landscape. It is in this sense that the image can become sacramental. The Bright Field I have seen the sun break through To illuminate a small field for a while, and gone my way and forgotten it. But that was the pearl of great price, the one field that had the treasure in it. I realize now that I must give all that I have to possess it. Life is not in hurrying on to the receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. It is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush, to a brightness that seemed as transitory as your youth once, but it is the eternity that awaits you.29

FURTHER READING Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, [1958] 1964. Bachelard, Gaston. Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Dallas, TX: Pegasus Foundation, 1983. Eck, Diana L. Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, [1998] 2007. Eck, Diana L. India: A Sacred Geography. New York: Harmony Books, Random House, 2012. Ramanujan, A. K., trans. The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994.

H. Zimmer, Philosophies of India (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, [1951] 1990), 216. R. S. Thomas, Later Poems, 1972–1982 (London: Macmillan, 1984), 81.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Sacramentality and Music DOROTHEA HASPELMATH-FINATTI

INTRODUCTION: MUSIC AS SACRAMENT? OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES FOR THEOLOGY “All that hath life and breath come now with praises before him”!1 Since ancient times and around the globe, humans have praised their gods with their “life and breath.” They have used their voices and music to sing praises, and in doing so they felt connected to the other singers; they felt uplifted, consoled, even transformed; they experienced the power of faith. Drawing on studies from the dialogue between theology and the natural sciences as well as recent studies on singing I propose understanding sacraments as actions and experiences that combine physical and intellectual aspects of religious ritual, operating in life-transforming ways through fostering human faith and even health, with an impact on social and ethical behaviors. Famously, the understanding of as well as the actions regarded as sacraments or sacramental (sacrament-like) differ between and even within Christian traditions and denominations. In this chapter, the emphasis lies on the simultaneously physical and intellectual characteristics of ritual religious actions and experiences. The claim is that, while worship music cannot be found in any of the official lists of sacraments, it nonetheless shares the main features that characterize sacraments. The physical–mental participation in the sacraments is believed to transform the participants, strengthening faith, community, and ethical behavior. Worship music, as an action that conjoins physical and mental dimensions, can also transform: music in worship can induce faith experiences, foster feelings of bonding, and promote prosocial behavior. This chapter aims to contribute to a better understanding of music as one of the aesthetic strands of the rich texture of sacramental celebrations. Further, this chapter suggests that worship music itself is a “sacramental experience.” Musical activity, in a similar way as a sacramental celebration, involves the human body, mind, community, and environment. Recent studies in different fields of human sciences are continuously uncovering increasingly complex networks of inner (brain and body) and outer (human being and the environment) relations.

Verse 6, second line, from “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty,” by Joachim Neander, English translation by Catherine Winkworth in New English Hymnal (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1986), No. 440. 1

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Anthropological studies now confirm that music, and especially singing, can bring forth experiences of transcendence and foster healing; music-making can strengthen health and longevity and even promote prosocial and compassionate actions. Singing, playing instruments, and listening to music can induce physical transformations, with repercussions for mental health and ethical behavior. Liturgical scholars now find that embodied liturgical and sacramental practices, specifically when engaging with a rich variety of aesthetic and cognitive strands, can augment the chance for the participants to experience transcendence. Worship music is one such strand. At the same time, worship music itself comprises a number of such strands: joint singing combines a variety of voices and musical expressions, especially where there is four-part singing or involvement of instrumental music. These findings lead to the hypothesis that worship music is not just one feature of sacramental liturgies, but that it can achieve what sacraments are believed to accomplish: Worship music can induce experiences of transcendence and faith; it can foster healing and promote prosocial behavior. Two key perspectives follow: Firstly, a deeper understanding of human musical activities can contribute to a deeper understanding of the functioning of the sacraments, which in turn can ferment the ecumenical dialogue on the sacraments and the church. Secondly, if music itself functions in sacramental ways, then music can transform human relationships. Music can foster the understanding between diverse groups of church and society, with healing consequences for the entire environment. A number of theologians are already engaged in an intensified dialogue with the natural and human sciences, and some have already applied these new insights into the human neurological and evolutionary condition to diverse theological subjects. This study introduces concepts of this dialogue, namely from the liturgical theologian Giorgio Bonaccorso, the systematic theologian Markus Mühling, and the intercultural theologian and musicologist Verena Grüter. In a second step, this chapter draws on selected studies on music and singing from various fields of the human sciences (evolutionary anthropology, psychology, and neurobiology) and on theological concepts now engaged in the dialogue with the human sciences.

THEOLOGY IN DIALOGUE WITH THE NATURAL AND HUMAN SCIENCES Liturgical Theology: The Stranded Fabric of Liturgical and Ritual Practices Giorgio Bonaccorso is a Roman Catholic liturgist at the Istituto Liturgico Pastorale in Padua, Italy. In his book Il corpo di Dio. Vita e senso della vita, Bonaccorso outlines the development of the understanding of the relationship between body and mind, or life and soul, in concepts of theology, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. He demonstrates how studies in these fields are uncovering increasingly complex networks of human inner (between body and mind) and outer (between the human being and the environment) relations. Bonaccorso demonstrates how embodied ritual and liturgical practices, particularly when engaging with a variety of aesthetic strands, can bring forth experiences of transcendence.

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One of the manifold studies presented by Bonaccorso was conducted by the researchers Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili.2 The scientists analyzed brain images from Buddhist monks and Franciscan nuns produced during times of meditation and prayer. They found alterations of neural activities in exactly the brain region responsible for orientation. This brain region enables orientation by capacitating the organism to perceive the limits between the self and the environment. What the researchers found was a decisive reduction of neural activity in the orientation system during meditation and prayer. In consequence, the perceived borders between the self and the rest of reality weakened and vanished. As the monks and nuns affirmed, in intense meditation and prayer the self ceases to perceive any limits; it feels connected to everything around it.3 The researchers conclude that the brain is fitted with a predisposition to experience transcendent realities.4 Further, human society has developed not only mythical stories but also ritual behaviors. In the view of the researchers, this is owed to the fact that, for the story to become an experience that is emotionally relevant, the stories need to be enacted. Bonaccorso describes emotion, cognition, and action (“emozione, cognizione e azione”) as three major aspects of ritual and, more specifically, liturgy. For Bonaccorso, ritual is the interconnection between action and emotion, while the “story” that is woven into the ritual represents the cognitive aspect of a ritual or liturgy. Ritual activity is an activity that includes emotion and is a prerequisite for the conscious cognitive and intellectual aspects. Before human beings begin to act consciously, there is the movement of the body. Physical movement is linked to emotion. Together, action and emotion serve as the fertile ground for cognition. A ritual is performed as a movement of bodies that brings forth emotions and religious consciousness. What follows is that specifically when embedded in the context of ritual liturgy, a religious story can function as a living source of faith. The ritual or liturgical time of the reading of the “story”—or biblical reading—is a time of heightened complexity. Liturgical gestures, smells, meals, and different arts all add to the complex structure of time.5 The related complex emotions mediate between the self and the outside.6 Limits can be overcome, transcendence can be experienced.

Mühling: Loops. Networks of Inner and Outer Relations: The Brain and the Body; Humans and Evolution Within the German-speaking academic context, Markus Mühling is one of the first theologians to engage with the international dialogue between theology and neuroscience as well as evolutionary theories. In his book on neurobiology, evolution, and theology with the telling title Resonances, he engages with recent research in the two fields of brain studies and evolutionary theory.7

Eugene D’Aquili, Andrew Newberg, and Vince Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001). 3 Giorgio Bonaccorso, Il corpo di Dio. Vita e senso della vita (Assisi: Citadella editrice, 2006), 214. 4 Ibid., 215. 5 Ibid., 240. 6 Ibid., 237. 7 Markus Mühling, Resonances: Neurobiology, Evolution and Theology. Evolutionary Niche Construction, the Ecological Brain and Relational-Narrative Theology (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014). 2

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Mühling introduces the “ecological brain theory.” Here, the functions of the brain appear to be functionally interrelated not only with the entire body but also with the environment. Further, the subject of interrelatedness can be found not only in concepts of brain studies but also in evolutionary theories. While the Darwinian theory is based on the adaptation of individuals due to pressures of selection, more recent concepts now focus on types of interactions called “niche construction” activities.8 It is not only organisms that change and adapt to pressures but also the environment that changes and is changed by numerous influences. Both theories, the ecological brain and niche construction, are described as open systems, or “open loops.”9 While Mühling, as a systematic theologian, finds important similarities between niche construction theory and salvation history, he does not delve into the question where God’s history with humankind can actually be experienced in the life of a believer. This study proposes taking Mühling’s open loops as a way of describing what happens in the context of worship singing. The concept of open loops can serve as a model for a deeper understanding of worship singing. The theory on the brain and the body, as introduced by Mühling, can illustrate the personal experience of music: While we sing, play instruments, or listen to music, our brain functions within the body, words are pronounced, melodies are brought forth, the sound already reaches our ears and our bodies receive sounds, vibrating. We produce and receive emotions. Our brain functions as an open loop, in connectivity with the entire body and with the environment. We breathe in and out. Through music, we can experience that we receive faith, physically. We are moved and slightly altered. The theory of niche construction can further illustrate the communal experience of worship singing: we sing within our church community. However, in singing, a Christian community is all “open loops.” In singing, one community is linked to other church communities, and to humankind and creation. Through music and singing, we praise God as the one church. We already live what we are to become.

Verena Grüter: Contingent Experiences of Transcendence and Transformation in an Interreligious Music Festival Verena Grüter is a German theologian and musicologist specializing in intercultural theology. In her book Klang—Raum—Religion,10 Grüter analyses an interreligious and international music festival in Bavaria, Germany. Here, Grüter joins extensive empirical studies (interviews conducted with festival organizers and participants, both religious leaders and musicians) with theoretical insights from theology, religious studies, musicology, and sociology. For her analysis, she delves into the history of “functions and styles”11 of religious music in connection with the religions that were part of the festival. Different religions

Ibid., 144–66. Ibid., 81. 10 Verena Grüter, Klang—Raum—Religion (Zürich: TVZ, 2017). 11 Cf. her ­chapter 2.3: “Funktionen und Stile religiöser Musik im Rahmen des Festivals,” in Grüter, 77–115. 8 9

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show different approaches to music. In addition, religious attitudes to music are subject to change through history. In various religious contexts, such time spans when the use of music was limited or even prohibited were followed by epochs of a new endorsement of music. The festival “Musica Sacra International” is a sacred music festival. It takes place every two years in the Bavarian town Marktoberdorf. The festival was not designed as a religious or interreligious festival but as a music festival. However, the concerts always take place in religious spaces, such as churches and mosques. In her interviews, Grüter focused on the question of religious experience. She asked to what extent and in which ways the participation in this interreligious music festival could be defined as a religious experience. The majority of respondents were explicit in their view that these musical experiences should be described as “holistic”—as experiences that include aspects of “emotion, cognition and action.”12 Here, Grüter’s analysis comes surprisingly close to Bonaccorso’s. When referring to experiences of singing, some of the musicians spoke about ethical implications. They found that joint singing as well as listening to singing could elicit love. In some cases, enemies became friends.13 While these exceptional experiences were not regarded as religious, some of the respondents would qualify them as experiences of “sharing” and of “faith springing up from singing.”14 When people of different religious affiliations sang together, experiences of “sharing” were perceived. In participating in the joint activity of singing, mutual enrichment could be experienced and shared. From the perspective of theoretical interreligious dialogue, such sharing still seems to be a quite distant vision.15 However, in joint singing and listening, transformations of relationships could be witnessed. Here, Grüter speaks of new realities16 that were constructed and of interactions and moments of cross-pollination,17 enabled through the joint musical experience. These experiences of sound affect the bodies of the participants and bring them into states of vibration or resonance. The sound vanishes, but the effects on the body can prove to persist permanently.18 Grüter describes the joint musical experience as an interruption, a liminal “turn” experience, a destruction of order that opens up new freedoms and rights, if only for a short time space. When this destabilizing experience is repeated time and again, a new kind of order can emerge.19 In the context of the liminal experiences observed during the festival, participants tried to transgress the limits of their own religious certainties. Participants felt that they could reach out in love to people of other belief systems in ways they had not known before. New alliances could be imagined.

In using the terms “emotion, cognition and action,” Grüter refers to the German psychologist Matthias Jung (Grüter, Klang—Raum—Religion, 210). 13 Grüter, Klang—Raum—Religion, 160. 14 Ibid., 162. 15 Ibid., 163. 16 Ibid., 308. 17 In German, “Wechselwirkungen” (Grüter, Klang—Raum—Religion, 310). 18 Grüter, Klang—Raum—Religion, 311. Here, Grüter refers to insights from performance theories as presented by Erika Fischer-Lichte. 19 Grüter, Klang—Raum—Religion, 316. 12

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ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES: SINGING AND MUSIC CAN INDUCE PHYSICAL TRANSFORMATIONS, WITH REPERCUSSIONS FOR MENTAL HEALTH AND PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR Different fields of anthropological studies are now engaging with music and singing. Different studies engage with the importance of music for the development of language, with aspects of the role of music for health and society.

Music as “Scaffolding” for Language In their study Music and Early Language Acquisition,20 Anthony Brandt, Molly Gebrian, and L. Robert Slevc joined their competencies in music performance, musicology, and brain imaging to put forward their hypothesis: Music precedes language in human development. They describe music as a kind of “scaffolding” for language acquisition: Language is typically viewed as fundamental to human intelligence. Music, while recognized as a human universal, is often treated as an ancillary ability—one dependent on or derivative of language. In contrast, we argue that it is more productive from a developmental perspective to describe spoken language as a special type of music.21 On the way to establishing their hypothesis, Brandt and his colleagues come up with a proposed definition for music: “Music is creative play with sound; it arises when sound meets human imagination.”22 Speech uses sound in a creative way; but differing from music, speech is referential, is symbolic, and is used for communication. But “while speech is symbolic, sound is the bearer of the message.”23 The authors show how children, while learning to speak a language, play with sounds. However, this play is not restricted to young age. The authors emphasize, “Our abilities to engage in and appreciate ‘creative play with sound’ and to consider sounds irrespective of referential function lie at the heart of early language acquisition.”24 When children listen to language they first listen to the sound, to the musical aspect, of language. In the same way, while learning to use language actively, they first use the musical aspects: they cry, or they use vowel sounds, continually increasing the spectrum of musical expressions. “Infants use the musical aspects of language (rhythm, timbral contrast, melodic contour) as a scaffolding for the later development of semantic and syntactic aspects of language.”25 In the context of this study, the authors present language acquisition as a process that starts as a mainly passive and thus “receiving” activity. Language learning starts before birth. Prenatal infants are immersed into sounds and into the musical features of language.26 They recognize voices and musical styles, and they react to rhythms.

Anthony Brandt, Molly Gebrian, and L. Robert Slevc, “Music and Early Language Acquisition,” Frontiers in Psychology 3 (2012): 1–17. 21 Ibid., 1. 22 Ibid., 3. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 6. 26 Brandt, Gebrian and Slevc, 3, 327. 20

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Young children listen to their mothers’ voices. Mothers use their voices in a more musical way when speaking to their children than when speaking to adults. What children can grasp first is the “music of the speech,” the prosody. Only later do they learn to understand the referential features of language. While learning to speak, young children practice their repertoire of musical language features. Only later do they learn to build the referential meaning of language into the musical “scaffolding.” And only from now on music and language develop more separately. However, the continuing development of musical skills helps language learning not only in children. Various studies, as outlined by Brandt et al., give clear evidence of a strong relationship between musical training and language learning skills.27 As the authors make clear, music is necessary and central to human development. It is learned and trained.28 However, music does not serve a clearly defined purpose. Music is non-referential. As “creative play,” music can be understood as a gift to the human being and to humankind. This gift is a prerequisite for other purpose-led human activities, such as the use of language. If music is the scaffolding for language, language functions within the framework of musical behaviors. Mühling links the brain to the body in the way of “open loops” that are “resonating.” The relationship between language and music could be described in a similar way. Language could be seen as an open-loop activity that “resonates” within the musical “loop.” And further, language and music together function in constant exchange with their environment, as a joint open loop, resonating. In worship music and singing, language and music are interlinked, influencing each other, resonating with music as the primary gift. Sacraments, like baptism and the Eucharist, are characterized by physical actions that are interlinked with language, resonating with the body as the primary reality and gift. Worship music functions in similar ways as the sacraments. If music is the “scaffolding” for language, and language resonates within the framework of its pertaining musical features, then the spoken elements of liturgy cannot exist without music. Readings, prayers, and the sermon are not without musical features. As in all uses of language, the gift of music is then a prerequisite for such purpose-led human activities as readings, prayers, and preaching. Here, new light could be shed on the historical and still continuing dissent between more or less “musical” religious traditions. The question of liturgical music and singing can appear in a new light.

Choir Singing and Heart Rate In their interdisciplinary study on the relationship between choir singing and well-being, Music structure determines heart rate variability of singers,29 authors Björn Vickhoff, Helge Malmgren, Rickard Åström, Gunnar Nyberg, Seth-Reino Ekström, Mathias Engwall, Johan Snygg, Michael Nilsson, and Rebecka Jörnsten explored factors that may lead to experiences of well-being often reported in the context of choir singing. They hypothesized that one important reason for these positive effects of communal singing

Ibid., 5–6. Ibid., 5. 29 Björn Vickhoff, Helge Malmgren, Rickard Åström et al., “Music Structure Determines Heart Rate Variability of Singers,” in Frontiers in Psychology (July 2013): 1–16. 27 28

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could lie in the fact that “singing demands slower than normal respiration, which may in turn affect heart activity.”30 In order to validate their hypothesis, the authors focused “on the interplay between two oscillators, the respiratory organ and the heart, while singing.”31 The relationship between the respiration and heart rate variability (HRV) plays an important role. While both are irregular, the pronounced coupling of the two has calming effects both subjectively and biologically and is “beneficial for cardiovascular function.”32 By contrast, if the coupling is weak, circulation complications may occur. This is why guided breathing, as in yoga, can have regulating effects on blood pressure and heart rate. The authors here refer to a study on rosary prayer,33 a practice shown to enhance cardiovascular rhythms: “Recitation of the rosary, and also of yoga mantras, slowed respiration to almost exactly 6/min, and enhanced heart rate variability. The rosary might be viewed as a health practice as well as a religious practice.”34 Through their study, the authors were able to show how the structure of a song, and respiration and heart rate of the choir singers are connected: “Unison singing of regular song structures makes the hearts of the singers accelerate and decelerate simultaneously.”35 During the study, groups of choir singers were asked to engage in three consecutive singing tasks: humming while breathing individually, joint hymn-singing with free breathing, slow mantra singing while breathing only between phrases. During singing, the participants’ heart rate and respiration were recorded. Results showed that hymn- and mantra singing had significantly more influence on the HRV than humming. “Together, the results indicate a strong connection between song structure and HR patterns.”36 This leads to the observation that “music structure guides respiration for singers.”37 Building on further studies, the authors conclude, Stephen W. Porges, argues in his Polyvagal Theory that social engagement demands a calm, unthreatened state combined with arousing motivation to participate.38 These functions, as Porges found, are linked not only to the heart but also to the autonomic nerve system (ANS) and to the laryngeal vocal cord muscles. The state of the ANS is thus audible in human emotional prosody. Drawing on Porges’s findings, the authors conclude, Choir singing coordinates the neurophysiological activity for timing, motor production on words and melody, respiration and HRV. It has been proposed that joint action leads to joint perspectives … and joint intentions. … In other words: singers may

Ibid., 1. Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 2. 34 Luciano Bernardi, Peter Sleight, Gabriele Bandinelli et al., “Effect of Rosary Prayer and Yoga Mantras on Autonomic Cardiovascular Rhythms: Comparative Study,” British Journal of Medicine 1 (2001): 1446–9 (here 1446). 35 Vickhoff et al., “Music Structure Determines Heart Rate Variability of Singers,” 1. 36 Ibid., 7. 37 Ibid., 12. 38 Ibid., 13 [sic]. Here, the authors refer to Porges’s early presentation of his “Polyvagal Theory.” See Stephen W. Porges, “Orienting in a Defensive World: Mammalian Modifications of Our Evolutionary Heritage. A Polyvagal Theory,” Psychophysiology 32:4 (1995): 301–18. 30 31

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change their ego-centric perspective of the world to a we-perspective which causes them to perceive the world from the same point of view.39 Here, religious rituals, as widely performed in different ways around the globe, come into play: The vagal effect of breathing is, as pointed out, an ANS reaction. It is hardwired and thus universal. It could therefore be expected that various cultures use this technique wherever people gather to achieve relaxed communicative states. Interestingly, coordinated respiratory activity, irrespective if it is caused by yoga breathing, mantra chanting, praying or singing is ritually performed in most religions. This is a common factor, more so than the semantic content of beliefs.40 This study presented by Björn Vickhoff and his colleagues shows how the joint activity of choir singing can lead to consequences other than the traditional purposes of communal singing. Human beings often sing together without an explicit purpose. They often sing simply out of pleasure. Joint singing serves as a festive element in communal events and religious liturgies. However, choir singing has not often been connected to medical or ethical aims. Joint singing can be regarded foremost as an aimless activity. However, as more recent studies indicate, choir singing can now be found to be beneficial in medical as well as in ethical perspectives. The seemingly aimless activity of singing proves to strengthen health and well-being, not only for individuals but also for entire groups of singers.41 From the perspective of faith, sacramental actions promote spiritual health for individuals and for communal life. This study demonstrates that communal singing can foster communal and individual health and well-being.

Lavretsky et al., Benefits of Buddhist Chanting Meditation for Family Dementia Caregivers In the study A pilot study of yogic meditation for family dementia caregivers with depressive symptoms: Effects on mental health, cognition, and telomerase activity,42 Helen Lavretsky and her colleagues conducted research into the effects of yogic meditation on “family dementia caregivers,” for example, people engaged in caring for a family member with dementia. The researchers worked with a group of caregivers who were themselves affected by mild symptoms of depression. For eight weeks, one part of the group participated in a brief daily yogic meditation, consisting of an ancient chanted mantra (with the words “birth-life-death-rebirth,” chanted first aloud and then in a whisper) accompanied by repetitive finger movements and the visualization of light. A control group listened to a CD with relaxing instrumental music for the same time span each day. As the results could

ickhoff et al., “Music Structure Determines Heart Rate Variability of Singers,” 13. V Ibid. 41 Here, the study authors refer to Stephen W. Porges’s “Polyvagal Theory,” in Stephen W. Porges, “The Polyvagal Theory: Phylogenetic Substrates of a Social Nervous System,” International Journal of Psychophysiology 42 (2001): 123–46. Porges’s theory strengthens the evidence that members of a singing group will not only feel better and become healthier but by arriving at a “calm state” also become more open to spontaneous social engagement. 42 Helen Lavretsky, Prabha Siddarth, Nora Nazarian et al., “A Pilot Study of Yogic Meditation for Family Dementia Caregivers with Depressive Symptoms: Effects on Mental Health, Cognition, and Telomerase Activity.” Author Manuscript (National Institutes of Health (NIH), PubMed Central (PMC), January 2014), 1–14. 39 40

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prove, the chanting group showed “significantly lower levels of depressive symptoms and greater improvements of mental health”43 compared to the music listening group. The results are to be understood in the context of family dementia caregiving: the task of caring for a mentally impaired family member exposes caregivers to an especially high level of stress. Resilience to stress decreases with age, and caregivers are often of an advanced age. In addition, chronic stress leads to a higher risk of developing depression. The study confirms a number of positive effects of traditional chanting meditation, even after a short time of brief (in this case twelve minutes every day, at the same time of the day) daily practice, and in comparison with the control group. Mental health and cognitive abilities improved more in the meditation group than in the music listening group. The most impressive result is found in the influence of meditation on cellular aging: the “telomerase activity”44 improved by a factor of 43.3 percent in the meditation group, compared to 3.7 percent in the music listening group.45 In addition, the researchers found significant correlations between the improvement of mental health, cognition, and telomerase. They “observed close relationships between telomerase levels, levels of depression, and anxiety and distress are novel and deserve further examination.”46 This study strengthens the hypothesis that singing, in a context of repetition and ritual, is beneficial for mental as well as for physical health. It underlines how both are interrelated. Some of the benefits, especially the decrease of depression and anxiety, may also be achieved by the regular exercise of listening to relaxation music. However, telomerase activity, responsible for cell health and even linked to longevity, was found to increase much more in the chanting group. The reason could be the interlacing of several activities within this type of Buddhist meditation practice: “Because Kirtan Kriya had several elements of using chanting, mudras and visualization, there was a ‘brain fitness’ effect in addition to stress reduction that contributed to the overall effect of the meditation.”47 Here, the research on Buddhist chant can help gain a deeper understanding of the effects of worship singing. Religious or traditional song or chant is an activity that interrupts the usual daily occupations. While there is no explicit purpose, there may well be an “outcome”: the chanting activity improves mental health states and reduces depression; it furthers cognitive abilities and leads to the slowdown of cellular aging through the telomerase activity. It is obvious that ritual singing has healing effects. Further, this kind of singing activity not only helps the singers to live up to a stressful and demanding task, but it improves cell health and life expectancy through telomerase activity, in ways that exceed typical states of cell aging in healthy people who are not exposed to stressful situations. This study shows that more than simply listening to relaxing music, the regular chanting of words that signify life, death, and rebirth can strengthen the singers, help them to assist others, and even add to one’s life span where, without the singing, life expectancy would

avretsky et al. 2013; Author Manuscript: 2014, 1. L “A telomere is a region of repetitive DNA sequences at the end of a chromosome, which protects the end of the chromosome from deterioration. Shortened telomere length and reduced telomerase (the cellular enzyme primarily responsible for telomere length and maintenance) are associated with premature mortality and predict a host of health risks and diseases” (Lavretsky et al. 2013; Author Manuscript: 2014). 45 Lavretsky et al. 2013; Author Manuscript: 2014, 1. 46 Ibid., 7. 47 Ibid., 7–8. 43 44

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be reduced. As Bonaccorso has shown, the layering and interlacing of aesthetic activities can augment the probability of experiences of transcendence or faith. Regular ritual chanting and singing can then function in similar ways as the sacraments, as the sacraments are believed to transform the lives and actions of those who take part in them. Through the workings of the sacraments, transcendence can be experienced, faith can be strengthened, and those who suffer or assist others in need are believed to receive new strengths and hope for life to be restored.

Sebastian Kirschner and Michael Tomasello, “Joint Music Making Promotes Prosocial Behavior in 4-Year-Old Children” In their study “Joint music making promotes prosocial behavior in 4-year-old children,”48 Sebastian Kirschner and Michael Tomasello, psychologists at the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, explored the effects of joint music-making, in this case in young children. They hypothesized “that music evolved into a tool that fosters social bonding and group cohesion, ultimately increasing prosocial ingroup behavior and cooperation.”49 In order to test their hypothesis, they compared the behavior of two groups of children with nearly identical tasks, with “the same level of social and linguistic interaction.”50 The only difference between the two playful activities the children engaged in was that one group, but not the other, used music. As a result, the study showed clearly that joint music-making “increases subsequent spontaneous cooperative and helpful behaviour.”51 Kirschner and Tomasello developed two games to be played by the children in both groups. The first game included a situation of need where children would benefit from mutual help. The second game offered possibilities of “cooperative problem solving.” The children involved in the musical version of the game had sung together and jointly used simple percussion instruments. As a result, the active engagement in joint musicmaking significantly improved their helping behaviors in the first game and in the second game helped them to cooperate, much more so than the “nonmusical” group. “Children of both genders helped one another more after joint music making … girls were more helpful than boys overall …, but the magnitude of the difference between conditions was similar for both genders.”52 The second, “spontaneous cooperative problem solving,” game arrived at similar results. However, within the music-making group, the second game was accompanied by a much higher frequency of verbal communication between the cooperating players than in the group without music. As a result, the study leads to a “clear evidence for music and dance functioning as behavioral tools for mutual social bonding.”53 As observed in our study, the use of discrete pitches in culture-specific scales helped to harmonically blend the children’s voices along with the experimenter’s singing and the

Sebastian Kirschner and Michael Tomasello, “Joint Music Making Promotes Prosocial Behavior in 4-Year-Old Children,” Evolution and Human Behavior 31 (2010): 354–64. 49 Ibid., 354. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 360. 53 Ibid., 361. 48

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playback music. This joint singing experience alone might have created the stronger commitment and cooperative attitude we observed during the dependent measures.54 The authors of the study suggest that one main reason for these astonishing results may be the “joint intentionality” in music-making, which can even be found in contemporary Western cultures where music is used for “social bonding” at many public occasions, such as sporting events, worship, and weddings, supporting an understanding of music as a collectively intended activity. Compared to the use of language which is most effective in mobilizing joint intentionality for goal-directed behavior, music might be more efficacious in mobilizing joint intentionality per se—in the sense of feeling a “we” unit, thus getting people to experience each other as co-active, similar and cooperative members of a group.55 Joint music-making is then, for the authors of the study, an “expressive mode that is beyond the referential and propositional use of words in language.”56 While there seems to be no “goal” in joint music-making, the joint activity creates group experiences. It promotes the possibility of common feelings and emotions. If there is an “outcome,” it is the higher probability that group members will help each other. Readiness for this comes spontaneously. As the study shows, the chances of finding readiness for mutual help among participants are higher in the music-making group than in the “non-singing” group. However, this help is not a necessary consequence of the joint singing experience—its probability is only increased by it. The children do not sing in order to help each other. In contrast, they sing, they experience themselves as a group in joint singing, and then they help each other. Their singing is an aimless activity. This study compares two similar enactments of children’s games, only one of them containing joint singing, instrumental rhythmical music, and dance. In some ways, the musical game can be compared to liturgy: Liturgy, at least in many traditions, contains joint singing and instrumental rhythmical music and, somewhat less frequently (at least in the Christian context), there is dancing. Liturgy, in the words of Romano Guardini, is aimless activity: Grave and earnest people, who make the knowledge of truth their whole aim, see moral problems in everything, and seek for a definitive purpose everywhere, tend to experience a peculiar difficulty where the liturgy is concerned … They must learn not to be continually yearning to do something, to attack something, to accomplish something useful, but to play the divinely ordained game of the liturgy in liberty and beauty and holy joy before God.57 This study results in clear evidence: The activity of joint singing gives rise to an enhanced readiness for prosocial behavior, at least within the young children involved. The link between the aimless game and the social behavior is not an ethical appeal but a sung group experience.

Ibid., 362. Ibid. 56 Ibid., 357. 57 Romano Guardini, The Spirit of the Liturgy (originally published 1961; reprint ed. Morrisville, NC: Lulu Press, 2015), 42. 54 55

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Here, joint music-making and singing is linked to social bonding and spontaneous cooperation. The music-making children seem to act more in the ways of “open loops” as described by Mühling in the niche construction theory than the non–music-making group. Joint music-making brings forth prosocial behavior—in the same way as the sacraments are believed to affect group cohesion and human cooperation and compassionate behavior.

CONCLUDING REMARKS These findings lead to the hypothesis that worship music is not only one feature of sacramental liturgies, but music can achieve what sacraments are believed to accomplish: worship music can induce experiences of transcendence and faith; it fosters healing and promotes prosocial behavior. Two key perspectives follow: Firstly, a deeper understanding of human musical activities can contribute to a deeper understanding of the functioning of the sacraments, which in turn can ferment the ecumenical dialogue on the sacraments and the church. Secondly, if music itself functions in sacramental ways, then music can transform human relationships. Music can foster the understanding between diverse groups of church and society, with healing consequences for the entire environment. As the studies presented here show, the dialogue with the natural and human sciences can help theology to understand human life and activity as conditioned through the physical existence of the stream of evolutionary development. As the liturgical theologian Bonaccorso has found, human beings develop multilayered rituals, arts, and music through which they can experience that they belong to a wider communion and reality beyond their usually perceived limits. The systematic theologian Mühling traces several “loops” that open up to a wider space: the brain is open to the body in order to function, the body is open to the environment. The human being is open to humankind, and humankind, in turn, functions in resonance with the wider environment, engaged in niche construction activities. Before we can reason and use language, we are already immersed into sounds and music. Musical behavior can heal and even renew our life. Human beings can display compassionate behavior even when they are not taught explicitly how to assist others: joint singing promotes prosocial behavior. The studies evidence that music can do what the sacraments are believed to bring forth. When it comes to the question of how sacraments “work,” research on music and singing can bring some intriguing aspects to light. Sacraments engage the human being with body and mind. The sacraments do not only engage the human body and mind. They also connect human and Divine action. The gravest dividing line between denominations has long been the question: “What saves us?” Is it faith or good works? Is it God’s word or the sacraments? In recent times, ecumenical and liturgical theologians have already found ways to bridge the divide.58 Research in music and singing can here provide important insights. Music is a gift to human beings and to humankind long before it is practiced as a human

Cf. for example, Martha Moore-Keish, Do This in Remembrance of Me (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008). The biblical word is a word that cannot be separated from its ritual and sacramental dimensions. 58

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activity. God’s work has preeminence. God’s primacy is not questioned when it comes to the human ritual act of worship music and singing. Making music is “creative play.” With Romano Guardini, worship music belongs to the “aim-less” liturgical activities, comparable to the dance of the angels.59 Where humans strive to act in such purposefree ways, they can experience God’s agency. For Protestant theology, it is God’s grace and the gift of faith alone that save us, while traditionally Roman Catholic theology has stressed the importance of “good works” for Christian faith life and salvation. Research on music and singing can provide evidence for the intimate interconnection between faith (as transcendence experience) and good works, through “good works” of human ritual behavior (as spontaneous prosocial behavior) and can thus bolster ecumenical endeavors. Some questions remain. The most important is that of abuse. As music-making promotes bonding between group members, music can strengthen one group while alienating nongroup members, a frequent occurrence in authoritarian regimes. Further, music, as one strand in the fabric of song, supports the sung words and augments the message. This remains true when the words are destructive. How can such abuse be prevented? The insights into the sacramental aspects and functions of music do not explicitly answer the question of choice. Which music should be used, which hymns should be sung? However, the observation that music works in ways that can be called sacramental might help to find new criteria for worship music preparation—and a renewed regard for the labor of church musicians.

FURTHER READING Bonaccorso, Giorgio. Il corpo di Dio. Vita e senso della vita. Assisi: Citadella editrice, 2006. Grüter, Verena. Klang—Raum—Religion. Zürich: TVZ, 2017. Haspelmath-Finatti, Dorothea. Homo cantans. On the Logic of Liturgical Singing. NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion 73:3 (2019): 191–203. Haspelmath-Finatti, Dorothea. Theologia Prima. Liturgische Theologie für den evangelischen Gottesdienst (APTLH 80). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014. Moore-Keish, Martha. Do This in Remembrance of Me: A Ritual Approach to Reformed Eucharistic Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008. Mühling, Markus. Resonances: Neurobiology, Evolution and Theology. Evolutionary Niche Construction, the Ecological Brain and Relational-Narrative Theology. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014.

Guardini, The Spirit of the Liturgy, 63.

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CHAPTER NINE

The Sacramentality of the Word and the Holiness of Preaching LISA M. WEAVER

INTRODUCTION “Then God said let there be ‘light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness” (Gen. 1:3-4). The opening verses of the Bible attest to the inherent creative power of God’s Word and the nature of the things that God creates (they are good). In what is canonically1 the earliest biblical witness to a divinely spoken word, a human author declared—and subsequent generations of humans learned—three things about God’s Word: (1) it has the power to create, (2) it creates good things, and (3) it creates things that produce an effect. The notion of a word producing something external and apart from itself or its speaker and causing a particular effect provides a context for understanding God’s Word as sacramental. For if fundamental components of the definition of a sacrament are that (1) they are the context for a particular kind of encounter with God and (2) they communicate grace from God to humanity,2 then the opening verses of Genesis 1 reveal the sacramental character of God’s Word. This understanding of God’s Word finds a New Testament complement in Heb. 11:3: “By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.” By the time of the

It is important to note that this is the earliest “canonical” witness to God’s creative work (vis-à-vis what would be the earliest chronological witness). Biblical and theological matters that concern pastors, liturgists, liturgical theologians, catechists (teachers), and so on are not always based on the chronological ordering of biblical texts but rather on the theology and the narrative arcs communicated within and among them. 2 In response to the question as to “Whether the sacraments are the cause of grace,” Aquinas responds that “none but God can cause grace. … And it is thus that the sacraments of the New Law cause grace: for they are instituted by God to be employed for the purpose of conferring grace” (Summa Theologiae, Pt. III, Q. 62, art. 1). This concept gets more clearly articulated in the Bull of Union with the Armenians (“There are seven sacraments of the new Law … [they] both contain grace and bestow it on those who worthily receive them.”). Council of Ferrara, Session 8 (November 22, 1439), in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 1:541. Kevin Irwin identifies liturgy and the sacraments as “strong moments” of encounter in which “God is revealed, disclosed and experienced.” (Kevin W. Irwin, “A Sacramental World—Sacramentality as The Primary Language for Sacraments,” Worship 76:3 (May 2002): 198–9). 1

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writing to the Hebrews, the first-century Christian community understood and possessed three understandings of the Word of God: (1) the creative, generative divine utterances of God that created the universe, (2) the Word of God, recorded on scrolls by prophets and scribes, and (3) the kerygma (the preaching of the Gospel), first done by the apostles and which continues to this present day. In the subsequent centuries during the early church period, the church’s understanding of the Word of God becomes sacramental. In his book Scripture as Real Presence, Hans Boersma asserts that the early church fathers in fact viewed Scripture as a sacrament, and they read it in a manner consistent with that understanding.3 The church’s understanding of the sacramentality of the Word of God and how the sacramental nature of the Word of God contributes to the holiness of the preaching event are the foci of this chapter.

THE TRANSMISSION OF GOD’S WORD The earliest canonical transmission of God’s Word to God’s people begins in Exodus 20, with the earliest noted recording of those words described in Exodus 24 and then Exodus 31. After being released from Egyptian bondage, God speaks to Moses and beginning with the Decalogue, God explains how God intends for the Israelite people to live before God, with each other, and among people of other tribes and nations. Exod. 24:3-4a reads that “Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the ordinances; and all the people answered with one voice, and said, ‘All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do.’ And Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord.” This first collection of God’s words is described as “the book of the covenant,” and when Moses read it to the people, they again consented that “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient” (Exod. 24:7). In the same chapter, God instructs Moses to come up to the mountain where God will give Moses “the tablets of stone, with the law and the commandment, which [God has] written for their instruction” (Exod. 24:12). In ch. 25 God begins to speak, and God’s speaking culminates in Exod. 31:18 with God giving Moses “the two tablets of the covenant, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God.” This is the early beginning of a long history of the transmission of the Word of God to God’s people. In the growth and development of Israel as a nation and a unique people, the need for the preservation, promulgation, and passing down of God’s spoken words became necessary. God’s instruction ordered how the Israelites were to live with each other and among the surrounding nations. So God’s frequently repeated imperative to “write” resulted in God’s spoken word becoming God’s recorded (written) word.4 The history of the transmission of God’s Word continues in the Hebrew Bible with the

Hans Boersma, Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), 1. 4 “The Lord said to Moses: Write these words; in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel” (Exod. 34:27). 3

Now this is the commandment—the statutes and ordinances—that the Lord your God charged me to teach you to observe in the land that you are about to cross into and occupy, so that you and your children and your children’s children my fear the Lord your God all the days of your life, and keep all his decrees and his commandments that I am commanding you, so that your days may be long. … Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deut. 6:1-2, 8-9) There are other Sacred Scriptures with similar imperatives.

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prophetic literature. In these books, God speaks through select individuals (prophets), with exhortations and warnings concerning God’s people and sometimes concerning the enemies of God’s people. In the historical books, it is “the spirit of the Lord” that comes upon individuals to communicate what “thus says the Lord” to either an individual or a community.5 The understanding of God’s Word being transmitted to God’s people continued within the early Christian communities of the New Testament. Jean Gribomont writes, “That the Word of God was transmitted to his people as Sacred Scripture is something that the Christian community inherited from Judaism.”6 This is seen in each of the Gospels, from Jesus’ “It is written” statements to references from the narrative of Israel’s history from the Hebrew Bible7 in addition to several references to the Hebrew Bible found in the book of Acts.8 Concurring with Gribomont, J. N. D. Kelly states that the “divine inspiration of the Holy Scripture” that Christianity inherits from Judaism is evidenced repeatedly throughout the New Testament, but two particular verses explicitly articulate this: 2 Tim. 3:16 (“All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,”) and 2 Pet. 1:21 (“… because no prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.”).9 As such, by virtue of Scripture being understood as divinely inspired, the authority of the Word of God during the earliest centuries of the Christian church was loftily regarded and revered, though as early as the patristic period debates and challenges emerged as to what books were actually divinely inspired and thus worthy of inclusion into the canon of the Bible.10

THE WORD OF GOD IN THE POST-APOSTOLIC PERIOD The understanding of the Word of God (i.e., recorded Sacred Scripture) as both having an effect and being inspired continues into the post-apostolic period of the church. In the First Letter of Clement to the Corinthians, the oldest Christian text outside of the New Testament, the presumed author Clement, bishop of Rome, writes to the church to address problems that have arisen there. Throughout the epistle, he quotes both testaments, including the words of Jesus.11 So while there is no canonized body of scriptural text at this juncture,12 the Scripture already has a particular authority. Clement appears well versed in the scriptural texts of both testaments, most likely by oral tradition. Even though not written and canonized, he ascribes to the scriptural text a divinely inspired character. In ch. 45, he writes, “You have gazed into the holy and true Scriptures that were given

For example, 2 Chron. 20:14-15. (“Then the spirit of the Lord came upon Jahaziel son of Zechariah, son of Benaiah, son of Jeiel, son of Mataniah, a Levite of the sons of Asaph, in the middle of the assembly. He said, ‘Listen, all Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem, and King Jehoshaphat: Thus says the Lord to you.”) 6 Jean Gribomont, “Scripture, Holy,” in Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity, vol. 3 (P-Z) (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2014), 511. 7 Mt. 4:4 cites Deut. 8:3. Mk 7:10 cites Exod. 20:12. Lk. 4:18-19 cites Isa. 61:1-2. Jn 6:32 references Exod. 16:4. 8 Acts 2:16-21 cites Joel 2:28-32. Acts 3:19-22 cites Deut. 18:15-20. 9 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, revised ed. (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1978), 60–1. 10 Lee M. McDonald, “Final Reflections,” in The Formation of the Biblical Canon, revised and expanded ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), 250–7. 11 Jer. 9:23-24 is cited in ch. 13. Mt. 5:7 is cited in ch. 13. 12 The date of this epistle is before the date of the last written Gospel. 5

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through the Holy Spirit.”13 A third-century African church father deeply acquainted with Scripture, Origen connects the Word of God and the Holy Spirit by explaining the activity of the priests. In Homily 2 in Origen’s series on Joshua, he writes, “when you see priests and Levites ministering not ‘the blood of bulls and goats’ but the Word of God through the grace of the Holy Spirit, then say that Jesus received and retained the leadership after Moses—not Jesus the son of Nun, but Jesus the Son of God.”14 While the Scripture text is understood by these church fathers as “the voice of God” and is both synonymous with and sanctified through the Holy Spirit, Bishop of Hippo Augustine explains that not only is the human being the instrument through which the Word of God is heard aurally, but the human heart is the place in which a person hears God speak, and those two work in conjunction with one another. In his sermon on Lk. 10:16, Augustine says, Go back, therefore, to the heart,15 and if you are believers, you will find Christ there; he himself is speaking to you there. Yes, here I am, shouting my head off; but he, in silence, is doing more teaching. I am speaking by the sound of these words; he is speaking inwardly by the dread of your thoughts.16 Modeled after the Didache, the Didascalia Apostolorum is another church order that addresses various inquiries regarding the organization of Christian communities, particularly with respect to the liturgy. In ch. 13, in exhorting the faithful to be consistent in their church attendance and mildly upbraiding them about their focus, the writer(s) state the effect that the Word of God has on the hearer: “and you are anxious about baths, and to be fed with the meat and drink of the belly, and about other things, but for things eternal you have no care, but neglect your soul and have zeal for the Church, to hear and receive the word of God.”17 These earliest witnesses attest to the early church’s understanding of the inherently divine nature and communication of Sacred Scripture. The holiness of the Word of God was inextricably bound to the holiness of God. Though spoken through human beings, the Word of God was understood to be communicated by the Holy Spirit. And, while it was heard aurally, the heart was the locus of the deep listening. The sacramental character of the Word of God seems to warrant a particular kind of lector. In another church order, the Canons of Hippolytus, the special nature of the Word of God indicated that its public reader must have particular types of virtues. “When one chooses a reader, he is to have the virtues of the deacon. One is not to lay the hand on him before, but the bishop is to give him the Gospel.”18 Later Latin theologian Jerome wrote to a presbyter named Nepotian, who left the military to become clergy. Jerome writes a Clement of Rome, The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, ch. 45, in The Apostolic Fathers: I Clement, II Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, Didache, ed. Bart D. Ehrman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 115. 14 Origen, “Homily 2,” in Origen: Homilies on Joshua, trans. Barbara J. Bruce, trans. and ed. Cynthia White (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 2002), 37–8. 15 The translation cites Isa. 46:8 as the reference to this language, but this language is not found here. 16 Augustine, “Sermon 102.2, in Sermons III/4 (94A-147A) on the New Testament,” in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, ed. John E. Rotelle and trans. Edmund Hill (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1992), 73–4. 17 Didascalia Apostolorum 13, in Didascalia Apostolorum: The Syriac Version Translated and Accompanied by the Verona Latin Fragments, ed. and trans. R. Hugh Connolly (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), 126. 18 The Canons of Hippolytus, Canon 7, ed. Paul Bradshaw and trans. Carol Bebawi (Bramcote Nottingham: Grove Books, 1987), 15. 13

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treatise on the duties of the clergy and, similar to deacons, the life that clergy are required to lead by virtue of the office they hold. In paragraph 8 of the letter, Jerome’s words can be understood as intimating that Scripture is sacramental. He writes, When speaking in church, seek not the people’s cries of approval but their lamentations. The tears of those listening are to be your praises; the words of the presbyter are to be based on the reading of the Scriptures. Do not be a declaimer or a garrulous chatterbox; rather, be someone who is most skilled in the mysteries and in the sacraments of your God.19 In his letter to Maximus, bishop of Antioch, Pope Leo I reinforces this by explicitly stating that an unordained person should not read publicly. He writes, My dear brother, you should take care that no person other than a priest of the Lord dare assume the right to teach or preach, whether this individual be a monk or a lay person claiming to be knowledgeable. Although all the Church’s children are to understand what is right and sound, nonetheless, it is not permitted that a person who has not been ordained a priest assume to himself the office of preaching since in God’s Church it is fitting that all things be orderly so that in the one Body of Christ both the more preeminent members may fill their office and those lower in rank may not oppose those who are higher.20 Around the end of the fourth or beginning of the fifth century, this is codified, presumably, in a synodal document.21 One of the canons of a synod held in Carthage reads, When a reader is ordained, the bishop speaks to the people regarding him, his faith, and his life, and then presents him with the book from which he is to read, saying, “Receive and be a reader of God’s word. If you faithfully and profitably fulfill your office, you will share in the reward of those who have ministered the word of God.”22 It was not only the reading of the Word of God that was considered a holy act by the church. Preaching was also understood as a divine function (in that it is understood to be performed by Christ through human instruments). In his commentary on First Thessalonians Thomas Aquinas writes, “The ministers of God are those who preach, namely Christ, the prophets and the apostles. Preaching is performed by Christ as the one

Jerome, Letter 52. To Nepotian. 52.8, in Worship in the Early Church: An Anthology of Historical Sources, ed. Lawrence J. Johnson, vol. 3 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009), 362, para. 3959. See also Philip Schaff, ed., M. A. Freemantle, trans., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 2, vol. 6 (New York: Christian Literature Company and Parker, 1893), 93. 20 Leo I, Letter 119.6, in Worship in the Early Church, ed. Johnson, vol. 3, 123. See also Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Series 2, vol. 12 (New York: Christian Literature Company and Parker, 1895), 87. 21 “… presumably. …” There are questions as to whether this synod actually took place. In Worship in the Early Church, vol. 3, Lawrence J. Johnson writes, “This collection of canons … was long attributed to a spurious counsel supposedly held in Carthage in 398.” In A History of the Councils from the Original Documents, Charles J. Hefele writes about “the First Four Carthaginian Synods under Aurelius, and the Synods of Adrumetum and Constantinople.” In referencing the canons, he states that the heading ascribed to the synod is spurious, not the meeting itself: “The conclusion obtained from the researches [sic] of the Ballerini is, that these 104 canons are certainly very old, but that the heading which ascribes them to the Carthaginian Synod of 398 is spurious.” Of the canons themselves, Hefele writes, “The often quoted canons of this supposed fourth Synod of Carthage runs thus. …” Charles J. Hefele, A History of the Christian Councils, from the Original Documents, to the Close of the Council of Nicaea, a.d. 325, vol. 2 (2nd ed.) (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1876), 409–10. 22 Johnson, 3:192; Hefele, 2:411. 19

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from whom the doctrine originates, by the prophets who prefigured this doctrine, and by the apostles who carry out the injunction to preach.”23 For Aquinas, while the prophets prefigured the act of preaching, functioning as God’s instruments inspired by the Spirit of God, Christ is the foundation and exemplar of the preaching act itself, and the apostles are those who continue the preaching ministry from Christ.24 This sacred regard for the Word of God led to its physical elevation as well as its exaltation in the teachings of the church. In a letter to Emperor Theodosius II regarding events before and during the 431 Council of Ephesus, Cyril of Alexandria notes the placement of the Gospel book, stating, “Then the holy synod gathered in the church named after Mary and appointed Christ to be, as it were, its confessor and head. The gospel book was placed on its holy throne in order to be venerated.”25 That veneration of Scripture (along with tradition) continued to the Council of Trent26 and through to the last ecumenical council, Vatican II.27 Teachers and preachers had a particular kind of stewardship of the Word of God. Thus, the early church expected them to embody particular virtues and have a particular kind of deportment that befit their roles as lectors and preachers, respectively. Eventually, the church’s regard for the Word extended beyond the activities involving the Word to the actual placement of the physical text. In some contexts, the effect that Sacred Scripture produced elevated it to the level of sacrament, in practice if not in title.

THE SACRAMENTALITY OF THE WORD An understanding of the sacramentality of the Word is predicated on (1) an understanding of how the term “sacrament” emerged in the Christian lexicon, (2) the definition of

Aquinas, First Letter to the Thessalonians, 2-2 in Commentary on Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians and the Letter to the Philippians, ed. F. R. Larcher and Michael Duffy (Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1969), 19. 24 Domenico Grasso, Proclaiming God’s Message: A Study in the Theology of Preaching (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965), 30. 25 Cyril of Alexandria, Apology to the Emperor, in Worship in the Early Church, ed. Johnson, vol. 3, 375 (3992). 26 23

The holy ecumenical and general council of Trent, lawfully assembled in the holy Spirit, with the same three legates of the apostolic see presiding, keeps ever before its eyes this purpose; that the purity of the gospel, purged of all errors, may be preserved in the church. … The council clearly perceives that this truth and rule [“the whole truth of salvation and rule of conduct”] are contained in written books and in unwritten traditions which were received by the apostles from the mouth of Christ himself, or else have come down to us, handed on … as it were from the apostles themselves at the inspiration of the holy Spirit. Following the example of the orthodox fathers, the council accepts and venerates with a like feeling of piety and reverence all the books of both the old and the new Testament, since the one God is the author of both, as well as traditions concerning both faith and conduct, as either directly spoken by Christ or dictated by the Holy Spirit, which have been preserved in unbroken sequence in the catholic church. Council of Trent, Session 4 (April 8, 1546) from Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2 (Trent to Vatican II), ed. Norman P. Tanner (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), 663. 27 For Sacred Scripture is the word of God inasmuch as it is consigned to writing under the inspiration of the divine Spirit, while sacred tradition takes the word of God entrusted by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit to the Apostles, and hands it on to their successors in its full purity, so that led by the light of the Spirit of truth, they may in proclaiming it preserve this word of God faithfully, explain it, and make it more widely known. Consequently it is not from Sacred Scripture alone that the Church draws her certainty about everything which has been revealed. Therefore both sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of loyalty and reverence. (Dei Verbum, 2:9)

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the term “sacrament,” and (3) how Sacred Scripture meets that definition. While the English word is a derivative of a Latin term sacramentum, the meaning of the word has its origins in the Greek μυστήριον, meaning “mystery.” It was a pre-Christian technical religious term used among the cults of the Greco-Roman world to refer to a “secret rite,” the knowledge of which was limited to those who had been initiated in them.28 This pre-Christian term gets adopted by the early Christian community and shows up in some of the biblical writings as a way of explaining “the plan of salvation eternally hidden in God and revealed in and by Christ,”29 “what can be known only through revelation mediated from God what was not known before” (Mt. 13:11), “a supreme redemptive revelation of God through the gospel of Christ” (Rom. 16:25; Eph. 3:9), or “the hidden meaning of a symbol with metaphorical significance” (Eph. 5:32).30 These explanations ground the pre-Christian and biblical motifs of sacrament as that which is a secret, a secret rite, a mystery, hidden, a thing not commonly known or discerned, or requiring divine, otherworldly, or supernatural mediation or revelation in order to be apprehended and understood continued into the patristic era. During this time, μυστήριον was understood as a “secret,” an “oath of secrecy,” and a “sacred object,” and that understanding expanded over time. However, in early patristic texts and in the Christian Latin Bible, the word sacramentum comes to translate the concept of μυστήριον. According to Antonio Grappone, the emergence of the term sacramentum can be seen in the Latin communities during the second century, especially since μυστήριον increasingly developed a liturgical–ritual meaning. As the Christian Latin lexicon and language was developing, it was common, on the one hand, to privilege “native terms to express abstract concepts … and on the other hand … to avoid words that had been compromised by their connection to pagan religion, as indeed in the case of mysterium, esp. in its plural form.”31 One of the earliest patristic appearances of the word sacrament occurs in the late second/early third century in Tertullian’s treatise on baptism. In it he refers to baptism as “the sacrament of water,”32 though he does not explicitly define or explain what a sacrament is. It is in Augustine’s writings that the church has the earliest definitions of a sacrament as “a sign of a sacred reality” and “a visible sign of an invisible grace.” Augustine’s early definition of a sacrament meant that many things could be conceived as a sacrament, particularly since the entire created world points to God as creator.33 Over time, rites and items that were considered sacraments by the early church fathers included anointing, Eucharist, and the liturgy (for Cyril of Jerusalem) as well as “the Lord’s prayer, the creed, the liturgy, the sign of the cross, the font of baptism and the water used, ashes, oil, foot-washing, and the reading and exposition of Scripture and prayers” (for Augustine of Hippo).34

Barbara Friberg, Timothy Friberg, and Neva F. Miller, Analytical Lexicon of the Greek New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2000), 267. 29 Adrien Nocent, “Sacraments,” in Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity, vol. 3 (P-Z) (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2014), 452–3. 30 Friberg, Friberg, and Miller, Analytical Lexicon, 267. 31 Antonio Grappone, “Sacrament,” in Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity, vol. 3, 447–8. 32 Tertullian, De baptismo, 1, in Worship in the Early Church: An Anthology of Historical Sources, vol. 1, ed. Johnson, 119 (452). 33 Joseph Martos, Doors to the Sacred: A Historical Introduction to Sacraments in the Catholic Church (Liguori, MI: Liguori, 2014), 3. 34 Ann Loades, “Sacrament,” in The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, ed. Adrian Hastings, Alistair Mason, and Hugh Pyper (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 635. 28

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The understanding of the Word of God as having sacramental power does emerge during this era. The concept of sacramental efficacy as an effect of the Word of God is witnessed to as early as the writings of Augustine. In his treatment of the Gospel according to John, Augustine discusses the sacrament of baptism, specifically, the relationship of Sacred Scripture to the efficacy of the water. He writes, “Take away the word, and the water is neither more nor less than water. The word is added to the element, and there results the Sacrament, as if itself also a kind of visible word.”35 Just as the sacrament is a sign, for Augustine, a word is also a sign. For him, words fall into the category of “conventional signs” (vis-à-vis “natural signs”), and he states that Sacred Scripture, as the divinely inspired words of God, are signs as well.36 Thus, for Augustine, the Word of God is what gives the water its sanctifying, sacramental power; the Word of God, the sign of Sacred Scripture, itself possesses an inherent divine power, a holiness, to effect the sanctification of the water. Augustine’s contemporary Ambrose of Milan also understands God’s words to have the power to create the material world, and analogously, Christ’s words to have the power to create the sacrament. In his mystagogical work entitled De mysteriis, Ambrose writes, By what words, then, is the consecration and by whose expressions? By those of the Lord Jesus. … When it comes to performing a venerable sacrament, then the priest uses not his own expressions, but he uses the expressions of Christ. Thus the expression of Christ performs this sacrament. What is the expression of Christ? Surely that by which all things were made. The Lord ordered, the heaven was made; the Lord ordered, the earth was made … You see then how the creating expression of Christ is.37 This understanding of the sacramental efficacy of the Word of God has endured over the course of the church’s history. Although the definitive list of seven sacraments as articulated by Peter the Lombard and later codified by the Council of Trent does not include Sacred Scripture, an understanding of the Sacred Scripture itself as a sacrament does emerge in later centuries. In defining “sacrament” in their Dictionary of Theology, German theologians Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler write, The fundamental essence of the sacrament is to be found in the words used: the “matter” basically has only a secondary function of helping to make clear what the words signify. Words pronounced in the Church in the name and with the mandate

Augustine of Hippo, Treatise on the Gospel of John, Tractate LXXX, 15.3 in St. Augustine: Homilies on the Gospel of John, Homilies on the First Epistle of John, Soliloquies, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956), 344. 36 35

Now some signs are natural, others conventional. Natural signs … for example, smoke when it indicates fire. … Conventional signs, on the other hand, are those which living beings mutually exchange for the purpose of showing, as well as they can, their feelings of their minds, or their perceptions, or their thoughts. … the signs which have been given us of God, and which are contained in the Holy Scriptures, were made known to us through men—those, namely who wrote the Scriptures. … And all these signs are as it were a kind of visible words. The signs that address themselves to the ear are, as I have said, more numerous, and for the most part consist of words. Augustine, De christina doctrina, Book II, 1.2, 2.3, 3.4, trans. J. F. Shaw (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2009), 32–3. 37 Ambrose of Milan, De sacramentis IV.4,14-15 in Saint Ambrose: Theological and Dogmatic Works, Fathers of the Church, vol. 44 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1963), 302.

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of God and Jesus Christ have in principle an “exhibitive” character, that is they bring about what they are pointing to, in other words God’s grace. In the strictest and proper sense the word of God can only exist as the effect of his [sic] grace. The word of the Gospel is always sustained by a grace that is in fact effective because it derives from God and not simply from the good will of man [sic].38 For Vorgrimler, the Word of God is itself an event. In a later book titled Sacramental Theology, he writes, “The word of God (always clothed in human words), however it is communicated, is not limited to demonstrative or informative function: it effects what it says, it brings what it announces.”39 And Vorgrimler’s description of the activity of the Word of God meets the criteria of a sacrament.

PREACHING AS A KIND OF SACRAMENT Sacred Scripture itself is holy by virtue of (1) its words as they are understood to originate with and belong to God, (2) its content, and (3) being inspired and communicated by the Holy Spirit. Sacred Scripture is thus understood to be sacramental in that it mediates God’s presence to the reader/hearer and produces an effect in the reader/hearer. Sacred Scripture causes (effects) an encounter with the One who is the author and Logos, and this is accomplished through the work of the Holy Spirit. Thus, the reading/hearing event is holy, sacramental, and trinitarian. By extension, then, it makes sense that these criteria would also be presumed about the preaching of Sacred Scripture, and documentary witnesses support this. The earliest Christian preaching was referred to as kerygma (Greek κηρυγμα; verb κηρυσσω) “the oral transmission of the gospel message.” The Latin Vulgate often translated the Greek kerygma as praedico, meaning, “to notify, publicly announce in advance.” J. Kevin Coyle states that the kerygma consists in five elements: (1) God loves us and seeks our salvation; (2) God sent Jesus to become one of us; (3) Jesus taught us how to love God and one another, most of all through his death out of obedience to God; (4) Jesus is [the] risen Lord, whom God raised to glory; and (5) now God calls us to share in Jesus’ paschal mystery through conversion and a life of faith. As if to summarize these points, Federico Fatti states that Christian preaching (kerygma; praedico) contains three elements: “(1) an invitation to believe, (2) the content of the proclamation, and (3) the exhortation to change one’s behavior as a result.” Thus, as Fatti later explains, preaching was “(1) the (oral) message of an event, (2) an explanation of the proclaimed event, and (3) the exhortation to live accordingly.”40 There are several New Testament examples of this by Jesus and Jesus’ followers, both in the Gospels and in the other writings. Among them are: Jesus’ message of “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Mt. 4:17), Jesus’ disciples preaching of the paschal mystery41 of

arl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler, Dictionary of Theology, 2nd ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 452. K Herbert Vorgrimler and Linda M. Maloney, trans., Sacramental Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992), 77–8. 40 J. Kevin Coyle, “From Homily to Sermon to Homily: The Content of Christian Liturgical Preaching in Historical Perspective,” Liturgical Ministry 15 (Winter 2006): 1–2. Also, Federico Fatti, “Preaching,” in Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity, vol. 3, 273. 41 “Paschal Mystery” refers to the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. Some theologians will argue that the Paschal Mystery begins with the incarnation. One important thing to remember regarding all of them is that they attempt to communicate the mystery of sacrificial, salvific events of the life of Jesus Christ. 38 39

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Christ (Acts 2:14-36), “the message of the Cross” (1 Cor. 1:18), and Peter (and the other apostles) preaching Jesus as the One of whom the Hebrew Bible prophets spoke (Acts 10:43). There are, of course, others. This paradigm of kerygma is also evidenced in the post-apostolic writings of the church. In his First Apology, Justin Martyr writes, “And on the day called Sunday … the memoirs of the Apostles or the writings of the prophets are read. … Then when the reader has finished, the Ruler in a discourse instructs and exhorts to the imitation of these good things.”42 Like Justin Martyr, Tertullian also found himself making an apology (defense) for Christian faith and practices. In his Apology, he writes, in part, I shall at once go on, then, to exhibit the peculiarities of the Christian society, that, as I have refuted the evil charged against it, I may point out its positive good. … We assemble to read our sacred writings, if any peculiarity of the times makes either forewarning or reminiscence needful. However it be in that respect, with the sacred words we nourish our faith, we animate our hope, we make our confidence more stedfast [sic]; and no less by inculcations of God’s precepts we confirm good habits.43 Both Justin Martyr and Tertullian locate the kerygmatic event in the context of the Sunday liturgy, and both explain the content of the kerygmatic event (“the memoirs of the apostles”) and the effect of the event (nourishes faith, animates hope, secures confidence, and effects a holy comportment in its hearers). These descriptions are consistent with earlier descriptions and criteria for a sacrament. So, just as Sacred Scripture is itself holy and requires a particular disposition of its readers, the same can be said of those who proclaim (preach)44 Sacred Scripture and the preaching event itself.

THE HOLINESS OF PREACHING In this third millennium of the common era, theologians maintain the early church’s understanding of sacraments as vehicles for participating in the mystery of Christ. Cross and Livingstone state that this was recognized in the second millennium in conciliar documents of the Second Vatican Council, and that “There has been an increased emphasis on the word in the celebration of the sacraments, so that the reading of Scripture and a homily have come to form a normal part of sacramental celebration.”45 This emphasis is most strongly seen in Sacrosanctum Concilium and Dei Verbum, the first and third of the constitutions of Vatican II. Yet, not only has there been an increased emphasis on the Word of God in the celebration of the sacraments, there has also developed an understanding of the preaching itself as a sacrament/sacramental act and the preacher as the mediating instrument. Thus, the act of preaching as well as the preacher are understood as holy.

Justin Martyr, First Apology 67 in St. Justin Martyr: The First and Second Apologies, Ancient Christian Writers, no. 56, ed. Walter J. Burghardt, John J. Dillon, and Dennis D. McManus and trans. Leslie William Barnard (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 71. 43 Tertullian, Apology 39 in The Writings of Tertullian, vol. 1, Ante-Nicene Christian Library: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to a.d. 325, vol. 11, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1869), 118; see also Johnson, 1:117 (447). 44 It should be noted that in the Roman Catholic tradition, “proclamation” and “preaching” are not synonymous. “Proclamation” in this context means the reading of sacred texts, and “preaching” means the delivery of a homily, sermon, or eulogy. In many Protestant contexts, those terms are used interchangeably. 45 “Sacrament,” in Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised ed., ed. F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1445. 42

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For Augustine, that which was preached was Christ Himself through the vessel of the human preacher. In his homily on the feast of John the Baptist, Augustine states that John was the voice of Christ and that all preachers before and since Christ are, like John, the voice of Christ in the preaching event. Augustine writes, John was cast in the role of the voice but symbolically, in a mystery; because he wasn’t the only one to be the voice. Everybody … who proclaims the Word is the voice of the Word. … How many preachers were produced by the Word abiding with the Father! He sent the patriarchs, he sent the prophets, he sent so many and such great ones to proclaim him in advance. The Word abiding sent voices, and after many voices sent in advance, the one Word himself came as in his vehicle, in his voice in his flesh. So gather together all the voices which preceded the Word as into one man, and lump them all together in the person of John. He was cast in the symbolic role of all of them, he alone was the sacred and mystical representative or person of them all. That’s why he’s properly called the voice, as the sign and sacrament of all voices.46 Augustine identifies John as “the sign and sacrament” of all voices who proclaim (preach) the Word of God. Thus, the proclamation (preaching) event becomes the moment in which the Word Himself speaks. Therefore, the preaching event is a holy moment because (1) the content of the preaching is the Word of God, (2) it is God in Christ who is actually speaking in the proclamation (preaching) event, and thus (3) it is Christ Himself whom the hearers encounter in the proclamation (preaching) event. Roman Catholic priest Dominic Grasso describes preachers as “channels through which the voice of God passes, tongues in which he speaks, cases which contain the seeds he sows, or interpreters, organs, and instruments of God.”47 Grasso goes on to explain that God’s presence and activity in the proclamation (preaching) event has a sacramental effect on its hearers. He writes, The presence of God in the word preached attests to yet another quality … namely … its sacramentality. This effect of the Word of God presents no difficulty once one grants that God Himself is present and active in the word preached. God is the author of grace, truth and salvation. Nothing, then, is easier to understand than that preaching by its very nature can be as effective as the sacraments.48 Additionally, for Grasso the proclamation (preaching) event is also a trinitarian event. He later writes, “All three Divine Persons are present and active in the word of the preacher. The Father is the source of the Word, He who pronounces it; the Son is the Word which the Father speaks; and this Word communicates the mysteries explored and penetrated by the Holy Spirit.”49 While the language of sacramentality is not often explicitly or frequently employed in the lexicon of the Protestant tradition, the understanding of the sacramentality, or holiness, of preaching is found beyond the confines of the Roman Catholic church and is held in the larger catholic (i.e., universal) church among Protestant Christians. Luke Powery, an ordained Baptist clergyperson, emphasizes that the pneumatological

Augustine of Hippo, “Sermon 288: On the Birthday of John the Baptist (On the Voice and the Word),” in Sermons III/8 (273-305A) on the Saints, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, trans. Edmund Hill and ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1994), 114–15. 47 Grasso, Proclaiming God’s Message, 30, citing Zoltan Alszeghy and J. B. Schneyer. 48 Grasso, Proclaiming God’s Message, 40. 49 Ibid., 45. 46

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dimensions of the proclamation (preaching) event lead to an understanding of that event as both trinitarian (like Grasso) and sacramental. Powery writes, “Preaching is an act rooted in the triune God. Because of this, the Holy Spirit is vital to the entire process of preaching. The effects of this event, however, are felt long after the benediction has been declared in a service because of the sacramental presence of the Spirit.”50 This is because Powery believes that in the preaching moment, the hearers/recipients encounter the living God. He writes, Preaching’s aims should not solely be to talk about Christ but to offer Christ in such a manner that the community may meet Christ. Preaching is a divine event because God is encountered in and through it. This “encounter” is experiencing the real presence of God in Christ through the Word proclaimed such that people know about God but also come to know God. … Through the Spirit, Christ is made present through the proclamation of the Word.51 For Powery, preaching is clearly a sacramental, and thus holy, act. Additionally, because proclamation (preaching) is a sacramental act, it produces an effect in the lives of its recipients. Based on the understanding on the person and work of the Holy Spirit in the Black church tradition and expanding on an article written by Edward Wimberly entitled “The Black Christian Experience and the Holy Spirit,” Powery writes, An individual cannot then prioritize one dimension of life over another because all realms are spaces of the Spirit. … This understanding of the Spirit from a cultural perspective links the work of the Spirit in preaching with the work of the Spirit in daily living, enabling one to consider a preaching life in the Spirit that is, a life that walks the talk of the pulpit—a lived sermon. … Though we, as preachers, on any given Sunday, may be finished with the Word as sermon, the Word is never quite finished with us as the Word preached becomes the Word lived through the Spirit.52 As the vehicle through which God speaks, preachers contribute to the sacramentality of the proclamation (preaching) event. In his explanation of the sacramental nature of the proclamation (preaching) event, Harold Dean Trulear employs language that reflects his Episcopalian formation,53 language more familiar within the Roman Catholic tradition. Trulear explains the sacramentality of both the proclamation (preaching) event and the preacher where he writes, “There is a sacramental reality in the preaching event as the preacher declares the gospel with an accompanying ecstasy that assures the congregation of the ‘real presence’ of grace. … and the preacher herself or himself becomes the symbol of grace in the midst of the congregation.”54

Luke A. Powery, “Walkin’ the Talk: The Spirit and the Lived Sermon,” in Readings in African American Church Music and Worship, vol. 2, ed. James Abbington (Chicago: GIA, 2014), 324. 51 Powery, “A Spirit-Driven Theology of Preaching,” in Ways of the Word: Learning to Preach for Your Time and Place, ed. Sally A. Brown and Luke A. Powery (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2016), 32–3. 52 Powery, “Walkin’ the Talk,” 324. See also Edward Wimberly, “The Black Christian Experience and the Holy Spirit,” Quarterly Review 8:2 (Summer 1988): 19–35. 53 The Reverend Dr. Harold Dean Trulear is widely known as an ordained clergyperson of the American Baptist Churches USA. However, Trulear was raised and formed in the Episcopal church. After completing his undergraduate studies, he was preparing for seminary and the Episcopal priesthood. A series of events directed him to the Baptist church, the tradition into which he was ultimately ordained. 54 Harold Dean Trulear, “The Sacramentality of Preaching,” in Primary Sources of Liturgical Theology: A Reader, ed. Dwight W. Vogel (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), 264, 266. 50

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Womanist theologian and ethicist Katie Geneva Cannon discusses the enfleshment of God as the Word, that Word that came and dwelt among humanity as “the living God.” Cannon asserts that this enfleshed Word, and not simply the “words” of the sacred text spoken or heard, is the focus of the Word of God. Like Augustine and like Powery, Cannon recognizes the instrumentality of the preacher and the work of the Holy Spirit in the preaching event. She writes, Divine activity refers to the customary three-tiered configuration that places the Black preacher in the mediating position between God and the congregation. … The Godself is present as the content of the preached word. The Holy Spirit must work through the critically conscious preacher to present the person and work of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Bible to the body of believers.55 For Asian American homiletician Eunjoo Mary Kim, “spiritual preaching” is based on Christian eschatological spirituality. Whereas Augustine, Grasso, Trulear, and Cannon recognize the preacher as the instrument through which God speaks, Kim makes a nuanced distinction and identifies human rhetoric as the medium of God’s self-disclosure. This is one of the gifts of preaching and for Kim, like Powery, it is pneumatological. She writes, Spiritual preaching is based on the theological conviction that God the Spirit was, is, and will be present among the congregation and has been revealed to them through preaching. Thus, it anticipates the presence of the Holy Spirit at the moment of preaching. … If preaching becomes the moment of experiencing the presence of the living God, it is God’s gift for two reasons. For one, it is because we humans can experience God only when God opens God’s self to us. … For another reason, it is because God uses preaching as a medium of self-disclosure. Through human rhetoric in preaching, God accommodates the various situations and capacities of the congregation.56 Kim likens the effects of preaching to the effects of the Eucharist. For her, both nourish the gathered community. Kim writes that “whereas the Eucharist is a visible communal meal, spiritual preaching is an invisible communal meal that nourishes the community of faith spiritually.”57 Both preaching and the Eucharist communicate a spiritual grace on its hearers and recipients. Thus, for Kim, both preaching and the Eucharist are sacramental moments in the life of the church.

CONCLUSION Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Decalogue contains the earliest canonical recording of the transmission of God’s Word to a single human being, Moses. Those words were then shared with the community of God’s people in Moses’s care. The weightiness and holiness of those words was directly connected to the majesty and holiness of God. Throughout the Hebrew Bible and through the first century of the Christian community (as recorded in the New Testament), the words of God were considered inspired and Katie Geneva Cannon, Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community (New York: Continuum, 1995), 116–17. 56 Eunjoo Mary Kim, Preaching the Presence of God: A Homiletic from an Asian American Perspective (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1999), 68–9. 57 Ibid., 68. 55

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holy because God spoke them through prophets and apostles as the Holy Spirit inspired them. In the post-apostolic period, not only did this understanding continue, but it took deep root. As the church began to develop more formal organizational structures, liturgical offices were created. As liturgical stewards of the Word of God, lectors and priests (preachers) were to have particular virtues and comportment befitting their role and responsibility as reader and preacher, respectively, of the Word of God. The deep reverence for the holiness of the Word of God led to the physical book itself being exalted and having a particular and prominent place in liturgical spaces. Eventually, the church began to understand that there was a divine economy at work in the proclamation and preaching of the Word of God. There began to emerge an understanding of the Word of God and the preaching event itself having a sacramental character in that hearers not only encountered God in the proclamation and preaching but that there was also a grace that was communicated to the hearers (recipients) of the Word of God. And while the language of lectors, priests, sacraments, and sacramentality is more common parlance among Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican traditions, it is not their purview exclusively. The traditions that emerged after the Protestant Reformation also possess sacramental understandings of the Word of God and the holiness of preaching; the vocabulary used to express those understandings is simply different. Though the language and lens used may be different, these perspectives are held in Black and Asian worshiping communities as well.58 The incarnational nature of the Christian faith helps to make this clear. In both the Word of God proclaimed (read) and preached, there is a divine economy at work. God’s words are preserved in written text and communicated by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit through human instruments in the form of proclamation. The Word itself then becomes flesh and dwells among humanity. After the descent of the Holy Spirit, the apostles, then bishops, ministers, and lectors continued in the ministry of preaching and proclamation, up to this very day. The living and holy nature of the Word of God makes those moments events, sacramental events, for in them the hearers (recipients) encounter a holy God. For some, the event itself is a sacrament, where God bestows a particular kind of grace to its hearers. Thus, the Word of God is, in essence and content, proclamation and preaching, a sacramental and holy event.

FURTHER READING Boersma, Hans. Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017. Brown, Sally A., and Luke A. Powery. Ways of the Word: Learning to Preach for Your Time and Place. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016. Chauvet, Louis-Marie. The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body. Translated by Madeleine Beaumont. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001. Grasso, Domenico. Proclaiming God’s Message: A Study in the Theology of Preaching. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965. Janowiak, Paul. The Holy Preaching: The Sacramentality of the Word in the Liturgical Assembly. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000.

This does not mean that these theological and sacramental perspectives are not held within Native American and Latinx communities. At the time of this writing, the author was not aware of Native American or Latinx writings that could be cited. 58

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CHAPTER TEN

Gathered Church Sacramentality: Loss and Recovery PHILIP E. THOMPSON

“The salvation of the world cannot be prefigured in the same language that dismembers it and deprives it of theological significance,” shared a young person reflecting on experience in the Peace Corps.1 The student was glossing words of the poet and essayist Wendell Berry: “It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world is dismembered and defaced.”2 It is a memorable line, often invoked. In response to a comment on its potency, Berry extended the thought, “You’ve got to reach towards a better language, and you’re not going to make it up from scratch; you’ve got to reach back into the tradition.”3 This brief archaeology provides a fit epigraph for the present essay. With it in mind, we will consider the question before us, asking broadly how traditions widely considered by persons outside and inside them not to interpret baptism and the Lord’s Supper sacramentally now show a surprising sacramental vitality. We might well say it is a narrative of the loss of and return to a use of language better signaling redemption. First, however, a brief word is in order about the words we shall use to identify our communities of reference. All appellations are either too precise (James Wm. McClendon, Jr.’s “baptist” or Lesslie Newbigin’s “Pentecostal”), or imprecise (“Free Church” widely used, yet lacking a single set of referents), or seem invidious (“believers’ churches,” begging the question of the composition of other churches).4 I will opt for “gathered churches,” admittedly inadequate but perhaps less problematic, gathered by

. Gregory Jones, “Speech Lessons,” Christian Century 122:9 (May 3, 2005): 37. L Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2001), 8. 3 Wendell Berry and Morris Allen Grubbs, Conversations with Wendell Berry (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007), 172. 4 James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Systematic Theology: Ethics (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1986), 19–20; Lesslie Newbigin, The Household of God: Lectures on the Nature of the Church, Biblical Classics Library (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1998), 95; Richard L. Harrison, Jr., “Early Disciples Sacramental Theology: Catholic, Reformed, and Free,” Mid-Stream 24:3 (July 1985): 285, who admits Free Church has so many definitions as to become “vague.” 1 2

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Christ through the baptism of believers.5 English Baptist hymnist and liturgical theologian Christopher J. Ellis quite rightly concedes that it is easier to describe these churches than to offer a name that identifies them precisely, since they are attempts to draw together a disparate group of traditions. They are also, significantly, movements that emerged and took form outside of positions of power. This backroads condition has not remained uniformly true in the traditions we will examine. Yet it was certainly true for them all initially, and shaped their particular sacramental witnesses. There will be a certain unevenness to my examination. I will draw primarily from Baptists in the United Kingdom and North America, seeking to be attentive to work among the Anabaptists (especially Mennonite), churches of the Stone–Campbell Movement (hereafter SCM; The Disciples of Christ, the Independent Christian Churches, and the a cappella Churches of Christ), and both Wesleyan-Pentecostal and Finished Work streams of Pentecostalism. Arguments could be made to include other communions, yet space precludes it. I have chosen to proceed in the manner I will for two reasons. First, I work from within the broad range of traditions called “Baptist.” Second, it is arguably among the Baptists that the sacramental renewal has taken the widest hold and produced the most extensive body of work to date.6 In all our communions of reference, however, there is fruitful work in sacramental thought reflecting the distinctions of each tradition, offering gifts to all churches. I hope to show a properly grateful reception of these gifts. I also hope to share a sense of the gifts this shared sacramental recovery might hold for the wider church in an increasingly post-Christian context. All communions included in this essay have shown during their history careful attention to language for baptism, the Lord’s Supper (the generally preferred term, and used here), and other practices of the church, seeking to gesture in redemptive directions through it. The preferred terminology has been, and continues to be, that of “ordinance.” The preference has been due to unfortunate excesses that more explicitly sacramental language has been used by other churches to justify, for instance, at times indiscriminate baptism more sociocultural than theological in purpose. This does not mean that this language of “ordinance” has lacked all sacramental depth, nor that explicitly sacramental language has been entirely absent. Indeed, it has been quite carefully used. Yet along the way, the carefulness was forgotten. In its place came an often non- or even antisacramental view that in its assumption of being the singularly faithful historical position erased important aspects of historic witness.7 To that story we now turn.

John Colwell, Promise and Presence: An Exploration of Sacramental Theology (Bletchley: Paternoster, 2005), 66–7, notes that gathered churches and believers’ baptism are generally mutually defining, though they do not overlap completely. The two ideas arose alongside each other in the sixteenth century. 6 See, for example, Anthony R. Cross and Philip E. Thompson, eds., Baptist Sacramentalism, Studies in Baptist History and Thought, vol. 5 (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2003); Anthony R. Cross and Philip E. Thompson, eds., Baptist Sacramentalism 2, Studies in Baptist History and Thought, vol. 25 (Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 2008), in which sacramentality is given wide exploration. I must also express my gratitude here to Anthony Cross, Irma Fast Dueck, Fred Aquino, and Wolfgang Vondey for conversations that have lent richness to my reflection. 7 See James E. Carter, “The Lord’s Supper: A Baptist Perspective,” Southwestern Journal of Theology 31:2 (1989): 34–41; John P. Mills, “The Lord’s Supper as Viewed and Practiced by the Christian Churches, Churches of Christ, and the Disciples of Christ,” in The Lord’s Supper: Believers Church Perspectives, ed. Dale R. Stoffer (Scottsdale: Herald Press, 1997), 195; Andrea M. Dalton, “A Sacramental Believers Church: Pilgram Marpeck and the (Un)Mediated Presence of God,” in New Perspectives in Believers Church Ecclesiology, ed. Abe Dueck, Harder Helmut, and Karl Koop (Winnipeg: Canadian Mennonite University, 2010), 223; and Chris E. W. Green, Toward a Pentecostal Theology of the Lord’s Supper: Foretasting the Kingdom (Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2012), 5. 5

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EARLY SACRAMENTAL WITNESS AND LOSS All four of our communions of reference show some measure of sacramental thought historically. It was most pronounced among the Baptists and in the SCM. While no doubt present, it was a less widely held basic position among the Anabaptists and Pentecostals. As one might anticipate from the gathered church ecclesiologies and/or the emergence from radical dissenting movements, baptism received the greater degree of thought and development. That was the rite in which their distinction from the world and other churches was most evident. The Lord’s Supper was also regarded sacramentally, yet as Dale Stoffer has noted with reference to the Anabaptists, “Compared to the deafening roar of discourse concerning baptism … the discussion of the Lord’s Supper is a mere whisper.”8 Baptists likewise emphasized baptism, though they did not ignore the Supper.9 Richard Harrison notes similarly that the early Disciples put much less energy into developing their theology of the Lord’s Supper than they did baptism.10 The earliest of our communions of reference, the Anabaptists, have perhaps the most diffuse beginnings, though the plural is more apt for all our communions than is “beginning.” They are better understood as a “cluster of interrelated (charismatic) [sic] movements— that never achieved uniformity.”11 They emerged from various radical expressions of the reforming impulse that appeared throughout Europe in the sixteenth century. Generalization is thus impossible. Many formative factors inclined them more toward the non-sacramental view most often associated with them. The initial crystallization of this radical impulse into more organized communal life was in the mid-1520s among younger associates of Zwingli, with whom they shared a leaner view of the sacraments. Anabaptism found what would be its largest mature and lasting expression in the Netherlands under the leadership of Menno Simons (1496–1561), who associated the idea of sacrament with infant baptism. He thus rejected sacramentalism.12 There emerged within this mix a basic tension between those who moved in ever more “spiritualist” directions, seeking to dispense entirely with the outward forms of religion, and those who continued to hold to the value of the material life of community.13 Against this backdrop we find the more robustly sacramental position of Pilgram Marpeck (1495– 1556) who contested the views of spiritualist Caspar Schwenkfeld. Andrea M. Dalton notes that Marpeck not only affirmed the importance of sacraments, but on the basis of Christ’s incarnation articulated a doctrine of divine presence in the Supper such that

Dale R. Stoffer, “Editor’s Preface,” in The Lord’s Supper: Believers’ Church Perspectives, ed. Dale R. Stoffer (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1997), 11. 9 Michael J. Walker, Baptists at the Table (Didcot: Baptist Historical Society, 1992), 2, who rightly observes that Baptist thought on the Lord’s Supper was largely derivative from that of other Reformed articulations; and Philip E. Thompson, “People of the Free God: The Passion of Seventeenth-Century Baptists,” American Baptist Quarterly 15:3 (September 1996): 230–1. 10 Harrison, “Early Disciples Sacramental Theology,” 274. We will see that a somewhat different situation obtained among Pentecostals. 11 John D. Rempel, “Baptism: Communicating Grace and Faith,” Pro Ecclesia 25:3 (2016): 300. In the weeks following this essay’s initial completion, news came that Rempel has come under ecclesial discipline for violations of trust and personal boundaries. While I have tried to minimize my use of his work, examination of this topic cannot proceed entirely without it. I cite his work no more than necessary, grieving any pain even limited use may cause. 12 Anthony G. Siegrist, Participating Witness: An Anabaptist Theology of Baptism and the Sacramental Character of the Church, Princeton Theological Monograph Series 199 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013), 88. 13 Siegrist, Participating Witness, xii; Dalton, “A Sacramental Believers Church,” 224, 227. 8

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the Supper is what formed the church to be the Body of Christ.14 Christ was united with the church so profoundly that its characteristic practices were understood as being one with the work of God which they commemorated. Indeed, for Marpeck, Christ was not so much mediated, as simply present in the church.15 While the sacramentalist view was not the majority position among early Anabaptists, neither was Marpeck a lone voice.16 Appearing among English Puritans early in the seventeenth century, the Baptists had perhaps the most robust sacramental theology of the four families of communions we are examining. Baptists also had disparate beginnings. Most important for us are the General Baptists, who emerged around 1610, and the Particular Baptists, who first appeared in 1638. Their names reflect their respective Arminian and Calvinist doctrines of the atonement’s scope. A sacramental view is evident in both groups, and examples are abundant in their literature.17 Brian C. Brewer has quite rightly observed “nearly overwhelming evidence in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Baptist writings … that many Baptist groups and leaders held that the rites of baptism and the Supper … encompassed both human and divine action in their enactment.”18 In the early nineteenth century, amid the ferment of the early American Republic and consternation over the multiplicity of “sects,” Thomas and Alexander Campbell, father and son, and Barton Stone launched movements to restore the New Testament church on a biblical basis for the sake of uniting Christians in gospel simplicity. These movements eventually came together, giving rise in time to the three expressions noted earlier. While eschewing the language of sacraments as unbiblical, Alexander Campbell expounded a baptismal theology that can only be described as sacramental.19 Stone, who has been described as a “naïve sacramentalist,” and Campbell were baptismal sacramentalists on the basis of their understanding of the plain meaning of Scripture.20 There is less consensus on whether they were sacramentalists in their views on the Supper.21 This is not to say it was unimportant. If anything, the place of the Supper in the ecclesial practice of the

Dalton, “A Sacramental Believers Church,” 224; John D. Rempel, “Toward an Anabaptist Theology of the Lord’s Supper,” in The Lord’s Supper: Believers Church Perspectives, ed. Dale R. Stoffer (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1997), 244. 15 Dalton, “A Sacramental Believers Church,” 225–8. She notes, however, that this did not mean Marpeck opted for some sense of immediacy. 16 William R. Estep, Jr., “Contrasting Views of the Lord’s Supper in the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century,” in The Lord’s Supper: Believers Church Perspectives, ed. Dale R. Stoffer (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1997), 57–60; and Siegrist, Participating Witness, xix. 17 See Thompson, “People of the Free God”; and Philip E. Thompson, “A New Question in Baptist History: Seeking a Catholic Spirit among Early Baptists,” Pro Ecclesia 8:1 (1999): 51–72. In 1681 William Kiffin approvingly quoted Daniel Rogers, “Doubtless He That Cares Not for … Christ in the Water, Christ in the Bread and Wine, Christ Sacramental; cares as little for Christ God … By these he comes near …” in A Sober Discourse of Right to Church-Communion (London: Geo. Larkin, 1681), 42–3. 18 Brian C. Brewer, “‘Signs of the Covenant’: The Development of Sacramental Thought in Baptist Circles,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 36:4 (2009): 419. See Stanley K. Fowler, More Than a Symbol: The British Baptist Recovery of Baptismal Sacramentalism, Studies in Baptist History and Thought, vol. 2 (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2002), 10–88, for a broad survey of Baptist sacramentalism in England from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. 19 Mills, “The Lord’s Supper as Viewed and Practiced by the Christian Churches, Churches of Christ, and the Disciples of Christ,” 195; John Mark Hicks, “ ‘God’s Sensible Pledge’: The Witness of the Spirit in the Early Baptismal Theology of Alexander Campbell,” accessed June 7, 2020, JohnMarkHicks.com/70-2/. 20 Keith Watkins, “Naive Sacramentalism: Barton W. Stone’s Sacramental Theology,” Encounter 49:1 (1988): 37–51. 21 Harrison, “Early Disciples Sacramental Theology”; Belva Brown Jordan and Stephanie A. Paulsell, “The Lord’s Supper,” in Chalice Introduction to Disciples Theology, ed. Peter Goodwin Heltzel (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2008), 154–6. 14

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SCM churches can rightly be compared to that of Roman Catholics. From the start, it has been observed weekly as the center of SCM worship.22 There were as well persons in the early years of this movement who interpreted the Supper in a more explicitly sacramental manner. Robert Milligan and Robert Richardson are often named in this regard.23 Pentecostal sacramentality is distinct from the others here surveyed. The primary focus is not on water baptism. Rather, sacramental reality has from the start been located in manifestations of God’s presence in Spirit baptism with the accompanying signs of tongues, healings, and in the washing of feet.24 Though Spirit baptism has received more attention than water baptism, and indeed may rightly be considered the primary site of Pentecostal sacramentality, Chris Green has shown that there was an undeniable affirmation of the sacramentality of the Lord’s Supper in early Pentecostal reflection, primarily in denominational publications, as well as theological writings over the years.25 Wesley Scott Biddy and Kimberly Alexander have observed, however, that this sacramentalism was nontraditional and formally underdeveloped. Yet in more recent times, a number of theologians have called for a more sacramental imagination, hermeneutic, and understanding of the church and certain of its practices.26 It is important that we not compartmentalize the sacramental thought of any of our communions of reference. It goes beyond baptism and the Supper. Indeed, all the communions we are considering have shown at various points in their histories a more expansive sense of sacramentality.27 We see in the early years of these communions evidence of broader sacramental imagination. Dwelling on terminology obscures this. We find, for example, in an eighteenth-century Particular Baptist catechism the carefully worded question, “What are those Gospel Ordinances called Sacraments, which do confirm us in this Faith?”28 Similarly, Alexander Campbell invested the language of “ordinance” with rich sacramental meaning.29 There was a particular character to the early sacramental thought of these communions. It has been described by Pentecostal theologian Frank Macchia: “Pentecostalism represents a kind of ‘protest’ … sacramentality that is critical of, yet, ironically, bears significant similarity with sacramental traditions.”30 The charismatic signs, he notes, have arrison, “Early Disciples Sacramental Theology,” 285. H John Mark Hicks, “Stone-Campbell Sacramental Theology,” Restoration Quarterly 50:1 (2008): 40. 24 Frank D. Macchia, “Tongues as a Sign: Towards a Sacramental Understanding of Pentecostal Experience,” Pneuma 15:1 (1993): 61–76; Wolfgang Vondey and Chris W. Green, “Between This and That: Reality and Sacramentality in the Pentecostal Worldview,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 19:2 (2010): 243–4. 25 Green, Toward a Pentecostal Theology of the Lord’s Supper, 74–181. 26 Wesley Scott Biddy, “Re-Envisioning the Pentecostal Understanding of the Eucharist: An Ecumenical Proposal,” Pneuma 28:2 (2006): especially 228–32, but throughout; Kimberly Ervin Alexander, “Matters of Conscience, Matters of Unity, Matters of Orthodoxy: Trinity and Water Baptism in Early Pentecostal Theology and Practice,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 17:1 (2008): 48–69; Vondey and Green, “Between This and That”; Wolfgang Vondey, “Pentecostal Ecclesiology and Eucharistic Hospitality: Toward a Systematic and Ecumenical Account of the Church,” Pneuma 32:1 (2010): 41–55; and Green, Toward a Pentecostal Theology of the Lord’s Supper, 58–61. 27 We see this more expansive sacramentality early in the SCM and Pentecostal traditions. See Kenneth J. Archer, “Nourishment for Our Journey: The Pentecostal via Salutis and Sacramental Ordinances,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 13:1 (October 2004): 79–96; Hicks, “Stone-Campbell Sacramental Theology.” It is more characteristic of the sacramental recovery for Baptists and Anabaptists. See Colwell, Promise and Presence. 28 Benjamin Keach, The Child’s Delight: Or Instructions for Children and Youth (London: William and Joseph Marshall, 1702), 38. Quotations from earlier sources will not be altered to conform to contemporary conventions of spelling, capitalization, grammar, or inclusivity. 29 James O. Duke, “The Disciples and the Lord’s Supper: A Historical Perspective,” Encounter 50:1 (1989): 3–4; Hicks, “Stone-Campbell Sacramental Theology,” 35–7. 30 Macchia, “Tongues as a Sign,” 73. 22 23

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functioned as a kind of “countercultural” sacramental worship, offering in their practice tacit criticism of the objectification of the Holy Spirit in worship and ecclesial life, an objectification that underwrites hierarchies defiant of the radical equality of the Spirit’s gifts.31 It is not wrong to characterize the sacramental practice of all the communions here considered as a kind of “protest” in their early years. SCM sacramentality, for example, constituted a protest against Christian disunity and its sources such as “creedal systems” and revivalist experientialism, things which drew Christians away from gospel simplicity. There is another form of protest. Both Anabaptist and Baptist movements arose in contexts in which churches and states existed in powerful alliance. With their rejection of constantinianism deeply grounded in a critique of idolatry, the baptismal theology and practice of both made them in the eyes of the ruling powers “seditious sectaryes.”32 Peter Berger observed over fifty years ago that to counter the precariousness inherent in socially constructed worlds, societies seek to legitimate themselves as existing apart from human construction. Religion is the most effective and widely employed means of legitimation historically.33 Ritual acts in turn are primary sites for this work of legitimation. They are, argues Paul Connerton, not merely expressive, but performances that form persons as dwellers of a given social world.34 Through their ritual life, the Anabaptists and Baptists established themselves as a kind of delegitimating “counter sign” to the claims of earthly rulers and allied churches. Canadian-American Baptist theologian Jonathan R. Wilson reflects this well, noting that the gathered churches: (understand) that the gospel is the irruption, the breaking into this age, of a new reality, the basileia tou Theou—that can make life more dangerous, more difficult in this age, but is, in the end, the way, the truth, and the life. The evangelical tradition is quite ambivalent about this while the Believers Church movement appears to better reflect the reality of the gospel that sees the church as the people of God called into a new reality that necessarily demarcates a line between the church and the world.35 Life was made more dangerous indeed. They suffered for their beliefs, the Anabaptists and Baptists most especially. Thus sacramental theology and practice were political theology and practice. Baptism especially was a site at which they contested the claims of government to oversee and defend the rule of Christ.36 The contest occasioned by “protest sacramentalism” was embedded within what we might call “protest ecclesiology.” The church and its ritual actions were seen as signs of God’s rule in the midst of the world. This was true of both established and dissenting churches. It was indeed the claim underwriting state church legitimization. Against churches allied with the state, the Anabaptists and Baptists made claims to be the true I bid., 72. See too Green, Toward a Pentecostal Theology of the Lord’s Supper, 36. L. Joseph Kreitzer, “Seditious Sectaryes”: The Baptist Conventiclers of Oxford, 1641–1691, 2 vols., Studies in Baptist History and Thought, 30.1 and 30.2 (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2006). 33 Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, 1st ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 3–34. 34 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 32–3. 35 Jonathan R. Wilson, “Discerning the Spirit in the Ferment of Evangelical Ecclesiologies,” in New Perspectives in Believers Church Ecclesiology, ed. Abe Dueck, Helmut Harder, and Karl Koop (Winnipeg: Canadian Mennonite University, n.d.), 259–60, italics original. This is part of Wilson’s argument that Baptists are more properly regarded in the Believers Church tradition rather than Evangelicalism. 36 Kenneth Archer interprets Pentecostal protest as being in a way against constantinianism as well. See Kenneth J. Archer and Andrew S. Hamilton, “Anabaptism-Pietism and Pentecostalism: Scandalous Partners in Protest,” Scottish Journal of Theology 63:2 (2010): 185–202. 31 32

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church. The early Swiss Anabaptist leaders disagreed with Zwingli on questions of the church’s constitution and relation to the civil realm. They were rather starkly dualistic in their understanding of church and world, and thus made claims more strident than would the Baptists, who were less strictly separationist.37 Yet the Baptists pressed the Reformed critique of idolatry with noteworthy consistency.38 It was for the sake of being what we today would call an eschatological sign. Thus in the oldest Particular Baptist confession, the London Confession (1644), we find: “That Christ hath here on earth a spirituall Kingdome, which is the Church … [T]‌hither ought all men to come … that acknowledge him to be their Prophet, Priest, and King, to be … under his heavenly conduct and government, … that they may be made partakers of their inheritance in the Kingdome of God.”39 The eschatological dimension was crucial. Anabaptist and Baptist gatherings “participated in a future opened up through Christ.”40 How did these gathered churches lose their early sacramentalism? Very broad strokes must suffice. One dynamic seems distinct to the Baptists. On both sides of the Atlantic, Baptists, already growing detached from awareness of their own history, reacted against more explicitly sacramental positions. English Baptists reacted to the Anglo-Catholic sacramentalism of the Oxford Movement, not by reasserting a distinctively Baptist sacramental position but by largely abandoning sacramentalism.41 In the United States, the reaction was to the baptismal theology of the SCM, which drew churches and even entire associations away from the Baptists.42 Explanation varies of what led not only to the loss of sacramentality in our communities of reference but to the rise of what is sometimes called a “sub-Zwinglian” understanding of baptism and the Supper as “orthodoxy.”43 English Baptist historian Anthony Cross has described it succinctly. The Enlightenment, he observes, prioritized the unmediated,

See the third and fourth articles of The Schleitheim Confession (1527) in John H. Leith, Creeds of the Churches: A Reader in Christian Doctrine from the Bible to the Present, 3rd ed. (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1982), 285–6. 38 We see this clearly in the writings of the founder of the General Baptists, John Smyth. In 1609, he wrote, “The idolatryes of Antichrist are not heathenish & paganish, but of another nature, viz. not false Gods, but means invented by men to worship the true God by …” in “Parallels: Censures: Observations,” in The Works of John Smyth Fellow of Christ’s College, 1594–8, vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), 344. See Philip E. Thompson, “Sacraments and Religious Liberty: From Critical Practice to Rejected Infringement,” in Baptist Sacramentalism, ed. Anthony R. Cross and Philip E. Thompson, Studies in Baptist History and Thought, vol. 5 (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2003). 39 William Latane Lumpkin and Bill Leonard, Baptist Confessions of Faith, 2nd rev. ed./rev. by Bill J. Leonard. (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 2011), 153–4. A sense of being the true church, while not identical to that in the Anabaptists and Baptists, is not absent from the SCM and Pentecostals. See Earl West, “The Churches of Christ,” in Baptism & Church: A Believers’ Church Vision, ed. Merle D. Strege (Grand Rapids, MI: Sagamore Books, 1986), 87; and Green, Toward a Pentecostal Theology of the Lord’s Supper, 76. 40 Fernando Ens, “Believers Church Ecclesiology: A Trinitarian Foundation and Its Implications,” in New Perspectives in Believers Church Ecclesiology, ed. Abe Dueck, Helmut Harder, and Karl Koop (Winnipeg: Canadian Mennonite University, 2010), 181–2. 41 Walker, Baptists at the Table, 2, 84–120; and Anthony R. Cross, “The Evangelical Sacrament: Baptisma Semper Reformandum,” Evangelical Quarterly 80:3 (July 2008): 200. 42 See Timothy George, “The Southern Baptists,” in Baptism & Church, ed. Merle D. Strege (Grand Rapids, MI: Sagamore Books, 1986), 50; and William H. Brackney, “Sacrament, Ordinance, or Both? Baptist Understandings of the Lord’s Supper,” in The Lord’s Supper: Believers Church Perspectives, ed. Dale R. Stoffer (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1997), 235. 43 Curtis W. Freeman, Contesting Catholicity: Theology for Other Baptists (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014), 311–38, uses the term “sub-Zwinglian” to describe a flat, “memory as recall of facts” understanding of the Supper. Duke, “The Disciples and the Lord’s Supper,” 3–4, observes that the Disciples continued to stress the word “ordinance” after they had forgotten what Alexander Campbell meant by the term. 37

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and Evangelicalism is a child of the Enlightenment.44 More important than the cause, however, is the effect that has been present to some degree, often a profound one, in all our communions of reference. Douglas Knight, interpreting the Enlightenment project under the term “economy of modernity,” notes that this project, this economy “is the claim to dispense with the whole population of intermediaries” for the sake of direct seeing.45 He dates the beginning of a collapse of mediation to the seventeenth century.46 Thus it informed and shaped the context within which almost the entire history of our communions of reference unfolds. It is an overgeneralization, but not without propriety, to say there resulted in our communions an unwitting legitimation of the earthly realm as the bearer of meaning in history in a manner as thorough as the established churches of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.47 It is not too much, I believe, to say that language that once prefigured the salvation of the world, disclosed through the church, came largely to deprive the church and world of theological significance. Another child of the Enlightenment, Western democracy, received a particular stamp in the early decades of the United States. The Baptists, SCM, and Pentecostal movements have been particularly suited for the socioeconomic–political environment of the United States. Much literature has detailed the effects of this environment on the churches, with its acids of populism and individualism driving the loss of intermediaries. This environment led to sacramental loss, and not just among our communions of reference.48 Creation came to be scorned as being religiously insignificant. With the loss of creation, the incarnation became less important, as did the church (defaced indeed!).49 There was yet more. While we see it in some form in all our communions of reference, we see in sharp relief among the Baptists a collapse of eschatology into history. With this, hope collapsed into the immanence of earthly politics or was deferred entirely to a transcendent and individualistically understood heaven. History functions to articulate identity, of persons and communities alike. As such, history is a site of contest, bound up in dynamics of power and struggle, of legitimation and delegitimation of a rendering of truth about reality. This truth, when successfully legitimated, posits itself as an originary Cross, “The Evangelical Sacrament,” 204. English and Scottish forms of Enlightenment thought were more influential than Continental forms. See Siegrist, Participating Witness, 7–13, who focuses more on the revivalist aspect; Hicks, “Stone-Campbell Sacramental Theology,” 36; Green, Toward a Pentecostal Theology of the Lord’s Supper, 76; and Joseph Lee Dutko, “Beyond Ordinance: Pentecostals and a Sacramental Understanding of the Lord’s Supper,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 26:2 (2017): 259, who also notes an element of reaction among Pentecostals. 45 Douglas H. Knight, The Eschatological Economy: Time and the Hospitality of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 181–93. 46 Ibid., 188. 47 Barry Harvey, Another City: An Ecclesiological Primer for a Post-Christian World, Christian Mission and Modern Culture (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999), 81. 48 Linden J. de Bie, “The Spoils of War in Nineteenth-Century American Eucharistic Controversy,” Pro Ecclesia 4:4 (1995): 431–41, examines a similar dynamic within American Presbyterianism in the Princeton–Mercersburg debates. The Princeton–Mercersburg debate may have had an effect on the loss of sacramentality among Baptists in the American South. Several founders of the Southern Baptist Convention studied at Princeton with Hodge. 49 All of our communions have been affected by this dynamic, and in them we see some degree of awareness. Baptist and Anabaptist writers address the loss of creation. See Philip E. Thompson, “Re-Envisioning Baptist Identity: Historical, Theological, and Liturgical Analysis,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 27:3 (September 2000): 287–302; and Siegrist, Participating Witness. The general absence of ecclesiology has been noted by Pentecostal theologians, whose communion emerged at the far end of the narrative set forth in this essay. See Vondey, “Pentecostal Ecclesiology and Eucharistic Hospitality,” 42–3, who equates loss of sacraments and loss of the church; and Dutko, “Beyond Ordinance,” 265–7. 44

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truth under what Edith Wyschogrod calls the “myth of autochthony.” She continues, “History written under the sign of autochthony must be heroic history, … an incessant remythologization of the divine origin, of how it was in illo tempore.”50 Among many Baptists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this heroic history served to subsume the redemption of the world, and the Christian life that reflected it, into the triumph of American democracy.51 Gone is the church and its practices as a counter sign.52

THE RENEWAL OF (SACRAMENTAL) THEOLOGY AND CONSTRUCTION The renewal of sacramental theology has differed among our communions, with no two being alike. Scripture has, quite naturally, played a significant role, particularly in the English Baptist context.53 The ecumenical and liturgical movements have had influence on all, as have various bilateral dialogues with other communions. A result has been interrogation of their own history leading to deepened awareness of the witness of their own past, often with attendant awareness of their continuity with the early church.54 We should not, further, be surprised that this theological recovery entailed not only sacramentality but also incarnational and trinitarian theology, ecclesiology, and eschatology. Thus, while we see some projects devoted exclusively to sacramental questions, perhaps as often sacramental recovery is ingredient in broader, often ecclesiological, projects.55 There are constructive projects that cannot receive here the consideration they deserve.56 We find in all four communions some measure of affirmation of the sacramentality of the Edith Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 220–5. 51 See Barry Harvey, Can These Bones Live?: A Catholic Baptist Engagement with Ecclesiology, Hermeneutics, and Social Theory (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2008), 39–42, who cites Walter Rauschenbusch’s claim that the spread of democracy is “more than natural. It is divine,” and commended, among others, Baptists and Disciples for their embrace of “principles of pure democracy” as qualifying them for “leadership in the democratization of the social order.” Harvey cites as well Southern Baptist theologian Edgar Young Mullins, who said that the fundamental principles of religion and American political society are together part of the life-giving stream that flows from the throne of God, destined to triumph together. 52 John Mark Hicks, “Churches of Christ and the Lord’s Supper: Twentieth Century Perspectives,” Lexington Theological Quarterly (Online) 46:3–4 (2016): 116–20, documents a loss of eschatology in the SCM. 53 Fowler, More Than a Symbol, 89–97, dates the beginning of recovery to Oxford Old Testament scholar H. Wheeler Robinson in 1922. A signal contribution came with George Raymond Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1962). Their arguments were based not on the Baptist past but on biblical sacramental realism. 54 Three examples are: Everett Ferguson, The Early Church and Today, vol. 1, ed. Leonard Allen and Robyn Burwell (Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2011); Everett Ferguson, The Early Church and Today, vol. 2, ed. Leonard Allen and Robyn Burwell (Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2014); and Steven R. Harmon, Baptist Identity and the Ecumenical Future: Story, Tradition, and the Recovery of Community (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016). 55 See Elizabeth Newman, Untamed Hospitality: Welcoming God and Other Strangers (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2007); Brian Haymes, Ruth M. B. Gouldbourne, and Anthony R. Cross, On Being the Church: Revisioning Baptist Identity, Studies in Baptist History and Thought, vol. 21 (Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 2008); Wolfgang Vondey, People of Bread: Rediscovering Ecclesiology (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2008); Freeman, Contesting Catholicity; and Anne Klose, Covenantal Priesthood: A Narrative of Community for Baptist Churches (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2018). 56 Examples include Vondey, People of Bread; John Mark Hicks, Enter the Water, Come to the Table: Baptism and Lord’s Supper in the Bible’s Story of New Creation (Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2014); Mark E. Powell, John Mark Hicks, and Greg McKinzie, Discipleship in Community: A Theological Vision for the Future (Abilene, TX: Leafwood, 2020); and Siegrist, Participating Witness. 50

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church and the eschatological nature of the sacraments.57 The challenge for all of our traditions is to ask if the earliest witness can enable language generative of a sacramental and redemptive vision for our own time.58 My goal here is to suggest the contours of constructive sacramental thought mediated by my Baptist tradition, listening to our other communions. Among Baptists the sacramental recovery is not without connection to the recent apocalyptic turn within theology. While far from a complete overlap, I believe this intersection holds promise for the articulation of a constructive sacramental position drawing on the Baptist past.59 Canadian Baptist theologian Douglas Harink distills the gospel as “God has acted … decisively in the apokalypsis of Jesus Christ to invade and liberate the enslaved cosmos, and through the invasive and powerful Holy Spirit, to bring about a new creation, already being formed in a community of free, faithful, and active participants in God’s own apocalyptic work.”60 This aptly summarizes, I believe, the logic of gathered church sacramental theology.61 From the Baptist past we receive two terms that provide direction. The first is the sacraments as “signs,” present in hymnody and theological writing. From the mid-1960s on, theologian James Wm. McClendon, Jr. argued on the basis of speech-act theory that “sign” was a more fruitful category for sacramental theology than was symbol. Rather than “betokening” a greater reality, even if in a participatory manner, signs, he argued, accomplish something.62 He referred to baptism, the Supper, and preaching as “remembering signs,” which by God’s acts are efficacious.63 His development of these signs, however, seems to veer at times toward a more symbolic interpretation. What the remembering signs recall are the great “historic signs” of redemption.64 Here another sense of “sign” is more operational. They have a more evidentiary function, “way-marks set … to show that God in his creative redemptive journey passed this way.”65 This resonates with the way in which baptism and the Supper were understood in the Baptist past. Not only were they signs, baptism and the Supper were occasions of meeting,

For the sacramentality of the church, see Timothy George, “The Sacramentality of the Church: An Evangelical Baptist Perspective,” in Baptist Sacramentalism, ed. Anthony R. Cross and Philip E. Thompson, vol. 5, Studies in Baptist History and Thought (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2003), 21–35; Jordan and Paulsell, “The Lord’s Supper”; John Colwell, “Provisionality and Promise: Avoiding Ecclesiastical Nestorianism?,” in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 106–12; and Siegrist, Participating Witness, 92. For the eschatological nature of the sacraments see Hicks, “Churches of Christ and the Lord’s Supper,” 123; Hicks, Enter the Water, Come to the Table; and Vondey and Green, “Between This and That,” 255–8. 58 Colwell, Promise and Presence is a notable example. While a sterling work in sacramental theology by a Baptist, it does not reflect significant dialogue with the Baptist past. 59 Apocalyptic is a significant theme in Harvey, Can These Bones Live? See too Siegrist, Participating Witness, 37, 54. 60 Douglas Harink, “Partakers in the Divine Apocalypse: Hermeneutics, History, and Human Agency after Martyn,” in Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology: With and Beyond J. Louis Martyn, ed. Joshua B. Davis and Douglas Harink (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015), 96. 61 Some significant efforts in sacramental theology are not consonant with an apocalyptic perspective. See Paul S. Fiddes, Tracks and Traces: Baptist Identity in Church and Theology, Studies in Baptist History and Thought, vol. 13 (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2003); and Irma Fast Dueck, “It’s Only Water: The Ritual of Baptism and the Formation of Christian Identity,” Vision (Winnipeg) 12:2 (2011): 21–7. 62 James Wm. McClendon, Jr., “Baptism as a Performative Sign,” Theology Today 23:3 (October 1966): 403–16; James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Systematic Theology: Doctrine (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1994), 373–416. 63 McClendon, Jr., Systematic Theology: Doctrine, 381–2. 64 Ibid., 186–7. In this category he lists the events of salvation history, including creation, the call of Abraham, the Exodus, the mission of Jesus, the resurrection, and Pentecost. 65 McClendon, Jr., Systematic Theology: Doctrine, 186. 57

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of encounter, with Christ. This is our second term. Examples abound in theological treatises and hymnody alike through the first two centuries of Baptist existence. A representative example comes from an eighteenth-century baptismal prayer that included: “O let us find the messiah here! Thou that comest by water and art witnessed to of the water come by this water … And afford us communion with thee in thy baptism; for in the water and in the floods thy presence is promised!”66 Each gathering of the church at the water (or around the Table) was an occasion of Christ’s presence in that particular place and time. The sacramental moment was the moment of apocalypse.67 Each sacramental occasion, as sign and meeting, shares in the apocalypse of God in Christ. This is not the stuff of symbol. Apocalypse cannot be symbolized. Two implications follow. First, it means that sacramental occasions constitute a refusal to grant history meaning apart from Christ. It is Christ in the church who is the bearer of the meaning of history.68 Nathan Kerr has asserted, “Only as we refuse to grant history a status or meaning apart from the … cross and resurrection, and only as this event perpetually conditions history as the site of the apocalyptic arrival and inauguration of God’s coming reign, can the confession that ‘Jesus is Lord’ be considered true for us today.”69 The sacraments are the paradigmatic occasions for this confession. As such, and consequently, every sacramental observance bears the word of judgment and redemption, of death and resurrection. The church … requires at every moment, again and again, to be halted, caught up, and commissioned by the Messiah … to be redeemed in the Messiah from even its own wreckage-making powers, to trust … that it will be “awakened from the dead” and made whole by the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being the things that are not.70 Baptists with their loss of sacramentality have not allowed themselves to be halted and caught up, have not listened adequately in their baptisms and celebrations of the Supper to this word of judgment and grace, of what has died and the new life given. It requires that the community listen together for what the Spirit is saying to the church. Yet did they do this earlier? It is a question calling for more searching study of the records of the forebears. Perhaps a hopeful hint lies in the witness of a small Appalachian “subdenomination,” the Old Regular Baptists. Historian Howard Dorgan relates that Old Regular Baptists have always practiced full racial equality. They are also among the Baptist communions that have practiced the washing of feet since their founding.71 While we cannot draw too firm a conclusion, an eighteenth-century source included the washing of feet as another occasion of Christ’s presence in Baptist gatherings. The rite included acknowledgment of equality and mutual service.72 Here we find at least the possibility of

Morgan Edwards, The Customs of Primitive Churches (Philadelphia: n.p., 1774), 81–2. We find similar themes of presence especially in Communion hymns. 67 Siegrist, Participating Witness, 54. 68 Harvey, Another City, 27. 69 Nathan R. Kerr, Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008), Kindle loc. 153. 70 Harink, “Partakers in the Divine Apocalypse,” 107. See too Harvey, Can These Bones Live?, 57–91, especially 83–91. 71 Howard Dorgan, The Old Regular Baptists of Central Appalachia: Brothers and Sisters in Hope (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 102–12, 189–94. 72 Edwards, The Customs of Primitive Churches, 91–2. 66

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salvation prefigured in continuity with the witness of embodied political protest of the earlier gathered communities.

TASKS AND QUESTIONS These efforts of sacramental recovery are quite new still, and a number of tasks lie ahead in their continued development. Three merit particular mention, all of which have begun to be taken up. First, as this essay shows, the conversation has thus far been predominantly male and in the global north. Yet the greatest growth for more than one of our communions has been in the global south. The conversation surrounding sacramental recovery cannot expand solely in categories favored by the global north. There must be attentive and receptive listening to those forms of prophetic protest, among women, indigenous persons, and global southern people that may well speak of sacramental realities under different names. A second issue is a perennial one in our communions, the status of the past. In various ways, all of them sit uneasily with tradition. A lively conversation on this matter parallels those on sacraments and ecclesiology. How should these communions regard their own past? Does the early history constitute an infancy from which there had to be maturation, or a heart that must always continue to beat in later generations?73 Finally, implicit in a more sacramental theology of Christian initiation and life is a critique of the more revivalist mode that has been so strong in the history of several of our communions. Thus questions of catechesis and ongoing formation form a tributary of conversation surrounding these matters. This is a conversation that must strengthen.74

FURTHER READING Colwell, John E. Promise and Presence: An Exploration of Sacramental Theology. Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2005. Cross, Anthony R., and Philip E. Thompson, eds. Baptist Sacramentalism, Studies in Baptist History and Thought, vol. 5. Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2003. Green, Chris E. W. Toward a Pentecostal Theology of the Lord’s Supper: Foretasting the Kingdom. Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2012. Harvey, Barry A. Baptists and the Catholic Tradition: Reimagining the Church’s Witness in the Modern World, 2nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2020. Hicks, John Mark. Enter the Water, Come to the Table: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper in the Bible’s Story of New Creation. Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2014. Siegrist, Anthony G. Participating Witness: An Anabaptist Theology of Baptism and the Sacramental Character of the Church. Princeton Theological Monographs. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013.

See Green, Toward a Pentecostal Theology of the Lord’s Supper, 74–5. See George, “The Southern Baptists,” 49; Harvey, Can These Bones Live?, 82–3; and Derek C. Hatch, “Is There a Eucharistic Kids’ Table?: Reflections on Children, Catechesis, and Baptism,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 45:3 (2018): 299–312. 73 74

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Christian Initiation RUTH A. MEYERS

INTRODUCTION During the twentieth century, liturgical scholars came to understand Christian initiation as a process that includes catechesis, baptism, confirmation, and first communion. The rites and processes underwent significant developments in Western Christianity in light of historical study, while Eastern Orthodox rites and theology have remained largely unchanged from earlier centuries. Hence the focus of this essay is Western Christian understandings and practices. In addition to liturgical scholarship that informed the revision of rites, the emerging context of post-Christendom has meant that churches can no longer assume a close correlation of church and society, requiring new approaches to theology and the practice of initiation. The ecclesial context of baptism has come to the fore, rather than an emphasis on individual salvation. Additionally, the ecumenical rapprochement of the twentieth century has led to a new appreciation of a rich biblically based theology of baptism.

CHRISTIAN INITIATION: INSIGHTS FROM ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES During the twentieth century, anthropological studies provided an important frame of reference for the understanding and practice of Christian initiation. Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep coined the term “rite of passage” to describe rituals that societies, organizations, and religions use to mark the transition from one state or stage of life to another: for example, birth, coming of age, and marriage.1 Van Gennep identified a tripartite structure characteristic of rites of passage: separation, transition, and incorporation. The rites typically take place over a period of time, beginning with ritual processes that separate initiates from their community. During a transitional or liminal period, initiates may receive instruction in the customs and traditions of their community and may undergo rituals intended to facilitate the transition from one state of life to the next. The process concludes with rites of incorporation, in which initiates enter the community and take on their new identity or status. This final stage in the rite of passage often includes a ritual meal that initiates share with the community.

Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). Originally published as Rites de passage (Paris, 1909). 1

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Christian scholars have used the model of rites of passage to understand the shape of rites of Christian initiation, particularly the highly elaborate process that developed during the early centuries of Christianity. For Christians, initiation begins with admission to the catechumenate, which may take place through a formal rite of acceptance that separates the catechumen from their former way of life. During the transitional period that is the catechumenate, those to be initiated receive instruction and formation in a Christian way of life. As the time for their baptism approaches, catechumens may participate in a rite of enrollment or election, marking the beginning of a final intense period of preparation that may include additional rituals and prayers. The process of initiation culminates in the celebration of baptism and the initiates’ first communion, a ritual meal shared with the community. Newly incorporated, the initiates participate in a period of mystagogy, during which they are further integrated into the community as they receive explanations of the meaning of the rites they have experienced. Rites of passage are intended to effect a transformation in the individuals who undergo those rites, and in this way a parallel with Christian initiation is evident. Key biblical metaphors for baptism include rebirth and participation in Christ’s death and resurrection. Through rites of Christian initiation individuals are incorporated into a new community and become members of the body of Christ, taking on a new identity. Yet anthropological studies can provide at most an overarching conceptual framework and structure for the ritual process. Theological interpretation as well as the particular content and rites of the initiatory process are distinctively Christian and cannot be extrapolated from ritual studies. Moreover, in the elaborate initiatory process of patristic Christianity the normative candidates were adults, and they were joining an alternative community through a process of conversion that required changes in belief and behavior. As Christianity became the religion of the empire, infants became the normative candidates for baptism, and baptism came to serve as a life-cycle rite rather than entrance into a new community with beliefs and behaviors different from the surrounding sociocultural context.2

CHRISTIAN INITIATION: INSIGHTS FROM LITURGICAL HISTORY In addition to anthropological studies, the discovery, translation, and interpretation of ancient documents had a profound influence on understandings and practices of Christian initiation.3 The fourth-century baptismal homilies of Cyril of Jerusalem, John Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Ambrose of Milan provided a model for the restoration of an adult catechumenate and the development of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) in the Roman Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council. The RCIA as well as studies of ancient initiatory rites underlie liturgical revisions in many other churches during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.4

For the definition of conversion as a change in belief, behavior, and belonging, see Alan Kreider, The Change of Conversion and the Origin of Christendom (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1999), xv. 3 English translations of key primary sources can be found in E. C. Whitaker and Maxwell E. Johnson, Documents of the Baptismal Liturgy, Alcuin Club Collections 79, rev. and expanded ed. (London: SPCK, 2003). 4 International Commission on English in the Liturgy, Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, study ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1988). For excerpts in English translation from the fourth-century baptismal homilies of Cyril of Jerusalem, Ambrose of Milan, John Chrysostom, and Theodore of Mopsuestia, with commentary relating them to the RCIA, see Edward Yarnold, The Awe-Inspiring Rites of Initiation: The Origins of the RCIA, 2

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The conversion of Constantine in the early fourth century transformed the church from a minority sect whose members were periodically subject to persecution, to a favored religion in which membership might bring social and political benefits. In earlier centuries, initiatory processes had assumed genuine motivation for becoming Christian, but in the fourth century it became necessary to ensure an authentic conversion. A lengthy catechumenal period became normative, culminating in an intensive period of preparation in the weeks leading up to baptism. The baptismal rites took on additional elements that heightened the psychological effect of the rites on the candidates, impressing upon them the significance of the step they were taking. The rites became cloaked in secrecy, the details explained either shortly before or immediately after the baptism, further underscoring their dramatic effect.5 Over the course of the fourth century, baptismal rites in different regions of the ancient world coalesced into a common pattern, with some variations, and that pattern provided a template for liturgical reform after the Second Vatican Council (1962–5). The elements of this outline were in place by the third century: preparatory instruction, renunciation, profession of faith, anointing, immersion, admission to communion. But twentiethcentury scholars came to understand that the structure and theological interpretation varied widely.6 For example, most Eastern baptismal rites gave ritual emphasis to an anointing before the immersion and did not call for additional ritual actions after the immersion, while in Western rites an anointing took place after immersion, not before, and in some places was accompanied by imposition of hands and/or consignation. Ancient writers offered different interpretations of the anointing, including messianic, pneumatic, and apotropaic meanings. Evidence for the fourth-century rites suggests a borrowing or exchange of practices and interpretations across the ancient world, although regional differences also persisted. Entrance to the catechumenate might come at any point in a person’s life, even as a young child. The Easter Vigil became the preferred (if not only) occasion for baptism, reflecting a new emphasis on a Pauline theology of baptism as participation in Christ’s death and resurrection, rather than earlier emphases on rebirth and the baptism of Jesus. 2nd ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994). For critical editions of the homilies, see: F. L. Cross, trans. and ed., St. Cyril of Jerusalem’s Lectures on the Christian Sacraments: The Procatechesis and the Five Mystagogical Catecheses (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977); Auguste Piédagnel, ed., and Pierre Paris, trans., Catéchèses mystagogiques [Cyril of Jerusalem], Sources chrétiennes 126, 2nd ed. (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2004); Bernard Botte, trans. and ed., Des sacrements; Des mystères; l’explication du symbole [Ambrose of Milan], Sources chrétiennes 25 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1961); Antoine Wenger, trans. and ed., Jean Chrysostome: Huit catéchèses baptismales, Sources chrétiennes 50, rev. and corrected ed. (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2005); Auguste Piédagnel and Louis Doutreleau, trans. and ed., Trois catéchèses baptismales [John Chrysostom], Sources chrétiennes 366 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1990); Alphonse Mingana, trans. and ed., Commentary of Theodore of Mopsuestia on the Lord’s Prayer and on the Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, Woodbrooke Studies 6 (Cambridge: W. Heffer, 1933); Raymond Tonneau and Robert Devreesse, trans. and ed., Les homélies catétchétiques [Theodore of Mopsuestia] (Vatican City: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 1949). For English translations, see Leo P. McCauley and Anthony A. Stephenson, trans., The Works of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, vol. 1, Fathers of the Church 61 (Washington, DC: Catholic University, 1969); Bernard M. Peebles, Leo P. McCauley, and Anthony A. Stephenson, trans., The Works of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, vol. 2, Fathers of the Church 64 (Washington, DC: Catholic University, 2000); Paul W. Harkins, St. John Chrysostom: Baptismal Instructions (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1963). 5 Maxwell E. Johnson, The Rites of Christian Initiation: Their Revolution and Interpretation, rev. and expanded ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2007), 115–20. 6 Ibid., 41–114; Paul F. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 144–70; Bryan D. Spinks, Early and Medieval Rituals and Theologies of Baptism: From the New Testament to the Council of Trent (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 14–37.

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Catechumens seeking baptism at Easter would have their names recorded at the beginning of Lent. In the weeks leading up to their baptism, instruction continued, and candidates underwent exorcisms. The baptismal rite itself included a renunciation, typically a threefold renunciation of the devil, the world, and the flesh. In Eastern rites, an act of adherence followed the renunciation, while in the Christian West and in Jerusalem, candidates professed their faith as they were immersed. In most places, anointing took place both before and after the immersion. The prebaptismal anointing, typically associated with the Holy Spirit in pre-Nicene Eastern rites, was described variously as protective, preparatory for combat with the devil, or branding with Christ, but in most places it was no longer interpreted pneumatically. The postbaptismal anointing came to be associated with the Holy Spirit, although Chrysostom does not describe an anointing after the immersion, instead associating the Spirit with immersion, and Ambrose refers to a spiritual seal but does not indicate what ritual action effected this seal. Alone among these rites, the Roman baptismal rite included a hand-laying and second anointing administered by the bishop after immersion. Following the anointing, the newly baptized were clothed in special white garments, and they then joined the assembly for eucharist.7 As Christianity became the predominant religion in Western Europe, the elaborate rites of the fourth century, intended primarily for the baptism of adults, were gradually adapted to accommodate a growing norm of infant baptism. Scholars in the late twentieth century characterized these changes as a disintegration. Confirmation developed as a sacrament distinct from baptism, and by the end of the Middle Ages, infants were baptized within eight days of birth and confirmation ordinarily was administered no earlier than age seven. Admission to communion also came at the age of discretion, that is, age seven or later. Catechesis was limited to memorization of key texts such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. Rites that had been celebrated publicly, signifying a conversion that entailed changes in belief and behavior and entrance into the community of faith, had become life-cycle rites, marking birth and coming of age, that were celebrated apart from the worshiping community.8 While sixteenth-century reformers gave some attention to baptismal theology, the late medieval practice of infant baptism continued to be normative in most churches of the Reformation.

EXCURSUS: EASTERN BAPTISMAL RITES The Christian East today comprises several liturgical traditions. While each family of rites has distinctive emphases, they share a common pattern of initiation and have similar theological emphases. In contrast to the separation of baptism, confirmation, and admission to communion in the Christian West, Eastern Christian traditions maintained the practice of a single initiatory rite even as infant baptism became normative.9 Like Western Christian rites, Eastern baptismal rites incorporated the ancient catechumenal rituals into baptism. The consecration of the baptismal water became highly elaborate, with exorcisms, consignations, exsufflations (breathing into or blowing

Johnson, Rites of Christian Initiation, 115–200; Spinks, Early and Medieval Rituals, 38–67. J. D. C. Fisher, Christian Initiation: Baptism in the Medieval West, Alcuin Club Collections 47 (London: SPCK, 1965); Johnson, Rites of Christian Initiation, 219–67; Spinks, Early and Medieval Rituals, 109–56. 9 For further discussion of Eastern baptismal rites, see Alexander Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974); Johnson, Rites of Christian Initiation, 269– 307; Spinks, Early and Medieval Rituals, 71–108. 7 8

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on the water), and infusions of chrism accompanying lengthy prayers. In those churches that retained an anointing before the administration of water, texts for the consecration of the oil and for the anointing include the pre-Nicene association of anointing with the Holy Spirit and the messianic priesthood and kingship of Christ as well as exorcistic associations introduced during the fourth century. All the Eastern rites also include a postbaptismal anointing using chrism previously consecrated by a bishop or patriarch, and every rite associates this chrismation with the gift of the Holy Spirit. In several Eastern traditions, the anointing requires multiple signings of different parts of the body. Some churches of the East began to call this anointing “the sacrament of chrismation,” and some Western churches identified chrismation as confirmation. However, the postbaptismal anointing in Eastern rites is not comparable to the rite of confirmation that developed in the Christian West during the Middle Ages, and viewing these practices as sacramental equivalents forces the Eastern rites into the categories of late medieval Western sacramental theology. Unlike medieval Western tradition, Eastern Christian traditions have maintained to the present the close connection of water baptism and postbaptismal chrismation, customarily administered by a priest. In addition to the bestowal of the Holy Spirit signified in the postbaptismal anointing, the theological emphases of Eastern baptismal rites include cleansing, regeneration, new birth, and adoption. The motif of participation in Christ’s death and resurrection is less pronounced or absent. The baptismal rite is intended to culminate in the reception of communion. However, as in the Christian West, baptism in Eastern churches came to be celebrated as a private event with the family of the infant candidate, separate from the Sunday liturgy, and communion was administered from the reserved sacrament or omitted altogether.10 More recently, influenced by the liturgical renewal following Vatican II, some Eastern churches have begun once again to celebrate baptism in the context of the eucharistic liturgy.11

TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITURGICAL REVISION: RITUAL PATTERNS AND PRACTICES The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council directed that the catechumenate for adults be restored and the rites for the baptism of infants and adults be revised. In 1969 the Ordo Baptismi Parvulorum (Rite of Baptism for Children) was published, and the Ordo Initiationis Christianae Adultorum (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) followed three years later, in 1972. The expansion of Western missionary activity that began in the sixteenth century was a key factor prompting the development of an adult catechumenate. Missionaries in many churches, not just the Roman Catholic Church, recognized a need for preparation of adult converts, resulting in the development of catechetical programs. Roman Catholic missionaries in different regions developed a catechumenate that progressed through stages toward baptism. After the Second World War, church leaders in Paris introduced a catechumenate with young adults who had never been baptized. In 1962, just before

Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit, 115–21. For example, Church of Greece, Archieratikon, 3rd ed. (2014); Michel Najim and Patrick B. O’Grady, eds., The Services of Initiation into the Holy Orthodox-Catholic and Apostolic Church (LaVerne, CA: Antiochian Orthodox Institute, 2017). 10 11

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the opening of the Second Vatican Council, the Congregation of Rites published rites for a catechumenate in seven stages, culminating in the celebration of baptism. These developments set the stage for the Second Vatican Council to call for a catechumenate for adults comprising several distinct steps.12 The Roman Ritual published after the Second Vatican Council places the RCIA before the Rite of Baptism for Children, suggesting that the initiation of adults is theologically normative.13 The stages and many of the ceremonies of the RCIA have roots in ancient liturgical practices, some of which continued to be part of the Roman Catholic baptismal rite up to the Second Vatican Council. In keeping with fourth-century practice, the Easter Vigil is the preferred time for the baptism of adults. The process begins with the precatechumenate, a time of evangelization and initial conversion, leading to the individual’s decision to follow Christ. After members of the community—clergy, catechists, sponsors, other laity—determine that the inquirers are demonstrating the beginnings of faith and commitment, this informal stage concludes with entrance into the catechumenate. In this public rite, inquirers express their intent and the assembly promises to help them know and follow Christ. Several ritual actions signify the decision to follow Christ: in addition to signing on the forehead and entry into the church building, the rite may include signing of the five senses, giving of salt, presentation of a Bible or book of gospels, and giving of a cross. Depending on the cultural context, the rite may also include an exorcism with exsufflation and a renunciation of non-Christian worship, as well as the giving of a new name. From this point forward, in keeping with ancient practice, catechumens are considered “joined to the church” and “part of the household of God.”14 They participate in the liturgy of the word at the eucharist and are dismissed before the liturgy of the table so that they may continue their catechetical formation. The catechumenate is an extended period of formation, a spiritual journey of deepening conversion that includes not only growth in knowledge, that is, a change in belief, but also a change in behavior evident in a pattern of Christian living and witness to the Gospel. In addition to the Sunday liturgy, the RCIA calls for special celebrations of the word of God throughout the catechumenate, and it provides prayers of exorcism and blessing, as well as anointing with the oil of catechumens. The final preparation for baptism at Easter begins with a rite of election or enrollment, normally a diocesan celebration on the first Sunday in Lent. The priest or catechist and the sponsors attest to the catechumens’ preparation, and the names of the candidates are written in the “book of the elect.”15 From this point forward, catechumens are called the “elect,” that is, those chosen by God; they are also called competentes (“copetitioners”), asking to receive the sacraments of Christ, and illuminandi (“those to be illumined”), because baptism fills the baptized with the light of faith.16

Paul Turner, The Hallelujah Highway (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2000), 139–55. International Consultation on English in the Liturgy, trans., The Rites of the Catholic Church as Revised by Decree of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council and Published by Authority of Pope Paul VI, study ed. (New York: Pueblo, 1976, 1983). Paragraph numbers below refer to this text. On adult initiation as theologically normative, see Aidan Kavanagh, “Christian Initiation in Post-Conciliar Roman Catholicism: A Brief Report,” in Living Water, Sealing Spirit, ed. Maxwell E. Johnson (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 1–2; originally published in Studia Liturgica 12 (1977): 107–15. 14 Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA), para. 18. 15 RCIA, para. 22. 16 RCIA, para. 24. 12 13

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The Lenten period of purification and enlightenment is a time of profound spiritual preparation for the elect and for the entire community. At the eucharist on the third, fourth, and fifth Sundays in Lent, public scrutinies, consisting of prayer and exorcism, are intended to free candidates from sin and the devil and strengthen them in Christ. The candidates receive the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer in formal presentations, a practice originating in the fourth century, when these texts were kept secret until catechumens were nearing the time of their baptism. On the morning of Holy Saturday, just a few hours before their baptism, the candidates return the creed, professing their faith in a ceremony that concludes with the ephphetha, that is, the opening of the ears and the mouth. The RCIA culminates in the celebration of the rites of initiation—baptism, confirmation, and first eucharist—at the Easter Vigil. Following the vigil readings and homily, the candidates and their sponsors gather at the font, and the litany of saints and prayer over the water introduce the baptism. Next, the renunciation and profession of faith lead immediately to baptism, with full immersion as the preferred mode. Explanatory rites follow the administration of water: anointing, clothing with a white garment, and presentation of a lighted candle. However, when confirmation follows immediately after baptism, the “explanatory” anointing is omitted and instead, candidates are anointed in confirmation, which in the absence of a bishop may be administered by the priest. The rite continues with the eucharist, beginning with general intercessions, and the newly baptized receive their first communion. Celebrating baptism, confirmation, and first eucharist in a single rite restores the primitive unity of the initiatory rite, signifying “the unity of the paschal mystery” and “the close relationship between the mission of the Son and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit.”17 However, the omission of the first anointing after baptism marks a significant change from the ancient liturgical practice of Rome, which called for two anointings after baptism. In the RCIA, the first anointing is messianic and christic, associating the candidate with Christ’s anointing as prophet, priest, and king. In contrast, confirmation is pneumatic, including the ancient prayer for the sevenfold gift of the Spirit and a new formula for anointing, “be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit,”18 a formula adopted from Eastern Christian practice. In keeping with fourth-century practice, the RCIA does not conclude with the celebration of the initiatory rites at the Easter Vigil but rather continues with a final period: postbaptismal catechesis, or mystagogy. The newly baptized participate in the Sunday eucharist, and with whole community, they “move forward together, meditating on the Gospel, sharing in the eucharist, and performing works of charity.”19 The RCIA encourages a festive celebration at the end of the Easter season and recommends that the newly baptized gather on the anniversary of their baptism to share their experiences and be strengthened in their journey. In contrast to the preparation before baptism, the postbaptismal period focuses on the Sunday eucharist without additional ceremonies. The RCIA includes adaptations for use with children of catechetical age, recognizing that they are able to speak for themselves yet also dependent on their parents or guardians and influenced by peer pressure. The rite of baptism for children is intended for younger children who have not reached the age of discretion and so are unable to profess their CIA, para. 34. R RCIA, para. 269–70. 19 RCIA, para. 37. 17 18

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faith. While emphasizing that infants should be baptized within a few weeks of birth, the rite calls for baptism to be celebrated during the Easter Vigil or on Sunday, “when the Church commemorates the Lord’s resurrection,” and it further emphasizes the ecclesial context by suggesting that baptism occasionally take place during the Sunday Mass or at least “in the presence of the faithful … who are all to take an active part in the rite.”20 The rite begins with a few remnants of ancient catechumenal rites. The “reception of the children” at the beginning of the rite includes consignation. After readings, a homily, and intercessions, the rite continues with a prayer of exorcism and anointing with the oil of catechumens. The rite then proceeds with the celebration of baptism, following a structure parallel to the RCIA: blessing of the water, renunciation of sin and profession of faith, administration of water, anointing with chrism, clothing with a white garment, and giving of a lighted candle. The ephphetha follows; in pre-Vatican II rites, the ephphetha came at the conclusion of the prebaptismal ceremonies, a placement similar to that in the RCIA. Maxwell Johnson proposes that this postbaptismal location in the rite of baptism for children suggests that baptism serves as an enrollment into the catechumenate for those baptized as infants, anticipating the time when the infants will be able to hear and receive the word, and their mouths open to proclaim the faith.21 The RCIA provided a foundation for the restoration of the catechumenate in other churches. While the 1979 Book of Common Prayer (BCP) of the Episcopal Church does not include rites for the catechumenate, The Book of Occasional Services published in 1979 includes a brief description of the catechumenal process and rites that are a simplified version of the RCIA. Similarly, a catechumenate is not provided in the 1978 Lutheran Book of Worship, but the 1982 Occasional Service Book has a rite of enrollment of candidates for baptism and a brief description of a catechumenal process, and the 2006 Evangelical Lutheran Worship includes an optional rite of welcome to baptism, with consignation and presentation of a Bible. Efforts to implement a catechumenate in Lutheran and Episcopal churches in the United States and Canada led to the founding in 1993 of the North American Association for the Catechumenate (now called Journey to Baptismal Living). Pastors and lay leaders from the United Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church (USA), and United Church of Christ have also participated in the network, fostering an ecumenical conversation about theology and practice. The modern revival of the catechumenate originated in response to missionary activity that led to the conversion of unbaptized adults. The emergence of post-Christendom in Europe and North America during the twentieth century has resulted in a need for evangelization and formation of unbaptized adults in those contexts. As the catechumenate was being introduced after Vatican II, Aidan Kavanagh pointed out that it required a new way of being church: One cannot set an adult catechumenate in motion without becoming necessarily involved with renewal in the ways a local church lives its faith from top to bottom. For members of an adult catechumenate must be secured through evangelization; they must be formed to maturity in ecclesial faith through catechesis both prior to baptism and after it; and there must be something to initiate them into that will be correlative to the expectations built up in them throughout their whole initiatory process. This

ite of Baptism for Children (RBC), para. 8–9, 32. R Johnson, Rites of Christian Initiation, 404.

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last means a community of lively faith in Jesus Christ dead, risen, and present actually among his People.22 Kavanagh underscores a foundational shift evident in post-Vatican II revisions of baptism, from a socio-personal understanding of baptism as a life-cycle rite marking human birth, to an ecclesial context in which baptism is initiation into a community of faith whose members are transformed by their encounter with the Spirit of Jesus. Yet this shift remains a work in progress as churches adapt to the realities of post-Christendom, and the catechumenal process and rites have not been widely adopted. A renewed understanding of the ecclesial context for baptism is evident in expectations that baptism be administered during public worship, preferably the eucharist. Many contemporary baptismal rites include a promise by the assembly to support the candidates in their Christian life. In addition, most rites call for the assembly to join the candidates in responding to the interrogatory Apostles’ Creed just before the administration of the water. Many rites also provide a congregational statement of welcome after the baptism, leading to the exchange of the peace, parallel to ancient baptismal practice in which the newly baptized exchanged the peace with the assembly for the first time.23 A more effusive use of symbol is also characteristic of contemporary baptismal rites. Affusion, that is, baptism by pouring or sprinkling, had become common by the end of the Middle Ages. In churches that began to practice believer’s baptism after the Reformation, immersion baptism became normative, and church buildings following that practice typically feature a sunken font or tank, often covered except on occasions when baptism will be administered. However, until the late twentieth century the Roman Catholic Church and churches of the Reformation that allow infant baptism customarily administered baptism by affusion. Reforms after the Second Vatican Council, beginning with the RCIA and the rite of baptism for children, emphasize the symbolism of water. Many churches encourage an effusive use of water, some giving preference to immersion while still allowing baptism by pouring of water.24 In some places, baptismal fonts and worship spaces have been renovated to accommodate this practice.25 Extensive prayers of thanksgiving over or blessing of the water are common, with biblical references to the creation, the flood, the exodus, and the baptism of Jesus, further underscoring the significance of the water.26

avanagh, “Christian Initiation,” 8. K See, for example, “Holy Baptism,” in The Book of Common Prayer [Episcopal Church] (New York: Church Hymnal Corp., 1979), 298–308 [hereafter BCP]; “Services of the Baptismal Covenant,” in The United Methodist Book of Worship (Nashville, TN: United Methodist Publishing House, 1992), 81–110 [hereafter UMBOW]; “Holy Baptism,” A Prayer Book for Australia [Anglican Church of Australia] (Alexandria, NSW: Broughton Books, 1995), 50–71 [hereafter APBA]; Church of England, Common Worship: Initiation Services (London: Church House Publishing, 1998) [hereafter CW]; “Holy Baptism,” in Evangelical Lutheran Worship, Leader’s Desk Edition (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2006), 581–91 [hereafter ELW]; “The Sacrament of Baptism/El sacramento del Bautismo,” Book of Common Worship [Presbyterian Church (USA)] (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2018), 407–20 [hereafter BCW]. For a discussion of contemporary Anglican baptismal rites, see Ruth A. Meyers, “Rites of Initiation,” in The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer: A Worldwide Survey, ed. Charles Hefling and Cynthia Shattuck (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 484–99. 24 See, for example, RCIA, para. 32, 220; RBC, para. 18, 148; BCP, 307; UMBOW, 81; APBA, 70; CW, 9; ELW, 590; BCW, 405, 411. 25 Regina Kuehn, A Place for Baptism (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1992); S. Anita Stauffer, On Baptismal Fonts: Ancient and Modern, Alcuin/GROW Liturgical Study 29–30 (Bramcote: Grove Books, 1994). 26 See, for example, RCIA, para. 215; RBC, para. 54; BCP, 306–7; UMBOW, 90–1; APBA, 57–8; CW, 23–4. ELW (586–9) and BCW (410–11, 417–18, 444–8) offer several texts for the prayer over the water. 22 23

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Other symbols are also common. Most churches of the Reformation had reduced baptism to the administration of water with the trinitarian formula, eliminating all supplementary rites that were part of the late medieval Western service of baptism. Baptismal rites introduced after Vatican II require or allow a number of additional ritual actions rooted in early Christian practice: anointing, imposition of hands, consignation, giving of a lighted candle, and clothing with a white garment.27 The association of baptism with the liturgical year offers other symbolic associations. The RCIA insists on baptism of adults at the Easter Vigil, emphasizing baptism as participation in Christ’s death and resurrection.28 Other churches have restored an Easter Vigil and prioritized or made provision for baptism on that occasion. Drawing on ancient traditions, some have also commended Pentecost as an occasion suitable for baptism, highlighting the pneumatic character of baptism, and the feast of the baptism of Jesus, which in the 1969 Roman lectionary and the Revised Common Lectionary is celebrated on the first Sunday after Epiphany.29 In some Anglican churches, All Saints Day (or the Sunday following) has emerged as a preferred day for baptism because it associates baptism with the communion of saints.30

THE MEANING OF BAPTISM The common practices of baptism that emerged in the late twentieth century reflect a growing consensus about the meaning of baptism. The ecumenical convergence document Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (BEM), adopted in 1982 by the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, presents a rich biblical theology of baptism.31 Baptism is a participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (Rom. 6:3-5; Col. 2:12), immersing Christians in the death of Jesus and signifying their death to sin, raising them to new life in the power of Christ’s resurrection. Baptism washes away sin (1 Cor. 6:11), requiring a conversion of heart. Through baptism, Christians are reborn (Jn 3:15), enlightened (Eph. 5:14), and clothed in Christ (Gal. 3:27). The Holy Spirit is at work in people’s lives, and God seals the baptized with the Spirit, renewing them and giving a pledge of their inheritance as children of God (2 Cor. 1:21-22; Eph. 1:13-14; Tit. 3:5). Baptism incorporates people into the body of Christ and brings them into union with each other and with Christians in every time and place (Gal. 3:27-28;

See, for example, BCP, 308, 313; UMBOW, 91–2; APBA, 60, 70; CW, 25, 31; ELW, 590–1; BCW, 411–12, 419–20. 28 RCIA, 8. 29 For baptism on feast days, especially the Easter Vigil, see, for example, BCP, 284–95, 312; UMBOW, 368– 76; Common Worship: Times and Seasons (London: Church House Publishing, 2006), 170–83, 331–71; ELW, 643–53; BCW, 290–304. For the feast of the baptism of Jesus, see International Commission on English in the Liturgy, The Roman Calendar: Text and Commentary (Washington, DC: US Catholic Conference, 1976), 24; Consultation on Common Texts, The Revised Common Lectionary (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1992), 14. 30 See, for example, BCP, 312; The Book of Alternative Services of the Anglican Church of Canada (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1985), 146–7 (hereafter BAS); Episcopal Church in the Philippines, The Book of Common Prayer (Quezon City: Episcopal Church in the Philippines, 2015), 210. The origins of All Saints’ Day as a baptismal feast may lie in an article by Anglican liturgical scholar H. Boone Porter: “Baptism: Its Paschal and Ecumenical Setting,” Worship 42:4 (April 1968): 208. 31 World Council of Churches, Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, Faith and Order Paper 111, January 15, 1982, https://www.oikoum​ene.org/en/resour​ces/docume​nts/comm​issi​ons/faith-and-order/i-unity-the-chu​rch-and-itsmiss​ion/bapt​ism-euchar​ist-and-minis​try-faith-and-order-paper-no-111-the-lima-text (hereafter BEM). 27

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Eph. 4:4-5). The new life of baptism is a sign of the life of the world to come (Col. 1:12-13). While BEM affirms that baptism signifies the forgiveness of sin, it makes no mention of original sin, a concept that dominated late medieval Western baptismal theology and practice, grounded in the teaching of Augustine of Hippo. In response to Pelagianism, which asserted that humans in their free will can choose good as well as evil and do not require divine grace to do good, Augustine argued that humans from the moment of their birth require divine grace to choose, to will, and to do good. Augustine attributed human sinfulness to the sin of Adam, transmitted to all human beings along with suffering and death.32 He based his theology in part on the practice of infant baptism, reasoning that if baptism is given for the forgiveness of sin and the church baptizes infants, then infants must in some way have sinned. For biblical support, Augustine relied on Rom. 5:12, “Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned.” However, Augustine used the Latin Vulgate text, which read, “death spread to all in whom all have sinned,” a translation that implies that the entire human race was present in Adam and hence sin is an inherited condition, rather than understanding that humanity is ensnared in a web of sin. While Augustine developed his theology in part based on the practice of infant baptism, during the Middle Ages theologians turned to Augustine’s theology to insist on baptism as soon as possible (quamprimum) after birth in order to save infants from eternal damnation.33 Contemporary baptismal rites make little or no reference to original sin. The term is absent in the RCIA, while in the rite of baptism for children, the prayer of exorcism and anointing before baptism asks that the children may be freed from original sin. Concern for the salvation of the child through baptism is also evident in provisions for baptism if a child is in danger of death. Some other churches also allow for emergency baptism. Although a theology of original sin is not a dominant feature of contemporary baptismal rites, an understanding of sin is evident in the renunciations that are a normative component of the rite. Following ancient baptismal practices, the rites typically require baptizands (or their sponsors, for those baptized as infants) to renounce the devil, the world, and the flesh. In addition, in most rites the prayer over the water refers to cleansing from sin. Overall, however, contemporary rites place more emphasis on salvation for baptismal life rather than salvation from sin. Beginning in the sixteenth century, theologians in the Reformed tradition justified infant baptism not as redemption from original sin but rather as a sign of entrance into the covenant community. The 1992 United Methodist Book of Worship includes baptism under the heading “Services of the Baptismal Covenant,” a covenant comprising God’s promise of adoption by grace and our promise of a response in faith and love.34

Augustine of Hippo, De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione et de Baptismo Parvulorum, ed. K. F. Vrba and J. Zycha, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 60 (Vindobonae: Tempsky, 1913); ET On the Merit and Forgiveness of Sins, and the Baptism of Infants, trans. Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, rev. Benjamin B. Warfield, rev. and ed. Kevin Knight, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series 5 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1887), http://www.newadv​ent.org/fath​ers/1501.htm. 33 Johnson, Rites of Christian Initiation, 194–8; Spinks, Early and Medieval Rituals, 63–6. 34 UMBOW, 81–114. 32

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The 1979 BCP of the Episcopal Church introduced the “Baptismal Covenant,” consisting of the Apostles’ Creed in interrogatory form, followed by five questions eliciting the assembly’s commitment to Christian practices. These questions expand a promise to “keep God’s holy will and commandments” that followed the interrogatory creed in the baptismal rite of the 1662 BCP of the Church of England. Several other churches of the Anglican Communion include a similar covenant in their baptismal rites, with some variation in the questions of commitment. Bryan Spinks has criticized this covenant, arguing that it could be considered semi-Pelagian because it requires promises prior to the act of baptism, implying a contractual agreement needed to receive God’s grace. He expresses a similar concern about baptismal rites that ask parents to agree to raise their child in the Christian faith at the beginning of the rite, a practice already found in sixteenth-century rites in the Reformed tradition. Spinks prefers the sixteenth-century English pattern, in which parents are instructed in their responsibilities only after the child is baptized. A similar pattern, which Spinks describes as grace/response, underlies the baptismal rite in the Church of England’s Common Worship, which places a “commission” after baptism. The 1989 New Zealand Prayer Book goes even further, requiring only a request for baptism, followed by renunciation and affirmation of Christ, before administration of the water, with the interrogatory creed following.35 Spinks rightly insists on the priority of God’s grace in baptism. By beginning with the interrogatory creed, the Baptismal Covenant in the 1979 BCP and other contemporary Anglican prayer books establishes God’s action as the basis for human response. The questions of commitment in the Baptismal Covenant of the Episcopal Church are one expression of the ethical implications of baptism, another emphasis of contemporary baptismal rites. BEM describes baptism as both God’s gift and human response, a response that involves lifelong growth in Christ, as Christians wait in hope for God’s new creation. The document asserts that baptism “has ethical implications which not only call for personal sanctification, but also motivate Christians to strive for the realization of the will of God in all realms of life (Rom. 6:9-11; Gal. 3:27-28; 1 Pet. 2:21–4:6).”36

SACRAMENTAL QUESTIONS: THE AGE FOR BAPTISM Some sixteenth-century reformers rejected the late medieval practice of infant baptism on the grounds that it was not scriptural. For these reformers, called Anabaptists because they rebaptized those baptized in infancy, baptism required conscious conversion leading to a personal decision to follow Christ. Rather than a sacrament conveying grace, those practicing believer’s baptism came to view baptism as an ordinance, a public act of witness made in obedience to Christ.37 By the twentieth century, many of these churches had also developed rites of infant dedication.38 Although the theology of baptism differed significantly from other churches of the Reformation (Lutheran, Reformed, and

Bryan D. Spinks, Reformation and Modern Rituals and Theologies of Baptism (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 175, 177, 181–3, 199. 36 BEM, B-10. 37 Johnson, Rites of Christian Initiation, 349–53; Bryan D. Spinks, Reformation and Modern Rituals and Theologies of Baptism (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 83–100. 38 Arthur G. Patzia, “Baby Dedication in the Believers’ Church,” American Baptist Quarterly 3:1 (March 1984): 64–6. 35

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Anglican) and from the Roman Catholic Church, the practices were similar: a rite in infancy (dedication or baptism), catechesis during childhood, and an adolescent rite of public profession of faith (baptism or confirmation). Among churches continuing to practice infant baptism, theological controversy erupted in the mid-twentieth century when Karl Barth argued that baptism requires an active obedient response in order to recognize the salvation that Christ imparts. The baptism of infants, Barth concluded, is incorrect, wounding the body of the church.39 Barth’s critique led to vigorous debate over the next two decades. In response to Barth, theologians countered that baptism is God’s action, bringing the individual into the community of the church and into Christ.40 Those arguing in favor of infant baptism, however, did not claim that every infant should be baptized. Theologians and other church leaders recognized a problem with indiscriminate baptism in the context of Christendom and called for baptism of infants who would grow up in the faith. BEM affirms the possibility of both the baptism of believers and the baptism of infants, pointing out that in both cases, the baptized person must grow in their response of faith. In its commentary, BEM proposes that these practices are complementary. According to BEM, both practices “embody God’s own initiative in Christ and express a response of faith made within the believing community.” The baptism of infants “emphasizes the corporate faith and the faith which the child shares with its parents,” while the baptism of believers “emphasizes the explicit confession of the person who responds to the grace of God in and through the community of faith and who seeks baptism.”41 Moreover, baptism must always be followed by Christian nurture, at whatever age a person is baptized. Some contemporary baptismal rites give equal weight to the baptism of adults and of young children, recognizing that people of any age are suitable candidates for baptism.42 Other rites, like the RCIA, give theological priority to the baptism of adults, for example, by calling for adult candidates to be presented before infants and young children.43 Understanding adult initiation as the foundation for all initiatory practice is a major departure from the medieval practice of baptism soon after birth, giving priority to the biblical pattern of baptism upon a personal profession of faith. Yet, despite claims that the baptism of adults is theologically normative, the baptism of infants and young children continues to be a common practice in these churches. Moreover, whether theologians and church leaders assert the priority of adult baptism or the rites give equal weight to baptism of people of any age, contemporary rites in churches that allow infant baptism emphasize that parents and godparents are expected to nurture and raise the child in the Christian faith.

Karl Barth, The Teaching of the Church Regarding Baptism, trans. Ernest A. Payne (London: SCM Press, 1948). Originally published as Die Kirchliche Lehre von der Taufe, Theologische Studien 14 (Zurich: A. G. Zollickon, 1943). 40 See, for example, Oscar Cullmann, Baptism in the New Testament, trans. J. K. S. Reid (London: SCM Press, 1950), originally published as Die Tauflehre des Neuen Testaments: Erwachsenen und Kindertaufe, Abhandlungen zur Theologie des Alten und Neuen Testaments 12 (Zurich: Zwingli-Verlag, 1948); Edmund Schlink, The Doctrine of Baptism, trans. Herbert J. A. Bouman (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1972), originally published as Die Lehre von der Taufe (Kassel: Stauda-Verlag, 1969). 41 BEM, Commentary on B-11. 42 See, for example, UMBOW, 82; BCW, 404. 43 For the claim that the baptism of adults is historically and theologically normative, see Marion Hatchett, Commentary on the American Prayer Book (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 269–70. For rites that present or address adult candidates before infants, see BCP, 301; BAS, 147, 153; ELW, 584. 39

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SACRAMENTAL QUESTIONS: THE RELATION OF CONFIRMATION TO BAPTISM In churches that practice infant baptism, a rite of public profession of faith often follows later in life, and in many of these churches, that rite is called confirmation. But the roots of confirmation lie elsewhere, in postbaptismal actions that the bishop performed in the ancient Roman baptismal rite: hand-laying and prayer for the sevenfold gift of the Spirit, followed by an anointing. As the rites of Rome were adopted throughout Western Europe, bishops were not always available for baptism, and the postbaptismal ceremonies gradually came to be administered in a separate rite called confirmation. Theological interpretation came after the emergence of the rite, in what some twentieth-century liturgical scholars characterized as “a sacrament in search of a theology.”44 Medieval theologians explained confirmation as a bestowal of the gift of the Holy Spirit, providing an increase of grace and strengthening those confirmed for spiritual combat. In the sixteenth century, the Lutheran and Reformed traditions rejected the late medieval theology and practice of confirmation, while providing a coming-of-age rite with hand-laying that followed catechesis and led to admission to communion. Unlike these other churches of the Reformation, the Church of England in its BCP retained confirmation with the medieval prayer for the sevenfold gift of the Spirit and laying on of a hand, eliminating the anointing. This Anglican rite also introduced catechesis as a prerequisite, blending the late medieval sacramental practice with the catechetical Reformation rite. Children were required to be able to recite the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, and to answer the questions in a short catechism prefixed to the confirmation rite. The 1662 BCP underscored this catechetical aspect of confirmation with the addition of a question requiring confirmands to renew the promises made for them at their baptism, “ratifying and confirming the same in your own persons.”45 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Anglicans debated the meaning of confirmation in relation to baptism. Frederick William Puller and Arthur James Mason asserted that the indwelling gift of the Spirit is bestowed at confirmation and not at baptism. In response, A. Theodore Wirgman and Darwell Stone, citing many of the same biblical and patristic sources, argued that the Holy Spirit is bestowed at baptism. In the mid-twentieth century, Gregory Dix, taking up the position of Puller and Mason, distinguished between baptism of water and baptism of the Spirit, arguing that water baptism effects only forgiveness of sin and is incomplete without the sealing of the Spirit in confirmation. Geoffrey Lampe responded that the seal of the Spirit is one aspect of water baptism and not bestowed separately, whether through hand-laying or anointing.46 The 1991 International Anglican William J. Bausch, A New Look at the Sacraments, rev. ed. (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1983), 92. For a discussion of the complexities of confirmation from a Roman Catholic perspective, see Paul Turner, Confirmation: The Baby in Solomon’s Court (New York: Paulist Press, 1993). For a Protestant perspective, see Robert L. Browning and Roy A. Reed, Models of Confirmation and Baptismal Affirmation (Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press, 1995). For a more recent discussion of perspectives in the Episcopal Church, see Sharon Ely Pearson, ed., Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Theologies of Confirmation for the 21st Century (New York: Morehouse, 2014). 45 “The Order of Confirmation or Laying on of Hands upon Those That Are Baptized and Come to Years of Discretion” (1662), in The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed. Brian Cummings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 431. 46 Frederick William Puller, What Is the Distinctive Grace of Confirmation? (London: Rivingtons, 1880); Arthur James Mason, The Relation of Confirmation to Baptism as Taught in Holy Scripture and the Fathers (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1891); A. Theodore Wirgman, The Doctrine of Confirmation Considered in Relation to Holy Baptism 44

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Liturgical Consultation acknowledged multiple understandings of confirmation in Anglicanism, including ratifying baptismal promises, sealing by the Holy Spirit, and commissioning by the bishop for the ministry of Christian life. The consultation concluded that baptism is “complete sacramental initiation,” while confirmation is a “pastoral rite” that has “a continuing pastoral role in the renewal of faith among the baptized” but is not a completion of baptism.47 The Episcopal Church in its 1979 BCP had already defined baptism as “full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit.”48 Underscoring that baptism is complete, the rite includes the classic prayer for the sevenfold gift of the Spirit, followed by hand-laying with consignation and optional chrismation, with the formula, “you are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever.” But the 1979 BCP also includes a separate rite of confirmation with hand-laying by a bishop, albeit without the prayer for the Spirit, and this rite is expected not only for those baptized as infants but also for those baptized as adults unless baptized with hand-laying by a bishop, undermining the claim that baptism is full initiation. Only a few other churches in the Anglican Communion have followed the lead of the Episcopal Church. Most have retained the prayer for the sevenfold gift of the Spirit in confirmation and require confirmation for adults as well as children. Some encourage that adults be baptized and confirmed in the same service, similar to the practice in the RCIA. The Roman Catholic Church has retained the medieval Western understanding of confirmation as a bestowal of the Holy Spirit, underscored by the introduction of the Eastern formula for chrismation “be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit.” The RCIA emphasizes the relation of confirmation to baptism by allowing a priest to confirm adults who are baptized at the Easter Vigil, reintegrating baptism and confirmation.49 For those baptized as infants, however, confirmation remains a separate rite, administered at age seven or later. Those preparing for confirmation are to be catechized. The rite begins with an “instruction” that associates confirmation not only with the Holy Spirit but also with vocation and service, and it introduces a renewal of baptismal promises at the beginning of the rite, elements akin to the Reformation understanding of confirmation as a catechetical rite.50 In the 1979 BCP, confirmation is a catechetical rite requiring a mature public affirmation of faith. Recognizing that multiple occasions in Christian life may call for formal public reaffirmation of one’s baptismal promises, the Episcopal Church introduced parallel forms for “reaffirmation” and for “reception,” without defining the circumstances for use of these forms. Several other churches of the Anglican Communion have introduced similar rites, as have other churches. In some churches, the term “affirmation of baptism” is replacing “confirmation.” These practices approach confirmation and other rites of affirmation through a Reformation lens of catechesis, providing a public opportunity for individuals to renew the promises of their baptism not just once when they come of as a Sacramental Ordinance of the Catholic Church (London: Longmans, Green, 1897); Darwell Stone, Holy Baptism (London: Longmans, Green, 1899); Gregory Dix, The Theology of Confirmation in Relation to Baptism (London: A. & C. Black, 1946); Geoffrey W. H. Lampe, The Seal of the Spirit (London: Longmans, Green, 1951). 47 Fourth International Anglican Liturgical Consultation, “Principles of Christian Initiation,” in Growing in Newness of Life: Christian Initiation in Anglicanism Today; Papers from the Fourth International Anglican Liturgical Consultation, Toronto 1991, ed. David R. Holeton (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1993), 229, 243–5. 48 BCP, 298. 49 RCIA, para. 46. 50 “Rite of Confirmation,” in Rites of the Catholic Church (1976, 1983), para. 11, 12, 22, 23.

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age but potentially at other significant turning points, for example, returning to active Christian practice after lapsing or affiliating with a different Christian tradition.

SACRAMENTAL QUESTIONS: BAPTISM AND ADMISSION TO COMMUNION The unitary initiatory rite of early Christianity culminated in admission to communion, a practice that continued in Western Christianity until well into the Middle Ages, whether those baptized were adults or infants. The practice of infant communion declined gradually, corresponding to less frequent reception of communion by laity during this period and the eventual withdrawal of the chalice from the laity. Eucharistic theology focused on an ever-more realistic understanding of Christ’s presence in the consecrated elements, leading to a practice of communicating infants only from the cup in response to concerns that infants might desecrate the sacrament by spitting up the host. When laity ceased to receive wine, practices of communing infants from the chalice also ended.51 As first communion was separated from baptism, initiation came to be a years-long process. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) decreed that the reception of communion was not obligatory for children under the age of discretion (age seven) and required a first confession in preparation for first communion. A Council of Lambeth held by Archbishop of Canterbury John Peckham in 1281 required confirmation before admission to communion, and Anglicans retained this requirement in the BCP. The sixteenthcentury reformers reinforced the separation of baptism and first communion by requiring catechesis prior to admission to communion.52 By the twentieth century, most Western Christians believed that children needed to understand communion before they could receive it. Twentieth-century liturgical scholarship led to new understandings of the eucharist as the culmination of Christian initiation, and the liturgical renewal of the twentieth century fostered a new appreciation for regular, even weekly, celebration of the eucharist with the assembly receiving. As a result, Lutherans and Anglicans (among others) began admitting children to communion before their confirmation, and some of these churches throughout the world revised worship books and guidelines to allow communion of all the baptized, including infants. Some congregations have gone beyond communion of all the baptized to an open table, inviting anyone present at a celebration of eucharist to receive, whether or not they are baptized. This practice marks a significant departure from historic Christian teaching; since the end of the first century and perhaps earlier, baptism has been the prerequisite for admission to communion in both Eastern and Western Christianity. However, the 1992 United Methodist Book of Worship allows all who intend to lead a Christian life to receive the bread and cup and points out that Methodists have no tradition of refusing any who present themselves for communion.53 Proponents of an open table argue that just as Jesus broke down barriers and shared meals with sinners and outcasts without condition, so too Christians today should invite all present to share the eucharistic meal. The open table emphasizes God’s grace-filled

Fisher, Christian Initiation, 101–8; Johnson, Rites of Christian Initiation, 262–4. Johnson, Rites of Christian Initiation, 353–62. 53 UMBOW, 29. 51 52

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initiative, which always precedes any human response. The experience of eucharistic hospitality can be a transformative encounter that leads people to baptism by drawing them into a grace-filled community and a life of faithful service in response to God. In response, those who uphold the historic teaching of the church distinguish between Jesus’s open table fellowship and meals that he shared only with his disciples. This more restrictive meal practice is intended to sustain followers of Jesus, that is, those who are baptized, while not limiting other meal practices and feeding ministries of the church. Those who have entered the body of Christ through baptism are sustained through regular participation in eucharist, the repeatable part of the baptismal liturgy.54 Alongside debate about an open table in some Christian traditions, ecumenical barriers continue to prevent eucharistic sharing among some baptized Christians. Eastern Orthodox churches and the Roman Catholic Church allow only those in full communion with those churches to receive the eucharist, with limited exceptions for pastoral considerations. Though these churches today recognize baptism administered in other traditions, differences in eucharistic theology and in understandings of ordained ministry prevent eucharistic communion.55

CONCLUSION During the twentieth century, liturgical history provided new insight into the origins and development of initiatory rites, although theological understanding and ritual practices continue to vary. In some churches that have historically practiced infant baptism, adult baptism upon profession of faith has become theologically normative, while the baptism of infants and young children continues to be practiced when there is reasonable expectation that the children will be raised in the Christian faith and life. Most churches have adopted a symbolically rich baptismal rite, immersing candidates or pouring a significant amount of water in the triune name, with additional actions required or permitted: anointing, imposition of hands, consignation, giving of a lighted candle, and clothing with a white garment. Baptism is customarily celebrated publicly, often in the context of the eucharist at which the newly baptized receive their first communion. Churches live with multiple understandings of confirmation, which developed during the Middle Ages as a rite in search of a theology. Sacramental understandings of confirmation as a bestowal of the Holy Spirit or a blessing sit alongside catechetical

Andrew McGowan, “The Meals of Jesus and the Meals of the Church: Eucharistic Origins and Admission to Communion,” in Studia Liturgica Diversa: Essays in Honor of Paul F. Bradshaw, ed. Maxwell E. Johnson and L. Edward Phillips (Portland, OR: Pastoral Press, 2004), 101–15; James Farwell, “Baptism, Eucharist, and the Hospitality of Jesus: On the Practice of ‘Open Communion’,” Anglican Theological Review 86:2 (Spring 2004): 215–38; Kathryn Tanner, “In Praise of Open Communion: A Rejoinder to James Farwell,” Anglican Theological Review 86:3 (Summer 2004): 473–85; J. Barrington Bates, “Giving What Is Sacred to Dogs? Welcoming All to the Eucharistic Feast,” Journal of Anglican Studies 3:1 (June 2005): 53–74; Mark W. Stamm, Let Every Soul Be Jesus’ Guest: A Theology of the Open Table (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2006); Stephen Edmondson, “Opening the Table: The Body of Christ and God’s Prodigal Grace,” Anglican Theological Review 91:2 (Spring 2009): 213–34; Ruth A. Meyers, “Who May Be Invited to the Table?” Anglican Theological Review 94:2 (Spring 2012): 233–44; Donald Schell, “Discerning Open Table in Community and Mission,” Anglican Theological Review 94:2 (Spring 2012): 245–55; Thomas E. Breidenthal, “Following Jesus Outside: Reflections on the Open Table,” Anglican Theological Review 94:2 (Spring 2012): 257–62; Hannah Bowman, “Communion without Baptism and the Paradox of the Cross,” Anglican Theological Review 102:3 (Summer 2020): 373–92. 55 For further discussion of the question of eucharistic sharing between Catholic and non-Catholic Christians, see Timothy Brunk, “Ecumenism and Roman Catholic Eucharist” later in this volume. 54

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understandings associated with affirmation of faith and commitment to the promises of baptism, particularly for those baptized as infants. Some churches use confirmation or a parallel affirmation of faith to receive Christians from other traditions into membership. In some churches, confirmation is required for admission to communion, while other churches allow all the baptized to receive and some congregations and traditions invite anyone present to share the eucharistic meal. In the contemporary post-Christendom context, initiatory rites and processes bring people into union with Christ, with one another, and with Christians in every time and place, building up communities of disciples with distinctive beliefs and behaviors. A baptismal way of life is nurtured and renewed in the regular celebration of eucharist and in a pattern of Christian living in response to God’s grace.

FURTHER READING Johnson, Maxwell E., ed. Living Water, Sealing Spirit: Readings on Christian Initiation. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995. Johnson, Maxwell E. The Rites of Christian Initiation: Their Evolution and Interpretation. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2007. Schmemann, Alexander. Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism. New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. Spinks, Bryan D. Early and Medieval Rituals and Theologies of Baptism: From the New Testament to the Council of Trent. Liturgy, Worship and Society. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Spinks, Bryan D. Reformation and Modern Rituals and Theologies of Baptism: From Luther to Contemporary Practices. Liturgy, Worship and Society. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

One Baptism, Many Churches JOYCE ANN ZIMMERMAN

In his Letter to the Romans, Paul poses a prescient question: “Do you not know?” (Rom. 6:3). No, we really do not know. In fact, we can spend our whole lifetime searching out the question “Do you not know?” Know what? As Paul goes on to say, “All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by Baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:3-4). Through Baptism we know, from Paul, that we are plunged into the depths of the mystery of Christ. What we do not know is what this costs us, what this demands of us, what this incorporation into Christ does to and for us and that this mystery so completely determines who we baptized are. Nevertheless, what we do know is that this life of Christ we embrace impels us forward on a lifelong journey that leads to a Life for which we hope, a fulfillment for which we yearn, a joy that is complete because it brings us before the very face of God. The creative tension between what we do not know and what we do know urges us to open ourselves to the wisdom that only comes from God, a wisdom that teaches us our yes to God is worth more than we can possibly imagine. Yet, we often choose to limit our knowledge about Baptism to what immediately concerns us. We are better off seeking what goes beyond immediate concerns to what has ultimate consequences for who we are and how we are together in community. We baptized Christians tend to limit our understanding of Baptism to issues around removing sin, church membership, covenantal commitment to Christ, and other such concerns. While obviously these are important considerations, when we thus limit our grasp of the meaning of Baptism, we run a risk of missing the breadth and depth of its deepest meaning. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in a brief summary of its presentation of Baptism, has this to say about its fruits or effects: The fruit of Baptism, or baptismal grace, is a rich reality that includes forgiveness of original sin and all personal sins, birth into the new life by which man [sic] becomes an adoptive son [or daughter] of the Father, a member of Christ and a temple of the Holy Spirit. By this very fact the person is incorporated into the Church, the Body of Christ, and made a sharer in the priesthood of Christ.1 Catechism of the Catholic Church (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1994), no. 1279.

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Surely, even this statement does not say it all. Baptism initiates us into the life of Christ, and along with that initiation, it opens up to us a lifelong identity and a formidable commitment to continue the saving ministry of Jesus Christ. Baptism challenges us to delve into its richness, not in a theologically abstract way but in a theologically and pastorally concrete reality as we live together as Christians as well as with those others who profess a different belief. This chapter addresses two main points: (1) what we can learn about baptismal identity and living from Scripture and early rites that we share as a common root; and (2) from this common root, what we can still ecumenically affirm given the evolving tendrils growing from our common baptismal root.

EARLY, ONE COMMON ROOT In this age of water filtration plants producing clean water, indoor plumbing allowing for easily accessible water, and water abundantly available for many people, some of us tend to take water for granted. We turn on a faucet, and there it is. Until a drought. Or until contamination gets into the supply. Or until a pipe breaks. No so long ago, this was not the case. Water was carried from river or well to the home (and still is, in all too many instances in our economically divided world). It was by a well that Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman and says to her that his water will be a spring of eternal Life (see Jn 4:14). Jesus himself was baptized by John the Baptist in the river Jordan (see Mk 1:9). At least one gospel reference suggests that Jesus himself baptized (Jn 3:26). After Philip proclaims to the Ethiopian eunuch the good news about Jesus, the eunuch asks to be baptized in some water at hand by the roadside (see Acts 8:35-39). What we notice in these and other early references is that Baptism uses water, and in the earliest time people were baptized in flowing water from a river, stream, or pool. Baptismal waters were ample. One got wet—all over. The symbolism was abundant and rich. The waters of Baptism cleansed and brought new life. The waters of Baptism communicated forgiveness and conversion of life.2 The waters of Baptism initiated one into the community of those who share what Jesus came to offer: the new Life of salvation. The waters of Baptism do all of this and more: along with the action of the Holy Spirit, these waters effect in us a paschal event. The old self dies and passes over into a new self, a new identity. Through these waters of Baptism we are made members of the Body of Christ. Let us look more closely at some of the references to Baptism in Sacred Scripture to see how we can support this assertion of Baptism as a paschal event.

Baptism in Sacred Scripture We often draw out a baptismal theology only from the New Testament. However, considering the Old Testament as well brings us to a rich typology. Consider the imagery recalling God’s wonderful deeds of salvation from the very beginning of time in the Roman Catholic Blessing of Baptismal Water at the Easter Vigil: O God, who by invisible power accomplish a wondrous effect through sacramental signs

See Irene Nowell, “Biblical Perspectives on Conversion,” Liturgical Ministry 8 (Spring 1999): 57–67.

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and who in many ways have prepared water, your creation, to show forth the grace of Baptism; O God, whose Spirit in the first moments of the world’s creation hovered over the waters, so that the very substance of water would even then take to itself the power to sanctify; O God, who by the outpouring of the flood foreshadowed regeneration, so that from the mystery of one and the same element of water would come an end to vice and a beginning of virtue; O God, who caused the children of Abraham to pass dry-shod through the Red Sea, so that the chosen people, set free from slavery to Pharaoh, would prefigure the people of the baptized; O God, whose Son, baptized by John in the waters of the Jordan, was anointed with the Holy Spirit, and, as he hung upon the Cross, gave forth water from his side along with blood, and after his Resurrection, commanded his disciples: “Go forth, teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” look now, we pray, upon the face of your Church and graciously unseal for her the fountain of Baptism. May this water receive by the Holy Spirit the grace of your Only Begotten Son, so that human nature, created in your image and washed clean through the Sacrament of Baptism from all the squalor of the life of old, may be found worthy to rise to the life of newborn children through water and the Holy Spirit. May the power of the Holy Spirit, O Lord, we pray, come down through your Son into the fullness of this font, so that all who have been buried with Christ by Baptism into death may rise again to life with him. Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.3 The Roman Missal, Third Typical Edition, For Use in the Dioceses of the United States of America, 2011, The Easter Vigil in the Holy Night, no. 46. English translation of The Roman Missal © 2010, International Commission on English in the Liturgy Corporation. All rights reserved. Other Christian denominations have similar prayers. For example, the Anglican baptismal rite has a Prayer over the Water; PCUSA has a Thanksgiving 3

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This prayer references a number of types for the baptismal waters: The waters of creation that are a type of the new Life of Baptism; the waters of the flood during the time of Noah that washed away evil and preserved goodness and are a type for the forgiveness of sins and the infusion of the grace of a new creation at Baptism; the waters of the Red Sea that furthered the first passing over from slavery to freedom and are a type of passing from the slavery of sin to the freedom of the daughters and sons of God in Baptism; the waters of the River Jordan that John the Baptist used to baptize Jesus, when the Holy Spirit announced him as the Beloved Son and are a type of our adoption by God at Baptism; the waters that flowed from Jesus’ side when pierced on the Cross and are a type for Jesus’ passing from death to Risen Life and our same passing in Baptism.4 The prayer includes words of the Great Commission given after the Resurrection in Matthew’s gospel: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Mt. 28:19-20a). The prayer then moves from remembrance of God’s saving deeds to petition, when through water and the Holy Spirit we are reborn as we are united with Christ’s death and Resurrection. Here we have two archetypical theologies of Baptism: dying with Christ to rise with him found in Romans 6 with which we began this chapter as well as an allusion to the discussion between Jesus and Nicodemus about “being born from above … of water and Spirit” (Jn 3:3b, 5b).5 Now let’s turn more specifically to Baptism in the New Testament. The baptism of John the Baptist is mentioned in all three synoptic gospels (Mt. 3; Mk 1:1-11; Lk. 3:122). John’s gospel mentions John the Baptist, but not as one who baptizes Jesus but as one who points to another who comes to baptize with the Holy Spirit (Jn 1:19-34; cf. Jn 3:2236). There is a distinction in both manner and effect between John’s baptism and the Baptism of followers of Jesus. John’s baptism is with water and is directed to repentance and conversion. As Reginald Fuller says, “John’s baptism was a singular conversion event carrying with it the promise of eschatological salvation.”6 John’s baptism carried eschatological promise because, as precursor of the Messiah, he pointed to the new era of covenant and Life that would come with the new inbreaking of God’s kingdom. The Baptism of Jesus’ followers includes both the water and purpose of John’s baptism, but goes beyond this. Baptism with the Holy Spirit adds the dimension of identity: we are baptized into Christ and thus share in his identity and mission (cf. Rom. 6:1-11; 1 Cor. 12:12-13; Gal. 3:11-13; Col. 2:12-13).7 over the Water for Baptism; ELCA has a Thanksgiving at the Font; LCMS has no prayer over the water, as such, but does include a prayer after signing each candidate for Baptism with the Cross on the forehead; The Methodist Church, Section 10 of the baptismal liturgy, has a Thanksgiving over the Water. References to both the Old and New Testaments are used in these prayers, noting that reference to Israel passing through the Red Sea and Jesus being baptized in the Jordan are common. 4 Other Old Testament types for Baptism would include Moses bringing water from the rock during the desert sojourn (see Exod. 17:1-7 and Num. 20:1-13) and the crossing of the River Jordan into the Promised Land (see Josh. 3:1-17). Editors’ note: for another view of typological interpretation of Scripture elsewhere in this volume, see Gordon Lathrop’s essay, “The Bible and the Christian Sacraments.” 5 For more on these two archetypical Scripture passages for Baptism, see Michael G. Witczak, “Baptismal Imagery: The Meeting of Two Worlds,” Liturgical Ministry 8 (Winter 1999): 22–30. 6 Reginald H. Fuller, “Christian Initiation in the New Testament,” in Made, Not Born: New Perspectives on Christian Initiation and the Catechumenate,” The Murphy Center for Liturgical Research (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), 9. 7 Acts 19:1-6 makes a clear distinction between John’s baptism of repentance and Christian Baptism with the Holy Spirit. This passage also adds another sacramental sign: the Holy Spirit is conferred with the laying on of hands (see also Acts 8:14-17; 9:17-18; Heb. 6:1-2).

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One more comment before we leave the New Testament era. For a correct understanding of what Baptism by water and the Holy Spirit means, we must realize that Christian Baptism is grounded in a post-Resurrection and post-Pentecost Church. The Spirit coming upon the gathered community at Pentecost is, of course, the Spirit of the Risen Christ. “It is clear that for all who did not belong to the original nucleus which experienced the resurrection appearances, baptism was the universal means of entering the eschatological community.”8 This is important when we consider Baptism as a Sacrament of identity and mission. It is into the Risen Christ that we are baptized, and we carry forward our embracing and furthering Christ’s saving mission only because of and in the power of the Spirit and within the community of believers. Baptism is our participation in Christ’s death and Resurrection and in Pentecost. Paul’s insistence that we are the Body of Christ (see 1 Cor. 12:27) clearly asserts an identity with Christ. In Baptism, the old self dies and the new self imbued with the very Life of the Spirit is now who we are (cf. Rom. 6:11). Moreover, this is shared Life, that which binds us into the one Body of Christ, that which binds us together as a community. Baptism and community are inseparable, and we can learn much from how the early Christian communities celebrated Baptism.

Baptism in the Early Church Water at hand, occurring naturally and wherever the people gathered as evidenced in Acts and early Christian writings, eventually gave way to fixed places with baptismal waters close at hand where the Christian community celebrated their liturgies. What is clear at this early time (especially from the mid-third century to the mid-fifth century) is that water is the sign of Baptism, the laying on of hands and anointing indicate the Presence of the Holy Spirit, and Trinitarian words complete the sign. These are the bare basics of the rite.9 Now comes a time in the Church when the ritual itself begins to take a fuller shape with more symbols, without ever mitigating the basic sign and words. By the beginning of the fourth century, when Constantine issued his Edict of Milan (313 ce) granting religious tolerance to Christians within the Roman Empire, Christians were free to have dedicated places to meet for worship. Signaling the significance of Baptism as initiation into the Church community, special baptismal spaces emerged. Known as “baptistries,” meaning “bathing space,” these buildings were often circular or octagonal in shape. A circular building suggests fullness and completion; an octagonal building is reminiscent of the early Church’s name for Sunday, the “eighth day,” because Jesus rose from the dead on Sunday, the first day of the week or eighth day. “Eight” is one beyond the seven days of a complete week. It is a day out of time, a day when we look to fulfillment at the end of time. An octagonal baptismal building highlighted the eschatological thrust of Baptism. These buildings housed the baptismal pool, usually cut into the floor and large enough to contain enough water for the person being baptized to be submerged. With the peace of Constantine in 313, persecution ceased and Christians now enjoying freedom to practice their rituals in gathered communities, Baptism developed into a much more elaborate and image-filled ritual with serious preparation directed to conversion of

uller, “Christian Initiation in the New Testament,” 11. F These bare basics are what give us the common roots for our ecumenical acceptance of Baptism, which is developed in the last section of the chapter. 8 9

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life. This gives rise to the catechumenate process.10 From the early fourth century on we have a number of texts that have been preserved and that give us insight into how the baptismal ritual was carried out along with homilies that conveyed its meaning in this earlier era of the Church.11 Let us briefly look at two mystagogical homilies, one from an Eastern Church perspective, and the other from a Western Church perspective. Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 313–87 ce) preached his mystagogical homilies, that is, the preaching after Baptism, once the initiated had experienced the rite; these homilies help us discover what the shape of the rite looked like in a fourth-century Eastern Church. He begins Sermon I with an explanation of why he has waited until after initiation to explain the rites: “I awaited this chance of finding you more amenable to my words, so that out of your personal experience I could lead you into the brighter and more fragrant meadow of Paradise on earth.”12 The elements of Cyril’s baptismal rite included the following. First, before entering the baptistry, the candidates for Baptism renounced evil while facing west with their hand outstretched;13 west is the region of darkness, symbolizing the region of sin and wickedness. The candidates then turned from west to east, looking to the region where the Garden of Paradise was and also the region of light, and made their profession of faith. And then they entered the baptistry proper.14 Next, the candidates took off their clothes, symbolizing putting off the old nature of sin. Then they were anointed with oil “from the hair of your head to your toes,” symbolizing becoming “sharers in Jesus Christ, who is the cultivated olive tree. For you have been separated from the wild olive tree and grafted onto the cultivated tree.”15 Next the candidate was led by the hand into the baptismal font; asked if they believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and were submerged three times, “re-enacting the burial of Christ three days in the tomb.”16 After emerging from the baptismal waters, the newly baptized were anointed with oil (myron or chrism), whereby “the soul is sanctified by the holy, hidden Spirit.”17 This is only a brief outline of Cyril’s baptismal ritual and symbolism. Undergirding all of this, Cyril emphasizes Baptism as a share in Christ’s sufferings. He draws on both the Romans 6 and John 3 baptismal texts when he describes Baptism as a single action in

One of the hallmarks of Vatican II was the phrase “back to the sources,” or ressourcement (a French and German theological movement of the twentieth century). The desire of the Council Fathers and those preparing the documents (schemas) to be discussed during Council sessions was to go back and recover the original inspiration that shaped theology and rites prior to the historical accretions that crept in. There was no desire to recover actual early rituals, but rather to glean what is an essential part of Christian tradition. This movement is what gave rise to the catechumenate and Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults that has been judged by many to be one of the many successful fruits of Vatican II. Further, by emphasizing early sources of theology and rites, we have been able to discover common ground for ecumenical dialogue and agreement in the contemporary situation. This point is developed in the last section of the chapter. 11 For an overview of these texts, grouped into geographic/local church regions, see E. C. Whitaker, Documents of the Baptismal Liturgy (London: SPCK, 1960). This volume contains select original texts, outlining key elements of the baptismal liturgies and symbolism. 12 Cyril of Jerusalem, Sermon I.1, in Edward Yarnold, S. J., The Awe-Inspiring Rites of Initiation: The Origins of the R.C.I.A. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994), 70. 13 This seems to be a kind of “in-your-face” gesture toward Satan! 14 Cyril of Jerusalem, Sermon I, 70–5. 15 Ibid., Sermon II.3, 77. 16 Ibid., Sermon II.4, 78. 17 Ibid., Sermon III.3, 83. Curiously, Cyril does not mention the newly baptized putting on a white garment after the water bath in his baptismal mystagogical catechesis. Rather, he addresses the white garment in Sermon 4 on the Eucharist (4.8, pp. 88–9). 10

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which those baptized “died and were born; the water of salvation became both tomb and mother for you.”18 Throughout Cyril speaks of the light that comes with Baptism, that the newly baptized person is coming into the light of Christ. Now let’s turn to Ambrose of Milan (c. 339–97 ce) and his six mystagogical homilies in his treatise De Sacramentis. Ambrose was contemporary with Cyril, but his mystagogical catechesis, as well as many of the ritual elements themselves, is quite different. Ambrose is rather allegorical in his interpretation of the rites, taking symbolism beyond the obvious to making connections that are sometimes startling and always insightful. The pre-baptismal rites texts begin with the ephphetha or opening, when “the bishop touched your ears and your nostrils … so that [the ears] might be opened to the word and to the homily of the priest … touches the nostrils so that you may receive the sweet fragrance of eternal goodness.”19 Next, arriving at the baptistry, the candidates were anointed with oil, symbolizing they were “rubbed like an athlete, Christ’s athlete, as though in preparation for an earthly wrestling match, and you agreed to take on your opponent.”20 Then comes the renunciation of sin, in Ambrose’s community put in the form of questions and response. As the candidates entered the font area, Ambrose goes into an extended allegory about Naaman the Syrian who comes to the prophet Elisha for healing of his leprosy (see 2 Kgs 5:1-14). Ambrose uses this allegory to make the point that “not all waters have a curative power: only that water has it which has the grace of Christ.”21 This introduces the prayer over the water, which ensures that the action with the water is efficacious because of the Holy Spirit. After a lengthy interlude on the prefiguration of Baptism that begins Sermon II, Ambrose describes the water bath. The candidates are asked if they believed in each person of the Trinity, and with their “I believe,” they were plunged into the water three times. Ambrose likens this triple affirmation of belief to Peter’s post-Resurrection triple avowal of love (see Jn 21:1517). All of this underscores that in Baptism we die with Christ.22 In Sermon II, no. 24, Ambrose speaks about anointing with chrism, but does not actually describe what takes place; he comes back to the post-baptismal anointing in Sermon III.1 where he briefly comments on chrism being poured over the head because that is where wisdom resides. Ambrose mentions proclaiming the Gospel of John’s account of the footwashing at the Last Supper, but the text is unclear whether a footwashing actually takes place.23 Then he says the “spiritual sealing follows.”24 It is curious that Ambrose mentions a post-baptismal anointing three separate times with little explanation in comparison to some of his other allegorical tangents. Ambrose does not mention a white garment. Because Ambrose uses an allegorical method, it is a bit more difficult to detect where exactly he locates his baptismal theology, as dying and rising with Christ or as a regeneration. His comparison of the pre-baptismal anointing with an athlete preparing for a contest would seem to point to dying and rising. He speaks about the waters of the font as evoking a pasch, a passing from sin to life (see Sermon I.12). Ambrose’s baptismal theology seems to be most consistent with the Western Church’s emphasis on Romans 6.

I bid., Sermon II.4, 78. Ibid., Sermon I.2, 3, 100–1. 20 Ibid., Sermon I.4, 102. 21 Ibid., Sermon I.15, 105. 22 Ibid., Sermon II.20-23, 118–19. 23 Ibid., Sermon III.4-7, 121–3. 24 Ibid., Sermon III.8, 124–5. 18 19

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What is clear in the baptismal practices of both the Eastern Church and the Western Church is that adult Baptism was the norm, that preparation was about an ongoing act of conversion in living the gospel, that there was an acceptance and embracing of the whole mystery of Christ, and that Baptism included a strong commitment by professing one’s faith in Christ and his Church. From the rites we learn that various symbols and rituals helped understand the meaning of the basic sign of the Sacrament: water and Trinitarian words. We only looked at two baptismal rituals, but when we consider all the extant rites, we can see many variations in elements, not only between the Eastern Church and Western Church but also within the individual churches of East and West themselves. We can identify the most common elements: pre-baptismal anointing, renunciation of sin and profession of faith, water bath, white garment, and post-baptismal chrismation.25 This reality of the early Church allows us to affirm one Baptism, though many churches. The rites of Baptism varied from congregation to congregation during this time in the Church, but clearly there was one Baptism. This historical fact parallels nicely the situation in which the Christian churches find ourselves today: one Baptism celebrated among many different congregations. This point is addressed in the last section of the chapter. From the time of Christ and beyond, many people were baptized and became followers of Christ. As time went on, especially when the Church became the religion of the Roman Empire, the adults were all baptized and so infant Baptism became the norm.26 Sometime after the sixth century churches were built with smaller baptismal fonts within the church building itself, since this would have been adequate for infant Baptism. Today many churches have renovated their baptismal spaces to include larger fonts which allow for immersion, if not complete submersion. We have come from stream to dream. We dream of Baptism once again expressing the powerful symbol of water’s cleansing and promised Life, of incorporation into Christ such that we all share a common identity in Christ. Indeed, we are all members of the one Body of Christ.

LATER, ONE COMMON ROOT, MANY GROWING TENDRILS We would be remiss, indeed, to think that the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) was strictly a Roman Catholic event that set about the renewal trajectory for only that Church. In fact, the Council was a world event influencing much of Christianity and beyond. Lumen Gentium (the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, November 21, 1964) gave the lie to the long-held and narrow Catholic view that “outside the Church there is no salvation” and instead declared that Christ came to save all people.27 Sacrosanctum One way to corroborate this assertion concerning a good many common elements is to examine the thirteen baptismal services of a wide variety of Christian communions in Baptism Today: Understanding, Practice, Ecumenical Implications, ed. Thomas F. Best, Faith and Order Paper No. 207 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, A Pueblo Book, 2008). 26 Though infant Baptism is not accepted in some Christian denominations, nevertheless there is evidence that infant Baptism was practiced in the Church from the very beginning, given the cultural fact that if the head of a household was baptized generally the whole household was also baptized. 27 25

The one People of God is accordingly present in all the nations of the earth, since its citizens, who are taken from all nations, are of a kingdom whose nature is not earthly but heavenly … All [people] are called to this catholic unity which prefigures and promotes universal peace. And in a different way to it belong, or are

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Concilium (the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, December 4, 1963) moved liturgy beyond simply a means of grace and instead declared that liturgy is about the “paschal mystery of [Christ’s] blessed passion, resurrection from the dead, and glorious ascension” and that through Baptism we “are grafted into the paschal mystery of Christ; they die with him, are buried with him, and rise with him.”28 And, perhaps most importantly for our purposes in this section of the chapter, Unitatis redintegratio (Decree on Ecumenism, November 21, 1964) gave real impetus to the ecumenical movement and recognized that there was a “long span of earlier centuries when the Christian people had lived in ecclesiastical communion”29 and excited the hope for Christian unity. Beyond this, Unitatis redintegratio comments on four fundamentals that Christians share: Jesus Christ is the center of our lives (no. 20), Sacred Scripture is the Word of God (no. 21), Baptism is our common bond of unity (no. 22), and even with our worship, as varied as it is, we still find common elements that have been handed down to us through tradition (no. 23). “As a result of numerous bilateral dialogues, a growing familiarity with baptismal theology and practice among churches has made a profound contribution to the church’s ability to claim its vision of unity.”30 Noting that there remain knotty theological and polity differences among the various Christian communions, it is refreshing indeed to acclaim so clearly what we share. This second section of the chapter addresses our common identity in Christ through Baptism and projects how we can learn and challenge each other.

Sharing a Common Identity in Christ In spite of the many divisions occurring throughout the Christian tradition, there remains a unity of identity among the many churches because of how we regard Baptism. All Christian communions recognize some need for a formal, visible incorporation into that Body that is the Church. For most, it is Baptism. Ecumenical dialogue over the past halfcentury since the Council has affirmed the mutual recognition of one another’s Baptism. The grounds for mutual recognition rest in the Great Commission (see Mt. 28:19-20a) where both the sign (water) and the words (the Trinitarian formula)31 are given by Jesus Christ himself. Sharing a common identity in Christ rests in mutual recognition of the baptisms of various Christian communions and what we understand the effects of the ritual to be. Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry32 states in its opening paragraph that Baptism “is incorporation into Christ.” This is a participation in Christ’s paschal mystery (life, death,

related: the Catholic faithful, others who believe in Christ, and finally all [human]kind, called by God’s grace to salvation. (no. 13) Taken from Austin Flannery, O.P., gen. ed., Vatican Council II, Volume 1: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, New Revised Edition (Northport, NY: Costello, 1998). All quotations from Vatican II are taken from this volume. 28 Sacrosanctum Concilium, nos. 5, 6. 29 Unitatis redintegratio, no. 19. 30 “These Living Waters: Common Agreement on Mutual Recognition of Baptism.” A Report of the Catholic Reformed Dialogue in the United States 2003–7. This is an unpublished report on Round 7 of the National Ecumenical Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Reformed Churches. From section 1.A. This manuscript is presented in outline form, and not the usual paragraph numbering of various church documents. Citations, then, can only take the reader to the general area of the document that is referenced. 31 See 5.g of “These Living Waters” for the necessity of using water and the Trinitarian formula for Baptism. 32 World Council of Churches, Geneva, Faith and Order Paper No. 111, 1982. This text is available from a number of different sources on the internet. Hereafter cited as BEM with paragraph number in the text.

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and Resurrection); in Baptism we are buried with him, we die to sin, and are given a share in his Risen Life (see BEM no. 2). The waters wash away our sin (see BEM no. 3) and through chrismation we receive life through the Holy Spirit (see BEM no. 5). These effects of Baptism presuppose a conversion of life, a commitment to live the Gospel, and a deep and abiding faith in Jesus Christ and his saving mission. For our purposes in this chapter, the most important effect of Baptism is our incorporation as members into the Body of Christ (see BEM 6). We share the same identity, Life in Christ. We are one in Christ. Alas, we don’t always witness to this oneness, this unity. We are to open ourselves to each other so that “our one baptism into Christ constitutes a call to the churches to overcome their divisions and visibly manifest their fellowship” (BEM 6). Without ignoring our differences, it is helpful to focus on what is common among us. Admittedly, the issues that divide our churches are far more complex now than even those that caused the East–West Schism of 1054 and the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation.33 Various theological disputes have continually fractured our churches. The further away from originating schisms we are, the more issues not only around theological disagreements but also around church organization, authority, or self-understanding as a church challenge to Christian unity. Our road to unity probably cannot begin with tackling these thorny problems. Indeed, even individual communions within themselves have experienced division and heartache over these issues and further divided various communions. But through it all, for the last half-century there has been a refreshing commitment to ecumenical dialogue, furthered by biblical and patristic scholarship, new theological insights, and a desire to find ways to pray with each other: The discovery of new source material—both patristic and biblical—has greatly enhanced our collective ability to affirm a common heritage. More than ever before, ecumenical prayer services include a ritual for the reaffirmation of our baptismal vows, a reminder of that which binds us to each other as kindred in Christ, acknowledging our one calling through our one baptism, claimed by one God.34 Many of us Christians recognize the scandal of division and pray that one day we will be healed of it. A deeper understanding of Baptism on the part of all of us, grounded in our mutual recognition of each other’s Baptism, could be a good starting point to the healing that is so badly needed.35

BEM’s commentary on no. 6 mentions sex, race, and social status; we might add to these the rise of issues around ordination and authority, differing methods for interpreting Sacred Scripture, church structure, the establishment of independent churches that claim no set doctrine, extreme individualism that causes us to go our separate ways when disagreements happen rather than finding a means to work through them. 34 “These Living Waters,” second paragraph of the introduction. For round 7 of the Catholic-Reformed National Dialogue, which produced this common statement of agreement, a liturgical theologian from each of the five dialogue communions was invited to participate. This action was not only an affirmation of our willingness to pray together, but it brought to the fore how liturgy can connect through discovering common elements in liturgical rites and delving deeper into liturgical theology. 35 The eight statements of agreement concerning Baptism between the Catholic-Reformed Churches National Dialogue in “These Living Waters” spell out the importance of Baptism as a starting point for Christian unity: (1) Baptism is the bond of unity of all who are members in the Body of Christ; (2) Baptism is a gateway into Christian living; (3) Baptism celebrated in a particular Christian community incorporates us into the universal Church; (4) Baptism can be conferred only once, which is an impetus for our mutual recognition of Baptism; (5) Baptism is conferred by the use of water and the Trinitarian formula; (6) Baptism is mutually recognized when it is faithful to the apostolic tradition and a church’s duly authorized ministers; (7) Baptism can be a sign of unity when 33

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Baptism is not a once-and-for-all ritual that happens at some point in our lives. As BEM asserts, “Baptism is related not only to momentary experience, but to life-long growth into Christ” (no. 9). In our differences, we struggle. But in the struggle we must surrender ourselves to God’s grace, a freely given divine gift, as is the gift of faith itself. The ritual unfolds in a chronological moment. The reality of Baptism as sharing in the Body of Christ is realized through our embrace of Gospel living (cf. BEM no. 10). BEM goes on to accent how living together, witnessing together, and serving together can have an impact on our unity: As they grow in the Christian life of faith, baptized believers demonstrate that humanity can be regenerated and liberated. They have a common responsibility, here and now, to bear witness together to the Gospel of Christ, the liberator of all human beings. The context of this common witness is the Church and the world. Within a fellowship of witness and service, Christians discover the full significance of the one baptism as the gift of God to all God’s people. Likewise, they acknowledge that baptism, as a baptism into Christ’s death, had ethical implications which not only call for personal sanctification, but also motivate Christians to strive for the realization of the will of God in all realms of life (Rom. 6:9ff; Gal. 3:27-28; 1 Pet. 2:21–4:6). (BEM no. 10) With a common identity as Body of Christ, a common goal of serving others so our world is more just and peaceful, and a greater commitment to community, we are pulled outside of ourselves to embrace a larger reality than simply what is familiar to us. Our shared identity is a share in divine Life itself. As God is one and we are one with Christ and each other (cf. Jn 17:22-23), the bonds of identity are much stronger than the divisions of doctrine and polity. All of this rests on a mutual recognition of “the one baptism into Christ” (BEM 15).

How We Learn from and Challenge Each Other Anyone involved in ecumenical dialogue at any level—international, national, local— knows that one of the first challenges to a fruitful dialogue is to be careful about terms used. Concerning Baptism, some of the terms that can easily be understood differently among the dialogue participants would be grace, regeneration, justification, sanctification, original sin, validity, efficacy, predestination, and believer baptism. Much of our past history and subsequent divisions involved a misunderstanding of terms. Although coming to succinct, agreed definitions of the meaning of terms used in the discussion is indispensable for moving the discussion forward, this can be a time-consuming and difficult task. Arriving at agreed definitions, however, opens up new meanings for all involved, and helps the dialogue partners to learn how to think outside of assumed meanings. Another challenge is truly to listen to each other. Often we hear another through our own context, our own lived experience, our own desire to be right about our faith convictions and practice. When we let go of our own preconceptions and truly listen to another, we can not only learn new ways to understand our own positions but also begin to hear how what we considered to be so divisive is perhaps not so difficult to resolve. Listening deeply opens our hearts to others; it sets aside our own convictions to be immersed in another in order to hear the other speak from the heart. Real communication people of other communions are invited to baptismal rites; and (8) careful baptismal records are to be kept, with information about how the rite was celebrated.

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requires a charitable listening that does not prejudge another. Real communication enables empathy, compassion, and love, all essential for fruitful ecumenical dialogue. Concerning Baptism, one difference in practice among Christian churches is the issue of infant or believer Baptism. The latter emphasizes a conscious and firm commitment on the part of the one being baptized (an adult, someone old enough to understand and make the commitment) to embrace the Gospel and Christian living. Baptismal promises are meant to be taken seriously, and one must know and understand them before one can make a commitment. This position underscores a focus on individual commitment. Obviously, infants who are baptized cannot make such a conscious commitment; the profession of faith is made by parents and/or godparents. Infant Baptism36 focuses on becoming a member of the Body of Christ and underscores a focus on community engagement in the ongoing growth in faith and commitment. The end objective of both approaches is the same: commitment to Jesus Christ. When dialoguing about a ritual, a comparative analysis of ritual structure, prayers, gestures, and other ceremonial aspects is indispensable. We quickly discover common structural elements, and these are essential for coming to theological agreement. The ancient liturgical principle ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi (that the law of praying establishes the law of believing)37 is important here. How we pray evidences our belief. Admittedly, this is easier to address when Christian communions use fixed texts. Many contemporary communities of worshipers do not have fixed ritual books. Human experience suggests, however, that when doing worship regularly, patterns do emerge. A very practical, contemporary challenge for mutual recognition of Baptism is the issue of inclusive language. Some ministers and congregations are not comfortable with the Scripture-bound and traditional way of speaking about the Holy Trinity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Some communions accept this variation in the words of Baptism, others do not. For some denominations, the change in language actually affects the validity of the Sacrament, and so recognition of this Baptism is not possible and rebaptizing would be the norm if someone seeks admission to these denominations. Deep emotions and feelings often surround the language we use. We need to learn from others why a change in language is deemed necessary and be sensitive to this position. For some, changing language poses as great a challenge to mutual recognition as would a change in sign (using something other than water for Baptism).38 A good starting point for any ecumenical dialogue is to recognize the one common root we have in our love for and commitment to Jesus Christ. Over the centuries this has been expressed in many different ways, sometimes leading to variations in practice within a single denomination. Indeed, observing worship from congregation to congregation rarely leaves us with a sense of total homogeneity. Even liturgies based on fixed texts include a number of options and variations depending on the time and circumstances, the particular congregation and culture. At other times, variations in practice lead to division, hurt, and misunderstanding and sometimes even fracturing. Ecumenical dialogue urges See note 27 above. See the fourth paragraph of Section 4: Baptismal rites, a. Common early history in “These Living Waters” for more detail about whether infants were baptized in the early Church. 37 Attributed to the fifth-century Christian writer Prosper of Aquitaine. 38 Section 5.g. (Who May Baptize and with What Means and Formula) of “These Living Waters” addresses the issue of inclusive language as well as language and the validity and mutual acceptance of the sacrament of Baptism. On the issues of liturgy and language, one fine source is Gail Ramshaw, Christ in Sacred Speech: The Meaning of Liturgical Language (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1986). The entire Fall issue of Liturgical Ministry (vol. 1, 1992) is devoted to exploring the notion of inclusive language. 36

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us to respect the many tendrils growing out from our common root. Experiences in respecting differences, honoring the dignity of others with different religious persuasions, and striving for unity would ensure that the commitment to ecumenical dialogue does not diminish. With so many Christian communions mutually recognizing each other’s Baptism, grounded in accepting our common identity as members of the Body of Christ, we have taken a major step toward Christian unity. May we all read and pray again and again Jesus’ words about unity and Paul’s words about the unity of the Christian community. Indeed, we do profess, confess, and acknowledge our common identity as members of the Body of Christ each time we say the Nicene Creed: “We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.”39 May we profess our common identity in Christ with conscious commitment, full-throated belief, and diligent action that leads from our one Baptism through our many churches to our oneness in Christ.

FURTHER READING Best, Thomas F., ed. Baptism Today: Understanding, Practice, Ecumenical Implications. Faith and Order Paper No. 207. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, A Pueblo Book, 2008. Johnson, M. E., ed. Living Water, Sealing Spirit: Readings on Christian Initiation. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995. Murphy Center for Liturgical Research. Made, Not Born: New Perspectives on Christian Initiation and the Catechumenate. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976. Whitaker, E. C. Documents of the Baptismal Liturgy. London: SPCK, 1960. Yarnold, S. J. Edward. The Awe-Inspiring Rites of Initiation: The Origins of the R.C.I.A. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994.

1976 International Consultation on English Texts (ICET). This Creed dates to the Council of Nicaea in 325 ce and was addressed again in the Council of Constantinople in 381 ce. For a comparison of these two creeds, see J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1960), 215–16 and 297–8. 39

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

White, Wet Devils: Baptism, Race, and the Struggle for Baptismal Solidarity ANDREW WYMER

In her work Resurrection Song: African-American Spirituality, Flora Wilson Bridges writes of a saying within her Black community, “You can go down a dry devil and come up a wet devil.”1 Wilson Bridges interprets this saying as the verbalization of a profound awareness that adherence to and participation in the ritual of baptism does not necessarily result in an “existential encounter” through which a person “knows how to, and begins to, in the words of the Negro spiritual, ‘treat everybody right.’ ”2 The explicit ritual suspicion of this saying is grounded in awareness of varied baptismal outcomes and functions, not all of which will result in spiritual and ethical transformation. This suspicion of baptism invites, even necessitates, a confirmation of the baptized entering into a new, just ethic, that is, leaving the “devil” behind in the water. Interpreted through the critical lens of liberation theology, in which the literal and metaphorical baptism of persons into dominating—even demonic—social hierarchies that actively harm the socially marginalized is an urgent baptismal problem, “wet devils” provides a frame for this essay on baptism and race. When Victor Codina declares, “the problem is the baptism of the rich,” he is declaring that the problem of baptism is rich, dry devils—persons who are deeply formed and literally and metaphorically invested in capitalist class identity and its economic mechanisms that prey upon the poor—who emerge from the baptismal waters as rich, wet devils.3 The problem of “wet devils” read through Codina’s liberation critique names how baptism can be aligned with domination, functioning not just spiritually but also economically, politically, and socially to immerse people in demonic identities and structures. In the context of baptism and race, the urgent problem of baptism is its demonic racial function through which racially dominant persons and communities—white, wet devils—are confirmed in their racial identity and the power

Flora Wilson Bridges, Resurrection Song: African-American Spirituality (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), 2. I draw this term “wet devils” from the saying recorded by Flora Wilson Bridges in the first paragraph of the essay. 2 Ibid. 3 Victor Codina, “Sacraments,” in Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology: Readings From Mysterium Liberationis, ed. Jon Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuria (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), 172–84. 1

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it lends rather than beginning a lifelong process of exorcising their violent racialization, if only provisionally, and entering into baptismal solidarity with all humanity, the earth, and other-than-human creatures.4 In this essay, I explore this baptismal problem, unpacking the history of colonial and racialized violence in the context of baptism, centering theological perspectives on baptism from racially minoritized scholars, and then arguing for a continuing realignment of baptismal theory and practice around baptismal solidarity, through which baptism might disrupt white, wet deviltry of colonial Christianity in the context of the United States.5 This essay will include three primary sections. In the first, I survey primary sources and critical histories of baptismal practices in colonial society in the Americas, and I examine the shifting baptismal tactics of colonial conquest that inform the present-day context of race in the United States.6 In the second section, I survey critical theological perspectives from racially minoritized scholars working at the intersection of baptism and race, engaging key arguments that suggest future contours for anti-racist and decolonizing baptismal theory and practice. In the third section, drawing upon these historical and theological foundations, I will take a brief constructive turn, exploring a continued decolonial shift toward baptismal solidarity in the context of race and tracing basic contours for baptismal theory and practice.7

A BRIEF BAPTISMAL HISTORY OF RACE The history of baptism and race is a gruesomely bloody one in which the church and colonial European powers weaponized a “holy thing” as a tool of conquest and genocide, creating what Willie Jennings labels “conquest-baptism.”8 However, the history of baptism and race is also a history of survival and struggle for liberation on the part of

I must note the potential of baptism to play an exorcising or decolonizing role in the baptismal rituals of racially minoritized persons and communities, but my expertise lies in focusing on white racialization, my own and that of my skin-folk. For an example of such a ritual, see Lara Medina, “A Home Baptism,” in Voices from the Ancestors, ed. Lara Medina and Martha Gonzalez (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019), 64–5. As to my utilization of the term “demonic” in relationship to race in the context of white supremacy, I feel little need to justify this use beyond noting that I am in good company. Leonardo Boff explores the “diabolic movement” of sacraments that separate and divide. Victor Codina implies the demonic potential of baptism at various points in his essay, “Sacraments,” where he engages biblical passages on the demon, and Willie Jennings utilizes the term in specific reference to baptism and race as will be surveyed later in this essay. See Leonardo Boff, Sacraments of Life, Life of the Sacraments (Portland: Pastoral Press, 1987), 85. See: Codina, “Sacraments.” 5 This is a limiting frame within the broad global context of racialization; however, I am confined by the limits of this essay and my own expertise. 6 The reader may note here that I am drawing repeated connections between colonization and race. This is a crucial aspect of my approach to race, and the connections should become clear in my argument. In addition, while I acknowledge the limitations of focusing on race primarily in the context of the United States, the scope of this essay, the boundaries of my own expertise, and my severely curtailed access to research materials during a time of prolonged quarantine render this focus necessary. 7 This essay is intentionally structured in a way that will hedge against racism. Sara Ahmed argues that in order for persons deemed white to move beyond simply performing anti-racism, our work must acknowledge that expertise in the subject of race and responding to race lie outside of ourselves. I structure this essay’s turn toward racially minoritized theologians working at the intersection of race and baptism to amplify awareness that any answers to the problem of white, wet devils came or will come from scholars and communities deemed not white. See Sara Ahmed, “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism,” Meridians 7:1 (2006): 104–26. 8 Willie Jennings, “Being Baptized: Race,” in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 278. 4

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non-European and racially minoritized persons and communities targeted by colonialism. To tell this still unfolding tragedy that has spanned roughly six centuries in such a brief manner has the potential to sterilize this history, to render it bloodless, which I will hedge against by including within this broad survey examples of particular acts of violence. A survey of primary sources and critical histories of baptismal practices in colonial society in the Americas reveals that colonial conquest has—over time—adapted its genocidal and colonial baptismal tactics from baptismal imposition, to baptismal exclusion, and then to baptismal segregation and that these tactics illustrate how baptism and race came to be situated in the present context as a site of ongoing struggle for survival and contestation of the white, colonial social order.9

Baptismal Imposition The violent history of race is also a baptismal history, but before race was literally and metaphorically birthed, baptized, and confirmed in the bloody baptismal fonts of the seventeenth century, baptism was already the primary ritual of expanding Western colonial conquest and enslavement both in providing the theoretical justification for conquest and for practically imposing colonial rule on indigenous persons in Africa and the Americas. However, baptism’s alignment with colonial conquest and enslavement represented theological and practical innovation. Prior to the fifteenth century, the church generally maintained a long-standing tradition of prohibiting the enslavement of Christians—that is, the baptized. As an example, in 1434, Pope Eugene IV issued Creator Omnium, and it was quickly followed in 1435 by Sicut Dudum.10 These papal bulls expressed a religious distinction as a basis for enslavement, explicitly prohibiting the enslavement of baptized inhabitants of the Canary Islands and threatening any violators with excommunication.11 However, as colonial conquest intensified in the mid-fifteenth century, the church explicitly authorized European conquest and justified—even celebrated—it in direct relationship to conversion.12 In 1452 Pope Nicholas V issued Dum Diversas, a papal bull sanctioning the Portuguese conquest and enslavement of non-Christian persons, and in 1455, he issued Romanus Pontifex, celebrating the conversion of many Africans through Portuguese colonization. In the late fifteenth century, a series of bulls, including Inter Caetera issued in 1493, established what is now known as the doctrine of discovery, granting Spain the right to conquer any lands that were yet undiscovered by Europeans and to convert the inhabitants of those lands—by force, if necessary. The policy of the church established what was a colonizing tactic of baptism or conversely a baptismal tactic of colonization. The baptismal tactic of early colonization

I classify these baptismal tactics aware that the realities that I attempt to catalogue occurred over a number of centuries and encompass complex, even contradictory, geopolitical circumstances. As such these tactics overlapped and may have often been alongside each other at various points. 10 For Creator omnium see Monumenta Henricina, vol. V 1434–6 (Coimbra, 1963), 118–23. I am particularly indebted to Daniel Smith, research librarian at the Styberg Library at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, for helping me locate this document amidst a global pandemic. For Sicut dudum see Caesar Baronius (ed. O. Raynaldus), Annales Ecclesiastici, vol. 28 (Luca, 1752), 226–7. 11 David Stannard argues that this distinction emerged out of anti-Muslim religious tensions, which forced the church to choose between outlawing enslavement from which it and the European powers greatly benefited or allowing for the enslavement of Christians alongside Muslims. See David Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford, 1992), 207–8. 12 When I utilize conversion here, I am necessarily speaking of baptism, since the theological possibilities of baptism were linked to conversion. 9

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was to baptize as many persons as possible—by imposition if necessary—and with blatant disregard of their material well-being, sociocultural particularity, and full participation in order to bring them and their land under the control of the European religious, social, political, and economic order. The brutality embedded in baptismal imposition and the further bad faith with which it—an already violent practice—was frequently deployed interwove baptism with colonial genocide—effectively a baptismal genocide—on a scale of such horrific proportions as to stand as one of the worst genocides in human history. Baptismal imposition took many expressions that include but are not limited to the following. Portuguese slavers baptized enslaved Africans by the boatload before the deadly transatlantic crossing.13 Spanish conquistadors hastily read Requirimiento, a Spanish decree issued in 1513 granting its bearers permission to enslave or kill any indigenous person who did not immediately express fealty to the Spanish state and convert to Christianity, in Spanish—a foreign language to indigenous persons in the Americas—and then immediately proceeded to kill or enslave those who did not immediately request baptism.14 Friars baptized those whom conquistadors and their dogs fatally injured but who had not yet died.15 Indigenous persons sought baptism as a cure for disease, and contracted diseases to which they had no immunity and later died.16 Missionaries enforced what Henrietta Stockel calls “identity theft through baptism,” erasing indigenous names, intentionally rupturing tribal communities, and eradicating indigenous culture.17 The violence of colonial conquest was so brutal as to cause resistance within the church, such as was expressed in Bartolome de las Casa’s Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias.18 Widening awareness from accounts of the genocidal violence of conquistadors brought about a marked pivot in the position of the church.19 In 1527 Pope Paul III issued a bull, Sublimus Dei, revoking previous authorizations to enslave Christian persons.20 See James Barbot, Jr. “A Voyage to the Congo River,” in Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea, ed. Jean Barbot (London, 1732), 519. Italics and spelling are original. Barbot, Jr. writes, 13

The Portuguese also cause the slaves they ship off to be baptiz’d, it being forbid under pain of excommunication to carry any to Brazil, that are not christened. However, it is pitiful to see how they croud those poor wretches, six hundred and fifty or seven hundred in a ship, the men standing in the hold ty’d to stakes, the women between decks, and those that are with children in the great cabbin, and the children in the steeridge, which in that hot climate occasions an intolerable stench. (ibid.) Joaquín E. Pacheco et al., Coleccion de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y colonizacion de las antiguas posesiones españolas en America y Oceania (Madrid, 1864–84), 316–17. 15 Bartolomé de Las Casa records one instance in which Christian baptism occurred amidst the genocidal violence of Spanish conquistadors. He writes of a particular instance in which Spaniards and their hunting dogs were hunting and brutally murdering indigenous persons. According to Las Casa and horrifyingly portrayed in a later engraving by Theodor de Bry, one indigenous woman with a child was sick, and she knew she could not escape the Spanish soldiers. Taking a rope, she tied her child to her waist—perhaps trying to protect the child from the dogs or to end its life as well—and then hung herself. The hunting dogs were still able to reach and mutilate the child, but, as Las Casa observed, before the child died from its wounds, a friar baptized it. See Bartolomé de Las Casa, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Spain, 1552). Available online: https://facu​lty.chass.ncsu. edu/sla​tta/hi216/docume​nts/dlasca​sas.htm (accessed August 27, 2020). 16 Woodward Skinner, The Apache Rock Crumbles: The Captivity of Geronimo’s People (Pensacola, FL: Skinner, 1987), 295. 17 Henrietta Stockel, Salvation through Slavery (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 4 and 130. 18 Bartolomé de Las Casa, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Spain, 1552). 19 Here I note that any contribution to this would have been from the early work of Las Casa, since his book was not written until 1542 and published in 1552. Las Casa began reporting atrocities much earlier. 20 It read in part, 14

Notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of

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Sublimus Dei was followed by a number of papal documents denouncing slavery or the slave trade. However, a bloody Pandora’s box of genocide that provided European rulers and the church with an ongoing stream of immense wealth had already been opened, and the practice of baptismal imposition continued.21

Baptismal Exclusion As colonial conquest expanded Europe’s—and the church’s—grip on Africa and the Americas, there was a growing awareness of the threat that baptismal freedom, even if only ever inconsistently enacted, posed to the long-term settlement of colonized lands and the maintenance of the accompanying economic plunder made possible through human enslavement. While the violent colonial tactic of baptismal imposition was suited to “discovering” vast swathes of territory, claiming those lands as part of Western Christendom, and enslaving the local inhabitants, it proved over time to be profoundly vulnerable to subversion by baptized, enslaved persons who—depending on the legal codes of their particular context—could potentially use their baptism to legally secure their manumission. Cotton Mather coldly stated the problem in this way, “Well, But if the Negroes are Christianized, they will be Baptised; and their Baptism will presently entitle them to their Freedom; so our Money is thrown away.”22 As a means of resolving this tension, a shift began to be made away from religious differentiation as the basis of slavery to a basis of ethnic—and eventually racial— differentiation. While there are early, local examples of this shift occurring as soon as the fourteenth century in Europe, these local manifestations would, over time, develop into a much more widespread doctrine in the European colonies in the Americas.23 In 1667, the English colony of Virginia issued a law, revoking the long-standing, if contradicted, policy of baptismal manumission.24 This law and others like it represented both a shift to perpetual slavery based on the status of the parent and a removal of the possibility of baptismal manumission.25 In The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race, Rebecca Anne Goetz notes a very important shift, away from the colonial tactic of baptismal imposition.26 She writes, In one swift stroke, the Virginia legislature undid centuries of English and Christian custom. A close reading of the language the burgesses used in the law reveals two innovative threads in their thinking about the sacrament of baptism: that they ought their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect. See John Tracy Ellis, ed., Documents of American Catholic History: 1493–1865 (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1967), 7. 21 As an example, the Jesuits held slaves for some time thereafter, and the Roman Catholic response was inconsistent and even contradictory. The violent role of baptism in colonial conquest cannot be understated. 22 Cotton Mather, “The Negro Christianized: An Essay to Excite and Assist that Good Work, the Instruction of the Negro Servants in Christianity” (Boston, MA: B. Green, 1706), 18–27. Italics and spelling are original. 23 See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 101. See also Stannard, American Holocaust, 208. 24 William Waller Hening, Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia from the first session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619, vol. 2 (New York, 1823), 260. 25 Mannix and Cowley note that Maryland passed a similar law in 1671, New York in 1706, and other states followed. See David Mannix and Malcolm Cowley, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 60–1. 26 Rebecca Anne Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

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to take more care to determine that only sincere converts received baptism, and that many enslaved people might not be capable of baptism at all.27 Colonial baptismal imposition and its subversion by enslaved persons was resulting in the emergence of a racialized baptismal tactic of forcibly restricted access—that is, baptismal exclusion.28 The social order of the Euro-American colonies of the seventeenth century was tenuously maintained and seething with resentment and unrest. A few Euro-American, male, landowning elites ruled over an immense and ever-expanding geographical space. They also ruled a vast number of indentured servants of both European and African origin who resented and at times rebelled against their servitude, religious dissenters who openly critiqued the State church and consequently the power of the State itself, and enslaved persons who also resented and at times revolted against their enslavement.29 In order to consolidate power and enhance their incredible wealth, the term “Christian” was constricted to a racial category that was limited to persons of European origin.30 Through this consolidation of who could be “Christian” based on race, the landowning elite granted new recognition and protections to white, indentured servants, differentiating them from enslaved Black persons and to white religious dissenters recognizing them as “Christian.” Goetz recounts this shift, writing, Anglo-Virginians accepted religious toleration because Christianity was defined as a religion only for whites. The 1705 Act Concerning Servants and Slaves, which gave new and detailed protections to English indentured servants, assumed these servants were white and Christian. The act prohibited the whipping of a “christian white servant naked.” This was the first time that Christians were legally and explicitly defined by a physical distinction—skin color—and granted certain privileges based upon color and religious identity … Christianity was thus strongly equated with whiteness.31 Goetz recounts the formalization of the settler colonial tactic of baptismal exclusion through which white, landowning elites secured—even expanded—their power in the colonial social and economic order, gaining the legal right to perpetually own and exploit Black bodies. Just as the colonial tactic of baptismal imposition had been sanctioned by the church, so too the colonial tactic of baptismal exclusion along lines of race was justified and supported by leaders in the now post-Reformation church—particularly the Church of England within the context of the English colonies in the Americas. As an example, Christian support for these new laws racializing baptism utilized biblical texts and either drew on or outright disregarded existent theological discourse. Daniel Mannix and Malcolm Cowley record one seventeenth-century Anglican bishop as declaring that Black enslaved persons were “creatures of another species who had no right to be included or admitted to the sacraments.”32 In the already bloody waters of baptismal imposition, the

Ibid., 104. One other type of subversion that I did not name was the participation in the baptismal ritual while also maintaining an outside religious life. See Henrietta Stockel, On the Bloody Road to Jesus: Christianity and Chiricahua Apaches (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), 205. 29 I capitalize “State” to differentiate between provincial bodies called states, which together form a nation-state. 30 I deploy “Christian” to invite critique of the spiritual, economic, social, political, and racial implications of this term. 31 Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia, 137. 32 Mannix and Cowley, Black Cargoes, 59–60. 27 28

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church—in a racial backlash against those non-European enslaved persons who subverted European colonial domination by using their baptism to secure their manumission— birthed, baptized, and confirmed as divinely sanctioned the brutal shift in tactics of the ongoing baptismal genocide of colonial conquest to baptismal exclusion through racial categorization and its corresponding dehumanization, exploitation, and murder of those deemed Black and brown.33

Baptismal Segregation The changes in laws in the Euro-American colonies in the seventeenth century reveal that baptism was long functioning as a ritual site of the contestation of the colonial social order in which European landowners, indigenous persons, and Africans were profoundly aware of what they each had to lose or gain.34 This proved true even after the widespread codification of the racial order in the European colonies in the Americas. Critical historical examinations of the function of baptism in colonial society have examined both the brutal, myriad ways that baptism imposed the racial order and the ways that enslaved persons, at times, were able to utilize baptism to survive the violence of white supremacy. Both Nicholas Beasley and Sherwin Bryant in two separate studies connecting baptism and marriage explore how racialized baptism and its withholding reinforced white domination over the familial life, sexuality, and reproduction of enslaved persons.35 However, these scholars also name how Black persons, enslaved and free, were able to negotiate this ritual in ways that resisted white power. In Rivers of Gold: Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito, Bryant argues that baptism was “the single most important sacrament for most Africans,”36 and he writes, Such sacred acts as baptism and marriage can be recognized as both racializing practices and slaves’ attempts to make a life within the predicament of colonial servitude. Their processions, marriages, and baptisms reveal how the enslaved crafted moments to seize pleasure, repossess their bodies, fix kin, and pool resources as sacred communities.37 Racialized baptism, while intensely violent, was also a site of the struggle for Black and brown survival, an act of resistance in a white supremacist society. The colonial tactic of baptismal exclusion quickly proved vulnerable to resistance and subversion. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, enslaved and later emancipated Black persons increasingly wrested away religious control—including baptismal authority—from white elites, and a subversively powerful religious tradition emerged. This Black baptismal tradition inspired revolutionary uprisings and even a sacramental

It is important to understand the sexual, reproductive, and familial violence of withholding baptism. Nicholas Beasley explores how withholding baptism allowed white elites to claim moral superiority over Blacks, to destabilize families through withholding marriage (a ritual that required being baptized), and dehumanized and targeted Black sexuality for violence and abuse. See Nicholas Beasley, Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies, 1650–1780 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010). 34 Goetz notes that this law was not uniformly enforced and was even contradicted, with enslaved persons earning their freedom due to their baptized status in the years following the act. See Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia, 103 and 109. 35 See Beasley, Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies. In addition, see Sherwin Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). 36 Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage, 22. 37 Ibid., 85. 33

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revolution, rejecting the mode of baptism utilized by plantation owners and opting instead for baptismal immersion. Beasley writes that this widespread shift toward baptismal immersion “signaled the rise of a new ritual vocabulary, an earthy vocabulary that entirely displaced that of the traditional leaders of the plantation colonies.”38 Beasley characterizes autonomous Black worship in the British Caribbean: “In the worship of the black churches, African American Christians created a vibrant tradition of enormous political power, appropriating the liberating narratives of the Bible for their own struggles and rejecting the manipulations of Christian liturgy long practiced by whites.”39 Katie Grimes makes similar assessments, noting the radical liberative commitments that enslaved persons frequently held regarding baptism. She writes, “Yet slaves retained an older, radical view of Christian conversion. To them, their religious status gave them rights to freedom and respect, for which they were willing to fight.”40 The tactic of baptismal exclusion proved susceptible to resistance, eventually failing to withhold the baptismal waters. Goetz writes, “In becoming advocates for their own Christianity, and in embracing Christianity at its most radical and egalitarian, enslaved people defied their status and their masters’ religious and racial ideology.”41 In the context of the United States, enslaved Black persons won emancipation in the mid-nineteenth century, but the empty promise of reconstruction gave way to the sinister reality of Jim Crow. This was the century of adaptation of colonial baptismal tactics to baptismal segregation that created and enforced religious and social divisions and inequalities along racial lines. Unable to withhold baptism and freedom from enslaved Black persons, the white church in the United States was complicit in maintaining the “separate but equal” racial order of Jim Crow. Baptismal segregation relied upon and enforced separation along racial lines. In her essay, “The Sacraments of Initiation in a Habitat of White Supremacy,” Grimes examines the role of baptism in white, Roman Catholic participation in Jim Crow, the midtwentieth-century Civil Rights Movement, and the racial shaping of urban and suburban areas. She writes, “In the period after slavery’s abolition, baptism has reinforced this power by helping to keep blacks and whites apart.”42 She observes how Roman Catholics forcibly segregated Black parishes throughout the South at the beginning of the twentieth century, writing, “Baptism did not suture racially segregated parishes together; it solidified their separateness.”43 Grimes argues that the baptismal status of Black Catholics did not pierce the enforced segregation of Jim Crow even at white, Roman Catholic medical and educational institutions in the North. She writes, “Baptism provided black Catholics no shield from the rageful vagaries of white mob violence. Nor did it compel white Christians to feel kinship with the thousands of baptized black women and men lynched across the United States during the century after the Civil War.”44 Grimes describes years of anti-Black, heavily white, Catholic “guerilla warfare” and “liturgical harassment” to integration in the Chicago suburbs in the mid-twentieth century that required massive

Beasley, Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies, 139. Ibid., 120. 40 Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia, 166. 41 Ibid., 167. 42 Katie Grimes, “Breaking the Body of Christ: The Sacraments of Initiation in a Habitat of White Supremacy,” Political Theology, 18:1 (2017): 32. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 38 39

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police presence in order to prevent anti-Black violence on the part of white, predominantly Catholic neighborhoods.45 While focused on a particular tradition, Grimes’s work is descriptive of the function of white worship and baptism in the maintenance of suburban spaces in the United States. As an example, in “The Making of Ferguson: Public Policies at the Root of Its Troubles,” Richard Rothstein records how white, suburban churches played a key role in enforcing restrictive covenants limiting Black persons’ ability to purchase a home in white suburbs.46 In this same report, the author records how roughly forty Black churches in the St. Louis neighborhood of Mill Creek Valley were destroyed and the entire community was displaced in order to expand a white educational institution and create a white neighborhood.47 The colonial tactic of baptismal segregation reinforced and enforced the configuration of white spatial dominance, white racial identity, white privilege, and strategically homogeneous racial normativity while also rendering as “other” racially minoritized persons—baptized or not, and baptismal segregation validated white disregard for human suffering of racially minoritized persons in the face of white terrorism.

A BRIEF BAPTISMAL THEOLOGY OF RACE The colonial violence of baptismal imposition, baptismal exclusion, and baptismal segregation still shape our world today. In Ian Baucom’s theory of history, the horror of the transatlantic slave trade is not just in the past; rather, the present day is shaped by an accrual of this violent history that lives on in capitalist financial systems. He poetically writes, To lay the past to rest thus means not that we should forget it but that we have no choice but to relate to it, no choice but to live on within the full knowledge and unending of it. Time does not pass but accumulates. Why? Because what has been begun does not end but endures. Because this fatal Atlantic “beginning” of the modern is more properly understood as an ending without end. Because history comes to us not only as flash or revelation but piling up. Because this is, not was. Because this is the Atlantic, now. Because all of it is now, it is always now, even for you who never was there.48 Within Baucom’s theory, the horror of past and present must be grappled with if we are to discover a more just future. This is a helpful frame through which to survey baptismal theory and practice. From the moments that colonial conquest and race were literally and metaphorically birthed, baptized, and confirmed in the bloody fonts of Europe, Africa, and the Americas, the horrors of colonial conquest and racial violence have continued to flow in the baptismal waters of today, seeping and spilling into ever-deepening pools. While baptismal imposition may now be only infrequently expressed in forced baptism, baptism within our

Ibid., 34. Richard Rothstein, “The Making of Ferguson: Public Policies at the Root of Its Troubles” Economic Policy Institute Report (2014). Available online: https://www.epi.org/publ​icat​ion/mak​ing-fergu​son/ (accessed August 27, 2020), 15. 47 Ibid., 23. 48 Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 333. 45 46

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racialized world still has the potential to impose racially dominating identities, ideologies, and cultures on the baptized that internalize racism in addition to reinforcing its external structures. Though baptismal exclusion may no longer be legally codified, baptism is still frequently practiced in racially dominant and homogeneous spaces, communities, and traditions surrounded by and violently curated through racialized boundaries. Today after the illegalization of explicit segregation policies, baptismal segregation can be expressed both in the baptismal practices of literally segregating communities and in—more broadly—any baptismal practices that reflect and recreate inequities between particular social groups along racial lines. In fact, exclusion and segregation continue to shape—whether intentionally or unintentionally—guilds such as the North American Academy of Liturgy that predominantly comprise white liturgical scholars and in which engagements of baptismal theology are too frequently centered on racially dominant theory and practice to the exclusion of nondominant knowledge and experience. Today, baptism still does not offer a statistically verifiable protective buffer for racially minoritized persons from the violent structures of institutionalized white dominance. Baptisms in this context and the racialized bodies and communities that participate in this ritual too often remain separate and unequal. Vast economic, social, and political disparities still cut through our society along racial lines, dividing human beings and communities regardless of baptismal status. This is observable in the rampant xenophobia motivating the targeting of Latinx refugees—who, data suggests, are highly likely to have been baptized—for “family separations”—a deceivingly gentle word for violently ripping apart families, sometimes permanently—internment in concentration camps, sexual and more broadly physical violence, and deportation.49 Baptismal segregation today takes the form both of police murders of Black persons, such as George Floyd, Philando Castile, and Sandra Bland, regardless of their being baptized Christians—not to mention even more basically their humanity—and of subsequent white disregard or even outright hate when their murders and systemic racial injustice are protested. It is in the midst of this still unfolding colonial and racial violence that voices in baptismal theology have, over the past decades, begun to turn toward attention to nondominant knowledge and experience—including for the sake of this essay, racially nondominant knowledge and experience. This emerging attention is part of what Cláudio Carvalhaes calls in the broader context of liturgical studies, the “liturgical turn,” a decolonial movement decentering white liturgical normativity and emphasizing new ways of embodying the theory and practice of liturgy.50 Within this liturgical turn is a more specific baptismal turn that includes perspectives of theologians particularly grappling with baptism as a site of the ongoing contestation of racialized imposition, exclusion, and segregation.51 In Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Hybridity, Brian Bantum notes the competing demands between the racialized world and Christian baptism, stating, “We are born into a world of race even while we are baptized into Christ.”52 Bantum situates Alexander Koch et al, “Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492,” Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (2019): 13–36. 50 Cláudio Carvalhaes, ed., Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspectives: Only One Is Holy (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 5. 51 As Jennings notes, this is not a new approach to the theory or practice of baptism. It is as old as colonizing and racializing baptismal violence. However, the expression of these theories and practices in academic discourse is relatively new. 52 Brian Bantum, Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Hybridity (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 141. 49

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baptism in a positive sense as starkly set against the racialization of the world. The term “positive” is used here to denote how he primarily locates racialized imposition, exclusion, and segregation as distinct from the baptism ritual, and his work constructs a theology of baptism as a resource for the disruption of race and the limits of racial differentiation in the outside world. He argues that baptism should function to disrupt “racial fidelity” and bring us “in-between,” challenging the reductive, dehumanizing binaries through which human beings are positioned in our social and cultural context.53 Bantum offers baptism as a resource that challenges the imposition of racial identities and colonizing economies, the violent internal and external impositions and exclusions necessitated by racial constructs and racism, and the subsequent ways in which boundaries are erected that divide human beings internally and externally along reductive racial lines. His theological vision of baptism contests racial imposition, exclusion, and segregation by emphasizing hybridity and the “in-between” nature of the divine, the experience of which can draw Christians together to “disruptively presence God in the world.”54 Another theologian grappling with baptism and race is Cláudio Carvalhaes who, in the specific context of white supremacy, approaches baptism with some wariness of a baptismal realism.55 His approach has both deconstructive and constructive elements. He observes that “Baptism can be a way of enculturating the baptized into asymmetrical forms of power that keep some people receiving more privileges at the expense of others who have to have less.”56 However, while Carvalhaes explicitly names the potential violence of baptism, he—like Bantum—expansively argues for baptism as a ritual fundamentally situated against racism and other intersecting oppressions. This is an important dimension of Carvalhaes’s work in that he consistently examines the relationship between baptism and white supremacy in an intersectional way, connecting issues of baptism and race to other expressions of domination along lines such as class, gender, sexuality, or religion. One imaginative contribution of Carvalhaes’ is his vivid utilization of baptism as a ritual hermeneutic of the world through what he calls “baptismal lenses.”57 He situates baptism as a ritual hermeneutic of the world through which he subversively interprets social—and necessarily racial—power through the revolutionary ritual of baptism. Carvalhaes writes, “Baptism is thus the discovery of my coexistence with the whole universe through God’s creation. In other words, baptism is the embrace of various forms of being human, a much larger sense of life, a belonging to an eco-system that is the source of our living.”58 This is a critical baptismal hermeneutic that deconstructs power and “dismantles some ways of assimilating life from the perspective of one group over against the others.” Reading the world through baptism leads individuals and communities to resist intersectional oppression in a number of ways, including going “into the streets to scream Black Lives Matter,” and to work for “the protection of indigenous people’s rights for their land and sovereignty.”59

I would here differentiate Bantum’s sacramental positivity from Katie Grimes’s critique of the “sacramental optimism” of Hauerwas. See Grimes, “Breaking the Body of Christ,” 23. 54 Bantum, Redeeming Mulatto, 142. 55 By using this term, I do not mean to imply that Bantum’s work is unrealistic. 56 Cláudio Carvalhaes, What’s Worship Got to Do with It?: Interpreting Life Liturgically (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018), 67. 57 Ibid., 58. 58 Ibid., 58. 59 Ibid., 67–8. 53

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Carvalhaes’s work is an expression of hopeful baptismal realism. He acknowledges the ways in which imposition, exclusion, and segregation can be embedded within the ritual itself, but he frames baptism in a manner that implicitly suggests that it may be inappropriate to call the baptism of white, wet devils just that: baptism. In his work, Carvalhaes counters racial imposition, exclusion, and segregation through baptism in a particularly intersectional way, reminding the reader of the interwovenness both of domination and of life itself. As with the preceding work, baptism immerses people and communities into the struggle for liberation and survival in a racist world. In his essay, “Being Baptized: Race,” Willie Jennings argues that the church today is “crippled by its colonialist disease” of race,60 a problem that he baptismally situates. Jennings deconstructs “conquest-baptism” and its role in the consolidation of the colonial, racial order in the Americas. The problem of race is for Jennings also a problem of baptism. He writes, We are caught between two competing baptisms, with two mirror baptismal rites, and two forms of baptismal consciousness. The way forward for the Church cannot be simply to invoke baptismal confession, commitment, and identity without realizing its demonic deployment in the formation of the New World. That demonic deployment created not only a false vision of humanity but a process of creation that must be challenged and turned toward the body of our savior, the Jewish Jesus.61 The theological vision of baptism that Jennings constructs in response to the baptismal history of colonial violence is that of baptism as a ritual of disruption and connection that unites its participants with a vast diversity of other bodies. He writes, “The newly baptized are set on a journey that will bind them to peoples they have not seen, to ways of life they have not known, and endow them with a holy desire to love other people different from the people who brought them to those waters. This is the fire born of baptism that they will carry.”62 For Jennings, baptism permeates the boundaries of homogeneous identities, illuminating and connecting bodies in their particularities. Such a baptism has the potential to transgress homogenizing and segregating familial and relational boundaries and identities. He writes, “Baptism means that our baptized loved one may, by the desire of the Spirit of God working in them, decide to love others we don’t want them to love, others we don’t like, others that we believe are troublesome and that we do not want among us.”63 For Jennings, this disruptive potential of baptism also functions to transgress homogenizing and segregating social identities and boundaries. In order to practice such baptism, Jennings argues that “Churches must be about the business of engaging place and space,” leading them to recognize the earth as sacred, resist commodification of the earth and its inhabitants, and emphasize communal connection to the land—as opposed to what he argues is the colonial commitment to private property. In addition, he argues that the church must commit to an ongoing journey of renunciation that disrupts “racial becoming” through which race continues unfettered to chart the trajectory of ourselves, others, and the space of our world. For Jennings, baptism also draws us into a new way of becoming, not through violence but through connection. This is a baptismal becoming shaped, in part, by renunciation. We renounce the ways in which J ennings, “Being Baptized: Race,” 284. Ibid., 285–6. 62 Ibid., 286. 63 Ibid. 60 61

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colonial and racial, spatial formation of our world shapes our own becoming and that of our communities. Jennings writes, Renunciation in this regard breaks open and reroutes every determination of life that chains together what neighborhoods we live in to where we send our kids to school to where we go to church to where we shop to who we will love and to how we see ourselves, because it is precisely in such determinations that the racial condition continues to be born anew with each generation.64 This is the possibility of baptism, to lead us into a different becoming, one that continually renounces the ways in which race and baptism have worked to limit our sense of possibility and connection. In Jennings’s work, this is not a new possibility; rather, it is as old as baptism itself. He writes, “The way forward has never been hidden from us. It has always been there at the margins where people who should not love one another do love one another. It has been there where men and women risk all in order to be with those who are not their people, who [sic] they make their people.”65 Jennings’s work stands as a reminder and an admonishment—evocative of Baucom’s previously mentioned theory of history as an accrual—that through baptism the church is always becoming, and if we are to shape that baptismal becoming toward racial justice, we must grapple, not just with race but also with the ongoing role of baptism in unleashing colonial genocide and race on the world. Jennings provides a model of how to first name and grapple with this bloody history in order to construct a baptismal theology for today. Each of these theologians approaches baptism informed by critical theories and theologies that deconstruct racial power and domination, and each of these theologies emerges from a deep commitment to securing a more just racial future. In the preceding historical survey, this essay examined how the church literally and metaphorically birthed, baptized, and confirmed race in the fonts of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. This survey of baptismal theology by racially minoritized scholars suggests that the present unfolding of race demands another baptism, that of liberation. This is not a new baptism. This baptism flows out of a long baptismal history of survival, contestation of racial dominance, and revolutionary struggle for freedom. Immersed in these baptismal waters, the violence of race is named and contested. This baptism reveals the white, wet devils for what they are, and invites all humanity to another way of living out their baptismal faith. Other key themes emerge. In these theological visions, baptism honors embodied complexity and particularity, troubling dominating internal identities and disrupting dominating external behaviors. These theological visions of baptism emphasize human dignity and committed connection to others who are different and yet similar. Instead of consolidating power for the few, these baptismal visions emphasize the empowerment of all the baptized—particularly those targeted by racial structures—diffusing power and bringing together people in diverse communities of care. Each of these visions of baptism is disruptive and contests the present social order, inviting the baptized into lifelong resistance to and expanding awareness of racial domination. Finally, these theological engagements implicitly invite the church to enter more fully into “one baptism” through baptismal solidarity that unites us in bonds of shared struggle through which we might together transgress racial boundaries, develop greater awareness of and respond to the

Ibid. Ibid.

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racialized experiences of others, and actively pursue the well-being of all human beings, other-than-human creatures, and the earth itself—particularly those of these who are targeted by colonial and racial violence.

BAPTISMAL SOLIDARITY FOR TODAY Within Jennings’s analysis of the racial injustice embedded in the church in the existence of “two baptisms,”66 one imposing and one contesting race, and the broader, framing problem of white, wet devils, how might we move toward a more just racial future through the theory and practice of baptism? Long-standing baptismal division and violence along racial lines necessitate a turn in our baptismal trajectory toward baptismal solidarity. As was stated previously and bears repeating, baptismal solidarity unites the baptized in bonds of shared struggle through which we might together transgress racial boundaries, develop greater awareness of and respond to the racialized experiences of others, and actively pursue the well-being of all human beings, other-than-human creatures, and the earth itself—particularly those that are targeted by colonial and racial violence. Baptismal solidarity provides an important theoretical and practical reframing of baptism. The late-twentieth-century liturgical renewal movement in the United States witnessed sustained ecumenical dialogue on, and efforts to harmonize, baptismal theory and practice—efforts that were primarily led by white scholars and practitioners and that primarily focused on white baptismal theory and practice. These decades witnessed a broad array of rich scholarship: formal ecumenical engagement such as is evident in Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, and renewed denominational baptismal liturgies. However, these past decades of predominantly white attempts to harmonize baptismal theory and practice across denominational lines were not accompanied by a simultaneous ecumenical formation—let alone harmonization—of sustained denominational efforts to work together to critique and disrupt systems of racial domination. The limitations of racially dominant “baptismal unity” in a racialized world of two baptisms are stark. In naming the limits of baptismal unity, we must also account for racial power and the violent role of baptism in imposing colonial order and subsequently forcibly homogenizing, assimilating, erasing, or even exterminating marginalized persons. HyeRan Kim-Cragg critiques the dangers of language of “baptismal unity,” arguing, While unity should never be identified as sameness or uniformity, it delineates a totalizing force, opting for homogenization … While it may not be intended that way, unity has often been presented, interpreted, and practiced as what Christine Smith calls “a religious naming for assimilation.”67 In response, Kim-Cragg offers up a postcolonial baptismal theory of “crossing beyond belonging” that honors the complexity of human beings and human journeys across geography and time. Her theology also emphasizes avoiding homogenization and forced assimilation through baptism and envisions baptism as part of a journey of becoming. Baptismal solidarity invites us to recognize the vast chasms of inequality and violent division that baptism has and continues to create in our world. The material expansiveness

Ibid., 285–6. HyeRan Kim-Cragg, “Baptism as Crossing Beyond Belonging,” in Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspectives: Only One Is Holy, 204. 66 67

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of baptismal solidarity reminds us that baptismal unity must not just be theological or liturgical. It also must have radical economic, political, and social implications for the material well-being of those human beings who are racially targeted for violence—or targeted by any other intersecting violence. Baptismal unity is a beautiful utopian vision that in no way needs to be discarded; however, we must recognize that meaningful, material baptismal unity is only achievable through the struggle born out of baptismal solidarity. Baptismal solidarity is suited to a world of segregation and exclusion, because it definitionally relies upon and validates differences, emphasizing relationship and shared struggle in spite of those differences. Solidarity and baptism have long been linked in liberation theological engagements of baptism—whether implicitly or explicitly. One example is Victor Codina’s essay, “Sacraments,” in which he grounds baptism in the relational justice of the Kingdom of God and declares that baptism “orients … [the baptized] to the Kingdom, to life, and to solidarity.”68 For Codina, the solidarity of baptism expands beyond the boundaries of the church—baptism itself representing a potential ritual boundary separating human beings—to encompass responsiveness to all oppressed persons in a manner that leads to mutual, revolutionary struggles for justice. The importance of this commitment to revolutionary effort cannot be understated. Baptismal solidarity grounded in a commitment to justice must be framed within revolutionary struggles against the white supremacist agenda of the State. Examples include Nat Turner’s Rebellion, John Brown’s anti-slavery efforts, and the Civil Rights Movement, and for as long as colonialism has conquered and settled, there have also been struggles, revolts, and revolutions. Such a vision of revolutionary struggle within the context of the United States must confront the powerful racialized agendas of the State, major corporations, and dominant institutions and work to overthrow those systems. As an example, Grimes argues for the centering of “the transformative grace of Black Power,” and to that I add that this vision of justice will be radically committed to indigenous sovereignty and movements that assert the power of all persons of color.69 Baptismal solidarity is abolitionist in nature, immersing us into struggling alongside contemporary abolitionist movements such as #abolishICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and movements to #abolishthepolice or #defundthepolice.70 Baptismal solidarity calls us into solidarity with radical, revolutionary movements that dismantle white power, decenter white persons and communities, and challenge the dominating spatial boundaries of our day (the white suburbs, unjust reservations, ghettos, the rural sundown towns, and even State borders), leading us to transgress those boundaries and to work for their ultimate deconstruction. Baptismal solidarity must be built upon a baptismal affirmation of what Stephen Burns and Michael Jagessar call “the dignity of every human being,” and such an affirmation must encompass the full range of human particularity.71 Burns and Jagessar must be read with a liberation lens, especially emphasizing the dignity of human beings who have

odina, “Sacraments,” 180. C Grimes, “Breaking the Body of Christ,” 43. 70 I utilize hashtags here to reference these movements for several reasons. First, this names the contestation of race in digital media on which some of these movements were birthed, and it provides the reader a means of tracking past and ongoing conversations about these movements. 71 Michael Jagessar and Stephen Burns, Christian Worship: Postcolonial Perspectives (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2014). 68 69

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been marginalized along lines of race or any other reductive human identification. Such a commitment does not erase particularity; rather, it celebrates it. Baptismal solidarity requires that we affirm the dignity of all aspects of other ethnicities, cultures, societies, and religions. Baptism must not function to erase those but to affirm them and to affirm their ongoing expression. Henrietta Stockel in On the Bloody Road to Jesus: Christianity and Chiricahua Apaches explores in depth the ways that baptism did direct physical violence as well as wreaking cultural violence on a widespread scale. After noting similarities between Apache faith and Christianity, she asks hauntingly, “So, if there is only very little difference in all of this, why do we have to change?”72 Baptismal solidarity calls us into anti-racist, abolitionist, and decolonial struggle. Such struggles will grapple with both the internal and external impositions of race that shape our identities and experience of being human and that shape our cultures and societies. This is both a deconstructive and an intensely constructive task requiring that we decolonize ourselves and our communities, learn from those who have gone before us, and imagine a different way of being human and ordering society. Here, Carvalhaes’s baptismal lenses are helpful. Might baptism itself provide us a way of reimagining the world, offering up a baptismal–political vision of ordering ourselves and our world that connects us more deeply to others, to the land, and to all living creatures? Very importantly, the relational, connecting nature of baptismal solidarity entails accountability and critique. This chapter has explored the problem of white, wet devils in the context of accruing colonial and racial violence of baptism. Baptismal solidarity invites those of us deemed white into another way of encountering our baptism and the baptized—one that is not our own and one over which we must not attempt to exert control. In this vision, mutuality, racial accountability, and racial critique are crucial aspects of baptism and the baptismal process. Here I am reminded of the explicit ritual suspicion of the saying, “You can go down a dry devil and come up a wet devil.” Such an awareness and the still unfolding violence of race and baptism necessitate both a rigorous catechumenate process prior to baptism and a rigorous confirmation of the baptized, ensuring that they have committed to a lifelong journey of disrupting their internal and external formation into whiteness and entering into solidarity with persons and communities who have been racially minoritized.

CONCLUSION The still accruing, violent history of baptism and race is far from over. The specters of colonial white, wet deviltry loom over us today in the form of widespread white Christian support for white nationalist politics and the ensuing emboldening of white supremacists who publicly antagonize racially minoritized communities.73 Our fonts are bloody. The Ibid., 206. This is not just an evangelical problem. A recent study suggests that white Christians—evangelical Protestant, Catholic, and mainline Protestant—are all statistically more likely to hold racist attitudes than white religiously unaffiliated persons. See Robert Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020). Also, it is helpful here to review the breakdown of electoral support for Donald Trump who ran on an explicitly, brazen white nationalist agenda. Christians across these three categories previously mentioned significantly swayed to Donald Trump. See Jessica Martínez and Gregory Smith, “How the faithful voted: A preliminary 2016 analysis,” Pew Research (November 9, 2016). Available electronically: https:// www.pewr​esea​rch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/how-the-faith​ful-voted-a-prel​imin​ary-2016-analy​sis/ (accessed August 31, 2020). 72 73

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future is uncertain. In this tenuous moment, we must not turn away from the centurieslong horrors of Christian baptism. It is only through carefully accounting for this brutal history, carefully uprooting and displacing white, colonial thought and experience, and subsequently turning toward baptismal solidarity with people of all races—particularly those persons and communities who have been racially minoritized—that the church might yet emerge one day from the baptismal waters free from white, wet deviltry.

FURTHER READING Carvalhaes, Cláudio, What’s Worship Got to Do with It?: Interpreting Life Liturgically. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018. Goetz, Rebecca Anne, The Baptism of Early Virginia. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Grimes, Katie, Christ Divided: Antiblackness as Corporate Vice. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017. Jennings, Willie, “Being Baptized: Race,” in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells. 277–89 Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Sacrament of Reconciliation JULIA GATTA

A summons to repentance stands at the beginning of the gospels. John the Baptist first appears “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” After John’s arrest, Jesus immediately echoes the same message: “Repent, and believe in the good news” (Mk 1:15). Yet Jesus does not simply take up John’s prophetic mantle by preaching repentance; he enacts the corresponding divine mercy that makes repentance possible. He repeatedly reconciles those estranged from God, and often from respectable society, through one-to-one encounters: the paralytic, the woman taken in adultery, the hapless sick man by the pool of Bethsaida (Mk 2:3-12; Jn 8:1-11; 5:14). Jesus shares meals with public sinners in a culture that defined moral probity, at least in part, by one’s dinner companions. He seeks out those despised and shunned for notorious sin: Matthew at his tax office; Zacchaeus perched in his tree; the woman weeping at his feet in the house of Simon the Pharisee (Mt. 9:9-13; Lk. 19:1-10; 7:36-50). Jesus’ association with the publicly sinful finally culminates in his crucifixion between two criminals; and in Luke’s passion narrative, Jesus forgives even his murderers (Lk. 23:34). Within the New Testament, the gracious gift of divine forgiveness is further developed as a consequence of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Paul puts it succinctly: Jesus “was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25). Early in the Acts of the Apostles, Luke sketches the events of Pentecost day, including Peter’s proclamation of the death and resurrection of Jesus. His preaching triggers conviction of sin, as the Jerusalem crowd, “cut to the heart,” recognize their collusion in the death of Jesus amid wonder at his resurrection. Immediately a practical question arises for them: “What should we do?” Over the centuries, the response of the church has been the same as that given by Peter and the apostles: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:37-38). Baptism is how forgiveness gets inside people, and it forms the sacramental grounding for Christian life—a life animated and shaped by the Holy Spirit. When a robust theology of baptism is preached and taught, it becomes the interpretive key to human experience. Romans 6 is the foundational text here, where Paul teaches that through baptism Christians are united with Christ both “in a death like his” and “in a resurrection like his.” In this same crucial passage, Paul teases out the practical implications of what it means to share in the death of Christ. Prior to bodily death, it calls

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the baptized to “consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 6:11). There is an ascetical edge to baptism that should never be underestimated. Both the demands and the grace of baptism mold Christian life at every turn. Dying to sin is hard. It requires self-knowledge, vigilance, labor, and many humiliating defeats. Still, the whole process is grounded in hope: all this toil is but one dimension of what it means to live in Christ, sharing at all times in his death and resurrection.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF RITES OF RECONCILIATION It should come as no surprise that the question “What should we do?” also arises as Christians recognize their protracted entanglements with sin after baptism; and for most people, baptized as infants, this is their sole experience of personal sin. In the history of the church, the pastoral response to post-baptismal sin has taken a variety of forms and approaches. Some of this diversity is evident within the New Testament itself. At one end of the spectrum, the Epistle to the Hebrews and the First Epistle of John reflect the most rigorous view. For these writers, at least one sin—the sin of apostasy—was considered beyond forgiveness (Heb. 6:4-6; 1 Jn 5:16-17). As a repudiation of Christ by one who had received his grace, apostasy seemed to cancel permanently the benefits of baptism, including the forgiveness of sin. By contrast, when Paul exercises pastoral discipline in the churches under his authority, his overarching aim is to restore the offending party. He frequently deals with an array of post-baptismal sins damaging the inner life of churches to whom he writes, usually through correction and exhortation, but occasionally urging temporary exclusion. A still milder approach may be found in the Epistle of James, which links healing with confession (Jas. 5:13-16). When James urges the presbyters of the church to anoint the sick and pray over them, he adds that “anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven.” In this context, his counsel to confess sins “to one another” probably refers to a mutual confession of faults among Christians, a practice evidenced in other early Christian texts.1 The handing over of the “keys of the kingdom of heaven” with their power to “bind and loose” in Mt. 16:19 (to Peter) and 18:18 (to the apostles) would play a definitive role in the church’s evolving understanding of her disciplinary prerogatives. In rabbinic circles, the expression to “bind and loose” referred to authoritative interpretations of the Law, meaning either to forbid or allow something. A related usage connected this faculty to imposing or lifting a ban of excommunication from the synagogue. The presence of this terminology in Matthew’s Gospel indicates that this sort of rabbinic understanding informed the evangelist’s community, that matters of forgiveness and church discipline were being handled along these lines, and that such authority was taken to derive from Christ himself, who had handed it over to the apostles and their successors in church office.2

I am grateful to Martin L. Smith, my coauthor of Go in Peace: The Art of Hearing Confessions (New York: Morehouse, 2012) and to Nancy Bryan, editorial vice president of Church Publishing Incorporated, for permission to incorporate portions of our book into this chapter. 1 Jeffery John, “‘Authority Given to Men’: The Doctrinal Basis of Ministerial Absolution in the New Testament,” in Confession and Absolution, ed. Martin Dudley and Geoffrey Rowell (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990), 15–39. 2 Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, Volume XV: Penance in the Early Church, trans. Lionel Swain (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 6–8.

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The classic New Testament text conferring authority to forgive sins is, of course, Jn 20:19-23. The strategic placement of this resurrection appearance—the risen Lord’s first meeting with the apostolic band on Easter evening—presents forgiveness at the heart of salvation, the entrance into new life. First, the disciples themselves must be forgiven. As Jesus shows them “his hands and his side,” allowing them to inspect the consequences of sin, including their own cowardly desertion of him, the customary greeting of “shalom” becomes a declaration of pardon: “Peace be with you.” So essential is this implied absolution that Jesus says it twice. As Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit into his disciples, he then releases the possibility of forgiveness into the world: “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you … Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” This dual authority—either to forgive or to retain sins—parallels the “binding and loosing” of Matthew 18. The various strands of evidence in the New Testament, then, point to a spectrum of pastoral approaches to reconciliation within the incipient church. Unlike the formulae for baptism or the Lord’s Supper, however, the church did not inherit any clear tradition for ritually enacting forgiveness on behalf of penitent Christians. With the sporadic outbreak of persecution of the church in the second and third centuries, however, the issue of reconciling those who had abandoned the faith under pressure became urgent. Although there were some voices who, like the authors of Hebrews and 1 John, regarded apostasy as effecting an enduring self-excommunication, eventually the church devised a means of absolving those who had once abandoned the faith but later sought restoration. Just as baptism drove a wedge between one’s former life of sin and the new life of grace, so the developing practice of formal reconciliation required drastic renunciations and severe penances, often lasting for years. Those who had committed the grave sins of murder and adultery were included with the apostates in this course of penance and absolution. The first step in the process entailed a voluntary private confession of sin, usually made to the bishop, although occasionally he would designate certain presbyters to receive such confessions. A penance was then assigned proportionate to the sin. Penitents were excluded from Communion and ritually dismissed at the same time as the catechumens at the conclusion of the Liturgy of the Word. From their place at the back of the church or by its doors, they would beg for prayers from the faithful as they entered the church. Other aspects of penitential ritual included dressing in rags or sackcloth, prostrations before the clergy, and the bishop’s prayers over the penitential group. During the period of excommunication, the bishop would make regular pastoral calls on penitents, encouraging them to persevere in their penance and embrace the demands of a Christian life. When the bishop deemed the penitent ready and the congregation satisfied that sufficient penance had been performed, he would restore the penitent to communion with prayer and a solemn laying-on-of-hands. This ceremony usually took place on Maundy Thursday. In the Western Church, although not in the East, such a venue of restoration was available only once. The public penitential rites of the patristic era provided a way forward for the church to reconcile Christians guilty of serious sin, while driving home for penitents and congregants alike the enormity of it. Yet the severity of canonical penance also caused problems for the church. Many people postponed it until late—or too late—in life for the same reason people put off baptism: because they doubted their capacity to measure up to its rigors or were unwilling even to try. In the Western Church, especially after large numbers of

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northern tribes were admitted to baptism without the thorough catechumenate of earlier days, most public rites of penance gradually faded away.3 Fortunately, another means of spiritual unburdening developed side-by-side with public ecclesiastical penance. This was the private confession of sin to a mature and wise Christian, whether lay or ordained, to seek that person’s prayer, encouragement, and counsel. It was in the monastic movement, begun in the deserts of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, that the custom became widespread. What was confided to a monk or nun of holy reputation was a wide-ranging “disclosure of thoughts”: not just sinful actions or words but the whole gamut of troublesome thoughts and feelings that disturbed the soul. In the intense solitude of monastic life, such self-disclosure was immensely healing, and the guidance provided in these encounters fostered spiritual growth and insight. It was through the influence of Celtic Christianity that the shift to private confession became normative in the Western church. It is not clear how Christianity first came to Britain and Ireland, but certain aspects of Eastern monasticism left their mark on church practice. The public penance of the Mediterranean world was completely unknown; instead, the private confession fostered in monastic circles prevailed. Over time, the bishop’s authority of the keys “to bind and loose” was transferred (as were many other prerogatives of the patristic bishop) to priests. One regrettable legacy of both the patristic and the Celtic traditions was the tendency to make the performance of penance—prayer, fasting, and other physical austerities—the focal point of reconciliation. Although initially seen as a token of sincere repentance and a means of combating temptation, penance ended up becoming the heart of the matter. A distinct form of pastoral literature, called “penitentials,” spread abroad by the Celtic church, furthered this transmutation. These were handbooks designed to help priests assign appropriate penances for sins. While some distinctions were made based upon the situation of penitents and their motivations, on the whole the penitentials presented a rather wooden correlation of penance-for-sin. More troubling still was the incorporation of aspects of tribal law, which allowed for the payment of tariffs for offenses, thus promoting a disastrous externalization of repentance. Although lacking any official ecclesiastical backing, the penitentials were enormously popular, especially with poorly educated clergy, who looked to them for guidance. Yet the emphasis on penance, with its implied suggestion that forgiveness might be earned by making sufficient “satisfaction” for sin, was a theological time bomb waiting for the Reformation to explode. Still, the benefit of confession as a ministry of renewal, healing, and comfort was by no means lost throughout the Middle Ages. Writing at the end of the eighth century, the learned deacon Alcuin of York affirmed sacerdotal authority to bind and loose in confession, interpreting this aspect of priestly ministry as a distinctive feature of the cure of souls. “The ministry of the physician will come to an end if the sick do not lay bare their wounds,” he wrote in one of his letters, urging exposure of one’s spiritual ills through confession. The medical analogy was a frequent theme in the literature on confession, appearing earlier in the Venerable Bede and later in scholastic theologians such as Abelard and Aquinas.4 Recently scholars have documented some diversity in forms of public or quasi-public penance in certain regions of Europe up to the thirteenth century. But for the most part, public rituals of penance were reserved for heinous crimes or high-profile offenders such as kings. See Rob Meens, “The Historiography of Early Medieval Penance,” in A New History of Penance, ed. Abigail Firey (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 73–95. 4 Martin Dudley, “The Sacrament of Penance in Catholic Teaching and Practice,” in Confession and Absolution, 58–9. 3

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By the eleventh century, it had become customary for priests to pronounce absolution at the close of confession rather than after penitents had completed their penance. This development had the constructive effect of shifting the weight of significance to contrition and absolution rather than acts of reparation. Also about this time absolution began to be pronounced in a declarative form (“I absolve you”) rather than administered in the earlier, precatory mode as a prayer over penitents. By 1215 private confession had become sufficiently normative in the Western Church that the Fourth Lateran Council could require an annual confession to one’s own priest by all those who had come to “the years of discretion.” This same decree likewise made binding the reception of Holy Communion during the Easter season, and these regulations continue to be in effect in the Roman Catholic Church to this day.

EASTERN ORTHODOXY From the spectrum of penitential disciplines that characterized the early centuries of the Christian era, the Eastern Church developed patterns of pastoral care and reconciliation similar to those developing in the West. People continued to consult saintly monastics for the unburdening of their consciences and for spiritual guidance. While ecclesial reconciliation had entailed an initial private confession of grave sins to the bishop or his designated presbyter, from the first other Christians sometimes turned to their bishop for confession of less serious sins to seek counsel and prayer rather than absolution and formal reconciliation. The Orthodox trace the beginnings of an order for private confession to the sixth-century Patriarch of Constantinople, John the Faster. In the centuries that followed, this service underwent extensive development within the Greek and Slavic traditions, and there continues to be considerable variety among the churches in the forms for sacramental confession.5 In Eastern Orthodoxy, the role of the priest hearing the confession is construed somewhat differently from the preponderant tradition of the Latin Church. The priest is understood to be a “witness” to a confession of sins that is made to Christ, and a sense of solidarity between priest and penitent is evident at several points. It is expressed liturgically, among other things, in the posture of priest and penitent—typically, both stand before the altar facing an icon of Christ.6 Older forms of confession used a question-and-answer format, but in recent practice penitents use their own words to confess their sins. The priest usually offers counsel, especially if the penitent has asked for guidance about a particular matter. These words are necessarily brief and focused, since the counsel given in confession differs from a more expansive spiritual conversation. A penance is usually imposed, which in the past could be quite severe. Nowadays, however, the penance is regarded as a form as ascetical reeducation, and amounts to a manageable set of prayers or actions. While confession is required before Holy Communion only for grave sins, the faithful are encouraged to make their confessions during the Great Lent, and in the periods of fasting prior to the

Hilarion Alfeyev, Orthodox Christianity, Volume V: Sacraments and Other Rites (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2019), 128. 6 The Book of Needs of the Holy Orthodox Church, trans. G. V. Shann (London, 1894; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1969), 49. 5

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Feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul (June 29), the Dormition of the Theotokos (August 15), and Christmas.7 Most Orthodox churches continue the patristic practice of offering absolution in the precatory form, with the priest asking God to forgive the penitent’s sins and restore union with the Church. The Russian rite additionally includes an absolution in the declarative mode. Yet, the difference between precatory and declarative formulas for absolution— whether between the Greek and Russian Churches or between East and West more generally—is one of emphasis rather than theology. All agree that God alone forgives sin; the role of the priest here, as in all the sacraments, is instrumental.

THE CHURCHES OF THE REFORMATION Because the issue of personal salvation was at the center of much Reformation controversy, sacramental confession came under exacting scrutiny and heated debate. First, there was the question of its sacramental status. If today we recognize the development over time of sacramental rites in the church, such historical awareness was in its infancy in the Reformation era. Most reformers argued that since auricular confession had not been instituted by Christ, it could not be regarded as a sacrament of the church. It is not necessary for salvation, and its use should never be compulsory. Moreover, the reformers insisted that neither contrition nor penance earned forgiveness because salvation is an utterly free gift received by faith in Christ. Luther, however, maintained a high regard for confession to bring relief to individual consciences, encouraged its use, and continued to make his own confession throughout his life.8 In his early writings he spoke of it as the “third sacrament,” after baptism and the Eucharist. Even when he later set it aside as a sacrament in the strict sense, he esteemed it as a continual renewal of baptism, since Christian life entails daily mortification or death to sin. In his Short Catechism, he explains that after confessing our sins, “we receive absolution or forgiveness from the confessor as from God himself.”9 Calvin, too, argued against penance as a sacrament, and fiercely denounced Roman Catholic theology and practice as he understood it. Nevertheless, he could look beyond abuses to recognize the value of unburdening one’s conscience, especially to one’s pastor, in order to receive the consolation of the gospel: Therefore, let every believer remember that, if he be privately troubled and afflicted with a sense of sins, so that without outside help he is unable to free himself from them, it is a part of his duty not to neglect what the Lord has offered to him by way of remedy. Namely, that, for his relief, he should make private confession to his own pastor.10

Alexander Elchaninov, “A Talk before Confession,” in The Diary of a Russian Priest, trans. Helen Iswolsky; English ed. Kallistos Timothy Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), 238, 232, n.2. 8 Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 349. 9 Martin Luther, The Small Catechism, chap. V in The Creeds of the Churches, ed. John H. Leith (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1963), 121. 10 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. I: The Library of Christian Classics Vol. XX, ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1960), Book III, Chap. IV, par. 12, 636–7. 7

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Writing as a Reformed pastoral theologian, Martin Bucer relocated confession in Protestant practice as a feature of home visitation. The faithful pastor was charged “to assist people in their personal lives of faith at the point where sin, especially habitual sin, had to be brought to repentance and life amended.”11 Moreover, the continental reformers affirmed the “power of the keys” both to maintain church order and to absolve penitent sinners. The Lutheran Short Catechism, the Augsburg Confession, and the Westminster Confession of 1646 thus endorse confession to a pastor, followed by absolution.12 Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006) continues this tradition by offering a service of “Individual Confession and Forgiveness.”13 It is significantly grouped with various rites concerned with baptism; and its opening rubrics make the connection explicit: “Confessing our sin involves a continuing return to our baptism where our sinful self is drowned and dies; in the gift of forgiveness God raises us up again and again to new life in Jesus Christ.” The baptismal motif is also sounded in the second form of absolution. The first declaratory form of absolution is based on Luther’s Short Catechism. The traditional seal of confession is upheld in the opening rubrics. The English reformers made provision for a reformed understanding and practice of confession, making explicit liturgical references to it. In the first English Book of Common Prayer (1549), the Exhortation in the Communion service concludes by encouraging those whose consciences were troubled to make “secret confession” to a priest. The same Prayer Book directed that the absolution specified in the Visitation to the Sick also be used for “all private confessions.” That absolution, based on the Sarum Manual, was repeated in the 1662 Prayer Book and closely resembles that offered in rites for private confession found elsewhere in the Anglican Communion. The 1979 Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church (USA) provides two forms for “The Reconciliation of a Penitent.”14 The first is a brief service, drawing on services found in earlier unofficial pastoral manuals and devotional books. The second, longer, and newly composed form weaves rich scriptural imagery throughout the rite. It incorporates elements from Eastern Orthodoxy: for example, priest and penitent begin by reciting verses from Psalm 51 together, followed by the Trisagion. It also inserts the traditional Anglican “Comfortable Words,” familiar from the older General Confession of the Eucharist; these scriptural sentences now serve to encourage the penitent prior to the making of confession. Most notably, at several points this service underscores the connection between Reconciliation and Baptism as well as the social dimensions of both sin and grace. The question put to the penitent prior to absolution—“Will you turn again to Christ as your Lord?”—for instance, is a compressed iteration of the baptismal promises. In offering absolution, the priest is directed to lay a hand upon the penitent’s head or at least to extend a hand over the penitent, recalling both patristic and Orthodox usage. Two formulas for absolution, precatory and declarative, are provided. Finally, the rubrics emphatically enforce the seal of confession upon all who engage in this

Andrew Purves, “A Confessing Faith: Assent and Penitence in the Reformation Traditions of Luther, Calvin, and Bucer,” in Repentance in Christian Tradition, ed. Mark J. Boda and Gordon T. Smith (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2006), 260. 12 Geoffrey Rowell, “The Anglican Tradition: from the Reformation to the Oxford Movement,” in Confession and Absolution, 91–2. 13 Evangelical Lutheran Worship (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2006), 243–4. 14 The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1979), 446–52. 11

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ministry: “The secrecy of a confession is morally absolute for the confessor, and must under no circumstances be broken.” The Book of Common Prayer, like most reformed liturgies on the European continent, provided for a General Confession and Absolution to be part of the regular liturgies of the church.15 This was a decidedly pastoral strategy, since private confession, once it was no longer required, would become a minority practice. For most people, this general confession followed by absolution seems to be a sufficient form of reconciliation. However, general confessions suffer from some real limitations. The repetition of a generic confession week after week can simply lose its force over time. Forgiveness of sin then becomes something people believe in, but do not experience in a personal and powerful way. Sacramental confession can then offer a more compelling vehicle of repentance and forgiveness. Like other reformed churches—Lutherans, Presbyterians, and the United Church of Christ—which today offer rites for individual confession and pardon, the Anglican approach to sacramental confession is distinguished by its pastoral emphasis. Confession is not required: “All may, none must, some should,” declares a familiar Anglican adage.

ROMAN CATHOLICISM During its Fourteenth Session in 1551 the Council of Trent vigorously responded to Protestant attacks on the Sacrament of Penance, sought to rectify abuses by setting forth guidelines for the proper administration and reception of this sacrament, and clarified its relation to baptism.16 Appealing to Jn 20:22-23, it insisted that Penance was a true sacrament, mercifully provided by the risen Christ to remit post-baptismal sin. It set forth the connection between these two sacraments, both of which offer divine forgiveness: “For, by baptism putting on Christ, we are made therein entirely a new creature, obtaining full and entire remission of all sins … so that penance has justly been called by holy Fathers a laborious kind of baptism.” Penance is deemed necessary to salvation “for those who have fallen after baptism” (Chapter II). The Council therefore upheld the directive of the Fourth Lateran Council requiring the faithful to make at least an annual confession during the Lenten season. All mortal sins of which the penitent is conscious must be confessed, and the confession of venial sins was strongly encouraged (Chapter V). The Decree on the Sacrament of Penance often takes a warmly pastoral tone, all the more remarkable for the polemical atmosphere of the day. In urging the full confession of sin, it appeals to the established medical analogy, granting the humiliation involved in such disclosure: “for if the sick be ashamed to show his wound to the physician, his medical art cures not that which it knows not of.” To address a superficial or even mechanical use of Penance, the Council demanded that “contrition, confession, and satisfaction” are “required in the penitent for the integrity of the sacrament” to effect “reconciliation with God” (Chapter III). Of these, contrition “holds first place” (Chapter IV). Absolution, the power to “bind and loose,” belongs solely to bishops and priests (Chapter VI). One of the more controversial teachings of Trent was its endorsement of “satisfaction” through acts of penance, either imposed by the confessor or undertaken voluntarily. Marion J. Hatchett, Commentary on the American Prayer Book (New York: Seabury Press, 1981), 341, notes that at the end of the Middle Ages, priest and server exchanged a mutual confession and absolution prior to the Mass, but that a confession of sin on the part of the entire congregation was an innovation of the Reformation. 16 https://www.papal​ency​clic​als.net/counc​ils/trent.htm (accessed on August 18, 2022). 15

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While many Protestants would deem these acts of “satisfaction” evidence of “works righteousness,” the Council was careful to link such expiatory actions to the work of Christ: “But neither is this satisfaction, which we discharge for our sins, so our own, so as not to be through Jesus Christ. For we can do nothing of ourselves …” (Chapter VIII). The present-day Code of Canon Law regulating the Sacrament of Penance (Title IV. Canons 959–997) is entirely congruent with the teachings of the Council of Trent. It simply details the norms for celebrating the sacrament. Its minister must be a priest, who has been granted the “faculty” of hearing confessions by the local ordinary. The sacramental seal is “inviolable.” The dispositions of the penitent are those outlined by Trent, including “purpose of amendment”; and the faithful are offered complete freedom in their choice of confessor. As part of the liturgical renewal set in motion by the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI authorized a revised Rite of Penance in December 1973 for use in the Roman Catholic Church.17 This thoroughgoing revision envisions three possible ritual expressions of the sacrament: individual confession; communal rites of penitence followed by individual confession; and general confession and absolution for exceptional situations. In every case, individual confession remains the norm. Even when the general confession and absolution is used, penitents must intend to make an individual confession in due course. There are several striking features of this new rite. To begin, there is a fresh emphasis on pastoral warmth and solicitude. The priest is directed to help the penitent, if necessary, to make an integral confession and to offer “suitable counsel” adapted “to the penitent’s circumstances.” At the time of absolution, the priest is directed to “extend his hands over the penitent’s head (or at least extend his right hand).” Readings from Scripture are included in both individual confession and communal penitential services; several apposite scriptural texts are offered for selection. In this and other respects these rites exhibit considerable liturgical flexibility, allowing for various circumstances to shape aspects of the service. The Introduction to the rites sees Penance as an aspect of ongoing conversion, relating it to baptism into the paschal mystery.18 While Penance has never been construed merely as a private conference between priest and penitent, but always as a sacrament enacted on behalf of the Church, the new Rite of Penance gives greater scope to the corporate dimension of sin and grace in the liturgies themselves and their accompanying material. The Decree promulgating these new rites explicitly states the intention “to emphasize the relation of the sacrament to the community.” Solidarity in sin is particularly underscored, of course, by communal penitential services.

THE BENEFITS AND GRACES OF SACRAMENTAL RECONCILIATION The various rites of reconciliation that developed in the church over the course of centuries addressed a clear pastoral need of Christians and their communities. This need still exists. It is not necessary to rehearse scholastic arguments or Reformation controversies to recognize that rites of reconciliation, as palpable vehicles of the divine mercy entrusted

The Rite of Penance: Approved for Use in the United States of America, trans. International Commission on English in the Liturgy (New York: Pueblo, 1974). 18 “Introduction,” in The Rite of Penance, ix. 17

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by Christ to his church, mediate grace. While the term “private confession” helpfully distinguishes it from the general confession of public liturgy, it can also be misleading. It can suggest that sacramental confession is not a regular ministry of the church but an odd devotional practice for the exceptionally pious or a therapeutic support for the notoriously sinful. On the contrary, there are many who readily benefit from all the ways reconciliation is practiced in the church, yet who desire the maximum help that individual confession affords in the struggle of ongoing conversion. As Anglican theologian Kenneth Leech writes, “Confession is a way of making systematic and effective the essential struggle against evil that is so central to the life in Christ. It is not an abnormal, crisis activity, but is part of the day-by-day, domestic ministry of the church.”19 As in all other sacramental actions, in reconciliation the church is gathered in the presence of the Lord. In this case, the smallest quorum of the church is at hand: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” However, confessing one’s personal, specific sins in the presence of another is painful and, in some cases, profoundly shaming. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a strong advocate for private confession, acknowledged, “Because this humiliation is so difficult, we keep thinking we can avoid confessing to one another.” Yet for him, the costly self-exposure entailed in confession is a participation in the costliness of the cross. In Life Together, Bonhoeffer trenchantly expresses this severe grace: In confession there occurs a breakthrough to the cross. The root of all sin is pride, superbia … Confession in the presence of another believer is the most profound kind of humiliation. It hurts; it makes one feel small; it deals a terrible blow to one’s pride. To stand there before another Christian as a sinner is an almost unbearable disgrace. By confessing actual sins the old self dies a painful, humiliating death before the eyes of another Christian.20 Consistent with Christian thinking before him, Bonhoeffer situates confession within the paschal mystery. Here one encounters Christ, crucified and risen, and shares experientially in the dynamics of that union with him. To be sure, confession begins with the arduous disclosure of sin, but it concludes with forgiveness, renewal, hope, and joy. In the end, confession generates an experience of resurrection: “In confession there occurs a breakthrough to new life. … What happened to us in baptism is given to us anew in confession … Confession is the renewal of the joy of baptism.”21 There are several distinct yet related reasons why people seek sacramental confession. Because the sacraments are rooted in the human experience of time, they serve as rites of passage. As a discrete temporal event, the rite of Reconciliation closes off a sinful past and marks the commencement of a new stage. Something clear and definite happens in Reconciliation, and the dismissal at the end always inaugurates a fresh start. Confession helps to focus repentance. Many people are weighed down by vague feelings of guilt or remorse. Some carry shameful memories for decades. Others sense that they are somehow inadequate as Christians and “not as charitable as they ought to be.” The responsibility for spelling out sins in confession counteracts the tendency to let penitence

Kenneth Leech, True Prayer: An Invitation to Christian Spirituality (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1980), 132. 20 Geffrey B. Kelly, ed., Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 5, trans. Daniel W. Bloesch and James H. Burtness (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), 111. 21 Kelly, Life Together, 112. 19

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become fuzzy and general. Preparation for confession can thus be a grace in itself. Honest and thorough self-examination might lead to discarding obsolete images of the self: the false and deficient stories people tell themselves for years. By setting aside erroneous notions of guilt and self-blame, genuine responsibility for omissions and transgressions can then be taken up. Because confession requires making oneself intelligible to another, penitents must find words to name their particular sins. It involves moving past the blur of hazy guilt feelings to a sharper and liberating penitence. Sometimes, however, it can be hard to unravel the threads of precise responsibility in knotty situations where no solution seemed workable or right at the time. In that case, the confessor can help people distinguish between what calls for repentance and what does not. The counsel offered in confession speaks precisely to the penitent’s condition. And the words of absolution offer an objective, authoritative assurance of God’s forgiveness, in response to penitents’ confessed sins and no one else’s. It applies the mercy of God directly to their personal circumstances. Confession also brings destructive secrets into the open so healing can begin. Modern familiarity with psychotherapy has prepared a generation who can appreciate the wisdom of the church’s provision for a safe place in which to tell the truth about one’s pained and troubled self, its loveless and harmful behaviors. The ancient practice of disclosure of thoughts, even the most twisted and shameful, was grounded in a shrewd understanding of human nature. Saying sins aloud makes them real and deepens penitence. At the same time, it is profoundly cathartic. As penitents hand their sins over to the mercy of God, anguishing memories are let go. While therapeutic, the rite of Reconciliation should not be construed as psychotherapy on the cheap. It is a sacrament, an encounter with the merciful Christ through the ministry of the church. By the grace of God, forgiveness is itself healing, and the whole process of contrition, confession, amendment, and absolution is restorative. In his discussion of the importance of individual confession of sins in Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, Pope John Paul II observed, The confession of sins therefore cannot be reduced to a mere attempt at psychological self-liberation, even though it corresponds to that legitimate and natural need, inherent in the human heart, to open oneself to another. It is a liturgical act, solemn in its dramatic nature, yet humble and sober in the grandeur of its meaning … It is an act of entrusting oneself, beyond sin, to the mercy that forgives.22

THE ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE CONFESSOR “The cure of souls,” wrote Gregory the Great, “is the art of arts.” In no other sacrament is the priest’s own spiritual depth, human maturity, and personality brought to bear on its administration more than in this most intimate forum. Beyond the canonical requirement in some churches that priests be granted “faculties” to hear confessions, there have developed over time widely held norms regarding the responsibilities of those who exercise this ministry. First and foremost, except in cases of emergency, those who hear confessions must put themselves under the discipline of using the sacrament of Reconciliation regularly. Being frequently on the penitent’s side of confession makes one Reconciliation and Penitence: Post Synodal Apostolic Exhortation of John Paul II (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1984), 121. 22

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thoroughly accustomed to the rite and sensitive to how it feels, and, even more crucially, cognizant of its distinctive graces. Because hearing confessions is an art rather than a technique, it is passed from person to person experientially, from confessor to penitent. It is from a priest’s own confessors over the years that the requisite bearing, tact, focus, attentiveness, and discernment are best learned. The counsel given in confession is a form of preaching the gospel, personalized and addressed briefly and in all simplicity to the one person present. The penitent will, of course, feel exposed and vulnerable after the confession of sins. Hence, although it is not strictly necessary, a pastoral response is called for at this pivotal moment. Without some words of encouragement or counsel, most penitents will experience the rite as mechanical and impersonal and be left wondering what the priest now thinks of them. So it is crucial for confessors to gain confidence not in their own wealth of insight but in the utter faithfulness of God. It is a matter of trusting that the Holy Spirit will provide the apt word at the right time, using the confessor’s own humanity in the process. Even in Roman Catholicism, where the role of confessor has traditionally been described as “judge,” such judgment now focuses on spiritual discernment. Prayerful openness to God is the key to discerning the movements of grace in another’s situation, and to speaking the word of God directly and spontaneously. Counsel should not consist in friendly advice for selfimprovement. It needs rather to be God-centered: how God is acting just now to give new life in Christ. The hearing of confessions must therefore be steeped in prayer: before, during, and after the rite. The Preface to the Orthodox “Order Concerning Confession” begins with an exhortation directed to the priest, urging him to be exemplary at all times in the practice of virtue and constant in prayer in order to fulfill this ministry. Similarly, Pope John Paul II discusses at length the educational and spiritual formation of those who serve as confessors, noting that “it is even more necessary that he should live an intense and genuine spiritual life. In order to lead others along the path of Christian perfection the minister of Penance himself must first travel this path.”23 In this “art of arts,” the soul of the priest meets the soul of the penitent. The earliest Exhortation in the Book of Common Prayer (1549) advised penitents to open their “sin and grief ” to a “discreet and learned priest.” Discretion refers, among other things, to the capacity to exercise prudent reserve in speech and behavior. In hearing confessions, the words to the penitent must be relatively brief and compressed. Discretion thus requires refraining from a line of questioning with the penitent that would be more suitable in a counseling session. Another aspect of discretion involves a clear and unwavering adherence to the seal of the confessional. The seal is absolute and admits of no exceptions whatsoever; the obligation it imposes does not expire upon the death of the penitent. It means that people can approach this sacrament feeling secure that their sins will not be disclosed or their revelations abused. The seal differs from other forms of professional confidentiality. In all sorts of communication with pastors, especially those confidences disclosed in counseling settings, a strict standard of professional confidentiality is required. Yet at certain times the obligation to those who have communicated their secrets outside the parameters of sacramental confession is overridden by a higher moral obligation. For example, in most

Reconciliation and Penitence, 111.

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states clergy are officially identified as “mandated reporters” in cases of child abuse; they are legally bound to report such cases of which they become aware, even in the course of counseling. But the church’s rule of the seal of confession insists that the secrecy surrounding disclosure made in the rite of sacramental Reconciliation may not be broken for any reason whatever, including legal obligations imposed by the state. Adamant adherence to this rule is a basic condition for protecting the essential security needed by penitents. Despite scenarios created by the movie industry, in which a priest cannot protect someone from danger, such occurrences are extremely rare and in most cases preventable. Sacraments, including Reconciliation, should not be administered to those who are unprepared to receive them. The Introduction to the Rite of Penance of the Roman Catholic Church indicates that a brief pastoral conversation should take place with an unfamiliar penitent before beginning the rite. Such a preliminary conversation would be in order in any case in which a penitent’s familiarity with and comprehension of this sacrament might be uncertain. If the priest has any reason to doubt the penitent’s motives or preparation, the confessor should make sure before beginning the rite that the person seeking absolution understands that both contrition and amendment are requisite dispositions for it.24 Confessors and penitents share alike in the grace of this sacrament, although in different ways. To hear a confession rightly, priests must allow themselves to be centered in Christ as they listen carefully to the penitent’s prayer of confession. Throughout, the confessor is engaged silently in a work of intercession, itself a defining priestly act. Archbishop Michael Ramsey spoke of priestly intercession as being called “near to Jesus and with Jesus, to be with God with the people on our heart.”25 When hearing a confession in this spirit, the sense of divine presence can be almost palpable. The Holy Spirit is directing the confession, and Christ is present in the priest as his representative. In this setting, simple straightforward words of prayer and counsel often have tremendous resonance and power. The absolution and laying-on-of-hands can be felt by the penitent to be momentous and awesome. For penitents, a significant shift occurs after the confession of sin. Through the grace that first prompted repentance and led to confession, a death to sin has been accomplished. The rite enacts handing the burden of guilt over to Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. The deep catharsis of confession is then ratified by the words of absolution. From the unfathomable creativity of resurrection life, the risen Christ imparts forgiveness, and his Spirit breathes new life into those who turn to him. Joy springs up, anchored in hope. “You have shown yourself to me face to face, O Christ: I meet you in your sacraments,” wrote St. Ambrose of Milan. The risen Lord ministers to specific needs in each sacrament of the church. Through confession and absolution Christ is present as our merciful savior, and contact with him is transformative. Deliverance from the twin evils of sin and death is at the heart of the kerygma. While reconciliation is enacted in diverse ways throughout the life of the church, the specific rite of Reconciliation powerfully and dramatically enacts this saving ministry of Christ. Yet it remains an underused sacrament in all churches, and in some quarters its availability is simply unknown. Pastoral preachers know how to connect the gospel proclamation that sin is forgiven with their congregation’s lives and with the church’s liturgical practice.

or further discussion of the seal of confession, see Go in Peace: The Art of Hearing Confessions, 53–6. F Michael Ramsey, The Christian Priest Today (London: SPCK, 1972), 14.

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Advent and Lent pose particularly apt occasions for such preaching and teaching, but other seasons and pastoral settings offer opportunities as well. Through Christ’s singular gift of forgiveness in the sacrament of Reconciliation, he seeks and finds the lost sheep of his fold.

FURTHER READING Boda, Mark J., and Gordon T. Smith, eds. Repentance in Christian Theology. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2006. Coffey, David M. The Sacrament of Reconciliation. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001. Talley, Thomas J. “The Liturgy of Reconciliation.” In Worship: Reforming Tradition. Washington, DC: Pastoral Press, 1990. Thurian, Max. Confession. Translated by Edwin Hudson. London: SCM Press, 1958.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Ecumenism and Roman Catholic Eucharist TIMOTHY BRUNK

In the Roman Catholic world there is widespread agreement on the centrality of Eucharistic celebration in the life of the church.1 Formal dialogues between Catholics and Protestants have made identical or nearly identical claims about this centrality.2 Likewise, there is widespread affirmation of the belief that sacramental communion in the Eucharist is a sign of unity.3 There is today widespread agreement as well that being baptized makes one a Christian and places one in communion with all other Christians in the world.4 There is less agreement on the question of which baptized persons may be admitted to or seek sacramental communion in which churches under what circumstances. This chapter will assess the state of the question of admitting non-Catholic Christians to Eucharistic

For recent official Catholic statements on this subject, see Vatican II, Presbyterorum Ordinis, Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests (December 7, 1965), 6; Sacred Congregation of Rites, Eucharisticum Mysterium, Instruction on Eucharistic Worship (May 25, 1967), 1; General Instruction of the Roman Missal (1975), 1 and the corresponding passage in General Instruction of the Roman Missal (2002), 16; Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994), 1327; John Paul II, encyclical letter Ecclesia de Eucharistia (April 17, 2003), 3; John Paul, apostolic letter Mane Nobiscum (October 7, 2004), 3; and Benedict XVI, Post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis (February 22, 2007), 15. 2 See ARCIC “Agreed Statement on Eucharistic Doctrine” (Windsor 1971), 3; Roman Catholic / Evangelical Lutheran Joint Commission, “The Eucharist” (1978), 26; Disciples of Christ-Roman Catholic International Dialogue, “The Church as Communion in Christ” (1993), 31; Lutheran-Roman Catholic Dialogue Commission for Finland, Communion in Growth (2017), 93; but see also Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, “Dublin Report of the Joint Commission between the Roman Catholic Church and the World Methodist Council” (1976), 71; Final Report of the Dialogue between the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity of the Roman Catholic Church and Some Classical Pentecostals (1982), 45; “Encountering Christ the Savior: Church and Sacraments,” Report of the International Dialogue between the World Methodist Council and the Roman Catholic Church (Durban, 2011), 132. 3 See Roman Catholic/Evangelical Lutheran Joint Commission, “The Eucharist,” 27; Disciples of Christ-Roman Catholic International Dialogue, “The Church as Communion in Christ” (1993), 31. More broadly there is Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, Eucharist II.A.4.9. The Roman Catholic Church was not a signatory of this 1982 document issued by the World Council of Churches, but the document is nevertheless indicative of the general agreement among Christians that the Eucharist is a sign of unity. 4 On the Roman Catholic side, there is the affirmation in the 1964 decree Unitatis Redintegratio [UR] promulgated by the Second Vatican Council. See especially paragraph 3. See also the council’s 1964 dogmatic constitution on the church Lumen Gentium [LG] 15. For a significant interchurch statement, see Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry II.D.6. This text is quoted in Joint Working Group between the Roman Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches, “Ecclesiological and Ecumenical Implications of a Common Baptism” (2004), 2. 1

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communion in the Catholic Church. First, I will present an overview of Catholic teaching on this subject at the level of the Vatican (though of course not every Vatican statement is of equal weight). I will then turn to a discussion of the 1998 statement One Bread, One Body [OBOB], issued by the Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. This document is notable in part because of the response it drew from the House of Bishops of the Church of England in 2001, “The Eucharist: Sacrament of Unity” [ESOU]. I will turn next to remarks of Pope Francis in 2015 on the question of interchurch marriages and access to Catholic Eucharist and developments in Germany in 2018. Finally, I will offer thoughts on avenues to explore on the question of admission to Eucharist.

Admission to Eucharistic Communion in Roman Documents As far back as the Council of Trent, official Roman documents have expressed a hope that all Christians might once more share one bread from one table.5 In her 2000 study of the issue, Myriam Wijlens reports that following Trent non-Catholics were generally barred from the communion table but that there were occasional exceptions to this policy in some cases where a conversion to Catholicism was a hoped-for outcome.6 However, the 1917 Code of Canon Law flatly prohibited the practice of admitting non-Catholic Christians to the sacraments: “It is forbidden that the Sacraments of the Church be ministered to heretics and schismatics, even if they ask for them and are in good faith, unless beforehand, rejecting their errors, they are reconciled with the Church.”7 The use of terms such as “heretics” and “schismatics” is in keeping with the Code’s employment of the term “sects.” [The 1917 Code] speaks of sectae when referring to groups of baptized non-Catholics. Such a reference is more sociological than theological; as a group, baptized nonCatholics were not considered in a theological sense. Instead, they were predominantly seen in their individual relationship to the Catholic Church. Therefore, they were called heretics or schismatics erring in good faith. The ecumenical model of church unity displayed in the norms could be described as “a return to the Catholic Church by the individual.”8 The Second Vatican Council opened the door for sharing Catholic Eucharist with believers in the Orthodox churches but relegated the issue of access to Catholic Eucharist on the part of other Western Christians to further dialogue.9 Establishing the framework for assessing the possibilities of communicatio in sacris, the Council taught that worship in common (communicatio in sacris) is not to be considered as a means to be used indiscriminately for the restoration of unity among Christians. There are two main principles upon which the practice of such common worship depends: first, that Trent, Session 13, chap. 8. Expressing his own ecumenical hopes, Pope Paul VI cites this passage in his encyclical Mysterium Fidei (September 3, 1965), 72. 6 Myriam Wijlens, Sharing the Eucharist: A Theological Evaluation of the Post Conciliar Legislation (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000), 62–4. Wijlens draws here on Johann Gamberoni, Der Verkehr der Katholiken mit den Häretikern: Grundsätzliches nach den Moralisten von der Mitte des 16. bis zur Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Brixen: Wagner, 1950). 7 1917 Code of Canon Law can. 731, §2. Text in The 1917 or Pio-Benedictine Code of Canon Law, curated by Edward Peters (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001). 8 Wijlens, Sharing the Eucharist, 73. 9 For Orthodox access, see UR 15; for “dialogue” with other Western Christians, see UR 22. 5

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of the unity of the church which ought to be expressed; and second, that of the sharing in the means of grace. The expression of unity generally forbids common worship. Grace to be obtained sometimes commends it.10 Moving beyond the language of “sects” in the 1917 Code, the Council held in Unitatis Redintegratio [UR] 3 and Lumen Gentium [LG] 15 that all Christians not in the Catholic Church have a real but imperfect communion with the Catholic Church. Having thus acknowledged a partial unity, subsequent Roman documents and theological studies of admission to Eucharistic communion address especially what it means to be a sign of unity, and the circumstances under which communicatio in sacris can be permitted.11 For example, the 1967 Ecumenical Directory [ED] specifies, following the thinking of Robert Bellarmine, that the ecclesial unity in question involves unity in “faith, worship, and life.”12 In the same paragraph, ED holds that Since the sacraments are both signs of unity and sources for gaining grace, the Church can for sufficient reasons permit separated Christians individually to receive these sacraments. This reception is permissible • in danger of death or in a case of pressing need (in persecution, in prisons), • if such persons do not have access to a minister of the own Communion and • if they voluntarily ask for the sacraments from a Catholic priest. The only conditions are some sign of belief in these sacraments consonant with the faith of the Church and the individual’s own right dispositions. For other cases of necessity the local Ordinary or the conference of bishops should decide.13 ED, then, offers guidance for assessing when communicatio in sacris may be allowed, going beyond the framework provided by the Council three years earlier. Of course, right disposition and a faith “consonant with the faith of the Church” are criteria as well for Catholics wishing to receive communion, though one might dispute what counts as right disposition and right faith. Noteworthy too is the stipulation that the non-Catholic in question is to ask for the sacrament on his/her own initiative. Ruled out here is a situation in which a Catholic minister extends an invitation. Conditions applying to nonCatholics but not to Catholics are lack of access to a minister in one’s own tradition and a “need” in view of imminent death or other “pressing” situation. What qualifies as lack of access? What, besides imminent death, persecution, or imprisonment, qualifies as a pressing need? In the following year, Augustine Bea, head of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, issued a note in which he observed, [ED], by way of example, gives three situations beyond the individual’s control, where these conditions prevail: danger of death, persecution, prison. In other instances the UR 8. Citation from Austin Flannery, ed., Vatican Council II: The Basic Sixteen Documents (Northport, NY: Costello, 1996). All citations from conciliar documents will come from this book. 11 For discussion of what “indiscriminately” means in the context of sacramental sharing, see Wijlens, Sharing the Eucharist, 175–6. 12 Secretariat for Christian Unity, Ecumenical Directory [henceforth ED] Part 1 (1967), 55. Text in International Commission on English in the Liturgy, Documents on the Liturgy: 1963–1979 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1982), 327–8 [henceforth, DOL]. Paragraph 10 of ED repeats the teaching of UR 3 and LG 15 concerning real but imperfect communion between the Catholic Church and all who are baptized. 13 ED 55. I have added bullet formatting for clarity. ED 42 had clarified that the sacraments at issue are penance, Eucharist, and anointing of the sick. We are concerned here only with Eucharist. 10

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local Ordinary or the conference of bishops has the power to give permission, if it is required, but under the condition that it is a question of urgent necessity similar to those cited in the example and in which the same conditions obtain. Where any one of these conditions is missing, admission to eucharistic communion in the Catholic Church is not possible.14 Bea indicates that the necessity must be “similar” to the situations identified in ED but does not offer examples that might qualify as “similar,” leaving that question to the discretion of the bishop(s) in question. In 1972, the Secretariat issued an instruction “On Special Instances of Admitting Other Christians to Eucharistic Communion in the Catholic Church” [Special Instances]. While this document clearly affirmed that Eucharist is something “needed by every believer,”15 it also stressed, Never is it permitted to weaken the strict relationship between the mystery of the Church and the mystery of the eucharist … [T]‌he celebration of the eucharist is intrinsically the sign of the completeness of the faith professed and of ecclesial communion. This principle may never be obscured but in this matter must show us the right course of action.16 The instruction continues: The principle will not in fact be obscured if admission to Catholic eucharistic communion in particular instances applies exclusively to those Christians: • who give signs of a belief consistent with the Church’s faith regarding the eucharist and • experience a genuine spiritual need for the food of the eucharist, yet • not having for a prolonged period access to a minister of their own Communion, • ask for the sacrament of their own accord; • who are rightly disposed to receive it and • maintain a manner of life befitting a Christian.17 The question of what it means for Eucharist to be a sign of unity here moves beyond the bonds identified in ED. Here, the Eucharist is a sign of “completeness” in unity; apparently, nothing is to be lacking. The stress on the initiative of the non-Catholic is retained. As with ED, there are criteria in common with criteria that would apply to Catholics, namely, right faith and right disposition (which would be manifested in a Christian way of life). However, the criterion of “pressing need” from ED, which became “urgent necessity” in documents of 1968 and 1970, becomes in 1972 a criterion of “genuine spiritual need.” The instruction adds that the need at issue is “the need for Secretariat for Christian Unity, Note In questi ultimi mesi of Cardinal Bea, On the Application of the Ecumenical Directory (October 6, 1968) 5. Text in DOL, 330. The wording here was repeated verbatim in Secretariat for Christian Unity, Declaration, Dans ces derniers temps, On the Position of the Catholic Church Regarding Eucharistic Sharing between Christians of Different Confessions (January 7, 1970) 7. Text in DOL, 333. 15 Secretariat for Christian Unity, Instruction, On Special Instances of Admitting Other Christians to Eucharistic Communion in the Catholic Church [Special Instances] (June 1, 1972) 3a. Text in DOL, 340. 16 Special Instances 4a. Emphasis added. Text in DOL, 340. 17 Special Instances 4b. I have added bullet formatting for clarity. Text in DOL, 341. 14

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growth in the spiritual life and for a deeper entrance into the mystery of the Church and its unity.”18 Yet if the necessity is now “merely” genuine and not necessarily “urgent,” the criterion of no access to one’s minister is expanded in this document; now the lack of access must be of a prolonged nature. The 1973 Communication “On the Interpretation of the Instruction of 1 June 1972” [Dopo] repeated the insistence on the Eucharist as a sign of the “completeness of the faith professed and of ecclesial communion.”19 Dopo likewise repeated the criteria of Special Instances (including lack of access to one’s own minister for a prolonged period) and then added that as bishops consider the applicability of the criteria, Notice should also be taken of the fact that the Instruction speaks of particular cases and thus of cases that have to be weighed individually. Ruled out therefore is the issuance of a general norm that would turn an exceptional case into standard practice; nor is it permissible to make decisions on the basis of equity (epikeia) by making this the general norm.20 The Code of Canon Law promulgated in 1983 treats the question of admitting other Western Christians to the Catholic sacraments of penance, Eucharist, and Anointing of the Sick in can. 844 §4: If • the danger of death is present or other grave necessity, in the judgment of the diocesan bishop or the conference of bishops, • Catholic ministers may licitly administer these sacraments to other Christians who do not have full communion with the Catholic Church,

○

who cannot approach a minister of their own community and



○

on their own ask for it, provided that



○

they manifest Catholic faith in these sacraments and



○

are properly disposed.21

The new Code changes the language of “genuine spiritual need” to “grave necessity” and offers no examples of such necessity apart from danger of death, leaving that question to the discretion of the relevant bishop(s). The Code drops the demand for a “prolonged period” of no access to one’s own minister and preserves the condition that the nonCatholic ask for the sacrament. In 1992, the Vatican promulgated the first universal catechism of the Catholic Church since the Catechism of the Council of Trent was issued in 1566. The 1992 document treats communicatio in sacris with respect to the Eucharist and other Western Christians in no. 1400 succinctly: “Eucharistic intercommunion with these communities is not Special Instances 4b. In other words, as the instruction points out in 3b and 3c, the need is not merely a matter of “individual aspiration” but always also involves “deeper integration into Christ’s Church.” 19 Secretariat for Christian Unity, Communication Dopo la pubblicazione, On the Interpretation of the Instruction of June 1, 1972 [Dopo] (October 17, 1973) 3a. Text in DOL, 343. 20 Dopo 6. Emphasis added. Text in DOL, 344. 21 The Canon Law Society of America, The Code of Canon Law: A Text and Commentary, ed. James Coriden, Thomas Green, and Donald Heintschel (New York: Paulist, 1985), 609. I have added bullet formatting for clarity. For additional comments on can. 844, see Frederick McManus, “Commentary on Canon 844” in the same volume, 609–11. 18

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possible.” Here there is not even one reference to can. 844, which, as we have just seen, does envision the possibility of admitting other Western Christians to Catholic Eucharist. This omission is puzzling but perhaps one piece of the puzzle is the catechism’s use of the word “intercommunion.” In a 1970 letter to Cardinal Jean-Marie Villot, then the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, then the head of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, drew distinctions between “intercommunion,” “open communion,” and “admission to Eucharist.”22 The first term refers to agreements between churches that their members may have access to communion in each other’s celebrations. The second term refers to cases in which one church unilaterally permits access to communion for members of another church. The third term concerns case-by-case individual decisions on the part of one church to admit members of other churches to communion. If the 1992 catechism is employing “intercommunion” according to Willebrands’s definition, then the prohibition on intercommunion makes a certain amount of sense. No Catholic document and no ecumenical document suggests that relations are such that intercommunion in this sense is possible. However, the catechism’s silence on admission to Eucharist raises questions about the ecumenical sensitivities of the editors. On the other hand, a document released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the same year takes a decided step back from notions of the Catholic Church as a societas perfecta. Since, however, communion with the universal Church, represented by Peter’s Successor, is not an external complement to the particular Church, but one of its internal constituents, the situation of those venerable [=Eastern Orthodox] Christian communities also means that their existence as particular Churches is wounded. The wound is even deeper in those ecclesial communities which have not retained the apostolic succession and a valid Eucharist. This in turn also injures the Catholic Church, called by the Lord to become for all “one flock” with “one shepherd,” in that it hinders the complete fulfilment of its universality in history.23 The Vatican promulgated a revised Directory for the Application of Principles and Norms on Ecumenism [DAPNE] in 1993. DAPNE repeats claims about real but imperfect unity (e.g., paragraphs 18, 92, and 104) and in paragraph 129 offers a summary assessment of communicatio in sacris. A sacrament is an act of Christ and of the Church through the Spirit. Its celebration in a concrete community is the sign of the reality of its unity in faith, worship and community life. As well as being signs, sacraments—most specially the Eucharist—are sources of the unity of the Christian community and of spiritual life, and are means for building them up. Thus Eucharistic communion is inseparably linked to full ecclesial communion and its visible expression. At the same time, the Catholic Church teaches that by baptism members of other Churches and ecclesial Communities are brought into a real, even if imperfect communion, with the Catholic Church. … It is in the light of these two basic principles, which must always be taken into account together, that in general the Catholic Church permits access to its Eucharistic or discussion of this letter, see Wijlens, Sharing the Eucharist, xvii. F Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Letter, “On Some Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion” (1992): 17. Emphasis added. The letter is citing Jn 10:16. 22 23

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communion and to the sacraments of penance and anointing of the sick, only to those who share its oneness in faith, worship and ecclesial life. For the same reasons, it also recognizes that in certain circumstances, by way of exception, and under certain conditions, access to these sacraments may be permitted, or even commended, for Christians of other Churches and ecclesial Communities.24 DAPNE specifies that in cases of danger of death or other cases deemed by local bishop(s) as qualifying, admission to Eucharist may be offered to other Western Christians provided that

• the person be unable to have recourse for the sacrament desired to a minister of his or her own Church or ecclesial Community,

• ask for the sacrament of his or her own initiative, • manifest Catholic faith in this sacrament and • be properly disposed.25 Of great significance in DAPNE is the identification of interchurch marriages as a context in which admission to Eucharist may be permissible. Because of problems concerning Eucharistic sharing which may arise from the presence of non-Catholic witnesses and guests, a mixed marriage celebrated according to the Catholic form ordinarily takes place outside the Eucharistic liturgy. For a just cause, however, the diocesan Bishop may permit the celebration of the Eucharist. In the latter case, the decision as to whether the non-Catholic party of the marriage may be admitted to Eucharistic communion is to be made in keeping with the general norms existing in the matter both for Eastern Christians and for other Christians, taking into account the particular situation of the reception of the sacrament of Christian marriage by two baptized Christians.26 John Huels observes that “[DAPNE] marked the first time that an official document of the Holy See explicitly recognized that the non-Catholic party to an ecumenical marriage might fulfill the conditions for receiving Holy Communion when the Eucharist is celebrated at a Catholic wedding, and in exceptional cases also during the marriage.”27 This is a point to which we will return. Rounding out this summary of Roman statements on communicatio in sacris, we have two encyclicals from Pope John Paul II. In Ut Unum Sint [UUS], promulgated in 1995, he wrote, It is a source of joy to note that Catholic ministers are able, in certain particular cases, to administer the Sacraments of the Eucharist, Penance and Anointing of the Sick to Christians who are not in full communion with the Catholic Church but

DAPNE draws here on can. 840 of the 1983 Code; UR 3, 22, and 8; and can. 844 of the 1983 Code. All italics in this citation are mine. The full text of DAPNE is available online: http://www.vati​can.va/roma​n_cu​ria/pont​ific​ al_c​ounc​ils/chrst​uni/docume​nts/rc_pc_chrst​uni_​doc_​2503​1993​_pri​ncip​les-and-norms-on-ecume​nism​_en.html. 25 On danger of death, see DAPNE 130; the bullet points are taken from 131 of DAPNE, formatted by the present writer for clarity. 26 DAPNE 159. All italics in this citation are mine. DAPNE 160 specifies that such admission to communion must remain “exceptional.” 27 John Huels, Review of Sharing the Eucharist in Worship 75:1 (2001): 92–4 at 92. 24

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• who greatly desire to receive these sacraments, • freely request them and • manifest the faith which the Catholic Church professes with regard to these sacraments.28 The question of need and necessity is here simplified to a question of “great desire” and there is no mention of lack of access to a minister in one’s own tradition. Some writers concluded that with this encyclical John Paul may have revised church law on communicatio in sacris.29 However, John Paul did not promulgate a change to canon law and indeed in his 2003 Ecclesia de Eucharistia, the pope quoted these lines from UUS and explicitly stated that there can be no dispensation from the norms set forth in can. 844 of the 1983 Code.30

ONE BREAD, ONE BODY (1998) AND “THE EUCHARIST: SACRAMENT OF UNITY” (2001) In OBOB, the Catholic bishops of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland repeat the teaching that the Eucharist is a sign of unity: “Full communion of faith is made clearly visible above all at the Eucharist, the celebration of Mass … Sharing Eucharistic Communion should always imply sharing in the profession of [the] Catholic faith. Full Eucharistic sharing is a profession of the fullness of the faith of the Church.”31 A few paragraphs later, concerning Eucharist as a sacrament of initiation, the Catholic bishops add, “In other words, receiving Holy Communion is the supremely powerful sign that the person is now a full member of the Catholic Church. It is an effective sign which on that one occasion, the Mass of Reception, actually brings about the state of full membership.”32 Though they repeat the criteria for communicatio in sacris from DAPNE and they acknowledge the pain surrounding exclusion from Eucharist, the Catholic bishops “do not judge the celebration of the Eucharist at an ecumenical gathering or event to be a situation in which sacramental sharing might be considered as appropriate in our countries.”33 In summary, There are times when sacramental sharing is to be commended, but it cannot be justified simply by the desire to remove the sense of sorrow and hurt when we are together and yet not fully together, at a celebration of the Eucharist. Feeling strongly that we want to do something together does not necessarily mean that it is the right thing to do. Catholic teaching allows exceptional sharing only when a strong desire is accompanied by a shared faith, grave and pressing spiritual need, and at least an implicit desire for communion with the Catholic Church.34 For the Catholic bishops, “pain is a keen reminder that there is something wrong, that we need healing. Simply taking the pain away does not in itself bring healing: it can

John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Ut Unum Sint [UUS] (25 May 1995) 46. Bullet formatting added by the present writer. 29 See, for example, Eoin de Bhaldraithe, “Intercommunion,” Heythrop Journal 43 (2002): 76–80. 30 See John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 46. 31 Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of England & Wales, Ireland, Scotland, One Bread, One Body [OBOB] (1998) 60. 32 OBOB 64. Italics in original. 33 OBOB 78. For the 1993 criteria, see 106. For the pain of exclusion, see 6 and 76. 34 OBOB 77. Italics in original. 28

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sometimes dull our sense of the need for serious medical attention.”35 In view of this position, they write, We know only too well that the Catholic Church’s understanding of itself and our convictions about who may and may not be admitted to Holy Communion can and do cause distress both to other Christians and to some Catholics. It is not, however, the Church’s norms on sacramental sharing which cause division: those norms are simply a reflection and consequence of the painful division already present because of our Christian disunity. People often ask, “What would Jesus do?,” implying that he would offer the gift of himself to anyone who asked. Jesus himself was often the cause of division.36 In cases where communicatio in sacris is ruled out, the Catholic bishops suggest coming forward for a blessing during the communion procession.37 They also suggest the practice of spiritual/ocular communion. “The traditional idea of spiritual communion is an important one to remember and reaffirm … This idea of ‘spiritual communion’ is an important part of our Catholic tradition which we should not lose.”38 Responding in 2001, the House of Bishops of the Church of England in ESOU characterized OBOB as “hurtful and unhelpful.”39 Jeffrey VanderWilt writes that “when the Anglican bishops report this finding, Catholics must not dismiss their statements as the result of strong emotional reactions only. When the bishops said there was ‘hurt,’ this is not only the indication of a feeling or an intuition. It is the result of deliberation and reflection by responsible and charitable Christian leaders.”40 On the subject of Eucharist as a sign of an already-accomplished unity, the Anglican bishops argue that the “Anglican practice of extending an invitation to share in eucharistic fellowship to baptized communicants of other Christian churches can be seen as a proper pastoral anticipation of the eschatological summons to the marriage supper of the Lamb and a foretaste of full visible unity.”41 Concerning the question “what would Jesus do” and the assertion by the Catholic bishops that Jesus was himself a source of division, VanderWilt notes that the paragraph at issue in OBOB has a footnote to the divisive “Bread of Life” discourse in John 6. He continues, In the time of the author of the Gospel, this analogy helped to distinguish Christians from others who could not accept Jesus’ teachings (Jews, followers of other religions,

OBOB 76. On this point, the bishops are echoing an argument made by Pope John Paul II. See John Paul II, Address to the Secretariat for Promoting Unity at the SPCU General Meeting (November 18, 1978) and John Paul II, Address to the Bishops of the Antilles ad limina visit (May 4, 1979). Texts available in Thomas Stransky and John Sheerin, eds., Ecumenical Documents I: Doing the Truth in Charity: Statements of Pope Paul VI, Popes John Paul I, John Paul II, and the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity 1964–1980 (New York: Paulist, 1982), 303; 310. Responding to this line of argument in OBOB, Gabriel Daly asserted that “it is rather like telling sick people they can have their medicine only after they have recovered their health.” Quoted in Victoria Combe, “Carey Calls Catholics Hurtful over Sacraments,” The Daily Telegraph (March 22, 2001), 9 as quoted in Jeffrey VanderWilt, Communion with Non-Catholic Christians: Risks, Challenges, and Opportunities (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003), 45. 36 OBOB 119. 37 OBOB 43. 38 OBOB 43; 84. Italics in original. 39 House of Bishops of the Church of England, “The Eucharist: Sacrament of Unity” [ESOU] (2001), foreword. 40 VanderWilt, Communion with Non-Catholic Christians, 175. Emphasis added. Notably, the Catholic bishops had written about strong feelings in 77 of OBOB, not about considered judgments. See also 107 of OBOB. 41 ESOU 14. 35

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and so forth). In the modern ecumenical context, however, the analogy is less apt. I hope the authors of [OBOB] did not think that non-Catholics are departing from Jesus because of his teachings. I hope they do not think that the division of baptized Christians from one another is caused by Jesus himself.42 Finally, there is the matter of other Western Christians presenting themselves for a blessing during a Catholic communion procession or in some other way making a spiritual communion. The Anglican bishops offer this assessment: We fully accept the ancient Catholic teaching that a person prevented from receiving the sacred elements may be brought into real communion with our Lord through faith (“Believe and you have eaten,” as St. Augustine says), just as the whole Christ is received when communion is administered in one kind. However, we do not think that this should be too readily applied to Christians who desire to receive the elements that are actually available … Moreover, while we recognize that reciprocal blessings are not uncommon at eucharistic services involving Roman Catholics and Anglicans, and have proved fruitful in building up communion, we judge that a blessing is normally appropriate for catechumens and penitents, rather than for those who are regarded by their own churches as spiritually prepared to receive Holy Communion.43 In other words, the Anglican bishops are here raising the question of whether the pastoral suggestions offered by the Catholic bishops are a matter of misappropriation of traditional practices just as VanderWilt wonders whether the Catholic bishops are misappropriating John 6. We should also note that there is no single view in the Roman Catholic Church on the question of the suitability of blessing those who do not share in communion. Among the documents that comment favorably on the practice are • UUS 72 • Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle (Australia), “Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations within the Catholic Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle: A Companion to the Document ‘Real Yet Imperfect,’ ” (2001), 6.5.3.1 • “The Grace Given You in Christ,” Report of the Joint Commission for Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the World Methodist Council (2006 Seoul), 155/5 • Archdiocese of New Orleans, Letter from Office of Worship (April 9, 2019) Among the documents that discourage the practice are

• Diocese of Phoenix, “In Search of Unity: Guidelines and Resources for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs” (2005), 23

• Congregation for Divine Worship Protocol No. 930/08/L (November 22, 2008), a private letter regarding blessings at communion44

VanderWilt, Communion with Non-Catholic Christians, 170–1. ESOU 44 and 46. 44 No. 5 of this letter, a private correspondence that has no binding authority, states that for those “who are not to be admitted to Holy Communion in accord with the norm of law, the Church’s discipline has already made clear that they should not approach Holy Communion nor receive a blessing.” The letter in English translation is available at https://adore​mus.org/2009/02/15/On-Giv​ing-Blessi​ngs-Dur​ing-the-Commun​ion-Rite/. 42 43

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As with many liturgical matters in the Catholic Church, policy concerning blessings is at present a matter determined at the diocesan level. This rapid review of OBOB and its aftermath does not resolve the questions raised here. Rather, it indicates points at issue.

POPE FRANCIS (2015) AND GERMANY (2018) In 1993, DAPNE appeared to open a door to the possibility of admitting non-Catholic spouses to Catholic Eucharist at the wedding celebration and perhaps even at other times in their married life. In a 2015 exchange that drew global attention, a Lutheran woman told Pope Francis of her pain over exclusion from Catholic Eucharist when she attends Mass with her husband. She asked, “What more can we do to reach communion on this point?” Francis responded, I ask myself: “Is sharing the Lord’s Supper the end of a journey or is it the viaticum for walking together?” … It is true that in a certain sense sharing is saying that there are no differences between us, that we have the same doctrine … but I ask myself: don’t we have the same Baptism? And if we have the same Baptism, we have to walk together. You are a witness to an even [more] profound journey because it is a conjugal journey, truly a family journey, of human love and of shared faith. We have the same Baptism … When you pray together, that Baptism grows, it becomes strong; when you teach your children who Jesus is, why Jesus came, what Jesus did, you do the same, whether in Lutheran or Catholic terms, but it is the same. The question: and the Supper? There are questions to which only if one is honest with oneself and with the few theological “lights” that I have, one must respond the same, you see. “This is my Body, this is my Blood,” said the Lord, “do this in memory of me,” and this is a viaticum which helps us to journey … Life is greater than explanations and interpretations. Always refer to Baptism: “One faith, one baptism, one Lord,” as Paul tells us, and take the outcome from there. I would never dare give permission to do this because I do not have the authority. One Baptism, one Lord, one faith. Speak with the Lord and go forward. I do not dare say more.45 Francis wrestles here with Eucharist as a sign of unity and a means of grace, the two principles set forth in UR: “Is sharing the Lord’s Supper the end of a journey or is it the viaticum for walking together?” He neither prescribes nor proscribes sacramental communion for the Lutheran woman: “Speak with the Lord and go forward. I do not dare say more.” His reference to the discernment of the person(s) involved is a remarkable development. It drew both praise and criticism.46 Francis returned briefly to this subject in the 2016 document Amoris Laetitia [AL], in which the “exceptional” nature of such admission to communion was again emphasized.47

Francis, Address at Christuskirche Parish [Rome] (November 15, 2015). Text at https://w2.vati​can.va/cont​ent/ france​sco/en/speec​hes/2015/novem​ber/docume​nts/papa-france​sco_​2015​1115​_chi​esa-eva​ngel​ica-luter​ana.html. 46 For a small sample, see https://www.prayt​ellb​log.com/index.php/2015/11/15/pope-fran​cis-on-int​erco​mmun​ion/. 47 Pope Francis, post-synodal exhortation Amoris Laetitia [AL], (2016), 247. AL is well known also for footnote 351, which appears to raise the possibility of access to Catholic Eucharist for Catholics who marry in the church, divorce, and remarry outside the church without an annulment. There, AL makes explicit reference to the importance of discernment. 45

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In 2018, the German Bishops’ Conference released a pastoral handout, Walking with Christ [Walking], which sought to provide a pastoral response to interchurch couples.48 Hewing to the idea that “Eucharistic sharing can only be exceptional,”49 Walking nevertheless states the desire of the German bishops to lay out a “secure path” that interchurch couples may travel as they consider the question of access to Catholic communion for both spouses.50 Indeed, the German bishops intend to “show how spouses living in an interdenominational marriage can, with pastoral support, reach a conscientious decision that they can express publicly within the Catholic Church, which might also involve receiving Holy Communion.”51 Stressing, by way of quoting John Paul II, that such reception of Eucharist is not intended to “bring about an intercommunion which remains impossible until the visible bonds of ecclesial communion are fully re-established,”52 the bishops assert that they are seeking to address cases in which if the unfulfilled longing of an interchurch couple to share Eucharist is not remedied, “the marriage that is founded on Christ’s love of the church may even be jeopardized.”53 Notable here is that the bishops are addressing the need of the couple and not simply the need of the individual spouse who is not Catholic: “A grave need arises when the faith that has led a woman and a man to bestow on each other and receive from each other the sacrament of marriage, then leads to a longing to share Holy Communion when they can see no way to satisfy this longing with the church’s blessing.”54 The German bishops take this analysis a step further by noting that a Christian family can be regarded as a “domestic church”55 and then applying this concept to interchurch families. This idea, which goes back at least as far as John Chrysostom,56 was taken up by Pope Francis in AL in a passage cited by the German bishops: “No church can exist without the Eucharist. Just as the church lives from the Eucharist, in

The text is available in the original German at https://www.dbk.de/filead​min/redakt​ion/divers​e_do​wnlo​ads/ dossie​rs_2​018/08-Ori​enti​erun​gshi​lfe-Kommun​ion.pdf. An unofficial English translation is available at https:// dbk.de/filead ​ m in/redakt​ i on/divers​ e _do​ w nlo​ a ds/dossie​ r s_2​ 0 18/Walk​ i ng-with-Chris​ t _Tr​ a cin​ g _Un​ i ty_​ A rbe​ its%C3%BCber​setz​ung-der-Ori​enti​erun​gshi​lfe_​ENG.pdf. For the current essay, F. Russell Mitman has reviewed this translation for accuracy; I will cite from the English translation. 49 Walking, 15. The document is here quoting DAPNE 160. 50 Walking, 33. 51 Ibid., 6. 52 Walking, 17. The bishops are here citing John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 45, which is discussing the general question of access to Eucharist for non-Catholics, not the particular case of interchurch marriages. 53 Walking, 18. 54 Ibid. Emphasis added. The 1998 Directory on Ecumenism for Southern Africa, issued by the South African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, had made specific reference in VI.B.3.b to the idea that “both [spouses] may experience a real need to express [their] unity by receiving holy communion whenever they attend Mass together.” However, after an unrelated incident in which a South African Catholic priest provided Eucharist to the non-Catholic US President Bill Clinton, the Vatican requested a revision of the Directory. The Revised Directory on Ecumenism for Southern Africa (2000) refers instead in 7.13 to cases in which “a spouse in such a marriage, now commonly called an interchurch marriage, could well experience a serious spiritual need to receive holy communion.” In 2003, however, the Australian Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle issued guidelines for sacramental sharing, observing that in interchurch marriages “both [spouses] may experience a real need to express their unity by receiving the Eucharist whenever they attend Mass together.” Citation from Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle, “Real Yet Imperfect: Pastoral Guidelines for Sacramental Sharing” (rev. 2003), 11. See also Diocese of Saskatoon (Canada), “Sacramental Sharing: Pastoral Directives for Sacramental Sharing in Particular Circumstances” (2007), 21. 55 Walking, 29. 56 See Chrysostom’s Homily XX on Ephesians. See also LG 11. 48

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Christian marriage—as [AL] emphasizes—the food of the Eucharist offers the spouses the strength and incentive needed to live the marriage covenant each day as a ‘domestic church.’ ”57 In an important passage, the German bishops specify that they do not have in mind a “general admission to full participation in the celebration of the Catholic Eucharist for the non-Catholic party of an interdenominational marriage” and that those concerned “must therefore reach a personal, conscientious decision after having given the matter due consideration in conversation with their pastor or another individual appointed to provide pastoral care.” A positive decision “requires a firm commitment to the life of the church.”58 The history of Walking provides insight into the paradoxically firm but unsettled state of the question of admitting other Western Christians to Catholic Eucharist. The document received the required two-thirds support of the German Bishops’ Conference (indeed, it passed with the approval of more than three-fourths of the bishops59), but some in the minority appealed directly to Rome to have the document withdrawn, without notifying the conference president.60 Francis directed the German bishops to resolve the matter among themselves.61 Just over a month later, the pope decided that the matter was not one for a conference of bishops to decide and that discretion for such questions (still) rests with diocesan bishops.62 One German bishop said that as a result of this sequence of events, “many are deeply disappointed and the damage is not yet foreseeable. Old wounds have been reopened. Bitterness and resignation have started to spread.”63 On the other hand, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the German former head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, characterized the conference’s action as a “claim to be the ‘pacemaker and schoolmaster’ for the world Church,” adding, “That was once again a typically German own goal!”64 Can. 844 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law has not changed. The criteria established in 1993 by DAPNE have not changed. Though Francis raised the intriguing possibility that the Lord’s Supper is food for the journey (toward reunification among Christians?), Catholic teaching has not formally changed on whether communicatio in sacris may be a means to unity: the answer is no. What is at issue, then, is the question of grave need. On this point, there is no agreement. In the German case, for example, some dioceses are pressing ahead with the principles in Walking and others are not.

alking, 29, citing AL 318. W Walking, 21. 59 Catholic News Agency, “On Intercommunion, Vatican Returns the Ball to German Bishops” (May 3, 2018). Text at https://www.cat​holi​cnew​sage​ncy.com/news/on-int​erco​mmun​ion-vati​can-retu​rns-the-ball-to-ger​man-bish​ ops-45742. 60 Catholic News Agency, “Vatican Reportedly Rejects German Bishops’ Proposal for Intercommunion of Spouses” (April 18, 2018). Text at https://www.cat​holi​cnew​sage​ncy.com/news/vati​can-rep​orte​dly-reje​cts-ger​man-bish​ ops-plan-for-int​erco​mmun​ion-of-spou​ses-65682. 61 Catholic News Agency, “On Intercommunion, Vatican Returns the Ball to German Bishops.” 62 Catholic News Agency, “On Papal Flight, Francis Says Intercommunion Policy Should Be Decided by Diocesan Bishops” (June 21, 2018). Text at https://www.cat​holi​cnew​sage​ncy.com/news/on-papal-fli​ght-fran​cis-says-int​erco​ mmun​ion-pol​icy-sho​uld-be-deci​ded-by-dioce​san-bish​ops-86244. 63 Bishop Gerhard Feige (Diocese of Magdeburg), quoted in Christa Pongratz-Lippitt, “Ladria’s Letter on Communion Angers German Bishops,” The Tablet (June 14, 2018). Text at https://www.thetab​let.co.uk/ news/9247/lada​ria-s-let​ter-on-commun​ion-ang​ers-ger​man-bish​ops. 64 Cardinal Gerhard Müller, quoted in Christa Pongratz-Lippitt, “Ladria’s Letter on Communion Angers German Bishops.” 57 58

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AVENUES TO CONSIDER I offer here two avenues to explore concerning who may be admitted to Catholic Eucharist. First, I have already noted a key passage in Unitatis Redintegratio 8, according to which “the expression of unity generally forbids common worship. Grace to be obtained sometimes commends it.” For can. 844 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law, the grace to be obtained requires, among other things, “danger of death” or “other grave necessity.” Concerning danger of death or other grave necessity, it is worth pondering the trajectory of the Catholic sacrament of Anointing the Sick. The full details of the centuries during which this sacrament was celebrated as Extreme Unction need not concern us here. At issue is the 1917 Code of Canon Law specified in Canon 940 that the proper recipient of the sacrament was someone who has “come into danger of death from infirmity or old age.”65 Less than a half-century later, Sacrosanctum Concilium 73 held that “it is certain that as soon as any of the faithful begins to be in danger of death … this is already a suitable time for them to receive this sacrament.”66 Canon 1004 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law follows the Council’s lead here. We have seen that the 1993 DAPNE requires at least danger of death or other cases deemed by local bishop(s) as qualifying. Given that the Catholic Church has lowered the “death” threshold for celebration of Anointing of the Sick, is there room to consider what “danger of death” or “grave necessity” might mean for admission of other Western Christians to Catholic Eucharist? Second, it is worth pondering the ends of sacramental celebration according to Sacrosanctum Concilium. Twice (in 7 and 10), the Liturgy Constitution identifies the sanctification of people and the worship of God as the purpose or ends of sacramental celebration. These processes happen in view of each other. When people are sanctified, God is glorified. When God is glorified, people are sanctified. Sacrosanctum Concilium 59 adds a third consideration: “The purpose of the sacraments is to sanctify people, to build up the body of Christ, and, finally, to worship God.” The sanctification of individuals is never an exclusively self-regarding affair. As Lumen Gentium 9 puts it, “[God] has … willed to make women and men holy and to save them, not as individuals without any bond between them, but rather to make them into a people who might acknowledge him and serve him in holiness.” The sanctification of believers, the building up of the body of Christ, and the worship of God may be distinguished as aspects of sacramental celebration, but can they be made distinct and isolated pieces of such worship? In the words of UR 8, can the “grace to be obtained” be divided from the unity entailed in admitting other Western Christians to Catholic Eucharist? As I write these words, the world is convulsed by the ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic. In many places, people have been staying at home, observing social distancing, and refraining from congregating. This means that Christians around the world have been deprived of the Lord’s Supper; gathering in such a time means running the risk of contagion, of spreading a disease that killed more than 300,000 people between late fall 2019 and late spring 2020. Catholics, of course, are among those who are in this state of sequestration. I suggest that fellow Christians who are present at the Catholic Mass face an analogous sequestration. If being divided during Covid-19 is a matter of restricting a viral contagion,

1917 Code of Canon Law, no. 940. Text available in The 1917 or Pio-Benedictine Code of Canon Law, curated by Edward N. Peters (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2001), 328. 66 Emphasis mine. 65

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then perhaps there is fear of an analogous sort of contagion if fellow Christians partake of Catholic Eucharist. The feared contagion is potential indifference to doctrine and to the meaning of symbol. If fellow Christians share in Eucharist but do not share the fullness of Catholic faith and teaching, could this indicate that indifference to doctrine is acceptable among Catholics themselves? If the symbol of Eucharistic participation does not automatically involve complete unity in faith, then what does that symbol mean? Reckless social gatherings in a time of pandemic is profoundly unwise. Reckless participation in Eucharist is likewise unwise.67 Yet, when pandemics pass, social gatherings can still run the risk of spreading lesser diseases: a cold, for instance. No social gathering is biologically risk-free. Engaging participation in Eucharist when pandemics pass is not biologically risk-free. Engaging participation in Eucharist as a means to unity as well as a means of grace is not risk-free but continuing the practice of Eucharistic sequestration carries great risks of its own. When people at last emerge from a time of social distancing and relieve the need for social contact, perhaps Catholics and their fellow Christians can press for a need to emerge from Eucharistic social distancing and relieve the need for Eucharist, a need shared by all who have been baptized.

FURTHER READING Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland, One Bread, One Body (1998) and the response of the House of Bishops of the Church of England, “The Eucharist: Sacrament of Unity” (2001). Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Declaration on the Way: Church, Ministry, and Eucharist (2015). Lutheran-Roman Catholic Dialogue Commission for Finland, Communion in Growth (2017). Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Directory for the Application of Principles and Norms on Ecumenism (1993).

“Reckless” here should be understood in the sense of having the assembly “approach the altar as a group indiscriminately,” that is, without regard for personal dispositions (sinfulness) not compatible with receiving Communion. Citation from Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments Instruction Redemptionis Sacramentum (March 25, 2004), 83. Text at http://www.vati​can.va/roma​n_cu​ria/congre​gati​ons/ ccdds/docume​nts/rc_con_ccdd​s_do​c_20​0404​23_r​edem​ptio​nis-sac​rame​ntum​_en.html. 67

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Healing Eucharist: Excavating the Table’s Delusion and Redemption in White Dominant Church MARCIA W. MOUNT SHOOP

Eucharist re-members. Eucharist embodies. Eucharist is a way of life. Eucharist is both mirror and aspiration, and it carries with it the capacity to inform and transform the gathered Body of Christ.1 Eucharist is healing because it carries this capacity to shape and change us. When we neglect these layers of its potency, it becomes a trivialized shadow of itself. Its healing impact is diminished. In its trivialized enactment Eucharist can become another tool of Empire that entrenches the collective delusion of those most steeped in white supremacy culture. In its full flower Eucharist can help transform relationships, communities, and the church’s way of being in the world. Eucharist can disrupt and it can normalize. Its power is also its peril. In a racialized country this power and this peril are racialized. Eucharistic practice, therefore, requires scrutiny when practiced in white churches in a country radically afflicted by the disease of white supremacy. Most white churches struggle to see the connection between the legacy of chattel slavery and racial terror in America and the re-membering of brokenness, betrayal, and redemption that Jesus spoke of in the origin meals that we evoke in eucharistic practice. Herein lies both the truth and the distortion of the life of faith in American white Christianity. James Cone describes this truth and distortion with powerful clarity: “Until we see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a ‘recrucified’ black body hanging from the lynching tree, there can be no genuine

In my book, coauthored with Mary McClintock-Fulkerson, A Body Broken, a Body Betrayed: Race, Memory, and Eucharist in White-Dominant Churches (Seattle: Cascade Books, 2014), we explore these dynamics of Eucharist using critical race theories and constructive theological engagement with embodiment, trauma, memory, and collective healing through sacramental practice. 1

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understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.”2 Since that Last Supper that generated the template for Eucharist, believers have tasted both liberation and domination at Table. The Last Supper narratives circle around a traumatized community anticipating state-sanctioned violence unleashed in order to undermine the social and spiritual movement to which they have given their lives. Jesus calls his friends to an upstairs room where he can speak freely to them. Different scriptural narratives highlight different layers of this intense moment in time. Jesus tells the truth about the pain of betrayal at the hands of his friends. Jesus encourages his friends that they are part of a bigger story, a mighty movement of God’s Spirit, that will not end with his physical absence. Jesus uses brokenness as a vivid portal into the truth of how God works in the world to transform. The Last Supper is a real-time enactment of “the truth will set you free.” Jesus is simultaneously speaking and embodying the truth of human brokenness and the power of God’s capacity to use that brokenness and its truth to liberate. Domination is the disease that creates brokenness. God’s love and truth is the power that breathes healing opportunities into that same brokenness. Mutual liberation is tasted and also remains a hope that could only unfold in a better world. In these words, actions, and embodied sensations, Jesus generates visceral data for his friends about the nature of liberation and domination. He is unveiling and restructuring the way power is deployed and understood in terms of intention and impact. There is a residue of mystery in how this moment lands for those first followers. And that ambiguity of interpretation and appropriation remains in the heritage of sacramental practices of Eucharist through the ages. Therein lies both the healing and harm that Eucharist can deploy in communities of faith. People of faith have embodied both redemption and delusion at Table. What and who the Table feeds are radically contextual even as the practice itself evokes a universal aspiration of God’s creation reconciled and healed. White supremacy culture distorts and contorts Eucharist in white churches, and so goes the distortion of the Church and American Christianity itself. And Eucharist simultaneously creates healing opportunities for whiteness to become visible, to be disrupted, and for white communities to be transformed through learning and practicing liberative ways of being church. In all these ways, Eucharist provides us with embodied iconography that conceals, reveals, and invites. This chapter will excavate the marks of white supremacy culture that have emptied Eucharist of its prophetic and redemptive power in many white dominant churches in America. And this chapter will invite the possibility of Eucharist’s healing capacity when consciousness and practice are transformed. Healing Eucharist means centering bodies and attending to the deep impacts of trauma. Healing Eucharist also requires disrupting whiteness and the ways it has trivialized the Body of Christ. Trauma and embodiment are centered for construction. Whiteness is centered for disruption.

PART ONE: “THIS EUCHARISTIC LIFE” “This Eucharistic Life” was our fall 2019 theme at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church (henceforth GCPC) in Asheville, North Carolina. It may be hard to hear it on the written

James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), Kindle loc. 200.

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page, but this theme is a riff on the NPR radio show “This American Life.”3 “This Eucharistic Life” was more than a theme. It was an immersive experience. Communion every Sunday. Each Sunday a different experience and encounter with the Table; Eucharist explored in creative ways. Periodic podcasts about how “This Eucharistic Life” took on flesh and blood in the life of Grace Covenant went out to the congregation electronically. Everything was “on the Table,” every part of our life together: music, community engagement, relationships, pastoral care, spiritual formation and education, children and youth, our community garden, our ministry partnerships, stewardship, administration, our building, and our intensive work since July 2016 to dismantle white supremacy culture within ourselves and within our community. Grace Covenant centered Eucharist and the question of what it means to live “eucharistically” for months. The Session voted to continue weekly Communion even after the fall had passed. We were to celebrate weekly Communion at both worship services through Pentecost in 2020 as we continued to explore how “This Eucharistic Life” was forming, informing, and transforming us. The Covid-19 pandemic hit in mid-March 2020 and GCPC went to online worship services. The last Sunday we were together in the sanctuary, we celebrated a modified Communion by intinction. People came forward, and we used small cups instead of the common cup. And two staff members, with sanitized hands, placed pieces of bread into the palms of those coming forward. The next time we celebrated Communion together would be Easter Sunday, online. The congregation gathered their elements from their own kitchens and we broke bread and shared the cup simultaneously across the miles.4 In the mystery of the Holy Spirit’s power we were nourished in our deep embodied connection in the midst of a global pandemic that was conspiring to keep our bodies at a distance from each other. At first glance one could assume that our “This Eucharistic Life” initiative was thwarted by Covid-19. As we made the steep climb up the learning curve about how to worship online, we hoped that we would be back in the sanctuary in time for Easter and could resume our practice of Communion when we were face-to-face. As the pandemic raged on, we realized that it would be a long time before we could be together again face-toface. And we decided that Eucharist would be celebrated online on Easter. It has been an emerging process to navigate when the practice of Eucharist is incorporated into our online worship. We have celebrated it several times since Easter on Sundays like our fall kick off, World Communion Sunday, All Saints, and Christmas Eve. But our inability to meet face-to-face and our decision not to continue weekly Communion while we are worshiping online actually deepened our ability to engage the abiding questions at the heart of “This Eucharistic Life.” How can our faith change the world? How does the way of life we learn about at the Communion Table shape the lives we actually live? The pandemic broke us open to the visceral realities of living eucharistically in ways perhaps nothing else could have with such potency. We weren’t just talking about these things or practicing them with creative embodied liturgy in worship. We were living it

This American Life is a podcast produced in the NPR studios (WBEZ) in Chicago, Illinois. https://www.thisa​meri​ canl​ife.org/. 4 Editors’ note: for another discussion of the possibilities and concerns regarding digitally mediated eucharistic practices, see the essay by James Farwell and Martha Moore-Keish, “Sacramental Theology and Worship Technology in the Wake of a Pandemic,” elsewhere in this volume. 3

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and feeling movements of the Spirit every day. We were practicing and learning. We were living into new ways of being together and dying to our old selves and our old ways. And the amplification of the Movement for Black Lives and Black Lives Matter gave even more clarity to the intertwining pandemics that were bearing witness to our brokenness as a country and as a culture. While nostalgia may have filled some of those early days of the pandemic for Grace Covenant, we soon moved into an acceptance and an openness to the gifts of the pandemic ways of being church. Building and rebuilding trust, sharing vulnerability, telling the truth about our brokenness, laying bare the betrayal of systems of power, disrupting the mentalities and habits of Empire, acknowledging the embodied toll of injustice, and more deeply accepting the ways white identified people and white dominant institutions do harm and are harmed by white supremacy culture all became even more vivid and penetrating. Sacramental living every day, an aspiration we had named and been searching for in our exploration of Eucharist, now seemed so obvious. Everything was sign and seal of God’s healing power in the world—hummingbirds and spider webs, phone calls and mask wearing, connecting online and holding each other in prayer, discomfort and difficult conversations, growing self-awareness and deepening community engagement. Eucharist as a way of life garnered more and more visceral data for all of us. And Communion’s connection to brokenness was more and more undeniable. Some of these emerging habituations are things we are able to name together in worship through sermon, song, prayer, and participation. For instance, the YouTube chat has become a way to connect in real time, to share hopes and fears, gratitude and petition. It’s not breaking bread, but it is telling the truth about our brokenness, our grief, and our abiding connection and devotion to beloved community. As the redemptive and transforming power of Eucharist became more visceral, so too did the delusions of our practices and our habits of being together. When we had to let go of the liturgical habit of face-to-face sharing of bread and cup, the sacrament as we had always known it, the ways whiteness has marked our traditional practice could become even more visible. And the conversations and work we had been doing together since 2016 around dismantling white supremacy culture within ourselves and within our community became a centered iteration of our eucharistic practice. Whiteness became more and more visible as we had to let go of our sanctuary, our choir, our Communion Table, Wednesday night dinners, our ushers, our Communion servers, our busy building full of ministry partners and programs. So many layers that we associated with being the church were not accessible to us. And this loss, this brokenness, this deep grief made room for the loss, brokenness, and grief that had not been invited to the surface in a white dominant space. Brokenness, grief, and a power analysis converge and Eucharist as a way of life becomes an even more pressing question. What about white Christianity has been trivialized, lost, distorted? What about white Christianity can be healed and why? Do white Christians even know we are broken? And without acknowledgment of brokenness, how can we possibly expect to be healed? White supremacy rests on a façade of perfection and paternalism.5 There are many great resources from the growing body of work that is critical race theory. Descriptions of white supremacy culture are particularly helpful in recognizing how white supremacy culture shows up in white dominant spaces. Tema Okun’s “White Supremacy Culture” document has been one of the most impactful at GCPC. https://www.disman​tlin​grac​ism.org/uplo​ads/4/3/5/7/43579​015/okun_-_wh​ite_​sup_​cult​ure.pdf. 5

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White Christians of the mainline variety have made a way of life out of both. “We” help those “in need.” “We” do things “decently and in order.” “We” reach OUT to the “less fortunate.” “We” are not hampered by the obsession with personal morality that the Evangelical white churches focus on (e.g., people can get divorced and still be leaders in the church). “We” are focused on “social righteousness,” which means we help those who are poor and in need, but our lives don’t really need healing. Living eucharistically means first seeing ourselves eucharistically—as those Jesus is speaking to when he names the brokenness and the betrayal. How have white dominant churches particularly embodied a betrayal of the liberative promise of eucharistic practice? How have white Christians denied our own brokenness at the Table in ways that have exacerbated instead of alleviated racialized harm?

PART TWO: EXCAVATING EUCHARISTIC EXPECTATION For a white dominant church to seek to lay down white supremacy in order to be the church breaks open the practice of Eucharist itself. And John Calvin’s mystical descriptions of the Eucharist surface anew. Calvin writes, By faith we embrace Christ, not as appearing at a distance, but as uniting himself to us, … As bread nourishes, sustains, and protects our bodily life, so the body of Christ is the only food to invigorate and keep alive the soul. When we behold wine set forth as a symbol of blood, we must think that such use as wine serves to the body, the same is spiritually bestowed by the blood of Christ, and to use it to foster, refresh, strengthen and exhilarate.6 In the dialogue sermon I preached with my pastoral colleagues, Samantha GonzalezBlock and Richard Coble, to inaugurate “This Eucharistic Life” in the fall of 2019, I revisited the way reading Calvin’s Book Four in graduate school had actually raised the eucharistic bar for me, a multigenerational Presbyterian. Thousands of pages that John Calvin wrote back in the sixteenth century and called uninspiringly (at least from my perspective), “The Institutes of Christian Religion,” were not something I ever expected to enliven my faith and whet my appetite for Eucharist like they did. Honestly reading most of that book was like alternating between reading the yellow pages and reading a diatribe against all things human. By the time I got to Book Four, chapter Seventeen, I was just trying to get through it as a dutiful graduate student. Just a few lines in I start reading words like “our souls feed,” “living bread,” “great mystery,” “refreshed,” and “vigor.” It had never occurred to me that Communion could be soul food, mysterious, refreshing, invigorating. In the midst of slogging through that dry academic text, a whole new expectation was created in me about the gift of this sacrament. And it wasn’t just the words but the mystery they pointed toward. The theology Calvin laid underneath the sacrament made me hungry for that mystery—and it emboldened me to expect more from the practice of the sacrament. In that sermon I suggested that Calvin may roll over in his grave to know this, but his words freed me up to call the church to be accountable to the amazing, embodied mystery that is available to us in our practice of the sacrament. The subterranean shift is something I imagine to be true, even though Calvin

John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, Chapter 17.

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gave his life to holding the institutional church accountable to this mystery of Eucharist. I imagine the “rolling over” more because I am deploying his theological clarion call to dethrone the perfectionism of whiteness and the disembodied dis-ease with our human bodies therein. Calvin struggled to be at home in his own body with multiple chronic diseases and frequent melancholy. Even with his theological embrace of sacramental mystery, he remained captive to some of the violent habituations of domination and superiority. Just bringing a word like “exhilarate” into relationship with the sacrament in the Presbyterian tradition gave me a new sense of possibility. Calvin didn’t believe in anything like a private Communion. Eucharist is an act of the community, and should be accompanied by proclamation of the Word in community.7 When we come together in Christ’s name with our hearts open to the Spirit’s mysterious capacity to transform us, we, the community, the gathered people of God, become the Body of Christ in the world. Christ’s body isn’t in the bread or in the cup, but in the way we are together, the way we center brokenness and healing together. Calvin wrote, The full communion with Christ goes beyond their description, which is too confined … it is a mystery I am unable to comprehend with my mind, so far am I from wishing any one to measure its sublimity by my feeble capacity. Nay, I rather exhort my readers not to confine their apprehension within those narrow limits, but to attempt to rise much higher than I can guide them … All then that remains is to break forth in admiration of the mystery.8 Eucharist is not just something we do, it’s who we are. What a beautiful possibility! And what a sobering reality that the way Eucharist is traditionally practiced in white churches does not substantially touch this powerful mystery. Like much of Mainline white Christian worship, Eucharist has been intellectualized, moderated, and reduced down to something that many believers can take or leave. Communion Sundays may be best known for taking longer than an hour than for being a brush with Divine Mystery. The trivialization of Eucharist is a mirror for a deeper diminishment of white Mainline churches. White churches traded in a prophetic edge for respectability and prestige. White churches centered institutional maintenance and the status quo and pushed courageous and controversial social justice stances to the margins. It was more important to get along than stand up and be counted. And this tepidness around the liberative edge of Eucharist in white churches mirrors the same dynamic in the larger white culture. Those with the most power in a culture can struggle to see the ways they hoard power and the ways domination can be masked as virtue and propriety. Empire is the institutional expression of dominance and supremacy, and Empire demands a high degree of conformity and replication. Eucharist in white churches has been trivialized by the collusion of white Christianity with white supremacy culture.

In Calvin’s “Short Treatise on the Lord’s Supper” (1541) he outlines all the errors of the Lord’s Supper that he saw in the larger church. Among them were withholding the elements from the community, abstaining from taking the sacrament, the infrequent celebration of the sacrament, and not having the Word proclaimed in an understandable way in community and public prayer taking place before taking the sacrament. 8 Calvin, Institutes, Book IV, ­chapter 7, section 7. 7

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PART THREE: EVIDENCE OF EMPIRE Context matters when it comes to Eucharist. Its universal message does not prevent the causes and conditions that give rise to its contextuality from having the capacity to define its collective impact. Eucharist is and should be formative and in-formative for the gathered body. But it is always both mirror and aspiration. Bringing a power analysis to the Table is necessary for Eucharist to truly be a liberative and transformative practice. Interrogating power is required for true liberation. How have white dominant churches emptied Eucharist of its healing and transforming power? The absence of a power analysis is the most basic answer to this question. And that resistance to a power analysis has trivialized Eucharist and its transformative power. Without a power analysis Eucharist can become an expression and reiteration of whiteness in white churches. Without a power analysis Eucharist can become a way to strengthen and deepen the reach of Empire. When we neglect the power analysis—the mirror and the aspiration, we trivialize the redemptive potency of Eucharist. Look no further than the ways Eucharist has taken on the garb of higher and higher expressions of ecclesia for the cost of such neglect. As Mary McClintock Fulkerson and I describe, “material dynamics, power structures, affective postures, theological understandings, and bodily performance have a potent impact on how the sacrament is experienced.”9 The trappings of Empire and formal vestments in hierarchies that formalize stratifications of power and privilege create a very different experience than breaking bread in a homeless shelter. On one level, Calvin’s church in Geneva and the practice of Eucharist enacted outside the authority of the Roman church embodied an ecclesial revolution of power sharing. On another level, the moral and practical fence constructed by congregational shaming and judgment in Geneva about who was properly disposed to the sacrament embodied a whole new architecture of power hoarding. Context matters. Power analysis matters. The power of Eucharist is trivialized when the practice itself is not encountered as a critique of power hoarding, dominance, and violence. The liberative power of Eucharist rests in the capacity of the practicing community to see the power structures they are entangled in and to see Eucharist as a critique, an interruption, a liberative moment in time over and against the oppression of Empire. The “hush harbors” during American chattel slavery covered enslaved people in a space to teach and proclaim the promise of liberation and their deep connection to Jesus’ experience of state-sanctioned terror and violence.10 These secret gatherings re-membered Jesus as subversive liberator and as convener of a community of care and revolution. Eucharist created in the hidden spaces where truths could be told among those most impacted by oppression and violence brought Jesus to life in the gathered body. Context and power matter for how Eucharist embodies its liberative capacity. Eucharist as mirror and aspiration carries performative efficacy—that is, the actual doing should impact our being. The Eucharist performs and informs community. The Eucharist, like Baptism, is a visible sign of an invisible grace. The sacraments do not mechanistically ensure our status as God’s beloved children, they are sign and seal of that primal reality. In progressive iterations of the Reformed faith today, Eucharist is billed

McClintock Fulkerson Mary and Marcia Mount Shoop, A Body Broken, A Body Betrayed: Race, Memory, and Eucharist in White Dominant Churches (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015). 10 Peter Paris, “The Theologies of Black Folk in North America: Presidential Address to the American Theological Society, March, 2012,” Theology Today 69:4 (January 2013): 385–402. 9

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as “joyful feast” and “the welcome table.” The Table is a place where we live out the oft quoted phrase in mission statements and signs in front of churches that “all are welcome.” At the same time, in the blood memory of Reformed theological and ecclesial DNA are fences, tokens, intellectual oratory, and communal shame that constructed the scaffolding of exclusion and propriety around the Communion Table. John Calvin’s teachings in Geneva and John Knox’s in Scotland tethered partaking of the sacrament to one’s moral standing in the community. Calvin and Knox also weaponized the sacrament to exclude rivals and philosophical nemeses.11 In contemporary progressive iterations of the Presbyterian Church (United States) no formal bar to the Table remains. Even language about the requirement of Baptism has been removed from the Book of Order and common practice is to welcome all who both “trust in Jesus and long to trust in Him … regardless of age or understanding.”12 The opening up of the Table embodies within it a healing opportunity for Eucharist. These openings carry within them an invitation to become “less white” in the way we celebrate The Lord’s Table without shame, blame, or exclusion. However, stripping away the moral and ecclesial bars to the Table should not be mistaken for a complete reckoning of the way the Table performs and entrenches whiteness in who the white church is. The trappings of Empire go deeper than vestments, locations, and dogma; they seep into our habits and expectations, into our dispositions and our capacity to see ourselves.

PART FOUR: DELUSIONS OF WHITENESS Jesus was lynched by an angry mob of people who had confused their allegiance to God with their allegiance to Empire. The crucifixion was a public execution of a religious leader who had pushed against the status quo and called out the abuses of power that defined his historical moment and the human condition. The trauma and blood memory of such tragic human cruelty and distortion seems far, far away from well-dressed professionals embedded in the power structures of American culture stoically distributing tiny squares of bread and thimbles full of grape juice. The characteristics of white supremacy can be easy to miss in a white dominant church. These characteristics are toxic particles in the air we breathe. They are concealed in normalcy, propriety, virtue, good manners, and even piety. To see delusion, we must be able to gaze upon something with a new lens, a new prescription for seeing things clearly. Tema Okun’s and Kenneth Jones’s list of the characteristics of white supremacy culture is a powerful tool for bringing whiteness into focus in white dominant institutions and systems. White supremacy culture is about a much deeper and stealthy reality than overt racist acts. White supremacy culture is about a way of being in the world that renders For example, Calvin barred the Libertines from the Communion Table in Geneva. For more on Calvin’s Consistory see Carl Lindbergh, The European Reformations (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010). 12 Current language in the Book of Order recommended by the 222nd General Assembly and then ratified by a majority of presbyteries. W-2.4011a. Theology of the Lord’s Supper 11

a. The opportunity to eat and drink with Christ is not a right bestowed upon the worthy, but a privilege given to the undeserving who come in faith, repentance, and love. All who come to the table are offered the bread and cup, regardless of their age or understanding. If some of those who come have not yet been baptized, an invitation to baptismal preparation and Baptism should be graciously extended. Worshipers prepare themselves to celebrate the Lord’s Supper by putting their trust in Christ, confessing their sin, and seeking reconciliation with God and one another. Even those who doubt may come to the table in order to be assured of God’s love and grace in Jesus Christ.

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whiteness invisible. White ways are seen as simply the right ways—absent of cultural context or racialized power relationships. Okun and Jones list the characteristics of white supremacy culture as follows: perfectionism, sense of urgency, either/or thinking, defensiveness, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, only one right way, paternalism, power hoarding, fear of open conflict, individualism, I’m the only one, progress is bigger/more, objectivity, and right to comfort.13 Okun and Jones sketch out how these character traits show up in institutions, practices, and in our bodies and habits of mind. Common eucharistic practices in the white church perform whiteness, a dynamic made visible with a power analysis that is wise to white ways of concealing whiteness itself. In the Presbyterian tradition that formed me, common eucharistic practice follows a pattern that performs an orderly, periodic, formalized community ritual.14 Commonly the elements are passed pew by pew by designated Ruling Elders, often somber about their task. People take their cube of bread and their thimble full of grape juice and quietly follow instructions. In some communities people line up in the aisles to walk down to the front. There, servers stand together to distribute the elements, holding a plate of bread and a cup filled with grape juice. Often during Communion music plays, perhaps to help us feel less awkward or less self-conscious about our practice. Some bow their heads in prayer, others keep their eyes forward, and others inspect the elements they’ve been given. We’re told it’s a joyful feast, but things are usually somber and we receive a tiny portion. We’re told people come from everywhere to sit at this Table, but people who most often look a lot like us are there. And we’re told that Jesus said the bread was his body broken, the cup his blood poured out, but in such a sanitized environment the violence of a state-sanctioned execution, a lynching encouraged by an angry mob, seems almost impossible to believe. We inhabit stiff, brittle habituations toward those pushed to the margins by whiteness while telling ourselves that we are welcoming. We feast on sameness while professing God’s call to live in a complicated and multifarious world. We habituate forgetfulness when we say we are remembering the story that defines us. We deny wounds—our own and the ones whiteness has inflicted, while boasting of beloved community. Printed words on a page, stiffened bodies quietly tamping down their ambiguities and moderating their spiritual appetites define this “visible sign of an inward grace” in the white church. The liturgy in the Book of Common Worship does not mention how the real presence of Jesus is present in the celebration of Eucharist. That same liturgy does not include mention in the “Invitation” or in the “Words of Institution” of the betrayal and rupture of relationship that Jesus references in every scriptural tradition about the Last Supper. Depending on how officiants engage the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving, there may be mention of these facets of the story in one of the options offered. However, the versions of the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving in the BCW tend to focus much more theological attention on atonement, sacrifice, and resurrection, than they do on oppression, liberation, and justice.15 That same liturgy does little to reference the theological mystery ttps://www.whites​upre​macy​cult​ure.info/char​acte​rist​ics.html (accessed August 18, 2022) h Similar descriptions as the one that follows of common Communion practices in Presbyterian churches can be found in my book, Let the Bones Dance: Embodiment and the Body of Christ (WJKP, 2010), and in A Body Broken, A Body Betrayed: Race, Memory and Eucharist in White-Dominant Churches. 15 For a more detailed encounter with the traditional Presbyterian eucharistic liturgy, see A Body Broken, A Body Betrayed, chapter two, “Eucharist as Template.” 13 14

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that Calvin took such great pains to point toward. On the contrary, the standard liturgy creates a predictable, formulaic, and trivialized ethos around the Table. While Calvin placed the real presence of Christ in the Holy Spirit’s mysterious movement in the flesh and blood community gathered in Christ’s name, bodies are only thinly engaged in the actual practice itself. Faith communities are left with a well-worn set of liturgical habits with little to show for it. If Eucharist is supposed to be a taste of God’s kingdom, for many the kingdom may seem a lot like a staid reception of hors d’oeuvres at the local country club. And the uncritical, quiet ways that the gathered body partakes of this trivialized practice and the rhetoric that comes along with it is an emblem of one of the stealthiest qualities of whiteness: systemic gaslighting. Whiteness is adept at telling us things are fine when they are not fine, that people are all one big happy family when we are all a part of abusive and oppressive systems and structures. Whiteness knows how to say one thing, but embody another. We come to the Table hosted by a Savior dismembered and tortured by Empire, while dishing out comfort to the powerful. White church often prioritizes “feeling good” at church by not “being political.” With that priority comes a need to silence and enforce conformity from bodies who bring a different story to the Table. Bodies that carry the weight of oppression and trauma receive a conditional welcome. White Christians instruct Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) with practices and normativity to “know how to act in church.” That enforced conformity and prioritizing of propriety are really about knowing how to perform whiteness. Whiteness therefore becomes equated with church. BIPOC in white churches are expected to center white comfort and affirm the status quo. And the liberative, transformative power of Eucharist is emptied into a reiteration of moderation and perfectionism, another layer of either/or thinking and worship of the written word, another layer of paternalism and right to comfort. Emotionless encounter with a story about violence and brokenness habituates the false expectation of objectivity and rationality. Stories are lost to formality. Feeling is truncated by conformity and normalcy. And not letting people see the real struggle becomes a way of life—layers of bondage in a place where we say we are being set free. There is a chilling quality to institutions that say one thing but embody another. It is traumatizing to be in spaces like that when one’s life knows a different truth. The trivializing is not superficial, it runs deep into our spirits and our cells and diminishes who we can be and are together. To all the characteristics listed by Okun and Jones, I would add this “disembodied ethos” and “systemic gaslighting” that define white systems and white churches.16 And with this disembodied ethos and gaslighting comes emotional numbness and a deep and unacknowledged self-loathing. This self-loathing often manifests in the hesitancy and shame white people carry around their own woundedness. People struggle in white dominant systems to tell the truth about their own struggles with things like addiction, job loss, divorce, illness, shame, mental illness, body image, family pain, sexual trauma, and loneliness. These characteristics of white supremacy culture as embodied in common eucharistic practices in white church discourage things like shared vulnerability, embodied engagement, spiritual flexibility, white racial consciousness, and a liberative power In my book, Let the Bones Dance: Embodiment and the Body of Christ (Louisville, KY: WJKP, 2010) I describe this disembodied ethos and use rape, pregnancy, and motherhood as windows into embodied experience trivialized by this ethos. 16

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analysis. And Eucharist becomes a performance of white moderation and denial—a mirror of our woundedness mismatched with a denial of those very wounds. Eucharist’s healing power rests in the truth of our brokenness being joined with the truth that Christ broke open with his wounds. When that connection itself is broken, the transforming promise is diminished and distorted. Bringing a power analysis around whiteness to the Table makes this sacred and salvific connection explicit in our encounter with God’s incarnate grace. Liberation is a tangled-up reality of bodies and power and the violence that ensues when mutuality is lost to domination. Power is incarnate in Eucharist as shared vulnerability and stark truth. Jesus breaks bread in the midst of broken trust and ruptured relationships. And he lays bare the architecture of state-sanctioned violence and the danger of colluding with the abusive impulse to dominate. Our bodies must be broken open for our woundedness to speak truth. And our relationships must share a susceptibility to truth and accountability to be put back together. Right relationship is the aspiration. Broken relationship is the mirror. The power analysis that backlights these realities must name the violence of white supremacy culture in all its forms. Without that mirror and aspiration white Christianity has no access to the healing power the Table offers up.

PART FIVE: HEALING EUCHARIST Breaking open ourselves, our stories, our cultures, our fears, and our feigned innocence in white dominant churches embodies a eucharistic way of life. Gathering around the power of speaking truth about brokenness and betrayal is eucharistic. Echoing the radically contextual online gathering of bread and cup from the homes of Grace Covenant’s congregation during our Covid Communion, our pandemic “bread” and “life-blood” are embodied in ingesting and digesting our deepening collective pursuit of truth. This truth is a reckoning, a healing, and an incarnational iconography of Jesus’ laying bare the sins of the world. Far from the numbing effect of the traditional rote and stoic trays passed in an orderly fashion between rows while people stare forward and wonder what we are supposed to be experiencing together, this eucharistic practice is uncomfortable and comforting, disruptive and constructive, troubling and healing. At Grace Covenant we have used Okun’s and Jones’s list for over four years to help us disrupt and dismantle white supremacy culture within ourselves and in our communities. If we can’t recognize our whiteness, then we certainly can’t be transformed. Disrupting these marks of whiteness in our midst has manifested at every level of the church. From the way we share power and make decisions in meetings to the ways we use our bodies in worship, there are countless ways we are doing this disruptive work. In our pre-Covid-19 worship, we made a habit of practicing disruption. Worshipcentered disruptions have invited us into embodied vulnerability, discomfort, growth, and even joy. Sometimes our prayer of confession is embodied—postures and gestures replace or deepen spoken word. Sometimes our sermons include congregational participation and conversation. Sometimes they include sung refrains and silence. Sometimes our scripture readings are acted out by youth or shared in readers’ theater style. We do things like move furniture around, including Font and Table. We learn new songs and sing songs we know by heart. We do dialogue sermons and come out from behind the pulpit. We interrupt the announcements with a skit that invites laughter and leaves a lasting impression. Lots of people of all ages help lead worship every Sunday. Children and youth also help us administer and serve Communion.

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While we were still worshiping in our building, pre-Covid, we practiced Eucharist in many different ways during our “This Eucharistic Life” initiative. These practices were also disruptions to traditional patterns of worship and Eucharist in Reformed churches. We changed the ways our bodies related to the Table and to each other. Some weeks we came up in small groups and took turns forming a large circle around the Table and serving each other. Other weeks we moved the Table into a different position in the sanctuary. Some Sundays we had children break the bread and pour the cup. Most Sundays children and youth brought in the Communion elements. Some Sundays we had Communion in silence—no words read or spoken, only gestures and postures for the entire liturgy. Some Sundays we formally welcomed new members to our church as part of the invitation to the Table. Some Sundays we sang the liturgy. And in more and more explicit ways we named Jesus’ death as a public execution, a lynching. We named Jesus’ death as state-sanctioned violence that faithful people supported. We named the brokenness and betrayal. With these new ways of being together came more emotion, more vulnerability, more awareness of our deep connection to each other and to Divine Mystery. And our words of invitation invoked our ancestors, the generations of those hungry and thirsty for God’s liberation. We brought our brokenness to the Table, to each other. And our pandemic Eucharist is an extension of this valuing of deep connections with each other, this valuing of speaking the truth, and this valuing of challenging systems that hoard and abuse power. Our pandemic Eucharist is about practicing a way of life that is about our shared vulnerability and our need for each other and for God. Movement, poetry, breath, silence, song, stillness, eye contact, tears, and grief generate visceral data and a new appetite for freedom and healing. Covid-19 has disrupted, dismantled, and revealed. And church will never be the same. It’s hard to imagine all the ways the gathered body is being transformed even now. And for churches that are heeding the guidance of scientists and medical experts, there is not a clear path back to face-to-face worship again for a while as of the writing of this chapter. Grace Covenant is going deeper into community. And the central focus of our collective spiritual practice is disrupting white supremacy within ourselves and in our community. The church is not biding its time until the pandemic is over. The church is celebrating the strength that Divine Mystery is giving us to make meaning and find vitality in the midst of radical change and loss. The mirror of Eucharist reflects back to us that the truth about whiteness is our road to freedom. And it’s not just our road, but it is the road that our culture and our world is traveling together for mutual liberation. The aspiration that we find in living eucharistically is the capacity to be grateful and even joyful when there is so much change and loss. Perhaps the most radical transformation underway is the evaporating need for whiteness to feign innocence or to perform racial obliviousness. To truly give ourselves to Jesus’ invitation to the healing he offers us at Table, we taste joy in the very act of freely admitting how much we need to lay down the burden of being carriers of white supremacy.17 Eucharist is a way of life that is both grateful and free.

My colleague in justice work, Ashley Cooper, has created a wonderful resource expanding the Okun and Young document about white supremacy culture into what other cultures and worldviews offer in terms of how to build relationships and community. I find it to resonate with the healing work we’ve been doing at Grace Covenant. Cooper’s document is a helpful collection of information about how disrupting whiteness makes way for different ways to use and share power: https://ashley​pcoo​per.com/domi​nant​cult​ure/. 17

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And Eucharist is a way of life that intuits the irreducible interdependence of collective freedom. None of us are free if everyone is not free. And so, we yearn to taste and see, drink in and feel the sensations of a world where freedom from dominance and oppression, freedom from violence and white supremacy is a flesh and blood reality for all. James Cone makes a distinction between personal suffering and social suffering. He says, “personal suffering challenges faith, but social suffering, which comes from human hate, challenges it even more. White supremacy tears faith to pieces and turns the heart away from God.”18 For Cone, white Christianity must see the cross and the lynching tree as one and the same. The gospel is nothing if not about Black liberation as the healing of the world. Seeing the history of lynching in America through the lens of the cross is the road to the redemption of white Christianity because only then do white Christians “encounter the real scandal of the cross.”19 And this way of encountering the cross means healing the false piety of white Christianity. And that false piety evaporates and white supremacy dissolves into a life of solidarity and kinship. Siblings in Christ know in their deepest selves that joy comes when freedom sings as our shared thanksgiving for God’s faithful and enduring power to heal the world. Eucharist is both mirror and aspiration of the lengths to which God’s love will go for God’s beloved. Eucharist calls us to trust that love with our whole selves—our histories, our hopes, our fears, our secret shame, our broken connections, and our resilience. Eucharist is healing because it carries this capacity to shape and change us—it stitches our past, present, and future together as we learn to make meaning out of tragedy and loss. Eucharist becomes a trivialized shadow of itself when it is celebrated in a cultural vacuum, when it is willfully blind to the power dynamics embedded in social brokenness. A white-washed Eucharist is the gross neglect of the very story that we profess to remember at Table. In its trivialized enactment Eucharist becomes a tool of Empire. The collective delusion of those most steeped in white supremacy culture must be the central site of disruption in our eucharistic practice in white dominant churches. Without this work, living eucharistically becomes impossible. Eucharist heals when we re-member that the way back home to each other is through the brokenness that tears us apart.

FURTHER READING Battalora, Jacqueline. The Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People and Its Relevance Today. Houston: Strategic Book, 2013. Cone, James. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011. DiAngelo, Robin. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2018. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. The Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2014. Menakem, Resmaa. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017.

Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Kindle Loc. 4464. Ibid., 4547.

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Mount Shoop, Marcia, and Mary McClintock Fulkerson. A Body Broken, a Body Betrayed: Race, Memory, and Eucharist in White Dominant Churches. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015. Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste. New York: Random House, 2020. Wise, Tim. Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity. San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 2010.

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Blessed Are Those Who Hunger and Thirst for Justice: Overlapping and Indecenting Eucharistic Desire, Now and After the Covid-19 Pandemic ÁNGEL F. MÉNDEZ MONTOYA

This essay seeks to discern a sacramental theology of the Eucharist that concentrates on an intersectional gesture of Eucharistic performance. Body and spirit, eros and agape, politics and theology, hunger and bread, humankind and the planet, as well as divine and human agency intersect and overlap Eucharistic sacrament and sacramentality, that are both sign and symbol. The implicit overlapping performativity of the Eucharist is further embedded in concrete hungry bodies, in the material quality of everyday life, in those who hunger and thirst for justice amid colonial/hegemonic violence over and against vulnerable and abject human bodies, as well as human and ecological devastation. In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is imperative that Christian communities take this crisis not only as a challenge but also as an opportunity to move beyond clericalism, obsolete centralized and vertical heteropatriarchal domination in order to reimagine and promote a truly Eucharistic planetary community. Whenever and wherever Eucharistic practices conjoin their communal performativity with God’s desire and invitation to share, breaking bread with those who suffer hunger, embracing and being embraced by those considered “indecent” because of their gender, race, sex, migratory status, disability, or uninhabitable state of precariousness, shall the beatitudes truly incarnate and satiate today’s spectrum of planetary hungers. In order to theologically discern the Eucharist, in view of the 2020 pandemic crisis, this essay offers a hermeneutical and heuristic approach inspired by a diversity of “queer theologies.” Rather than expressing one absolute voice, this theological reflection brings together the voices of many theologians who critically reflect upon God, religion,

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and spirituality, not only from the experience of or reference to LGBTQIA+ people but also from other bodies that are abjected or rejected because of their gender, skin color, ethnicity, migratory status, and disability, among other characteristics. “Queer” is an insult, but has been further resignified in order to express recognition, dignity, and resistance to hatred and violence.1 To resignify is also to subvert—to queer—the material and discursive practices of subordinating the other and removing the agency of the other. Queer theologies also imagine creative ways to envision and make possible a more livable life for all, including the well-being of our planet. I firmly believe that these emancipatory hermeneutical and heuristic tools can help us better discern what is at the heart of a sacramental theology of the Eucharist.2

FEEDING THE HUNGRY: INDECENTING EUCHARISTIC COMMUNITIES AMID COVID-19 The year 2020 started with a massive global shock. Covid-19, a potentially fatal coronavirus, started to spread throughout the planet, sending billions of people into lockdown, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, affecting health, security, economy, employment, and the general physical and emotional well-being of local and global populations. Churches and other places of worship closed, while many religious services were held via the Internet. Rituals and homilies took over audiovisual screens to replicate, often in a cut-and-paste fashion, exactly the same liturgical canons and mechanisms as if the church buildings were again the true center and raison d’être of cocreating ecclesial and religious communities. At the same time, this humanitarian crisis provided a space for new explorations of liturgical, religious, and theological practices beyond the confinement of conventionally understood sacred spaces. Institutionalist and clericalist regulations were also put aside, and people started to allow themselves to be creative, exploring a wide diversity of spiritual expressions. All these experiences provide food for thought regarding, in particular, the quest mostly among the laity for gathering ecclesial communities beyond the controlling confinement of physical gatherings in church buildings.3 People who have usually been rejected by church institutions, particularly the LGBTQIA+ communities, felt welcome and participated in diverse liturgical and Eucharistic celebrations shared through social media and often led by laypeople. Some leaders of these liturgical celebrations shared via the web were openly queer people who availed themselves of the opportunity to “come out of the closet” and virtually perform and preside in prayer with Eucharistic words, gestures, and symbols. These new ways of communicating via digital technology are certainly still to be discerned in order to learn how and whether or not to use them for creating effective sacred and sacramental meaning out of living religion and spirituality For further explaining the aspect of resignification both in queer theory and queer theology, see particularly Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000); Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993); and Stefanie Knauss and Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez, “Queer Theologies: Becoming the Queer Body of Christ,” Concilium (London: SCM Press, 2019), 5. 2 In order to avoid distracting the reader with many footnotes, references are being limited to only those found indispensable. At the end of this chapter, a list of bibliographical sources that have been an inspiration for this personal reflection are shared. 3 James Alison has a website that is an excellent theological example of living and sharing the Eucharist through digital media. See: http://pra​ying​euch​aris​tica​lly.com. Accessed June 28, 2020. 1

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in times of social confinement, and even beyond that into a post-coronavirus era. After the pandemic, will all the churches around the world hold Eucharistic celebrations with a radical “inclusive table,” welcoming those who have normally been unwelcome to the communal banquet? At the time of writing, we do not yet know exactly when the world will overcome the pandemic crisis, or if we shall ever surpass it at all. However, hopefully, the world will not return to “normalcy” again. In fact, “normalcy” is the problem. It has become normal to live in a world dominated by global capitalism that increases the abysmal gap between a few rich families and a large majority of people living in poverty. A large sector of the world became accustomed to living in a “normal world,” where some have a home and food on their table, while millions are homeless and suffer hunger. During the pandemic, social distancing, and confinement at home, millions of low-income workers were unable to remain at home but were obliged to work outside their homes, placing their and their families’ health at risk, or even losing their lives; otherwise they could lose their job and no longer receive income. Normalcy has become business as usual, with destructive mechanisms as well as systems of labor and ecological exploitation. Our daily bread is a world in which people are fed but can no longer put up with the systemic violence of racist, sexist, and marginalizing hegemonies of heteropatriarchal individuals, societies, and fundamentalist religious groups. The public execution of George Floyd in Minneapolis is expressive of the brutality of the racialization of bodies that do not matter, particularly Black bodies in the United States, but also in most other countries. “I can’t breathe!” was his final cry, just before dying of asphyxia, his neck brutally crushed by a white policeman. The fact that this happened during social distancing and the rise of social media, right on our screen, made the asphyxiating “normalcy” more evident. Floyd’s death evidenced the tip of the iceberg: the long history of normalizing the criminalization and racialization of Black, brown, and ethnic bodies; as well as the violence against the bodies of women, sexual minorities, and undocumented migrants. There were periods during which some towns and cities declared a “state of emergency.” This was used as an opportunity to further militarize the police, normalizing the use of brutal force against unarmed citizens. All this violence and hatred only deepens the sinister normalcy of colonial hegemony: systemic material, discursive and symbolic practices of exploitation, violence, and subordination of local bodies, territories, and epistemic worldviews, which is deeply devastating the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Despite the fact that the coronavirus does not discriminate against social class, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, or religious affiliation, the massive devastating experiences, effects upon, and consequences to a large and most vulnerable population during this time of social confinement and physical distancing is becoming more evident. The elderly, women, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities are increasingly becoming infected throughout the world, particularly in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. We are all vulnerable in this pandemic, yet those who live more precariously have less agency and opportunity to access medical and emotional care. In Mexico, for example, domestic violence against women and femicides (gender-driven homicides against women), as well as hatred and violence against sexually diverse people, migrants, and children are becoming part of our everyday life. The cruel reality behind these times of quarantine unmasks a devastating sense of normalcy and normativity, which are far from being “Eucharistic.” As we shall further see in this essay, being and becoming Eucharistic implies material, discursive, and symbolic practices of mutual affirmation, nurturance, and care.

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More than ever, this critical situation also presents great challenges still to be faced by communities of faith at a local and global level. It may seem too late to make changes during a crisis that appears irreversible, yet it is all the time we have at hand to twist and turn (to “queer”) our present and future collective planetary home so as to make it more livable for everyone everywhere. The current human and ecological crisis could become an opportunity to reimagine our living, performing, and embodying the discursive and material practices carried out by Eucharistic communities. In order to achieve authentic Eucharistic communal life, in addition to healthcare, psychological, emotional, and spiritual support are also needed. A spirit of courage and resistance is also necessary in order to embody other ways of becoming a community and belonging to a collective planetary home, in which communal relationships are founded upon a profound desire for love, justice, and peace. Eucharistic living stirs an appetite, enlivens a hunger for mutual recognition, care, and nourishment. These ways of performing community lead the way to rethink and reimagine the Eucharist as a performance exceeding the “normal.” What could be more counternormal than a performance of an extravagant, excessively queer sacramental ritual of becoming Christ’s body, a corpus Christi that includes abject bodies? During the times of social distancing and quarantine, it hurt to witness in Mexico City that many LGBTQIA+ people, particularly transgender women, were evicted from their homes, thus increasing homelessness. Such was the concrete situation that a collective of transgender homeless people found themselves in, even before the Covid-19 quarantine. Back in 2018, after a transgender sexual worker and social activist was murdered, a group of transgender women in Mexico City decided to create a home under a collective called “La Casa de las Muñecas Tiresias” (Tiresias’s House of Dolls). By 2020, when the quarantine hit Mexico City hard, the number of homeless and malnourished populations increased, in particular among transgender people. However, this collective decided to come out of their confinement and give free food to the hungry. “I can’t stay home with a full pantry, knowing that my community hungers”; “I can’t sit back doing nothing, expecting the government to feed them.”4 These are statements by some social activist leaders of La Casa de las Muñecas Tiresias, articulating what drives them to move out of their sheltered home to feed the hungry. They are moved by desire, a hunger to feed the hungry. Every day, most transgender women in Mexico City suffer violence and abuse, discrimination and rejection. Yet, by feeding the hungry, La Casa de las Muñecas becomes a sign of radical hospitality and care. Their generous gesture illustrates a way of resisting, subverting, queering the normalcy of injustice and indifference toward the other. This queer gesture, as expressed in the Gospel of Saint Matthew, is a sign of authentically experiencing the beatitudes: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”5 Blessed are those transgender women who hunger for justice, blessed be the hungering that moves them to feed the hungry. This radical hunger for justice and righteousness is at the heart of Eucharistic performance: for becoming one body in Christ ultimately means to nurture communities under the principles of divine love, peace, and justice. More than the coronavirus, the real pandemic in the world is hunger,

https://www.info​bae.com/amer​ica/mex​ico/2020/04/28/ind​igen​tes-de-la-cdmx-lib​ran-el-ham​bre-grac​ias-a-la-ini​ ciat​iva-de-este-colect​ivo-trans/?fbc​lid=IwAR0G2DyGj6UKY8gQjHoh85MdfSqgretK​ZDZj​d0sx​WNOc​QlRZ​ IlLo​SiHf​Bcs. Accessed May 25, 2020. 5 Mt. 5:6. 4

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hatred, violence, and inequality. Blessed are those who resist such malnourishment, for they shall be nurtured aplenty. The beatitudes express a “kenotic delight,” a paradox of desire that does not ultimately lack, but rather savors God’s superabundant gift of what is right, good, and fair for all. To hunger for justice is not a dystopian desire, wishful thinking for an impossible or devastating gift that only increases the giver’s perpetual debt. Nor do the beatitudes express a utopian desire, melancholically yearning for the blessings of a gift yet to come, still to be received. Rather, the beatitudes presage the “enfleshing” here and now of a Eucharistic desire, that is, a desire rejoicing in God’s desire to satisfy our hunger with divine love, justice, and peace. The heart of those who hunger for justice is full of gratitude and blessings, even if the justice they desire is eclipsed by injustice. For desiring another possible world is already an encounter with God’s own desire to bring about justice in the world. Hunger and nourishment are both central to Eucharistic performance. They are the most radical expression of the gift of desire as plenitude, as embedded in the paradoxes of the beatitudes. Like the transgender women who are moved by the injustice of hungry homeless people in Mexico City, feeding the hungry at the same time as they hunger and thirst for a world without hunger, so is the queer performing of Eucharistic desire. Perhaps now more than ever, the pandemic could be a great opportunity to reimagine and queer the Eucharist in order to collectively perform the beatitudes as an inclusive table where everybody is welcome, inviting in particular those who are not “normally” invited—even allowing the equal sharing of the Eucharist with people of all genders and sexual orientations, whether lay or clerical. In doing so, the Eucharistic desire for the blessedness of receiving and sharing the divine gifts of love and justice for all is satisfied.

EUCHARISTIC DESIRE: QUEER SACRAMENTAL HUNGER What do you hunger for? This is the ultimate existential question, but it is as well the most fundamental theological quest, most importantly when we reflect upon a theology of the Eucharist. Hunger is a transhuman experience, for without food, all living beings perish. Hunger transitions and trespasses sexual-generic, national, cultural, ethnic, and religious borders, among others. However, not all hungers are the same. There are those who can satisfy their hunger by eating more than plenty and even wasting tons of food, while there are more than 820 million people who do not have enough to eat. Since 2016, world hunger has been escalating, without any signs of decreasing in the years to come.6 Although hunger is transpersonal and trans-corporeal, it reveals that some bodies matter more than others. Around the world, women are more food insecure than men; diasporic bodies located at the periphery of many cities and towns around the world are perpetually malnourished; more than the rest of societies, the bodies of children, migrants, and indigenous peoples are those who most hunger. At this existential level, and reflecting upon the Eucharist, the world’s hunger really matters, since hunger and food are central elements in performing the Eucharist. It is worth asking, if the Eucharist communally and gratefully celebrates God’s generous gift expressed in the materiality of food, our daily bread, why is there so much hunger in the world? Why do some hungry bodies matter more than others?

See the 2019 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO): http://www.fao.org/ news/story/en/item/1200​484/icode/. Accessed June 16, 2020. 6

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However, not only does bread satisfy our hunger, but we also hunger and thirst for love, justice, peace, and a more habitable world for everyone everywhere. We hunger for a world where the whole planet and people can breathe unrestrained, without asphyxiating. Hunger therefore also expresses our most profound desires. At the heart of religious, spiritual, and theological experience, there is hunger-as-desire for God, for divine and cosmic communion. Thus, at an existential level, we hunger for bread, which represents the material and symbolic sign of food and sustenance. But there is also a hunger not just for bread. There is a spiritual and theological hunger that materializes as desire for communion with God and creation. To desire justice and love could also become a symbol and expression of sacred and sacramental experience. That is why the prophets throughout history and cultures manifest that faith also expresses resistance to hatred, violence, and injustice. To hunger for justice voices a desire that subverts the hegemonic powers that exploit and kill people and nature, while kindling a desire for radical transformation and emancipation for all, including the planet. The Eucharist resonates with all these experiences and narratives from the past and present, signaling a communal desire to feed our hungry planet, to break bread and share it with the other, and care for one another, gesturing a beatific queer sacramental hunger that conjoins divine and human desires. Blessed are those who desire as God desires. God desires us first. The Eucharist is a communal expression of gratitude for the gift of God’s desire to commune with us, to become one body and transform us into participants of divine love. Eucharistic performance expresses gratitude for this divine nurturing love that co-implicates both eros and agape, desire and plenitude, hunger and satiety. Eros and agape constitute a rather queer ontology regarding a relational God, a kind of ménage à trois of intra-Trinitarian divine loving, giving, and sharing. Eros and agape are co-implicated by virtue of God’s perichoresis, the inter-penetration and co-abiding within a Triune God. God desires us first, because first and eternally God pulses with a queer Trinitarian performance of divine desire-as-love. The Trinity already sheds light on Eucharistic desire, for God is koinonia, a community of excessive love shared among the Trinity: a divine appetite where God the Father–Mother desires and rejoices in the Son–Daughter, and this love is reciprocated and celebrated by the desire of the Holy Spirit for the other two, the other two being united in love and desire by the Holy Spirit. This is a Trinitarian Eucharistic desire of infinite gratitude for receiving God’s superabundant love, which eternally returns to the other, nourishing God’s hunger in plenitudinous mutuality between divine eros and agape. God’s desire is ultimately satisfied with God’s generous love by the infinite divine nurturing love, truth, beauty, and goodness that nourish and celebrate God-communion. Herein divine desire is not lacking, but rather is radical excessive and perpetual love. This is why the Eucharist is ultimately both and simultaneously an erotic and agapeic performance that stimulates the Eucharistic desire emerging from the heart, soul, and mind, as well as in all the bodily senses, particularly touch and taste. As a prelude to and participation with the Eucharistic desire, the Eucharist is not a mere spiritual experience, but it is also a material, bodily, and sensual experience, as well as personal and transpersonal performance. In the Eucharistic performance, we touch, taste, and foretaste a perpetually emerging Trinitarian love. Eucharistic desire is an expression of gratitude for such proleptic and protological divine love that is not encapsulated inwardly within a Triune God alone. Instead, God “comes out of the closet,” kenotically sharing queer Trinitarian love for all creation, poetically making the whole creation a sacramental sign and symbol of God’s eternal gift. The whole creation is a sacrament of God-koinonia, the creative community of God.

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Something is cooking in the creation and God, the cook par excellence, is an extravagant chef that delights in creation. Desire, from the horizon of a queer theology of the Eucharist, is a communal expression of thanksgiving by virtue of divine plenitude, not out of primordial lacking, since such proleptic and protological kenotic sharing of God in the act of creation does not eradicate God’s extravagant and superabundant—indeed, queer—perichoretic love. But Eucharistic desire is not only protological, for it also points to an eschatological desiring of a final fulfillment and consummation, still to become at the end of time, yet enfleshed and foretasted in the daily narratives of those who hunger and thirst for justice and love, embedded in the bodies of those who resist violence and hatred. By virtue of this protological and eschatological divine desire, the whole of creation is envisioned as a perpetual Eucharistic performance of God’s kenotic delight, a paradoxically superabundant sharing of divine nurturing love. Moreover, Eucharistic performance is an expression of thanksgiving to and for God who feeds the hungry with bread, and invites whomever goes hungry, particularly those who suffer violence and lack agency. So radical is God’s desire to feed the hungry and to make us participants of divine communion that God queers materiality and becomes incarnate as food and drink, the very bread of eternal life. In Jesus, God becomes flesh and food to satiate our hunger, creating a loving, intimate communion with us. God’s love is so queer and subversive that it resists the abysmal ontological gap between ultimate transcendence and radical immanence, to the extent of becoming flesh, body, and matter; a queer relational ontology of birth and death. In the Last Supper, we witness and partake of the narrative of an extravagant gesture of Jesus giving himself as food, resisting the violence of world necropolitics and expressing solidarity with all crucified bodies, those who live uninhabitable lives. Instead of being inscribed in violence and death, Eucharistic desire is embedded in the extravagant divine gift of peace and eternal life. The Gospel narratives regarding the resurrection of Jesus are full of stories heralding peace and making communion by eating and breaking bread in community, embracing with love and care the fellow diners gathered around a common inclusive table, inviting everyone everywhere to continue this same desire in today’s world and into the future. The Eucharist simultaneously performs the crucifixion and resurrection of God who shares divine love as bread of eternal life for all, resisting the sinister necrophilia of violence, exclusion, exploitation, and death. Eucharistic desire expresses Jesus’ own desire to radically incorporate all humanity and creation around an inclusive table for everyone everywhere, particularly the outcasts: “sinners” and prostitutes, the ill and the disabled, the undesired and the untouchable, those who are queer, abject, and who live in a diaspora. Through words, gestures, and actions Jesus becomes bread for all, promoting a more livable life, especially for the “last ones,” the indecent ones who are invited as diners to share a banquet of love. Jesus was killed because of his practices of transgressive table fellowship, feeding miracles, and performing alimentary parables and actions. However, crucifixion persists throughout history, whenever the indecent and wretched of the world are exploited, rejected, and killed. Jesus’ desire envisions justice and peace for all, kindling our own desire, hunger and thirst for justice. The Eucharist foretells a desire fueled by the beatitudes, blessedness, and delight, forecasting divine justice, peace, and eternal love. The Holy Spirit is ever-present in the perichoretic communion of this queer Eucharistic performance. The Holy Spirit is the queerest of the Triune God, for it is an expression of God’s loving koinonia, the very exchange of divine love as desire and of desire-as-love. The third person of the Trinity is a radical gift of love shared by a communal God who

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in the Eucharist becomes the very donum of God’s love given and shared as bread. The Holy Spirit breathes divine love into alimentary elements and the diners who share the Eucharistic bread of eternal life, as partakers of one body with and in God-koinonia. In the spirit of courage and resistance, of radical and inclusive love, the gift of the Holy Spirit kindles the Eucharistic desire for communing with God and the whole of creation, desiring a better life for all and for our Mother Earth, desiring to breathe together with freedom and mutual care. God is a communion of Father–Mother, Son–Daughter, and Holy Spirit that desire to share divine love with humanity, desiring us first, and activating the impulse that opens the appetite for better interpersonal relationships and our relationship with the Earth and God. In the Eucharist, desire is not abstract but rather is enfleshed, embodied in a communal, corporeal, and material sharing of God’s nurturing love. The community of God becomes an extravagant presence as gift and nourishment that summons us to the same table in order to celebrate diversity and live communally in justice, enacting radical hospitality. For this reason, Eucharistic performance implies a queer Eucharistic desire. The Eucharist is not only embedded in divine desire but fuses God and human desires. Nor is it a homogeneous and self-replicating identical desire, but the envisioning of self and other as a dynamic co-identity amid diversity, a nonidentical repetition of divine desire as a nurturing gift. Neither is it a performance of desire as fundamental lack, but rather as beatific nourishment and mutual care. By virtue of sharing divine desire, the Eucharist performs an identity in excess, fluid, and eschatologically becoming, yet paradoxically situated in the vicissitudes of “here and now.” The Eucharistic gesture invites all to partake of “this” body, yet it is a body in excess of itself by virtue of the superabundance of divine desire. The body is not erased but transfigured, transitioning both in and beyond self-identity. That is why at this inclusive table embraced by a communal God, there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free person, man or woman, straight or gay, poor or rich, and so forth.7 Becoming the Body of Christ at communal Eucharistic sharing does not mean leaving behind our differences and diversity, but inscribing them instead into a polyphonic and kaleidoscopic mosaic of divine and human desire, constituting one body that nonidentically repeats an extravagant and queer communal banquet of love. The Body of Christ is trans-corporeal, perpetually displaced, transiting from one form of embodiment to another: from God’s immanence to the economy of incarnation; from birth to crucifixion; from death to resurrected life; from Jesus’ own body into the Body of Christ embedding diverse and plural ecclesial communities. The Body of Christ is queer, constantly resignifying within and beyond itself. Bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ without leaving behind their material nature. The Body of Christ is food, yet it also includes the bodies of diverse communities. The Eucharist is God’s gift as personal nourishment to individual bodies, yet with the purpose of reaching beyond personal ingestion in order to become Eucharistic people for others. It is shared by particular communities, yet subversively it trespasses frontiers, reaching toward every corner of the Earth, even those who have been invisibilized, those on the margins and diasporas of society. Performing the Body of Christ is becoming Eucharistic people, a Eucharistic planet, trans-corporeally co-belonging to and co-indwelling the self with the other/Other, as performed at the heart of the Trinitarian gift exchange. This extravagant

A free paraphrasing of Gal. 3:28.

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performance of becoming Eucharistic people, that is, becoming trans-corpus Christi, provokes a queer sacramental hunger, intensifying a profound appetite, a heart-felt desire for justice, love, and peace.

TRANSFIGURATIONS: EUCHARISTIC TRANSFORMATION IN POST-PANDEMIC TIMES The trans-corporeal Eucharistic performance and desire not only take place in Eucharistic celebrations inside a church building, with bread and wine only. For, by virtue of divine kenosis and sharing, it is enfleshed amid fraternal, sororal, and queer communal celebrations of participating in God’s caring transformations and transfigurations; it incarnates in the bodies of those who resist injustice, hatred, and violence; and it is embodied by the resilience emerging from hungry bodies in the diaspora that hunger not only for food but for divine presence whenever and wherever God seems to be absent. During the 2020 pandemic crisis when this chapter was written, and in the midst of closing places of worship and church buildings, we face great challenges for reimagining the meaning of becoming Eucharistic communities amid so much material, emotional, social, and spiritual hunger. The celebrations of diverse Eucharistic rituals shared through social media may hopefully whet an appetite to collectively nurture one another and thus move forward to become part of local and global transfigurations. The symbol of the bread that is not exclusively “mine,” but is “our” daily bread, prefigures a transfiguration of a trans-corporeal body that is represented by many and diverse pieces in order to be shared by all, particularly those who most hunger. The Eucharist performs a transfigured body, gathering all the broken pieces intersecting and overlapping with one another, yet constituting a collective and communal corporeality. All the members of the Body of Christ are part of one body made of a diverse multiplicity of members, all equally important and dignified. That is why we must not ignore the constitutive parts, however insignificant or irrelevant they may appear, without creating division but caring for each one of its members, in particular those who are wounded and suffer (1 Cor. 12:12-27). The pandemic crisis has unveiled a lasting colonial mechanism of systemic violence, racism, sexism, and ecological devastation—the absence of God in a crucified planet. Therefore, the Body of Christ is fragmented, broken into pieces. It is a wounded body. In order to become Eucharistic people, we need to cooperate with God’s desire to nurture, transfigure, and heal our wounded social and planetary corpus. Therefore, within ecclesial communities, we need to seriously discern those discursive and material practices that replicate a colonization of the body of women, children, the poor, African American people, ethnic and sexual minorities, which during pandemic times have become the most wounded members of our social corpus. Animals, plants, air, water, and soil are also part of our own planetary body, our daily bread, which is similarly being devastated by the power of coloniality: a mechanism of exploitation of the wealth and goodness of people and the Earth. In our being moved by, and through our communal engagement with God’s desire, we truly incarnate a Eucharistic performance as one human–divine body that heals the wounds of all the broken pieces of our corporeal planet. Since the late 1500s, Christianity and the theology of the Eucharist, on the one hand, became colonized by a logic of heteropatriarchal white supremacy that legitimizes every act of invasion and subordination of “other” bodies beyond colonial control, spreading

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hunger, fear, and death around the globe. Since then, a system of enslavement, exploitation, racialization, genderization, sexualization, subordination, violence, and hatred counters ecclesial and Eucharistic performance. Colonial logic consists of implementing military power to devastate bodies and territories with the purpose of benefiting only a minute apathetic elite. Under colonial logic, the “other” represents those queer diasporic bodies of women, children, African American, Latinx, Asian, indigenous, and LGBTQIA+ bodies. Whenever Christianity performs a logic of invasion, exploitation, hatred, and violence against these queer bodies, Eucharistic performance is interrupted, antagonized, thus becoming anti-Eucharistic. And yet, on the other hand, a powerful Eucharistic impulse resisting these same hegemonic colonial practices historically emerges in the narratives of so many prophetic and life-giving testimonies of those who stand and speak on behalf of the marginal, those who promote liberating practices from diasporic Eucharistic performances. Furthermore, the privatization and clericalization of the Eucharist could also interrupt Eucharistic performance, because ingesting the Body of Christ at Eucharistic rituals inside the privacy of church buildings often does not nurture our public everyday life with care. Whenever our churches mirror an antagonistic dichotomy between private and public space, between clerics and laypeople, between men and women, between heteronormative and queer bodies, and so legitimizes and normalizes injustice, different forms of racism, inequality, and violence, then, Eucharistic performance is interrupted or sabotaged. ¡Sin maricones no hay revoluciones! [“Without queering there is not revolutioneering!”]. This is the outcry of thousands of LGBTQIA+ people coming into the streets during Pride Day parades in Mexico. It also echoes the earlier mass meetings of protesters chanting “We are here and we are queer, get used to it!” Queer people move beyond the confinement of private spaces and subvert public space in order to resignify and transfigure its dichotomous antagonizing nature. The line that divides private and public space is trespassed by a collective and communal queer body of resistance, a body of drags, gays, lesbians, prostitutes, transgender and homeless people. Queer theories and queer theologies resonate with this subversive impulse that resists discrimination and dehumanization, and so revolutionizes, resignifies, queers, and transfigures the brutal coloniality of heteropatriarchal hegemony. Likewise, we need to queer our Eucharistic performances in order to gain resilience and resist every form of colonial power that outcasts people and creates the vast diasporas of millions of excluded bodies. During pandemic times and after the brutal killing of George Floyd and many other African Americans in 2020, women, transgender people, and Latinxs throughout the United States and Latin America, millions of peoples from diverse nations, genders, colors, races, and religions protested in the streets, queering and revolutioneering systemic racism, violence, and oppression. Despite risking contagion, people came out of their homes to demonstrate against their asphyxia and express outrage for the torture and killing of queer bodies. “Black lives matter” was the cry that broke the silence of the streets, equally affirming that the lives of Latinxs, Asians, women, indigenous, transgender, and disabled people … also matter. All these voices of resistance around the world could be a poetic analogy of a queer polyphonic Eucharistic performance that subversively expresses a beatific hungering for justice, love, and peace. A queer decolonial Eucharistic performance is necessary in order to incarnate another form of power that does not subordinate, nor inflict suffering on innocent

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victims. A queer decolonial Eucharistic performance does not eradicate power but transfigures it from within and without, ad intra and ad extra, manifesting power as service to one another, caring for those who are most vulnerable, and respecting and celebrating our great diversity and multiplicity. At the Eucharist, power is decolonized from the colonial empires of global capitalism, heteropatriarchal abuse, and systemic mechanisms of subordinating the “other,” and so integrates epistemic sacred traditions from original peoples and indigenous communities, as well as providing ways to create forms of empowerment to and from people on the margins and in the diasporas of society. Just as Jesus was a marginal Galilean Jew who subverted the diasporas and revealed solidarity with an emancipatory gesture to and from diasporic bodies, so is the Eucharistic performance that embodies a messianic, queer, decolonial, and subversive performing of the reign of God here and now, and into the future. It is an emancipatory power coming from below rather than from “above.” The reign of God expresses Jesus’ eschatological and messianic presence that invites and challenges us to provide a livable and caring life for everyone, performing here and now the blessedness of God who becomes food for all and welcomes those who hunger most to join Him at His table. Regrettably, many church institutions reject and do not welcome LGBTQIA+ people at the Eucharist table. Many women and queer people are not allowed to preside over some Christian communities around the world. And so many other bodies are not allowed to partake of the Eucharistic communal ingestion. However, the pandemic crisis has offered an opportunity to queer the Eucharist and resignify what is at the heart of Eucharistic performance. Although the partaking of the Eucharistic bread and wine was suspended in places, Eucharistic desire performs beyond the walls of buildings, penetrating and co-abiding with those hungering for justice, those who desire loving and peaceful communities, those who long for a healthier and more balanced planet, resisting the violence and exploitation of our human and ecological bodies. Many people around the world, especially those who have been rejected by the church, or who did not find a place of welcome within religious institutions, have used social distancing as an opportunity to find new ways of experiencing and strengthening a spiritual connection to a complex web of voices expressive of beatific desire for a better world. These beautiful poetic and subversive words by Pedro Casaldáliga regarding the Eucharist may kindle our Eucharistic desire to collectively transfigure and heal our wounded planet. My hands, these hands, and Your hands Make this Gesture, Sharing table and fate like siblings Your life and Your death are full of life. Myriad grains are joined together in this bread, We shall learn step by step To be a unified City of God, A City of humans. Through ingesting You, we will know how to be food for others. The wine in Your veins entices us. The bread that people lack invites us To become, together with You, their daily bread. Called forth by the glowing light of Your remembrance,

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We move forward towards Your Kingdom, creating history, Through the fraternal and subversive Eucharist. [Pedro Casaldáliga]8

FURTHER READING Alison, James. Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholics and Gay. New York: Crossroad, 2001. Althaus-Reid, Marcella. Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics. London: Routledge, 2000. Barreto, Raimundo, and Roberto Sirvent, eds. Decolonial Christianities: Latinx and Latin American Perspectives. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London: Routledge, 1993. Knauss, Stefanie, and Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez. “Queer Theologies: Becoming the Queer Body of Christ.” In Concilium. London: SCM Press, 2019. Méndez Montoya, Ángel F. “Eucharistic Imagination: A Queer Body-Politics.” Modern Theology 30:2 (April 2014): 326–39.

Taken from https://teoun​der.com/2020/06/14/ham​bre-pande​mia-y-euc​aris​tia-cor​pus-chri​sti/?fbc​lid=IwAR2​ 5Nr3​NBzc​hfQD​3wyX​0w7-0P8MapBBW​40t1​tA64​kXEX​9509​Grua​dM9x​3Ws and translated by the author. Accessed June 22, 2020. 8

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Sacramentality of Marriage in the Western Church: An Overview KIMBERLY BRACKEN LONG

In the West, marriage is considered a sacrament in the Roman Catholic church, a sacramental rite in the Episcopal church (though not one of the dominical sacraments), and a pastoral rite in other Protestant communions. The first part of this essay is a brief historical survey of the church’s understanding of marriage, explaining how it came to be regarded as a sacrament in the West, outlining pivotal sixteenth-century developments, and describing the evolution of marriage liturgies. The second part will discuss the liturgical changes that occurred in the late twentieth century, following the Second Vatican Council, highlighting three Protestant marriage rites published in the second decade of the twenty-first century and commenting on their theological significance.

PART ONE: A BRIEF HISTORICAL SURVEY OF MARRIAGE The church had very little to do with marriage for the first millennium of its existence. Marriage was understood to be a domestic affair; families arranged marriages between their children in order to strengthen their financial positions, cultivate adjacent properties, or forge political alliances. Marital unions were contracted in homes, not churches, and they were considered legal entities, not ecclesial ones. Neither does the New Testament say much about marriage. Paul was the first to mention marriage, in his first letter to the Corinthians, where he advises believers to remain unmarried and celibate if they can, since Christ’s return would be imminent. If passions ran too strong, however, then he conceded that it would be better to marry than to burn (1 Cor. 7:1-9). The author of Ephesians instructs husbands and wives to treat each other with mutual respect and uses the example of a marriage between husbands and wives to explain the union of Christ with the church (Eph. 5:21-33). Jesus says virtually nothing about marriage, mentioning it only when teaching that wives cannot be cast aside in divorce (Mt. 19:1-9). Some point to the story of the wedding at Cana (Jn 2:1-11) as proof that Jesus blessed the institution of marriage, but that account actually focuses on the miracle of turning water into wine as the first sign of Jesus’ miraculous power.

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Tertullian, a North African theologian who flourished at the end of the second and beginning of the third centuries, is one of the best known early Christian writers on marriage. In To His Wife, he describes “the marriage of two Christians” as one marked by unity in every respect: “They pray together, they worship together, they fast together; instructing one another, encouraging one another, strengthening one another. … They have no secrets from one another; they never shun each other’s company; they never bring sorrow to each other’s hearts.”1 The treatise is written not just to his wife but to all women who are Christian.2 Even though it sounds at first like he is describing a love relationship marked by mutual respect and shared purpose, he goes on to declare that if a husband dies, a woman should refrain from remarrying, eschewing “any disgraceful pleasures” on earth just as they will do when in heaven.3 As the next few centuries passed, and Christians accepted that Christ’s return may not be as imminent as once thought, Christian writers expanded their views of marriage. Augustine is arguably the most influential early Christian thinker on the topic; his treatise On the Good of Marriage, written in 401 ce, laid the foundation for centuries of thought regarding marriage. He outlined three “goods” of marriage, which he considered to be God-given: the procreation of children (proles), mutual fidelity (fides), and indissolubility or sacramentality (sacramentum). For Augustine, children are the primary good of marriage, the one positive outcome of a couple’s sexual relationship. Fidelity protects married people from fornication, as their lusts are satisfied within the sanctioned relationship of marriage. Augustine believed that the bond of marriage was so strong that it unified husband and wife even if no children were born. Because of this, he attributed to marriage “a kind of sacramental significance [sacramentum] … something greater than could arise from our feeble mortality.” A Christian couple who separates, or even divorces, remains married, he argues; neither partner may remarry without committing adultery.4 Augustine defines a sacrament as a visible sign of an invisible grace. He uses the term “sacrament” to describe marriage but not to define it; rather, Augustine compares marriage to baptism to point out similar qualities. Still, he stopped short of defining marriage as a sacrament, saying instead that it is “a kind of sacrament” or “what might be called a sacrament.”5 As Philip Reynolds points out, Augustine’s use of the word “sacrament” “was neither clear nor fixed,”6 and the word does not carry the same connotation that it would several centuries later, when scholastic theologians would define the term more precisely. He did not see marriage as a sacrament in the same way that he viewed baptism or eucharist, though he did compare the indissolubility of marriage to the fact that one cannot be unbaptized. As Philip Reynolds explains, the notion of indissolubility “brought marriage into the Church; it distinguished marriage in the Church from marriage among pagans and among the Jews; it distinguished the Christian law of marriage from Roman

Tertullian, “To His Wife,” in Treatises on Marriage and Remarriage, trans. William P. LeSaint, Ancient Christian Writers 13 (New York: Paulist Press, 1951), 35–6. 2 Geoffrey D. Dunn, Tertullian, Early Christian Fathers (London: Routledge, 2004), 3. 3 David G. Hunter, Marriage in the Early Church (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2001), 33–4. Sources of Early Christian Thought, William G. Rush, series editor. Originally published by Augsburg Fortress, 1992. 4 Hunter, Marriage in the Early Church, 109. Translated from Augustine, De bono coniugali. 5 Augustine, Goods of Marriage, 7, 17; cf. John Witte, Jr. From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition, 2nd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012), 73–4. 6 Philip L. Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage during the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), 309; cf. Witte, From Sacrament to Contract, 73. 1

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law; and it set marriage above merely human standards.”7 In this way, Augustine’s thought sets the stage for what would become the church’s theology of marriage in the West. While some early Christian writers worked out their theologies of marriage, people continued to marry just like anyone else. Marriages were arranged by families. Those in lower economic classes were often considered married when they began to live together. In other cases, there may have been some kind of domestic rite, such as the handing over of the bride or a bawdy celebration of the marriage’s consummation. There seem to be times when a priest might be asked to bless a newly married couple at home, but that was not a common practice. The earliest known marriage liturgy dates from the sixth century and is a eucharistic celebration that took place after a couple was married at home.8 After the eucharist, a blessing was spoken over the bride, with the hope that the couple would be fertile. Otherwise, there are no other elements of what would later be recognized as a marriage rite. This basic pattern, with local variations, continues over the next few centuries. What prayers and rituals we know about continue to reflect Augustine’s understanding of marriage as a proper outlet for sex, with procreation as its primary purpose. Church weddings became more common in eleventh- and twelfth-century England and France. Only at this point is there evidence of the sort of practices now commonly associated with weddings, such as the couple speaking vows, giving rings, and sharing a kiss. The audible expression of consent, spoken at the door of the church, becomes significant. As the twelfth-century scholastic theologian Peter Lombard described, “it is the bond which is established by the words of consent—when they say ‘I take you for my husband … I take you for my wife’—which makes the marriage.”9 It was not until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that theologians took up the question of how and when marriage became a sacrament. Some argued that consummation of the marriage was necessary, while others pointed to the priest’s nuptial blessing as the thing that made marriage a sacrament. Since not all marriages were made with a priest present, however, that would mean that not all marriages could be considered sacramental. By the late thirteenth century, theologians agreed that the exchange of vows was what made marriage a sacrament, regardless of where those vows were spoken or whether the marriage was consummated. Scholastic theologian Thomas Aquinas put forth an understanding of marriage as sacrament that would become the basis for Catholic doctrine for centuries. Like Augustine, he affirmed that marriage is for the purpose of procreation, making it a “natural estate.” Marriage is also a contract, however, because a couple agrees to forge and sustain their union. This union, he argued, is also sacramental because it is a means of grace. John Witte explains Thomas’s position thus: “The sacramental quality of Christian marriage helped to elevate the natural acts of marriage to spiritual significance. At minimum, it helped to remove the stigma of sin in sexual intercourse and to elevate the procreation and nurture of children into an act useful for the church. More fully conceived, [marriage is]

Philip L. Reynolds, How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments: The Sacramental Theology of Marriage from Its Emergence to the Council of Trent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 416. 8 The Veronense or Leonine Sacramentary includes the rite described here and can be found in translation in Mark Searle and Kenneth W. Stevenson, Documents of the Marriage Liturgy (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992), 41–4. 9 Peter Lombard, Sentences, 4.27.3, quoted in Mark Searle and Kenneth W. Stevenson, Documents of the Marriage Liturgy (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992), 253–4. 7

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something of an institution and instrument of grace.” Furthermore, the understanding of marriage as “an enduring communion of marital love, fidelity, and sacrifice were already prefigured in the sacrament between Christ and the church.” Seen this way, marriage was necessarily indissoluble, “because it went beyond the contract and consent of the couple with one another.”10 While Augustine declared marriage indissoluble because it symbolizes Christ’s union with the church, Thomas insists it is so because it is a means of grace. With this development in theology, marriage moves solidly into the ecclesial realm. The understanding of marriage developed by thirteenth-century theologians will become canon law at the Council of Trent in 1563. The church begins to oversee marriage; eventually priests are required to do the marrying, and marriage includes a ritual event. The earliest known complete wedding liturgy, from fifteenth-century France, includes a betrothal, which takes place at the church door, several weeks before the wedding. When the couple returns for the marriage service, they exchange vows before the priest, again at the church door, and the groom bestows a ring and silver to the bride. They then follow the priest into the church for mass. Afterward, at the couple’s home, there is a blessing of the couple’s bedchamber.11 The most influential early marriage liturgy is from the Sarum Manual, used throughout England in the early sixteenth century. In this rite, the betrothal liturgy is replaced by the couple giving their consent; this is followed by marriage vows. Both bride and groom pledge to love and honor one another, but only the bride promises obedience, “to be bonoure and buxum [agreeable and compliant] in bed and at board.” After the groom gives a ring to the bride, the priest offers a series of nuptial prayers. A mass follows. After mass, there is a wedding banquet; the following night the priest goes to the couple’s home in order to bless their marriage bed.12 Published early in the sixteenth century, the Sarum rite became the primary source for the marriage liturgy in Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer (1549), which will be described in more detail later in this essay. In Europe, Protestant Reformers began to deny that marriage is a sacrament, insisting that sacraments must be instituted by Christ. They affirmed the ideas, put forth by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, that marriage is for the procreation of children and the avoidance of sexual sin. They also affirmed that marriage is a contract, entered into voluntarily and by mutual consent. Yet they declared that marriage is a social institution, and that it does not require a couple to be persons of faith. The Reformers also denied the long-held view that celibacy is esteemed over marriage, pointing to sexual abuses among the clergy such as fornication and concubinage. And while they affirmed the goods of marriage described by Augustine, they did not agree that the marital union is indissoluble. As Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican traditions developed, their marriage liturgies reflected these theological similarities as well as some differences. Martin Luther argued that the understanding of marriage as a sacrament was founded on a faulty interpretation of Eph. 5:32 that arose when Jerome, who translated the Greek New Testament into the Latin Vulgate, rendered the Greek term mystērion (mystery) as sacramentum (sacrament). Since the Vulgate became the church’s standard translation of the Bible, and since scholastic theology fine-tuned its definition of a sacrament centuries John Witte, Jr., From Sacrament to Contract, 95. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, vol. IV, trans. Vernon J. Bourke (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 78. 11 Searle and Stevenson, Documents of the Marriage Liturgy, 158–62. 12 Ibid., 167–78. 10

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later, the church wrongly described marriage as a sacrament that confers grace, rather than a human relationship that the author of Ephesians used to help describe the relationship between Christ and the church. Luther’s own marriage liturgy involved each spouse giving consent at the church door, then exchanging rings and joining hands. With the words “what God hath joined together, let no man put asunder” (Mk 10:9; Mt. 19:6), the minister pronounced the couple “joined in marriage” then led them into the church. There, he read Genesis 2 to the couple and preached a sermon of exhortation that included readings from Eph. 5:2429 and Gen. 3:16-19. Luther would then tell the couple that though marriage is difficult, it is full of blessing. The service concluded with a prayer.13 The Lutheran model of marriage that emerged is that of a social estate, an earthly relationship, not a heavenly one. Marriage was to be overseen by the state rather than the church. Pastors did serve the needs of families, giving guidance to those considering marriage as well as those contemplating divorce, but the church exercised no authority when it came to making or dissolving marriages.14 Reformed theologian John Calvin also described marriage as an earthly estate for mutual love and help, for the birthing and nurturing of children, and for protection against sexual wrongdoing. Like Luther, Calvin believes that marriage is a symbol for the union between Christ and the church, but that it does not confer grace. Calvin gradually came to understand marriage as a covenant relationship between two people, similar to the covenant relationship between God and a believer. For Calvin, those who marry form a covenant that involves not only the couple but the whole community. They made promises before God; their parents gave their consent. Peers became witnesses, a minister instructed and blessed the couple, and the city magistrate registered the marriage so that it was legal and their property protected. A marriage was validated by a public wedding, held in the presence of the church community, which expressed not only the couple’s wishes but also social, ecclesial, and legal consent.15 Calvin’s wedding liturgy, The Manner of Celebrating Holy Matrimony (1545),16 included thorough instructions for the minister and ample biblical exhortations for the couple—taken from Genesis 2, Matthew 19, 1 Corinthians 7, Colossians 3, 1 Timothy, Titus, and Peter—and a sermon by Calvin himself. Following all this, the minister asks both bride and groom to consent to the marriage, then asks those gathered for their own consent. Both bride and groom take vows, with the bride promising to obey, serve, and be subject to the husband. The liturgy ends with a prayer and a blessing. Weddings were not scheduled on Sundays when communion was served, so there was no eucharistic celebration. Ritual acts were few, since the hearing of the Word was considered primary. Calvin’s Geneva was distinguished by a unique balance of church and state, since both ministers and magistrates were responsible for the life and discipline of the community. Perhaps for this reason, divorce was granted only when circumstances were dire, and the process of ending a marriage was long and difficult. Couples who turned out to be incompatible were encouraged to continue to try to work out their differences, although

Ibid., 212–14. Witte, From Sacrament to Contract, 6. 15 Ibid., 6, 186. 16 John Calvin, Ioannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia, vol. 6, ed. G. Baum et al. (Brunswick: C. A. Schwetschke & Filium, 1982), 203–8. 13 14

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abuse within the marriage was not tolerated. Engagements could be broken, but marriages were permanent in all but the most extreme cases. Although Calvin did not consider marriage to be a sacrament, he did believe that this earthly estate had a spiritual facet, since God is part of the marriage covenant. His views would spread throughout Europe, America, and South Africa and would remain influential among Protestant theologians. The most influential marriage liturgy among Protestants, however, is that of the Book of Common Prayer. Cranmer’s language has had great impact on English language wedding rites ever since it was first published. The service was, as mentioned earlier, shaped from the Sarum rite, along with other sources, including Luther’s marriage liturgy. The first edition appeared in 1549; minor changes were made to the 1662 edition, which remained unchanged until the late twentieth century.17 Cranmer’s wedding rite takes place in the church. As with earlier liturgies, banns— public announcements of an upcoming marriage, made so that any objections to the marriage may be voiced—have been read over the previous weeks. An opening statement defines the purposes of marriage that have now become familiar—procreation of children, protection from sin, and mutual companionship—and includes references to well-known passages from Genesis and Ephesians, as well as John 2. Questions regarding consent are asked to both groom and bride, followed by the presentation of the bride by her father or a friend. The man and woman then join hands to speak their vows. After the groom presents the bride with a ring, the priest prays for the couple and pronounces them “man and wife together.” They move to the Lord’s table, where there are more prayers, the reading (and sometimes preaching) of scripture, and communion. Cranmer’s position on the sacramentality of marriage became the prevailing Anglican understanding. Marriage is not a sacrament, as in the Catholic church, but it is a “holy ordinance.” Although the 1549 rite requires that a couple seal their vows with the celebration of communion, that is optional in the 1662 version. With the relaxation of the requirement of communion, marriage takes on more of the character of an occasional office, usually taking place outside of the community’s regular worship. Weddings involve a couple, their family and friends, and a priest. Given that the first edition of the Book of Common Prayer (1549) emerged against the backdrop of Henry VIII’s complicated romantic life (an estranged first wife, two mistresses, and a secret marriage to yet another woman), the dissolution of marriage became a topic of conversation in England and in Europe. Theologians Thomas Becon, Martin Bucer, and Heinrich Bullinger all contributed to the debate. They all affirmed the traditional benefits of marriage while emphasizing love and companionship as being primary. All three denied that marriage is a sacrament and upheld the idea of marriage as a covenant made between two people before God. Each thought divorce allowable under certain circumstances, and Bucer went as far as to claim that divorce should be allowed if both husband and wife desire it, since marriage is a human institution.18 Over the next couple of centuries, Anglican theologians came to promote the idea of marriage as part of the “little commonwealth” of the Christian household, a symbol of divine grace that contributed to the common good of husband and wife and their children, as well as the church and the state. A new emphasis on mutuality between The text of the 1559 liturgy, with a brief introduction, appears in Searle and Stevenson, Documents of the Marriage Liturgy, 215–26. 18 Witte, From Sacrament to Contract, 239–41. 17

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husband and wife arose, along with a certain democratization of relationships. In time, laws surrounding marriage become more liberal, eventually leading to the Enlightenment model of marriage as contract. Meanwhile, Catholic theology and practice around marriage became codified through the Council of Trent (1545–63).19 Christians were required to marry in the church before a priest and two witnesses. Consent of both partners became a crucial element of marriage liturgies in several countries across Europe. Although consummation was not required to validate the marriage, the union was understood as one instituted by God for the propagation of humanity. And although marriage was considered contractual, it was also seen as sacramental—indissoluble, signifying the eternal union of Christ with the church.20 It should be noted that among the lower classes, marriages were still formed when people simply moved in together. According to the theologians and canon lawyers, however, marriages were made in church. This view of marriage persisted for four centuries, until the Second Vatican Council revisited the church’s teaching. The evolution of theological perspectives and liturgical practices regarding marriage that has been described thus far provided the soil from which a range of beliefs and behaviors grew. Marriage continues to span the personal, communal, ecclesial, and legal realms. In the twenty-first century, countries make their own marriage laws, and Protestant denominations define their own policies. Families constitute themselves with and without marriage; children are born before, after, or outside of marriage; divorce and remarriage are considered legal and personal issues by many practicing Christians and are not legislated by most Protestant denominations.

PART TWO—TWENTIETH- AND TWENTY-FIRSTCENTURY PROTESTANT MARRIAGE LITURGIES The arc of history shows marriage moving from being considered a domestic matter to a sacramental rite of the church to a civil contract that may or may not include a religious component. All along that arc one can see a wide variety of beliefs and practices, variations that depend on culture, class, colonialization, and locale. Theological stances and liturgical rites would remain stable over the next couple of centuries, but societal changes would be great. By the late twentieth century, marriage rites reflected a new attitude of equality between women and men. Wedding vows spoken by husbands and wives became identical as women were no longer expected to promise to obey their husbands. Prayers asking for God to grant the gift of children were now considered optional. Some women began to reject the practice of being “given away” by a father or other male relative, and marriage liturgies included instead affirmations to be spoken by families and/or the gathered assembly. While church weddings were still common, some couples chose to be married by a judge, relative, or family friend.21 (The rise of online “ordinations” by the Universal Life Church means that virtually anyone can officiate at a wedding.)

Catechism of the Council of Trent for Parish Priests, trans. John A. McHugh and Charles J. Callahan (Rockford, IL: Tan Books & Publishers, 1982). 20 Witte, From Sacrament to Contract, 109. 21 See Kimberly Bracken Long, From This Day Forward: Rethinking the Christian Wedding (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016), 1–38, 121–52. 19

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By the last quarter of the twentieth century, same-gender couples began to quietly hold private commitment ceremonies. Without official liturgical resources, couples—and sometimes clergy—created their own liturgies. For decades, grassroots rites for samegender union services circulated among friends and colleagues, and were adapted for use by particular couples. By the early twenty-first century, a handful of published resources provided guidance for same-gender couples while Protestant denominations debated the theology of sexuality.22 In the second decade of the twenty-first century, three historic Protestant denominations published marriage liturgies appropriate for all marriages. The Episcopal church first published a rite for same-gender blessings in 2015; critics rejected the idea of “separate but equal” rites, and subsequently a provisional marriage liturgy was published in 2018. Available for use in churches, it has been submitted for possible inclusion in a future edition of the Book of Common Prayer. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America published an inclusive service of marriage as part of the Supplemental Resources to Evangelical Lutheran Worship in 2016. Two years later, the Presbyterian Church (USA) included an inclusive marriage rite in the 2018 edition of the Book of Common Worship.23 All three of the new rites retain the same structures as previously published ceremonies; processions and prayers, vows and rings all remain. Yet small but significant changes in language signal a new attentiveness to inclusivity; each rite can be used for the marriage of any couple. Options for language allow partners to be named in various ways: beloved, spouse, partner, husband, wife. Phrases like “two people” replace “husband and wife” or “man and woman.” Vows are altered slightly but retain much of their former language. In one of the 2018 Episcopal trial rites, for instance, the only change is to provide one version of the marriage vow with options for how to name members of the couple: In the Name of God, I N., take you, N., to be my wife/husband/spouse, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death. This is my solemn vow.24 Similarly, the first option provided in the 2018 Presbyterian Book of Common Worship refrains from naming a person as husband/wife/spouse/partner and omits any language of taking or giving: N., you are my beloved, and I promise, See Kimberly Bracken Long and David Maxwell, eds., Inclusive Marriage Services: A Wedding Sourcebook (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015, for liturgies from The Uniting Network Australia, United Church of Canada, United Church of Christ, Presbyterian Church (USA), and newly written liturgies from several authors. 23 Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music of The Episcopal Church, Liturgical Resources 2: Marriage Rites for the Whole Church (New York: Church Publishing, 2019). The inclusive marriage service for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America can be found at https://downl​oad.elca.org/ELCA%20R​esou​rce%20Rep​osit​ory/Supp​ leme​ntal​_Mar​riag​e_Re​sour​ces.pdf. The rite for the Presbyterian Church (USA) is found in Book of Common Worship (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018), 685–707. 24 Liturgical Resources 2, 13. (“Trial rites” in the Episcopal Church are texts being used in anticipation of full authorization.) 22

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before God and these witnesses, to be loving and faithful to you in plenty and in want; in joy and in sorrow; in sickness and in health; as long as we both shall live.25 Otherwise, the vow remains the same as in the earlier (1993) Book of Common Worship. The 2016 ELCA rite is the most extensively modified version of the three rites but still retains much of the language of the previous 2006 rite that appears in Evangelical Lutheran Worship. As in the Episcopal service, several options are given to name each member of the couple: [In the name of God (Father Son, and Holy Spirit,)] I, name, take you, name, to be my wife/husband/spouse/life partner, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death. This is my solemn vow.26 Not only do the recent rites reflect the legal and ecclesial changes that allow samegender marriage, but they mirror new understandings of what have been the biblical foundations of marriage and shifts in the traditional “goods” of marriage. While older rites declared that marriage was instituted by God, the newer services acknowledge that humans were created for loving relationships of all kinds. The opening section of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer marriage service includes the following sentence: “The bond and covenant of marriage was established by God in creation, and our Lord Jesus Christ adorned this manner of life by his presence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee.” The 2018 provisional liturgy omits that sentence, while retaining the next sentence, an allusion to Eph. 5:21-33, that asserts that marriage signifies the union between Christ and the church. Both the Lutheran and Presbyterian liturgies from the same decade also omit references to marriage as a gift from God and the assertion that Christ’s presence at Cana indicates his blessing of the institution. Rather, the marriage blessing in the 2016 Lutheran rite begins thus: Blessed are you, O God. Holy is your presence, glorious is your peace. You made humans to love and be loved. You call us together into community so that we might not live and die alone.27

ook of Common Worship, 694. B Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Supplemental Resources for Use within the Evangelical Lutheran Worship Service of Marriage (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2016), n.p. https://downl​oad.elca.org/ ELCA%20R​esou​rce%20Rep​osit​ory/Supp​leme​ntal​_Mar​riag​e_Re​sour​ces.pdf. 27 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Supplemental Resources, n.p. 25 26

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These changes show a fresh approach to the interpretation of scripture, one that refuses to read the human institution of marriage into biblical texts. The first creation account in Genesis indicates that God made human beings, both male and female, in God’s image and includes the command to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:26-31). In the second account (Gen. 2:18-24), God creates a companion for the first human, because it is not good to be alone; it is said that the two shall become one flesh. What God establishes is the expectation that human beings live in community, that they provide help and companionship for one another; nowhere, however, does God establish something called “marriage.” The 2018 Presbyterian marriage service reflects this understanding of the creation stories and also refocuses attention on Jesus’ role. The opening of the rite includes the following: From the beginning, God created us for relationship and kept covenant with us. Jesus gave himself in love and taught us to continually forgive. And the Holy Spirit, given in baptism, Renews God’s grace within us day by day, enabling us to grow in faith, hope, and love.28 Jesus’ miracle at Cana is mentioned only in the Invitation to the Lord’s Table, which underscores the purpose of that event in John’s narrative rather than asserting that Jesus’ presence is a tacit blessing of marriage: At a wedding feast in Cana, Jesus turned water into wine, revealing his divine power and giving the first sign of the abundant love we will share in the promised reign of God.29 One also hears a link between the earthly eucharistic table and the heavenly banquet, a reminder of the eschatological quality of the promises made in marriage. Another new emphasis seen in recent marriage rites is the centrality of baptism. Here, marriage is understood as one way of living out the baptismal vocation of every Christian. This is not to say that one must marry if one is baptized, but rather that Christians live out their baptisms through every aspect of their lives, including their marriages. This is most evident in the recent Lutheran and Presbyterian rites. The 2016 ELCA service includes a rubric regarding the Entrance, indicating that the presider and wedding participants may gather at the baptismal font if the service includes a thanksgiving for baptism. Two of three options for the service’s introduction include allusions to baptism. Water may be poured into the font, after which the minister may say: Name and name, dearly beloved of God, when you make your promises to one another, ook of Common Worship, 691. B Ibid., 697.

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you will draw from the deep well of the promise God made to you the day you were baptized: to make a home with you wherever you live, to clothe you with forgiveness and mercy, to send you as light into the world, and to give you abundant life in Jesus Christ.30 Or: In the waters of baptism, you are claimed by God and marked with the cross of Christ forever. God clothes you with mercy and lovingkindness, forgiveness and hope, gifts that you are called to share with the world. … As God has chosen us, you choose one another, sharing the gifts of your baptism not only separately but joined together.31 Allusion to baptism also appears in the minister’s invitation to the couple to declare their intention to be married, and a complete thanksgiving for baptism is included as an optional element of the service. The recently published Presbyterian rite includes similar references to baptism in the greeting, the prayer of the day, and the declarations of intent. Along with a new emphasis on baptism comes a heightened sense of the role of the gathered community in the wedding service. All three recent liturgies mention the assembly’s role as witnesses who pray for the couple and offer their ongoing support. The greeting in the new Presbyterian rite declares that as the two marrying make promises to one another, families are joined, friendships are strengthened, and a new community of love is formed. Let us surround N. and N. with our affection and prayer, giving thanks for their love for one another and for all the ways that God’s love is made manifest in our lives.32 After the presider asks the couple if they intend to marry, and each person declares their intent, the presider may address the families of the couple as well as the entire assembly in this way: Do you, the families of N. and N., give them your blessing, promise to uphold them in their marriage, and encourage them in their life together? We do. Do all of you witnessing these vows promise to uphold N. and N. in their marriage and encourage them in their life together? We do.33

vangelical Lutheran Church in America, Supplemental Resources, n.p. E Ibid., n.p. 32 Book of Common Worship, 691. 33 Ibid., 693. 30 31

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The 2016 Lutheran rite includes a similar question, to be addressed to the entire assembly. The 2018 Episcopal service includes two questions addressed to the gathered assembly, asking them first to uphold and honor the covenant being made and then to pray for the couple in times of trouble and celebrate with them in times of joy. The prayer that follows the speaking of vows and exchanging of rings in the Presbyterian service asks God for help in keeping those promises: Strengthen our commitments and enrich all relationships. Keep us attentive to N. and N., that we may support them in times of need and celebrate with them in times of joy.34 Although these changes may seem slight, they express the awareness that a couple does not marry in a vacuum but rather in the midst of a network of relationships. The implication here is that marriage is not just a private matter; sustaining and nurturing marriages is part of the mission of the church. To live as baptized people, then, is not only to tend to one’s own relationships but to seek to uphold, enrich, and enable the faithful and fruitful relationships of others. All three revisions of the marriage service feature new liturgy for celebrating the eucharist. One of the Episcopal rites features a new proper preface, which points to the love of the couple as a sign of the “joy and abundant life you share with your Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.” A new post-communion prayer shifts the focus from the couple to the whole assembly, giving thanks “for the communion of our life together” and asking that the holy meal might “nourish us for the work you set before us.”35 The ELCA service includes two new eucharistic prayers; the Presbyterian service includes one. In reviewing these three new services of marriage, it becomes clear that the twenty-firstcentury rites represent a marked shift away from Augustine’s three goods of marriage. The procreation of children is not seen as the primary reason for marriage; in fact, children are not even mentioned in the Lutheran rite, and the Presbyterian liturgy prays only for “the family they may become,” leaving open the possibility that the couple may not have children, either by choice or the circumstances of biology. Mutual fidelity is still a value; the phrase is used verbatim in the opening words spoken by the priest in the Episcopal rite. Each member of the couple is asked to honor the other, “forsaking all others” in the declaration of consent, and the celebrant prays for their “true fidelity.”36 The greeting in the Presbyterian service asserts that “those who marry are called to a way of life marked by grace, fidelity, and mutual respect.” Each partner pledges “to be loving and faithful to you,” and the rings are said to be “symbols of unending love and faithfulness.”37 Although the word “fidelity” is not used in the Lutheran service, it is implied. Augustine’s third good, indissolubility—which came to be equated with sacramentality— is not present in these services. First of all, marriage is not considered a sacrament in the Lutheran and Presbyterian denominations; the Episcopal church considers it as one of Ibid., 696. Liturgical Resources 2, 32. 36 Ibid., 10–11. 37 Book of Common Worship, 691; 694–5. 34 35

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five ritual acts “commonly called sacraments.” Divorce, while mourned in most cases, is accepted as a painful part of the lives of some people. The new Lutheran rite includes intercessions for “those who are married, those who long for marriage, those who struggle in marriage, and those who could not marry in the church, that the love of Christ give them peace, healing, hope and compassion.”38 A separate section in the 2018 Book of Common Worship titled “Prayer at the End of a Marriage” provides a brief liturgy for a couple or individual whose marriage is ending and focuses on forgiveness, healing, and guidance. At the center of the service is the following prayer: Holy God, fount of grace, you are the source of our being and the wellspring of our redemption. Pour out your Spirit upon us this day, and especially upon N. and N. Where hearts are broken, grant your healing. Where trust is eroded, restore good faith. Where bitterness has taken root, plant seeds of forgiveness. Do not let anger destroy us, but teach us to love as you have loved us, even after marriage ends. Look upon N. and N. as a new phase of life begins. Uphold them [and their children/their families] with your grace. Strengthen them by your Spirit, and renew in them the hope of your new creation, where peace will reign and all people will be reconciled to you and to one another. In the name of Jesus Christ, our Savior, we pray. Amen.39 The presence of this prayer, and the brief liturgy in which it appears, gives voice to the unending grace of God in the face of one of life’s most difficult circumstances and encourages the church to participate in healing, forgiving, and sustaining those who divorce. Marriage is not considered a sacrament in the three Protestant denominations represented here, but it might be said that these churches recognize that there is a sacramental quality to marriage. Although marriage is not a means of grace, it can be a place where grace is experienced and nurtured. Marriage can be a place where followers of Christ find themselves understanding more deeply something of the unconditional and steadfast love of God. And marriage is a way of practicing eschatological hope. Marriage vows can never be kept fully; they are impossible promises. Yet people make those promises in the hope of keeping them, with the faith that the Author of Love may imbue their sometimes feeble attempts at love with some divine strength and purpose. Each time a couple sits at an earthly table, they anticipate gathering at a heavenly one, when all love is perfected, all life is made whole, and all creation is complete.

vangelical Lutheran Church in America, Supplemental Resources, n.p. E Book of Common Worship, 713.

38 39

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FURTHER READING Reynolds, Philip Lyndon. Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage during the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994. Searle, Mark, and Kenneth W. Stevenson. Documents of the Marriage Liturgy. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992. Stevenson, Kenneth W. To Join Together: The Rite of Marriage. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1987. Witte, John Jr. From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition, 2nd ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012.

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Taking Lessons from the Liturgy: The Reception of the Second Vatican Council in the Rites of Marriage JAYA THERESE VASUPURATHUKARAN

In Catholic teaching, the sacrament of marriage marks the passage in human and Christian life whereby a man and a woman enter into a new stage of their lives, becoming spouses and forming a family of their own. In the liturgical celebration, a Catholic marriage is ritualized and its sacramental nature is revealed to the participants, which further enables them to participate in it and to experience the grace of the sacrament through prayers and liturgical actions. Along with its historical and theological evolutions, the liturgical structure of the marriage rite opens up an understanding of the sacrament demanding an active participation in the sacramental celebration. The post-Vatican II Council period is marked by a series of revisions and reformulations marking a renewal of liturgy in general. Recognizing that there are many Christian families, for example, Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed/Presbyterian, that have also undertaken significant revision to marriage rites in the past fifty years, this chapter focuses on two streams within the Catholic tradition, namely, Roman and Syro-Malabar Rites, representative of Western and Eastern churches and takes up a comparative evaluation of these two Catholic rites of marriage. By analyzing the existing liturgical texts of these traditions and comparing how they have responded to the principles and stipulations of the Council for renewal, this essay focuses on the reception of the Second Vatican Council as reflected in the revised rites of marriage and how it ushered in a transition in the sacramental theology of marriage from a classical position to one with broader horizons and fresh insights.

AN EXPOSITION OF THE RITES OF MARRIAGE: THE ROMAN (WESTERN) RITE AND THE SYRO-MALABAR (EASTERN) RITE The Liturgy of Marriage in the Roman Rite Before the Second Vatican Council The Council of Verona in 1184 declared that marriage is a sacrament. Later, the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) emphasized the restriction of prohibitions to matrimony and

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the punishment of those who contract clandestine marriages. It also pronounced that public announcement in the churches is to be done by priests when marriages are to be contracted. At the reunion Council of Lyons II in 1274, marriage was also included in the list of the seven sacraments as part of the profession of faith. The Council of Florence in 1439 again reemphasized that marriage is a sacrament. The Council of Trent (1563) could be considered pivotal in the development of the sacramental theology of marriage with its impact on the renewal of the rite of marriage, both through its new theology of marriage and the recommendations it proposed for the valid rite of marriage. In the manner it had existed in those days, marriage was generally understood to be a private affair and lacked an ecclesial nature; the Church had no significant role in its celebration. Consequently, before the Council of Trent there was a proliferation of irregularities and abuses in relation to marriage and clandestine marriages were prominent.1 In this context, the Council realized the urgent need to put a check on the existing situation and serious steps were taken to avoid “the serious sins” effected from clandestine marriages.2 Thus, the Council of Trent accepted the official regulations promulgated by the Fourth Lateran Council3 for the validity of the marriage but demanded a renewal. Furthermore, in the presence of a variety of challenges and problems that marriage encountered at that time, the Council of Trent eagerly wanted to attend to these issues and propose remedial measures. In its effort to intervene in the situation, the Council’s discussions and decisions on marriage were driven by a twofold motive: “to ensure its public celebration out of respect for the social character of marriage, and to secure its reverent celebration out of respect for its sacramental character.”4 Motivated by these goals, the Council stipulated a series of prescriptions concerning the publications of banns, marriage before the Church, in the presence of the priest, the ascertaining of the couple’s consent to the marriage, and the exchange of vows in the presence of the priest. Among these changes, the insistence on the need for the presence of a priest was the one striking change enacted by the Council. While this had been strongly urged prior to Trent, Kristi Thomas notes, it “was not necessary in Catholic weddings until 1563.”5 With the Council of Trent categorically emphasizing the mandatory presence of the priest for the ratification of the marriage, the Church officially put an end to the situation that arose

Clandestine marriages are secret marriages contracted with the free consent of the contracting parties. The main problem that arose from clandestine marriage was that, since it is a secret marriage, contracted only with the consent of bride and bridegroom it may gradually lead to a situation that “they have deserted a first wife married in secrecy and have publicly contracted marriage with another woman and live with her in a permanent state of adultery.” Council of Trent, “Canons on the Reform of Marriage, Session 24, 11 November 1563,” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils: Trent to Vatican II, ed. Norman Tanner and Giuseppe Alberigo, 2 (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 755. 2 Council of Trent, “Canons on the Reform of Marriage, Session 24, 11 November 1563,” 755. See also Searle and Stevenson, Documents of the Marriage Liturgy (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992), 179. 3 The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) is one of the important ecumenical councils with regard to the rite of marriage, as it deals with the “restriction of prohibitions to matrimony” and “the punishment of those who contract clandestine marriages.” It also announced that “when marriages are to be contracted they shall be publicly announced in the churches by priests.” See Lateran Council IV, “On the Punishments of Those Who Contract Clandestine Marriages,” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman Tanner and Giuseppe Alberigo (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), § 51, p. 258. 4 Searle and Stevenson, Documents of the Marriage Liturgy (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992), 184. 5 Kirsti S. Thomas, “Medieval and Renaissance Marriage: Theory and Customs.” http://celyn.dri​zzle​host​ing.com/ mrwp/mrwed.html (accessed November 30, 2014). 1

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from the understanding that it was only the mutual consent of the couple that validates the marriage. The Council enforced a specific form of marriage and declared: The celebration of the marriage must then take place in open Church, during which the parish priest will, by questioning the man and woman, make sure of their consent and then say, I join you together in marriage, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, or use other words according to the accepted rite of each province. (§ 755) Thereby, the Council offered a new form for the expression of the consent and, at the same time, recognized various forms for the celebration that existed in different cultures. By prescribing public announcement of marriage before its celebration and the presence of the priest during the marriage, the Council expressed its view of marriage as a sacrament and a social contract. However, the rite of marriage introduced in this new missal was not really innovative because it was almost identical to the local missals of that time but relatively “simple and sober.” As a result, in 1614 a revised rite for marriage was promulgated. Antonio summarized the rite of marriage according to the Rituale Romanum of 1614 in the following manner: The marriage celebration, except in cases of mixed marriage, takes place normally within the mass, before the altar. It begins with the exchange of consent and the blessing of the couple (with their hands joined) by the priest with the formula, Ego coniungo vos in Matrimonium. The blessing and giving of the wedding ring follows. The priest then recites some psalm verses and a short concluding prayer. The mass continues as usual but immediately after the Lord’s Prayer and before the embolism Liberanos …, the spouses receive the nuptial blessing. A final blessing patterned upon that which is found in the Book of Tobit (7:15), concludes the rite.6 Through these prescriptive procedures, the Council hoped to rectify the irregularities that had become part of the celebration of marriage when it was considered a private domestic affair with no place for an active role for the Church. In such a context, the mandatory need of the priest to ratify marriage through a formula like “I join you together in matrimony” ensured that the Church would have a commanding and regulating role. By prescribing banns and the presence of the priest, the Council expressed its view of marriage as a sacrament and a social contract. However, these measures taken by the Council to ensure its social and sacramental character had some unfortunate results. Speaking on the practical consequences of the insistence on the prescriptive procedures that the consent of a couple must be made before a priest, Antonio laments that “the role of the couple appeared as secondary to that of the priest.”7 Even though the chaotic situation that arose from the exclusive emphasis on the mutual consent of the couple was put to an end, the emphasis on “I join you” said by priest was criticized because the role of the couples in the marriage only secondary to that of priest and rite did not underline the active responsibility of the couple.

David William Antonio, “The 1991 Typical Edition of the Ordo Celebrandi Matrimonium,” ICST Journal 3 (2001): 27. 7 David William Antonio, An Inculturation Model of the Catholic Marriage Ritual (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2002), 3. 6

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The Second Vatican Council and Renewal of the Rite of Marriage Complying with the motto “to renew the Church,” aggiornamento, the Second Vatican Council made clear recommendations and proposed practical guidelines for the revision and renewal of liturgy. The first paragraph of Article 77 of SC clearly emphasizes the need for the revision and enrichment of the rite of marriage and affirms that “the rite of celebrating marriage in the Roman book is to be revised, and made richer.” Referring to the existing rite, it is observed that it “did not express quite adequately the grace of the sacrament and the obligation of the spouses.”8 Evaluating the Roman Rite of 1614, with its adaptations and modifications in the course of history, Anscar Chupungco comments that the concern of the rite of marriage prevailing at the time of Second Vatican Council “seems to be juridical, that is, to obtain the valid consent of the contracting parties” and he adds that “its celebration was too short and too sober to have an impact or leave a lasting impression.”9 Further he retraces that the Council fathers recognized “the brevity and ritual poverty of the Roman rite.”10 Indeed, this deficiency invited the serious attention of the Council fathers. Realizing, thus, the need for a renewed version of the rite of marriage, the Second Vatican Council undoubtedly asked for the revision and enrichment of the rite of the marriage. The Council clearly demanded a renewal of the rite that would rightly express the sacramental character of marriage and the responsibilities of the spouses.11 Like the Council of Trent, the Second Vatican Council approved and endorsed the use of local customs that have a contextual and cultural relevance to the particular rites of marriage. The impact of this openness had far-reaching consequences for the Church, “because it open[ed] up many liberties that include structure as well as content.”12 Moreover, the Council authorized competent ecclesiastical authorities of the local Church to draw up their own rites, recognizing the possibilities for adaptation and providing an opportunity for the use of vernacular language in the administration of sacraments and sacramentals. Amidst this great liberty, the only prerequisite demanded by the Council was that “the priest assisting at the marriage must ask for and obtain the consent of the contracting parties” (SC, §77). This condition was seen as indispensable and a necessary element for the juridical validity of the marriage. Consequently, these guidelines offer great possibilities for the renewal of the rite of marriage with due respect to the contextual and local customs of the parties involved. The Second Vatican Council stipulated some practical guidelines that are to be implemented in order to effect concretely the renewal and the revision of the rite of marriage.13 Antonio describes these guidelines as “operational principles.”14 The first

ntonio, “The 1991 Typical Edition of the Ordo Celebrandi Matrimonium,” 26. A Anscar J. Chupungco, Liturgies of the Future: The Process and Methods of Inculturation (New York: Paulist, 1989), 118. 10 Ibid. In this context, the observation of Kenneth Stevenson is remarkable: “Given the extreme sparseness of the service provided in the Ritual, what we have here is less a nuptial liturgy than a formula for ensuring that all the conditions for a clearly valid marriage are met.” Searle and Stevenson, Documents of the Marriage Liturgy, 184. 11 Second Vatican Council, “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 4 December, 1963,” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils: Trent to Vatican II, ed. Norman Tanner and Giuseppe Alberigo (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), §77. Hereafter abbreviated as SC. 12 Kenneth W. Stevenson, To Join Together: The Rite of Marriage (New York: Pueblo, 1987), 139. 13 “Matrimony is normally to be celebrated within the Mass, after the reading of the gospel and the homily, and before ‘the prayer of the faithful.’ The prayer for the bride, duly amended to remind both spouses of their equal obligation to remain faithful to each other, may be said in the mother tongue” (SC, §78). 14 Antonio, An Inculturation Model, 3. 8 9

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operational principle of the Council was its proposal to place the celebration of marriage within the Eucharist. However, it also gave options for celebrating the sacrament of marriage without the Eucharist. This operational principle really brings in a major transition in the evolution of the rite of marriage. In the early phase of its development, marriage was only a family affair and later it was connected to the Church premises—in facie ecclesiae. Now, it is placed within the celebration of the Eucharist. The celebration of marriage essentially became an ecclesial celebration and part of the liturgical life of the Christian community.15 In such a move, one can detect the seminal form of the great iconic statement of Lumen Gentium that the Eucharist is “the source and the culmination of all Christian life” (LG § 11).16 Further, the insertion of the sacrament of marriage into the sacrament of the Eucharist also accentuates the close relationship between the two sacraments by recognizing the Eucharist as the “source and summit” of the wedding celebration. Added to these, this new perspective has implications for the sacramental life of a Christian, as it rightly points to the interrelatedness of all sacraments. Finding in it an added significance, Anscar Chupungco observes that “marriage as the sacrament of covenant between man and woman has its source and finds meaning in the covenant sacrifice which the Church celebrates in the Eucharist.”17 Based on this understanding, one can also infer that the sacramental dimension of the sacrament of marriage is affirmed by the insertion of the rite of marriage into the Eucharist. The second operational principle was the introduction of the blessing of both the bride and bridegroom. The significance of this decisive step by the Council becomes clear only when it is understood against the existing custom of such a blessing only of the bride.18 Through this operational principle the Council solemnly affirmed the equality or reciprocity between husband and wife as well as the obligation of mutual fidelity. When the Council permitted that this blessing “may be said in the mother tongue,” it expressed the mind of the Council that the couples must fully understand the meaning

Stevenson, To Join Together (New York: Pueblo, 1987), 125. See also Josef Andreas Jungmann, “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,” in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II: Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy; Decree on the Instruments of Social Communication; Dogmatic Constitution on the Church; Decree on Eastern Catholic Churches, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 78. 16 For a detailed vision of the nuptial character of Eucharist see also Pope Benedict XVI, “Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist as the Source and Summit of the Church’s Life and Mission, Sacramentum Caritatis,” Libreria editrice Vaticana, http://w2.vati​can.va/cont​ent/bened​ict-xvi/en/apo​st_e​xhor​tati​ons/docume​ nts/hf_​ben-xvi_e​xh_2​0070​222_​sacr​amen​tum-carita​tis.html#The_E​ucha​rist​_and​_the​_Sac​rame​nts (accessed January 14, 2015), § 27–9. 17 Chupungco, The Liturgies of the Future, 121. In relation to the sacramental celebration of marriage along with the nuptial Eucharist, Kevin Irwin underscores that “this Eucharistic celebration says a great deal about the sacramentality of marriage in the first place, which needs to be developed for a liturgical theology, as opposed to a focus on the couple’s consent only.” Kevin Irwin, Context and Text, rev. ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018), 271–2. 18 When we look into the history of the bridal blessing, we can retrace an evolution. Edward Schillebeeckx presents the historical shift of marriage blessing to bridal blessing in a systematic manner. According to him, there was a veiling ceremony in the Roman rite of marriage that includes the veiling of both the bride and the bridegroom. By referring to Paulinus of Nola and Ambrose, he emphasized that “veiling and blessing” was an irreplaceable liturgical action for the sanctification of marriage. However, he argues that there emerged a tendency to propose a centralized position to the bride in marriage, which further leads to the replacement of “marriage blessing” with “a blessing of the bride alone.” He further claims that in the Liber Ordinum a shift of focus is underscored. “In this book,” he points out, “a first blessing, pronounced over the bride and bridegroom, and thus a blessing of the marriage, is followed by a second blessing pronounced over the bride alone.” Edward Schillebeeckx, Marriage: Human Reality and Saving Mystery (London: Sheed & Ward, 1988), 304. 15

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and significance of the rite. The third operational principle endorsed the irreplaceable role of the Liturgy of the Word in the rite of marriage and stated very explicitly that even on occasions where marriage is celebrated outside the Mass, the epistle and the gospel of the nuptial Mass should be read at the beginning of the ceremony. Hence, SC clearly makes a point that, whatever be the nature of the celebration of the marriage, it should begin with the Liturgy of the Word. With this emphasis, the Council perceived the renewal of the rite of marriage in the light of the Word of God and wanted it to be implemented by making the Liturgy of the Word a constituent part of the rite. The fourth and final operational principle stressed the obligatory character of the nuptial blessing. In the rite for the celebration of marriage existing before the Second Vatican Council, the nuptial blessing was not given when the rite was celebrated without the Mass. The Council desired that “the blessing should always be given to the couple.” This insistence not only underlines the “rich doctrinal content of this liturgical formulary” but also ensures “the juridical character of the marriage contract.”19 These operational principles thus reveal that the Council paid detailed attention to the doctrinal and juridical dimensions in its proposal for the renewal of the rite of marriage.

The General Structure of the Liturgy of Marriage of the Roman Rite The Revised Ordo Celebrandi Matrimonium (ROCM)20 of the Roman Rite promulgated in 1991 has four chapters: The Order of Celebrating Matrimony within Mass, the Order of Celebrating Marriage without Mass, the Order of Celebrating Matrimony between a Catholic and a Catechumen or a Non-Christian, and Various Texts to Be Used in the Rite of Marriage and in the Mass for the Celebration of Marriage. The second edition of the ROCM in Latin includes a chapter that details how a layperson presides in the absence of a priest or a deacon. The rite of marriage within the Eucharistic celebration in the ROCM begins with the introductory rite by welcoming the couple and the assembly into the celebration of marriage (nos. 45–54).21 It includes the procession of the couple with their parents and congregation to the aisle where the priest welcomes them with joy. He invites them to the celebration of the rite of marriage with the words given in the text or words similar to them. After this, the Eucharistic celebration continues from the Gloria through the Liturgy of the Word of God. Three readings are proclaimed, probably from the given texts, and a homily is recommended explaining the meaning, purpose, and significance of marriage (nos. 55–77). The rite proper to the celebration of marriage begins with the scrutiny before the consent, followed by the declaration of consent by the couple and reception of their consent by the priest (nos. 58–68). A comparative study of the three questions of the scrutiny shows a remarkable shift in one of the traditional teachings concerning the goods of marriage. According to Augustine, there are three goods of marriage: in the case of individual “men,” the goods of marriage include “the cause of generation and in the fidelity of chastity,” and “in the case of the people of God … the good is also in the

Chupungco, Liturgies of the Future, 121. See also Pope Paul VI, Instructions on the Revised Roman Rites, Inter Oecumenici (Glasgow: Collins, 1979), 205; Antonio, “The 1991 Typical Edition of the Ordo Celebrandi Matrimonium,” 28; Antonio, An Inculturation Model of the Catholic Marriage Ritual, 3. 20 Henceforth the Revised Ordo Celebrandi Matrimonium will be abbreviated as ROCM. 21 The number within the bracket signifies the number of the article of the text of the Ordo Celebrandi Matrimonium. 19

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sanctity of the sacrament.”22 The Code of Canon Law of 1917 teaches a hierarchical gradation in the ends or purposes of marriage stating that “the primary end of marriage is the procreation and education of children; its secondary end is mutual help and the allaying of concupiscence.”23 Departing considerably from this view, the Second Vatican Council affirmed that conjugal love “involves the good of the whole person, and therefore can enrich the expressions of body and mind with a unique dignity” in a way that “far excels mere erotic inclination.”24 Restructuring the hierarchical approach developed in the 1917 Code, the 1983 Code of Canon Law endorses “the matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life and which is ordered by its nature to the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring” (CIC, can. 1055 §1). The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) also takes up this canon and teaches that in the matrimonial covenant, bride and bridegroom establish a lifelong partnership, ordered toward their good, and open to love and life (CCC §1601). As reflected in the scrutiny of the consent, the reordering of the hierarchy of the goods of marriage underscores that the two ends—good of the spouses and the procreation and education of the children—are complementary goods of marriage. The question regarding the acceptance of children as the fruits of marriage is eliminated when the marriage is conducted among elderly couples. This, also, suggests that procreation is not the sole or primary end of marriage. After the scrutiny, the priest invites the couple to join their right hands and declare their consent before God and before the ecclesial community. The joining of hands during the liturgy of marriage signifies the love and commitment demanded of the couples.25 When consent is declared by the couples and received by the priest, the congregation praises God and there follows the blessing and exchange of rings. In the Tridentine rite of marriage, the exchange of rings followed immediately after the introduction by the priest. It provided an option for the conferral of just one ring, to be given by the bridegroom to the bride, or two rings, in a mutual exchange. Depending on the number of rings, there existed different blessings over the rings. Both the OCM and ROCM take this symbolic action into the rite of marriage, but both simplify the 1614 Roman Ritual. Consequently, the rite of rings has made into a “simple ceremony, consisting of the blessing, the giving, and the interpreting words said by each partner.”26 According to ROCM, immediately after the reception of the consent, the blessing and the exchange of rings take place. This liturgical action could be viewed as a symbol of “the confirmation and visible sign of the consent.”27 According to the revised version of the text, after the exchange of rings, an option for the blessing and exchange of arras (coins) is added. A prayer is recited where the priest asks the Lord to bless the arras that the spouses exchange between them and to “pour over [the couples] the abundance of [God’s] good gifts,” which is repeated by the

Augustine, “The Good of Marriage,” in St. Augustine: Treatises on Marriage and Other Subjects, ed. Roy J. Deferrari (New York: Catholic University of America Press, 1955), 48. 23 T. Lincoln Bouscaren and Adam C. Ellis, Canon Law of 1917: A Text and Commentary (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1951), §1013. 24 Second Vatican Council, “Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium Et Spes, 7 December, 1965,” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils: Trent to Vatican II, ed. Norman Tanner and Giuseppe Alberigo (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), § 49. Hereafter abbreviated as GS. 25 Searle and Stevenson, Documents of the Marriage Liturgy, 2. 26 Stevenson, To Join Together, 222; Searle and Stevenson, Documents of the Marriage Liturgy, 186–7. 27 Annibale Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy 1948–1975, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990), 704. 22

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bridegroom and bride while they exchange the coins (no. 67B). A blessing and placing of the veil before the nuptial blessing also is integrated. Then comes the prayer of the faithful and the proclamation of faith, the Creed, where it is required by the rubrics (no. 69), and then the celebration proceeds with the Liturgy of the Eucharist (nos. 70–1), where the newly wedded couple brings the bread and wine to the altar. The prayer especially for the spouses is inserted into the Eucharistic prayer. After that, the Our Father and the nuptial blessing take place where the former bridecentered prayer is made a more spouse-centered one (nos. 72–4). The nuptial blessing is not an optional one but is “a needful part of the inner meaning of marriage.”28 The nuptial blessing also affirms that marriage is a great mystery by which the covenantal relationship of the bride and bridegroom takes part in the sacramental relationship between Christ and the Church. Moreover, the nuptial blessing affirms the role of the Holy Spirit in the celebration of marriage. The prayer “Lord Jesus Christ” is normally omitted, but the prayer for peace and exchange of peace takes place (nos. 75–6). After the distribution of communion, the celebration of the marriage ends with a solemn blessing by the priest over the couple and the community (no. 77). This general outline of the rite of marriage within the Eucharistic celebration affords a broad perspective of the structure of the rite of marriage as presented in the ROCM. Having discussed the liturgy of marriage of the Roman Rite, the next section will discuss the history of the origin of the Syro-Malabar Church and its liturgy of marriage.

Rite of Marriage of the Syro-Malabar Church (East Syrian) According to tradition, the Apostle Thomas came to India in 52 ad. He formed a community of Christians in Kerala, one of the southern provinces in India that was then generally known as the Malabar Coast. From the seventh century onward they were connected to the East Syrian rite for its liturgy and administration. A different chapter in the history of the St. Thomas Christians was opened by the arrival of Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese explorer, at Calicut in 1498, which marked the beginning of the Roman Church in India. The Portuguese missionaries in Kerala suspected the Syrian Christians of being under the spell of Nestorian heresy “because, for them [the Portuguese], anything that was not Latin was heresy and schism.”29 From 1514 the Portuguese exerted influence over all Eastern Christians in India by convening a Synod in 1599, known as the Synod of Diamper. This Synod forcefully terminated the relations between the East Syrian Church and the Indian Church, and the Thomas Christians were brought under Latin Jurisdiction of the Portuguese Padroado. It further paved the way for the famous “Coonan Cross oath” in 1653, which eventually split the St. Thomas Christians into two groups: one group accepted the prelates appointed by Rome, while the other group entered into communion with the West Syrian Church of Antioch and broke away from Rome. The period that followed was a phase of Latinization that had retarding effects on the system of Church administration and the indigenous liturgies of the Church. In order to ease the tension existing between the Portuguese and the Syro-Malabar Church, the Holy See deputized the Discalced Carmelites to take charge of the St. Thomas Christians. In

Stevenson, To Join Together, 223; see also Julie McCarty, “Nuptial Pentecost: Theological Reflections on the Presence and Action of the Holy Spirit in Christian Marriage,” New Theology Review (February 2003): 59. 29 Varkey J. Vithayathil, The Origin and Progress of the Syro-Malabar Hierarchy (Kottayam: Oriental Institute of Religious Studies, 1980), 20. 28

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1887 as a result of continuous effort by the Malabar Christians, Pope Leo XIII decreed the separation of the Rite of the St. Thomas Catholics from that of the Latin Church. Moreover, in 1923, Pope Pius XI formally reconstituted the Syro-Malabar hierarchy. In 1992 the Syro-Malabar Church was raised to a Major Archiepiscopal Sui Iuris Church.30 In the historical development of the liturgy of the Syro-Malabar Church in general, three phases can be distinguished. The early period up to the Synod of Diamper in 1599 is followed by a middle period from 1599 to Vatican II, and, finally, the period from Vatican II to the formulation of the new texts for the liturgical celebrations. Parallel to them, there are three significant phases in the development of their rite of marriage. Until the end of the sixteenth century the rite of marriage of the Syro-Malabar Church was mainly based on the East Syrian liturgical tradition. However, significant elements of inculturation—integrating elements from the Indian culture—are also seen in the rite. Later, with the influence of the missionaries from the Latin liturgical tradition, the elements of this tradition crept into the liturgical ceremonies of the Syro-Malabar Church. The Second Vatican Council promulgated a decree on the Oriental Churches, which emphasized that the Oriental Churches should return to their original liturgical heritage. A new text of the sacrament of marriage was published in 2005, The Sacraments of the Syro-Malabar Church,31 after a long period of discussions, revisions of various drafts, and experimental implementations. Looking into the liturgy of marriage of the Syro-Malabar Church, the specific rites that constitute the sacrament of matrimony take place immediately after the Liturgy of the Word and before the Liturgy of the Eucharist as in the Roman Rite. The celebration of marriage begins with the announcement of the deacon where the ecclesial community is admonished to realize the significance of the unique moment and to pray for the priest who officiates the celebration and for the couple who are going to be united in the sacrament. It is followed with a prayer by the priest, which emphasizes the role of the priest in the celebration of the sacrament of marriage in the Eastern churches. The question about the minister of the sacrament of marriage is of central importance in the Eastern and Western Churches. The Code of Canons of Eastern Churches asserts that “only those marriages are valid which are celebrated with a sacred rite in the presence of the local hierarch or the local pastor or a priest who has been given the faculty of blessing the marriage by either of them” (CCEO, 828 § 1). It points to the fact that the celebrant of the sacrament of marriage is the priest. With this background, this priestly prayer announces that the sacrament of marriage is not celebrated by the couple alone, but it is celebrated as a sacrament where the priest is the main celebrant. Then, a hymn is sung that extols the meaning and significance of marriage from a Christological perspective. It is followed by the nuptial covenant that comprises the scrutiny of the consent of the spouses culminating in the public declaration of their consent, the joining of the hands of the spouses, and the blessing. It expounds the covenantal vision of marriage into which the spouses are entering through the celebration. In the scrutiny, George Karotemprel, The Syro-Malabar Church: The Church of St. Thomas Christians in India (Rajkot: Gujarat, 1999), 1; Michael Geddes, “A Short History of the Church of Malabar Together with the Synod of Diamper,” in Indian Church History Classics: The Nazranies, ed. George Menachery (Thrissur: South Asia Research Assistance Services, 1998), 31–55; Adolf E. Medlycott, “India and the Apostle Thomas,” in Indian Church History Classics: The Nazranies, ed. George Menachery (Thrissur: South Asia Research Assistance Services, 1998), 189– 203; George Cathanar, “The Orthodoxy of the St. Thomas Christians,” in Indian Church History Classics: The Nazranies, ed. George Menachery (South Asia Research Assistance Services, 1998), 149–86. 31 The Sacraments of the Syro-Malabar Church (Kakkanad: Commission for Liturgy, 2007), 125–50. Hereafter abbreviated as SMB. 30

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the couple are asked whether they understand the significance of marriage, the will of God and Law of Christ behind it, and the teachings of the Church on the sacrament of marriage (SMB, 144). The couple publicly express their consent, which confirms their readiness for an indissoluble and unitive marriage for their whole life.32 In the series of rituals, next comes the blessing of the thali, the knot, the most symbolic and traditional element of the Syro-Malabar sacrament of matrimony that is considered the “marriage badge.” The tying of the thali or minnu, a tiny gold pendant, around the neck of the bride is considered as the unique moment in the Syro-Malabar Rite. Traditionally the thali was a Hindu ritual with an image of a god or goddess engraved in it, which had the shape of a pear or that of the leaf of a banyan tree. When Christians adapted this symbol into their liturgy of marriage, they marked it with a cross made of twenty-one tiny gold beads, which distinguishes it from the Hindu thali. The cord used for tying the thali is made from twenty-one strands that are drawn from the manthrakodi, the wedding dress of the bride, entwined in seven sets of three.33 The cross embossed on the thali has great significance when it is understood within the framework of the mystery of the Christ–Church relationship. On the one hand, it demands the indivisible love and fidelity from the spouses as Christ loved the Church. On the other hand, it signifies that the spousal life is centered on Christ, who blesses the spouses throughout their life. The cross also signifies that marital life is not free from the challenges of life and therefore implies the need for divine assistance and strength to take up the crosses of life that may come on the way of married life. The formula for the blessing of the rings of the Syro-Malabar Church speaks of the ring as the symbol of “mutual love and fidelity” (SMB, 146) that signifies the commitment of the spouses to love and to be faithful to each other by the blessing of the Lord. After the mutual exchange of rings, the bridegroom covers the head of the bride with a new wedding garment, manthrakodi, which corresponds to the bridal veil used in many Eastern churches.34 The manthrakodi has significance for the whole of the couple’s life, which ultimately becomes the burial shroud of the wife. As the cloth is related to the personal life of every human being, “it frequently served to symbolize one’s self ” (cf. 2 Kgs 2:13-14; 9:13).35 It also signifies the act of entering into the covenantal relationship as expressed in Ezek. 16:8. The manthrakodi is, again, considered as “the symbol of loyalty, love, commitment and dedication to each other.”36 Further, it reminds the couple that by their

One of the particular laws of the Syro-Malabar Church explicitly makes sure that the prenuptial enquiry must be done before the betrothal: “Prior to betrothal the parties shall fill in the prenuptial enquiry form in front of their respective parish priests in order to make sure that they enter into the marriage covenant with due preparation, knowledge and consent (cc. 782–785).” Syro-Malabar Bishops’ Synod, Particular Laws of the Syro-Malabar Church, ed. Fr. James Kallumkal V. C. et al., vol. 2 (Kakkanad: Syro-Malabar Major Archiepiscopal Curia, 2003), § 160. 33 The number twenty-one is a significant number since it is a set of three and seven. The number three represents the Trinity and seven refers to the seven sacraments or seven days; thus, the thread used for tying the thali symbolizes that the life of the married couple is intertwined with the faith in Trinity and the Sacraments of the Church. Maniyattu, “Inculturation of the East Syrian Liturgy of Marriage by the St. Thomas Christians in India,” in Studies on the Liturgies of the Christian East: Selected Papers of the Third International Congress of the Society of Oriental Liturgy, Volos, May 26–30, 2010, ed. Steven Hawkes-Teeples, Bert Groen, and Stefanos Alexopoulos (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 174. 34 George Percy Badger, ed. The Nestorians and Their Rituals (London: Darf, 1987), 258. 35 Geoffrey F. Wood, “Ruth, Lamentations,” in The Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. Raymond Edward Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and Roland E. Murphy (London: Campman, 1984), 608; Jose Kochuparampil, “Theology of Raze: Mysteries of the Church in the East Syriac Tradition,” in East Syriac Theology: An Introduction, ed. Pauly Maniyattu (Satna (M.P), India: Ephrem’s Publication, 2007), 265. 36 Varghese Palathingal, Consortium Totius Vitae: Essence and Form of Marital Relationship in the Malabar Church (Kerala: Saint Thomas Academy for Research, 1992), 106. 32

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mutual love and enduring self-giving they “put on Christ” who loves the Church and sacrificed His life to earn the Church as His bride. The clothing imagery, the putting on and the putting off of the robe of glory or the robe of light, is one of the prominent themes in the Syrian tradition. The metaphor of the robe of glory, thus, links the “primordial and the Eschatological paradise” that reminds the entire salvation history and the “place of each individual Christian’s Baptism within the divine economy as a whole.”37 As each baptized person is exhorted to keep their robe of sanctity, the spouses are reminded to keep their wedding garment intact by being faithful to their marital union as indissoluble so that they can participate in the eschatological banquet with this robe of glory. What follows in the order of a series of rituals in Syro-Malabar marriage rite is the matrimonial pledge. By placing their right hands on the gospel, the couple repeats the words of the pledge after the priest. This solemnizes the promise of the couple, the core of which is their covenantal faithfulness and mutual adherence. This expresses and announces their commitment “to live in love and fidelity, and with oneness of mind” till death separates them, irrespective of whatever may happen in between (SMB, 148). The formula for the nuptial blessing by the priest with the hands extended over the couple once again reiterates and solemnly proclaims the significance of the grace of God in constituting the sacrament of marriage, which further enables the couple to fulfill their marital responsibilities. The nuptial blessing also repeats that marriage is a great mystery of a covenantal relationship of the bride and bridegroom after the model of the sacramental relationship between Christ and the Church. The invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the spouses forms part of this prayer as well. The Syro-Malabar Rite also provides a rubrical guideline that if the Eucharist is to follow after the celebration of marriage, “then it is resumed, beginning with the Onitha d’ Raze [Anthem of the mysteries].”38 Thus, after the proper rites of marriage, when it is celebrated within the Eucharist, it continues with the Liturgy of the Eucharist, exchange of peace, and distribution of the communion as in the Roman Rite. The liturgy of marriage concludes with a final blessing of the spouses and the ecclesial community.

REFLECTIONS ON THE RECEPTION OF THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL IN THE RITES Having completed the analysis of the two rites of marriage in the Catholic Church, this section will discuss how one could see the reception of the Second Vatican Council in these revised liturgies.

Integration of the Nuptial Blessing and Emphasis on the Equality of Man and Woman As already said, even before the Council, the nuptial blessing by the priest was part of the Syro-Malabar Rite of marriage. Contrary to this, one of the prominent changes that

Saint Ephrem, “Hymns of Paradise: Saint Ephrem the Syrian,” ed. Sebastian P. Brock (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990), 67; Sebastian Brock, “The Robe of Glory: A Biblical Image in the Syriac Tradition,” The Way 39:3 (1999): 253; Erik Peterson, “A Theology of Dress,” Communio: International Catholic Review 20 (Fall 1993): 565. 38 Onitha d’ Raze is the hymn sung by the congregation during the procession of the Eucharistic gifts to the altar in the Syro-Malabar Eucharistic celebration. 37

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appeared in the revised Roman Rite of marriage was the introduction of the nuptial blessing as an integral part of the rite. The prayer for the nuptial blessing in the present text affirms that marriage is a great mystery of the covenantal relationship between the bride and bridegroom that reflects the sacramental relationship between Christ and the Church. The nuptial blessing, thus, emphasizes the significance of the grace of God in establishing the sacrament of marriage, which alone will enable the couple to fulfill their marital responsibilities in a responsible manner. Additionally, the new rite of marriage also responded to the Council’s operational principle regarding the blessing of both the bride and bridegroom. This blessing of both partners, which replaced the earlier form of blessing given only to the bride, stresses the equal obligation and responsibilities of husband and wife. The creation of man and woman and their “dialogic nature”39 is the basis for the equal partnership between them. Moreover, sharing equal status, man and woman “mutually bestow and accept each other,” as emphasized by the Second Vatican Council (GS, §48). The created nature of human beings as man and woman and their responsibilities, which they equally share because of their created status, is repeated again and again in different ways throughout the rite: “formed man and woman in [God’s] own image,” “the human race, created by the gift of your goodness,” and “male and female you created them.” All of these allusions affirm that the celebration of marriage unites the polarity of two sexes, masculine and feminine but equal in status, and makes them one in love and flesh. This expressed accent on the equality of man and woman is easily recognizable in various liturgical actions of the rite of marriage. As is evident from the preceding analysis, an ecclesial procession took the place of the bridal procession, and a mutual exchange of rings between the spouses replaced the Tridentine option for the blessing over a single ring of the bride. This new gesture again underscores the equality between the bride and bridegroom and the equal rights and responsibilities they share to preserve their marital love and indissoluble unity. In these ways, the liturgy of marriage in the post-Vatican II period is characterized by a shift of focus from bride-centered rituals to couple-centered rituals, which focus on the union of two persons accepting the uniqueness of each person and complementing one another.

Active Participation of the Ecclesial Community Another noticeable change in the new liturgy of marriage after the Second Vatican Council is the recognition of the role of and the active participation of the ecclesial community in the celebration. One major limitation that characterized the pre-Vatican II rite of marriage was that it did not recognize any significant role for the ecclesial assembly present, which in consequence made them spectators of an event. The revised liturgical ceremonies, as mentioned, begin with the ecclesial procession, which substituted for the bridal procession of the previous rite. Thus, the ecclesial community physically accompanies the bride and the bridegroom together with the priest to the aisle. This gesture at the beginning thus reveals the ecclesial character of marriage; it is not a contract between two individuals,

The expression “dialogic nature” in relation to marriage was first used by Edward Schillebeeckx to explain the complementarity between man and woman. Underlining this dialogical nature of man and woman, Schillebeeckx presents “woman as complementary to man, woman as man’s life companion—man was not complete without woman, and both complemented each other in their humanity.” Schillebeeckx, Marriage, 20. 39

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but takes place within the ecclesial community, having the community as its witness and a source of strength and support in the new life ahead. Further, the community is recognized as an active witness of the matrimony, which is clearly attested by the constitutive role of two witnesses in the expression of the consent by the couple. Together with the spouses, the community actively praises the Lord and recognizes the consent they have declared in the Church. Moreover, in the Liturgy of the Word, the singing of hymns and prayers of the faithful by which the whole community prays for the newly wedded ensures and expresses the active participation of the congregation. In this manner, the active presence and participation of the community assures the couple of the support of this community throughout their marital life. During the celebration itself, the priest reminds and exhorts the community of this responsibility to support the spouses with affection, friendship, and assistance in times of need (ROCM, no. 52; SMB, 150). Thus, the recognition of the place of the ecclesial community in the rite of marriage announces that the new family that is born with the marriage is a constitutive unit of the Church.

Emphasis on the Inculturated Rites of Marriage The second principle of the Second Vatican Council for the renewal of the rites of marriage retains the teaching of Trent with regard to the various customs and traditions: “If any regions follow other praiseworthy customs and ceremonies when celebrating the sacrament of marriage, the council earnestly desires that by all means these be retained” (SC, 77). The present rites of marriage retained some of the customs that were in existence before the Council, like the joining of the hands and exchange of rings. The second edition of the Order of Celebrating Matrimony (English translation according to the second typical edition) has integrated some of the early Christian customs: the exchange of arras (coins) and the placing of the Lazo or the veil in the celebration of marriage.40 Further, there are some inculturated elements, like the thali and manthrakodi, in the Syro-Malabar marriage liturgy. From a Christian perspective, “tying the knot” is a cultural sensitivity, and the symbolic meaning attributed to the thali reminds the couple of the bond of love and unity between the spouses, their deepening mutual fidelity and accountability. From the perspective of tradition development, the use of manthrakodi is an example for the combining of Indian culture and the oriental liturgical tradition in giving expression to the unique Indian liturgical expression of Christian faith. The Chaldean rite of marriage, to which the Syro-Malabar Rite is indebted for its liturgical tradition, has the special blessing of the “wedding attire” during the celebration of marriage. There, the wedding attire signifies the sanctity of married life that will later become the robe of glory in the heavenly bridal chamber—eternity. The Syro-Malabar Church merged its rite of marriage with the Indian cultural marital practice of manthrakodi. Theological reflection and appropriate cultural analysis is needed to grasp the profundity and the significance of liturgical symbols because “a renewed sensitivity for symbols is at stake.”41 Thus, one must be able to convey the message behind the signs and

Anne McGowan, “Committed in Christ: A Historical Overview of Christian Marriage Rites,” in Catholic Marriage: A Pastoral and Liturgical Commentary, ed. Edward Foley (Collegeville, MN: Liturgy Training Publications, 2019), 34. 41 Joris Geldhof, “Liturgy Beyond Secular,” in Authentic Liturgical Renewal in Contemporary Perspective, ed. Uwe Michael Lang (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), 91. 40

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symbols through proper words and actions. For this purpose, the proper theology of each adapted element has to be incorporated into the liturgy either as prayers or as hymns. It will further help the worshipper to identify the theology behind the symbols and to differentiate them from the cultural elements.

CONCLUSION As already mentioned, the Second Vatican Council set out the guidelines and specified the operational principles for the reform of the rite of marriage. These principles, in responding to the signs of the time, underscored a progressive understanding of marriage in several ways. The analysis of the rites of marriage reveals how two distinctive liturgical traditions responded to the guidelines proposed by the Council in their respective renewal of the rite of marriage. By reflecting on the reception of the Council in the revision of the liturgies, we have emphasized that the renewed liturgies go far beyond the then existing rites of marriage by integrating the nuptial blessing into the rite of marriage, more firmly asserting a spouse-centered character of the sacrament of marriage, demanding the active participation of the ecclesial community, and emphasizing the need for the inculturated elements in the liturgy of marriage. Consequently, these two versions of renewed liturgies largely testify to their reception of the directives of the Council. Thus, a distinguishable transition is recognizable in the rites of marriage denoting the pre- and post-Second Vatican Council liturgy of marriage. Still, that does not mean the revised liturgies are finished works. Taking into account the prescription of the Council that authorized competent ecclesiastical authorities draw up their own rite, various language groups have created marriage rites for themselves.42 Consequently, liturgical renewal is an ongoing process responding to the faith experiences of the people and theological developments in the Church.

FURTHER READING Antonio, David William. An Inculturation Model of the Catholic Marriage Ritual. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2002. Bugnini, Annibale. The Reform of the Liturgy 1948–1975, translated by Matthew J. O’Connell. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990. The Book of the Holy Sacraments: Baptism, Chrismation, Holy Matrimony and the Order of House Blessing. Trivandrum: The Major Archiepiscopal Curia, 2017. The Order of Celebrating Matrimony: English Translation according to the Second Typical Edition. Totowa, NJ: Catholic Book Publishing Corporation, 2016. Schillebeeckx, Edward. Marriage: Human Reality and Saving Mystery. London: Sheed & Ward, 1988. Searle, Mark, and Kenneth W. Stevenson, eds. Documents of the Marriage Liturgy. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992. Turner, Paul. The Inseparable Love: A Commentary on the Order of Celebrating Matrimony in the Catholic Church. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2017.

Edward Foley and Richard N. Fragomeni, “The Marriage Rites: An International Perspective,” in Catholic Marriage: A Pastoral and Liturgical Commentary, ed. Edward Foley (Collegeville, MN: Liturgy Training Publications, 2019), 61–85. 42

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CHAPTER TWENTY

Sacramentality in Anointing of the Sick BRUCE T. MORRILL

INTRODUCTION What does it mean to assert that in anointing the sick, along with the pastoral care related to this sacramental ritual, people are healed? Although not one of the fundamental sacraments across contemporary Christian traditions—those being baptism and eucharist—the anointing of the sick, whether categorized as another sacrament or an occasional service, by virtue of its healing purpose has much to disclose about how churches understand and practice sacramentality and salvation. Sacramentality entails the biblical belief that bodily existence, as part of all creation, is the essential medium wherein humans encounter God. More precisely the Christian notion of sacramentality professes the divine–human encounter to be fully realized in the person of Christ Jesus, whose mission was and is one of salvation, of healing suffering humanity in a good but fallen creation. Among the many biblical symbols conveying what God has done for humanity and all creation in Jesus, salvation— along with redemption and justification—has proven among the most prominent. Whereas redemption and justification are economic and legal metaphors, salvation is a medicinal one, communicating Christ’s deliverance of humanity from suffering and sin in terms of the Greek sózó and the Latin salus, healing and safety, health and wholeness. Such a biblical, holistic approach is crucial to describing and analyzing both the potential and challenges to what practical Christian faith as sacramental and salvific has to offer in our contemporary late-modern, globalized context. The Second Vatican Council (1962–5), with the first of its four major constitutions addressing sacred liturgy, Sacrosanctum concilium, launched for not only Roman Catholicism but also many other Christian communions focused purposeful liturgical reform and renewal in service to the church in the modern world. Such a mandate, of course, presumed that much had gone wrong or at least had so adapted itself to prior historical contexts as to require a return to sounder principles in early sources of tradition. This essay will begin, then, by very briefly reviewing what had gone so wrong with sacramental anointing of the sick as to require reform and renewal, and this as symptomatic of the church’s problems but also potential to serve well its members and wider society in the present era. The next move, then, will be to look at modern society, how its dualistic and instrumental views of the human person-body, particularly with regard to sickness and health, needs this very

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service, for the sake of both every precious individual and the church, within society, as a whole. Equipped with that overview and analysis of the contemporary conditions in which believers observe and experience sickness, the remainder of the essay will unfold the sacramentality in the restored liturgical tradition of anointing the sick.

SACRAMENTAL HEALING: CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES AND POTENTIAL IN THE CHURCH Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy mandated the promotion and reform of the anointing of the sick as follows: 73.  “Extreme unction,” which may also and more properly be called “anointing of the sick,” is not a sacrament for those only who are at the point of death. Hence, as soon as anyone of the faithful begins to be in danger of death from sickness or old age, the fitting time for that person to receive this sacrament has certainly already arrived. 74.  In addition to the separate rites for anointing of the sick and for viaticum, a continuous rite shall be drawn up, structured so that the sick person is anointed after confessing and before receiving viaticum. 75.  The number of anointings is to be adapted to the circumstances, the prayers that belong to the rite of anointing are to be so revised that they correspond to the varying conditions of the sick who receive the sacrament.1 With those words the council set in motion a radical change in the theology, ritual, and pastoral implementation of this rite in contrast to how it had been understood and practiced for well more than a millennium in Western Christianity. In brief, the rite had evolved from its ancient form as a source of healing, comfort, and strength for the seriously ill (a tradition that Eastern Orthodoxy never abandoned) to the sacrament a priest administered to a person on the deathbed, that is, “at the very end” (Latin, in extremis). The ritual thereby became extreme unction, displacing the sound, earlier eucharistic theology and practice of Christian death. For roughly the first seven centuries the church’s rite for the dying had been a special service of Holy Communion whereby the Christ, who in church and sacrament had continuously been the believer’s way, truth, and life, now accompanied the person in the final passage from this life. The rite acquired the name Viaticum (Latin, via tecum, “on the way with you”). By the early Middle Ages, however, confident commendation of the dying, grounded in Christians’ sharing together in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection through baptism and eucharist, had largely ceded to fear of God’s judgment of sinners at death. Biblically based sacramental unity, both of the rites of the church and all the members together as the church, lost out to a fragmentary practice of the sacraments as life-passage rituals and in the case of the eucharist, as the priest’s sacrificial memorial of Christ’s atoning death for sinners. Forgiveness of individuals’ sins, the most serious of which threatened the soul’s eternal damnation, became one of the powers of the priesthood, administered in the sacrament that became known as confession. The majority of the people received Holy Communion but rarely, as the necessity of prior sacramental confession proved onerous. Vatican Council II, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy: Sacrosanctum concilium (4 December 1963), nos. 73–5, in The Liturgy Documents: A Parish Resource: Volume One, 4th ed. (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2004), 17–18. 1

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By the High Middle Ages, the sacramental focus on sin and its pardon through priestly ministration had come to impinge on the anointing of the sick, as well. In ancient tradition the local bishop had consecrated the oil for anointing the sick, as needed, during the Sunday celebration of the eucharist, with a lengthy prayer blessing God for the biblical history of healing and invoking the Holy Spirit so as to empower the oil. Ritual customs for home use of the blessed oil included both rubbing it on the body and drinking it, depending on the ailment, either by self-administration or, increasingly, the service of an ordained minister. The apostolic assurance of Christ’s healing work in the prayerful celebration of anointing came from a pastoral passage in the letter of James (5:14-16), instructing the Christian community to care for the sick by having elders anoint them “in the name of the Lord” and with “the prayer of faith” that would “save” and “raise them up.” The renewed gift of salvation would include forgiveness, should the sick person’s suffering and distress include awareness of any past sins. With the medieval focus on identifying the nature and gravity of people’s individual sins, however, as well as the priest’s exclusive power to administer forgiveness sacramentally, the anointing of the sick landed strictly in the hands of the priest at the deathbed. Since penance was the sacrament that judged and delivered individuals from eternal damnation for the sins confessed, extreme unction was held to release the dying person from temporal punishment for sins, punishment that would have to be served after death before attaining heaven. This made the rite utterly transactional, with the priest anointing the five bodily senses plus the heart (breast) of the dying person, cleansing each of the residues of the types of sins associated with them, preferably as close to the moment of death as possible. In fact, the custom evolved that the priest was the authority who declared the person dead at the conclusion of the rite. Thus did unctionem in extremis become popularly known as “last rites.” Western medieval theology, including a decree of the Second Council of Lyon (1274), identified seven precise sacraments whereby ordained clergy ministered divine grace for specific human needs of justification and sanctification. The sacramental rites, as well as the priests or bishops administering them, acquired a mechanistic character, functioning on an unperceivable (metaphysical) plane of reality. In such a philosophical system, grace, the encompassing biblical symbol of God’s generous favor toward humanity, became divided into particular graces whose effectiveness the power of the priest administering the prescribed words and physical symbols absolutely assured. In that sense, sacraments got identifiable, many even came to think measurable, results. In the face of suffering and physical decline in health and the inevitable failure of the body, what the church’s sacrament of extreme unction could provide was the soul’s purification for eternal life, as well as the body’s preparation for the promised final resurrection of the just. Citing the clergy’s widespread abuse of the sacraments for financial purposes (fees charged for sacraments and indulgences for Masses for the dead), the Protestant reformers rejected the late-medieval priestly sacramental system. With regard to extreme unction, John Calvin may have leveled the most trenchant criticism, condemning priests’ anointings “of half-dead carcasses” as an abuse of the pastoral care prescribed in the letter of James.2 The evolving Protestant traditions’ rejection of the Roman sacramental system included the discontinuation of not only extreme unction but also any anointing rite for

Cited in English translation in, Charles W. Gusmer, And You Visited Me: Sacramental Ministry to the Sick and the Dying, rev. ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, [1984] 1990), 33. 2

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the seriously ill. Roman Catholicism’s own program for reform in the Council of Trent (1545–63) included the commendable assertion that the anointing was not only for the dying but, rather, for the benefit of the dangerously ill, to console with divine mercy and strengthen against fear and despair. The correction fell on deaf ears, however, as both Roman Catholic clergy and laity continued only calling the priest to “bring the oils” to the deathbed for extreme unction. The popular custom of referring to the sacrament as “last rites” persisted across Roman Catholicism right through the twentieth century. That quick historical review positions us to appreciate the quite radical reform Vatican Council II intended for the anointing rite. Diplomatically introducing the sacrament by its long regnant title, “extreme unction,” the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy gently but firmly asserts it to be “more properly” called “the anointing of the sick” (no. 73). The council thereby effectively renewed Trent’s earlier effort to orient the sacrament as one of pastoral care and healing for persons in the throes of grave illness. The constitution presses the point by indicating that the very symbolism in the name “extreme unction” is unsuitable to a sound, original, apostolic nature of the rite, spelling out the implications in the ensuing couple sentences. Since the sacrament is not exclusively for those on the verge of expiring, its ministration is required once a person becomes dangerously ill. To free its pastoral potential from the old mechanistic formula, the constitution mandates flexibility in determining the number of places to anoint the given person’s body so as to provide healing comfort and strength, along with the composition of multiple prayers suited to a range of situations of sickness (see no. 75). The sacrament of anointing the sick stands, once again and at long last, in its own right, distinct from Viaticum, thereby pointing to the latter’s proper role for the dying (see no. 74), while a continuous ritual of the two nonetheless is to be provided for situations in which mortal illness is sudden or swift (picture the hospital emergency room, for example). The council not only unleashed the pastoral, biblical, truly traditional potential of the sacrament of the sick itself; rather, the radical changes it so briefly delineated touched on the very nature both of every sacramental rite of the church and of the ministry to them. For both, the watchwords henceforth were to be pastoral and adaptable, for real persons and circumstances, while true to the biblical and traditional roots of the saving and sanctifying—healing—service constituting their very institution. This would require a radical change in the clergy and laity’s understandings and expectations of the sacramental liturgies and rites of the church. No longer were they to be perfunctory, clerically dispensed rituals for the benefit of the immaterial realm of the soul, however fundamental that value is to Christian faith. Liturgy and sacraments, rather, were to serve the holistic human needs of the church, in its individual members but always as members together, as community, in communion as the body of Christ. Rather than isolated life-passage rituals only tangentially related to baptism and eucharist, the council’s unifying vision for the entire sacramental life of the church it summed up in the symbol of the paschal mystery—Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and glorification. Jesus carried out that saving mission in concrete, historical time and place, revealing God’s glory in human salvation. The glorification of Christ, however, did not end in first-century Jerusalem but, rather, continues in the salvation of the real lives of humans in specific times and places, in historical contexts. Such is the sacramentality fundamental to the Christian faith, whereby the Holy Spirit shapes lives not in a sacred vacuum but always in cultural contexts. And so, the contemporary restoration and reform of sacramental rites must be pursued true to sound tradition but attentive to the bodily, cultural, and social conditions of late-modern humanity.

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Drawing together much of the theological progress of the ecumenical Liturgical Movement of the previous decades, most importantly by grounding the sacramental– liturgical life of the church in the paschal mystery, the scope of Vatican II’s constitution on the liturgy as charter document for liturgical restoration reached far wider than Roman Catholicism. Numerous Anglican and Protestant bodies not only quickly embraced Sacrosanctum concilium but also took up the ensuing new ritual books and Lectionary for the Mass as models and guides for their own liturgical renewals. While this was readily the case with baptism and eucharist, given the common belief in their Gospel ordinance, by the 1990s orders or services of healing, including gestures of anointing, appeared in Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, Disciples of Christ, and Lutheran books of worship. To date, these have only begun to realize limited degrees of practice in local churches. For those congregations undertaking healing services of anointing, the practice is attractive due to increasing desires for more holistic approaches to sickness and health, as well as to becoming aware of how beneficial to many the new Roman Catholic rites for pastoral care of the sick were proving to be.3 Still, the fact that the holistic, biblically based revitalization of the original tradition of anointing the sick with oil and prayer continues to realize only uneven adoption and success among both Catholics and Protestants, clergy and laity, points to persistent compartmentalized and instrumental approaches to not only religion but also medicine, sickness, and health. Some description and analysis of contemporary society’s medical and market cultures is essential to considering the challenges to and potential for revitalizing sacramental–pastoral care of the sick in the late-modern context.

SICKNESS AND HEALTH IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY: PROGRESS AND PROBLEMS Essential to recognizing and promoting the sacramentality inherent to anointing the sick is an acknowledgment that what a given people mean by sickness, how they identify and experience it, is deeply embedded in their culture. If the renewing and reforming imperative is for ritual in service to the sick, then what do we mean by sickness, who qualifies as sick? Across cultures the meaning of sickness and identifying the sick, in general or particular, can prove controversial, fraught with ambiguity and even danger. Upon reflection, that this is so is not surprising, since sickness can throw individuals, families, local communities, and even entire societies into crisis. For churches striving for better pastoral ministry to word and sacraments, the social–scientific disciplines of medical anthropology and cultural criticism can provide basic analysis of how sickness and health are largely understood and valued in contemporary society, with its consumerdriven, technologically mediated culture. What has come to characterize health in late-modern society is an overarching image of the individual person in complete physical and mental well-being, comfortably secure financially and socially, fully in control. More concretely, this takes the form of perpetuated youthful appearance and vitality, requiring the denial—the social erasure—of aging and death. With an uncritical faith in unlimited progress in medical science (a notion many

For descriptions and theological assessments of these trends among Protestant congregations from Reformed and Lutheran perspectives, see the articles by Matthew Myer Boulton and Thomas H. Schattauer, respectively, in Liturgy: Journal of the Liturgical Conference 22:3 (2007): 21–40. 3

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professionals actually try to temper), the middle-to-wealthier social classes have made medicine the basis of modern hope, “a hope that subtly suggests that perhaps sickness, pain, and death are not inevitable after all.”4 This altogether amounts to a particular symbolism and myth of immortality. Such an ultimately unattainable goal for health is perfectly suited to a market-driven society. Ours is a consumer culture wherein fundamental value resides in individual commodities—products and services—pressed upon individuals by an advertising industry focused even further on individual body parts and functions, personal needs and desires. As it has evolved over the past century, commercial marketing creates the narrative for a product, a story with a captivating image or phrase, a singular symbol that can shape targeted individuals’ imaginations of the good, if not perfect, life, graspable through yet one more necessary product or service for a particular imperfection or lack in the individual. These altogether make for a social imaginary projecting health in glossy images of people the consumer has never nor will ever meet or actually know. The body is reduced to but one of its fundamental human dimensions—the physical, itself fractured into parts for targeted marketing—while the social and traditional dimensions of personal bodily life are cast in secondary, tertiary, or even expendable roles. Over the course of the twentieth century modern medicine itself developed as an industrial complex parallel and responding to the market-driven individual person’s body as the site for constructing and maintaining health and happiness. Medical anthropologists have come to identify modern healthcare as a biomedical culture. Biomedicine is a mechanistic approach to the human organism that approaches sickness in terms of disease, isolating and identifying symptoms, related physical evidence and causes (such as accidents or exposures), so as to determine a course of treatment with a reasonable expectation of improvement or even elimination of the harmful condition. The culture of biomedicine is a technological one of scientific research, trials, tests, pharmacology, surgery, and physical, chemical, and radiation therapies, whose advances have undeniably benefited large (but by no means all) swaths of humanity over the past century and a half. The symbol for success in biomedicine is the cure, an ideal based on undeniable achievements in vaccines, surgical methods, epidemiology, antibiotics, and a broad range of treatments for diseases specific to the human body’s composition (such as cardiology, oncology, etc.). People in advanced technological, commercial society have largely, as one academic critic puts it,5 embraced the biomedical model dogmatically, reducing the notion of health to absence of afflicting symptoms of diseases specific to certain bodily organs or systems. Total well-being is the expected ongoing condition of individuals, although reflection upon what such wellness entails tends to be lacking. The overall program, rather, is one of avoidance of negative ailments and isolated treatments of them as they arise. Biomedicine participates in modernity’s pervasive body–mind dualism, whereby the physical body is an instrument maintained and enhanced for personally unique experiences of happiness, which, ironically, conform to mass-marketed images. While biomedical culture, among

Joel James Shuman and Keith G. Meador, Heal Thyself: Spirituality, Medicine, and the Distortion of Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 43. 5 See David B. Morris, Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 1–20, 240–5. I intermittently draw upon Morris’s explanation of biomedical and biocultural approaches to sickness throughout this section. 4

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both professionals and laity, has traditionally attributed highest authority to the figure of the doctor, again, it is the fragmentation into specializations, ranked according to the complexity and mortal threat of particular diseases and health crises, that sets up a hierarchy of social and financial power across the medical profession. The reasoning and pressures of the market (equating human value to market value), unsurprisingly, have factored increasingly in biomedical culture, reaching a certain breaking point. By the end of the twentieth century the biomedical healthcare system had begun recognizing the detrimental health and financial costs caused by a lack of general practitioners (once known as “the family doctor”), a career choice that high-pressured, specializationfavoring medical education devalued. An irony in the overarching myth of modern medicine and the power of the doctor is that successful cures are actually decades-long processes in the aggregate, through trial and error, with advances and setbacks. The rates of definitive diagnoses and actual biomedical cures in particular individual cases are actually limited and, depending on particular diseases and personal or environmental circumstances, can be quite low. This puts immense social and economic pressure on institutions, especially hospital systems, in the biomedical world. While dread of suffering and death, for self and loved ones, is understandable within the human condition, a body-instrumentalization culture, one that moreover denies death through commodification of the youthful appearance, conditions people to expect, if not demand, personal positive results. As part of modern society, biomedical culture necessarily includes market competition, a competition for people’s faith and trust in their professionals, products, services—their brand. For that the marketing industry must enlist symbols—images and adages—from society’s wider cultural and even older traditional sources, so that people will find their story connecting with a given medical brand, whether that be over-the-counter or prescription medications, clinical therapies, or hospital services. Advertising firms creating commercials for medications and an expanding array of healthcare products predictably build on images of youthful strength and beauty—adapted even to upper-middle-aged persons—symbiotically with the entertainment industry. Healthcare marketing strategies can stretch ethical limits, especially in the extent to which they capitalize on widespread religious and nonreligious American beliefs in miracles.6 Two examples can open into discussion of how these modern forces place stresses on the sacramentality of pastoral care of the sick and can impinge on contemporary Christians’ openness to sacramental anointing of the sick. In one case, a children’s hospital ran a cover story on its glossy quarterly magazine proclaiming, “Expect a Miracle.” As one medical ethicist has argued, people are generally unsophisticated in their knowledge or even acquaintance with the myriad complications statistically impinging on the capabilities of medical technology and physicians in practice. Marketing rhetoric of miracles can engender false expectations of what the hospital can deliver.7 The ethical character of such commercial promotion becomes even more tenuous when, as in a second case, carried out by a religiously affiliated healthcare system.

A Pew Forum on the Study of Religion survey found nearly 80 percent of Americans believe in miracles. See, “Do You Believe in Miracles? Most Americans Do,” National Public Radio, February 23, 2010), http://npr.org/ templa​tes/story/story.php?stor​yid=124007​551. See also Tom W. Rice, “Believe It or Not: Religious and Other Paranormal Beliefs in the United States,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42:1 (2003): 93–106. 7 See William E. Stempsey, “Scientific Contribution: Miracles and the Limits of Medical Knowledge,” Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 5 (2002): 1–9. 6

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In 2014, a large Catholic hospital system launched a multimedia advertising campaign featuring a verse extracted from the Bible. Large banners on the outside of their buildings read, “For with God nothing shall be impossible. Luke 1:37,” trimmed down to “Nothing shall be impossible” for their website and advertising.8 Public criticism shortly followed, questioning whether divine guarantee to medical services preyed on people at their most vulnerable, while leaving chronically ill or disabled persons feeling abandoned by God. Defending the campaign, spokespersons for both the hospital system and advertising agency explained it as “inspirational and aspirational,” an assertion of hope congruent, they said, with their mission. The photographer providing the campaign’s images of exultant patients commented, “Miracles happen every day, and this scripture is incredibly inspiring and hopeful to me.”9 The initially controversial but enduring (because commercially successful) brand for that healthcare system is a textbook case of how commodification works in marketdriven, consumer culture. The marketing team extracted “this scripture” (the term itself a powerful symbol) out of its specific biblical context to present a generic message of hope attuned to their specific market. Marketing shapes consumers by isolating symbols (images, words, phrases) around which to create an entirely new (if not exciting, buzzgenerating) narrative for consumers to incorporate into their “experience.” Yet, the proper context of Lk 1:37 is the Angel Gabriel fully assuring an incredulous virgin Mary that she will conceive and bear a son by the power of the Holy Spirit. That nothing will be impossible with God, taken not as “a scripture” but within its entire biblical unit of text, is not a generic inspiration of hope but, rather, the guarantee of what would definitely happen to Mary. When isolated and inserted into the modern context of a mechanistic miracle-expecting culture, that single biblical verse becomes a prooftext for the quite different narrative of that religiously affiliated healthcare system’s brand. The content of Christian tradition, or at least Christian religiosity, becomes an instrument for the medical system. In the end, perhaps ironically, those two cases of hospital marketing give evidence that a reduction of sickness and health exclusively to the technical procedures of biomedicine is insufficient to human needs and expectations. In doing so, moreover, they point to not only people’s need to narrate their situation into meaningfulness but also how delicate, possibly dangerous, the conflating of the scientific and religious can be. The poverty of thinking sickness and health only in a mechanistic, instrumental framework results in an expectant dependence on the almighty doctor and Almighty God to deliver a positively determined biomedical result. Given the statistical evidence for the moderate to low success rates for complex medical procedures or treatments of acute and chronic diseases (the brute fact of mortality), the potential for exclusively instrumentalist approaches to serious sickness to set individuals and loved ones up for disappointment, even devastation, is not insignificant. Without denying the myriad benefits of biomedicine, medical anthropologists and ethicists are developing descriptions and analyses of sickness and health more holistically realistic to the human condition, the total person as physical, psychological, cultural, and traditional. Such holistic theorizing resonates with the fundamentally sacramental view

S aint Thomas Health/Ascension homepage (emphasis in the original), http://nothi​ngsh​allb​eimp​ossi​ble.com. Maria Mayo, “Biblical Hospital Advertising: Message of Hope or Despair?” June 29, 2014, http://huffp​ost.com/ entry/hospi​tal-adve​rtis​ing-mes​s_b_​5534​436. 8 9

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of the human person in the world outlined at the outset of this essay, thereby promising insight and resources for Christian sacramental companionship and ministry to the sick. Such an alternative worldview requires a different primary narrative in people’s lives; for Christians, that would be the paschal mystery. Based in scripture, mysterium entails the revelation of God’s wisdom and saving desire for humanity, definitively given in Christ’s death and resurrection (his pasch, passover), into which the Spirit draws each believer’s total life, in whatever circumstances. Recent decades have witnessed a growing array of positive, practical alternatives to biomedicine’s modern predominance that cultural theorist David Morris has helpfully categorized as a “biocultural model.”10 The biocultural approach views each instance of human sickness as a combination of the biological—the person’s bodily organs, structure, and functions—with a number of interrelated sociocultural conditions and resources— economic, educational, familial, religious, legal, political, artistic. Illness is not merely a biological condition treated for a potential cure but, rather, a process of nature and culture, of the bodily person’s whole life in context, the desired outcome for which is healing. The ethnomedical distinction between curing and healing rests on the larger observation that health is not merely the absence of biological malfunction but, rather, a comprehensive experience of well-being not dependent on the physical alone. In this model, how a person makes life meaningful comprehensively in context frames how one interprets and utilizes the resources of biomedicine. The strength of one’s cultural narrative, which by definition should be communal, works in tandem but not confusion or conflation with the instrumental services of professional medicine. Biomedicine, on the one hand, diagnoses and treats disease. Religion, on the other, is one among many cultural resources that may shape—and for some believers, primarily shapes—how people experience and navigate illness, how they face and integrate serious sickness within the ongoing narrative they construct as their life story. Such are the key elements for processes of healing to take place with and for particular persons. Thus, for example, celebrating the anointing of the sick on the eve of major surgery may bring healing strength to the patient, as well as accompanying loved ones or caregivers. The proclaimed word, prayer, and sacramental gestures frame the person’s apprehension and hope within biblical narratives and traditional symbols of Christ as compassionate, healing companion and, through the silent power of the Spirit, source of wisdom and knowledge for the surgical team. In another case, a person might undergo a biomedically successful surgery from which follow physical side effects, daunting changes to living conditions, or financial difficulties constituting a further state of affliction. Biocultural or ethnomedical analysis would say that whereas the medical professionals could conclude they had accomplished a cure (or beneficial degree of cure), the person is yet still in need of healing. Restoration of health would entail finding meaning in and acceptance of one’s overall condition so as to find strength for going forward. Recognition of that type of holistic human need for healing is the key to restoring rites of anointing as sacramental– pastoral service to Christians experiencing acute or chronic illness, or decline in elderly condition, of such gravity as to require making major adjustments to their entire way of life.

Morris, Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age, 9, 12, 19, 71–7.

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SAVING AND RAISING UP THE SICK: SACRAMENTAL MINISTRY OF ANOINTING Whereas Vatican II laid out the theological imperatives for reforming the liturgy and sacraments of the church, the production of the reformed rites was the work of commissions over the next two decades. The Congregation for Divine Worship completely dispensed with any language of extreme unction in producing the 1972 Ordo Unctionis infirmorum eorumque pastoralis curae (literal translation, Order of Anointing the Sick and Their Pastoral Care). The eventual English edition, with Vatican-approved slight adaptations and additions, for use in US dioceses, is titled “Pastoral Care of the Sick: Rites of Anointing and Viaticum” (1983). No longer a mechanistic deathbed ritual delivering results for the body and soul beyond the grave, anointing has been restored to the sound, apostolic tradition of pastorally ministering to the sacramentality of the seriously ill person, as the General Introduction of the rite makes clear: This sacrament gives the grace of the Holy Spirit to those who are sick: by this grace the whole person is helped and saved, sustained by trust in God, and strengthened against the temptations of the Evil One and against the anxiety over death. Thus the sick person is able not only to bear suffering bravely, but also to fight against it. A return to physical health may follow the reception of this sacrament if it will be beneficial to the sick person’s salvation. If necessary, the sacrament also provides the sick person with the forgiveness of sins and the completion of Christian penance.11 The instruction exudes a holistic sacramental view, with regard both to the sick person and divine grace. Grace is the action of the Holy Spirit, the very power of God for saving and sanctifying humans as enacted and revealed through Christ’s paschal mystery. The sanctifying grace specific to the sacrament of anointing is the comfort, strength, and support of the church’s faith precisely at moments when an elderly or sick person reaches a point of crisis or fatigue, a difficult turn making one susceptible to anxiety, despair, guilt, or a wavering trust in God. Thus it is in conjunction with hand-laying and applying oil that the prayer of faith not only comprises a key element of the sacrament of anointing but, according to the General Introduction, grounds the entire rite as healing action, a special moment of grace, an act of salvation: In the anointing of the sick, which includes the prayer of faith (see Jas 5:15), faith itself is manifested. Above all this faith must be made actual both in the minister of the sacrament and, even more importantly, in the recipient. The sick person will be saved by personal faith and the faith of the Church, which looks back to the death and resurrection of Christ, the source of the sacrament’s power (see Jas 5:15), and looks ahead to the future kingdom that is pledged in the sacraments.12 Divine grace in this sacrament becomes a reality not on some abstract plain of existence but through the ritual engagement—body, mind, and spirit—of the recipient, ministers, and other participants assembled. Christ comes as healer in the anointing of the sick through his Spirit’s confirmation of the ill or elderly person’s inestimable worth in the reality of his or her condition, the assurance of faith mediated through the church’s International Committee on English in the Liturgy, Pastoral Care of the Sick: Rites of Anointing and Viaticum (Washington, DC: National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1983), no. 6. Hereafter, PCS. 12 PCS, no. 7. 11

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ministry of word and sacrament. Such a profound acknowledgment of faith’s role in the grace of the sacrament gets at the heart of why the instruction condemns identifying the anointing of the sick with the deathbed and expects pastors to teach the faithful to request the sacrament for self or others as soon as a person’s illness or decline in old age becomes serious. The celebration of the sacrament may be repeated at any point the person’s condition recurs or worsens. No single part of the liturgy of anointing is explicitly designated as “the prayer of faith.” Rather, bodily enactment of the faith unfolds throughout its movements: a liturgy of the word leads into a litany, the laying on of hands, the prayer over the oil followed by the anointing, and the prayer after anointing. The prayer of faith suffuses the entire rite, taking different forms of expression and, thus, actualizing faith—the human response to divine grace—through a number of ritually related symbolic acts engaging a range of human capacities for knowledge and emotion, realizing salvation for body and soul. While the church cites the apostolic basis for the ritual in Jas 5:14-16 and Mk 6:13, any number of Gospel narratives, paired with psalmody, may constitute the proclamation of the word helpful in the particular pastoral case. The litany entails brief invocations bespeaking the profound human needs of the sick, to which those assembled respond, “Lord, have mercy,” a prayer consoling in its repetition.13 The priest performs the laying on of hands in silence, allowing the symbolic gesture to bespeak prayer not only in the physical imagery and touch but also in the silent thoughts all may have at that moment. While primarily “the biblical gesture of healing and indeed Jesus’ own usual manner of healing,” the hand-laying “indicates that this particular person is the object of the Church’s prayer of faith” while also functioning as “an invocation … for the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the sick person.”14 The Spirit’s power in the gesture is thereby not only as comforter but also commissioner, confirming the person’s Christ-like vocation even in weakness—an image of the cross. The prayer over the oil, whether a thanksgiving for oil already consecrated by the local bishop or an actual blessing thereof, includes the prayer forms of anamnesis and, if consecrating, epiclesis. The thanksgiving or blessing nurtures faith by recounting the merciful works of God in Christ and proclaiming the Spirit’s so acting again now. Biblical anointing imagery entails healing and restoration but, moreover, empowerment for one’s divine calling even in this difficult condition. The anointing of forehead and hands, as well as possibly any other place on the body related to the person’s affliction, is accompanied with this blessing: “Through this holy anointing may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit … May the Lord, who frees you from sin, save you and raise you up.” The words of the prayer elicit the imagery of healing in the New Testament, wherein sin is not narrowly a matter of individual immoral acts but an encompassing condition of guilt, failure, alienation, fear and loss, with death ever lurking in its shadow.15 The equation of salvation with being raised up not only paraphrases the letter of James but places the healing of this sick person within the scope of Christ’s entire saving work, namely, the power of the paschal mystery of

or the successive portions of the rite described in this paragraph, see PCS, nos. 121–4. F PCS, no. 106. Then, no. 107: “The prayer for blessing the oil of the sick reminds us … that the oil of anointing is the sacramental sign of the presence, power, and grace of the Holy Spirit.” 15 See James L. Emepereur, Prophetic Anointing: God’s Call to the Sick, the Elderly, and the Dying, Message of the Sacraments, ed. Monika K. Hellwig, no. 7 (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1982), 153–4, 171–2, 179. 13 14

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his death and resurrection. Therein lies the assurance of God’s love and mercy not as a wish but as a realized promise, help for the sick coming as divine consolation in Christ’s deliverance through life and death and the sure, empowering hope of sharing in his resurrection. Finally, for the prayer after anointing the priest selects from several options pertinent to the nature of the person’s infirmity: a couple of general versions are followed by those for terminal illness, advanced age, before surgery, for a child, and for a young person. The content and variety of those prayers bespeak ways Christ heals in the celebration of the rite, as well as the concrete shape that the practice of faith takes in the lives of people suffering various health misfortunes. The two general versions of the prayer after anointing each collect the theological wisdom of the entire rite by articulating the impact that psychological and spiritual stresses can have upon a person’s sickness and recovery, not shying from the existential link between sickness and the felt need for forgiveness from sin. In addition to touching on that crucial healing dimension of the sacrament, the prayer’s intercessions pair afflictions of mind and body with desired healing gifts: fear/courage, affliction/patience; dejection/ hope, loneliness/support of the community. Those needs and desires resonate with the types of illness prevalent in postmodern culture: cancer, chronic pain, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, depression, and anxiety disorders. These are all medically treatable conditions that nonetheless have strong societal, psychological, and cultural dimensions. We are learning anew that mind and body cannot be separated in the pursuit of health, as well as that human corporality is not only a physical but also a social and traditional reality.16 For believers afflicted with acute or chronic disease the sacrament of anointing situates the quest for restored health in the healing assurance of Christ’s desire for their wholeness and the church’s support in their striving for it. Preaching, counseling, and pastoral care in relation to anointing must also communicate to the sick person and all concerned that, as in many other situations in life, God’s grace is active in the honest expression of our desires. Faith is experienced as our confidently, or at least honestly, letting God know what we want and trusting that God will grant, in divine goodness and wisdom, what we truly need. In this way, “full health” is not the modernly imagined state of bodily perfection but, rather, an ongoing negotiation of the meaning of one’s life, in its concrete conditions, in relation to the message, vision, and promise of the Gospel. The complete elimination of disease symptoms does not necessarily define health, nor does the prevalence of such symptoms necessarily constitute the need for sacramental anointing. Each person’s situation is truly unique. In the case of cancer, for example, the need for anointing would seem quite obvious, given its dangerous, deadly possibilities. The sacrament is best celebrated at the outset of diagnosis and treatment so as to place the believer’s well-being in the faithful embrace of Christ and the church. In comparison to cancer, other postmodern illnesses may require even greater attention to the person’s total subjective health condition in discerning the need for the anointing of the sick. Is the person suffering from illness to such a degree as to See Morris, Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age, 67, 17, 39, 51, 77, 115–28. For elucidation of the I-body or person-body as a triple body of nature, culture, and tradition, see Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, trans. Patrick Madigan and Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 146–52. 16

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necessitate renegotiating one’s life in relation to self, others, and God? In the case of many contemporary forms of sickness a primary dimension of the suffering experienced by individuals is shame or fear of stigmatization. Thus, one person with a given chronic disease might be distraught and in need of anointing, while another person with the same disease may not. The rite heals, again, not in the sense of completely eliminating the complex psychological, physiological, and social conditions of the disease but, rather by manifesting God’s presence to and empowerment of the person’s life, renegotiating the person’s sense of self-worth and meaning. Celebration of the sacrament, whether in a private setting of just the pastoral minister(s), sick person, and perhaps a few others or, alternatively, in a larger communal liturgy, should also prophetically call the members of the church to adjust their own perceptions of the chronically ill person and his or her place in society and the faith community. Celebration of the sacrament heals by renegotiating the sick or elderly person’s place within the mystical body of Christ, the fellowship of God’s reign.

CONCLUSION In whichever contemporary tradition it may be practiced—Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant—the anointing of the sick affords Christians the possibility of experiencing divine healing in the context of holistically practiced and communally shared faith. As with all traditions in Christianity, the foundation is biblical revelation, while the flourishing depends on believers’ making that scripturally based faith, focused through the symbol of the paschal mystery, the fundamental or overarching narrative for their lives. The effectiveness of the occasional celebration of the anointing of the sick depends on its participants’ regularly hearing and responding to the proclaimed word of God in the Sunday assembly, in which the Gospel reading is the highlight, complemented by tasting and sharing the goodness of the Lord at table. A high percentage of the stories throughout the gospels are narratives of Jesus healing a broad spectrum of people suffering the full range of illnesses in the ancient Mediterranean world, diseases so often caused and exacerbated by financial and social poverty under imperial oppression. That world had physicians, which the teacher and healer—the prophet—from Nazareth certainly was not. Through a wealth of details consistent with what anthropologists categorize as ethnomedicine, the gospels depict Jesus as a folk healer, one who changed not only the physical but also the social statuses of the sick and “sinners” whom he encountered. In healing the demon possessed, the “unclean” lepers, the blind (eyes useless due to their “darkened” hearts), the chronically hemorrhaging woman, the moonstruck boy, the tax collectors and sinners, and more, Jesus consistently brought salvation to individuals and the communities around them as a whole. That holistic offer of salvation, amidst such economic, ethnic, religious, and political divisions, he solidified and sustained through meals, the bonding of people at table. The gospels, as well as two millennia of Christian tradition, profess Jesus as Christ (Messiah) and Lord, a title borne of faith in him as raised bodily from an excruciating death in service to a broken, sinful world. In that framework are all the healing stories to be appropriated. When members of the community of faith embrace that Gospel narrative as their own, allowing the two to interpret each other with the Spirit’s inspiration, they attune their lives for sacramental moments of original, holistic healing, wherein the anointed sick, as members of Christ’s body, are saved and raised up.

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FURTHER READING Brunk, Timothy. The Sacraments and Consumer Culture. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2020. Empereur, James L. Prophetic Anointing: God’s Call to the Sick, the Elderly and the Dying. Message of the Sacraments 7, edited by Monika K. Hellwig. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1983. Larson-Miller, Lizette. The Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. Lex Orandi Series, edited by John Laurence. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005. Morrill, Bruce T. Divine Worship and Human Healing: Liturgical Theology at the Margins of Life and Death. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009. Morrill, Bruce T., ed. “Healing and Anointing.” Thematic issue, Liturgy: Journal of the Liturgical Conference 22:3 (July–September 2007). Morris, David N. Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Pilch, John J. Healing in the New Testament: Insights from Medical and Mediterranean Anthropology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997. Shuman, Joel James, and Keith G. Meador. Heal Thyself: Spirituality, Medicine, and the Distortion of Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Wood, Susan K. “The Paschal Mystery: The Intersection of Ecclesiology and Sacramental Theology in the Care of the Sick.” In Recovering the Riches of Anointing: A Study of the Sacrament of the Sick, edited by Genevieve Glen. Collegeville, MN: 2002, 3–19.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Footwashing as a Christian Liturgy: A Challenge to Question What We Mean by “Sacrament” THOMAS O’LOUGHLIN

The story within John’s gospel (13:3-15) could hardly be presented with greater vigor or picturesque detail. At the climactic meal as the story approaches its finale, Jesus gets up from table, lays aside his robe, puts a towel around him, and then, in the manner of a female slave, washes feet. The protest of Peter is so vehement that it distracts us from a shift in the story’s logic and adds to the pathos of the scene. Then a teacher’s explanation of what has just occurred is put into the mouth of Jesus along with an explicit command that the whole event should act as a paradigm for the group’s social relationships. Indeed, it is an exemplary action for their own time as the story’s audience—when Jesus is no longer with them: So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. (13:14-15) In so far as one can find, apart from restatements of the Law, clear instructions in the texts now compiled as the New Testament, or more especially the gospels, about what the Christians are to do as a community, this statement is on a par with “Do this in memory of me” (Lk 22:19)1 and “Go make disciples … baptizing them …” (Mt 28:19). In each case, we have a command-in-the-plural (“do ye …”) and so the activity concerned was clearly

We have to allow for the probability that this was not known to Luke, but is an accommodation of the Synoptic Tradition to the text of 1 Cor. 11:24-25, because this is part of the notoriously problematic “long text” of Luke’s supper narrative; see T. O’Loughlin, “One or Two Cups? The Text of Luke 22:17-20 Again,” in The Liturgy and the Living Text of the New Testament: Papers from the Tenth Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, ed. H. A. G. Houghton (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2018), 51–69. 1

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something that was in the mind of those early preachers of the gospel when they spoke at the gatherings of the churches.2 Now imagine someone reconstructing the history of Christianity from fragmentary information about rituals and from a few sacred texts—the sort of procedure we engage in when we reconstruct the religions of ancient Mesopotamia—and envisage what they would say about footwashing. Given that they know that the Great Commission was seen as “leading to” the practice of baptism (and from many references, arguments, and artifacts such as baptismal pools and fonts they know this was a key ritual) and they have seen all the paraphernalia for the eucharist that the Christians have left in the archaeological record; upon deciphering and translating John 13, these scholars would confidently state that communal footwashing was also a standard ritual element of Christian gatherings. They might even argue that it was a typical event at gatherings because it ritualized a form of social inversion that could be seen as one of the Christian peculiarities; and, thus, this ritual was regarded as means of declaring the group’s continuity with its archetypal founder, Jesus. On this basis, footwashing would be placed with baptism and eucharist under the heading of “core rituals.” The resulting study would then be illustrated with shallow baptismal fonts, a variety of other bowls, and some fragments of silver vessels that were interpreted as ceremonial foot basins for this ubiquitous ritual. We, however, know that the actual story is very different. From the first two centuries we have only one reference to washing feet, 1 Tim. 5:10, and this seems to be witness to a situation far more in line with the role of servant women in Greco-Roman society than being any indication that footwashing was an activity valued as a specifically Christian practice in the churches. By the time we get definite references to it as a formal ritualized event, for example, in the writings of Augustine (354–430), it had become an annual event that was but one more item in an historicized liturgy whereby the rituals around Easter reenact the last days of Jesus.3 Just as Palm Sunday performed the story found in Mk 11:1-10 (and parallels), so a footwashing on the following Thursday, or sometime around then, dramatized the story from John 13. This would later develop into an elaborate spectacle for popes, princes, and bishops whereby they demonstrated that, even though they held secular power over their fellow Christians, they also had the humility and charity (in the form of alms) that a Christian potentate should demonstrate.4 In stark contrast to the view of power set out in John 13, footwashing had now become one more element in sacral panoply that buttresses political power. It was only in two contexts that footwashing took on a larger, but still limited, role in Christian practice. The first was in early monastic communities where a weekly footwashing was used to remind the monks of the dynamic of mutual service that should animate their communities.5 The other was in some churches of the more radical Reformation That both baptism and eucharist were practical concerns can be seen in the manner in which the Didache gives details for their performance; cf. É. Nodet and J. Taylor, The Origins of Christianity: An Exploration (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998). 3 Augustine, chosen here simply because he is such a well-known patristic writer, mentioned the practice on several occasions in his Tractatus in Iohannis evangelium (55,3; 56,1; and 58,2) and commented on its problems in practice in Epistola 55,18, 33. 4 There is a convenient summary of the history of the practice in T. O’Loughlin, Washing Feet: Imitating the Example of Jesus in the Liturgy Today (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2015), 1–29; for details of early references to footwashing, the article by G. A. F. Knight, “Feet-washing,” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. J. Hastings (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1912), 5, 814–23, is still fundamental. 5 Footwashing is mentioned twice—once as a welcoming ritual and once as a modeling of relationships of service within the community, in chs 35 and 53 of the Rule of St Benedict. 2

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where footwashing was practiced, usually in highly formalized settings, in deliberate fulfillment of the instruction that it should be practiced in John 13. In both groups, the actual practice proved to be more difficult to implement in concrete situations—for a variety of reasons—and it became marginalized over time.6 Similarly, attempts to make it a more widespread element in the fixed liturgy of churches have had limited success. It has been since the 1950s an optional element in the Easter liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church and in the liturgies of other Western churches since the 1970s, but it is, when used at all, a token affair that is understood as part of a Holy Thursday evening mime.7 Moreover, there is a widespread but inchoate hesitation over the whole idea such that there are more warnings of the dangers of footwashing within the liturgy than there are encouragements to see it as relating to discipleship.8 Consequently, in marked contrast to the speculations of our hypothetical archaeologists, footwashing is unknown to the vast majority of Christians. They have no conscious memory of seeing it performed in any manner, they have almost certainly never taken part in such a liturgy, nor has the idea that they might do so crossed their minds.

A SACRAMENT, AN ORDINANCE, OR WHAT? However, footwashing has not been without supporters in the theological community. The obvious similarities between the Johannine story of an action of Jesus at the Last Supper with the Synoptics’ accounts of another action at that supper, the “institution” of the eucharist, along with the imperative common to both narratives, have generated another stream of Christian thinking as to whether footwashing is a sacrament. In this case, it would be the forgotten sacrament, the marginalized sacrament, the neglected sacrament, or the sacrament waiting to be discovered. There have been several arguments made in favor of this case, the most eloquent in recent times being that made by John Christopher Thomas;9 criticisms of this case;10 and it has recently been used as a topos for a more general reflection on what footwashing might tell us about gender and space in the early churches.11 The problem with this debate, and perhaps why it tends to run in circles, is that the question is posed anachronistically—it does not take account of how what are called “sacraments” emerged in the life of the churches—and it is also badly posed because there are several unacknowledged premises in the debate. The fundamental weakness is

See K. Graber-Miller, “Mennonite Footwashing: Identity Reflections and Altered Meanings,” Worship 66 (1992): 148–70; and J. M. Lindman, Bodies of Belief: Baptist Community in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 7 See T. O’Loughlin, “From a Damp Floor to a New Vision of Church: Footwashing as a Challenge to Liturgy and Discipleship,” Worship 88:2 (2014): 137–50. This “mime” is emblematic of a wider tendency to view liturgy as a series of dramatic tableaux, something Kenneth Stevenson calls “representational” liturgical piety; see Stevenson, Jerusalem Revisited: The Liturgical Meaning of Holy Week (Washington, DC: Pastoral Press, 1988), 9–12. 8 Where not ignored entirely, it is often substituted by either a token drama or some vague parallel such as inviting the gathering to wash their hands! For a trenchant critique of such substitutions for a real human action, see A. Howells, “Foot Washing for the Sole,” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 17 (2012): 128–31. 9 John C. Thomas, Footwashing in John 13 and the Johannine Community (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991). 10 See, for example, F. D. Macchia, “Is Footwashing the Neglected Sacrament? A Theological Response to John Christopher Thomas,” Pneuma 19 (1997): 239–49. 11 A. McGowan, “A Missing Sacrament? Footwashing, Gender, and Space in Early Christianity,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 18–19 (2017): 105–22. 6

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that it assumes that there is a firm, fixed, and closely definable category within revelation to which we give the name “sacraments.” This is a class of actions, which by divine institution stand distinct within the ritual actions that Christians might perform. Into the class one could admit only one or two activities (classically for the churches of the Reformation only two actions met the criteria: baptism and eucharist), perhaps a third (whether it be preaching or footwashing or perhaps reading the Bible), or perhaps there are many more (that there are seven sacraments is the formal Roman Catholic position); but however many there are, they all share a common essence, which is their sacramentality. Underpinning the whole debate—as with the parallel debate about “ordinances”12—is that one can have a clear understanding of a “sacrament”—and indeed engage in interecclesial warfare about this—and then apply it to specific cases. The criteria might seem obvious—an institution by Jesus attested in the canonical scriptures; a mandate that warrants repetition; a clear role within the church’s life and preaching such that they did not contradict other dogmatic truths—but the awkward fact remains that these criteria are themselves posterior to the practices of the churches. This discourse—what constitutes a sacrament—has been close to the core of the dogmatic lives of many churches since the sixteenth century, as it has been at the heart of many of the debates between the churches in their attempts to clarify the position in relationship to one another either positively or negatively.13 What is less often noted is that this whole debate is an offshoot of a medieval scholastic debate about those rituals that were held to operate, in their having both interior and ecclesial effects, ex opere operato.14 By this was meant that the event took place independently of the spiritual condition of both the minister and the recipient. This, in turn, assumed that there was an exercise of a potentia by which this operation was brought about, caused, effected, and so one needed to be able to identify what was the underlying reality that was being changed (the material cause), what was being effected (the formal cause) by what sort of agent (the efficient cause), and what was the outcome of the action (the final cause). There is no intrinsic reason why this sort of analysis could not be applied to footwashing, and, indeed, in some of the treatments of the question one finds some of this language being used, but the real problem lies elsewhere. If this is the hinterland of “is it a sacrament?”— and this sort of approach has been found not only wanting but tending to reduce the mystery of our encounter with Christ to a set of formalized transactions—is this the sort of discussion that has any merit? However, the implications of the scholastic approach do not end there. The selection of the actions that were thus discussed actually arose out of the nature of medieval canon law: these were those activities of clergy that presupposed an act of power and jurisdiction—and so were of interest to the lawyers in that they had to regulate them—or actions that themselves (as in the case of marriage) had legal consequences. Long before “the septenarian system” was being examined by theologians, much less the exegetes of biblical texts, it was the domain of canonists. They needed precedents and warrants—and S ee A. Edgington, “Footwashing as an Ordinance,” Grace Theological Journal 6 (1985): 425–34. A good example of this debate in a positive mode is the 1982 Lima document, Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, which, focusing on three central areas, sought to open the questions up but without an appeal to an a priori category of “sacraments.” 14 This distinction is still present in the current Catechism of the Catholic Church (second edition, Rome, 1997) in that having set out the seven sacraments—implicitly held to possess the common factor of sacramentality (n. 1210–n. 1666), the next topic treated is “the sacramentals” (n. 1667–n. 1679), which are distinguished from the sacraments in that they do not operate ex opere operato. 12 13

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so “moments of institution” and sententiae in the form of biblical quotations—that supported their legal judgments. And anyone with even the least acquaintance with medieval canon law will know that when a resourceful lawyer needed a supporting biblical verse, it could invariably be found.15 This confusion of the canonical roots of much [systematic] “sacramental theology” is a source of never-ending confusion because we still ask the questions about institution/mandate/commission/first occurrence without recognizing the fundamentally legal nature of the questions we are asking. There is no better illustration of this than in contemporary ecumenical dialogue between the Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic church where there are, in effect, a multiplicity of such similarly sounding “languages” so that real dialogue becomes almost impossible.16 Furthermore, this canonical, and then the scholastic, analysis of “the sacraments” originated in the need for church authorities—individual dioceses or monasteries, then regions, and eventually the Latin-speaking church—to regulate and standardize practice, and so is subsequent to what was actually happening as rituals in communities. So asking whether footwashing is a neglected sacrament is anachronous: “sacraments” only arose in response to what was actually being done. Since this action was rare and not problematic canonically it did not rise to any significant level of examination such as that which might have generated a “theology of footwashing” in the manner that the scholastics generated theologies of such events as confirmation or penance. We must take very seriously the accidental, praxis-driven nature of “sacramental theology.” However, this does not mean that there should not be a theology of footwashing by analogy with that which is deployed by some Christians to such rituals as the anointing of the sick, but we should look for a different starting point and proceed in a different manner than by seeing footwashing in parallel with the “other” sacraments.

THE NEGLECTED CHALLENGE At this point it might be argued that the word “sacrament” is so flawed in Christian history that we should abandon it. Failing that, we should use it in the broad sense of the Christ as the basic sacrament or the church as the primordial sacrament or as the equivalent of the mysteries that are so interrelated that one should not presume to count them. This is a valuable linguistic warning, but for many Christians this word is so embedded in our discourse that it is scarcely possible to uproot it. So, if we wish to express the value we place upon a ritual—or an activity such as footwashing—we may need to refer to it as “sacramental” or as a “sacrament” but using those terms merely as markers of highly significant ritual within the life of a community. So where should we start? The questions about whether or not we have actually carried out/should carry out the footwashing prescribed by John in his gospel hide a My favorite examples come from early in the career of canon law, centuries before Gratian’s great compilation, when to justify the seven clerical grades ranging from “doorkeeper” (ostiarius) to priest (sacerdos) they appealed to Jesus ejecting the money changers from the temple (Mt. 21:10-17 and parallels) as the basis for the institution of “doorkeeper” and specifically to Jn 2:15—Jesus making a whip—as the basis of the institution of the characteristic instrumentum officii; see R. E. Reynolds, The Ordinals of Christ from Their Origins to the Twelfth Century (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1978), 166–91. 16 See T. O’Loughlin, “Sacramental Languages and Intercommunion: Identifying a Source of Tension between the Catholic and the Reformed Churches,” Studia Liturgica 47 (2017): 138–50; and T. O’Loughlin, “The Diversity of ‘Languages’ as an Inhibiting Factor in Ecumenical Debates Regarding Inter-Communion between Catholic and Protestant Churches,” One in Christ 52:2(2018): 237–58. 15

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more troubling question of whether the point being made there has been forgotten in the way those in the churches relate to one another. John’s narrative has a demonstration of the highest becoming the lowest, the master acting as the servant, the superior relating as the inferior (13:4-12); and then this is confirmed in words (13:12-16). While there is no parallel to the activity elsewhere in the gospels, the teaching on relationships within the communities is clearly present in the dispute story of the sons of Zebedee found in Mark and Matthew, and with an echo in Luke.17 The significance of these is that it was widely perceived in the churches that “whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave to all” (Mk 10:43-44). Moreover, as in John, this inversion of power relationship and status within the community must be one of its countercultural characteristics. While in John this is expressed in the shocked reaction of Peter to the action of Jesus, in the Synoptics it is given as a state with an imperative force: “You know [the style of ruling found among the nations], but it shall not be so among you.” This imperative about leadership styles in the churches, rather than the imperative regarding washing each other’s feet, is the kernel of Jesus’ message. The fact that this inversion of power within the Christian community has been neglected should be our primary concern. Only when one has attended to the real problem, the matter that the footwashing was to highlight and point toward, should we concern ourselves with the neglect, performance, or utility of the liturgical actions. If we were to take up the classic Augustinian distinction of signum and res,18 then the res is a manner of behaving and relating, and the washing of each other’s feet is the signum that communicates the depth of this Christian truth to us who are slow learners and apt to forget what we think we have learned. This signum–res relationship contains within itself a bitter warning: if we engage in the signum, actually washing the feet of sister or brother Christians, then we are acknowledging our awareness of the issue that our power styles are not to resemble the hierarchies found among the nations. If then we do not seek to redress the inevitable corruption19 of our relationships as Christians, we are to that extent engaging in inauthentic worship, conveying a cognitive dissonance to those taking part, and making the whole event look like a sham or a piece of propaganda.20 While all human liturgy is to some extent inauthentic—a fully authentic worship being the Omega toward which all liturgical education and church reform aims— this ritual, with its emphasis on making a contrast with normal experience, the way of the nations, leaves itself especially open to the critique of sham, hypocrisy, and trying to “fool more of the people more of the time.” We can now restate the starting point for this “sacrament” of footwashing thus: if a church, a real local community, has come to a recognition that its own set of relationships is in need of renewal because it has become too much like the power structures that are endemic within human societies, then it should mark this recognition of the need to

Mk 10:35-45, taken over by Mt. 20:20-28; and summarized by Lk. 22:24-27. There is also an echo of this issue in the saying, which concludes other stories at Mk 10:31 with parallels in Mt. 19:30; 20:16 and Lk. 13:30. 18 See De doctrina christiana 1 for Augustine’s most concise statement of this notion of sacramentality within human learning. 19 I say “inevitable corruption” not out of a fatalism that we are destined to be corrupt to some extent but partly on the basis of empirical observation—I have not met any person who has reached the ideal of being “servant of all,” and partly upon the reflection that just as there was a need for this lesson to be given to the first audiences, so it is naïve to imagine that any group is free from the desire for some to dominate others—one might say: free from sin—such that they do not need to be reminded of how they should not, and should, relate to one another. 20 See the biting critique of a very pompous liturgy detached from lived reality in Howells (2012). 17

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reconfigure itself according to evangelical values by celebrating a mutual footwashing. This ritual event, which of its nature can only be the outcome of a serious process of selfreflection within the church about how they mutually relate and welcome one another and the stranger,21 is then given form with this group activity. At a human and interpersonal level this very-out-of-the-ordinary activity can be seen as making concrete, a “signing on the dotted line,” of what the community now recognizes about what they must attempt in the future—and we are ritual animals who need such rituals to mark our commitments.22 It is also something more. Since it takes place within a liturgical context, marked at its outset by a declaration that what we do we do in the name of God, it is also a covenant ritual fulfilling among us a role equivalent to the rituals that marked earlier covenants between God and God’s people: before God, we are setting out from this footwashing on being obedient anew to the vision of the Christ for God’s people where the greatest is, as seen in the Master’s action in John 13, the slave of all. This remaking of the covenant—since it involves the inversion of power—cannot simply be a fulfillment of a rubrical command nor come from the top-down within a church (thought of as a whole denomination: e.g., “the Episcopal Church”). It requires that it start from the bottom-up, a recognition that our relationships—of pastor and community, parish council and “the rest,” the priest and the congregation, or some special interest group within a larger gathering—have a set of relationships that, for all their familiarity and efficiency, and indeed their paralleling of other organizations, may be awry for us as worshippers of God who relate to God as followers of Jesus. Then this church can ask if it has a message of reform for its larger ecclesial network. In this sense, we could say that as the eucharist is the sacrament of our relationship of thankfulness to the Father, so footwashing is the sacrament of our committing to God to act on our recognition that the church is ever in need of reform (ecclesia semper reformanda) to the vision of Jesus if it is to be his witness.

A FITTING ACTION? This allows us to look at the practical questions of the ritual and its appropriateness as a Christian event today. Leaving aside the issue of what happened in the final hours of Jesus’ life as an issue for debates focused on the relationship of early texts and the historical Jesus, the fact that the community of faith today receives and celebrates the Gospel of John as a central moment in its memory by which it seeks communion with Lord Jesus, there can be little doubt as to the appropriateness of footwashing as part of our anamnesis. If we understand anamnesis as “experiencing anew”23 then this common action allows us, literally, to feel the shock of the demands of the gospel’s proclamation

There is inherently an element of welcome within footwashing in that it marks the moment of entry into a house from the street, the welcome given to a guest—as we see in Gen. 18:4 and Lk. 7:44—and this welcome must be a welcome for the stranger and the outcast because of the nature of the Christian mission: Mk 2:17. 22 This aspect of our humanity, that we cannot live without rituals, is ever controversial for modern Christians whose primary relationship with Christianity is often limited to the domain of literary communication—reading, hearing preaching, engaging in debate—but that should not blind us to the fact that in those areas of life that touch our humanity, we are invariably ritual animals. See R. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 23 For a parallel case of the significance of this way of understanding anamnesis, see J. F. White, “United Methodist Eucharistic Prayers: 1965–85,” in New Eucharistic Prayers: An Ecumenical Study of their Development and Structure, ed. F. C. Senn (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006), 80–95 and especially 82. 21

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of the inversion of values whether it is expressed in the words of John or the Synoptics. Experiencing this, and engaging with it, as a church brings us into the divine presence, for it is the Christ, our High Priest, in whom we have a part when we engage actively in what we are remembering: “So, if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet” (Jn 13:14). Here, it is the very awkwardness of washing another’s feet—the distastefulness that has led to the practice being marginalized and ignored down the centuries—that is its strength: only someone who has fully taken on board the message and shares a commitment with their sisters and brothers to act in a new way will get down on the floor and do this without thinking it silly, distasteful, overly dramatic, or a definite indication that the pastor has lost the plot. The shock of a reversed world is somehow fittingly paralleled by the shock of the activity. Any activity that all Christians can look to and imitate as part of their common inheritance—because it is part of our core memories of Jesus as found in the canonical gospels—has a range of values that is as wide as communities who discover particular aspects of their discipleship in it,24 but four aspects of footwashing deserve special note because they relate to fundamental aspects of all Christian liturgy. First, it is now commonplace to point out that our rituals model an idealized perfection: the cosmos as it is imagined by the participants as it should be.25 In this case, the very function of the action is explicitly to lay out a paradigm of a Christian cosmos: the Johannine expression is hupodeigma. Moreover, the action is remembered— and enacted—as modeling a perfect future. This is the real weakness of the most common approach to this action when it is carried out as part of the contemporary Easter liturgy with its emphasis on historical mime of a Last Supper event26 and a concentration of just one person (the presider playing the role of Jesus) washing feet, on there just being twelve men having their feet washed, and many other details such as that the chasuble be removed in conformity with Jn 13:4.27 This activity of footwashing only takes on significance if it is a statement of what the community wants to be the case among them. It is a covenant ratification ritual involving, as with all covenants (cf. Exod. 19:3-8 for instance), a focus on the future, on what the parties agree they will do: it portrays the new, renewed future that all will seek to establish among the covenanting group. Second, this is a liturgy that is explicitly community focused. We live with the paradox that liturgy is “public worship”—or in Cranmer’s lovely usage: “common prayer”—but our culture constantly pushes us toward a consumerist notion of liturgy: I become the focus of my participation in baptism that alters me, the eucharist that sates my hunger, the ministry of the word that buoys up my spirit. But in this action I am actively and very consciously giving a service to another and receiving that service from another. It is very difficult to imagine within the individualistic framework of much of our spirituality. The

S ee O’Loughlin (2015, 87–111), where some of these are examined in detail. This theme is seen by many as almost synonymous with the work of J. Z. Smith, but it is older and wider than him. However, given the fact that he has made it a coin of our common currency, we might look to him first for its formulation as in his essay: “The Bare Facts of Ritual,” History of Religions 20 (1980): 112–27. 26 See T. O’Loughlin, “Celebrating the New Commandment: Footwashing and Our Theology of Liturgy,” Scripture in Church 43 (2013):118–27. 27 It is these details and the controversies that they have generated—all located in the notion of liturgy as mime—that underlies much of the writing on this topic among Roman Catholic writers: see, for example, P. Jeffery, “Mandatum Novum Do Vobis: Towards a Renewal of the Holy Thursday Footwashing Rite,” Worship 64 (1990): 107–41; J. M. Huels, More Disputed Questions in Liturgy (Chicago, 1996); and P. Rumsey, “Women Have Feet, Too …,” Pastoral Review 9:5 (2013): 51–4, who have sought to challenge this literalism. 24 25

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horror of the ritual, for many, consists in the very communality of the activity. And if this horror is to be removed, it can only be the result of a community-wide appreciation that the problem we have is a communal one: it is our structuring our relationships in a power structure of lords and slaves. A footwashing that is based on just me, or a single person’s actions (and here lies another fault not only in the mime approach but in the approach of royal and papal footwashings), does not address the problem that is the focus of John 13 and the related gospel texts. Third, the event of a footwashing within a community is subversive. Some may argue that, in a sense, all liturgy is subversive, but one of the consistent criticisms of religious ritual, including that of Christians, is that it is a buttress to the status quo no matter how perverse it is. This is a common and significant indictment of Christianity and one that is all too often justified. However, if this activity is not itself subverted to being a camouflage of the raw hand of power—and certainly many of the dramatic episcopal footwashings were little more than velveting the iron fist of power—then it makes the subversive Christian vision of our human relationships visible in a way that no other activity can. An actual slave who had her feet washed by her master knew that somehow there was something wrong with all the words, and a master must have sensed this. Just as the early Christian meal was eviscerated to all but its minimal eucharistic elements to become the formal ceremony with which we are familiar probably in response to its breaches of socially sanctioned stratification,28 so there was probably little appetite for a common activity of footwashing. Yet it is only in its ability to be a modeling of the subversive vision of Jesus that Christianity can claim credibility as a form of discipleship. Fourth, Christian liturgy should have inclusivity in its core as it forms a central element not only in Christian mission but in the missio Dei, yet here it continually encounters the paradox that group activities tend to the reinforcement of group boundaries and so toward exclusiveness.29 This activity of footwashing can only be entered into, other than as a silly mime, when it takes inclusivity seriously; otherwise I am locating someone else as inferior or superior to me in God’s sight. It is a liturgical statement not only of welcome and radical equality but of the universal inclusivity of God. In that the res of the activity of footwashing is that we should establish a community where the last is first, and we can make the liturgical titles of “sister” and “brother” more than merely jargon of the sanctuary, we need to come to appreciate that this cannot take place without active inclusion of any we might find ourselves marginalizing. We live in societies, and churches, riven by distinctions based on wealth, clerical status, color, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, and footwashing is possibly the only common activity that calls these divisions into question while, simultaneously calling on us to recognize our common humanity and equality as God’s creatures.

AND SO … Very few Christians down the centuries have even encountered footwashing within Christian ritual. Most of that minority who have seen it, or even taken part in it, probably See C. Leonhard, “Morning Salutationes and the Decline of Sympotic Eucharists in the Third Century,” Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum 18 (2014): 420–42. 29 I have sought to explore this paradox, and particular abandonments of the tension in favor of exclusion, in Eating Together Becoming One: Taking Up Pope Francis’s Call to Theologians (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2019), especially 81–3. 28

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only saw it in the form of a superior, a bishop or a prince, giving a bombastic display of “humility” and knew they should not take it too seriously. Those who practiced it more widely were often marginal groups. More recently (beginning with some Catholic communities in the later 1950s) it has made an occasional appearance in regular liturgy where it is usually performed and understood in terms of pious mime. Likewise, it has in recent decades attracted attention as a forgotten or potential third or eighth or “umpteenth” sacrament, but often within a curiously scholastic understanding of sacrament. Perhaps the most common factor is that few like the idea, and would welcome any opportunity to skip it. Yet for Christians an equally awkward fact remains: it is a significant element in our memories that we may ignore but cannot deny. So long as we read John 13 we have a challenge presented to us that calls some of our most sensitive attitudes, assumptions, and feelings into question.30 Could there be a more effective Bible study, meditation, or lectio divina than to actually take up the text’s invitation to action and, among our sisters and brothers, do to one another as the text bids us to do?

FURTHER READING Anderson, Catherine, and Sandra Carroll. “The Foot-Washing in John 13:1-20 in the context of L’Arche,” Australian eJournal of Theology 20 (2013): 185–96. McGowan, Andrew, “A Missing Sacrament? Foot-washing, Gender, and Space in Early Christianity,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 18–19 (2017): 105–22. O’Loughlin, Thomas. Washing Feet: Imitating the Example of Jesus in the Liturgy Today. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2015. Rempel, John D. “The Lord’s Supper in Mennonite Tradition,” Vision: A Journal for Church and Theology 2 (2001): 4–15. Schneiders, Sandra M. “The Foot Washing (John 13:1-20): An Experiment in Hermeneutics,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 43 (1981): 76–92. Thomas, John C. Footwashing in John 13 and the Johannine Community. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991.

See S. M. Schneiders, “The Foot Washing (John 13:1–20): An Experiment in Hermeneutics,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 43 (1981): 76–92. 30

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Ecosacramentality of the Funeral BENJAMIN M. STEWART

INTRODUCTION The funeral is Christianity’s most immediate liturgical answer to the question “what happens to us when we die?” The early and widespread answer was to return the earthly body to the earth accompanied by psalms and prayers. With time came greater complexity, and, especially beginning in the twentieth century, increasingly the disappearance of both the body and the earth from the funeral rite. If the function of religious ritual, as Ronald Grimes asserts, is to steward signs “so profoundly enacted that they suffuse bone and blood, generating a cosmos (an oriented habitat),”1 then what sort of cosmos can be generated through funeral rites without humus or the human body? In the context of structural environmental racism and injustice, a climate emergency, and earth’s sixth mass extinction, this essay is an ecotheological exercise analyzing the funeral through sacramental categories: how might the sacramental tradition offer support for conceptualizing funeral rites that—paraphrasing Grimes—can generate a habitable cosmos?

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Death is integral to all sacraments. Baptism and eucharist ritualize bodily incorporation into Christ’s death; anointing of the sick is practiced with more or less obvious adjacency to death; marriage vows establish death as their boundary as couples promise fidelity until parted by death. “All the sacraments,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “have as their goal the last Passover … through death.”2 Indeed, all sacraments derive their significance at least in part from the death of Christ. Ignatius of Antioch described Christ’s death itself as a mysterion, the Greek term most equivalent to the Latin sacramentum.3 Paul reminded communities in Rome and Corinth, “all of us who have been baptized into

Ronald L. Grimes, “Ritual Theory and the Environment,” Sociological Review 51 (2003): 44, https://doi.org/1 0.1111/j.1467-954X.2004.00449.x. 2 Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000), 1680. 3 Letter to the Ephesians 19.1. 1

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Christ Jesus were baptized into his death,” and “as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death.”4 In short, death suffuses the sacraments. Likewise, sacraments cluster around the event of death. Death has drawn to itself sacramental practices such as baptism and remembrance of baptism, viaticum, confession, anointing, and the funeral mass. While these sacramental practices originate apart from the death of individuals, the final enactments of these rites in an individual’s life— just before or after death—at times have become something like yet another distinct sacrament: baptism becomes the sprinkling of the corpse or the grave, eucharist becomes viaticum and funeral mass, a regular cycle of confession and forgiveness becomes a final confession before death, and occasional anointing for healing becomes final anointing in extremis. Death draws the sacraments into its orbit. While not commonly considered sacraments themselves, Christian death and the funeral rite have been given liturgical importance that approaches that of the sacraments. The death anniversaries of the saints anchor the sanctoral calendar, the occasion of death has normally been surrounded by cycles of liturgical prayer and song, and the places of the dead have been places of worship and vice versa.

The Anomalous Place of the Corpse and the Earth in the Era of Liturgical Renewal The twentieth-century liturgical renewal movement brought renewed attention to the centrality of baptism and eucharist and to the physically embodied strength of their symbols. Freestanding tables, the recovery of a common cup and recognizable bread, and the ample use of water in baptism exemplify the broad ecumenical movement away from abstracted, privatized liturgical symbols toward the use of public-scale, bodily engaged sacramental signs. The ecological dimensions of the sacramental elements of water, oil, grain, and grape have been subjects of liturgical theology and foregrounded in recent sacramental thanksgivings.5 While these two sacraments—baptism and eucharist—have maintained a central place in ecumenical sacramental theology, much of the previous centuries’ contention over the number and precise definition of discrete sacraments has yielded to an underlying principle of sacramentality that animates a “sacramental world.”6 A sacrament, Alexander Schmemann writes, “is primarily a revelation of the genuine nature of creation … of the sacramentality of creation itself.”7 Influenced by the scientific discovery of the relative youth of the human species compared to other living creations, and drawing on the scriptural traditions of creation itself at prayer,8 liturgical theologians can commonly

om. 6:3; 1 Cor. 11:26. R See Linda Gibler, From the Beginning to Baptism: Scientific and Sacred Stories of Water, Oil, and Fire (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2010); Christiana Zenner, Just Water: Theology, Ethics, and Fresh Water Crises (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018); Mary E. McGann, The Meal That Reconnects: Eucharistic Eating and the Global Food Crisis (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2020); Gordon Lathrop, Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003); Gail Ramshaw, Treasures Old and New: The Images in the Lectionary (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2002). 6 Kevin W. Irwin, “A Sacramental World—Sacramentality as the Primary Language for Sacraments,” Worship 76, no. 3 (May 2002): 197–211. 7 Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988), 33. 8 See Terence E. Fretheim, “Nature’s Praise of God in the Psalms,” Ex Auditu 3 (January 1, 1987): 16–30; and H. Paul Santmire, Ritualizing Nature: Renewing Christian Liturgy in a Time of Crisis (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008). 4 5

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affirm that “we join a liturgy already in progress, one begun in a place where we do not normally look. This liturgical activity stretches from creation, itself a protological cosmic liturgy.”9 In addition to the recovered centrality and symbol-strength of baptism and eucharist, twentieth-century liturgical renewal accomplished a significant expansion of other scripturally resonant and highly embodied liturgical actions including the sharing of peace, the imposition of ashes, and footwashing. Death rites, however, have been a strange exception. Over the same era that saw an expansion of embodied liturgical symbols and actions, the physicality and earthiness of the funeral rite tended to disappear rather than deepen. This is most obvious regarding the physical elements of the body of the deceased and the earth to which the body is returned. Their withdrawal from prominence is partly tied to the dramatic increase in the practice of industrial-scale cremation, which, in practice, has marginalized the liturgical role of the corpse and the ritual return of the body to the elements. At the dawn of the Second Vatican Council, the rate of cremation among deaths in the United States was 3.5 percent. Over the following decades the rate of cremation rose rapidly, reaching 55 percent in 2019, becoming the typical American practice.10 Cremation has been embraced for a number of reasons. It is typically less expensive than cemetery burials that involve a casket and vault; cremation allows funeral gatherings to be scheduled without consideration for the time pressures brought about by the decomposition of the body; it is perceived by some as being more sanitary or ecological than earth burial; and cremated remains are easily transported. To be clear, the type of cremation that is replacing earth burial is specifically industrial-scale incineration rather than the traditional practice of open-air cremation on a funeral pyre. This latter practice—almost unrecognizably different from mechanized incineration in terms of ritual experience—has received considerable interest from green funeral advocates and is exemplified in the United States by the public open-air funeral pyre in Crestone, Colorado.11 The practice of industrial-scale incineration has a number of impacts on the primary, quasi-sacramental symbols of the funeral rite—the body and the earth. As ritual elements, cremated remains are quite different from the body of a recently deceased human person. A corpse has the feel and appearance of the living human person, but cremated remains are much smaller and bear almost no resemblance to the person as they were known in life. While cremated remains are sterile, the body at death is radically fertile—alarmingly so, for some people. Rubrics in many funeral rites largely treat a corpse and cremated remains as ritually interchangeable, with either casket or urn carried in procession and even covered with an appropriately sized funeral pall.12 Yet it may be that the cremated David Fagerberg, “Liturgy, Signs, and Sacraments,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, ed. Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 457. 10 National Funeral Directors Association Cremation and Burial Report, Brookfield, Wisconsin https://www.nfda. org/news/sta​tist​ics. 11 See my description of their practice in Benjamin M. Stewart, “Little Apocalypse: How Green Funeral Practitioners Reconfigure the Iconography of Climate Catastrophe,” Currents in Theology and Mission 47:3 (June 10, 2020), http://www.curr​ents​jour​nal.org/index.php/curre​nts/arti​cle/view/263. 12 Roman Catholic practice strives to keep the rites related to cremation as much as possible governed by the ritual norms for full body interment. Some other recent prayers and rites have addressed more directly the particular circumstances of cremation, with images highlighting dust, breath, and fire. Such adaptations typically comprise a single alternative prayer or modified wording within a prayer. See, for example, committal “At a Cremation Service” and “At a Columbarium or before the Dispersing of Ashes” in Presbyterian Church (USA), 9

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remains’ unrecognizability and sterility make them a less powerful symbol of the deceased, leading, in turn, to the cremated remains commonly being left out of the funeral rite entirely. The commendation of the bodily elements is also transformed by the practice of industrial cremation. If the cremated remains are scattered or poured into the ground or water, there may be significant symbolic resonance with the biblical phrase, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” However, even in this case, the most profound moment of transformation at which the body is returned to the elements—the burning of the body—has already occurred apart from the ritual, normally without any significant participation on the part of an assembly. The cremated remains are not, strictly speaking, primarily ashes but largely comprise pulverized bone fragments, sometimes given the vaguely commercial designation, “cremains.” If the remains are returned to the earth directly, they lack the corpse’s well-known archetypal characteristic of ecological fecundity. (In fact, the high pH, concentration of minerals, and high sodium levels in the cremated remains impede most plant life.) If an urn or individual columbarium is used for interment, there may be little sense that the remains are being returned to the elements at all. In short, industrial-scale cremation both directly and indirectly distorts the quasisacramental elements of the body and the earth in the funeral rite. Undertaker poet Thomas Lynch, writing in The Christian Century, describes the withdrawal of the bodily and elemental through contemporary cremation practices as an unnecessary but serious problem: To the extent that cremation has become an accomplice in the out-of-sight and outof-mind nature of memorial services, it is at cross-purposes with the life of faith and the mission of the church … The problem is not that we cremate our dead, but how ritually denatured, spiritually vacant, religiously timid and impoverished we have allowed the practice to become. It is not that we do it, but how we do it that must be reconsidered.13 Even apart from cremation, there has been a general trend away from the prominence of the body in funeral rites. Thomas Long wryly observes that the dead are increasingly banned from their own funerals.14 In Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral, Long documents the trend toward memorial services without bodies present, noting that the corpse is increasingly portrayed as inconvenient and even unwelcome at the rite given its unwieldiness and its powerful evocation of death when a “celebration of life” may be the most valued ritual purpose. Long describes this exclusion as something

Book of Common Worship (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018), 796. Also see the readings and prayers for cremation in Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Evangelical Lutheran Worship Pastoral Care: Occasional Services, Readings, and Prayers (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2008), 282. More substantially, an Episcopal rite specifically for committal at the crematory names frankly that “we give her body to the fire,” and describes the body being “changed back to the energies and elements of the earth from which it came,” while also, unwisely, includes a reading from the Wisdom of Solomon which refers to “a sacrificial burnt offering” being accepted by God. See, Enriching Our Worship 3: Burial Rites for Adults, Together with a Rite for the Burial of a Child (Church Publishing, 2007), 84–6. An expansive Lutheran rite for washing, anointing, and shrouding the body may be used to prepare the body for cremation or natural burial. See Rebekkah Lohrmann, “Rite for Preparing the Body for Burial,” in In Sure and Certain Hope: A Funeral Sourcebook, ed. Melinda Ann Quivik (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2017), 113–16. 13 Thomas Lynch, “The Holy Fire: Cremation: A Practice in Need of Ritual,” Christian Century 127:7 (April 2010): 24. 14 Thomas G. Long, Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral, 1st ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 75.

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of a liturgical–theological crisis, as the accompaniment of the body through the entire funeral process enacts the foundational theological theme of divine solidarity with incarnate humanity, including into death and the return to the elements. Long thus argues that funerals should make it clear that we are not done here until we have handed our loved one over to the earth and to God. In short, we are carrying a loved one to the edge of mystery, and people should be encouraged to stick around to the end, to book passage all the way. If the body is to be buried, go to the grave and stay there until the body is in the ground. If the body is to be burned, go to the crematorium and witness the burning.15 With the recent disappearance of the body from funeral rites, theologians are rediscovering “the revelatory potential of the corpse.”16 Pastoral theologian Cody Sanders describes the presence of the dead body as evoking human responsibility, and, in the context of the earth, is a sign of life and wider relationship: “the dead body—lifeless as it may be—is not finished revealing to us our roles and responsibilities for care. And the ‘geo-logic’ of Earth still desires something in relation to our dead body: a return to the aliveness of the cocreated biosphere.”17 Even when the body or remains are present for the funeral, vaults, sealed coffins, and columbaria distort the basic process of the return of an earthly body to the earth—a disruption that is more or less what these technologies are designed to do. Together with the vanishing of the body from the funeral, these practices, Suzanne Kelly writes, have in many cultural settings seemingly “created a prohibition on returning the dead body to the elements.”18 The ritual exclusion is also an ecological exclusion, “distancing the dead body from its own decomposition and eradicating the ecological value of its reintegration into the cycles of nature.”19 In sum, even as the liturgical renewal movement of the twentieth century was enhancing the prominence of the body and the elements generally in liturgical and sacramental practice, the actual return of the body to the elements in the funeral rite was vanishing, eliminating the most vivid of the church’s enactments of human identification with the earth. However, at the same time, and largely in response to such changes in funeral practice, the natural burial, or green funeral, movement emerged.20 The movement encourages care for the body without chemical embalming, committal in biodegradable vessels without vaults, a return to the elements done with care for the ecological integrity of the land, normally carried out with encouragement for ritual participation on the part of the assembly. This model is consonant with many of the goals of the church’s liturgical Long, Accompany Them with Singing, 177. Cody J. Sanders, “Mor(t)al Remains: Pastoral Theology and Corpse Care,” Journal of Pastoral Theology 29:2 (May 2019): 11, https://doi.org/10.1080/10649​867.2019.1633​036. 17 Ibid. 18 Suzanne Kelly, Greening Death: Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring Our Tie to the Earth (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 54. 19 Ibid., 53. 20 For introductory accounts of the movement, see Mark Harris, Grave Matters: A Journey through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial (New York: Scribner, 2007); Elizabeth Fournier, The Green Burial Guidebook: Everything You Need to Plan an Affordable, Environmentally Friendly Burial (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2018); Benjamin M. Stewart, “Committed to the Earth: Ecotheological Dimensions of Christian Burial Practices,” Liturgy 27:2 (2012): 62–72; Benjamin M. Stewart, “Fertile Ground for Green Funerals,” Call to Worship 52:4 (May 2019): 19–25. 15 16

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movement: ritual in which the elements of body and earth are prominent within a participating assembly for the life of the world. Especially given its concern for the ritual and material integrity of the body and the earth, the natural burial movement can be helpfully understood as an extra-ecclesial liturgical renewal movement, accomplishing for funeral rites what the church’s renewal movement thus far has not.

FUNERAL AS ECOSACRAMENTAL Viewing the funeral through a sacramental lens brings especially the committal rite into focus. There is a striking elemental immediacy to this moment in the rite. While the funeral recalls past events (sacred history, the life and death of the deceased) and anticipates the future (cycles of mourning, the eschatological horizon), at the return of the body to the elements the rite normally coincides with the passage itself. “Earth to earth,” the presider may say, as the body of earth is returned to the earth. “Ashes to ashes,” a minister may say, as the torchbearers light the funeral pyre. The words distilled from scripture address a remarkable convergence, as one of earth’s most essential ecological processes coincides with a profound social transformation: a creature’s dead body becomes a fertile source for new life as the human community releases one of its members into a mysterious and wider community of relations. If sacraments are constituted when “the word comes to the element,”21 it is perhaps this word that addresses most archetypally the return of the body to the earth: “you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”22 This coherence of word and element at the committal anchors a sacramental center of gravity. The dust-to-dust imagery of scripture has evoked a wide variety of responses across theological and liturgical traditions,23 some of the most negative of which interpret the Genesis imagery as the expression of a curse. Recent scholarship, however, has drawn on scientific discoveries, indigenous traditions, and ecotheology to accent the fecundity at the heart of the earth-to-earth cycle of biological mortality.24 This motif is apparent in Psalm 104, a text that has been widely incorporated into eucharistic and baptismal texts. The psalm locates the phenomenon of fertility-in-death within a vision of blessings being continually poured out on creation. After evoking a panorama of diverse living creatures along a great watershed receiving an abundance of blessings flowing from God over mountain tops, through fields, out to the sea and the great depths, the psalmist considers the totality of creaturely life, and locates death and the return to dust not at the conclusion but in the middle of the divinely ordered cycle of life: These all look to you to give them their food in due season;     when you give to them, they gather it up; “ Accedit verbum ad elementum et fit sacramentum,” Augustine, Commentary on the Gospel of John, 80, 3. Gen. 3:19. The phrase appears in some form in funeral rites across Christian traditions. Today, the phrase is frequently referenced by participants in the green burial movement and is featured prominently in literature that promotes natural burial, offering what is portrayed as a simple and welcome alternative to chemical embalming, sealed burial vessels, and the general consumerization of funeral practices. 23 For my account of the ecological promise of this motif across liturgical traditions see Benjamin M. Stewart, “Wisdom’s Buried Treasure: Ecological Cosmology in Funeral Rites,” in Full of Your Glory: Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation, ed. Teresa Berger (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press Academic, 2019). 24 See Rosemary R. Ruether, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 1994); Douglas Davies and Hannah Rumble, Natural Burial: Traditional-Secular Spiritualities and Funeral Innovation (New York: Continuum, 2012); Elizabeth A. Johnson, Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 21 22

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    when you open your hand, they are filled with good things … When you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground.25 The cycle unfolds as eating and fruitfulness, then dying and dust, then birth and fecundity. The return of creaturely bodies to the elements is depicted as a pivotal and theologically significant moment within the ongoing fecundity of the creation. The return to the earth in death is also central to some accounts of Christian anthropology, and specifically to questions of human origins and purpose. The funeral rites do not describe a process in which humans simply decay into earth, dust, ashes. Any participant in creaturely life can observe the process of decay. Rather, in the funeral rite the process of bodily decomposition is more imaginatively portrayed as a return to an earlier state—a claim not first of all about decomposition but about mysteriously hidden human origins. Genesis 2 is the most familiar account of this origin story, but its imagery is referenced throughout scripture. For example, Psalm 139 evocatively conveys the “fearful and wonderful” mystery of human gestation using images drawn from both the observable pattern of maternal pregnancy and from the invisible process of formation from the earth drawn more imaginatively from practices of mortality: “you knit me together in my mother’s womb … My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.”26 Ecotheologians and biblical scholars employing an ecological hermeneutic find this earth-origin story in need of recovery and reinterpretation for an ecological age. Theodore Hiebert compellingly demonstrates what is at stake in the Genesis 2 dust-origin narrative and its interpretation: Here the archetypal human is made not in the image of God but out of topsoil, out of the arable land that was cultivated by Israelite farmers (Gen. 2:7). As a result of this kind of creation, humans hold no distinctive position among living beings, since plants and animals also were produced from this same arable soil (2:9, 19). Moreover, the role assigned humans within creation in this story is not to rule (radah) and to subdue (kavash) but rather to “serve” (avad; Gen. 2:15; 3:23). The Hebrew term avad is properly translated “till” in these verses (NRSV), since it clearly refers to the cultivation of arable land. But avad is in fact the ordinary Hebrew verb “serve,” used of slaves serving masters and of humans serving God (Gen. 12:16; Exod. 4:23). Thus Genesis 2 presents us with an alternative to the dominion theology of Genesis 1. Human beings are not created with special privilege or power. The first human is made of the same stuff, the arable soil of the biblical hill country, as are all of the other forms of life; and the divine breath blown into [their] nostrils is the same breath with which all the animals live and breathe (Gen. 2:7; 7:22). The language with which the role of the human in the earth is described is not the language of lordship but of servanthood. In this account of creation, the theology of the human place in creation is not a theology of dominion but a theology of dependence.27

Ps. 104:27-30. Ps. 139:13-15. 27 Theodore Hiebert, “Rethinking Dominion Theology,” Direction 25:2 (1996): 22–3. 25 26

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In this narrative, human origins and ongoing relations between humans and the land are established in a mythology that is founded most clearly not on the imagery of birth but on the ecological fecundity of death, brought to ritual clarity in the return of the body to the elements. Every death, in this sense, takes us back to “the beginning.” The identityconferring nature of the return to the elements is arguably as potentially orienting as the identities given in the very center of sacramental life. Just as the imagery of baptism establishes an anthropology of “the beloved child of God,” and communion continually reestablishes an identity as “body of Christ,” motifs from the funeral rite can establish a foundational human identity as “creature formed by God from earth” situated within a fecund cycle of death and life. In Augustine’s compelling image, human bodies are “the earth we carry.”28

Ecosacramental Reception If the funeral is to be perceived sacramentally, one should seek to identify an act of reception, as sacraments are received. Indeed, some current funeral rites portray the deceased as receiving ecologically resonant blessings. In a prayer that also appears at compline, the return to the earth is depicted as lodging and rest at the end of the day. The prayer asks for support “all the day long of this troubled life, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes and the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over, and our work is done.” After the “day” of life’s labor, the prayer asks for “a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.”29 What is received here? Whether at the end of a day or the end of a life, one receives peace, sleep, rest, as a blessing at the conclusion of a natural cycle. This motif draws on embodied knowledge of the cycle of daytime activity and nighttime rest. In this conceptual frame death is not portrayed as an enemy but as a natural reality to be received with some relief. Encoded in this model is the norm of an ample, natural, cycle of life. As discussed further below, this motif stands in the background of a number of important critiques of the threat of premature and unnatural death. Images of receiving ecological blessings in death are much more common in older funeral liturgies. Evoking the imagery of Psalm 23, Serapian of Thmuis prays that the deceased may receive rest “in green places.”30 In early Christian funerary art Adam and Eve are commonly depicted at home in Eden.31 Macrina’s final prayer in the influential account of her death recalls the creator’s ongoing shaping of bodies from earth, and looks forward to a restoration to paradise: You entrust to the earth our bodies of earth which you fashioned with your own hands … Put down beside me a shining angel to lead me by the hand to the place of refreshment where is the water of repose … You who have cut through the flame of the fiery sword and brought to paradise the man who was crucified with you, who entreated your pity, remember me also in your kingdom.32

onfessions 12.2. The original text is in first person singular but refers to the wider human condition. C Originally appearing in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, it is attributed to passages from a sermon of John Henry Newman. 30 en topos chloas cited in Geoffrey Rowell, The Liturgy of Christian Burial: An Introductory Survey of the Historical Development of Christian Burial Rites (London: SPCK, 1977), 21. 31 Robin Margaret Jensen, Baptismal Imagery in Early Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), Kindle loc. 4551. 32 Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Saint Macrina, trans. Kevin Corrigan (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005), 43. 28 29

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Attention to the sacramental category of reception reorients the focus of the rite especially in three ways: by centering the rite around the physical return of the body to the elements, by depicting the reception of an ecologically flourishing rest or return to Eden, and in some Eastern rites, by regarding the living earth itself as an active liturgical recipient. Remarkably, some classic orthodox funeral texts make the imagery of the actively receptive earth unmistakable, and do so by way of direct liturgical speech addressed to the earth itself. At the commendation of the body, the rite addresses the earth, “O gaping earth, receive the body formed from you by the hand of God, again returning to you as its mother … O earth, receive this body as your own.”33 Some other Byzantine rites turn the maternal imagery toward resurrection, speaking of returning the dead “to the womb of the earth from which they are to be born again.”34 The initial phrase of this verse (phrased in some rites as “open wide, O gaping earth”) can be read as evoking the consumption of food. This image connects with an interesting strand of ecophilosophical thought that foregrounds human edibility—that humans are part of a food chain in which we are necessarily food for other creatures in life and death—represented prominently by the work of philosopher Val Plumwood.35 For many, the motif of an edible body brought into ritual relationship with death and resurrection in a Christian liturgy of course evokes eucharistic imagery. Liturgical theologian Lisa Dahill has proposed extending eucharistic theology and practice to engage more “deeply our raw physical vulnerability to other creatures—our being food.”36 While Dahill’s emphasis is on the eucharistic rite, her work traces eucharistic problems to hyperliteral conceptions of bodily resurrection: “being eaten after death and metabolized into countless new tissues and lives—not rising to an eternal version of our present personhood—is a core biological reality of our lives.”37 Thus, it may be that a more full ritual incorporation of the human place in the interspecies food web begins not first of all at the eucharistic table but at the grave: “open wide, O gaping earth.” The funeral rite here suggests what we might call a eucharistic receptivity on the part of the earth itself. To state it provocatively, the body of Christ is given to the earth for the life of the world. In the fulfillment of the sacramental life accomplished in death, the human creature in Christ returns to its humble place in the cosmos, “not to rule and subdue but rather to serve.”38

ECOLOGY OF THE FUNERAL IN THE RESISTANCE OF EVIL The ecosacramental approach to funeral practice described here would involve a normalization of death not yet seen in any widely practiced Christian funeral rite. Some

Catholic Church, Office of Christian Burial According to the Byzantine Rite (Byzantine: Seminary Press, 1975). Prayer text available online at: http://www.byzc​ath.org/pdf/Fune​ral-Panach​ida-1998-2009.pdf. 34 Armenian Order, cited in Rowell, The Liturgy of Christian Burial, 39. 35 See Val Plumwood, Eye of the Crocodile (Canberra, Australia: Australian National University, 2012); and Val Plumwood, “Human Vulnerability and the Experience of Being Prey,” Quadrant 39:3 (March 1995): 29–34. 36 Lisa Dahill, “Eating and Being Eaten: Interspecies Vulnerability as Eucharist,” Religions 11 (April 20, 2020): 5, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel1​1040​204. 37 Ibid., 5. 38 Hiebert, “Rethinking Dominion Theology,” 22–3. 33

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may be concerned that such a full naturalization of death would entail surrendering the crucial Christian confrontation with the degrading powers of death, sin, and evil. Certainly, there are many examples of anodyne death spiritualities and nature pieties that romanticize death, ignore evil, and minimize suffering—though natural approaches are not alone in producing these effects. It is worth noting that the motifs of ecological necessity (“nature requires death”) and ecological promise (“you will become a tree”) can suppress ambiguity in the face of death similarly to the motifs of divine will (“God requires death”) or divine promise (“you will rise to heaven”). Thus, while the ecological approach to death is uniquely vulnerable to fallacious appeals to nature, this is only one route among many by which Christian ritual might evade a responsible engagement with the degradations of death. However, naturalizing death need not entail a critical surrender. In fact, if Christianity were more fully to naturalize death, its engagement with structural sin and evil might be strengthened rather than weakened. The motif of death in Christian sacramental practice did not arise first as a criticism of “natural” death, or of a general notion of death or mortality, but rather as a revolutionary reinterpretation and critique of the execution of a young adult. The death that stands at the center of Christianity is not death in the abstract but a premature, unnatural, wrongful homicide engineered by socially dominant classes through a manipulated justice system. To state it crudely, Christianity is almost unthinkable if Christ dies of old age. In other words, central to the significance of the death of Christ is its unnatural character: “by a perversion of justice he was taken away.”39 The contrast with natural death in Christology sometimes remains implicit but is nevertheless crucial. Thus, critical engagements with oppressive power— the powers of death, sin, and evil—arising from the death of Christ may be amplified by more clearly acknowledging the foundational ecologically informed principle of a natural span of life that these powers assault.40 The contrast between natural and premature death stands behind much of the recent body of literature that draws on the death of Christ to challenge the deadly power of structural injustice. Ignacio Ellacuría centers the place of what he describes as the “crucified peoples of history”—those whose lives are lived under the threat of suffering and death by the powerful. It is this intervention in the natural course of life that functions to “unify the figure of Jesus with that of oppressed humankind.”41 M. Shawn Copeland distinguishes the valorization of suffering and death from the foregrounding of the unjust dimensions of Christ’s death, the latter generating a socially critical perspective and an agency-generating sense of divine solidarity, specifically here in the African American hymnic tradition: If the makers of the spirituals gloried in the singing of the cross of Jesus, it was not because they were masochistic and enjoyed suffering. Rather, the enslaved Africans sang because they saw on the rugged wooden planks One who had endured what was their daily portion. The cross was treasured because it enthroned the One who went all the way with them and for them. The enslaved Africans sang because they saw the

Isa. 53:8. Of course, “natural life span” is imprecise, and is defined ecologically/contextually. 41 Ignacio Ellacuría, “The Crucified People,” in Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology: Readings from Mysterium Liberationis, ed. Jon Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuría (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), 258. 39 40

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result of the cross: triumph over the principalities and powers of death, triumph over evil in this world.42 Copeland calls for a theology that centrally challenges oppressive violence, urging theology to “work out the relation between the murderous crucifixion of the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth and the murderous crucifixion of countless children, women, and men” who have been “impoverished, marginalized, and excluded” by the powerful.43 James Cone, in his influential The Cross and the Lynching Tree, argues that “to keep the cross from becoming a symbol of abstract, sentimental piety” the death of Christ must be understood in the context of other regimes that traffic in the threat of premature death.44 Invoking the experience of suffering under white American enslavement and terror, Cone writes, “theologically speaking, Jesus was the ‘first lynchee,’ … crucified by the same principalities and powers that lynched black people in America.”45 The promise of the gospel, Cone argues, involves identifying the distinct, peculiar forms of suffering that arise from structural threats of premature death. Cone writes, “the real scandal of the gospel is this: humanity’s salvation is revealed in the cross of the condemned criminal Jesus, and humanity’s salvation is available only through our solidarity with the crucified people in our midst.”46 The liberationist implications of theologies of the cross have become widely recognized. What has gone relatively unremarked, however, is the background reliance on an ecological, naturalized norm for death. Thus, there may be a mutual strengthening of both the ecological and justice dimensions of Christian funeral rites through an ecosacramental approach to mortality. Natural motifs of death can also be deployed more directly to critique the threatening power of death. An ecological metaphor for human death from the Gospel of John is exemplary: “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”47 While this metaphor draws on natural imagery, its original scriptural context is not about natural death but rather execution. The logion is spoken by Jesus when he is “troubled” by the prospect of his impending death, and the passage is shortly followed by the narrator’s explanation that Jesus “said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.”48 John’s gospel is the only canonical gospel in which the tomb itself is a site for the appearance of the risen Christ, and only in John—the gospel with the seed falling into the earth—is the tomb located in a garden. This motif—the seed in the earth dying but bearing abundant fruit—has indeed been used in recent times to protest unjust suffering and premature death while simultaneously naming the resistant power that emerges from life lived under deadly pressure: “quisieron enterrarnos, pero se les olvido que somos semillas” (They tried to bury us. They forgot we were seeds.).49 This dicho has been used especially in Mexico to protest the disappearances

M. Shawn Copeland, “ ‘Wading through Many Sorrows’: Toward a Theology of Suffering in Womanist Perspective,” in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emilie Maureen Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 120. 43 M. Shawn Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), 127–8. 44 James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 168. 45 Ibid., 165. 46 Ibid., 165, 167. 47 Jn 12:24. 48 Jn 12:33. 49 Sometimes the phrase is rendered even more directly, referring not to an attempted burial but an accomplished one, that is, not “they tried to bury us” but rather “they buried us.” 42

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and killings of politically active young people, including the Ayotzinapa 43, a group of student-protestors who disappeared and were apparently killed through the collaboration of political authorities, police, and gangs in 2014.50 The slogan has migrated to resistance and liberation movements across the world.51 The twentieth-century hymn, “Now the Green Blade Rises,” portrays “love by hatred slain” being “laid in the earth,” even as the hymn repeatedly affirms “love is come again like wheat arising green.”52 The sentiment is resonant with the familiar text attributed to martyred bishop Oscar Romero, “I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me I will rise again in the Salvadoran people.” The natural imagery of the seed dying in the earth to bear abundant fruit is used to critique unjust and premature deaths while simultaneously claiming powerful agency on the side of the suffering and the dead. The motif of natural growth is used here—far from normalizing the oppressive dimensions of death—to draw on the imagery of the hidden and irrepressible power of plant life in a critique of the powerful and an empowerment of marginalized peoples facing the threat of death. In this way, the ecosacramental dimensions of the funeral contribute to the renewal of the rite’s revolutionary character founded in its origin in the sacramentum dominicae passionis, the “sacrament to which, from the beginning, all other mysteries were directed.”53

FURTHER READING Davies, Douglas, and Hannah Rumble. Natural Burial: Traditional-Secular Spiritualities and Funeral Innovation. New York: Continuum, 2012. Deloria, Vine. “Death and Religion.” In God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, by Deloria Vine, 165–84. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2003. Irwin, Kevin W. “A Sacramental World: Sacramentality as the Primary Language for Sacraments.” Worship 76:3 (May 2002): 197–211. Kelly, Suzanne. Greening Death: Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring Our Tie to the Earth. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Stewart, Benjamin M. “Wisdom’s Buried Treasure: Ecological Cosmology in Funeral Rites.” In Full of Your Glory: Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation, edited by Teresa Berger. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press Academic, 2019: 353–76.

Kirk Semple, Paulina Villegas, and Natalie Kitroeff, “Break Arrives in Vanishing of 43 People Inside Mexico,” New York Times, July 8, 2020, sec. A. https://www.nyti​mes.com/2020/07/07/world/ameri​cas/mex​ico-43-miss​ingstude​nts-rema​ins.html. I am grateful to Lauren Ayers and Professor Gerado Otero for tracing this saying’s early emergence to neo-Zapatista leaders, possibly Subcomandante Marcos or Comandante Moises. Lauren Ayers, e-mail to author, September 14, 2020. 51 The phrase is traced to Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos. His 1978 couplet in a published 1995 translation reads, “what didn’t you do to bury me / but you forgot that I was a seed.” From The Body and the Wormwood (1960–1993), translated into English by Prof. Nicholas Kostis (1995): “καὶ τί δὲν κάνατε γιὰ νὰ μὲ θάψετε / ὅμως ξεχάσατε πὼς ἤμουν σπόρος.” Full text available http://users.uoa.gr/~nek​tar/arts/poe​try/ntino​s_xr​isti​anop​oylo​s_po​ ems.htm. 52 Crum, John MacLeod Campbell, in Percy Dearmer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Martin Shaw, eds., The Oxford Book of Carols (London: Oxford University Press, 1928). 53 Leo the Great, Sermon 47.1,3. 50

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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Sacramentality of Orders: The Contribution of Sacramental Theology to the Pressing Ecumenical Question of the Recognition of Each Other’s Ministry JAMES F. PUGLISI

INTRODUCTION Have the ecumenical dialogues that have multiplied over the past fifty years made any progress to a mutually recognized ordained ministry in the churches? This gnawing question has dogged ecumenists for many years as they express their frustration that the concrete steps made in dialogue have not moved us forward on this fundamental ecclesiological question of the recognition of each other’s ministries. Perhaps we are looking in the wrong place for the answer to this dilemma. In the past we have approached this question from the point of view of dogma.1 What I believe may be a more fruitful path to take involves coming at the question from the viewpoint of sacramental theology.2 The advantage of To arrive at this point it is necessary to survey the dialogue results and to cull the consensus reached from the ecumenical dialogues and consider the questions that still remain open. A special look at the third section of the Lima document Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry has proved to be fundamental, since following its publication in 1982, many churches have used the insights and material presented for the revision of their liturgical books. We may ask: is this only “window dressing,” or has something fundamental occurred concerning the sacramental understanding of orders? The sacramental nature of ordination is an important question raised by many churches, especially the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. Cf. J. F. Puglisi, “Les dialogues interconfessionnels sur le ministère,” in Nouveaux apprentissages pour l’Église: mélanges offerts à Hervé Legrand, ed. G. Routhier and L. Villemin (Paris: Cerf, 2006), 341–61. A more complete history of the interconfessional dialogues may be found on the website of the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement: Centro Pro Unione at https://www.prouni​one.it/dialog​ ues/. This site presents an accurate listing of the dialogue sessions, their themes, and eventually the full text of any statements or agreements reached. 2 J. F. Puglisi, “Renouveaux liturgiques et marche vers l’unité,” La Maison-Dieu 266 (2011): 111–35. 1

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this approach is that it is first and foremost interdisciplinary, since it is biblical, liturgical, historical, canonical, pneumatological, Trinitarian, Christological, and eschatological. Its starting point is not an “all-or-nothing” approach to the problematic, but rather a more existential approach, starting from the first presupposition that sacraments are lifegiving; they will engage us in the search for where life is being generated and sustained. The recognition of this truth from the beginning permits us to understand how grace is life-giving and life-generating, and eventually to realize why it is the perspective of a sacramental reflection that will open the way to what churches desire in the recognition of each other’s ministries—full ecclesial communion. By examining the very practices of admission to ordained or special ministry that the churches employ, it will be possible to understand more clearly that the relationship of theory and practice opens new possibilities for the mutual understanding of the sacramental nature of ordination. The institutional character of ordination may then be seen as a grace-filled realization of the Gospel itself. Understanding the Gospel as grace and a bestower of a certain status is to be understood as a process where: with three phases: (1) the act of grace is unconditioned (it supposes a benevolent donor and a legally unempowered beneficiary); (2) the act of grace, which bestows legal competence, both makes a declaration and establishes a new state; and (3) the act of grace entails certain obligations—it creates a new situation.3 From this way of understanding the process of admission to one of the ordained ministries (episcopacy, presbyterate, or diaconate), it is possible to realize a convergence in practice that allows for a development in theology concerning the sacramental nature of ordination itself. What is necessary is a fresh articulation of how the churches recognize in each other the grace-filled processes and the very activity of the Holy Spirit that leads to a recognition of the apostolic nature of the other. It is our hope to end with some indication of what may be done to advance further in the mutual recognition of each other’s ministries as authentic manifestations of God’s care for the people of God and the progression of the Gospel.

SACRAMENTALITY OF ORDINATION: A FRESH ARTICULATION Ordination is, without a doubt, the most troubling issue that impedes the overcoming of the separation of Christians, a scandal to all the world, and it impedes the common Eucharistic celebration, the sacramental realization of our unity in Christ as God’s people. For this reason, we need to arrive at a bold and courageous solution that respects the beliefs that we hold dear but that finds a way to move forward toward that perfect unity for which Christ prayed, as God’s pilgrim people entrusted with a mission. The urgency of the task impelled me to look for a model from the Scriptures that might parallel our dilemma today. While extrapolation from one context for application to another is risky, there are heuristic advantages that outweigh the risks. For this reason, I wish to suggest the following as a possible way of taking the next bold steps in the repairing of the breach and building a bridge toward a respectful resolution.

I have come to this insight thanks to the extensive work of a Lutheran canonist, Hans Dombois. Cf. H. Dombois, Das Recht der Gnade. Ökumenisches Kirchenrecht, I (Witten: Luther Verlag, 1969), 175. All of this newness is none other than divine life itself, hence it is life-giving and sustaining. 3

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Biblical Heuristic Model The conclusion to the early crisis in the first community as the faith spread to different cultures, outside of its Judaic matrix, was expressed in the letter written to all: “It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials” (Acts 15:28). The issue had to do with conflicting religious practices: imposition of circumcision for salvation (Acts 15:1) and the observance of an ethos consistent with the Mosaic tradition (Acts 15:20-21). The theological model here is found in Peter’s address. So, let us listen to Peter again today: God, who knows the human heart, testified to them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us; and in cleansing their hearts by faith he has made no distinction between them and us. … On the contrary, we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will. (Acts 15:8-11) The theological model is the discernment of the Holy Spirit’s presence in the hearts of individuals and hence in the ethos of living in accord with the Spirit. What is important to note is that there was, from the very beginning, diversity in the practice of the living of the faith but a recognition of the activity of the same Spirit in the life and witness of each other. In this pericope, we may witness the temptation to see uniformity of practice and belief. It was the Spirit, however, who recognized the Spirit in the other, in spite of diversity. This pneumatological principle was present in the life of the nascent church as it spread from city to city, from culture to culture, from epoch to epoch. An additional dimension to this process was the mode with which it took place. We could call it a synodical process but conceived within an eschatological understanding of where the church was on the way. In those early days of the formation of the church it was the urgent and necessary desire to converse and to meet and to decide together if that was a way of life. There was a constant “handing on” (traditio) and a constant “receiving” (receptio) from one another. This traditio/receptio dynamic would become the hallmark of the institutional life of the church that enabled her to sort out authentic from inauthentic elements of the teaching of the apostles. The liturgical or sacramental ecclesiology at the local level was seen to be the place where both recognition of church and ministry was taking place. I believe that a necessary epistemological approach to the question at hand involves a serious inductive application of the adage lex orandi, lex credendi in a systematic way. This does not mean it is an exercise in putting together experience and dogma but rather one of deep discernment in relation to our experience. Pope Francis has articulated it this way: “Realities are more important than ideas,”4 as ideas are at the service of praxis.5 Only in this way will we be able to see the relation between church and ministry. An ecclesiology elaborated from its liturgical base renews, in a convincing manner, the debates such as the articulation between Christology and pneumatology, between order and jurisdiction, between confession of faith and succession in the apostolic ministry. Our new starting point will not be from what divides us in order to try to find solutions to questions that impede communion, such as the priestly dimension of ordained ministry, apostolic succession, and the “invalidity” that its absence entails. In an extensive work, I have applied this inductive method to the process of admission to ordained ministry in the early church Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 233. Ibid., 232.

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in order to be able to discover some fundamental epistemological principles in regard to church and its structuring (including its apostolic continuity) and ministry (including its role in succession in an apostolic church).6 This same method was comparatively applied to the study of the rites of ordination in the churches born out of the Reformation both in their historical context and in their contemporary form.7 What rich sources the liturgy and the liturgical assembly represent for theology, and how much they reveal of the inherent balances or imbalances in theological discourses! This locus theologicus affords the churches the opportunity to confront their theological discourse with their actual practice. Therefore, we can affirm that by considering what the churches do when they ordain a minister (praxis) illustrates more convergence than what they articulate in their systematics about ordained ministry (theory). The importance of the ordination ritual resides in the fact that it is a complex process that represents in a demonstrative way the structuring of each concrete church, that is at the same time an ecclesial act as well as a confessional, epicletical, and juridical act, and in all its aspects, a sacramental one. Christian ordination cannot be reduced to a simple rite of installation or of entrance into a charge, but it is an ecclesial process (traditio-receptio) in which a Christian receives a charism for the building up of the church that puts him or her in a new relationship—personal and lasting—with his or her brothers and sisters. Based on the practice of ordination in the churches, we may ask if there is not some sort of succession relative to the transmissible part of the apostolic ministry. Careful study of the texts of ordination reveals: each church follows in the line of continuity from the church of the apostles, and its ministries are described as a service of this continuity. According to the texts, ordination always contains a dimension that confesses the apostolic faith of the whole church: the scrutiny or examination before the people, of course, bears witness to the candidate’s moral qualities, but even more, to the candidate’s apostolic faith. The acceptance of the elected by the neighboring bishops or heads of other local churches, and their required participation at the imposition of hands and the epiclesis of the whole assembly, acknowledge that the faith of the church concerned is in accord with that of the church of the apostles. Since the existing ministers always have a decisive role in the admission of their new colleagues into the ministry, can we not speak of a succession? At least in the concrete realities there is a secondary transmission from ministers to ministers, for God is always the principal actor. There is a second aspect that we very likely could call apostolic. These texts always attribute an active episcopē to the ministers: they have the responsibility of watching faithfully over the apostolic faith (i.e., preserving the teaching of Christ), and to be worthy stewards of this faith (responsible for the pastoral ministry of governance and of the building up of the church) at the same time that they stand “facing” the church (they must inspire their brothers and sisters in their responsibility for the faith and for the apostolic mission of the church, and even exercise the power of the keys, namely the authority claimed by the ministry in some Christian churches to administer the discipline

J. F. Puglisi, The Process of Admission to Ordained Ministry: A Comparative Study, trans. from French by M. Misrahi, vol. I: Epistemological Principles and Roman Catholic Rites (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996), see especially ­chapter 2, “Theological Reflection,” 178–81. 7 J. F. Puglisi, The Process of Admission, vols. 2: The First Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican and Wesleyan Rites and 3: Contemporary Rites and General Conclusions especially the theological reflections at the conclusion of each volume. 6

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of the church, and to grant or withhold its privileges given by Christ to the church for binding and losing sins). Of course, the minister cannot be separated from his/her church,8 and the succession is a succession within the church. Traditionally, this succession is acceded to through the imposition of hands (cheirotonia, by those charged with this task) and through the epiclesis, the work of the whole church. The Protestant determination was to restore the Christian dignity conferred in baptism and to reaffirm that the entire church is responsible for the Gospel, and for the faith and the salvation that it preaches. Why was this reemphasis so important? Because it makes it possible to overcome the divisions between Christians within the one church, and to determine the right and proper nature of the pastoral ministry in relationship to the elements that make up the apostolic foundation of the church (the Spirit, the Gospel, and the sacraments): the pastoral ministry is necessary, but it is always secondary in relationship to these major constitutive elements.9 Accordingly, the ordained ministry is clearly in the service of those three principal elements and is therefore part of the structuring of the church. The category of diakonia is given special importance: it is the service of the Gospel, the building up of the church through the preaching of the Word, the administration of the sacraments, and the exercise of the power of the keys. The ministry here is seen as the function of a shepherd who remains at the same time one of the flock. But the grace of the Gospel endows the ministers with a new personal relationship to their fellow Christians. These ministers are vis-à-vis the church, for through them Christ speaks to his church as her Lord. But the ministers are also members, subject like the rest of the flock to the judgment of God. Lastly, they exercise their ministry in the communion of the other charisms and ministries, and along with them. All these churches agree that the public or ordained ministry belongs only to the persons duly chosen and installed, and that if a minister changes parishes, the ordination is not to be repeated. Luther fought to have Christ restored to his primacy as the sole Head of the Church in the mind of Christians: the attachment to Christ in faith should outweigh obedience to the pope or to the other ministers invested with apostolic authority. To bolster this conviction, Luther insisted that the church is found everywhere the Gospel is preached correctly and the sacraments are administered according to the command of God.10 The

This is the meaning of charisma veritatis of St. lrenaeus, who does not understand it as a personal gift but links it to the entire community. The bishop does not therefore bear personal witness but communal witness. See J. F. Puglisi, The Process of Admission, vol. I, 15–18. 9 Confirmed by the confessional writings, as, for example, Confessio Augustana V (= The Book of Concord 31); Confessio et expositio …, cap. XVIII (Bekenntnisschriften und Kirchenordnungen der nach Gottes Wort reformierten Kirche 253.19-47 = Cochrane, ed. Reformed Confessions of Sixteenth Century [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966], 268–9); and in the writings of Luther or Calvin, for example, Von den Konziliis …, WA 50, 632.3ff. (= LW 41, 154–6); Institutes of the Christian Religion (1560), IV.3.1 = Opera Calvini 4, 615–17 (= edition of McNeill 2, 1053–4). 10 For example, CA VII (= BC 32); P. Melanchthon, Apologia …, VII and VIII (BSLK 233-246 = BC 168– 78); Confessio et exposition …, cap. XVII (BKRK 248.35-253.10 = Cochrane 261-268); M. Luther, Von den Konziliis …, WA 50, 629.16-20 (= LW 149); J. Calvin, IC (1560), IV.1.9 (OC 4, 576f.) (= McNeill 2, 1023f.). For a discussion of this dimension of Luther’s ecclesiology, see the article by V. Vajta, “The Church as Spiritual-Sacramental Communio with Christ and His Saints in the Theology of Luther,” in Luther’s Ecumenical Significance. An Interconfessional Consultation, ed. P. Manns and H. Meyer, American trans. of the German [Ökumenische Erschließung Luthers. Referate und Ergebnisse einer internationalen Theologenkonsultation] (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press/Paulist Press, 1984) 112C121, with the responses of John of Helsinki (Orthodox) 137–9, G. Wainwright (Methodist) 139–49, and the conclusion drawn by G. Kretschmar (Lutheran) 155–8. On p. 157 Kretschmar has this to say on the interpretations of Luther: “If the visible side of the church is the sign 8

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personal position of the minister is relativized. The church is not visible because of the presence of an ordained minister, but because his/her ministry is exercised faithfully. Another remark on the subject of the communion within the church is appropriate at this point: this communion is restored within the local church (because of the reemphasis on the grace of baptismal priesthood). The role of the actors involved in the process of access to the ordained ministry shows that the entire church is responsible for the ministry entrusted to it by God. The election takes place in common (the whole church is involved, either in the sense that all its members are present, or in the sense that a group representing them, and their leaders, participate). The imposition of hands and the epiclesis are carried out by several pastors, and sometimes by representatives of the elders. This fact could be interpreted in this way: the local churches are not allpowerful, wholly sovereign; they can only exist in connection with each other. It is the epiclesis of the entire assembly (the vertical action of God) that preserves the ritual gesture of the cheirotonia (the horizontal human action) from its autonomy. Within this communion, this bond is seen in the expression of faith (the same confession of faith), in the same customs, and the same ministries. History prevented the churches of the Reformation from receiving the episcopal ordination of the Catholic church, and thus the horizontal communion of the churches of the West was broken: the Protestants no longer celebrate their ordinations in communion with the local Roman church, which no longer accepts their ordinations. However, the vertical communion, that is, the eschatological dimension, was conserved. A certain Catholic tendency to overemphasize the hierarchical, placing the accent on the “traditio” enacted by the imposition of hands by the bishops, and tending to ignore the “communio” within the local church by reducing its role in the choice of its bishop, is henceforth faced with the opposite tendency on the part of the Protestants, emphasizing the local or regional “communio” at the expense of the “traditio.” This new emphasis on communion is reflected also in the exercise of the ministry. Installed as shepherd in a community, the pastor is never alone in the exercise of his or her responsibility. There are always others to share it with him, namely, the elders, or a council. On the regional level there is even a ministry that serves a number of parishes at once—the bishop or superintendent who supervises the quality of the preaching, the moral life of the communities, and so on, and this also takes place in a collegial context, with the help of other pastors or a synod. Quite often this minister is installed in his/her functions in a process similar to that of ordination.

for its hidden essence, then there are, in spite of all ambiguity, nevertheless valid structures of the historical church.” A certain reservation regarding the use of the couplet “visible church”/“invisible church” is found in A. Greiner, “La notion d’Église dans la Confession d’Augsbourg,” Positions luthériennes 29, 4 (1981), 309–24. There he prefers the couplet “ecclesia coram hominibus”/“ecclesia coram Deo,” a concept that expresses better the relationship between article VII and article VIII of the CA. It would seem that the expression “hidden church” (Ecclesia abscondita) was preferred by Luther; see, for example, Ad librum …, WA 7, 722.1-12; De Servo arbitrio (1525), WA 18, 652.23f. (= LW 33, 88f.); In epistolam S. Pauli ad Galatas commentarius ([1531] 1535), WA 40/ II, 105f. = Ecclesia occulta (= “Lectures on Galatians,” LW 27, 83–5), and WA 7, 710.1-7 where it is a question of the Ecclesia invisibilis; lastly, on the end of the primacy of the ministry (i.e., the unique importance of the pope and the episcopal hierarchy) and the use of the thesis of the “invisible church,” see D. Olivier, “La question des ministères au sein des Églises de la Réforme protestante durant la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle,” pp. 94–5 in L. de Vaucelles, ed., Églises, sociétés et ministères. Essai d’herméneutique historique des origines du christianisme à nos jours (Paris: Centre Sèvres (coll. “Travaux et conférences du Centre Sèvres,” 7) 1986).

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Institutional Disassociation between Ministry and Ecclesia In the evaluation of the ministries of other churches and ecclesial communities, the Catholic church has often applied very rigorous criteria that it oftentimes has overlooked in the historical evaluation of the ministries within her own borders. When the history of the process of access to the ordained ministry is considered, it becomes evident that there are several moments when a gradual but ultimately radical shift occurs not only in the form of the ministries but also in their relation to the ecclesia. A growing division is produced between the pastoral ministry and the ecclesia, which is illustrated in an increasing autonomy of the ordained in relationship to the faithful. This result may be seen in three principal events in the life of the medieval church: namely, with ordinations “ad missam”; with the transformation of the “ecclesiological title (titulus)” to an “economic title”; and eventually, with the growth of the mendicant religious orders and their exemption from local bishops.11 Briefly, what happened in all three of these examples is the weakening, and eventual detachment of the ordained ministries from their ecclesial point of reference and attributing an autonomous, personal status to the person of the minister, enabling him/her to act in the name of a “personal power” he received in ordination. He was no longer seen within the church but now he was placed above the church, enabling him to act upon the church since he had the potestas over the Eucharistic Body of Christ and so over the ecclesial Body of Christ. These “deviations” were possible since no longer was the prescription against ordinations without a concrete pastoral charge known as absolute ordinations (canon 6 of the Council of Chalcedon) observed. The importance of this canon is seen in the relationship that was articulated between pastoral ministry and the ecclesia. The final result deriving from these three examples allows for the existence of a pastoral ministry independent from a particular community. Ministerial competency is no longer the fruit of a process that is ecclesial, liturgical, confessional, and juridical, necessarily linked to the structuring of the local church. Henceforth it arises from a juridical decision resting upon a “personal power over” the universal church.12 In addition, the central act of the cheirotonia and the epiclesis, both seen as part of a process involving several different actors (the faithful, the clergy, the neighboring churches in the case of episcopal ordinations, the ordinand, and most especially the Holy Spirit), slowly becomes obfuscated by the various “secondary explanatory rites.” These eventually become the classical “matter and form” of the sacrament and what will later be designated as necessary for the validity of the sacrament, namely the porrectio instrumentorum. The Catholic church will have to wait until Pope Pius XII clarifies what is to be considered the actual matter and form of the sacrament of orders, returning to the ancient tradition preserved by the Catholica, East and West, namely the imposition of hands and epiclesis.13 This decision of Pius was the prelude to the liturgical reform promoted by the Second Vatican Council concerning ordination as well as other matters sacramental. Following the Council, once again a sacramental ecclesiology that reflects a Trinitarian equilibrium will be developed. Rooted in the early tradition of the church, contrary to a conception I have studied this from the ecclesiological and sacramental point of view in J. F. Puglisi, The Process of Admission to Ordained Ministry: A Comparative Study, vol. I, 171–7. 12 See J. Ratzinger, “Der Einfluss des Bettelordensstreites auf die Entwicklung der Lehre vom päpstlichen Universalprimat, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des heiligen Bonaventura,” in Theologie in Geschichte und Gegenwart, edited by J. Auer, H. Volk (Munich: Karl Zink Verlag, 1957), pp. 697–724. 13 Pius XII, Sacramentum Ordinis, November 30, 1947 in AAS 40 (1948) 5–7. 11

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of the ministry elaborated at the end of the twelfth century (which defined the ordained ministry, or rather the priesthood, by its “power to consecrate”), the pastoral ministry of the bishop or presbyter is linked to the function of building up and presiding over the ecclesia. To sum up, we may say that the originality of ordained ministries can be understood from their ecclesial commission. Inadequate are the starting terms of priesthood (in the technical, more cultic sense of offering sacrifice, different from the presbyterate, as a ministry of presiding over the building up of the church), of mediation, of power, of sign, of status. On the other hand, the starting point of the ecclesial commission and the grace that is its foundation are pertinent. In fact the non-distinction between bishop and presbyter to which the New Testament witnesses could have a positive sense for us to the extent that there we can see in the episcopē the essential and fundamental function and thereby situate the presbyterate in the line of the episcopate. The presbyterate shares, at its own level, this function. The function is that of presidency, namely of the responsibility in relation to the vitality and to the unity of the Christian assembly and hence in respect to their fidelity to apostolic testimony. The priesthood however remains a corporate reality exercised in the assembly by an epicletic act. The assembly does not offer a sacrifice that its president confects but because Christ offers, each member of his body also offers (cf. Guerric d’Igny (end of XII century)): “The priest does not consecrate alone, does not sacrifice alone but the whole assembly of the faithful consecrate with him” (PL 185:87).14

Sacramental Ecclesiology In this sacramental ecclesiology, the church is structured according to a dynamic that respects the Trinitarian life received in the sacraments of initiation, and the communal dimension of salvation. In addition to the balance between Christology and pneumatology in this manner of treating the ordained ministry, one may also begin to articulate the content of each of the ordained ministries to allow their uniqueness in relation to the diversity of other ministries. This element is important for the realization that the whole church is itself ministerial (see Ephesians 4). Hence the content of the episcopate, the presbyterate, and the diaconate needs to be articulated in relation to the whole prophetic, royal, and priestly people of God. The three ministries need to be seen as permanent and defined by their authentic original function within the whole body. If we are going to speak of priesthood, the Catholic church will need to begin its reflection with the theology of baptism and not that of order since the priestly function is one of the whole church and not just that of the ordained.

St Thomas explains this by speaking of the role of the priest since it is only an instrumental action in persona Christi: 14

There are two ways of producing an effect; first, as a principal agent; secondly, as an instrument. In the former way the interior sacramental effect is the work of God alone: [first, because God alone can enter the soul wherein the sacramental effect takes place; and no agent can operate immediately where it is not: secondly, because grace which is an interior sacramental effect is from God alone, as we have established in I-II, 112, 1; while the character which is the interior effect of certain sacraments, is an instrumental power which flows from the principal agent, which is God.] In the second way, however, the interior sacramental effect can be the work of man, in so far as he works as a minister. For a minister is of the nature of an instrument, since the action of both is applied to something extrinsic, while the interior effect is produced through the power of the principal agent, which is God. (S.T. IIIa, q 64, a1)

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What will be necessary on the part of the Catholic church is an authentic recovery of a new epistemological stance when questioning the existence or nonexistence of the ministerial reality of another church. I would propose that this new stance is found precisely in the discernment of the apostolic quality of the other. It should be noted that in all of the dialogues that have gone on now for fifty years the questions of baptism, eucharist, apostolicity, and ministry have been discussed and with various levels of convergence toward a common understanding of their relationship to the teaching of the apostles through the ages.15

The Setting for Ministerial Recognition Is in the Context of Apostolicity The church as a whole, and not just the ordained ministry, transmits apostolicity.16 Historical studies motivated Vatican II to avoid ratifying the notion of unwritten traditions that supplement Scripture with further teachings and practices of apostolic origin. The Council carefully avoided a doctrinal decision on the contents of the “unwritten traditions,” while stressing instead an intimate correlation, permeating the whole life of the church, between Scripture and the dynamic process of tradition (DV 8.3, 9). By the interaction of these two in the church, the apostolic tradition of the Gospel and life is perpetuated, which Scripture expresses in a special manner (DV 8). This reality constituted of many elements is then perpetuated in and by the church “in her doctrine, life, and worship” as she continuously transmits “all that she herself is, all that she believes” (DV 8.1). The implications of accepting this vision leads us to consider that the recognition of church and ministry needs to be correlated and the point of departure should be the church developed from a liturgical ecclesiology at the local level. For this reason I have considered the question of ordination from its institutional perspective as a process of access to a ministry serving the construction of the church—a project eschatologically determined as the pilgrim people of God on the move to its final realization in the kingdom. The church cannot be well understood unless we start from eschatology, that is, from that which the church must be when it will finally be perfectly itself. Note the biblical theme of “perfection”: “Behold the house of God among humankind”—it is a question of the “holy city,” the new Jerusalem, beautiful as a bride, bedecked for her spouse—“See, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them; they will be his people, and God himself will be with them” (cf. Rev. 21:2-3). In this text more or less all the images or notions that present the church are united: dwelling—which includes the ideas of edification and of the holy temple—city, Jerusalem, spouse, people of God. The principal accent in the biblical uses of these images is placed upon God, the ultimate reference whose unity and unicity is communicated to the house or the temple in which he dwells, to the city that is the place of the prince or the principality, which is transferred to the church who is his spouse, to the people whose unity is created by God and who is called into being and consecrated by him. If the church is one and unique it is because God is one and unique (Eph. 4:4-6).17 Church Fathers present the church as

W. Kasper, Harvesting the Fruits: Aspects of Christian Faith in Ecumenical Dialogue (London: Continuum, 2009). See Joint Evangelical-Lutheran—Roman Catholic Commission, “Apostolicity in the Church” §113–14, https:// www.prouni​one.it/dialog​ues/l-rc/, accessed December 17, 2019. 17 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. 15 16

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“The people united by the unity of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.”18 The first principle of the unity of church and the fundamental reason of its uniqueness is found in the unity and uniqueness of God. However, this unity is reflected in the unity of human nature that must already be seen in the context of the unity of the world. Human sciences have renewed this aspect of study as well as the Fathers of the church having an awareness of this fact.19 Humanity forms a unity. God has made it thus and has treated it from the beginning to the end as such. The mystical Body of Christ is the raising of humanity to the supernatural state of the union that exists between all finite beings in relation to the infinite Being. This body represents the form of unity of that human nature when it reflects perfectly the unity of God through the fact of being assumed by the only Son of God: a unity that, completed by Christ, is applied to persons by the sacraments of incorporation in baptism and eucharist. It is at this level that the Fathers seek the foundation of the unity of the church.20 This unity must grow until its eschatological perfection. “God will be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). There will be a perfect unity of subjects that remains personal: unity together with an intimate communion established at the level of persons of an exterior collective life but social unanimity and its external expressions proceed from the internal expression of individual persons. The Augustinian city of God is prepared and begins in the people of God still as an itinerant state on earth.21 This earthly condition is characterized by an “already” and “not yet” simultaneously. The people of God is already that which we are called to be (we are already children of God). However, we await the glorious freedom of the children of God and the liberation of our bodies.22 We only possess the fruits of the Spirit,23 which is more than just a simple promise and more than an engagement; it is a beginning of the definitive reality, but only a beginning. This creates a dialectic and a paradox of the church, but it confers a structure that is characterized by this dual dimension—the well-known Augustinian analysis in sacramental theology: sacramentum and res—an exterior (sensible) mediation and a reality. Following the Scripture, the Fathers saw the unity of the soul among themselves and the union that they have with God as springing, by means of the sacraments, from the Incarnation with which God has united to himself human nature.24 The Fathers extend this sacramental value to the ministers, presiding over the community: no longer in the sense that they communicate union with Christ as does baptism and eucharist, but in the sense that they represent Jesus Christ whom God has constituted as principle of unity between him and us and among us.25 Cyprian, De orat. Domin 4:53; Ep 75:3; Clem. Cor 46,6; Irenaeus, Adv. Haer IV.6.7; 9.3; V.18.2; Augustine, Sermo 71, 20.33, Cf. LG 4. 19 See E. Mersch, Le Christ, l’homme et l’univers (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1962) as well as P. Teilhard de Chardin, Le phénomène humain (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1955) and E. Mersch, The Whole Christ: The Historical Development of the Doctrine of the Mystical Body in Scripture and Tradition (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1938). 20 H. de Lubac, Catholicism: A Study of Dogma in Relation to the Corporate Destiny of Mankind (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1950). See section on St. Augustine. 21 St Thomas knows this theme except for interpreting it in the terms of its common good (Quaest. Disp. De virt. In comm, a. 9; De caritate a. 2) he defines the people of God following Augustine who uses Cicero’s populus (De civ. Dei II, 21; XIX, 21, 24) cf. St. Thomas, Comm. in Hebr. c. 8, l. 3. 22 Rom. 8:21-23. 23 Rom. 8:23; 2 Cor. 1:22; Eph. 1:14. 24 E.g., Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. III, 18,1 & 7; IV,20,4; Leo the Great, Serm. 63, 6; Hilary De Trinitate VIII, 13. 25 Ignatius Antioch, Eph V, 1; Magnes. VII; Ciprian, Epist. 49: 2.4. 18

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Just as the unity of the church is growing toward its fulfillment, so too is an imperfect recognition of ministry, which parallels the imperfect communion of churches. Because of the eschatological dimension of unity, the Catholic judgment on the authenticity of ministry need not be of an all-or-nothing nature. For example, we may cite the document from the Lutheran/Catholic Dialogue in the United States, The Church as Koinonia of Salvation: Its Structures and Ministries. §107 quotes Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation on the Doctrine of the Faith, who wrote in 1993 to Bavarian Lutheran bishop Johannes Hanselmann: I count among the most important results of the ecumenical dialogues the insight that the issue of the Eucharist cannot be narrowed to the problem of “validity.” Even a theology oriented to the concept of succession, such as that which holds in the Catholic and in the Orthodox church, need not in any way deny the salvation-granting presence of the Lord [Heilschaffende Gegenwart des Herrn] in a Lutheran [evangelische] Lord’s Supper.26 An openness such as Ratzinger expresses leads us to consider that a more nuanced Eucharistic theology is needed that attends to the assembly as the subject of the liturgical action. Such a theology sees not only the words of institution but also the epiclesis as consecratory. Hence it would recognize the necessity of an ordained presider, but it realizes that it is not all his/her act but the act of the whole assembly invoking the Spirit to transform bread/wine and us into the Body of Christ.

From Ecclesiality to Apostolicity Treating in parallel the questions of ecclesial recognition and ministerial recognition enables us to situate the ultimate question of the recognition of one another’s orders alone a matter of apostolicity. The elements of apostolicity are multiple and no one element alone determined historically the apostolicity or non-apostolicity of a church. This will bring us full circle to my opening observation of how a biblical model may supply some help in the question of ecclesial and ministerial recognition. The ecclesial question is whether we can discern the Gospel in another tradition. What then is the Gospel if not that of witnessing to the love of God through service, through holiness, through prophecy and proclaiming that Word of God, of celebrating that Word of God and of living that Word of God? This is the apostolic root of the People of God, the Body of Christ and the irrefutable presence of the Holy Spirit’s activity. The undeniable criteria of ecclesiality is seen in prophecy, martyrdom, and holiness. All the churches of any denomination experience the gift of prophecy and, in the present and past horizon, all have witnesses by blood. The same is true of holiness, however it may be called. If martyrdom, prophecy, and holiness, all expressions of the Apostolic root, belong to the churches, to the point of having, for example, a common martyrology, why then deny each other the recognition of the ministry that intrinsically remains “functional” for the good order of the churches? Concerning the so-called “apostolic succession.” It cannot be only read on the vertical plane of the passage from a canonically ordained bishop to another ordained canonically. Catholicity has a horizontal dimension (in fact, it is also vertical in the sense that it “Briefwechsel von Landesbischof Johannes Hanselmann und Joseph Kardinal Ratzinger über das CommunioSchreiben der Römischen Glaubenskongregation,” Una Sancta, 48 (1993) 348. 26

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operates in the making of history). It articulates the people of God known to be based on the faith/testimony of the apostles. Apostolicity is not just magisterium and discipline and an uninterrupted succession, it is a faith professed, a tradition that grows, thanks to the assistance of the Spirit (DV 8). The “Great Church” for understandable, but often “secular” reasons, imposed discipline and traditions, even silencing the Spirit. The multiplicity of churches can no longer be read as vulnus, wounded unity, but as a way of elaborating a tradition that, like a prism (this is the image of the “polyhedron” repeatedly proposed by Pope Francis) reflects the original kerygma and embodies it in the diversity of times and places. We do not read disunity as a joke, but as a meaningful challenge that interrogates all the churches, often witnessing aspects that either have been lost or been neglected (I think of the mystagogical tradition of the East, or the primacy of the “word” reaffirmed by the Reformation, or the primacy of the Spirit to which Pentecostal churches appeal). By analogy with the ancient church that had different ministerial and catechetical traditions, yet used the name of church for each community, so we, too, should stop discussing the recognition of the gift that the Spirit gives to the “Catholica” in the different traditions of its churches: Evangelical, Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox, and so on.

Apostolic Continuity and Apostolic Succession We cannot isolate apostolic succession from apostolic continuity. Faith as well as sacramental life and ministry all form part of what is received and transmitted in and by the church. There is no true apostolic succession if the historic chain of ordination is maintained but there is a deviation from the right faith, nor can we have apostolic succession when there is only episcopal succession while the rest of the ministries, including the laity, are not participating in it. To correctly understand the role of ordination in the process of continuity and succession means to see it as a sign and visible means of apostolic succession that must be an insertion into the life of the community. When this happens the ordained bishop or other minister who exercises episcope both give and receive apostolicity from the community into which he is inserted. Apostolic continuity cannot be created ex nihilo through episcopal ordination unless it is somehow already there. And it cannot be taken for granted unless it is somehow affirmed, sealed, and proclaimed through episcopal ordination. There is no apostolic succession that could be limited to the episcopal college as such or to some form of apostolic collegiality. Every bishop participates in the episcopal college via his community, not directly. Apostolic succession is a succession of apostolic communities via their heads.27 The church is an entity that receives and re-receives what its history transmits to it (paradosis), but this transmission is never a purely historical affair; it takes place sacramentally or better, eucharistically, that is, it is experienced as a gift coming from the last days, from what God has promised and prepared for us in God’s Kingdom. It is the work of the Holy Spirit, to bring about the last days (Acts 2:17).

B.-D. Dupuy, “La succession apostolique dans la discussion œcuménique,” Istina 12: 3–4 (1967): 398.

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CONCLUSION: MINISTERIAL RECOGNITION The ecclesial question, as stated above, is whether we can discern above all the lived Gospel in another tradition or not. If this is the case, then we may ask what another tradition thinks it is doing when it is baptizing or celebrating the Lord’s Supper or ordaining a minister. If we can affirm that we are doing the same thing even though we may articulate it or celebrate it differently, then this is grounds for ecclesial communion. If ministry preserves a communion in apostolicity (prophecy, martyrdom, holiness), and preserves the Gospel and the sacraments, then it would appear that we can argue for the authenticity of that ministry (by their fruits).28 It would appear that this is precisely what the first communities of Christians did to resolve the first crisis on the road to their engagement in the mission left to them by the Lord. God, who knows the human heart, testified to them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us; and in cleansing their hearts by faith he has made no distinction between them and us. … On the contrary, we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will. (Acts 15:8-11)

FURTHER READING Karttunen, Tomi. “A Sufficient Differentiated Consensus Regarding the Sacramentality of the Ordained Ministry? A Lutheran Approach,” Reseptio 1 (2019): 76–9. Legrand, Hervé. “A Sufficient Differentiated Consensus Regarding the Sacramentality of the Ordained Ministry? A Catholic Approach,” Reseptio 1 (2019): 80–4. Puglisi, James F. “Catholic Learning Concerning Apostolicity and Ecclesiality,” in Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning: Exploring a Way for Contemporary Ecumenism, edited by Paul D. Murray. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 181–96. Puglisi, James F., “Ministry,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ecumenical Studies, edited by Geoffrey Wainwright and Paul McPartlan (published online June 2018). https://www.oxfo​ rdha​ndbo​oks.com/view/10.1093/oxfor​dhb/978019​9600​847.001.0001/oxfor​dhb-978019​ 9600​847. Torrell, Jean-Pierre, A Priestly People: Baptismal Priesthood and Priestly Ministry. New York: Paulist Press, 2013. Wood, Susan K., ed. Ordering the Baptismal Priesthood: Theologies of Lay and Ordained Ministry. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003.

S. K. Wood, “The Correlation between Ecclesial Communion and the Recognition of Ministry,” One in Christ 50 (2016): 238–49. 28

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Sacraments in a Post-Christian Society JORIS GELDHOF

A THOUGHT-EXPERIMENT It would be an interesting thought-experiment to imagine the absolute opposite of sacraments. What would be, or could be, diametrically opposed to the reality that Christians embrace as the sacraments? What would be opposed to their actual celebration, so that they cannot be celebrated (anymore) in any possible way? What would be opposed to their nature and the ways in which it is understood in various theological traditions? And what would be opposed to their shape, that is, their ritual outline and composition resulting from the respective liturgical families to which they belong?1 There is no doubt that it would be extremely difficult to come up with satisfactory answers to these challenging questions. Of course, it is possible to imagine circumstances under which Christians cannot physically gather for worship (as, e.g., under the conditions of a lockdown occasioned by the spring 2020 coronavirus crisis, during which I have been writing this essay); one can invent arguments and even subscribe to philosophical theories undermining or devaluing the essence of the sacraments; and one can argue that the shape of a sacrament has lost so many references to the Christian tradition or even to the Scriptures that they have virtually become unidentifiable or evaporated into sheer vagueness. Still, however, regardless of how radical these tendencies are, they would not simply annul the sacraments or completely destroy the reality they represent. All of the aforementioned developments would leave options for the sacraments to survive, to embody God’s grace, and to establish communion. And maybe even the remembrance that once in human history there had been sacraments is sufficient for upholding sacramental reality in a future present. This imaginative exercise raises further questions, in particular about the “positive” character of the sacraments. Literally, this means that they have been “put” or “set” (Lat. posita) in being, very much like God’s revelation in the history of humankind, around which German idealist philosopher F. W. J. Schelling built an entire “positive” philosophy in the later phase of his intellectual career.2 Fundamentally, the sacraments have been

The threefold distinction between celebration, shape, and nature of sacraments is derived from Johannes H. Emminghaus, The Eucharist: Essence, Form, Celebration (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1978). 2 Joris Geldhof, Revelation, Reason and Reality: Theological Encounters with Jaspers, Schelling and Baader (Leuven: Peeters, 2007). 1

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“given,” which implies that even when they are not accepted, one cannot deny that they were originally offered. The “fact” of their givenness is prior to and, as a consequence, to some extent independent of the “act” of their reception. This says at once something crucial about the sacraments’ transcendence and supernatural origin. But that is an aspect about which more will be said below. All of this, moreover, is not to downplay the seriousness of cultural and intellectual conditions that make it really hard for the sacraments to continue to exist and to do so in plausible and authentic ways. So-called “post-Christian” societies do entail particular challenges for the sacramental life of the Churches; there is no reason to deny that. On the contrary, it is of paramount importance not to deny or ignore the impact of these developments, both on the external form of the sacraments and on their understanding, at least if one does not want to run the risk of complete isolation or irrelevance. If and inasmuch as sacraments embody grace and salvation, and are thus there ultimately for the life of the world,3 they require careful attention from the leadership of the Churches as well as from the side of theologians and all the baptized in every possible respect, practically, ritually, pastorally, intellectually, as well as artistically and ethically—the latter aspects of which are sometimes, sadly and undeservedly, overlooked or neglected. The goal of the present essay is to shed light on the way in which the celebration, the shape, and the nature of the sacraments have been affected by cultural, social, and intellectual developments that are generally captured by the phrase “post-Christian.” While this concept is not unproblematic in itself, it does have the advantage that it at least attempts to speak without biases—if at all that is still possible “after” postmodernity. The term “post-Christian” significantly differs from characterizations such as “un-Christian,” “de-Christianized,” “a-Christian,” or even “anti-Christian.” The concept of a “postChristianity” implies that there was an era or a cultural ambience that could rightly be called “Christian” and that this is now a past reality, and maybe also that there once was a “pre-Christian” time. The big question is of course what caused, or at least impacted, those cultures and societies that were once “Christian” that now have become “post-Christian.” The obvious thing to do is to suppose that modernity and secularization were responsible for a tremendous decrease in the sociocultural influence the Christian Churches once exerted on all spheres of life, and that it was by and large in the areas commonly identified with “the West” where this happened most conspicuously. The whole story is of course much more nuanced, but the context at the background of which this essay was conceived is present-day Northwestern Europe. And it is not wrong to qualify that particular context as somehow “post-Christian,” at least at a descriptive and irenic level, that is, without willing to enter immediately in a strong counternarrative. The presupposition of talking and thinking about sacraments in a post-Christian environment is that it is not obvious how to do that, for the classical frameworks thanks to which that was done relatively smoothly have either suddenly vanished or slowly left the scene. Rivaling interpretations about the most appropriate way to conceive this disappearance abound, ranging from anger-filled reactions against contemporary culture over more neutral accounts to laughter and ridicule over the superfluity and obsoleteness of the once-so-powerful institution of the Church. However, the point is that the Christian

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973). 3

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faith in general and its sacramental structure in particular can no longer count on cultural and intellectual automatisms to explain and, if necessary, to defend them. First, I will briefly sketch the contours of a post-Christian culture and society, thereby focusing on the concept of secularization. This will lead me in a second section to explore the theological potential of the concept of crisis, and, thirdly, to show how an analysis of crises creates opportunities to look with fresh eyes at the sacramental core of Christian faith and liturgy. I will do that by referring to Cipriano Vagaggini’s groundbreaking study about the theological dimensions of the liturgy.4 Fourthly, I will defend the meaningfulness and indispensability of a symbolic paradigm in sacramental theology. The latter two steps will, fifthly and finally, equip me with a solid framework to return to contemporary challenges of sacraments in a post-Christian society and, more specifically, to develop to some degree the concept of sacramental density. It is the creative and reflexive potential of this notion that will allow me to eventually respond “positively” to the challenge raised by the above thought-experiment: that there is no absolute opposition (possible) to the sacraments, not even in so-called post-Christian situations.

SECULARIZATION There is a certain paradox involved in measuring the weight of secularization by referring to the sacraments. On the one hand, for the obvious decline in church attendance one abundantly refers to statistics showing that there continue to be fewer and fewer people who go to Sunday worship services, who have their marriages blessed by the Church and their children baptized, and who are buried after Christian funerals. Numbers may slightly differ in different countries, regions, or denominations, but the overall picture in Western Europe is clear: at least since the 1960s and 1970s institutionalized Christian Churches have seen a steady decrease in the numbers of people participating in their sacramental life, particularly among younger generations. On the other hand, the question is only rarely asked how relevant sociological “data” are in terms of sacramental theologies or other interpretations of the meaning of the contents that are celebrated, and to what extent these data tell something about one’s being religious, one’s spirituality, one’s sense for communion and solidarity, or one’s search for meaning. The least one can say is that there is a tension between sociological analysis and theological interpretation, which goes beyond the demarcation of disciplines and the use of methods. The understanding of secularization does need, however, interdisciplinary insights and conversation. It requires the expertise of historians, sociologists, philosophers, anthropologists, and theologians alike. Today it seems that the secularization hypothesis, which was once adopted by a majority of scholars, has become a minority position. In any case it has become clear that it is, as any other theoretical account, not one that is free from biases or even an ideological agenda. The classical secularization hypothesis supposed that religion would disappear in as much as modernity would grow. Ongoing processes of urbanization, industrialization, large-scale consumerism, individualization, and even democracy would lead to a situation where people no longer need religion for anything. The common opinion now is that, while official religious institutions have had and continue to have a hard time maintaining themselves, the religiosity and spirituality

Cipriano Vagaggini, Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy: A General Treatise on the Theology of the Liturgy, trans. Leonard J. Doyle and W. A. Jurgens (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1976). 4

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of people is very much alive. It just has taken on different forms, no longer as a loyal and lifelong adherence to a group with clear convictions (dogmas) and a strict organization (discipline), but as a mere (and sometimes ephemeral) element of one’s personal identity.5 That very identity, moreover, is no longer a fixed reality and easy to characterize and categorize, but rather a loose bundle of changing qualities, preferences, choices, and many diverse influences and interactions. As a theological comment one could add that the ideas of God and Church have not only undergone a drastic metamorphosis but also the very ideas of the self and the world. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor profoundly reflected about the origins of the modern self as well as about the nature and genealogy of the secular age.6 His theories stand out in terms of nuance and complexity, precisely because they are the result of detailed research into the history of ideas. Taylor’s work is one of the strongest and most comprehensive answers to the challenges put forward by the proponents of the secularization hypothesis and those who, under the veil of that, are vehement atheists. Instead of engaging in a direct polemic with their opinions about God and Christianity, he calmly demonstrates how through the last five centuries the multiple interactions between culture, society, civilization, commerce, politics, and religion have significantly changed. It is much too simplistic to assume that religion shrank while other domains of life, such as politics or the economy, achieved a more prominent and influential status, and to think that there is one single causal mechanism behind these developments. Taylor emphasizes that our very comprehension of religion changed, as well as the conditions under which we understand, interpret, and explain everything. In other words, the sole focus on the loss of religion—whether one welcomes this as kind of emancipation, combats it as a menace, or simply accepts it as a given—is misleading, for it certainly does not tell the whole story of modernity and secularization. With respect to the sacraments, the nuance brought into the debate by Taylor and others is crucial. His account undeniably makes one look away from mere figures and easy explanations. The changed intellectual and cultural conditions under which to understand the meaning of the Christian religion have a heavy impact on sacramental and liturgical theology. An adequate understanding of these conditions will prevent one from employing classical theories to interpret the sacraments for massive countercultural narratives. Therefore, it is very important that one does not see sacraments and secularism as antipodes or as opposed extremities on one spectrum.7 It is not the case, for instance, that sacraments would embody the sacred—whatever that means for Christians—and that secularism is replete with nothing but profanity. To celebrate the sacraments is not to keep out any secular influence from the life of the Church, and to live a life in a secular culture does not imply complete detachment from sacraments and liturgy. One does have to admit, though, that there is a thorough crisis with respect to the sacraments in a postChristian culture. It is worthwhile to explore that crisis from a theological point of view.

In this context the groundbreaking work of British sociologist of religion Linda Woodhead is both instructive and directive. Cf. some of her coauthored key publications: Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) and Ole Riis and Linda Woodhead, A Sociology of Religious Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 6 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). 7 For a full elaboration of that argument, see Joris Geldhof, Liturgy and Secularism: Beyond the Divide (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018). 5

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CRISIS A fitting starting point for this exploration is a famous essay by Martin Heidegger in which he investigates in his own inimitable style the foundations of modernity, Die Zeit des Weltbildes (“The Age of the World View”). At the outset of the essay, Heidegger expresses himself enigmatically about the interwovenness of Christianity and modernity—thereby testifying to the idea that the process of secularization cannot be reduced to the decline of religion. Heidegger nevertheless acknowledges that “modern times” brought about “a transition to godlessness,” a development to which, according to him, Christianity significantly contributed. “Christendom,” he says, “transforms its Christianity [better: its being-Christian] into a world view (the Christian world view) and so adapts itself to modern times.”8 Heidegger clarifies that the said “transition to godlessness is far from excluding religiosity,”9 but that it, on the contrary, cleared the way for a situation in which the relation to God (he actually talks about “the gods” in plural) has now settled in the area of religious experience (Erlebnis, not Erfahrung). Further on, the essay remains virtually silent about Christianity, faith, and theology, let alone Church or sacraments. Instead it develops fundamental thoughts about science and research (Forschung), another domain that drastically changed through the emergence of modernity. Briefly put, Heidegger claims that modernity shaped conditions under which things in the world and even the world itself could become “objects” for scrutiny and analysis. This simultaneously implies that the human being became a “subject,” that which, according to the etymology of the word, “underlies” everything (Lat. subiectum). Heidegger comments that this was a major shift for, given previous metaphysical eras (he thinks of ancient Greece and the Christian Middle Ages), it was not evident that humanity would become the determining principle of being. In any case, modernity thus created a new situation whereby the relations and connections between human beings and their surroundings changed enormously. It first enabled and then consistently advanced a model in which both subjectivism and objectivism were radicalized, almost as mirrors of each other. On the one hand, the human subject became the sole and final principle for epistemological, moral, political, and religious affairs. On the other hand, the call for perfect objectivity and objectified truth(s)—and thus for accountability as mere countability, manageability, controllability, and so on—became louder and louder, in all areas of life. Obviously, this new situation caused a deep crisis, both for the position of the subject and in terms of the tenability of a paradigm of universal objectification. A fine theologian who reflected on the crisis caused by modernity along similar lines is Jan Hendrik Walgrave, a Belgian Dominican and contemporary of Edward Schillebeeckx, less well-known than the latter but certainly not less interesting or thorough. In the mid1960s, that is, when the Second Vatican Council was still going on in all fervor and enthusiasm, he wrote a masterly monograph entitled Faith and Theology in the Crisis.10 Martin Heidegger, The Age of the World View, trans. Marjorie Grene, Boundary 2 4:2 (1976): 340–55, 342. In the original German version, “godlessness” is Entgötterung (which actually does not necessarily mean a state of being without God, but rather the process of the vanishing of the gods). And there is a slight terminological difference between the use of Weltbild (translated as “world view”) and (christliche) Weltanschauung (also translated as “(Christian) world view”). Especially the choice to translate Bild as “view” is debatable. 9 Heidegger, The Age of the World View, 342. 10 Jan Hendrik Walgrave, Geloof en theologie in de crisis (Kasterlee: De Vroente, 1966). Unfortunately, this book was never translated into English. For a compilation of some of Walgrave’s writings in English (and French), see Jan Hendrik Walgrave, Selected Writings: Thomas Aquinas, J. H. Newman, Theologia fundamentalis, ed. Georges De Schrijver and John Kelly (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1982). 8

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It was meant as the first and foundational volume opening a series of no less than sixteen books that were meant to cover all areas of life about which theology reflects. The author’s overall concern, and the central topic of Walgrave’s book, was the relevance of faith in a context which, in their view, rapidly evolved from homogeneously Christian to “post-Christian,” although they neither knew nor used that term. Three fundamental considerations of Walgrave can be instrumental to shed light on the subject of the present essay. First, Walgrave emphasizes that crises intrinsically belong to life. A life without crises is hardly imaginable, for a living organism always interacts dynamically with its environment and cannot but be confronted with situations of sudden changes, challenges, and risks in the course of its existence. As such, that is nothing to be afraid of, it is just normal. Walgrave gives the example of puberty and, without psychologizing too much, derives from this example that for growth to happen, crises are not only likely, but even indispensable.11 It seems, however, that Walgrave is not only looking at the life of individual persons and the development of their conscience when he says that crises do occur. He ventures extrapolations to phenomena of a much larger scale and different nature, such as the “life” of the Church, the continuation of a civilization, or the maintenance of a regime in politics or the economy. In all of these areas, growth, identity, and a sense of one’s self are almost necessarily interwoven with crises. While there is certainly a vitalist undertone in Walgrave’s thinking, the point he is making about crises in general—also about historical crises at the level of cultures, countries, traditions, religions, and civilizations—transcends traits (and possible reproaches) of a naïve optimism or progressivism. Crises are periods in organisms and organizations during which normal processes of self-preservation and ordinary balances between continuity and discontinuity are shaken, and which allow one to say that there was a clear before and after. Second, Walgrave interprets the specific crisis occasioned by modernity in terms of an unfinished (r)evolution. According to him, a renewed equilibrium between what modernity irreversibly changed on the one hand (discontinuity), and those elements that remain more or less stable (continuity) on the other hand, has not yet been found. The breakthrough of a new era after the modern crisis is not yet accomplished. Interestingly, he sees modernity as part of what is being left behind, and Christian faith as a motor contributing to the new era emerging. The concepts that he employs to sketch the contours of this contrast are “rationalistic naturalism” and “existential personalism,”12 and the corresponding challenge for theology consists in an encompassing “transfusion of thinking” Christian faith along the lines of a naturalistic and rationalistic body of thought into an existential and personalist body of thought.13 What is essential in naming things in this way is not the focus on scientific rationality, its methods and results, but—in a way not unlike Heidegger’s conclusions—the observation that, slowly but surely, being as a whole becomes an objectified and infinitely objectifiable reality. Walgrave is convinced that the limits of such an approach are reached, and proposes an integral personalism as the alternative bursting through. Among many other things, this epochal and metaphysical shift bears consequences for the way in which truth is considered. Truth is not only an epistemological problem to be raised in terms of adequacy, correspondence, or coherence, but also a matter of growth Walgrave, Geloof en theologie, 23–6. Ibid., 345, 404. 13 Ibid., 372. 11 12

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for the development of a human person. According to Walgrave, it requires faithfulness, diligence, availability, the willingness to serve, the capacity for a purifying self-criticism, and even ascesis.14 Truth is a matter of permeability and interiorization: of letting the self enter the truth and letting the truth enter the self. Third, Walgrave points to the instrumental role of an acute and well-formed historical awareness. This awareness is indeed qualified as well-formed, which is not the same as well-informed. It is not primarily a matter of acquiring knowledge about past events, but it is about situating oneself in time and world in a way that does justice to both the contingency of time and one’s own responsibility in history. Historical awareness goes along with an existential attitude of openness for the emergence of meaning beyond the constraints of the subject; that is, human subjectivity does not simply impose its laws onto reality, but being itself has dynamic, dialectic, and organic characteristics that go unnoticed if one systematically reduces it to easily digestible units. A refined historical awareness goes along with the formation of a strong personal conscience; it is a significant tool to situate oneself in time and space and to assess one’s role in the great chain of being. Heidegger’s and Walgrave’s thoughts are highly pertinent with respect to the sacraments in post-Christian society. They show that it is absolutely key that one touches on and carefully considers levels of being that usually remain below the radar. Sacraments will only be meaningfully celebrated, adequately understood, and successfully explained in post-Christian contexts if reality is more than objects and if truth is above anything else something to live from. Sacraments embody and express layers of being that are irreducible to the logics of either objectivism or subjectivism. They rather suppose an intriguing and complex interwovenness of interiority and exteriority and depend on receptivity, sensitivity, givenness, existential openness, and a sense of communion— aspects of fundamental postures and behavior that do not necessarily require a “Christian” culture or society. At this point, it seems appropriate to introduce Cipriano Vagaggini, the Italian monk of the Benedictine order who not only contributed substantially to the preparations of the Second Vatican Council and the work of the Consilium carrying out its decisions on liturgical reform afterward, but who was also the author of one of the most important studies on liturgical theology in the twentieth century. It is fair to say that his abovementioned book, of which the first version appeared in the late 1950s, was not conceived in a post-Christian society. However, what he says about “the two great enemies of the liturgy” is particularly revealing. Vagaggini vehemently defends “a realist mentality” when it comes to making sense of liturgy and sacraments. This means that a certain order is preserved, guaranteeing and keeping a balance between God and humanity. Intriguingly, Vagaggini connects this fundamental distinction with the one between the object and the subject of the liturgy and accordingly underscores “the fact that there must be a certain harmonious relationship between subject and object, demanding of the subject an effort toward interiorization.” So the “enemies” he talks about are a “fruitless concentration on what is extrinsic unaccompanied by inward and vital reaction in the subject, and an interiorist and individualist psychologism of egocentric tendency.”15 Put differently, sacraments run into troubles when subjectivisms or objectivisms tend to

Ibid., 351. Vagaggini, Theological Dimensions, 187.

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become exclusive. And the crisis of modernity is not that it promoted one of these two, but that—as Heidegger already surmised—it shaped conditions under which both options are possible, even simultaneously.

SALVATION (HISTORY) It follows that, if Christian sacraments are to have a future in post-Christian societies, they will have to rely on more solid balances between subjectivity and objectivity, or, to put it in different though related semantic and theoretical frameworks, between interiority and exteriorization, between visibility and invisibility, between nature and the supernatural, and between immanence and transcendence. To this I would add— inspired by Walgrave—that what matters crucially when it comes to renewing, restoring, and rethinking these balances is a fine-grained historical awareness, one concomitantly qualified as an awareness concerning the history of salvation. Again, Vagaggini is an excellent guide to explore what this means. The question is which elements from his theological synthesis would stand, and which ones would fall, under the influence of the development from a Christian to a post-Christian culture. Vagaggini opens his tome with the foundational claim that “in order to penetrate the world of the liturgy we must penetrate the world of revelation and consider things in that over-all view of its own in which revelation, especially the Scripture, considers them.” He goes on to claim that “for this reason it is imperative to consider the liturgy always against the general background of sacred history, because sacred history is precisely the over-all view in which revelation considers everything.”16 In other words, there is an intrinsic and unbreakable connection between God’s revelation, the liturgy, and the sacraments—something that the notion of “mystery” accurately captures and combines. As a consequence, sacraments can never be reduced to social constructs, religious rituals, occasions for establishing (collective or individual) identities, didactic events, prayer sessions, and the like. They have something of all these qualities, but their essence and appearance cannot be explained by one of them only. The above-mentioned revelation is not something abstract for Vagaggini, for it takes on root in concrete stories embodying experiences of concrete people with a God who set them free, created unforeseen opportunities to flourish, and offered numerous occasions for reconciliation where every hope was lost. This history, moreover, is unfinished and ongoing. Vagaggini underlines that “the whole Judeo-Christian revelation rests on a history and is presented first of all as a history, a history always in the making, which has a long past and will be completed only in the future, the history of God’s free and loving interventions in the world and of the free response of creatures.”17 These notions of history and freedom are crucial in seeking a proper balance between objectivity and subjectivity for a future-oriented understanding of the Christian sacraments. In the encounter of humankind with God, neither partner is the object nor the subject. But the notion of revelation does imply, of course, that there is an insurmountable priority, or indeed an ontological transcendence, of God’s saving initiative, which resonates in the sacraments. If the soft sound of that resonation is no longer heard, or if the silent

Ibid., 3. Ibid., 9–10.

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glimmer of God’s Spirit is no longer seen,18 the dangers of a sterile objectivism and a stout subjectivism are lurking. A trustworthy shield against those dangers is formed by the accumulated meanings of the many stories and images that together constitute the history of salvation, and that are kept in, and passed on as, the treasures of Scripture and tradition. One could make the argument that without this grand accumulation of meanings, which is both dynamic and solidifying, the sense of the sacraments cannot be intuited. The sacraments rely on this inexhaustible resource of biblical, ecclesial, and traditional material, and they reveal their truth and beauty only inasmuch as they are a fruitful perception of it, implying that there is a minimum of existential openness toward it. In other words, the history of salvation constitutes the basis of the sacraments; it continuously offers invitations for sharing it, for integrating and interiorizing it, and for actively, consciously, and fully participating in it. This history of salvation is never purely outside of history, but always deeply anchored in the passing-by of time and the human memorial modes with which the future is prepared.

SYMBOLS The history of salvation thus finds expression in a sheer multiplicity of symbols. These symbols provide the hands and the feet for the economy of salvation to work, to move, to inspire, to incite, to challenge, in short to pervade the whole life-world of people. Sacramental symbols can be seen as originating at the crossroads of the history and economy of salvation; anchored in God’s invisible, immemorial, and inaccessible past they continuously offer effective opportunities of access through acts of commemoration. This explains why some of the greatest innovators and theoreticians in sacramental theology in the course of the twentieth century—Odo Casel, Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, David Noel Power, and Louis-Marie Chauvet, to name only a few of Roman Catholic signature—have, without exception, devoted so much attention to symbols, symbolism, and symbolicity. To understand how symbols work is to gain insight into the nature of the sacraments, with respect for the supernatural and transcendent dimensions of the revelation that they embody (as components of the history of salvation), and with an equal consciousness of their incarnate, that is, material, natural, and historical character (as elements of the economy of salvation). From the perspective developed in this essay so far, one could comment that these theologians’ profound thinking about sacraments as symbols consisted of attempts at avoiding the grip of narrow objectivist theologies of the sacraments as well as their subjectivist counterparts. They were after a better balance between objectivity and subjectivity than the ones available after the modernist crisis in the first quarter of the twentieth century and thereby led the foundations for the contemporary paradigm in sacramental and liturgical theology centered around the notions symbol, ritual, and worship.19 On the one hand, investigating the reality of symbolicity helped them find a way between disenchantment and re-enchantment, for symbols have nothing to do with Cf. Lambert Leijssen, With the Silent Glimmer of God’s Spirit: A Postmodern Look at the Sacraments (New York: Paulist Press, 2007). 19 David N. Power, Unsearchable Riches: The Symbolic Nature of Liturgy (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008); Gail Ramshaw, Christian Worship: 100.000 Sundays of Symbols and Rituals (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009). Cf. also Joris Geldhof, Liturgical Theology as a Research Program (Boston, MA: Brill, 2020), 80–6. 18

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magic, yet they do show a way out of dry and deconstructive rationalisms. Their finegrained explorations of the notion of symbol allowed them to (re)discover fundamental truths about the human condition, its corporeality, social nature, and the importance of the imagination and the senses when religion is concerned. They realized that it is an illusion for sacramental theology to appeal only to the intellect, the soul or the spirit, without attention to both individual and corporate bodies. Clearly, this paradigm of symbolism is characterized by ambiguity and paradox. The question, however, is whether trying to expel this ambiguity is possible, and also whether it is wise. Noted French sociologist and philosopher Marcel Gauchet has an interesting viewpoint here, especially because he does not profess himself to be a Christian but an atheist. Gauchet, who famously understands Christianity as “la religion de la sortie de la religion,” subscribes to the idea that many have voiced before, namely that Christianity played a huge role in the emergence and the very design of modernity. There is a dynamic pattern in Christianity that both dismantles and builds up religious structures, and it never stops doing that. According to Gauchet, this has to do with the fact that Christianity is the religion par excellence of creation, incarnation, and interpretation.20 Christian faith acknowledges a radically transcendent God, but this same God profoundly commits himself to the world, to humankind, and to history. God is ungraspable but shows himself in concrete reality, even eminently in the life of a particular human being, Jesus Christ. This implies that adherents of this religion are called—even condemned, with a wink to Sartre—to always interpret signs of presence in the light of an abyssal absence of God himself. At times that is highly frustrating, but there simply is no other way. Consequently, ambiguity is indispensably part and parcel of Christianity. To try to solve Christianity’s fundamental ambiguities would allow the logic of either modern subjectivism or objectivism to prevail. Both options operate with, and thus maintain, a binary that in the end brings no good to the table but that is eventually overcome by thinking, indeed, symbolically-and-sacramentally. A postChristian cultural situation and intellectual environment is a blessing inasmuch as it can create (again) more space for such thinking, but it is a curse when subjectivism is sharpened and ends up in mere individualism, solipsism, and relativism, or reversely, when objectivism is hardened and turns into hieraticism, traditionalism, and fundamentalism—the enemies of liturgy at which Vagaggini hinted. A healthy symbolic thinking, moreover, does justice to the action-context out of which symbols arise and which surround them, for symbolic frameworks are always active, if not “living” and organic. They are connected to human actions and their complex fields of meanings and multiple references, maybe more than that they reveal cognitive contents. Here lies the reason why someone like Vagaggini underscores that symbols are “efficacious” signs—they perform and are performed, they bring forth, they provoke, they enliven, they engage, they transform, they enthuse, and so on—and why scholars successfully investigate the sacraments primarily as symbolic rituals, thereby trying to integrate both theological and anthropological aspects.21

André Cloots, “Modernity and Christianity: Marcel Gauchet on the Christian Roots of the Modern Ways of Thinking,” Milltown Studies 61 (2008): 1–30. 21 Kimberly Belcher, Efficacious Engagement: Sacramental Participation in the Trinitarian Mystery (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011). 20

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SACRAMENTAL DENSITY Symbols can thus be characterized as visible realities—material objects or human actions—in which several layers of invisible meanings have been compressed. Oftentimes these meanings remain implicit, vague, or opaque, but this does not mean that they are not there. This lack of transparency is in fact a fundamental feature of symbols, and should not be evaluated in a derogatory mode as something primitive, archaic, suspicious, or even foolish. Symbols are original and generative; they are already there, producing and reflecting meanings in complex networks, before the conscious intellect starts asking questions, and will never be able to turn into perfectly lucid answers. They are ontologically different from the subject–object dialectic typical of modern epistemologies—which is why any merely expressivist theory of symbols sooner or later founders. The meaning(s) of symbols can never be fully captured by the intellect only. Asserting that this is nonetheless possible, or that it must be done for the sake of clarity or justification, or expecting that it once will are strategies that boil down to giving in to the Hegelian presumption, which is still underlying many intellectual (and intellectualist) accounts of religion, rituals, and a fortiori sacraments. Hegel famously held that art and religion are “still” dependent on images (Vorstellungen) while conceptual understanding (Begriff) can do without. He also concluded that this non-dependence on anything exterior of reason is to be ranked higher than the structural subordination intrinsic to religion (and art). Yet, on closer inspection through an intimate familiarity with them, religious symbols thoroughly question this intellectualist bias and actually undermine the metaphysical hierarchy that comes along with it. Clearly, moreover, Hegel said this in a homogeneous Christian culture, long before any post-Christian society was imagined. At the time, Hegel was a well-respected university professor and famous philosopher, and he deserves due respect for his intellectual achievements, but his account of religion, Christianity, God, history, and faith were misleading to the same extent as they were compelling.22 It is to be hoped that a post-Christian society will go beyond any expressivist and intellectualist—or moralist, historicist, or otherwise functionalistic— recuperation of symbols, so that the always slightly recalcitrant “otherness” of symbols is fully valued. A similar sociocultural and intellectual situation would come very close to the idea(l) that Walgrave had in mind, which he described in terms of existentialism and personalism. A person is a human being, with a multiplicity of porous relationships with the world, including first and foremost fellow human beings. A person is fundamentally open and receptive to that which comes from elsewhere, and responds to what they do not know on the basis of something that could be called an ontological hospitality, that is, without any intentions for abuse, profit, or deception. A person is a porous being in the midst of numerous processes of interiorization and participation, and entangled in many dynamics of externalization, communication, and conversation. Such a metaphysical, sociocultural, and intellectual milieu is also a necessary condition for symbols to flourish and, consequently, for sacraments to be able to flourish. Sacraments and symbols can only work if there are spheres of being that support the peculiarity of their nature. These spheres of being must be penetrable and spontaneously facilitate collaboration with and participation in them. Put differently, sacraments, symbolically

William Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).

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understood, give shape to, and at the same time rely on, spheres of sacramental density. This density can be sensed and experienced and must not always be brought to the level of consciousness and explicit knowledge. It even resists certain mechanisms of control that are the result of merely cognitive approaches to symbols and symbolicity. Sacramental density is neither something purely objective nor something entirely subjective. It hovers in between and operates through permanent permeations of meaning and engagement, that is, through dynamics of interiorization, a growing familiarity and embrace, as well as through dynamics of exteriorization, materialization, codification, and solidification. Human persons situate themselves always at the crossroads of several such processes of internalization and externalization. In other words, they share in varying degrees in processes of sacramental density. The concept of God’s shekinah may be of assistance to further clarify what I mean with sacramental density. Originally developed in early rabbinic Judaism, shekinah denotes God’s presence and proximity, and it found exemplary expression in the story of the cloud accompanying the people of Israel on its journey to the promised land.23 A cloud additionally appears in the Bible when God’s nearness critically matters. Clouds are connected with salvific events and set in motion a particular conversion of ordinary visibility, as, for example, in the psalms: “Clouds and thick darkness are all around him; righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne” (Ps. 97:2). Additional obvious associations of the cloud with God’s coming close to humankind appear in the passage in the Apocalypse where God is sitting on a cloud (Rev. 14:14), in the passage where the Holy Spirit “overshadows” Mary (Lk. 1:35), in the accounts of the Transfiguration in the synoptic gospels (Mt. 17:5; Mk 9:7; Lk. 9:34-35), and in the story of Jesus’ Ascension (Acts 1:9). A cloud is particularly apt to demonstrate sacramental density, not only because it is something between heaven and earth, thereby touching on transcendence as well as immanence, or because through dynamics of appearance and disappearance it plays a role in bringing light and fertility to the land, but also because it is not a “thing” among things, in the sense of a material object or instrument. Like the manna in Chauvet’s profound analysis of sacramental givenness, which is both gracious and gratuitous,24 a cloud cannot be stored, kept, and regulated by humans. Like clouds, sacramental density is just there. It has been put—is thus “positive” and hence not nothing—in such a way that it escapes manipulation and, at the same time, freely invites my own free collaboration and participation. I should also bring light, be(come better) enlightened, and be fertile for the earth and its inhabitants. In addition, with a wink to Chauvet again, a cloud resists “chosification,” by which he means the process through which a focus on a sacramental “thing” ossifies sacramental realities, thereby dramatically reducing their splendor. According to Chauvet and many other scholars, this is what actually happened with the eucharistic species of bread and wine roughly in the period between the Council of Trent and the mid-twentieth century, if not with much earlier roots in the Middle Ages. In any case, this chosification happened in a culture deeply imbued by Christianity and paradoxically obscured the access to other dimensions of sacramentality and liturgical celebration. The concept of sacramental density is meant to finally overcome this xod. 13:21-22. Cf. also Exod. 16:10 or Num. 16:42. E Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, trans. Patrick Madigan and Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 44–5, 222–3. 23 24

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development and pave the way for sacraments to flourish in a post-Christian culture and society. As a scholar, I hope to have demonstrated that this is at least possible and important. At the end and as the conclusion of this essay I now wish to add, as a baptized Christian and theologian, that I believe it is also necessary, and a blessing, for the world and the future of human life in it.

FURTHER READING Belcher, Kimberly H. Efficacious Engagement: Sacramental Participation in the Trinitarian Mystery. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011. Brunk, Timothy. The Sacraments and Consumer Culture. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2020. Geldhof, Joris. Liturgy and Secularism: Beyond the Divide. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018. Leijssen, Lambert J. With the Silent Glimmer of God’s Spirit: A Postmodern Look at the Sacraments. New York: Paulist Press, 2006. Pecklers, Keith F. Worship: A Primer in Christian Ritual. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003. Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Sacraments and Sacramentality: Toward a Postcolonial Pluriverse with a Decolonial Thrust KRISTINE SUNA-KORO

Postcolonial sacramental theology is, to put it somewhat generously, in its infancy. Postcolonial studies as a field of inter- and transdisciplinary discourses (e.g., from history to geography to literature and political science and design studies and everything in between) has a strong secular(ist) pedigree that has, up until very recently, avoided engagement with religion quite studiously—to its own unwitting loss.1 So it is not surprising that, on the one hand, sacramental discourses are often seen by postcolonial thinkers as exceptionally “churchy,” too self-referential and inwardly oriented to be a worthwhile conversation partner. As such, sacramental theologies are (mistakenly) perceived, almost by default, to be closed for critical and constructive re-envisagement that postcolonial approaches bring to every field of human inquiry and creativity. On the other hand, few sacramental theologians working in the English-speaking milieu have so far showed more than tangential interest in postcolonial, and more recently also decolonial, modes of specifically sacramental and liturgical theology.2 I will

For more about this still persisting predicament see Kristine Suna-Koro, In Counterpoint: Diaspora, Postcoloniality, and Sacramental Theology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017) and, more recently, Robert S. Heaney, Post-Colonial Theology: Finding God and Each Other amidst the Hate (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2019). 2 For an informative spectrum of such engagements please see the following monographs and essay collections: Stephen Burns and Michael Jagessar, Christian Worship: Postcolonial Perspectives (Sheffield: Equinox, 2011); Claudio Carvalhaes, Eucharist and Globalization: Redrawing the Borders of Eucharistic Hospitality (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013) and Claudio Carvalhaes, ed., Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspectives: Only One Is Holy (New York: Palgrave, 2015); HyeRan Kim-Cragg, Interdependence: A Postcolonial Feminist Practical Theology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2018); and my already mentioned, In Counterpoint: Diaspora, Postcoloniality, and Sacramental Theology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017). In the course of this chapter, I will also refer to articles and book chapters by the above-mentioned and a few other contemporary sacramental and liturgical theologians who have explicitly engaged postcolonial and decolonial discourses. A very recent, brief, and helpful overview of postcolonial and decolonial inroads in sacramental theology is offered by Edward Foley, “Sacramentality, Chaos Theory and Decoloniality,” Religions: MDPI 10 (2019): 44–53. 1

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further elaborate on the nuances of mapping out intersections between postcoloniality/ postcolonialism as well as decoloniality/decolonialism in the next section. For now, in a preliminary way, I refer to postcoloniality/postcolonialism as “a studied engagement with experience of colonialism and its past and present effects, both at the level of ex-colonial societies and at the level of more general global developments thought to be the after-effects of empire.”3 Decoloniality/decolonialism, in turn, “refers to the logic, metaphysics, ontology and matrix of power created by the massive processes and aftermath of colonization and settler-colonialism”; it is “a way for us to re-learn the knowledge that has been pushed aside, forgotten, buried or discredited by the forces of modernity, settler-colonialism, and racial capitalism.”4 But before we get there, I would like to emphasize that my overarching rationale for writing this chapter is that postcolonizing and decolonizing sacramental imagination, theology, and practices remain an exceptionally open field for theological creativity as well as intercultural dialogue and transdisciplinary engagement in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. It will be among my key wagers in the present chapter that far from being simply insular, nostalgic, or outright reactionary intra-ecclesial navel-gazing for “high church” traditionalists, Christian sacramental imaginaries can comprise a hitherto underappreciated yet exceptionally fecund method precisely for postcolonial theology. It may initially appear outlandish indeed to suggest that, at least in the Euro-Atlantic religious milieu of growing institutional disaffection and disaffiliation with organized forms of religious practices, including participation in ecclesial sacraments,5 something seemingly so passé as appealing to a religious imagination and practice could be exciting. But this is precisely where a postcolonial reorchestration of the sacramental imaginary with a decolonial thrust (more on these terms later) may open up reinvigorating and liberating new interfaces for spiritual and mutually cross-pollinating rendezvous among diverse lifeworlds and thoughtscapes in the time of planetary crisis. Furthermore, such an approach could also contribute toward the emerging postcolonial momentum of what Robert Heaney has recently described as the critical “unveiling of the particularities of imperialist sin and deconstructing the specificities of colonial dominance.”6 Such an unveiling remains a work very much in progress as so many Christian communities struggle mightily to identify and acknowledge histories of unholy enmeshment with “pathologies of dominance”7 inscribed in their religious traditions: imperialism, colonialism, racism, and heteropatriarchy continue to permeate large swaths of Christian communities. Fortunately, fascinating inroads have been made in the field of postcolonial liturgical studies.8 While liturgical studies are intimately connected to sacramental discourses, so Ato Quayson, “What Is postcolonial literature?” The British Academy, January 2, 2020. Online: https://www. thebri​tish​acad​emy.ac.uk/blog/what-is-postc​olon​ial-lit​erat​ure/. 4 “What Is Decoloniality?” Decolonizing Humanities Project, College of William and Mary. Online: https://www. wm.edu/sites/dhp/decolo​nial​ity/index.php. 5 Among many other analyses of this widespread Western phenomenon, see Foley, “Sacramentality, Chaos Theory and Decoloniality” and also His “Preaching in an Age of Disaffiliation: Respecting Dissent While Keeping the Faith,” in Liturgy With a Difference: Beyond Inclusion in the Christian Assembly, ed. Stephen Burns and Bryan Cones (London: SCM Press, 2019), 143–53. 6 Heaney, Post-Colonial Theology, 171. 7 Ibid., 41. 8 For a good place to start surveying some key themes and methodologies in postcolonial liturgical theology, please see Burns and Jagessar, Christian Worship: Postcolonial Perspectives, Carvalhaes, ed., Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspectives as well as essays in Stephen Burns and Bryan Cones, eds., Liturgy with a Difference. See also the essays in Liturgy: Journal of the Liturgical Conference, 34:2 (April–June 2019), which was edited by Stephen Burns and 3

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far the focus there has often been on ritual explorations and ethnographic analyses of liturgical texts and performances of sacramental rites. Without doubt, these analyses are to be commended! Sacramental imagination and sacramental theology at full stretch, however, reaches beyond the circumscribed realm of rituality and its performative enactments through variously institutionalized ecclesiastical rites. Although many deeper dimensions of the sacramental imaginary9 have become profoundly obscured in the sociocultural and spiritual imaginary of Western colonial modernity, within the broader horizon of Christian theological cosmovision or, even better, cosmosense/worldsense10 it still entails and shapes so much more than mere rituality and certain ecclesial conventions. Namely, Christian sacramental imaginaries always and already express as well as mold ontological, epistemological, ethical, and sociopolitical claims about reality as well as the modes, axiologies, and teleologies of divine and creaturely agency. Hence in the present chapter my goal is to sketch a postcolonial optic for sacramental theology—with a distinct decolonial thrust—by foregrounding a critical and constructive retrieval of sacramentality as an ontological imaginary. While it is truly good, right, and salutary to continue probing the coloniality/neocoloniality of power at work in specific sacraments as ritual and symbolic performances—be they seven, two, or whatever their number according to various ecclesial perspectives at any given historical moment and context—such pursuits will not comprise the focus of the present exploration. Adding to the growing literature of postcolonially inflected investigations into the problematic entanglements of sacramental liturgies with colonialism, imperialism, and a crusading ethos, I have already offered several analyses elsewhere of the ambivalent liturgical– sacramental legacies from a Baltic/Latvian angle of postcolonial and diasporic critiques.11 dedicated to “Postcolonial Perspectives.” For a deeper focus on the intersections of postcoloniality and migration, please see HyeRan Kim-Cragg and Stephen Burns, “Liturgy in Migration and Migrants in Liturgy,” in Church in the Age of Global Migration: A Moving Body, ed. Susannah Snyder, Joshua Ralston, and Agnes M. Brazal (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 113–29; see also Kristine Suna-Koro, “Liturgy and Lament: Postcolonial Reflections from the Midst of a Global Refugee Crisis,” Liturgy 34:2 (2019), 31–40 and also my “Liturgy, Language, and Diaspora: Some Reflections on Inclusion as Integration by a Migratory Liturgical Magpie,” 101–14, as well as Miguel A. De La Torre, “Worship through Sanctuary,” 154–64, both in Liturgy with a Difference. 9 As is common in postcolonial discourses, the term “imaginary” designates the ways diverse cultures and religious sensibilities have of perceiving and conceiving of the world as an interconnected and interactive whole. 10 The notion of “cosmosense/worldsense” is modestly similar to yet distinct from the narrower and visually centered term “worldview.” It is a more synesthetic and integrative notion. It conveys the cross-wired interactive landscape of human senses, emotions, and thoughts that we use to engender our understanding of the world and God. Additionally, here I am also thinking of a term in my native Latvian language, pasaules izjūta, or world sense, which conveys a much richer assortment of knowing compared to just visual and cerebral metaphors. Cosmosense or pasaules izjūta resonates quite interestingly with the decolonial notion, sourced from the South American indigenous traditions, of cosmo-vivencia. According to Walter D. Mignolo, cosmo-vivencia “could be translated as ‘cosmo-sense,’ which privileges all the senses, not only the eyes, like in cosmo-vision,” Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), endnote 10, 175. 11 Among the early forerunners to postcolonial critiques of sacramental liturgies are those offered by Aloysius Pieris, S.J. in his An Asian Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988) and Tissa Balasuriya, O.M.I. The Eucharist and Human Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979). For a Caribbean/South American postcolonial critique of baptismal imaginary in the context of the early modern Christian conquest, see Luis N. Rivera-Pagan, Essays from the Margins (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), particularly pp. 56–62. A broad spectrum of postcolonial analyses of various sacramental liturgies can be found in Burns and Jagessar, Christian Worship: Postcolonial Perspectives as well as in the essays in Carvalhaes, Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspectives. On the resonances between postcolonial critiques and how the liturgies, including the Eucharist, served as conduits of crusades, see M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017). On the postcolonial critiques of liturgical preaching see Sarah Travis, Decolonizing Preaching: The Pulpit as Postcolonial Space (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014). For my previous postcolonial and diasporic analyses of

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The quest for the renewal of sacramental ontology is a postcolonial exigency for Christian theology today. Why? Because a reimagined sacramental ontology has the potential to offer the most faithful, life-affirming, and consequential contribution of Christian theology to sustainable planetary flourishing in the Anthropocene era amidst the convoluted specters of ongoing neocolonial globalization. To that effect, I venture that sacramental ontology in a postcolonial key is an imaginary of redemptive repair for the flourishing of God’s whole creation. In what follows I propose that such a postcolonial ontology will be characterized by the four creedal marks traditionally attributed to the church—“one, holy, catholic, and apostolic”—but in this context as marks that are rescored into a conspicuously decolonial tonality. Finally, I will conclude my reflections by adding the fifth mark—“living/alive”— to the catalog of relevant features of postcolonial sacramental imaginary. To keep the promise made earlier, however, I first need briefly to clarify my use of the ever-elusive notions of postcolonialism/postcoloniality and decolonialism/decoloniality.

Postcoloniality: An Era and a Hermeneutic—with a Decolonial Thrust I must begin with a spoiler alert: neither postcolony as a historical era nor decolonization as a process of undoing the political, cultural, spiritual, and economic hegemonies of Western colonial modernity all over the globe are over, despite the rumors of their demise. Neocolonial versions of imperial and colonial power remain. “To be sure,” argues Howard Winant, “empires are not over” because “not only have multinational, external empires continued to operate, but also internal empires have hardly ceased to exist … race and empire still underwrite each other in the 21st century.”12 Postcolony—as an era or an epoch—remains the present state of affairs when virtually all continents continue to muddle through the incomplete decolonization and the lived consequences of colonialism and empire. Postcoloniality is not a supersessionist narrative of triumphal resolution and closure. The “post” in postcoloniality does not signal the final liberation from the colonial world system. Unfortunately, colonial matrix of power is not a conveniently obsolete historical relic. Therefore, postcoloniality as a material, cultural, political, and economic condition is a stalling contemporary vortex of unequal and inequitable power relations. It is an exceptionally hybrid, ambivalent, and jagged timescape that all living humans have the unchosen opportunity (or ordeal?) to inhabit. As Nelson Maldonado-Torres points out, “the globe is still going through the globalization and solidification, even amidst various crisis [sic], of a civilization system that has coloniality as its basis.”13 So the present global postcolony is inhabited, albeit rather asymmetrically, by a wide variety of (post)colonizing and (post)colonized cultures, economies, subjects, space, imaginaries, and spiritualities. Some of us inhabit the

sacramental–liturgical practices from a Baltic angle see ch. 3.1 “Revisiting Colonized Baptismal Waters: Sacraments under the Gaze of Postcolonial Vigilance,” in In Counterpoint as well as ch. 18 “Puzzling Over Postcolonial Liturgical Heteroglossia: In Search of Liturgical Decoloniality and Dialogic Orthodoxy,” in Carvalhaes, Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspectives, and Ch. 11 “Not With One Voice: The Counterpoint of Life, Diaspora, Women, Theology, and Writing,” in Women, Writing, Theology: Transforming a Tradition of Exclusion, ed. Emily A. Holmes and Wendy Farley (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011). 12 Howard Winant, “Preface: New Racial Studies and Global Raciality,” in Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, Decoloniality, ed. Paola Bacchetta, Sunaina Maira, and Howard Winant (New York: Routledge, 2019), xii. 13 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality,” Thesis 1. Online source: http://cari​bbea​nstu​dies​asso​ciat​ion.org/docs/Maldon​ado-Torres​_Out​line​_Ten​_The​ses-10.23.16.pdf.

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shared space of global postcoloniality “from below”—as having been colonized—while others “from above”—as having colonized and benefited, at least on a collective and societal level, from the historical colonization of other lands, resources, peoples, cultures, languages, and spiritualities. And yes, postcolonialism as critical discernment of life-denying and life-giving patterns of relationality in the world that continues to be chronically structured in domination and hegemony is also not over, regardless of how many academic and activist skirmishes continue to dissect the exact infinitesimal meaning of the term “post.”14 At its core, postcolonialism is a sociohistorically grounded and axiologically invested critical hermeneutic. It has emerged and converged, over the past half-century, as a transdisciplinary critical and constructive endeavor, from the crevices of various geohistorical postcolonies straddling continents, cultures, experiences, world-senses, and languages. In Robert J. C. Young’s classic expression, “postcolonialism offers a language of and for those who have no place, who seem not to belong, of those whose knowledges and histories are not allowed to count.”15 Postcolonial interventions are morally committed in theory, and in practice they seek to intersperse “alternative knowledges into the power structures of the West as well as the non-West.”16 In this sense, postcolonialism presents a transformative vision of relationality and power as it “seeks to change the way people think, the way they behave, to produce a more just and equitable relation between the different peoples of the world.”17 Postcolonialism functions as a multipronged analytical sensibility but also a politics of transformation.18 According to Achille Mbembe, the reach of postcolonial critiques is hardly limited to the conventional limits of historical analysis: For, beyond the compilation of empirical detail, the critique of colonialism or imperialism still has nothing to say about colonialism and imperialism until it confronts this will for power and constant obfuscation of its ontological, metaphysical, theological and mythological dimensions. As will for power, colonial reason is simultaneously religious, mystical, messianic, and utopian. Colonization is inseparable from the powerful imaginary constructions and the symbolic and religious representations that are integral to the depiction of a terrestrial horizon in Western thought.19 In other words, the real problem today—including for theologians and the work we do in sacramental theology—is that, as Robert J. C. Young reminds us, “the postcolonial remains.”20 The objective of postcolonial critique is to “locate the hidden rhizomes of colonialism’s historical reach, of what remains invisible, unseen, silent, or unspoken. In a or a more detailed/nuanced view on postcoloniality and postcolonialism see my In Counterpoint, 6–11, 50–7. F Robert J. C. Young, “What Is the Postcolonial?” Ariel, 40:1 (2009): 13+. Gale Literature Resource Center,  https://link-gale-com.noc​ d bpr​ o xy.xav​ i er.edu/apps/doc/A21​ 0 585​ 1 70/LitRC?u=xavi​ e r_m​ ain&sid=LitRC&xid=b3607​f6a. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. The focus here is most intensely on changing inequitable power structures of the world. 19 Achille Mbembe, “Provincializing France?” Public Culture 32:1 (2015): 116. 20 Robert J. C. Young, “Postcolonial Remains,” New Literary History, 43 (2012): 19–42. Young pointedly summarizes the decadent dismissals of postcolonial analysis as follows: 14 15

The desired dissolution of postcolonial theory does not mean that poverty, inequality, exploitation, and oppression in the world have come to an end, only that some people in the U.S. and French academies have decided they do not want to have to think about such things any longer and do not want to be reminded of those distant invisible contexts which continue to prompt the transformative energies of the postcolonial. (19–20)

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sense, postcolonialism has always been about the ongoing life of residues, living remains, lingering legacies”21 that are rendered visible out of the mystifying colonial regimes of power, knowledge, and being. To shift now to a theological register: postcolonial comportment in theological inquiry affirms the commitment to the “idea that postcolonial criticism is itself an ethical enterprise”22 or what I have elsewhere described as the “ethical pre-text” of postcolonial fabric of imagination.23 This comportment bodies forth through what Namsoon Kang describes as a biblically grounded (Mt 25:31-46) “hypersensitivity to the marginalized … colonized, imprisoned, and the poor.”24 The point here is that this sort of comportment is not something accidental for postcolonial (and also feminist, in her assessment) theology but rather constitutes a nonnegotiable dedication toward standing/walking/thinking/ praying/working with the les damnés de la terre, the “wretched of the earth” (Franz Fanon). In this sense, the labor of postcolonial theology will also endure until, as Young observes, “there are no unjust and unaccountable hierarchies of power in the world, where there are no forms of exclusions, no insides to which others are outsiders.”25 But what about that decolonial thrust? Clearly there are numerous overlaps between postcolonial and decolonial imaginaries. Similarities between these two clusters of critiques that originated from two different undersides of the modern colonial world order—predominantly but not exclusively the diasporas of Asia in postcolonialism and South America in decolonialism—outweigh the legitimate differences.26 That being said, decolonial perspectives insert a more insurrectional and confrontational tone into the existing trajectories of postcolonial critiques and constructive proposals. Decolonial discourses emphasize not so much postcolonial enmeshments, hybridities, quandaries, and ambivalences that permeate the postcolonial imaginary but rather focus on the oppositional ontologies of indigenous (predominantly South American, Central American, and Caribbean) traditions. Unlike many prominent postcolonial imaginaries, decolonial critical trajectories are much more organically at home in spiritual, mystical, and theological contexts even as they promote delinking27 from the hegemonic colonial epistemologies and their entanglements with theological imaginaries of Western colonial modernity. According to Catherine Walsh’s helpful summary, Decoloniality denotes ways of thinking, knowing, being, and doing that began with, but also precede, the colonial enterprise and invasion. It implies the recognition and undoing of the hierarchical structures of race, gender, heteropatriarchy, and class Ibid., 21. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson, “Introduction: Scale and Sensibility,” in Relocating Postcolonialism, ed. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), xii. 23 For a more detailed account, see my In Counterpoint, 93–111. 24 Namsoon Kang, Diasporic Feminist Theology: Asia and Theopolitical Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014), 125. 25 Young, “What Is the Postcolonial,” https://link-gale-com.noc dbpr oxy.xav ier.edu/apps/doc/A21 0585 170/ LitRC?u=xavi er_m ain&sid=LitRC&xid=b3607f6a. 26 For a more detailed comparison between postcolonial and decolonial theories and practices please see Amrita Ghosh, “On Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies: An Interview with Gurminder K. Bhambra,” Inverse Journal, March 22, 2020. Available at: https://www.inv​erse​jour​nal.com/2020/03/22/on-postc​olon​ial-and-dec​olon​ialstud​ies-an-interv​iew-with-gurmin​der-k-bham​bra-by-amr​ita-ghosh/. See also her “Postcolonial and Decolonial dialogues,” Postcolonial Studies 17:2 (2014): 115–21. 27 For more on this important decolonial notion see Walter D. Mignolo, “The Decolonial Option: Part Two,” in On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, ed. Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 103–257. 21 22

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that continue to control life, knowledge, spirituality, and thought, structures that are clearly intertwined with and constitutive of global capitalism and Western modernity. Moreover, it is indicative of the ongoing nature of struggles, constructions, and creations that continue to work with coloniality’s margins and fissures to affirm that which coloniality has attempted to negate.28 Decolonial critiques are also more explicitly and unapologetically vectored toward transformative action, not only through various modes of political advocacy but also in their theoretical elaborations. Walsh again highlights the distinctive sanguine commitments of decolonial ethos to effect resistance and change: Decoloniality is a perspective, stance, and proposition of thought, analysis, sensing, making, doing, feeling, and being that is actional … praxistical, and continuing. Moreover, it is prospectively relational in that it looks, thinks, and acts with the present-future-past, including with the peoples, subjects, and situated and embodied knowledges, territories, and struggles that push toward, advance, and open possibilities of an otherwise. It is in this sense that decoloniality can be understood as a process, practice, and project of sowing seeds.29 Finally, due to the deep and intentional engagement with the indigenous cultural and spiritual traditions of South America, decolonial imaginaries bridge the gap between attending to the socioethical and sociopolitical exigencies of the global postcolony and addressing the accelerating ecological crisis in a much more interactive and organic way, while postcolonialism with its pronounced anthropocentric orientation has struggled to make these connections up until very recently. Postcolonialism traces its methodological roots back to humanities and historical scholarship, while the origins of decolonialism incorporate a wider spectrum of social sciences. Hence the connections between the decolonial “efforts to depatriarchalize and decolonize society” and “liberating the Earth and weaving the pluriverse effectively with others, humans and not”30 offer a sorely needed corrective thrust to postcolonial anthropocentrism that is particularly important in the present conditions of environmental degradation. The radically relational decolonial ethics of planetary interexistence,31 especially with its methodological openness toward the spiritual and nonhuman dimensions of existence, can indeed constructively modulate the otherwise limited postcolonial focus on sociopolitical/-cultural/-economic realities into a more expansive register of the socionatural. The shift to the socionatural as the overarching framework for transformative praxis to carry forth the decolonial ethic of care for the whole “meshworks of humans and nonhumans”32 serves as the catalyst for postcoloniality, finally, to voyage into the predicaments of the Anthropocene with eyes wide open. But this is not just a matter of a profound shift in postcolonial theory. Postcolonial geographer Mark Jackson expressed an emerging tenor in postcolonial studies by recently underscoring the necessity of framing the postcolonial “more explicitly within

alsh, “Decoloniality in/as Praxis: Part One,” On Decoloniality, 17. W Ibid., 100. 30 Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible, trans. David Frye (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), xvii. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 127. 28 29

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the decolonial.”33 Hence decolonial thrust also challenges postcolonial theologies, including the embryonic postcolonial sacramental imagination, to consider questions like the one Arturo Escobar is directing toward all discourses under the umbrella of decoloniality: “How do we develop forms of knowing that do not take words and beings and things out of the flow of life—that is, forms of knowing and being that do not recompose nature as external to us, as dead or unsentient matter? What kind of rituals might we develop to this end?”34 In our context we might be interested to add, what kind of sacramental imaginaries might we develop to this end? In response, I will proceed to sketch five “marks” of a postcolonial sacramental imaginary or ontology—with a decolonial thrust. But before I get there, a bit more needs to be said about what I mean by postcolonial sacramental ontology and why it makes sense to conceive of it in terms of redemptive repair for the flourishing of the whole of God’s creation.

Sacramentality and Its “Ontological Turn”: Toward a Postcolonial Sacramental Ontology of Redemptive Repair Why even talk about such allegedly obsolete concepts as “ontologies,” instead of focusing on presumably more nimble rituals and discrete worship practices, as fragmented Western postmodern sensibilities might instinctively prefer? I am more interested in exploring an intersection of, on the one hand, a particular strand in sacramental theology that calls for more attention to sacramentality (that some call the “sacramental principle”) rather than just autonomous and institutionalized ecclesial rites, and, on the other hand, the so-called “ontological turn” in decolonial studies. First, the “ontological turn” in more recent decolonial studies is underwritten by the realization, mostly in social sciences where the typically Western philosophical term “ontology” gets used in a rather fluid and unsystematic sense, of how crucial are relationality and interdependence among humans, environment, objects, power constructs, and (even) spiritual realities. Ontology, according to Escobar, is about our “mode of being in the world.”35 Decolonially speaking, ontology describes “a host of formerly unaccented aspects” in critical theories that now focus on “ways of being, knowing, and doing,” providing richer and more adequate conceptions of “what counts as real, for modes of existence, and for adjudicating ethical or nonethical action.”36 If, as Maldonado-Torres argues, coloniality is a “metaphysical catastrophe” underwritten by “a logic, metaphysics, ontology, and matrix of power that can continue existing after formal independence and desegregation,”37 then decoloniality entails certain alternative metaphysics and ontologies of living, perceiving, relating, acting, and knowing

Postcolonial geographer Mark Jackson provides a nuanced distinction between the postcolonial and decolonial modalities of analysis, which takes into account the differences but also significant similarities and consonances. “While the decolonial is a more radical effort to challenge discourses of modernity and refuse them, and whereas the postcolonial might be read more as an attempt to bring multiplicity and difference within the modern, it is also important to recognise that both the postcolonial and decolonial are critiques of our present coloniality,” in “Preface,” in Coloniality, Ontology, and the Question of the Posthuman, ed. Mark Jackson (London: Routledge, 2018), xiii–xiv. See also his “Introduction: A Critical Bridging Exercise,” 1–17. 34 Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 200. 35 Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible, trans. David Frye (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), xii. 36 Ibid., xi, xiv. 37 Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality,” 12, 10. 33

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otherwise. The “ontological turn” moves beyond the postmodern Western valorization of sheer fragmentariness of reality. It attempts to recuperate the appreciation of a far more expansive understanding of reality—namely, our diverse senses of “what exists and how these things exist in relationship to each other.”38 Notably, due to the embeddedness of the “ontological turn” in indigenous cultures and traditions, cosmological as well as spiritual dimensions of reality (finally) come fully alive in these theoretical elaborations.39 In this sense, ontology is a kind of code-word to describe embodied, experienced, and enacted imaginaries of the whole cosmic and experiential lifeworld that individuals and communities indwell—historically, culturally, politically, emotionally, erotically, intellectually, economically, materially, and spiritually—and which express as well as shape the cosmosense/worldsense (and not just a cosmovision/worldview) of what is real—all things visible and invisible, all things human and nonhuman. Now, in sacramental theology, especially within the Euro-Atlantic cultural and (post)ecclesial milieu, there are more concerns about the growing alienation from and indifference toward participation in ecclesial sacramental rites. Meanwhile the very so-called mainstream “liturgical-sacramental” traditions shrink in numbers partially due to “paleness of liturgical expressions” and “experiences of underwhelming liturgy.”40 At the same time, the unaffiliated, the nones, and the spiritual-but-not-religious segments of society are increasing amidst the “rapid processes of de-churching, de-traditionalization, and individualization”41 away from institutionalized religions and their rites. Clearly this is by no means a globally uniform phenomenon. For me as a postcolonial theologian, its prevalence in the Euro-Atlantic cultural context pushes the question well beyond lamenting underwhelming local liturgical experiences. It raises even deeper questions than coming to terms with the rapidly changing cultural and spiritual patterns of religious belonging, fulfillment, and relation to the Holy Mystery that reverberates at the heart of all things. It rather reaches into the territory of growing frustrations with institutionalized racist and heteropatriarchal patterns of authority—both of which stem from the enduring legacies of the “colonial matrix of power,” that is, the “intersectionality of multiple, heterogeneous global hierarchies … of sexual, political, gender, epistemic, economic, spiritual, linguistic and racial forms of domination and exploitation.”42 From a postcolonial perspective, sacramental sensibilities do continue to glimmer in global metropolises and margins alike. Yet they have often been (mal)formed and mutilated during the colonial modernity, as I have argued elsewhere.43 Among the most harmful

Maria Regina Firmino Castillo, “Dancing the Pluriverse: Indigenous Performance as Ontological Praxis,” DRJ 48:1 (April 2016): 56. She refers to the set of (unsystematic) definitions offered by one of the pioneers of the ontological turn, Mario Blaser, by emphasizing the narrative aspects of ontology. 39 David L. Blaney and Arlene B. Tickner conclude that ontology as a study of what exists and what is real is closely interconnected with the “assumptions about the origins and the evolution of the cosmos. In this sense, ontologies and cosmologies can be said to co-constitute each other,” in “Worlding, Ontological Politics and the Possibility of a Decolonial IR,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45:3 (2017): 296. Overall, this is a significant methodological shift toward a more holistic view of reality in social sciences with humanities, also in the postcolonial critical milieu, generally catching up. 40 Gerald C. Liu, “Liturgical Free Association with Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One,” in Full of Your Glory: Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation, ed. Teresa Berger (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2019), 390–1. 41 Bert Groen, “The First of September: Environmental Care and Creation Day,” in Full of Your Glory, 329. 42 Ramon Grosfoguel, “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy,” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1:1 (2011): 11. 43 Suna-Koro, In Counterpoint, particularly see Coda, “Postcolonial Ressourcement and Diasporic Method,” 278–89. 38

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and potent malformations are those effected by the hegemonic Western metaphysics of competitive dualism, sacramental occasionalism, and human exceptionalism that pits the divine in a competitive relation to the world, disengages sacraments from sacramentality, and separates humans from the cosmic and planetary nonhuman web of life. In this context, sacramental theology, I suggest, would also benefit from its own kind of “ontological turn” toward a critically and constructively inflected postcolonial retrieval of the notion of sacramentality as an imaginary, an ontology, or a worldsense. To be clear, I do not believe there is such a thing as an absolute and unspoiled conception of sacramentality that could now be plucked ripe and ready from the Christian past and helicoptered in to alleviate our present challenges such as advancing ecological devastation, shattering inequality and the despair that it sows worldwide, or even fill the empty pews and collection plates of many liturgically underwhelming churches. To claim that such a notion of sacramentality exists and is waiting to be effortlessly implanted in today’s socio-spiritual milieu would be to nostalgically invent a golden nativist past that never was and to underestimate the magnitude of challenges that Christian churches and the whole planetary community of creation are facing today. What we can do is to identify, listen to, and carefully converse with those tenets of Christian traditions that offer alternatives to dualistic ontologies of separation, hierarchical domination, conquest, exploitation, and competitive fragmentation. To that effect, I suggest that to envision a postcolonial sacramental ontology involves, first, a methodological shift toward prioritizing sacramentality as the underlying and overarching horizon (i.e., ontology or imaginary) within which all sacramental mysteries and ritualized events, institutionalized or not, live and move in a profound and subtle labyrinth of resonances. And second, it involves a constructive axiological reorchestration of such a sacramental imaginary as an ontology of redemptive repair for the flourishing of the planetary web of life. As far as the methodological shift regarding “sacramentality” is concerned, postcolonial sensibility can find inspiring allies across not only (the usual suspects!) Eastern Orthodox theological cosmovisions but also among Western Catholic and Protestant perspectives. For to transform the dynamic of sacramental disillusionment and alienation, it is salient to begin with sacramentality as ontology and not merely two or “seven clerically enacted events.”44 As Kevin W. Irwin has argued, “if we understand sacramentality as referring primarily to the church’s (seven) sacraments, then we lose the rich basis for viewing the world as sacramental.”45 Elsewhere (over decades), he sought to argue in favor of perhaps an unfashionable yet sorely needed corrective to the Western (post)modern imagination as a whole to the effect that Sacramentality is a worldview, a way of looking at life, a way of thinking and acting in the world that values and reveres the world. Sacramentality acts as a prism, a theological lens through which we view creation and all that is on this good earth as revelations of God’s presence and action among us here and now … Sacramentality is a worldview that invites us to be immersed fully in the here and now, on this good

Susan Marie Smith, Christian Ritualizing and the Baptismal Process: Liturgical Explorations toward a Realized Baptismal Ecclesiology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012), 106. She offers a very insightful pastoral analysis as to why the attention has historically shifted away from sacramental experiences (real efficacy) to the presiding roles of clergy and the doctrinal efficacy from the Middle Ages onward, 106–11. 45 Kevin W. Irwin, “Sacramental Theology after Laudato Si,” in Full of Your Glory, 269. 44

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earth, and not to shun matter or avoid the challenges that such earthiness will require of us.46 At stake here is, as Irwin rightly emphasizes, the credibility of the whole sacramental imaginary (and not just tweaking one rite here or another liturgical activity there). From an Eastern Orthodox perspective, John Chryssavgis argues that “indeed, if there exists today a vision able to transcend and transform all national and denominational tensions, it may well be that of our world understood as sacrament.”47 Hans Gustafson advances the panentheistic imaginary of pansacramentalism. It “maintains the potential for all things to function as sacraments insofar as they facilitate the concretization (the making present) of the sacred in the contemporary world.”48 Without using the postcolonial/decolonial language of ontology and metaphysics as I am more inclined to do,49 others like Louis Weil have used the more understated language of “sacramental principle.” According to Weil, the sacramental principle means to see God in all created things … God is revealed in the whole created world; and in that sacramental perspective, everything is understood as an access, or a transparency, to the presence and action of God … the sacramental sense is not narrowly Christian because it is grounded in a certain understanding of our humanity.50 As a postcolonial theologian, I would be hesitant to use such triumphant language of transparency without qualifiers that Gustafson’s pansacramentalism underscores (e.g., “potentially” and “can” instead of “is,” as Weil puts it). As such, I would rather underscore the opacity of the emergent creatio continua through the vicissitudes of history and culture as well as the ongoing predicaments of wretchedness, dispossession, and abuse that actively obscure and distort divine presence and action across human and nonhuman creation. Nuances notwithstanding, the crux of the matter is this: postcolonial approaches re-orchestrate sacramentality precisely as a pluriversal,51 non-hegemonic, non-coercive, omnilaterally interactive, and inter-accountable imaginary of relationality throughout which all planetary lifeforms can reveal themselves as constituents of God’s cosmic and planetary meshwork. To add the decolonial thrust, it must be emphasized that within this meshwork, all lifeforms collaboratively coexist and interexist while indwelling our shared interspecies’ foundational relation to God as Creator and Redeemer of all created things, visible and invisible. Moreover, within this yet un-consummated ontology of complex creaturely conviviality that struggles and groans (Rom. 8:22) toward the promise of salvific harmony as all creatures “wait for new heavens and a new earth where righteousness is at home” (2 Pet. 3:13), all created realities can potentially minister, imperfect as they may be, as relational conduits of God’s revelation and salvation. This kind of sacramental efficacy springs from the Kevin W. Irwin, The Sacraments: Historical Foundations and Liturgical Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 2016), 210. 47 John Chryssavgis, “The World as Sacrament,” Pacifica 10:2 (1997): 1. Italics in original. See also his most recent Creation as Sacrament: Reflections on Ecology and Spirituality (London: T&T Clark, 2019). 48 Hans Gustafson, “Pansacramentalism, Interreligious Theology, and Lived Religion,” Religions 10 (2019): 56. 49 See my In Counterpoint, 291–2 for a more detailed argument in dialogue with Irwin’s proposals. 50 Louis Weil, “Lecture at Berkeley, CA,” February 8, 2000, 8–9. Quoted from Smith, Christian Ritualizing and the Baptismal Process, 110–11. 51 This is a preliminary reference to the notion of pluriverse to which I will return at the end of the chapter. At its root, the decolonial concept of pluriverse expresses the idea of a “world” of multiplicity “where many other worlds fit.” 46

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theological fact that, as it emerges from the messy evolutionary depth, the whole planetary web of life—not just humanity and our economic and cultural artifacts—is nothing less than God’s creation. Furthermore, the incarnation of God’s Word and Wisdom, Christ, is an incarnation as radical embodiment into the depths of the world’s flesh, God becoming “part of the nexus of the entire cosmos—around us and within ourselves” as material beings composed of the same stardust which we, humans, share with other creatures of God.52 This sacramental imaginary can offer an ontological alternative to the workings of the Western colonial “metaphysical catastrophe” (Maldonado-Torres) that continues to grind the colonial matrix of power into so many souls, bodies, relationships, and lifeworlds that continue to propel us all toward an accelerating ecological wretchedness and ever new mutations of injustice and inequality of truly decadent proportions. Finally, why would such an ontology be seen as an ontology of redemptive repair? First of all, Teresa Berger is right: there is no golden (lest invented and blatantly nativist!) “creation-sensitive or cosmic ritualizing” and there is no “earth-and cosmos-conscious past in everything from New Age spirituality and Celtic worship to Joseph Ratzinger”53— unless we willingly surrender to the seductions of variously motivated nostalgias. There is no golden and innocent sacramental past of perfectly functioning and ethically fruitful “participatory” (or Platonic) ontologies and liturgies to be rescued and happily restored from the perverse clutches of modernity. But even more importantly, all we have is a planetary lifeworld of convoluted and, as of late (cosmically speaking), heavily anthropocentric emergence. Although it is continually, as it were, being suspended in grace, it struggles with being mired in sinful patterns of relationships of domination, conquest, and competitive exploitation of which the global colonial modernity is just the most efficient manifestation. What we also have is a spectrum of ambiguous sacramental and liturgical traditions and cosmologies that often “bundled sacrament and dominion together and sent them sailing the high seas to colonize” and to inscribe demeaning racial hierarchies, imperial conquests, subjugation, racism, androcentrism, and “civilizing missions” all over the globe.54 Hence, a postcolonial sacramental ontology, with a decolonial thrust, can only be an ontology of repair, not restoration. There is no immaculate “restore point” for sacramental, or any kind of Christian, theology. Meanwhile an ontology of redemptive repair hearkens back to the Jewish notion of tikkun olam with its synergy of divine blessing, grace, and creaturely agency investing itself in righteous action toward the proximate and ultimate flourishing of ta panta (Col. 1:16), all things created by God in Christ and through the Holy Spirit. This is an ontology for a world as God’s continuous creation, which is simultaneously also a process of repair for a world that is structured in both dazzling evolutionary emergence but also afflicted by deep biological and social histories of strife and corruption. The decolonial thrust for a postcolonial sacramental ontology of redemptive repair would, then, invite us to imagine it, with Arturo Escobar, like a pluriverse—a world in which many worlds fit: I am referring here to the concept of “deep incarnation.” For a concise overview, please see Ciara Reyes’s interview with the Lutheran theologian Niels Henrik Gregersen, “Deep Incarnation & the Cosmos: A Conversation with Niels Henrik Gregersen,” in God and Nature, Summer 2017. Online source: https://godan​dnat​ure.asa3.org/ interv​iew-deep-inca​rnat​ion--the-cos​mos-a-conve​rsat​ion-with-niels-hen​rik-greger​sen-by-ciara-reyes--niels-hen​rikgreger​sen.html. 53 Teresa Berger, “Introduction,” in Full of Your Glory, 11. 54 Larry L. Rasmussen, Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 258–9. 52

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The fact is that we all live within Earth as pluriverse; we weave the pluriverse together with every existing being through our daily practices. We are all summoned to the task of repairing the Earth and the pluriverse, one stitch at a time, one design at a time, one loop at a time … Our collective weaving of a place, including a form of habitation, is a major part of it. We are summoned by place into entanglements with each other and with nonhuman, whether in conflict or cooperation or both, as all of us, willy-nilly, live in coexistence with multiple others through intricate relations that define our very way of being, even if most often we imagine those relations as weak links from which we can easily disassociate ourselves.55

Pondering Postcolonial Sacramental Ontology: Five Marks Finally, how might a postcolonial sacramental imaginary be described? I suggest that we consider the four creedal marks of the church—one, holy, catholic, and apostolic—but from postcolonial perspectives and with a decolonial thrust. And then add one more “mark”—living/alive—to undergird them all as a particularly salient “sign of the times.” One  It is not often that sacramental theology, and indeed Christian theology in general, and postcolonialism quite noticeably share a common epistemological stance. Yet anthropocentrism presents just such a case. Sacramental discourses typically offer a far more cosmologically and materially sensitive methodological comportment toward both Creator and creation than most other Western theological outlooks do. Nevertheless, even some otherwise salutary expressions of the sacramental principle reflect intractable anthropocentrism. For example, Richard McBrien argues that the sacramental principle is “the notion that all reality, both animate and inanimate, is potentially or in fact the bearer of God’s presence and the instrument of God’s saving activity on humanity’s behalf.”56 In the present time, sacramental imagination can only be consequential—that is, exercise its revelatory and redemptive function—if it is willing and able to muster a theological imaginary that foregrounds the ontological oneness and radical interdependence of God’s creation and offers an epistemology that is adequate for such a “planetary turn” in sacramental theology to foster a responsible ethics of creaturely interbeing. Postcolonialism faces a similarly acute challenge. Over the past decade, postcolonial studies has awakened to the realization that during Western colonial modernity “the material and cultural violence of colonialism reverberates throughout human and other-thanhuman worlds.”57 The postcolonial focus on justice remains. However, it is becoming clear that “the projects of social and environmental justice must be symbiotically entwined.”58 Like theological orthodoxies, also “human-centered orthodoxies in postcolonial analysis … are now being asked to account for how human beings are entangled in ontological aspects of wider relational and ecological processes.”59 The decolonial thrust here insists, at last, on the explicit recognition that, as Maria Lugones aptly puts it, the “dichotomous Escobar, Pluriversal Politics, xvii. Richard P. McBrien, The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), 1148. Italics added by me. 57 Dana Mount and Susie O’Brien, “Postcolonialism and the Environment,” 1. In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies ed. Graham Huggan (2013). Online: December 2013. DOI: 10.1093/oxfor dhb/9780199588251.013.0021. 58 Ibid. 59 Jackson, “Preface,” xi. 55 56

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hierarchy between the human and the non-human is the central dichotomy of colonial modernity.”60 Hence an intentionally postcolonial sacramental theology with a decolonial thrust will need to be, one way or another, ecologically and cosmologically posthumanist to signify the oneness of creation precisely as grace to be revealed to us in order to effectively challenge and transform speciesism and its politics of destructive human exceptionalism. Postcoloniality and decoloniality—as well as sacramental ontology of redemptive repair—are ultimately imaginaries of flourishing. To begin contributing toward such planetary flourishing, Christian sacramental imaginaries and ritual practices can explore making a commitment to, for example, what Lisa Dahill calls the “Christian spirituality of biocentric sacramental reimmersion into reality: ‘rewilding’ Christian spiritual practice for the Anthropocene” since “grace calls us out into a much larger communion, unpaved, unprivileged.”61 Or, perhaps, seriously entertaining the imaginary of the world itself as sacrament: not something entirely unheard of in Christian cosmosense but certainly underexplored and underappreciated.62 Holy  Holiness, through the postcolonial optic with a decolonial thrust, is about metanoia—contrition, repentance, and transformation toward flourishing so that, through Christ and in the Spirit, “we might live for righteousness” (1 Pet. 2:24). I have already referred to the unholy synergies of sacramental imagination and practice with colonialism/coloniality earlier in this chapter and throughout In Counterpoint, in conversation with other postcolonial and decolonial thinkers. Here let me reiterate that sacramental theology in a postcolonial key stands under the proviso that holiness— that is, sanctification of human persons and communities in, with, under, and through sacramental encounters and interactions—is vacuous at best and idolatrous as worst in the absence of ethical commitment to the “wretched of the earth,” whoever and wherever they may be, and now also the earth itself as well as the exploited nonhuman creation. As Heaney argues, postcolonial theology has the spiritual vocation to call Christians “to repentance and, thus, to holiness.”63 The decolonial thrust concretizes and materializes both repentance and the path of transformation toward holiness. Therefore, from a postcolonial perspective, “whatever holiness means, it will have to mean something in the light of the heretical hubris of imperialisms and the church’s particular complicity in patriarchy, racism, ethnocide, war, and genocide”64 to which ecocide now must also be added. To postcolonize and decolonize sacramental imagination, rites, and practices means something quite strenuous and ambivalent—for individuals and communities to live, labor, and worship with an “abiding suspicion of the rhetoric of progress and an abiding faith in the presence of the Holy One.”65

aria Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia 25:4 (2010): 743. M Lisa E. Dahill, “Rewilding Christian Spirituality: Outdoor Sacraments and the Life of the World,” in EcoReformation: Grace and Hope for a Planet in Peril, ed. Lisa E. Dahill and James B. Martin-Schramm (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2016), 179, 194. 62 For further exploration, please see the following sources: Chryssavgis, Creation as Sacrament, Dumitru Staniloae, “The World as Gift and Sacrament of God’s Love,” Sobornost 5:9 (1969): 662–73, and ch. 3.3 in my In Counterpoint. 63 Heaney, Post-Colonial Theology, 151. 64 Ibid., 171. 65 Ibid. 60 61

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To begin contributing toward such a postcolonial transformation toward a decolonial holiness, Christian sacramental imaginaries and ritual practices can explore making a commitment to encountering God through sacraments perceived, according to the Indian Jesuit theologian Francis X. D’Sa, as “fully liberative relationships.”66 It is hard to disagree with D’Sa that, especially in the context of the eco-justice crisis, “it is rare that we find a theology of sacraments that takes the world seriously.”67 It is postcolonially imperative to heed his insistence that “only the realization that a sacrament is first and last a sacrament of liberation can bring about a radical change in our approach to sacraments.”68 What makes a sacrament a sacrament or what engenders its faithfulness, truthfulness, and ultimately holiness that sacraments signify and affect is its ethical intentionality and ethical efficacy—the “liberative dynamics” that is not like a benign side effect but rather is “thematically stressed.”69 These two rudiments constitute the postcolonial key and the decolonial thrust toward bringing to fruition the planetary scope and the redemptive vocation of sacramentality. Catholic  To talk about sacramentality as catholic in a postcolonial key is to talk about a “retrieval of the wholeness of reality.”70 Such a retrieval goes beyond what I have elsewhere called the “numbers games”—the Western penchant for counting, limiting, and quarreling over the number of sacraments. It rather tries to reconceive the flesh of diverse humanity, the flesh of all sentient beings, and the flesh, as it were, of the earth as an immensely intricate sacramental interface of revelation and redemption where “the operative presence of the divine mystery in our times” is to be discerned and realized.71 To foreground the wholeness of reality is to perceive catholicity in terms of a sacramental pluriverse. A sacramental pluriverse is an imaginary in which many sacramental sensibilities and “systems” can fit and coexist. It disarms the fixation to postulate only one allegedly “correct” or “real” sacramental system of seven, two, or whatever canonized number of sacraments, by anathematizing other visions and experiences.72 The decolonial thrust of postcolonial sacramental catholicity—its pluriversality—is “fractal, or endowed with selfsimilarity: anywhere you look at it, and at any scale, you find similar (yet not the same) configurations, meshes, assemblages”73 of revelatory signs and transformative encounters, ritualized or otherwise. To reiterate, a sacramental pluriverse is not a totalizing imaginary of enforced sameness that camouflages some sort of reductive ecumenism under which all spiritual traditions should fuse into uniformity under the tutelage of the most powerful system/tradition/vision. Rather, the notion of sacramental pluriverse “designates relational existence under conditions of partial connection, where every world is more than one Francis X. D’Sa, S.J. “Sacramentum Mundi: Preface to a Cross-Cultural Re-Vision of Sacraments,” in The World as Sacrament: Interdisciplinary Bridge-Building of the Sacred and the Secular, ed. Francis X. D’Sa S.J. et al. Essays in Honor of Josef Neuner on the Occasion of his 90th Birthday (Pune: Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth Theology Series, 1998), 253. 67 Ibid., 249. 68 Ibid., 269. 69 Ibid., 248. 70 Ibid., 269. 71 Francis X. D’Sa, S.J. “The World as Sacrament,” in Celebrating the Sacramental World: Essays in Honour of Emeritus Professor Lambert J. Leijssen, ed. Kekong Bisong and Mathai Kadavil (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 37. 72 Foley’s idea of pandemonium sacramentum, based on the chaos theory, suggests a resonant concept. See “Sacramentality, Chaos Theory and Decoloniality,” 47. 73 Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse, 257. 66

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(not complete or total unto itself) but less than many (that is, we are not dealing with a collection of interacting separate worlds); all worlds are, in short, within the pluriverse.”74 Such a sacramental pluriverse can also open up toward other religions to expand the horizon of what Gustafson calls the “sacramental authenticity of the sacred in the world”75 through a distinctly interreligious way of theologizing and ritualizing. After all, Christians do not hold a monopoly on sacramental presence, ontology, or imagination!76 Finally, to speak of postcolonial sacramentality as catholic or pluriversal within an ontology of redemptive repair is to emphasize not merely some sort of static wholeness but rather what the Franciscan theologians Ilia Delio and Daniel Horan see in catholicity as wholemaking. It is the orientation of life toward making wholes. But it is also a hermeneutic “that looks beyond the ostensibly axiomatic principles of radical distinction, separateness, exclusivity, and isolation to recognize an intrinsic connectivity present throughout the whole of God’s creation”77 toward a post-anthropocentric salvation of all God’s creation to unfetter us all from the “immobilizing oppositions”78 of the colonial matrix of power, knowledge, and being. Apostolic  Valuing connections with the apostolic legacies and the richness of Christian traditions is by no means antithetical to postcolonial theological endeavors. At the same time, within the postcolonial and decolonial horizons, theological retrievals are seriously tricky. They necessarily involve deploying a certain hermeneutics of ethical vigilance that cannot abdicate its task of interrogating complicities between sacramental cosmovisions, doctrinal formulations, ritual practices and ecclesial policies, and the coloniality/imperiality of power, knowledge, and being.79 Moreover, postcolonialism is acutely attuned to the dangers of fetishization of the past that Graham Ward has so succinctly highlighted, since there is indeed an abyss between “respect for tradition and nostalgia”—a nostalgia that has “no future” and can only offer a petrifying backward glance resulting in “sacraliz[ing] concepts, objects, forms, and states from the past and reproduces them in a present that simulates and commodifies their pastness.”80 Perhaps the most salient question for engaging traditions of spirituality and theopolitics from a postcolonial perspective with a decolonial thrust is not about what to retrieve first but what to let go first. Walter Mignolo has argued that decolonial “liberation is not something to be attained; it is a process of letting something go, namely, the flows of energy that keep you attached to the colonial matrix of power.”81 Postcolonial discernment into what needs to be let go therefore might materialize through the effort of honest identifying and judicious delinking from spiritually moribund and ethically toxic/abusive sacramental symbols, doctrines, rites, practices, and institutions. Quite a long time ago Paul Tillich pointed out that unless a religious symbol and sacrament is able to open up

Ibid., 216. Gustafson, “Pansacramentalism,” 54, 64–7. 76 For example, see the 2016 “Sacramental Presences” seminar at the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions: https://cswr.hds.harv​ard.edu/news/2016/3/4/sacr​amen​tal-presen​ces-cen​ter. 77 Daniel P. Horan, OFM, Catholicity and Emerging Personhood: A Contemporary Theological Anthropology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2019), 6. 78 Madina Tlostanova, “Human/non-human Binary in Modernity/coloniality,” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 22:2 (2017): 25. 79 See my In Counterpoint, 9–10, 149–78. 80 Graham Ward, “Between Virtue and Virtuality,” Theology Today 59:1 (2002): 55. 81 Mignolo, On Decoloniality, 148. 74 75

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the ultimate depth of the Holy, then it dies, while new symbols are being born “out of a changed relationship to the ultimate ground of being, i.e., to the Holy.”82 To identify such moribund and toxic elements in sacramental theologies and practices is among the top tasks of postcolonial analysis. Postcolonial analysis must go much further than criticizing the much lamented disengagement of people from institutionalized sacramental rites in the Global North, which is often superficially blamed on secularization and rampant individualism in the Euro-Atlantic cultural milieu. It also entails probing into the deeper and growing despair over the metastases of “the dominant ontology of devastation”83— racism, heteropatriarchy, inequality, as well as hierarchical institutionalized clericalism in some denominations more than others—that continue to shade the so-called “liturgical/ sacramental” traditions of worship and spirituality. Yet pushing this task further into a decolonial trajectory also requires a resolutely nonnostalgic analysis of where, when, how, and at the expense of whom the theo-ethical and theopolitical “demonization” of sacraments (to use Tillich’s terminology) happened in the past and where it persists from the past into the present. This kind of theological analysis will need to work along similar lines as broader postcolonial and decolonial endeavors, as Achille Mbembe has proposed: it “will need to work with and against the past to open up future that can be shared in full and equal dignity … we must create a future that is inseparable from the notions of justice, dignity, and the in-common.”84 Living/Alive  Finally, the present Zeitgeist calls for adding another, a fifth, “mark” to the pivotal characteristics or exigencies of postcolonial sacramental imaginary—that of aliveness. At the time when sacramental ontology, sacramental imagination, and sacramental practices experience considerable marginalization, at least in their conventional and institutionalized forms in the Global North, all those who practice sacramental spirituality and engage their sacramental imagination in theology and other fields of human creativity have both a hefty challenge and a hefty opportunity in our hands. If indeed the trajectory of disassociation of Christians from (at least the organized/ institutionalized forms of) the conventional sacramental practices of worship persists,85 then, in order to survive and thrive, most existing sacramental imaginaries will need to weigh very carefully what needs to be let go, what must change, what demands careful preservation, and what calls for vigorous cultivation. For specifically postcolonial sacramental theology, under the aegis of redemptive repair toward the flourishing life of the world, however, what might the criteria of aliveness be? One criterion might be a pursuit of the spiritual sense of vincularidad—a decolonial term for “awareness of the integral relation and interdependence amongst all living organisms (in which humans are only a part) with territory or land and the cosmos”86—with life, with reality, and with the world in all its present glocal complexity, beauty, ugliness, suffering, and promise, not only on individual but also on communal and planetary levels. As I currently live and work in the Global North, I can best speak about this situation; Paul Tillich, “The Nature of Religious Language,” in The Essential Tillich: An Anthology of the Writings of Paul Tillich, ed. F. Forrester Church (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 49. 83 Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse, 7. 84 Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 177. 85 Liu, Foley, and Gustafson’s works cited earlier (among many others writing on the topic) suggest that this process is likely to continue. 86 Mignolo and Walsh, On Decoloniality, 1. 82

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and here, at least, such engagements with reality, life, and the world—always local but never detached from the inextricably pervasive (invasive?) global—will require an honest grappling with a long-standing Western malaise that cannot be circumvented, camouflaged, suppressed, or postponed any longer. Namely, the Jesuit maverick Teilhard de Chardin (already in 1929!) captured arguably the greatest disappointment of the Euro-Atlantic sacramental trajectory while simultaneously hinting at the path forward. Depending on the denominational tradition, one can wonder: how much has really changed (in ecclesial practice and not just in the academic publications of the Liturgical Movement) almost a century later if we are increasingly scratching our heads about “nones,” “somes,” SBNRs,87 and the “unaffiliated” in religious surveys? According to Teilhard—and his words apply not only to Roman Catholicism but, in some regards equally strongly also to the Protestant and Orthodox liturgical/sacramental traditions in decline—the church is drifting into a “sacramentalism” of over-refined piety, [which] has lost contact with the real. The guidance provided by the clergy, and the interests of the faithful, are gradually being confined to a little artificial world of ritualism, or religious practices, of pious extravagancies, which is completely cut off from the true current of reality. The Eucharist, in particular, is tending to become a sort of object whose validity rests entirely in itself, and which absorbs religious activity instead of making it work as a leaven for the salvation of everything in the universe.88 De Chardin pleads for connecting the “mutually supporting passion for Christ and passion for the world”89 as the nonnegotiable double helix of sacramental cosmovision worth fighting for. In my estimation, only such a double helix of commitments that tangibly bodies forth the indispensable vincularidad between creation and salvation can lead the postcolonial sacramental endeavors of redemptive repair toward embodying a consequential decolonial teleology of co-creating with God for the life of the world. Such co-creative endeavors can only be “made alive in the Spirit” (1 Pet. 3:18) and oriented toward nourishing decidedly postdualist “new, nonexploitative forms of life”90 rooted in the eschatological promise “behold, I make all things new” (Rev. 21:5). Just to reiterate: postcolonial aspirations have nothing to do with salvaging allegedly underwhelming forms of sacramental practice or imagination, or the ecclesial groups that hang onto them, come what may. The goal is to body forth witness to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, whose deep incarnation in the whole planetary web of life continues to insert the good news of life into the ruined landscapes and mindscapes of the global postcolony. Christ came so that we all, the whole creation, human and nonhuman, “may have life, and have it abundantly” (Jn 10:10). And this brings me finally to the second criterion of postcolonial aliveness in sacramental theology: the preferential option for the flourishing of all planetary meshworks of life to counteract what Achille Mbembe calls necropower/necropolitics. Postcolonial Christian sacramentality is an ontology of repair and conduit of flourishing insofar as all sacramental actions, events, and rites nurture life and undo wretchedness

“ SBNR” designates those who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. “The Sense of Man,” in Toward the Future, trans. Rene Hague (New York: Helen and Kurt Wolff Book/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 38. 89 Ibid., 38–9. 90 Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse, 7. 87 88

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to arrest the unholy efficacy of “history’s two privileged sacraments”—war and race.91 For Mbembe, war, conquest, and terror continue the necrotic reign of the “sacrament of our times,” that is, the ongoing factual “subjugation of life to the power of death” to create “death-worlds” as “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of living dead.”92 In these global circumstances, a wager for a postcolonial sacramental ontology of redemptive repair comes alive whenever and wherever it challenges the dominant ontology of war—“a war that henceforth pits species against one another, and nature against human beings.”93 Wherever and whenever the whole postcolonial pluriverse of sacramental encounters, sacramental imagination, sacramental actions, and sacramental transformations does actually signify, mediate, and cause redemptive repair toward flourishing and “abundant life” for human and nonhuman life alike, and above all for the “wretched of the earth,” it enfleshes decolonial grace for the life of the world.

FURTHER READING Carvalhaes, Claudio. Eucharist and Globalization: Redrawing the Borders of Eucharistic Hospitality. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013. Carvalhaes, Claudio, ed. Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspectives: Only One is Holy. New York: Palgrave, 2015. Escobar, Arturo. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Jagessar, Michael H., and Burns, Stephen. Christian Worship: Postcolonial Perspectives. Sheffield: Equinox, 2011. Suna-Koro, Kristine. In Counterpoint: Diaspora, Postcoloniality, and Sacramental Theology. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017.

Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 6. Ibid., 2, 92. Italics in original on p. 92. 93 Ibid., 15. 91 92

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Gender, Sacraments, and Sacramentality SUSAN A. ROSS

Human beings learn and experience everything through their bodies and through the material realities they encounter. Sacraments are the Christian recognition of this: that God reveals Godself to human beings through nature, through the (written and heard) word, through rituals, and, most significantly, through Jesus the Christ.1 Yet the sacraments, like bodies, are also places of division and exclusion. Women’s very bodiliness, the entry point for the Incarnation, is, for some Christian traditions, the very reason for women’s exclusion from full participation in sacramental rituals. The sacraments are also points of division between Christian denominations, and played a significant role in the Protestant Reformation. At the heart of considerations of gender, sacraments and sacramentality is the body: how it is defined, how it is “natural” or “socially constructed,” how it is understood to reflect the will of God. This essay will consider the ways that Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox traditions understand the relationships between gender, the sacraments, and sacramentality; how theologians concerned with gender challenge practices of exclusion; and how they reenvision and reconstruct sacramental thought and practice. What is a sacrament? The traditional Catholic answer, found in The Baltimore Catechism, is: “an outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace.”2 The Reformed theologian John Calvin defines a sacrament as “a testimony of divine grace toward us, confirmed by an outward sign.”3 Grace, another term for God’s love for humanity, is communicated through gestures, rituals, material objects, and relationships. Sacramentality is a broad term used to convey the idea that God is potentially revealed in material and historical reality; it is a way of looking at the whole world as revelatory. The sacraments in particular are Christians’ communal celebrations of the presence of Christ in their midst. In a sense, Christian communities are constituted by their sacramental practices, in that it is in these particular rituals and symbols that the presence of Christ, not just the sense of the holiness of the world, is found. “Sacramentals” are actions or objects that are

Cf. the title of Edward Schillebeeckx’s book Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, trans. N. D. Smith (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963). 2 The Baltimore Catechism, http://www.baltim​ore-catech​ism.com/lesso​n13.htm. 3 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill and Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1960), Book IV, Ch. XIV, a. 1 (at 1277). 1

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holy, such as a cross, but are not officially sacraments. Material and historical reality and gender are deeply implicated in each other.

HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS Christians have baptized, gathered together for meals commemorating the Last Supper, anointed, forgiven, and married since the earliest years of the community. But it was only in the sixteenth century, at the Council of Trent (1545–63), that the official number of sacraments in the Roman Catholic Church was listed as seven.4 This number had been used by the theologian Peter Lombard (c. 1100–1160) centuries earlier but was only formalized at Trent. Protestant Reformers, relying on the Bible and rejecting the authority of tradition, recognized only the two—Baptism and Eucharist/Lord’s Supper—that were understood to be formally instituted by Christ. Women and men participated in all of these rituals, including women being anointed as abbesses in the Middle Ages and, significantly, being recognized as sacramental ministers to their husbands in marriage. Yet, the ability to lead congregational worship, to preach, and to administer the sacraments has involved gender as an issue of controversy from the very beginning. In 1 Tim. 2:11, Paul states, “let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness,” and continues in v. 12: “I permit no woman to teach or have authority over men; she is to keep silent.” This proscription is based on Eve’s purported guilt for original sin and its inheritance particularly in women. Later statements about women’s behavior, as one will find in Tertullian (c. 200–300), continue to blame women for humanity’s sinful plight.5 In addition, women are seen to be too concerned with their appearance, are seductive, and are inferior in reason. In some cases, women were prohibited from even being in the church proper and were relegated to the back of the church;6 women’s menstruation was also a reason for being unable to receive communion.7 Along with menstruation, the “churching” (purification) of women after childbirth is another way that women’s bodies were (and, in some traditions, still are) reasons for their exclusion from “sacred space.” Thomas Aquinas, while defending the creation of woman, nevertheless says that women are “misbegotten males,” given his (faulty) understanding of biology, and that if a woman were ordained, it would not be “received.”8 Luther argues that women’s primary role is childbearing, and Karl Barth unequivocally states that men are A and women are B.9 Women were even forbidden to sing in church by Isidore of Pelusium (d. c. 435); as a historian of sacred music writes, “he related women’s singing to moral laxity and the rousing of passion as in the music of the

he Council of Trent, http://www.thecou​ncil​oftr​ent.com/ch7.htm. T Tertullian, “On the Apparel of Women,” in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, ed. Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), Book I, ch. I, p. 14. 6 Susan J. White, A History of Women in Christian Worship (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2003). 7 See http://ortho​doxi​nfo.com/pra​xis/men​ses.aspx: “Accord​ing to the Canons, though a woman is not in any manner more sinful in her cycle than a man is in the case of involuntary bodily emissions, she, like the man, must avoid Holy Communion at this time.” Yet this attitude is not universally held among Orthodox clergy or laity. 8 On the creation of woman, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 92, a. 1; on ordination, see ST III (Supp.), q. 39, a. 1. 9 Elizabeth A. Clark, Elizabeth and Herbert Richardson, eds. Women and Religion: A Feminist Sourcebook of Christian Thought (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1977) for more examples. 4 5

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theater.”10 Anyone looking for statements about women’s “natural” inferiority will find ample material in scripture and in the tradition. But the story of women’s sacramental and ritual involvement is in fact far more complex. As feminist scholars have shown, women exercised powerful leadership roles in the early church, advised theologians, led communities, preached, and heard confessions.11 Ordination, as Gary Macy has shown, was a term that was used broadly to designate leaders in the community and only in the late Middle Ages was used specifically for priestly ordination.12 Some women, such as Hildegard of Bingen, saw themselves as lesser than men, but also used this “inferiority” to see themselves as closer to the human, rather than the divine, Jesus.13 It is true that it was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that women began to be officially ordained in a few Protestant denominations,14 but women have always played important roles in educating, caring for the sick, feeding their families and their communities, reconciling relationships, to say nothing of bringing new life into the world. Thus, what is an official sacrament—that is, recognized by ecclesiastical authorities and administered by an ordained minister— and what is “only” sacramental—that is, all those other practices and traditions such as devotions, holy objects, processions, home altars, needlework for vestments, altar cloths, and kneelers, veneration of relics—is a fuzzy and ambiguous distinction. It is clear that gender has been, and remains, a qualifying marker for sacramental leadership and participation. Although a few women were ordained ministers in the nineteenth century, the momentum for women’s ordination accelerated in the mid-twentieth century, as the movement for women’s equality took center stage in the 1960s and as issues such as gay marriage emerged as significant in the 1990s. And while ordination is not, for many Protestant traditions, understood as a sacrament, nevertheless the two sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are still most often administered by ordained ministers. Thus the issue of ordination is inextricably linked with sacramental theology and consequently also with gender.

CATHOLIC UNDERSTANDINGS OF SACRAMENT AND GENDER The Roman Catholic tradition recognizes seven sacraments: Baptism, Eucharist, Confirmation, the Sacrament of the Sick (formerly known as the Last Rites, or Extreme Unction), Penance (or Reconciliation), Marriage, and Holy Orders. It is entirely possible for a man to receive all seven sacraments—that is, a widowed man can be ordained a

Paul Westermeyer, Te Deum: The Church and Music (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998), 77–8. See also Heidi Epstein, Melting the Venusberg: A Feminist Theology of Music (New York: Continuum, 2004), who develops the point that women’s singing was dangerous and seductive (53–7). 11 Teresa Berger, Women’s Ways of Worship: Gender Analysis and Liturgical History (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 17: On prohibitions against women in liturgical roles, Berger writes, “the very protests against them show that women did baptize and teach, exercise liturgical leadership, exorcise, bless, anoint, and heal” (17). 12 Gary Macy, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 13 Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 14 Antoinette Brown Blackwell is acknowledged to be the first woman ordained by a mainstream Protestant church (Congregational) in 1853. 10

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priest, as well as a married former Protestant minister—but women can receive only six. Moreover, official Catholic teaching recognizes the priest as the only one who can “dispense” the sacraments, as I will elaborate on more below. In an emergency, a woman (or any baptized lay person) can baptize, and women are technically the minister of the sacrament of marriage to their husbands15 (and vice versa), as noted above, but the teaching office of the Catholic Church—the “magisterium,” constituted by the hierarchy—makes a sharp distinction between what a layperson can do and what a priest can do. It is important to note as well that gay, lesbian, and transgender men and women are also unable to receive the sacrament of marriage, according to official church teaching. As noted above, the number of sacraments was set at seven in the sixteenth century. Nothing really changed in Catholic sacramental practice in the four hundred years between Trent and the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), when Masses began to be celebrated in the vernacular language and when the laity were encouraged to take on a more active role in the practice of their faith. Nor did gender enter into Vatican II discussions, apart from mention of the importance of marriage and the acceptance of both mutual love and procreation as the two “ends” of marriage.16 But in practical terms, gender always was a significant issue, although it was not specifically named. As the church’s attitude toward “the world” shifted from the fortress mentality characteristic of the post-Tridentine Church to a more open and welcoming approach, many laypeople began to find their voices, became more involved in parishes, and sought theological education. Men and women clergy and religious—priests, brothers, and sisters—also came to see that “vocation” was to be found not only in vowed religious life but also in “worldly” work, and many left religious life for marriage and paid employment. Laypeople, drawing on the renewed ecclesiology of Vatican II, came to see themselves as the church, and not just the obedient faithful; many took on positions that did not exist prior to Vatican II. Men and women became eucharistic ministers, lectors, religious education coordinators, pastoral associates, and theologians, positions that heretofore were held almost exclusively by clergy. It is worth noting that the overwhelming majority of laypeople working in the Catholic Church are women.17 At the same time, the women’s and gay liberation movements emerged, along with movements for racial equality. The sense of empowerment that these movements provided extended to religion. As more Protestant denominations began to permit the ordination of women ministers, many Catholic women saw no reason for their exclusion from priesthood. In 1975, the first Women’s Ordination Conference was held in Detroit,



15

According to Latin tradition, the spouses as ministers of Christ’s grace mutually confer upon each other the sacrament of Matrimony by expressing their consent before the Church. In the tradition of the Eastern Churches, the priests (bishops or presbyters) are witnesses to the mutual consent given by the spouses, but for the validity of the sacrament their blessing is also necessary. This quotation is from #1623 in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part II, Section II, Chapter 3, Article 7. The notes in the passage also refer to the Corpus Canonum Ecclesiarum Orientalium, which is the Code of Canon Law for the Eastern Rites of the Church. 16 See Gaudium et Spes, The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, December 7, 1965 http://www.vati​can.va/arch​ive/hist_c​ounc​ils/ii_​vati​can_​coun​cil/docume​nts/vat-ii_con​st_1​9651​207_​gaud​ium-etspes​_en.html, #50. 17 Specific information on numbers is difficult to track. But see the USCCB website on lay ecclesial ministers: http:// www.usccb.org/about/laity-marri​age-fam​ily-life-and-youth/lay-eccles​ial-minis​try/lay-eccles​ial-minis​try-faqs. cfm#q7.

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Michigan. Organizers had planned for six hundred attendees but over two thousand people showed up to attend the conference.18 In 1974, a group of eleven Episcopal women were ordained by three Episcopal bishops who did not hold jurisdiction in the diocese where the rite was performed. Their ordination was considered to be “invalid” until 1976, when the General Convention of the Episcopal Church opened priestly orders to women, effective January 1, 1977, and ruled these earlier ordinations, though irregular, to be valid.19 Many Catholic women saw in the Episcopal Church’s experience some hope, given its strong sacramental tradition. In 1975, the Pontifical Biblical Commission issued a report on the biblical evidence for or against the ordination of women. In its conclusion, the document said, “It does not seem that the New Testament by itself alone will permit us to settle in a clear way and once and for all the problem of the possible accession of women to the presbyterate.”20 Yet the Catholic tradition has historically not been reliant only on scripture; magisterial tradition (church creeds, conciliar statements, theologians, etc.) has also played a significant role in theological decisions. Thus it was not a complete surprise that the Vatican document on the ordination of women, Inter Insigniores, issued in 1976 but not made public until 1977, ruled out the ordination of women not only on the basis of the biblical evidence (or lack thereof) but also on historical practice and, significantly, the sacramentality of the priest.21 There needs to be a “natural resemblance” between Christ and the minister, the statement says: “if the role of Christ were not taken by a man … it would be difficult to see in the minister the image of Christ.”22 In this, the Vatican was appealing to the “sacramental nature” of the priesthood, where the sign (the male priest) stands in the place of Christ in persona Christi.23 But what is most extraordinary in this statement is the implication that one cannot see in a woman the image of Christ. Although many considered Inter Insigniores to be the final word on the issue, it did not sufficiently settle the question, so in 1994, Pope John Paul II issued the statement Ordinatio sacerdotalis, followed by a statement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in which it was declared that the practice of ordaining only men was to be “definitively held” by the faithful, and that the question was closed.24 Notwithstanding these official statements, a majority of Catholics are in favor of the ordination of women.25 In addition, the sharply decreasing number of priests has meant that many parishes around the world are without a resident pastor. Thus the practice of

ary Jo Weaver, ed., What’s Left: Liberal American Catholics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). M See https://www.episc​opal​news​serv​ice.org/wp-cont​ent/the​mes/ens​_v2/timeli​nes/timel​ine-1/timel​ine-ass​ets/timel​ ine.html#vars!date=1939-02-17_21:36:02! for a thorough timeline of the Episcopal Church and its positions on women acolytes, readers, deaconesses, priests, and bishops. 20 See Leonard Swidler and Arlene Swidler, eds., Women Priests: A Catholic Commentary on the Vatican Declaration (New York: Paulist Press, 1977). 21 The full text is available in Swidler and Swidler, no. 19 above. It can also be accessed at https://www.vati​can.va/ roma​n_cu​ria/congre​gati​ons/cfa​ith/docume​nts/rc_co​n_cf​aith​_doc​_197​6101​5_in​ter-ins​igni​ores​_en.html. 22 Swidler, Women Priests, 44. 23 Swidler, Women Priests, 45; in Inter Insigniores, #32. 24 Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, http://www.vati​can.va/cont​ent/john-paul-ii/en/apost_​lett​ers/1994/docume​nts/hf_jp-ii_ apl​_199​4052​2_or​dina​tio-sacer​dota​lis.html and “Responsum ad Propositum Dubium”: “Dubium: Whether the teaching that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women, which is presented in the Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis to be held definitively, is to be understood as belonging to the deposit of faith. Responsum: Affirmative.” See http://www.vati​can.va/roma​n_cu​ria/congre​gati​ons/cfa​ith/docume​ nts/rc_con​_cfa​ith_​doc_​1995​1028​_dub​ium-ordina​tio-sac​_en.html. 25 See https://www.pewfo​rum.org/2015/09/02/chap​ter-4-expec​tati​ons-of-the-chu​rch/. 18 19

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appointing women and laymen as “parish” or “pastoral coordinators,” who do everything except preside over the sacraments, but do pastoral care, preach, handle finances, and in general keep parishes running, grew in the 1980s and 1990s.26 Due in large part to the increasing involvement of lay ecclesial ministers, the Vatican issued a statement in 1997 making it clear that there was a major distinction between lay ministers and ordained clergy and warned against any confusion of their roles.27 I will comment on this document at greater length below. There is also the question of the admission of women to the permanent diaconate, which is the first level of Holy Orders, the other two levels being priesthood and the episcopacy (bishop). Reestablished at Vatican II, the permanent diaconate (as distinct from the transitional diaconate, which is the final step before priestly ordination) consists of men who serve in parishes, perform marriages and funerals, and, perhaps most significantly, preach. Most are married men, and they cannot remarry if they are widowed. At this writing, two papal commissions have met to consider the question and have provided reports that acknowledge that women were deaconesses in the past, but are not unanimous as to the nature of this office.28 In 2020, Pope Francis appointed a third commission, to consider the issue yet again.29 On the one hand, it is clear that women served as “deaconesses” in the early church; they are mentioned in the New Testament and there is mention of them throughout the first millennium. On the other hand, whether or not these women were “ordained” in a way comparable to men seems to be the main point of contention and concern. The fear among conservatives is that ordaining women as deacons would be the proverbial “camel’s nose in the tent,” despite the argument by its advocates that the diaconate is clearly a ministry of service, distinct from the “sacerdotal” office of the priesthood.30 Because in the Catholic Church ordination so clearly involves power over the sacraments, no discussion of sacraments can ignore gender. Yet the issue of gender is not always taken into account when it concerns the other sacraments. There is no obvious difference regarding gender in the rituals of baptism, confirmation, anointing, confession, communion, or marriage. But there are deeper issues to consider in how the sacraments For an interesting study of this phenomenon, see Ruth Wallace, They Call Her Pastor: A New Role for Catholic Women (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). 27 “Instruction on Certain Questions regarding the collaboration of the non-ordained faithful in the sacred ministry of Priest,” https://www.vati​can.va/roma​n_cu​ria/congre​gati​ons/ccle​rgy/docume​nts/rc_c​on_i​nter​dic_​doc_​ 1508​1997​_en.html. See also a statement in July 2020 to lay leadership in parishes: “The pastoral conversion of the Parish community in the service of the evangelising mission of the Church,” of the Congregation for the Clergy, July 20, 2020. This can be found at: https://press.vati​can.va/cont​ent/sal​asta​mpa/en/bol​lett​ino/pubbl​ ico/2020/07/20/2007​20a.html. This statement makes it clear that the titles given to laity are to be clearly separate from those of the clergy. From America magazine: “The document also instructs bishops to not designate deacons, consecrated and lay men and women who are given responsibilities in a priestless parish as pastor, co-pastor, chaplain, moderator, coordinator, parish manager,” which are typically reserved for priests “as they have a direct correlation to the ministerial profile of priests.” America July 20, 2020: https://www.amer​icam​agaz​ine.org/faith/2020/07/20/vati​can-docum​ ent-laity-role-paris​hes-prie​sts. 28 International Theological Commission, “From the Diakonia of Christ to the Diakonia of the Apostles,” http:// www.vati​can.va/roma​n_cu​ria/congre​gati​ons/cfa​ith/cti_do​cume​nts/rc_con_cfait​h_pr​o_05​0720​04_d​iaco​nate​ _en.html (2002). In 2016, a second commission was established and made its report in 2019, but its conclusions were not unanimous. Pope Francis named a third commission in early 2020. 29 https://crux​now.com/vati​can/2020/04/pope-crea​tes-new-exp​ert-com​miss​ion-to-study-women-deac​ons/. 30 This is a point repeatedly made by Phyllis Zagano, who has written extensively on the issue of women deacons. See Phyllis Zagano, Gary Macy, and William Ditewig, Women Deacons: Past, Present, Future (New York: Paulist Press, 2011). 26

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themselves are understood. As Teresa Berger puts it, “Christian worship has historically been deeply gendered, but … liturgical historiography has all but ignored this fundamental gender differentiation.”31 Baptism, for example, is initiation into the Christian community. As is often said, “by virtue of their baptism,” all are children of God, all are called to be disciples; all are called to be missionaries, as Pope Francis recently remarked; all share in the royal priesthood of Christ. Yet given the obstacles to women’s full participation in ministry, some have argued that if women cannot be ordained, then they shouldn’t be baptized. A few Catholic pastors have even denied baptism to the children of married gay and lesbian couples.32 The claim to the fundamental equality of all the baptized in Christ seems questionable to many feminists when considering the prohibition of women’s ordination; it is a point of contention whether this equality is only spiritual or eschatological and not also social. Another sacrament to consider is Penance, or Reconciliation, as it has come to be known since Vatican II. The intimate relationship between sinner and priest is a sacred one; the “seal of the confessional,” which obligates the priest to complete confidentiality, has been challenged as reports of clerical sex abuse have emerged particularly in the last forty years.33 But are women and/or members of sexual minorities comfortable in sharing their deepest desires and thoughts with a celibate male clergy? The Catholic doctrine of ex opera operato teaches that a sacrament is valid even when performed by a sinful priest, but the dynamics of gender relationships are not automatically absent in religious encounters.34 A third sacrament to consider with relation to gender is marriage. As recently as 1930, official Catholic teaching on marriage was that divorce was forbidden (it still is, officially) and that women were to be obedient to their husbands.35 In cases of domestic violence, which overwhelmingly involve male violence to women, how does one understand the indissolubility of marriage in a context where women’s voices are understood to be subordinate to their husbands’? Even in recent years, when the availability of an annulment—a declaration that the marriage was never valid—is less an issue, women may find it difficult to leave a violent relationship not only out of fear for their safety but also out of fear of loss of relationships with a church community. The Catholic sacramental theology of marriage is also based in a strong theory of gender complementarity, perhaps most powerfully explicated in Pope John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body.”36 In the “nuptial metaphor” of the bridal couple, men are seen

Berger, Women’s Ways, 5. https://www.dig​nity​usa.org/press/gay-catho​lic-gro​ups-depl​ore-cardi​nal%E2%80%99s-den​ial-bapt​ism-theirchild​ren; yet Pope Francis has congratulated same-sex couples for baptizing their children: https://www.wash​ingt​ onbl​ade.com/2017/08/08/pope-fran​cis-congra​tula​tes-gay-cou​ple-baptiz​ing-child​ren/. 33 h ttps://crux​ n ow.com/chu ​ r ch-in-the-usa/2019/06/cha ​ l len​ g es-to-seal-of-con​ f ess​ i on-att​ r ibu​ t ed-to-cle​ rgy-sex-abuse-scand​als-2/. 34 The distinction between ex opera operato (sacramental effectiveness is not dependent on the minister) and ex opera operantis (consideration of the minister’s faith) is worth pursuing further. 35 See Casti Connubii: http://www.vati​can.va/cont​ent/pius-xi/en/ency​clic​als/docume​nts/hf_p-xi_enc​_193​0123​1_ ca​sti-connu​bii.html. “Domestic society being confirmed, therefore, by this bond of love, there should flourish in it that ‘order of love,’ as St. Augustine calls it. This order includes both the primacy of the husband with regard to the wife and children, the ready subjection of the wife and her willing obedience, which the Apostle commends in these words: ‘Let women be subject to their husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife, and Christ is the head of the Church’” (#26). 36 John Paul II. The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan (Boston, MA: Pauline Books & Media, 1997). 31 32

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as the bridegroom and women as the bride. Yet this metaphor goes far beyond a seemingly simple description of male and female. Christ is also the bridegroom, and the church is his bride. While men can be both bridegroom and bride, as both male and lay, women can only be the bride. In addition, same-sex couples are not complementary; in fact, they are seen as “narcissistic,” since they “lack” the “balance” provided by the opposite sex.37 Much of official Catholic marriage preparation draws on the Theology of the Body, as does diaconal formation, and is also used extensively in Catholic schools and colleges.38

PROTESTANT UNDERSTANDINGS OF SACRAMENT AND GENDER As I noted above, most Protestant traditions recognize two sacraments: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. These are understood to have a direct tie to Jesus’ actions as recorded in the New Testament: Jesus himself was baptized and he said at the Last Supper, “Do this in remembrance of me.” Although the sacraments are defined in similar ways to Catholicism—they are visible signs of an invisible grace—how they are understood by the churches varies among traditions. Some practice infant baptism, while others only recognize adult baptism. Some practice frequent communion, while others have it monthly or even more rarely. Especially since Vatican II, with greater openness to ecumenical issues on the part of many Christian churches, some traditions have come to value the sacramental dimension of such practices as confession, anointing, or even marriage and ordination, but do not formally consider them sacraments. This means there may be a stronger sense of sacramentality among many Protestant traditions, as there already is in Catholicism, than in the past, but without a change in church teaching on the number of sacraments; this is a relatively recent development in some Protestant denominations. As is the case with Catholicism, historically gender has not been understood to be a central issue in sacramental theology. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are open to both men and women. Since the Protestant traditions base their understandings of the sacraments primarily on the Bible, how the Bible is interpreted for the present is a major determining factor as to whether or not women are ordained. Increasingly, the ordination of women and also of gays and lesbians has caused internal divisions among members of Protestant denominations.39 Among the many Protestant denominations, many do ordain women, but even within the same tradition, there are some branches that do not ordain women, or have seen some members break off as a result of the decision to do so, as among Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists, to name just some

See, for example, the US Catholic Bishops’ statement “Frequently Asked Questions on the Defense of Marriage,” http://www.usccb.org/iss​ues-and-act​ion/marri​age-and-fam​ily/marri​age/promot​ion-and-defe​nse-of-marri​age/fre​ quen​tly-asked-questi​ons-on-defe​nse-of-marri​age.cfm: 37

In marriage, the complementarity of husband and wife is expressed clearly in the act of conjugal love, having children, and fathering and mothering—actions that call for the collaboration and unique gifts of husband and wife. In fact, both are necessary for marriage; only a man and a woman, through their distinctive otherness that is ordered to each other, can join in a spousal union. I draw here on many conversations with students and colleagues who have gone through pre-Cana (marriage preparation) courses, diaconate formation programs, and high school religion courses. 39 There is a great deal of material on this. For one recent example, note that the United Methodist Church is facing a schism on the basis of the ordination of gay and lesbian clergy. See http://www.vati​can.va/cont​ent/pius-xi/ en/ency​clic​als/docume​nts/hf_p-xi_enc​_193​0123​1_ca​sti-connu​bii.html. 38

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of the major denominations. Less centralized churches, such as some Pentecostals and non-denominational churches, leave the decision to the local church. Are the injunctions against women preaching and teaching to be seen in their particular context in the first century, like so many other statements, or are they to be understood as permanent? It is clear that Protestant traditions are not in agreement on this issue. A related point is the significance of the Word. The Word is not only the written or spoken “word” of scripture but also the embodiment of the Lord as Word (Logos), so the office of preaching takes on great importance. Preaching is not a sacrament in the technical sense, but it is central to the worship of the Protestant Christian community. Thus women’s ability to preach in the assembly, as the earlier quotation from 1 Timothy proscribes, has provoked similar strong reactions from conservative Protestants as women’s ability to be ordained has from conservative Catholics. One conservative Lutheran writes of the “feministic abomination” of women’s liturgical leadership, charging that “God has not instituted pastoral office for women.”40 There has been similar and strong resistance to the idea of women preaching or holding pastoral positions in other Protestant congregations. The Southern Baptist Convention in the United States, formed in the nineteenth century because of its disagreement with the abolition of slavery, is also opposed to women holding pastoral leadership positions and, like other conservative Christians, argues that women’s true place is in the home and in offering their “unique” gifts to the church.41 Other Baptist denominations, such as the American Baptist Convention and the National Baptist Convention, do ordain women to pastoral positions, in contrast to the Southern Baptists. As noted above, women were ordained in the Episcopal Church in the United States, and women’s ordination was recognized in 1976. Women’s ordination to the priesthood became a reality in England in 1992, and women are now bishops as well, as they are in Lutheran and Methodist traditions. It might seem to some that Catholic theology has been more concerned with sacraments than Protestant theology has, given its concerns about canon law, ritual precision, and sacramental validity, but the ecumenical movements of the twentieth century, and especially following the Second Vatican Council, have resulted in a greater appreciation of the sacraments on the part of Protestants. Don Saliers, a Methodist and one of the leading voices in American liturgical theology, writes of a renewed sense of sacramentality in the Methodist Church and observes that “for Christians, the other sacramental actions of the church in our worship and ministries in the world take their specific identification from these two sacraments [Baptism and the Lord’s Supper].”42 As is the case for Catholicism, gender has not been one of the major considerations in the renewal of Protestant sacramental theology in the last sixty years. Yet the greater sense of voice and empowerment for women and sexual minorities has undoubtedly had an effect on how they conduct worship, preach, and administer the sacraments, although it is impossible to measure this. Having women as worship leaders or preachers means that the worshipper is more aware of gender, since the “default” clergy person is male. When the minister is pregnant, for example, worshippers cannot ignore the minister’s gender. If the minister has children, it makes a difference what the minister’s gender is, as I have

“ Theological Observer: Feminism and Neo-Donatism,” Concordia Journal (January 1990): 3. See “Resolution on Ordination and the Role of Women in Ministry,” http://www.sbc.net/reso​luti​ons/1088/res​ olut​ion-on-ord​inat​ion-and-the-role-of-women-in-minis​try. 42 Don E. Saliers, “Taste and See: Sacramental Renewal among United Methodists,” Quarterly Review, 22:3 (Fall 2002): 229. 40 41

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heard from many women and men ministers. If the minister is openly gay or lesbian, the congregation’s attitude comes into play. Despite the Protestant tradition’s apparently less robust sacramental theology, gender remains an issue with regard to worship.

ORTHODOX SACRAMENTAL THEOLOGY AND GENDER Like Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox churches do not allow the ordination of women, for many of the same reasons; an “iconic” understanding of priesthood, a strong value placed on tradition, and cultural prohibitions all play a role. When the question of the ordination of women has arisen in Orthodoxy, the answer has most often been that there is a need for greater study of the issue. One important difference from Catholicism is the practice of the ordination of women deacons. At least a few Orthodox churches have renewed the tradition of women deacons, and the scholar Phyllis Zagano, who has dedicated her career to advocating for the ordination of women to the diaconate, has argued that if the Roman Catholic Church recognizes the validity of the sacrament of Holy Orders within Orthodox churches, it ought to follow that women deacons be granted the same recognition.43 The strong sense of sacramentality present in the Orthodox tradition, with its practice of the veneration of icons, its rich and often ornate liturgies, and its strong valuation of the symbolic character of religious life, is attractive to women as well as men. As in other religious traditions, women, while excluded from official liturgical roles and leadership, nevertheless find ways of expressing their piety that may not be recognized as such, but are rich sources of religious feeling.44

CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES IN SACRAMENTAL THEOLOGY AND PRACTICE While the ordination of women is the most obvious way in which gender factors into sacramental theology and practice, the fundamental theology of the sacraments—what, in technical language, is called “the sacraments in general” —raises a number of important issues. What are the sacraments for? How do sacraments relate to human beings’ everyday life, as well as their liturgical life? What distinguishes a sacramental understanding of the world from a secular one, especially in this postmodern age? As noted at the beginning of this chapter, the materiality of bodily existence grounds the sacraments. Not only does each sacrament involve some kind of material reality—water, bread, wine, oil, the laying on of hands, speaking and hearing, sex—but that very material reality is transformed into something more. By virtue of the Incarnation, all of created reality is raised up: it is no longer mere matter but the potential vehicle of encounter with the triune living God. In Catholicism, this is known as the “sacramental principle.”45 But more needs to be said. Not every material reality has the same sacramental status. Bread

See Phyllis Zagano, “Catholic Women’s Ordination: The Ecumenical Implications of Women Deacons in the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Orthodox Church of Greece, and the Union of Utrecht Old Catholic Churches,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 43:1 (2008): 124–37. 44 “Itinerant Feasting: Eastern Christian Women Negotiating (Physical) Presence in the Celebration of Easter,” Exchange, 42:4 (2013): 319–42. 45 For a helpful discussion of this point, see Judith Kubicki, “Perception, Presence, and Sacramentality in a Postmodern Context,” Studia Liturgica (2005): 221–34. 43

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and wine are used for communion, not chips and soda (despite the excesses of the 1960s). Bread and wine are used because they were used by Jesus and because the tradition has been that they are to be the elements consecrated, symbolic of the “stuff of life.” But what of the places in the world where bread and wine are neither widely available nor eaten, as they are in the West? In parts of Africa, for example, corn flour and palm wine are the basics for life, not wheat flour and grape wine. In Asia, rice is the main source and symbol of food. Context thus plays an important role in sacramental practice, as does the fact that the sacraments are not individual but communal celebrations. The inherent sacrality of the material world, the cultural context of the sacraments, and their communal dimension are all powerfully affected by gender. Consider how purity laws have relegated women and sexual minorities to the ritual periphery, how social and communal practices such as patriarchy have determined who has sacred power and who does not. In addition, the salvific role of the sacraments, as is seen in the contested issue of whether the Lord’s Supper/Eucharist is a sacrifice, perpetuates certain kinds of attitudes regarding the nature of sacrifice, self-sacrifice, and surrogacy. Who is encouraged to put others first, to see oneself as responsible for the care of others, to sacrifice oneself for one’s child or family?46 What sorts of attitudes does liturgical language encourage in worshippers? Feminist theologians of different denominations have challenged many of these fundamental issues lying beneath sacramental practice.47 John Calvin, for example, is known by many for his doctrine of double predestination and his focus on sin. But Reformed feminists see much more in his theology. Leanne Van Dyk argues that for Calvin, the sacraments represent a kind of “medicine” for a sinful world.48 Through the sacraments, “believers receive the support, encouragement and care they so desperately need.”49 According to Van Dyk, Calvin has a “strong” view of the sacraments, meaning that God “self-discloses, reveals, and acts in the particular sacramental rites of the worshiping community.”50 While Calvin did affirm a strong view of human sin, he also affirmed that humans continue to have a seed of divine awareness, and that creation as a whole testifies to God’s glory.51 Reformed feminists note the ambiguities and tensions in aligning feminist concerns with Reformed sacramental theology, such as in how community is understood and how power has been unequally distributed, but they also see potential in emphasizing the sacraments as gift, pointing to Christ, and empowered by the action of the Holy Spirit. The fact that sacraments engage the body has already been mentioned as one of the major points of convergence between feminist and sacramental theologies. A number of feminist theologians have noted that many of the sacraments reflect or even try to move beyond the bodily experiences that they celebrate. Baptism, for example, is often described as a “new birth” or even one’s “real birth” in Christ. In a classic article from

The classic source is Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Journal of Religion, 40:2 (April 1960): 100–12. 47 See, e.g., Delores Williams, “Black Women’s Surrogacy Experience and the Christian Notion of Redemption,” in After Patriarchy: Feminist Transformations of the World Religions, ed. Paula M. Cooey et al. (New York: Orbis Books, 1991), 1–14. 48 Leanne Van Dyk, “The Gifts of God for the People of God,” in Feminist and Womanist Essays in Reformed Dogmatics, ed. Amy Plantinga Paw and Serene Jones (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 204–20. 49 Ibid., 206. 50 Ibid., 205. 51 Calvin, Institutes, Book I, ch. III, No. 1, at 43. 46

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1987, Christine Gudorf argued that the “ordinary human activities” on which the sacraments are based —giving birth, feeding and nurturing, reconciling, nursing—that are overwhelmingly performed by women are, in the sacraments, taken up by men: “Fear of women’s power leads men to take on in symbolic ways these powerful functions of women.”52 Even more, Gudorf argues that the clerical control of these rituals in fact “den[ies] the significance of the real life activities on which sacraments are modeled.”53 What is needed, then, is a reconnection between the “ordinary” activities of life and their ritual celebrations. Gudorf notes that “gender socialization” is harmful not only to women but also to men. It is important, then, that men cooperate in the ordinary activities of childrearing, cooking, and reconciling so that they do not feel the need to claim these activities for themselves and surround them with ritual power. Women ought to have ritual power, she argues, but simply including women in present gendered ritual practices does not address this basic problem.54 In Catholicism, women have taken on more and more active roles in parishes, especially in music, spiritual direction, and religious education of both children and adults. As mentioned above, the need to draw strict lines around what is considered to be a sacrament and what is seen as “only” sacramental has been a continuing concern of the hierarchy. While official Catholic teaching affirms the priesthood of all the faithful, there is “an essential difference” between the “common” priesthood of the faithful and the “ministerial” priesthood.55 The latter has a “sacred power” of acting “in the person of Christ.” The 1997 Vatican document, “Some Questions Regarding Collaboration of Nonordained Faithful in Priests’ Sacred Ministry,” takes great pains to make this point and declares that lay ministers not be allowed to use such titles as “pastor,” “chaplain,” or “coordinator,” out of fear of “confusing” the faithful. The Vatican’s concerns also extend to those who do sacramental preparation, and its fear of “confusion” leads it to issue this extraordinary statement: Above all in the preparation for the sacraments, catechists take care to instruct those being catechized on the role and figure of the priest as the sole dispenser of the mysteries for which they are preparing.56 This concern for a strict demarcation has led to some religious educators, the majority of them women, being forbidden by their pastors to incorporate any ritual element at all in their instruction, such as even candles or flowers, despite the fact that those being educated about their future reception of the sacraments typically encounter the priest only for a few moments in the actual ritual.57 This document lists other concerns, such as titles, preaching, distribution of communion, and makes clear its focus on maintaining these strict divisions. These latter two examples demonstrate the Catholic Church’s discomfort with the intrinsic ambiguity of the sacraments. This is especially acute for women, since the participation of women in the sacraments is already a highly ambiguous one. Clericalism Christine E. Gudorf,“The Power to Create: Sacraments and Men’s Need to Birth,” Horizons, 14:2 (1987): 296– 309; at 302. 53 Ibid., 303. 54 Ibid., 309. For a fascinating look at gender and ritual/sacrificial practice, see Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion and Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 55 See n. 26 above. 56 Article 2, #5; my emphasis. 57 See article 6, #2. 52

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persists, ancient symbols and rituals still carry patriarchal baggage, and women are still excluded in many traditions from taking on leadership roles. The sacraments can both nurture and exclude.58 For many Christian women, and for people who do not see themselves in the traditional gendered binary, living with this ambiguity—with the riches of the tradition along with its problems—is a continuing process and struggle.59 For some women, this ambiguity is too much to bear. The organization Roman Catholic Women Priests (RCWP), for example, has proceeded by women taking sacramental power into their own hands and being ordained outside of the official church. Tracing their roots to the Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC) in Detroit in 1975, this international organization began with the ordination to the priesthood of seven women on the Danube River in 2002.60 Subsequently, women were ordained as bishops in 2003, and RCWP now counts over one hundred women priests and bishops worldwide. Despite the fact that a Catholic participating in this process will be automatically excommunicated from the official Catholic Church, according to canon law, RCWP has forged ahead. “Women are no longer asking for permission to be priests. Instead, they have taken back their rightful God-given place ministering to Catholics as inclusive and welcoming priests.”61 To a somewhat lesser degree, women of all denominations have taken on the task of ritual reimagination. As Teresa Berger has so effectively demonstrated, worship has always been gendered. But particularly in the last fifty years, inspired by the Liturgical Movement, Vatican II, ecumenical initiatives for a greater sacramental sense, and the women’s movement, rituals and sacraments have been redefined, reimagined, and reconstructed. Instead of women being objects of manmade sacramental and liturgical rules, women have taken on ritual leadership and seen themselves as subjects, “creators and shapers of a sphere that was traditionally not open to their ritual authority.”62 While it is impossible to identify every aspect of reimagined feminist liturgies and sacraments, some general points can still be made. One is that these celebrations are highly participatory, and that leadership is often fluid. A related point is that the format of rituals is often circular, underscoring the point that leadership is not hierarchical. Yet a third dimension is that women’s bodily experiences are given a kind of ritual recognition and celebration that counters much of the historical tradition, where women’s bodies are often stringently excluded. For example, while some women may have been excluded from sacramental participation at the time of menstruation, still practiced in some Orthodox churches, the life-giving power of women’s cycles is here celebrated rather than hidden.63 Women have often been thought to be “closer” to nature than are men, so this affiliation with the cycles of the natural world and of the earth itself is also something to be embraced and honored.64 Rituals such as marking the onset of menarche or the S ee Susan A. Ross, Extravagant Affections: A Feminist Sacramental Theology (New York: Continuum, 1998), 88. The issue of the employment of LBGTQ men and women in Catholic parishes and schools is a serious one. For a listing as of June 2020, see https://www.neww​aysm​inis​try.org/iss​ues/emp​loym​ent/emp​loym​ent-dispu​tes/. 60 https://romanc​atho​licw​omen​prie​sts.org/. 61 Ibid. 62 Berger, Women’s Ways, 122. 63 For some examples, see Janet R. Walton, Feminist Liturgy: A Matter of Justice (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000); Lesley Northup, Ritualizing Women: Patterns of Spirituality (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1997); Rosemary Radford Ruether, Women-Church: Theology and Practice of Feminist Liturgical Communities (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1988). 64 Although now rather dated, see Sherry Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), 67–88. 58 59

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“croning” of women at menopause, lamenting the loss of a child through miscarriage or healing after sexual assault, commemorating the lives of women who have died are only a few examples of the kinds of liturgies that have been developed that look to women’s experiences. The literature of women’s rituals is abundant.65 But it is important as well to recognize and retrieve the many “traditional” ways that women have historically prayed and worshiped. Pilgrimages, home altars, novenas, processions, devotions to Mary, Bible studies, and rosary recitations are also “sacramental” in that they draw on material experiences, often experiences traditionally dominated by women, and are most often done without clerical leadership. It is both interesting and in some ways unfortunate that, for Roman Catholics, the “renewed” emphasis on the Eucharist as the “fount and summit of liturgical life”66 has led to a much more central ritual role for the (male) priest and a much diminished one for the laity. That is to say, before Vatican II, it was common to observe that the Mass was the same all over the world, since it was in Latin, and the actions of one priest were largely indistinguishable from another, given the need to follow the “rubrics.” With the renewal of the liturgy during and after Vatican II, the priest was now at the center of the Mass, and his personality can have a big influence on the way that the liturgy is experienced by the congregation. Once the priest faced the people, his liturgical “style” became much more visible than when the congregation mostly saw his back. After the Council, many of these older lay-led—in fact, a large number of them women-led—devotions were greatly deemphasized in favor of the Eucharist, although some of them, such as eucharistic adoration, are experiencing renewed interest in the present, often by conservative Catholics. And although women can now be readers, altar servers, eucharistic ministers, and cantors, they serve in an “extraordinary” capacity in these ministries, in that men but not women can be “admitted [to them] on a stable basis.”67 Nevertheless, lay- and women-led devotions are still alive and well, particularly in many Hispanic communities in the United States. Devotion to Mary, usually considered a hallmark of Catholic practice, is even found in Pentecostal and Evangelical churches.

CONCLUSION AND ISSUES FOR THE FUTURE Gender continues to be a highly contested category in religion, particularly in the sacraments. In some ways, the “higher” the sacraments are valued—as in Roman Catholicism, “high” Anglicanism, and Orthodoxy—the more threatening the question of gender becomes, particularly when it comes to women taking on liturgical roles. Catholic conservatives as well as the Vatican condemn “gender ideology,” which means any understanding that does not automatically identify sex and gender. As one website defines it, “Gender ideology consists in denying that the differences between men and women have natural and biological foundations.”68 In 2019, the Vatican issued a document, “Male and Female He Created Them: Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education,” that, while arguing for the importance of “listening,” S ee, e.g., The Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, Ritual: http://www.wate​rwom​ensa​llia​nce.org/. Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, https://www.vati​can.va/arch​ive/hist_c​ounc​ils/ii_​vati​can_​coun​cil/docume​nts/ vat-ii_​cons​t_19​6312​04_s​acro​sanc​tum-conci​lium​_en.html #10. 67 As this book was going to press, Pope Francis made explicit that such ministries are open to women as well as men. https://www.ncronline.org/news/vatican/francis-changes-catholic-church-law-women-explicitly-allowedlectors-altar-servers. See Code of Canon Law 230.1 http://www.vati​can.va/arch​ive/cod-iuris-canon​ici/eng/docume​ nts/cic_l​ib2-cann​208-329​_en.html#TITLE​_II. 68 https://www.hli.org/resour​ces/the-roots-of-gen​der-ideol​ogy/; italics in original. 65 66

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nevertheless maintained a traditional understanding of the “natural” and God-given differences between the sexes.69 These “biological foundations” are seen as completely separate from any social context. “Same-sex attraction,” as it is defined in some Catholic publications, is understood to be akin to an illness that the person must learn to live with, and is even described as a kind of “cross” that one must bear, in solidarity with Christ’s suffering.70 Protestant congregations that bar women from pastoral office and condemn homosexuality strenuously hold to a strong, if not literal, biblical interpretation, and cite passages from the Bible that condemn both women’s leadership and homosexual activity.71 In both cases, as with Orthodoxy, questioning traditional gender roles emerges out of what is seen as a dangerous “modern” and “secular” worldview. Such challenges to the traditional hierarchical order are seen as challenges to God himself—exclusive language here used deliberately. Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that human sexuality is far more complex than a simple male/female duality, gender remains one of the most contested issues not only in religion but in the larger society as well. Yet many societies and religious organizations, although not all, have moved forward and no longer ban homosexuality or women’s education and leadership. The sacraments, however, operate on a symbolic level, one that is not entirely rational. Symbols evoke deep feelings and attitudes and are not easily changed. Fear, repulsion, anger, and disgust can be reactions to challenges to one’s worldview, particularly a worldview that orders one’s life and gives it meaning.72 It may be that religion, like society, will continue in a kind of standoff between traditionalists who hold to a stable “natural” or “biblical” definition of sex and gender and progressives who see sex and gender as a complex interweaving of nature and nurture, a combination that is not (yet) fully understood. These stable or fluid understandings are also synecdoches for the kind of religious, social, and political worldviews of their adherents. In any event, one cannot ignore the significance of gender for the sacraments or sacramentality.

FURTHER READING Berger, Teresa, Bradshaw, Paul, Leal, Dave, Spinks, Bryan, and Tovey, Phillip, eds., Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History: Lifting the Veil on Liturgy’s Past. Farnham: Taylor & Francis Group, 2011. Cheng, Patrick. Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology. New York: Seabury, 2011. Northup, Lesley. Ritualizing Women: Patterns of Spirituality. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1997. Power, Kim, Elvey, Anne F., Hogan, Carol, and Renkin, Claire, eds., Reinterpreting the Eucharist: Explorations in Feminist Theology and Ethics. Oxford: Taylor and Francis, 2014. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Women-Church: Theology and Practice. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1985.

ttps://www.hli.org/resour​ces/the-roots-of-gen​der-ideol​ogy/. h See http://www.vati​can.va/roma​n_cu​ria/congre​gati​ons/cfa​ith/docume​nts/rc_con_cfa​ith_​doc_​1986​1001​_hom​ osex​ual-per​sons​_en.html. 71 See Robert K. Gnuse, “Seven Gay Texts: Biblical Passages used to Condemn Homosexuality,” Biblical Theology Bulletin, 45:2 (2015): 68–87. 72 See Ross, Extravagant Affections, esp. ch. 5, “Women Sacraments, and the Symbolic,” 137–70. 69 70

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Sacraments and Queer Theory W. SCOTT HALDEMAN

My assigned task is to reflect on Christian sacraments and their relation to queer theory. What happens when one thinks sacraments queer-ly? Something that matters, one might well hope. Let us see. Sacraments seem “special” and so they are meant to be. They are special occasions, undertaken in special times in special places, with special words and objects and actions, and intended to effect special changes in who we understand ourselves to be, both as individual disciples and as communities of faith. Sacraments, in different particular ways, open a portal for an encounter with the divine itself. They are about vulnerability, risktaking, and (trans-)formation. What we say about them should matter. Similarly, queer theory (or, theories that “queer” whatever subject) are highly specialized academic conversations, but if they do not encourage social change, if they do not save lives, especially the lives of LGBTQIA+ folk, they are just bluster. Queer theory is about looking behind the curtain to see how our individual identities and collective social structures were constructed with certain values and purposes that can harm and constrain and exclude. At the same time, however, this also must mean that such identities and structures can also be demolished and rebuilt to foster liberation and joyous, transgressive life. To think on these two things together is a promising intellectual exploration, but the result must yield more than insight. It must contribute to human flourishing and the free flow of grace in both ecclesial and social life. This is my purpose; my readers will judge. I proceed in four moves: • establish the assumptions about sacraments/sacramental theology for this piece; • introduce key concepts about what it means “to queer” something like sacramental theology; • identify the foundations of the heteronormativity of Western Christian liturgical traditions writ large, along with reflection on the sacraments as mechanisms of exclusion and discrimination as well as queer critiques and reframings of them; and • conclude with some inkling about how sacramental practice and thought needs ongoing reform in light of our queer critique of inherited traditions; and a

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proposition that sacramentality, generally and inescapably, is actually in itself a queer phenomenon.

WHAT IS A SACRAMENT? The volume as a whole will illustrate the range of approaches to sacraments, sacramentality, and sacramental theology among liturgical scholars today.1 In terms of my own claims, I define a sacrament as a symbolic act done by a group of Christians through which grace is received according to the divine promise. In sacrament, we are claimed and known and nourished. In sacrament, too, we reexperience saving acts, rehearse our values and ethics, and glimpse the promised future of cosmos and community fully healed, fully just, fully at peace. Such doings are shaped and enacted by human communities who desire a trustworthy means to encounter our creating, redeeming, liberating God. They are gifts from God for the people of God, inherited ritual forms in which divine encounter can be expected because Jesus as Christ assures us that this is true. This happens through simple but richly symbolic and material acts, such as washing, eating, anointing, kissing. In the words of John Calvin, “[God] condescends to lead us to [Godself] even by these earthly elements, and to set before us in the flesh a mirror of spiritual blessings.”2 However, as human acts, sacraments can also be misshapen and poorly enacted so as to become brittle, opaque, alienating, and even harmful, especially for those on the margins of church community. The divine promise is sure; however, one’s ability to find grace amidst the rubble can be frustrated. Still, grace pursues us in and through these same sacraments. Expressed in this way, I trust the reader begins to glimpse possible bridges between my central claims about sacraments and concerns of queer theory. Sacraments are all the more necessary for queer folk as our faith is not only as weak as everyone else’s but is constantly undermined as we are named within and by our very own faith communities as sinner, degenerate, abomination. So, too, as our embodied loving is central, blessings set before us “in the flesh” are crucial. Further, the corruptibility of sacraments to become weapons used against us should not surprise, just as the fact that they can always be redeemed—are, in fact, always being redeemed by the Spirit of Love—helps us hold fast to the promise. Further analysis of ways in which these central acts, these gifts of assurance and hope, have also become deeply (mis-)shaped by the norms of heterosexuality can be found below. But, first, we turn to an introduction to central concepts of queer theory for theology.

WHAT IS IT TO “QUEER”? In Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics, Linn Tonstad provides, in her words, “a brief, ordinary-language overview of some of the major ways of thinking about gender, sexuality, and the formation of human personhood characteristic of queer theory.”3 Along the The original draft of this essay (which exceeded my assigned word limit) included a conversation with Reformed liturgist Graham Hughes about a sacramental theology appropriate to our contemporary age (which I hope to publish elsewhere); the current all-too-brief description of my premises about sacraments relies upon the other essays in this volume for a broader foundation, which the reader may use to affirm or to question my starting point. 2 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1960), IV.xiv.3. 3 Linn Marie Tonstad, Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018), 23 (e-book EBSCO Publishing). 1

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way, she identifies three crucial strategies employed by such theorists, which I highlight for our purposes: anti-essentialism, denaturalization, and the destabilization of norms. I add a fourth from the work of Melissa Wilcox that is especially relevant to liturgical theology: “serious parody.”

Anti-essentialism How does one know who one is? How does one choose who and how to be in the world? How much is a choosing and how much is always already scripted for us? The search for a sense of self that feels “true” involves the cobbling together of identity from among the tiny boxes that are presented to us in our various particular social contexts. I, for instance, when called upon to describe who I am, say something like: “a white, cisgendered, gay man who serves as a seminary professor in Chicago and lives in long-term but unconventional relationship with another man.” This is not all of me, but it is enough for you to locate me and so to choose how to relate to me. Further, all these labels are malleable; queer theories call them “constructed.” They are also unstable. I have to try to live up to (or, down to) the idea of “a man,” “a professor,” “a gay man,” and on and on—sometimes resisting a category as I receive it, sometimes embracing it. “White,” of course, was invented precisely to assert a sense of superiority over peoples-of-color. As is often said, “racism is prior to race.”4 Race is a good example of how constructed categories regularly serve the interests of some group while marginalizing another: here, to bolster white supremacist social structures, whose cruelty is clearly on display in cases of police brutality and the lopsided effects on both health outcomes and economic privation of the Covid-19 pandemic in black and brown communities. On certain occasions (e.g., for Pride celebrations and gay rights activism or to reject any notion of conversion therapy or to claim treatment that honors my full humanity), I may claim my gayness as something substantive and fixed. But the messy truth is that, in another common phrase of queer theories, my gayness is “an identity without an essence.” In other words, beyond stereotypes, gayness, like all other identities, consists in “a stylized repetition of acts” that read as “gay.” This means, as Aretha Franklin sings, one can be made to “feel like a natural woman!” Does not such a feeling belie the notion of “the natural” itself? Tonstad thinks so, and I do too.

Denaturalization Lady Gaga sings that queers (and everyone else) should declare that we are simply “born this way.”5 Gay men applaud the two male penguins raising a chick of their own in the Central Park Zoo in NYC, saying, “See, gayness is ‘natural,’ the birds do it!”6 Laurel

For instance, Justo Gonzalez in his book Alabadle: Hispanic Christian Worship (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996) writes, “Contrary to what we are told, racism is not the outcome of race, but vice versa. In other words, it is not race that gives rise to racism, but racism that gives rise to the very notion of race” (15–16). 5 Lady Gaga, “Born This Way,” title song of her album, Born This Way (Interscope Records, May 2011). 6 Jonathon Miller, “New Love Breaks Up a 6-Year Relationship at Zoo (New York Times, September 24, 2005), https://www.nyti​mes.com/2005/09/24/nyreg​ion/new-love-bre​aks-up-a-6year-relat​ions​hip-at-the-zoo.html. 4

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Schneider asks instead, “What if it is a choice?”7 Just so, queer theory unmasks claims of what is “natural” and hence (supposedly) immutable. As already implied, there are great risks here. If one’s sexuality is not based in nature then it must be “unnatural,” right? Why, then, should it not be condemned? So, too, if it is a choice, why can’t one choose instead to be what one is “supposed” to be “according to nature”? When religious weight is added to such questions, they become potentially violent as the divine imprimatur is added to what is supposedly observable in the natural world. “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” we hear again and again. Then, queer folk should not exist, right? But, is that what the first chapter of Genesis is really about? And, didn’t God also create David and Jonathan (e.g., 1 Sam. 18:1-4) and Ruth and Naomi (e.g., Ruth 1:11-18)? And, didn’t Jesus say, “in heaven there will be no marriage” (e.g., Mt. 22:30 in paraphrase)? Still, the belief in a divinely created natural order that also properly shapes our moral universe justifies discrimination, even criminalization, of the non-normative, the marginalized, the minoritized. Are not humans to rise above base nature through culture, and, especially, through religion? Or, is that view also equally problematic? Tonstad concludes, Denaturalization is part of the process of destabilizing, in order to change, binary and hierarchical distinctions between men and women, straight and gay, cisgender and transgender. For many theorists of sex and gender, denaturalization is a fundamental form of queering. Showing that binary categories are unstable and incomplete loosens their hold on us, it is hoped.8

Destabilization of Norms Deploying “nature” is one way we construct norms that govern who is worthy of respect, who gets access to institutions like marriage, who counts, who is protected, who is accorded full human dignity. There are others. Tonstad uses Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Obergefell v Hodges (2015) to discuss the language of normativity that is at issue here. She expresses concerns with the principles underlying Kennedy’s words because they continue to reward people who are accepted as “normal” (in this case, with access to marriage) while excluding those who choose (or, may be forced) to live differently and who thereby occupy a lesser social location in the view of the law. After describing the liberal subject on which Kennedy’s view of society and its citizens and their intimate relations (she notes actual sex is basically passed over) rests, Tonstad writes, This normative subject is the one against whom, implicitly, nonnormative subjects of all kinds are measured and fall short (some more than others), even though in reality, it’s not the case that some human beings are self-possessing, self-determining, autonomous

Laurel Schneider, “What If It Is a Choice? Some Implications of the Homosexuality Debate for Theology,” in “The Gilberto Castañeda Lectures, 1998–2001: Countering Homophobia in Bible and Theology,” The Chicago Theological Seminary Register 91:3 (2001): 23–32. She writes, 7

So whether I am a lesbian or choose to be one is relevant only in terms of what I ultimately do in community with being one. How, for instance, does being lesbian [or refusing to be lesbian] make me a better, more whole person working toward a better, more honest and peaceful world? … Does being a lesbian give me strength to love others more deeply and courageously? If the designation helps me with that—and in my case it does—so much the better. Tonstad, Queer Theology, 25.

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subjects and others are not. In reality, all human beings experience loss, lack, and fragmentation. … [T]‌he imaginary vision of the truly free subject continues to haunt us as a specter of possibility against which different people fall short in different ways. … [E]ven the most “normative” human being can be made such only by a process of abstraction, a snapshot taken at a specific moment that erases both particularity and the time across which human life takes place. Put differently: the normative subject is a fiction, but it’s a destructive fiction.9 For Tonstad and other queer theorists, destabilization of norms, along with antiessentialism and denaturalization, helps us to unmask the ways in which we govern each other and parcel out the resources of our society (e.g., economic benefits and opportunity, certainly, but also liberty and civil protections) inequitably in order to remake them. This is what “queering” is all about.

Serious Parody In her 2018 book Queer Nuns, Melissa Wilcox takes us deep inside the lives and practices of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an independent religious order of gay men in nun-like drag whose mission is to “promulgate universal joy and expiate stigmatic guilt.”10 Immersed in this queer order for five years, Wilcox’s ethnography focuses on the intersection of their religion and their activism (which often coincide). She describes their work as “serious parody,” an image of efficacious queer religiosity. I add this fourth strategy because of its performative and ritual dimensions and as a bridge back to the subject of sacramentality. In defining “parody,” Wilcox relies on Linda Hutcheson and Dennis Denisoff. Hutcheson writes that parody “is a form of imitation, but imitation characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the expense of the parodied text.”11 Denisoff adds that “one particular aim for which parody has proven to be especially well suited is the undermining of normative idealizations by oppressed groups and individuals trying to negotiate their own positions in society. … Through its reliance on double meanings, parody effectively questions the possibility of any such thing as an ‘original.’ ”12 In other words, “to parody” is to emulate, to criticize, and to resignify forms of being to which one relates ambiguously. For the Sisters, the foil is the homophobia of the Roman Catholic church—although they parody Protestants and the notion of religion generally, too, on occasion. Their parody is a complex and deadly serious response to death-dealing doctrine about so-called disordered sexualities. Although the Sisters consider themselves nuns proper, they also use tropes of Roman Catholic nuns to poke fun at traditional thought and practice while also embodying an alternative. For the Sisters, homosexual pleasures and identities are not sinful; homophobia is. During the HIV/AIDS crisis, the Sisters invented a parody of the Mass in which a gold-foil-wrapped condom served as the host and the words at

Ibid., 27. Melissa Wilcox, Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody (New York: New York University Press, 2018). 11 Linda Hutcheson, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms, 2nd ed. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 6; quoted at Wilcox, Queer Nuns, 70. 12 Dennis Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, 1840–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3–4; quoted at Wilcox, Queer Nuns, 71. 9

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consecration and distribution were about keeping oneself and one’s lovers safe from a virus that is transmitted by receiving the sexual fluids of another. Promoting values of safety and health while honoring the need for pleasure and connection in the midst of a deadly plague is paramount. Like the consumption of Jesus in the host, there is also a clear homoerotic dimension here. I trust the echoes of the categories we have identified in both sacramental theology and queer theory resonate here: materiality, iconicity, and alterity from the former; anti-essentialism and destabilization of norms from the latter; and the complexities of signification from both.13 As we (re-)turn to the realms of theology and liturgy, it may be helpful to be explicit that, in my view, “to queer” our rites reveals that they too are imbricated in regimes of normativity, fostering both the faithful formation of participants as disciples and the reinscription of dynamics of oppression and domination. Tonstad, drawing on Marcella Althaus-Reid, calls not only queer scholars but all of us to a new vision of theology. She writes, Theology, in short, is about sex, money, and God. Theology is about bodies meeting bodies, and where bodies meet are also images, representations, imaginations, fantasies. Bodies are sustained by money, or what money can buy; bodies are threatened by the lack of money, or what money can pay for. For Althaus-Reid, all theology is sexual theology, all theology is economic theology, and all theology is implicated in the socioeconomic and sexual systems within which it emerges. During the brutal military dictatorship in Argentina, the Plaza del Mayo outside the cathedral in Buenos Aires resounded with the shout: “They were taken away alive, we want them back alive.” And inside the cathedral, the church continued its business, feeding the body of Christ to people and promising resurrection under the benevolent gaze of the virgin Mary.14 Such disconnects between the bodily suffering of those “disappeared” and the symbolic practices of the church should horrify us and so must be moved to the center of theological reflection. In a similar way, queering our rites involves exposing how they serve, at least partially, as performative mechanisms in which we submit to particular norms of—among other lines that we use to divide humanity—gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity/culture, and class through parodic performance. Given this, what is now required of us as scholars and pastors is to consider what may happen when we expose the ways the heterosexual matrix shapes profoundly central metaphors of our faith, our theologies, and our liturgies—and, for the purposes of this essay, especially in our sacraments. My hunch is that employing strategies of queer theorizing will both enrich and challenge our sacramental thinking and doing, revealing new dimensions of “the blessings God has set before us in the flesh.”15

SACRAMENTS, HETERONORMATIVITY, AND QUEER POSSIBILITIES Anyone who has paid any attention at all to the life of the churches in recent decades knows the subject of homosexuality has spilled both much ink and much blood. Can queer

See Wilcox, Queer Nuns, 67–103. Tonstad, Queer Theology, 31. 15 A paraphrase of John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV.xiv.3. 13 14

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folk be members? Can we receive communion? Is it our so-called sin that is hated or is it really us, the so-called sinners? Is same-sex desire a sin at all? How about same-sex sex? Can we be married? Can we be ordained? Can we be buried in Resurrection hope rather than as reprobate, to serve only as a sermon illustration to underscore paths that lead inevitably to eternal damnation? These questions have been debated across the Christian landscape and for most of the churches’ history as sexual behavior has been a constant preoccupation. In recent decades, such debates have split church bodies and ruined many lives and denied many sincere callings. This is not the place to rehearse these debates but to lay out a plausible explanation for why they are so long-lasting and contentious. My hypothesis is that the heterosexual metaphors at the heart of ecclesiology and liturgical theology must be interrogated to honor the full dignity of sexual minorities of all types, as well as the gender-fluid. These include: God as Father, the Body of Christ (the Son) as a male body, and Christ as Bridegroom with Church as Bride. Let us look briefly at each of these central metaphors for God, Christ, and Church.

God the Father For Christians, the primary name of our God is not (or, should not be) “Father.” God is, first, known as a Trinity—as three-in-one and one-in-three. This image (or sign) of “Trinity” emphasizes the divine relationality, both within Godself and with creation. The divine reality dances through the one who sends, the one sent, and the one who abides, without division, hierarchy, or separation. There is only pulsating love, love that is stronger than death, love that creates solar systems and ants and leviathans and quarks, love that will bring all reality into harmony—when every tear is wiped away and all creatures dwell together in peace. This Trinity always and forever relates in love within itself. This Trinity always and forever relates in love to all that has been created. This Trinity is dynamic and mysterious. It cannot be grasped or nailed down. It is open to new futures, new interpretations, new revelations. It is not a name; it is a claim. It is the claim that the One who is “I am becoming who I am becoming” is love. Instead, the members of the Trinity have been given titles. The ungraspable Trinity has become known as Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Many contend that this is the one and only name. However, “father,” of course, is not a name but a social role. Same with Son. They are gendered and sexualized and imply relations of authority and subordination. The Spirit connects the other two and adds an element of freedom and mystery, but is too often subordinated as well. Given the story being told—that one sends, one was sent, and one abides—this was understandable, perhaps inevitable. Jesus spoke of the unnamable one as Father, and so, we, of course, identified him as the Son. There are several problems with identifying the God of Moses and Miriam and Jesus and Mary and Paul with the “name” Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The flow of love that is the dance of the onewho-is-three becomes halting. The sense of how the three-who-are-one relate to creation becomes divided and fixed. “I am becoming who I am becoming” seems to stand still rather than remaining on the move. The one who declares “I am God, and not a male” (Hos. 19:11) has their gender fixed in bald contradiction. And so, as Mary Daly declared decades ago, “If God is male then the male is God.”16

Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1985; originally published 1973), 19. 16

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The casting in stone of any name flirts with idolatry in attempting to contain the uncontainable. Fixing the name in a way that reinforces hierarchical social dynamics misconstrues the heart of the divine in ways that make this God of ours unrecognizable.17 Should we not expect that worship, and especially baptism, “in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” will reinscribe male domination and the heterosexual matrix? Might not reform of our practices involve, necessarily, new metaphors, queer images, signs of nonbinary, polyamorous, and gender-fluid divinity?

God the Son (and His Male Body) In his essay “Bodies: The Displaced Body of Jesus,”18 Graham Ward reflects on the challenge of Jesus’ maleness—the particularity of Incarnation marked in circumcision, among other things. Along the way, he identifies five displacements: the Transfiguration, the Eucharist, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Ascension. He argues that at each stage Jesus’ male Jewish body expands and is transposed in ways that both reflect and break open our understandings of embodiment itself. I focus here on one moment, that of the Last Supper. Ward writes, Transfiguration turns into transposition: “He took bread, and blessed and broke it, and gave it to them, and said: ‘Take; this is my body.’ ” … It is the handing over of himself that is paramount. He places himself in the hands of the disciples who then hand him over to the authorities. … What had throughout the Gospel story been an unstable body is now to be understood as an extendable body. For it is not at this point that Jesus stops being a physical presence. It is more that his physical presence can be extended to incorporate other bodies, like bread, and make them extensions of his own. A certain metonymic substitution is enacted, re-situating Jesus’ male physique within the neuter materiality of bread … The “body” is both now sexed and unsexed.19 We must tread carefully here. Is such displacement liberating or destructive? Christopher Grundy worries that our Table practices with their focus on a body broken for consumption encourages (rather than helping us to reject) the objectification and abuse of others. He writes, Most services of Holy Communion today tend to focus narrowly on a body (whether we understand that body as symbolic or actual) that is shared (more like ‘distributed’) and consumed. So then, are we formed by practices that enact the commodification of Jesus as an item of ritual exchange? … Regardless of the reverent rhetoric that we use, … aren’t we interacting with a body (symbolic or actual) in ways that indicate that this is a body from which the ethical restraints against commodification have been removed?20

This is a condensed version of an extended argument on the Triune name in baptism that can be found as Haldeman, “In the name of …: Baptismal Incorporation in a Gender-Fluid Age” in Call to Worship: Liturgy, Music, Preaching, and the Arts, 53:3 (2019): 2–10. 18 Graham Ward, “Bodies: The Displaced Body of Jesus Christ,” in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, ed. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (London: Routledge, 1999), 163–81. 19 Ward, “Bodies,” 167. 20 The quote is from Grundy’s blog: https://amo​repe​acef​ulta​ble.wordpr​ess.com/2010/11/10/child-prost​itut​iont​ his-is-my-body-its-not-for-you/. He makes his full argument in his book, Recovering Communion in a Violent World: Resistance, Resilience, and Risk (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019). 17

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I take Grundy’s questions seriously. Certainly, enough bodies—female, black and brown, queer and especially trans—have been handed over for torture and death to be cautious about any mechanism that might encourage such violence. Still, I want to follow Ward a bit further. He continues, “This is my body” is not a symbolic utterance. … The bread is the body of Jesus. This ontological scandal is the epicenter of the shockwaves which follow. For it is actually translocationality that is surprising—as if place and space are being defined such that one can be a body here and a body there, one can be this kind of body here and that kind of body there. … [in] the eucharist … the hidden nature of being embodied is made manifest. Bodies are not only transfigurable, they are also transposable. In being transposable, while always being singular and specific, the body of Christ can cross boundaries—gender boundaries for example. Jesus’ body as bread is no longer Christ as simply and biologically male.21 If we become what we eat, perhaps consuming a queer eucharist over time will help us all cross boundaries—freeing us all from living simply, biologically, as male or female, as cisgendered or trans, as stuck in any essentialized identity. Jesus escapes any schemes to pin him down in terms of gender and sexuality. He is a queer Messiah. And, at his Ascension, he leaves a queer body (us!) behind to be the divine presence in the world, the Queer Body of Christ, His Bride.

Christ as Bridegroom and Church as Bride At the heart of our metaphors of “church” is a wedding. In “groom” and “bride,” as they inaugurate life together, we are meant to glimpse something of divine love—in Pauline terms, an image of the love of Christ, the Bridegroom, for the Church, the virgin Bride (Eph. 5:21-33). The joining of Bride to Groom is initiated in a marriage ceremony— in their promises, in the pronouncement, in the giving and receiving of rings, in the signing of documents. The joining is completed when their bodies will comingle and interpenetrate later in private, perhaps on honeymoon; consummation (even if we do not think it polite to discuss) culminates the wedding and commences the marriage. This is also why we feast and often dance. As Althaus-Reid and Tonstad said above about theology writ large, it is all about bodies! And, it is here that we run into problems. The new husband stands, metaphorically, in for Jesus; as Christ is the head of the church, so he is head of the woman, his wife. He is to love her, but the relationship is hierarchical, not egalitarian. Yes, his love is to be sacrificial—he, like Christ, should give up his life in order that she be presented holy and blameless. But his role is savior; hers to be saved. His mandate is to love; hers is to submit. Here, too, the creation story is invoked: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh” (Eph. 5:31, quoting Gen. 2:24). Here, then, also, are “first man” and “first woman”—bone of bone, flesh of flesh, two out of one, companions of procreative complementarity. Arguing with the Pharisees about divorce, in one of his more absolutist moments—at least in relation to men who would abandon their families—Jesus also quotes this same verse of the creation story to remove Moses’ escape hatch (Mk 10:8 and Mt. 19:5). These are the root metaphors of the wedding, which, in a kind of circular logic, also become a root metaphor of church. Ward, “Bodies,” 168.

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Here, conceptions of the traditional family, the valorization of gender complementarity, and the construction of sexual moralities that privilege potentially procreative acts are founded as exclusive norms. Yet, there are cracks in the edifice already, are there not? Men, as well as women, become members of a Bride, married to Christ, for instance. As this “Father” God is not a male, as the Son’s maleness is transfigured and transposed, perhaps this Body/Bride is also fluid, nonbinary, and queer. We actually know this to be the case, even if we have wanted to ignore it, as we queers have always and already been members of the Body, members due equal dignity. In fact, the Body is bound to honor the less respectable of its parts more than those that are already respected and, most pointedly, no member has the right to tell another: “I have no need of you” (see 1 Cor. 12:12-27). To queer the Body, in other words, requires only that the Body live in the manner in which it was called to be … perhaps.22 If all this is, in any way, true, it should not be surprising that central practices of the churches, the sacraments (in any of our various configurations), must also be interrogated as practices that reinscribe heteronormativity. We have space and time to focus only on Baptism and eucharist, although other rites stand closely by, and, in fact, the entire Christian ritual system is in view.

Baptism Baptism is, among other things, the Christian rite of incorporation, (re-)identification, and assurance. We are confirmed as members of the Body of Christ. We become in Elizabeth Stuart’s phrase, “ecclesial persons,” “transformed from … atomized individuals and taken into the very life of the Trinitarian God who is incarnated in the Church.”23 Our sense of self must, from this moment on, be a corporate sense—we act for the edification of our fellow members, we have a mandate to build up rather than tear down the Body, we are to honor the weak and the less honorable, and we are to bring good news and aid to all who suffer. And we do all this, having died and risen again, to new life, a life no longer bound to fear of death. But, Stuart also reminds us, “The Church in northern Europe and the US [has] allowed itself to become identified with the bourgeois family and thereby implicated in the economic, social and cultural structures that have created and sustained it through shifting patterns for generations.”24 Baptismal practice, it seems to me, has been central in the establishment and perpetuation of this “captivity.” A rite that should attenuate traditional blood ties and initiate one into an alternative relational matrix is too often reduced to a celebration and valorization of the nuclear family. As we may see in our mind’s eye, Mom and Dad bring the infant to the front of a church and are placed on display as “the norm.” Single mothers and other differently configured families have too often been relegated to private ceremonies, if a congregation will even offer baptism to them. Where we should (in theory, at least) say, “give me your child, entrust her to God and Christ’s Body; I am going to drown her!”—we say

This subsection is a revised and condensed version of an extended argument on the wedding and queerness, which can be found at Haldeman, “The Queer Body in the Wedding,” in Liturgy with a Difference: Beyond Inclusion in the Christian Assembly, ed. Stephen Burns and Bryan Cones (London: SCM Press, 2019), 61–78. 23 Elizabeth Stuart, “Sexuality: The View From the Font,” Theology and Sexuality 11 (1999): 14. 24 Ibid., 13–14. 22

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instead, essentially, “we will support you in your parenting that the child may grow up to express her or his own faith … after confirmation class.” When the child is carried to the Font by a same-sex couple norms are certainly disrupted or recast. Until recently, the community could not assume the couple was duly married—and so “less respectable” family configurations might thereby be recognized and even honored. Perhaps here, echoing Judith Butler, there was, for a few moments, an appropriation that makes over forms of domination.25 But now that marriage equality has been achieved, the primacy of the nuclear family in the midst of the church is actually even further reified by this celebration of a lovely couple and their children. There seems little parody here—only assimilative reinscription—perhaps not of heterosexuality but certainly of the two-parentheaded, monogamous household as the primary economic and social unit. The baptism of an adult, of course, has a different dynamic. Those being baptized approach the Font under their own power, answer the scrutinies with their own words, and articulate their own commitment to faith. They are washed and welcomed as full members and so can begin to find and to fill their own unique role in the Body. The promise of baptism is that we are marked as God’s own, as God’s beloved, we are made a part of Christ’s Body forever. Yet, when LGBTQIA+ folk “come out” as their true selves or as participants in unfamiliar forms of family or ask to be ordained, they risk rejection; and, through such rejecting, baptism is betrayed. The long-standing and widespread (although certainly not universal) Christian obsession with sex—and especially sexual difference, which is so often maligned as irredeemably sinful—can turn the sacrament into a promise emptied of content. Grace may yet persist but hearing “you do not really belong” does damage and makes all of our washings and welcomings suspect. A final challenge we face at the Font is a troubling of the ecumenical commitment to disallow re-baptism. When re-baptism serves to annul a baptism conducted by another denomination, it should, of course, be refused. However, consider this scenario, one which congregations are now facing—and will face more and more often given the increasing visibility of transfolk. What is the faithful response when a member of the local body, already baptized, presents themselves for re-baptism with a new body and new name, with a self finally integrated and coherent after a long and vulnerable journey of discovery and revelation both internal and external? A simple “No, we do not do that” seems inadequate, does it not? Surely, such a request to be baptized again, to hear one’s new name echo through the Body, ought not to be so easily dismissed, even for the sake of the so-called integrity of the sacrament itself. To conclude, a queer baptism highlights the ways in which all Christians are called to live the roles we are given—like Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free … and white and black, gay and straight, trans- and cis-gendered, single and partnered, and on

Judith Butler says of Jennifer Livingston’s film, Paris Is Burning, and the gay and transsexual, black and brown drag queens who are its subjects and are known collectively as “the children,” 25

Paris is Burning documents neither an efficacious insurrection nor a painful resubordination, but an unstable coexistence of both. The film attests to the painful pleasures of eroticizing and miming the very norms that wield their power by foreclosing the very reverse-occupations that the children nevertheless perform. This is not an appropriation of dominant culture in order to remain subordinated by its terms but an appropriation that seeks to make over the terms of domination, a making over that is itself a kind of agency, a power in and as discourse, in and as performance, which repeats in order to remake—and sometimes succeeds. In “Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion,” which appears as ­chapter 20 in ed. S. Thornham, Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 392–3.

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and on—differently, in ways that increase justice and mercy, that foster reconciliation, that value persons over things. We die to the self that society has shaped for us. Washed, drowned, and risen into new incorruptible life, we are made free to participate in the Body as different, yet equally cherished members who serve together as Christ’s presence in the world. In fact, in this way too, it seems to me that the Body is itself queer as well—constituted by diverse members, growing and changing with each new engrafting, celebrating human difference, sharing resources, and, continuously giving itself away. And it is this queer Body that hungers and thirsts for righteousness and is fed by its Bridegroom, who is also its head, who feeds upon itself: “this my Body” that I give to you, to you who are my children, my friends, my spouse, my Body, EAT! A queer body indeed.

Eucharist The betrayals of queer folk at the Table of welcome are well-known, and include at least two main types: the refusal to serve sinners, an unjust fencing; and the refusal to ordain demonstrably called and qualified queer candidates to become celebrants. So, let’s step back to think on the Supper again. If Baptism grafts us irrevocably as queer members into a queer body, the Eucharist serves (or, ought to serve) as: a regular reminder and experience that we are loved; a regular occasion to express our gratitude for divine mercy; a regular gathering of the Body to which we all belong and among which we express the love we have received to one another by practicing the sharing of food; and a regular prodding to live into the final hope that all things will be gathered harmoniously and every hunger sated at the Banquet Table of the Lamb. And, all this is meant to happen by the simple sharing of a loaf and a cup. This gift of nourishment and promise takes quotidian form. Sowing and reaping, baking and fermenting, setting Table, giving thanks, tasting, chewing, sipping, consuming, ingesting, digesting. If bread is Body and “we are what we eat,” then, by this regular practice at Table, we are confirmed again, regularly, as members of this same Body. But, of course, we have failed at this. We have eaten and drunk unworthily—not discerning the Body—as Paul had to remind the church in Corinth (1 Cor. 11:29). We tend to spiritualize Paul’s warning, but his focus is on the material. It is an economic critique. Where the meal should be an equal sharing among all of holy food and drink, some are gluttons and others get drunk, while those who have less resources are left hungry and alienated.26 The Table is a place to practice not an economy of currency-based exchange but an alternative economy of grace—but we failed and we fail still. One of the consequences of the spiritualization of the phrase “to eat unworthily” is the notion that only those who repent and receive pardon should be allowed to share in the meal. Both the “fencing of the table” (which, of course, folks like Calvin pursue with relish) and excommunication have been used to prompt the wayward and the lost, those who have inflicted harm, to find again the right path. This can be beneficial in effect, healing for both individual and Body. However, these tools of temporary exclusion have also been used to judge and shun those who do not (or, cannot) conform to social norms. The Table and its promises are betrayed when it is used to divide the Body, declaring, “Bread of heaven is not for you” (and we can all think of actual occasions of my list of those who have been rejected—and many more): the weak, the poor, the illiterate, the

Here I echo, with gratitude, Bob Hovda, The Amen Corner (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994), 220.

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slave, the black, the divorced, the developmentally delayed, those who have sex without benefit of marriage, those who are simply too different. So how do we proceed? The Table is the table of the Crucified and Risen One. This one is fully divine and fully human, a first-century Jewish male and the eternally begotten, our host and our meal, our Bridegroom and Lamb and Vine and Way and Truth and Life. This one is, ever and always, both/and, crossing boundaries, appearing and disappearing, being transfigured— and, finally, is “taken up”—leaving us as a Body, his Body, of which he remains head. There are of course many tables and even a few altars where queer folk are now welcome to partake. But, back in the day, because of the damage done by his people being turned away from the Table as unworthy, Troy Perry, founder of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC), insisted that eucharist be celebrated at every gathering of this marginalized part of the Body.27 Table practices again began to serve as a place of welcome, nourishment, and love rather than humiliation. Not only do MCC congregations celebrate eucharist frequently, they also invite any and all to approach the Table as a self-defined familial unit—to receive together and, then, to be offered opportunity to ask for prayer and to be blessed by a pastor or deacon as well. I have mentioned my concern about the idolatry of the nuclear family already. But, here, families are less about biology as about configurations of intimacy and mutuality—so, yes, two moms and their kids, but sometimes there are three moms or a tribe of “bears” or a gender-queer couple or just a “family” of friends. In this way, the MCC lives out the queer sacramental principle that the so-called less respectable are treated with abundant respect as the actual diversity of the relational matrices of the members of the Body is displayed. One might call this a serious parody that restores and heals the harm that sacramental practice elsewhere had inflicted. A queer eucharist, then, embodies profligate love as we feed one another, taste one another, taste the Crucified and Risen One; as we eat bread that is holy flesh, drink fluids pulsing with life, and ingest the Body and the Blood, becoming ourselves what we eat, divine signs and so joining the dance of love. Just so, we are nourished to share this love beyond our gatherings that all may taste and see that God is good.28

SACRAMENTS AS QUEER (OR, THE QUEER-ING OF SACRAMENTS) As I conclude, let us attempt to tie together at least a few of the many threads we have made and found in this unruly garment of sacramental thought and practice. What, I trust, I have established is that the sacraments have been used as weapons against queer folk. Instead of welcome and love and grace, we have received rejection, hatred, and condemnation. At Font, we have been washed but the stain of sin remains—and we are reminded of this over and over again. At Table, instead of Bread of Life and Cup of Blessing, we receive crumbs of bitterness and cup of wrath … or, most often, nothing at all. This must end, but, for a new beginning, we must dig deep and reimagine with boldness. The root metaphors must be recast. We have made a start above. And, we

See Troy Perry and Thomas L. P. Swicegood, Don’t Be Afraid Anymore: The Story of Reverend Troy Perry and the Metropolitan Community Churches (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). 28 For another approach to the intersection of eucharist, embodied intimacy, and theology, see Jay Johnson, Divine Communion: A Eucharistic Theology of Sexuality (New York: Seabury Press, 2013). 27

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proceed to name, again and again, that Christian homophobia (and, in fact, erotophobia) can no longer serve as a central pillar of the tradition, to be preserved and handed on, but as one of the betrayals we have been carrying too long and should leave behind. As God writhes in an eternal polyamorous orgy of love that spills over into creation as grace, we cling to ideals of heterosexual monogamous parents of biological baby Christians. They (the nonbinary Trinity) must be laughing and crying in turn. Further, I am convinced that we do not need to be so protective of our signs. They are stronger than we fear. If they point to a living God who is on the move and always beckoning us onward, they can handle revision, even reimagining. Feminists have long been trying to teach us this. Queer theory just gives us new tools, new challenges, and new urgencies to continue this work. Fearlessly undertaking anti-essentialist and denaturalizing interpretive strategies of our core doctrines and the rites that both express and give them shape, we find our grip loosening on “tradition” as we have known it, that we might better free-fall into mystery. Our gatherings may refuse the domestication we so often experience and instead reflect Hovda’s vision: Good liturgical celebration, like a parable, takes us by the hair of our heads, lifts us momentarily out of the cesspool of injustice we call home, puts us in the promised and challenging reign of God, where we are treated like we have never been treated anywhere else … where we are bowed to and sprinkled and censed and kissed. and touched and where we share equally among all a holy food and drink.29 And, then, there is parody. The parody of the Sisters is obvious—they emulate the Mass (as received in the United States and Europe) and by doing so honor the power of such a rite, redirect that power to be a healing presence rather than a source of violence against queer folk, and thereby, in Butler’s terms, both reinscribe and make over the terms of domination. Christian sacraments seem to (or, ought to) parody both tradition and culture in deadly serious ways. We should experience “the painful pleasures of eroticizing and miming the very norms that wield their power” so as to replay and remake, again and again, the too often divisive, self-serving, comfortable rites that reify a cosmology of patriarchal heteronormativity. Finally, if sacraments are iconic portals for encounter with the divine, they are also more than this. They should reflect the “both/and” as opposed to “either/or” nature of this faith of ours. Is God Three or One? We say: Both. Is Christ fully divine or fully human? We say: Both. Is this bread mere bread or is it Jesus’ body? We say: Both. Barth was not only wrong about the proper relation of men and women; he was also wrong about a Wholly other God. Instead, are not our sacraments meant also to be “serious parody” of our contentious, inequitable, violent social dynamics—and, as Hovda says, “not as escape, not merely in distinction to daily routine, but in judgment, in the Lord’s judgment on those ways and institutions.”30 Ushering in the New Age, Hovda’s promised Reign of God, is what sacraments are meant in the end to accomplish. Grafted into a Body that is holy, fed with a Body of which we are always already members, we ingest the divine and become likewise—a part of the polyamorous orgy of love.31 Perhaps it is precisely the mutual penetration of divine life into us and our mortal lives into the eternal that Hovda, The Amen Corner, 220. Hovda, The Amen Corner, 220. 31 For an extended treatment of these themes, see Andy Bueschel, That We Might Become God: The Queerness of Creedal Christianity (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015). 29 30

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sacraments are all about! And, on we go. Things are never settled but always being spun round and round, head over heels again and again, we with God at Table and Font … and everywhere else we may find ourselves, dance on; a queer dance, indeed.

FURTHER READING Cheng, Patrick S. Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology. New York: Seabury Books, 2011. Garrigan, Siobhan. “Queer Worship.” Theology & Sexuality, 15:2 (2009): 211–30. DOI: 10.1558/tse.v15i2.211. Hughes, Graham. Reformed Sacramentality. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2017. Wilcox, Melissa. Queer Religiosities: An Introduction to Queer and Transgender Religious Studies. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Sacramentality and Comparative Theology: Rethinking Transcendence in Immanence SEBASTIAN MADATHUMMURIYIL

INTRODUCTION One of the greatest debates in theology revolves around the nature of God, and God’s relationship to the world. Western traditions, in general, have striven to understand this relationship in terms of a transcendent God, who is engaged with the world as its creator and sustainer, while remaining Godself, beyond or outside of it. Popular religious imagination often represents this transcendent God as an old white man who is sitting on a throne in ethereal realms. This “pop” version of the classical theistic view that shaped the Western sacramental imagination has the benefit of affirming the divine origin of the material world while safeguarding God’s otherness, independence, and autonomy. Although this classical theistic model liberates God-talk from the pitfalls of an absolute monism (pantheism) as well as a reductionist naturalism, its enthronement of an absolute and transcendental creator at whose power the world came into being, and whose will it obeys, inherently contains an unbridgeable chasm between the supernatural God of above and a secular world of below, tainted with sin, suffering, and death. As Louis Dupré says, “the obsession with transcendence turns into an all-consuming fire, destructive of the very culture which ignited it. Intolerance, persecution, iconoclasm, religious warfare and racial discrimination all have followed the trail of the unrestrained negation of the immanent.”1 In the present chapter, I will explore how the significance of a comparative theological approach stemming from the very notion of sacramentality can reduce, if not resolve, this unmitigated separation and exclusion of the supernatural beyond of above from the natural world of below, which is still the hallmark of classical theism as well as absolute pantheism. I will propose sacramentality as a resourceful ground for comparative

Louis Dupré. “Transcendence and Immanence as Theological Categories,” CTSA Proceedings. https://ejourn​als. bc.edu/ojs/index.php/ctsa/arti​cle/view/2842/2469 (1976), 1. 1

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theological engagement by exploring the thought of Sri Ramanuja (1017–1137) of South India who powerfully reflected on the God–world relationship, and Richard Kearney who offers a path for bringing God-talk back to the “post-modern/post-secular west.” First, I will situate the notion of sacramentality within the context of comparative theology and Christianity’s encounter with non-Christian religions. Second, I will propose the notion of “immanent-transcendent” (transcendent within) as shared sacramental understanding capable of addressing the limitations of classical theism, pantheism, and reductionist materialism while bridging the secular–sacred divide that resounds often in religion– secular debate. Finally, I will discuss Kearney’s “anatheistic” philosophy in rethinking sacramentality/sacred in the West.

SACRAMENTALITY AND COMPARATIVE ENGAGEMENT Comparative theology can be broadly described as a mode of theological reflection aimed at deep religious learning that is informed and shaped by one’s own religious experience, taking religious otherness seriously. From a Christian perspective, the nature and method of comparative theology stem from one’s religious experience within a Christian tradition. In this process, a theologian undertakes a comparative engagement of a comparable tradition with a heightened interest of being enriched by that tradition.2 In a broader sense, comparative theology is as old as Christian theology itself because, since the early phases of its origin and expansion, Christianity saw mutual encounter with Jewish and Greco-Roman faiths and worship practices, even though the history of these encounters is not devoid of tension, animosity, and triumphalism. Comparative theology is the outcome of an increasing interest in “learning across religious borders,” from another’s perspective, while being rooted in one’s own tradition.3 This comes out of a positive regard for another faith tradition as well as a genuine interest in allowing oneself to be challenged, enriched, and even shaped by it. This way of engaging another faith usually deals with a comparable domain such as religious texts and myths and narratives, popular figures and images, prayer, or worship, as well as the manner of divine presence being experienced in nature, in the cosmos, and in certain symbols and rituals. This essay will confine itself to certain ways of engaging divine presence in the cosmos, sacramental worship, and the retrieval/rethinking of presence in the West.

The nature and scope of comparative engagement in this study is limited by the author’s horizon of experience as a Catholic Christian theologian. It is acknowledged that diverse perspectives and voices from other Christian traditions and non-Christian traditions are not engaged in the present study mainly due to the limited scope of this essay. 3 Francis X. Clooney understands comparative theology as an exercise of learning across religious borders. See Francis X. Clooney, Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Theologians employ different methods and areas of engagement. For instance, James Fredericks emphasizes the interpersonal and dialogical dimension in comparative engagement while Robert C. Neville emphasizes constructive philosophical and theological reflection in learning across religious borders. See Robert Neville, Behind the Masks of God: An Essay toward Comparative Theology (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991); Robert Neville, On the Scope and Truth of Theology: Theology as Symbolic Engagement (New York: T&T Clark, 2006); Robert Neville, Ritual and Deference: Extending Chinese Philosophy in a Comparative Context (New York: State University of New York Press, 2008); James Fredericks, Buddhists and Christians: Through Comparative Theology to Solidarity (New York: Orbis Books, 2004). Our approach of engaging sacramentality is based on Clooney’s definition of comparative theology while employing constructive philosophical and theological reflection following the method of Neville. 2

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Sacramentality and God-Talk The quest for and experience of the transcendent lies at the core of every religion. The ritual–symbolic celebrations are crucial mediators of this transcendent. The religious community is brought to experience the divine in the human realm in and through these ritual celebrations. The ways in which the sacred is mediated and experienced assume diverse expressions and manifold forms. The ritual–symbolic modality is inseparably linked to the faith as well as theology of the worshipping assembly. For Christians, this essential relationship between the faith of the believing community and the mode of their worship is powerfully expressed in the ancient adage, Lex orandi, lex credendi—a short tag phrase derived from a longer sentence of Prosper of Aquitaine, which means, roughly, that the law of prayer [is] the law of faith.4 Early Christian and patristic periods have bequeathed to Christian tradition a theology of sacraments that was shaped by a broader notion of sacramentality. Without any systematic explanation and formulaic definitions, sacraments were understood as mysteries or rites to be celebrated rather than truths to be formulated, defined, and numbered.5 Understanding sacramental encounter outside the confines of such definitions can be conceived as the period in which the meaning of sacramental celebrations was understood in relation to a broader notion of sacramentality. However, coupled with the developments of doctrine, sacraments gradually assumed clearer definitions and systematic explanations, confining sacramentality to the scope defined by ecclesial authority. Moreover, discussions on sacraments and sacramentality have been shifted according to varied nuances in God-talk. During the Scholastic period, for instance, sacraments were given a systematic exposition employing the notion of causality, based on the philosophy of Aristotle. The early and mid-twentieth century witnessed a shift beyond scholasticism and neo-scholasticism, back to the patristic period, explaining sacramentality in terms of an intrinsic connection to the incarnation itself and to the Church. Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, and Otto Semmelroth were chief proponents of an anthropological and phenomenological move.6 Rahner was a pioneer who understood God’s self-communication in Christ within the totality of world’s history that is permeated by divine grace, thereby viewing the entirety of history as a history in God.7 Thus, diverse modes of divine–human encounter proffered by world traditions both ancient and modern, whether proclaimed as religious, spiritual, or secular, with or without an explicit reference to a “divine being,” could be considered as sacramental.8 Christian sacramental theology, informed by this recent phenomenological move, is Though this axiom in its original expression, ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi (that the law of praying establishes the law of believing), does not first and foremost speak to the nature of faith in determining the mode of worship, it is important to acknowledge that the faith and liturgy are mutually informing. For a detailed study of Prosper of Aquitaine’s text, see Kevin Irwin, Context and Text: Method in Liturgical Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994). 5 See Sebastian Madathummuriyil, Sacrament as Gift: A Pneumatological and Phenomenological Approach (Leuven: Peeters, 2012), 8–13. 6 Otto Semmelroth, Die Kirche als Ursakrament (Frankfurt: Josef Knecht, 1955); Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of Encounter with God, trans. N. D. Smith (London: Sheed & Ward, 1963). 7 Rahner is well-known as a theologian of grace. For an introductory reading of Rahner’s treatment of grace as it relates to the world, see Leo J. O’ Donovan, A World of Grace: An Introduction to the Themes and Foundations of Karl Rahner’s Theology (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1995). 8 Certain symbolic and ritual practices comparable to Christian sacramental rituals resonant with what Christians mean by sacraments are found in other religions. For instance, the life-cycle rituals in Hinduism known as samskaras are believed to have almost the same life-cycle functions as Christian sacraments. See Rajbali Pandey, Hindu Samskaras: Socio-Religious Study of the Hindu Sacraments (New Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass, 1969). 4

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well-positioned to engage in dialogue with such non-Christian traditions and their ways of encountering the transcendent, with comparable domains from cosmic sacramentality to sacramental rituals and divine presence.

Sacramentality and Non-Christian Religions The presupposition that God created the world belongs to Christian belief from antiquity. Thus, the notion of creatio ex nihilo became part and parcel of early Christian tradition.9 The understanding of an Almighty God who created heaven and earth was overwhelmingly self-evident to early Christianity. This belief, which is the basis of the doctrine of creation, outlines the relationship between God as the creator and the world as the creation; the nature and characteristic of that relationship is sacramental. According to Christianity, this sacramental relationship assumed its climactic expression through God’s action in Christ. Thus, sacramental theology and sacramentality are closely linked to God’s engagement in history through creation as well as the person of Christ. Divine presence that is celebrated in the sacraments of the Church is embedded in divine grace present in all aspects of the natural order. This sacramental understanding of creation and the ritual mode of celebrating divine presence is found in various traditions, including the so-called secular ones. Since the Middle Ages, sacramental theology was developed and was construed into a closed system subservient to a metaphysical God of onto-theology, confining “real presence” to an imaginary moment and material elements of the liturgy.10 Sacramental theology since Vatican II began to rethink sacramentality outside the confines of the liturgical moment in terms of everyday domains of Christian life and the totality of the world’s religious history.11 While affirming the distinctive character of Christianity and the centrality of Christ in the whole world’s religious history, Karl Rahner holds the view that pre-Christian religions have a positive significance in this history of grace and God’s plan of salvation. The history of humanity and the world’s religions and cultures are considered as visible expressions of the one and only history of God. This perspective is the key to bridging the conventional divide existing between a “supernatural beyond” and a “lower secular world” deprived of grace and meaning. Rahner’s openness in seeing other religions as a part of a general history of salvation placing Christ at the center of religious history is certainly refreshing. Rahner does not view the religious experience proffered in liturgical celebration as an isolated event of divine grace otherwise absent in the ordinary domains of a Christian’s life. Thus, Rahner situates the divine experience of the sacraments within the broader context of grace that is experienced in the domains of one’s daily life. Rahner’s approach of applying sacramentality to the entirety of world history and all domains of one’s everyday life thereby discovers transcendence in immanence. This offers a sacramental perspective and thereby overcomes the commonly assumed secular–sacred divide.

Gerhard May, The Doctrine of “Creation from Nothing” in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 1. 10 Madathummuriyil, Sacrament as Gift, 17–29. 11 Karl Rahner is one of the best Christian thinkers who explored the relationship of God’s action in Christ to the totality of the world’s religious history. His lecture given in 1961, published in 1962 with the title “Christianity and Non-Christian Religions,” begins with the comments on an “open Catholicism,” which requires the church to understand what is outside itself. Karl Rahner, “Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions,” in Theological Investigations 5, trans. by K. H. Kruger (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1970), 115–34. 9

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Rahner occupies a prominent place among twentieth-century theologians who engaged non-Christian religions seriously. Since Rahner, comparative theology has gone a great deal further in this direction not only of acknowledging the presence of grace that permeates the entirety of universe and the religious history of humankind—what Christians mean by “sacramentality” in other traditions—but also allowing oneself to being open and enriched by the encountering of those other traditions. With the same openness, we will explore the theistic philosophy of Ramanuja as an example of comparative engagement in overcoming the limitations of classical theism as well as pantheism.

SACRAMENTALITY AND SRI RAMANUJA The theory of Ultimate Reality (paratattva), which is an important subject of Vedanta, received considerable attention of the Alvars.12 This theory attempts to determine the nature of the Ultimate Reality without mentioning the name of any cultic God, but Brahman. In reply to “What Is Brahman”? Taittiriya Upanishad says, “That from which all beings are born, that by which when born they live and that unto which, when departing, they enter” (Taittiriya Upanishad III.1).13 Based on this statement, the Vedanta Sutra defines Brahman as that from which proceeds the creation, sustenance, and dissolution of the universe (Vedanta Sutra I.1.2).14 In conformity with this Vedanta theory, the Alvars taught that the Supreme Being is the creator, protector, and dissolver (Thiruvaimozhi I.1.9.1) of the universe.15 This Supreme Reality is both transcendent and immanent. He pervades everywhere, always and in all things of the universe, both in sentient and non-sentient beings. As Nammalvar states, “The Supreme Being abides in every particle of water of the wide-spread cool ocean, in the same way as it pervades the gross physical elements of the cosmic universe; it also abides in the infinitesimal souls and in every minute particle of earth” (Thiruvaimozhi I.1.10), but remains unaffected by the changes and defects in them (Thiruvaimozhi III.4.10). The Vedanta Sutra points out that the individual soul (jiva) is an integral part of Brahman (Vedanta Sutra II.3.4.2). While striving to maintain the identity between Brahman and individual souls, different sectarian forms of devotion and worship emerged with a strong sense of the distinctiveness of the soul from Brahman. The Alvars were at the forefront of this development by upholding the individuality of soul (jivatman) as distinct from Brahman (paramatman) who can be the object of spiritual The Alvars were the Vaishnava saints (i.e., followers of the deity Vishnu) of South India who lived between the sixth and eighth ce. They were behind a devotional movement that contributed to the religious renaissance that evolved as Sri Vaishnavism. Vedanta (meaning “end of the Vedas”) refers to a group of texts that form the last (i.e., fourth) part of each Veda. The basic tenets of Vaishnavism can be traced back to the hymns of the Rigveda. Vaishnavism is a religious path within Hinduism (sanathana dharma) that regards Lord Vishnu (VishnuNarayana) as the Supreme Being. Vaishnavism has developed itself into a well-formulated monotheism in the hands of Ramanuja and his followers. Sri Vaishnavism (with the prefix Sri) follows the Vishishtadvaita philosophy of Ramanuja and distinguishes itself from other sects or forms of Vaishnavism. While this study engages the Vaishnavism that is in the tradition of Ramanuja, hereafter, we prefer not to use the prefix “sri.” For an excellent exposition of Vaishnavism tracing its historical development back to Rigveda, see S. M. Srinivas Chari, Vaishnavism: Its Philosophy, Theology and Religious Discipline (New Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass, 1994). 13 The references to the Upanishads (Up) are from The Principal Upanishads, ed. and trans. Swami Nikhilananda (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003). 14 The Vedanta Sutras of Badarayana with Commentary by Sankara, trans. George Thibaut (New York: Dover, 1962). 15 The Vedantic concept of Brahman evolves into a personal and approachable God (Lord/Narayana) in the later texts, namely, Itihasas, Puranas, and Bhagavad-Gita. Gods and goddesses with different names (nama) and forms (rupa) and distinctive roles become part and parcel of religious devotion and worship. The Alvars were instrumental in promoting devotion to these deities and providing theological rationale for their worship. 12

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experience. Though this development encouraged the development of Hinduism as a popular religion, the question of unity and difference was left almost unanswered. Ramanuja’s contribution to the interpretation of this Vedantic theory consists in explaining the nature of the Ultimate Reality and its relation to the world in a systematic fashion, using a quasi-dualistic philosophy whereby Brahman’s identity with the world is viewed as “identity-in-difference” (vishishtadvaita).16 Thus, Brahman as the universal soul (saririn) is organically related to the universe of sentient souls (cit) and non-sentient souls (acit) in the same way as the soul is related to the physical body. Relying on the insights from the scriptures and the theological tradition of the Alvars, he clarifies that the Supreme Being pervades everything in the universe using the metaphor of soul– body relationship that conceives the world as the body of Brahman.17 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad recapitulates the nuances of this self–body image and the body-of-Brahman theme: “He who dwells in all beings, who is within all beings, whom all beings do not know, of whom all beings are the body [sarira], who controls all beings from within, he is your Self, the inner Controller, the immortal One” (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad III.7.15). For Ramanuja the “world” is an aggregate of both finite conscious and non-conscious beings. They are the dependent modes that come into being as reality by virtue of being the modes of Brahman.18 All finite entities, both conscious and non-conscious, form the body of Brahman and they are being controlled and supported by Brahman solely for Brahman’s own purpose (Shri Bhashya II. 1.9).19 The relationship between the world and Brahman is compared with the relationship between the body and the soul. The conscious and non-conscious entities constitute the body of Brahman who is the Self of the universe. In other words, the universe is the embodiment of Brahman. The conscious and non-conscious entities are individuated by names and forms. The world as the body of Brahman is related to Brahman as its supporter and the thing being supported in such a way that the world is incapable of realizing its own reality without its supporter (Vedanta Sutra, para. 75/p. 114). There are two levels in which Ramanuja understands the self–body relationship. First, he interprets it in a microcosmic sense, as it applies to finite atman and its material body. Second, he interprets it in a macrocosmic sense, as it explains the relationship between Brahman and the world in a collective entity. The macrocosmic level is more important for our theological purpose in explaining the Brahman–world relationship as

The complex question that various schools of Vedanta were trying to resolve is to explain the indispensable unity between Brahman and the world without undermining their difference. Ramanuja’s quasi-dualistic perspective differs from Sankara’s (c. 788–820) monistic philosophy that yields to pantheism. 17 In this endeavor he relied on Hindu scriptures, namely, the Vedas, the Epics, and the Agamas, and, especially, the teaching of the Alvars who lived between the sixth and eighth centuries of the Common Era. Sri Vaishnavism, the oldest monotheistic tradition and the most popular form of contemporary Hinduism, has gone through four important phases of development, namely, the Vedic period, the period of the Ithihasas and Puranas, the period of Agamas, and the period of the Alvars or the twelve Vaishnava saints of South India. Of these, the last phase is of special importance because the Tamil hymns of the Alvars, which are the spontaneous outpourings of their divine dependence, contain rich philosophical and theological ideas related to the three fundamental doctrines common to Hinduism, namely, the Ultimate Reality, the means of its attainment, and the supreme goal of life. See S. M. S. Chari, Philosophy and Theistic Mysticism of the Alvars (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1997), 237. Julius Lipner explores the implications of the body-of-God image in Ramanuja’s philosophy from a methodological perspective. See Julius Lipner, The Face of the Truth (Albany: State University of New York Press), 120–42. 18 C. J. Bartley, The Theology of Ramanuja: Realism and Religion (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002), 70. 19 Sri Bhashya of Acharya Sri Ramanuja, trans. Sri A. Srinivasa Raghavachariar (Chennai: Hindu Dorairaj Iyengar Memorial Charitable Trust, 1985). 16

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it embodies the universe and its relationship with Brahman as its soul and sustainer. And the supported (the world) is related to its support (Brahman) in an existential way, such that the supported is incapable of being itself apart from the support. Thus, the world is ontologically related to Brahman as its support in an absolute sense. Ramanuja emphasizes the otherness and independence of Brahman by conceiving the relation between Brahman as support and the world as the thing supported as asymmetrical and unilateral.20 This distinctive philosophy of qualified monism or differentiated unity upholds the difference between God and individual selves (jiva) as well as between selves while, at the same time, seeing everything in God. Ramanuja and Rahner, though working in different religious and cultural contexts, have some elements of convergence about the understanding of the God–world relationship. Although we cannot find in his work a full-fledged theology of a God– world/human relationship comparable with Christianity, Ramanuja’s emphasis on the distinctiveness of the individual soul from Brahman and a more personal and intimate relationship between God and the devotee is quite close to Christianity. This manner of relating with God finds its concrete expression in Vaishnavism, which will be discussed in part two. This resonance suggests that a common experience of divine mystery may underlie the diversity of religious traditions, despite the manifold names they attribute to that mystery. Moreover, Ramanuja can be considered as an interesting partner for dialogue with a panentheistic theology that discovers transcendence in immanence (i.e., immanent-transcendence or transcendence within the universe). It is to this discussion we turn now.

Sacramentality as Immanent-Transcendence Western theologians have always rejected pantheism in their explanations of the God– world relationship. By contrast, many theologians have proposed panentheistic doctrine that understands that everything exists “within” God (all-in-God) to overcome the limits of God–world relationship explained by classical theism. According to panentheism, God immanently pervades the whole creation and at the same time transcends it. This position is situated in the middle of two alternatives: the conceptions of God in classical theism and pantheism. Christian theologians who share a panentheistic worldview often conceive of the cosmos as God’s body, or sacrament, to talk about God operating in and through the cosmos; or of God’s being inextricably intertwined with the cosmos, with a description of God as being dependent on the cosmos and at least in some sense affected by it.21 There is a greater intrinsic and positive value ascribed to the cosmos by panentheistic theology. Basically, God is not viewed as separate from the cosmos as in classical theism; instead, God is present to it and even affected by it, while not equated with the cosmos as in pantheism. Panentheism rejects the classical theistic extreme of separation and the pantheistic extreme of identifying God with the cosmos, while at the same time acknowledging some sort of mutuality between them. Thus, panentheistic thought affirms the mutual coherence between the transcendence and immanence of God.

Julius Lipner, The Face of Truth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 129. Michael W. Brierley, “Naming a Quiet Revolution: The Panentheistic Turn in Modern Theology,” in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World, ed. Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 1–15; Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1993). 20 21

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Apart from being a different tradition, time, and milieu, the pertinent questions Ramanuja engaged as well as the theology he has developed make him an excellent conversation partner with contemporary Christian theologians who support panentheism. Thus, with the philosophy that he developed over nine hundred years ago, Ramanuja provides valuable resources to Western theologians in their effort to bridge the chasm between a supernatural God of “above” and a secular world of “below.” Ramanuja maintained divine transcendence, perhaps more radically than some Western panentheistic theologians, by conceiving God’s relationship with the world as asymmetrical and unilateral. Dupré echoes Ramanuja when he says the “immanent is not transcendence, yet it is the transcendent which is immanent.”22 Ramanuja’s approach of affirming transcendence in immanence remains an area of comparative engagement with the West. His articulation of both unity and difference in the God–world relation helped the emergence of the Vaishnava tradition as an organized, distinctive, and defined group within Hinduism, emphasizing an exclusive devotion with Vishnu-Narayana as personal God.23 This personal and communal form of religious practice of Vaishnavism can be another important aspect of comparative engagement with a Christian theology interested in overcoming the limitations of both classical theism and pantheism.

Image Worship and Sacramental Presence The significance of Ramanuja consists not only in explaining the God–world relationship but also in promoting a ritualistic and devotional religion based on his understanding of the world. In this effort, he relied heavily on the devotional tradition of the Alvars who bequeathed a rich heritage of sublime poetical hymns in praise of the glory of the Supreme Being, Lord Vishnu-Narayana, in all his aspects and attributes. These divine hymns, amounting to four thousand, represent the spontaneous outpourings of their unfathomable love and experience of God. These hymns are rich in theology as they are grounded in religious texts like the Bhagavad Gita, Puranas, Ramayana, and Mahabharata. Vaishnavites recite these hymns during worship in temples and at homes on certain special occasions. The philosophical and theological teachings of the Alvars and their profound and intimate relationship with Lord Vishnu-Narayana expressed in these hymns influenced Ramanuja in developing a systematic Vaishnava theology and religious practice. The object of the Bhakti (devotional) tradition is a personal god, which has its basis in the idea of incarnation (avataras). The impersonal Brahman of the Upanishads becomes more accessible to the devotee as a personal god with whom the devotee can passionately enter into an intimate relationship. The Bhagavad Gita presents a wonderful form of divine–human encounter in Vaishnava tradition as exemplified in Krishna devotion. In that text, Krishna, the incarnation of Lord Vishnu, invites the devotee to surrender everything at his feet and take refuge in him. Thus, for the Vaishnava believer God becomes personal, as someone she or he can intimately relate with in love, prayer, and worship. Keeping in line with tradition of the Alvars, Ramanuja articulated the doctrine of absolute surrender (prapatti), and service of God as a direct means to moksha (salvation). As an ardent

Maurice Relton, “The Christian Concept of God,” in Studies in Christian Doctrine (London: Macmillan, 1960), 57. 23 When we use the term “God” in terms of Vaishnavism, it is understood that it stands for Lord Vishnu-Narayana who is considered as the Supreme Being. 22

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devotee of Vishnu, he encouraged devotion to Vishnu and promoted temple worship, offering it fresh meaning, coherent structure, and rubrics.24 In this regard, the theory of arcavatara became foundational to the understanding of image worship, which is an integral part of Sri Vaishnava religious practice. There are two major forms of Hindu rituals practiced by the Hindus of contemporary India, namely, puja (offering service) and Samskaras (life-cycle rituals at important occasions of life). Puja is an ordinary form of worship that can be performed in temples as well as homes. Worship of images (arcas) is an integral part of Vaishnava worship.25 Puja is only performed to an idol (arca) that can be represented as the embodiment of the divine. When puja is offered in front of an idol, the image is charged with the presence of the divine. The devotees look at the image as one of the many ways in which this Lord approaches human beings. Arcavatara represents Vishnu-Narayana’s desire to be close to his devotees. In the arca, Vishnu who is transcendent (paralva) becomes graciously accessible (Saulabhya) to the devotee without losing his divine transcendence. The deity’s accessibility is at the heart of the Sri Vaishnava concept of arcavatara. The atmosphere is one of intimacy, mutuality, and love. Invocations, praises, offering of flowers, blessings, food, sharing of the meals offered, and other rituals performed during puja make the worship an experience of God in the represented image.26 The divine image makes the encounter with Lord Vishnu possible and thereby a personal and intimate relationship between the worshiper and the Lord. In the light of what I have discussed so far, it seems that certain aspects of the sacramental worldview and the theology of presence in image worship resonate with the idea of presence embodied in Christian liturgy. Some of these aspects of Vaishnava worship, such as the notions of transcendence, mediation and presence, intimacy in divine–human relationship, and the ritual dynamics of image worship, make Vaishnavism a promising dialogue partner for comparative theological engagement. In the following section, we will explore in some detail two instances of comparative engagement, that is, sacramentality and experience of the God in divine worship.

Sacramentality and Divine Worship: A Comparative Reflection This comparative theological endeavor engaging Ramanuja has pivoted on two aspects of conceiving sacramentality and divine presence in worship. Ramanuja’s brilliance in conceiving the God–world relationship employing the body–soul image is refreshing and it can be used in reimagining sacramentality as immanence. The body–soul image can be used by both classical theistic and panentheistic theologians. Ramanuja’s theology can also be brought into dialogue with philosophical and spiritual perspectives that ascribe sacredness to nature and locate transcendence in nature. Philip Clayton’s constructive theological

Sarojini Jagannathan, Impact of Sri Ramanujacharya on Temple Worship (Delhi: Nag, 1994). The term arca can be translated as “idol.” However, we will use the term “image” and “idol” interchangeably, recognizing that in the European and North American context, the contrasting implications attributed to “idol” and “icon” in terms of understanding the presence of the divine are drastic. In Hindu worship “idol” is not seen in sharp contrast with “icon” as opposed to the Western consideration of these terms. The term “image” is used to imply “physical representation,” and not merely a conceptual image or picture. For a detailed exploration of the notions of “idol” and “icon” and their varied nuances as they relate to sacramental presence, see Madathummuriyil, Sacrament as Gift, 180–3. 26 Musashi Tachikawa, Shoun Hino, and Lalita Deodhar, Puja and Samskara (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2006), 29–63. 24 25

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understanding of a “self-transcending nature” is in line with Ramanuja’s understanding of the world.27 Mordecai M. Kaplan’s (1881–1983) theory of transnaturalism that discovers transcendence within nature (and other forms of explaining transcendence as or in nature) is very much in line with Ramanuja’s thought. According to Kaplan, There is only one universe within which both man and God exist. The so-called laws of nature represent the manner of God’s immanent functioning. The element of creativity, which is not accounted for by the so-called laws of nature, and which points to the organic character of the universe or its life as a whole, gives us a clue to God’s transcendent functioning. God is not an identifiable being that stands outside the universe. God is the life of the universe, immanent insofar as each part acts upon every other, and transcendent insofar as the whole acts upon each part.28 Though Ramanuja may not share Kaplan’s view of a non-absolute God within his religious naturalism, his scheme of locating transcendence within nature is in coherence with Ramanuja’s theology. The development of Vaishnavism as a ritualistic religion centered on the worship of Lord Vishnu-Narayana. A true Vaishnavite is expected to worship and be at the service of Vishnu throughout day and night. Worship (puja) of the Lord can be done both in temples as well as at homes. When the worship is done in the temple, the worship is officiated by the priest who is initiated by the prescribed initiation ceremony known as diksa.29 The object of worship may be an image (arca) of Vishnu that is duly consecrated. The process of worshipping God is given in detail in the Nitya-Grantham based on the Pancaratra treaties, which contains instructions on performing religious rituals.30 The Supreme Being (Lord Vishnu-Narayana) is believed to descend from His exalted divine abode to a lower level of the represented image. The coming of God is not an illusory manifestation but real, and this descent of Vishnu to a lower level is out of his free will and for the sole purpose of making himself available to his devotees. The idol ceases to be the abode of Vishnu as the worship is ended. When we compare the ritual contexts of Hindu and Christian worship, the “corporeality” of the material elements functions as the very mode of divine presence.31 In Hindu worship, the physical representation of Vishnu is crucial while in Christian worship, the advent of the presence is unfolding within the ritual–symbolic modality of divine worship. However, the idea of God’s gracious self-gift for the believer/community would be another aspect of comparison.

Philip Clayton, The Re-emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 28 Mordecai M. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American Jewish Life (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1957), 316. 29 Srinivas Chari, Vaishnavism, 307. 30 Ibid., 313. 31 Contemporary sacramental theology has appropriated the insights provided by the phenomenology of language and symbols in order to explain and explore sacramental presence and grace. “Symbolic efficacy,” “exchange,” “mediation,” “gift,” and so on have become familiar expressions in pastoral as well as academic contexts. For a detailed understanding of these renewed interpretations of sacraments, see Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, trans. Patrick Madigan and Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995); Marion Jean-Luc, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); David N. Power, Sacrament: The Language of God’s Giving (New York: Crossroad, 1999). 27

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SACRAMENTALITY AND, IN, (OR AFTER) THE SECULAR Postmodern sacramental theology has reconstructed the notion of sacramentality answering the question: what kind of God is meaningful after the “death of God”? This question led to the rediscovery of God’s engagement with his people in biblical terms, as love. This move of reconfiguring God in the West is represented by the so-called theological turn of French phenomenology, which is philosophy’s turning to religion. Christian sacramental theology has appropriated these postmodern philosophical developments in rethinking sacramental presence. However, the God-question is returning with a new sense of urgency in the wake of the contemporary religion/secularism debate. Richard Kearney’s attempt to overcome the secular–sacred divide by recognizing the sacred even in what is perceived as secular embodies this new wave of retrieving sacramentality, or the sacred in the West, after its cultural loss. Kearney’s distinctive concept of “anatheism” proposes a middle way between the God of metaphysics (theism) and atheism while acknowledging the retrieval of transcendence in postmodernity.32 This retrieval portrays an image of God who cannot be objectified but whose presence is unfolded in the sacramentality of the flesh that encompasses all spheres of life, including the works of literature, art, and painting. This post-secular (post-metaphysical) quest for the sacred in everyday life, called “anatheism,” is a return to God, including the so-called secular and atheistic domains.33 “Anatheism” implies the retrieval of the past experience that moves forward proffering new life to memory, giving a future to the past.34 As Kearney claims, his attempt is the “movement of returning to God after God—God again, after the loss of God.” Thus, it is the return of a more real presence after its loss. It is a powerful and moving presence, precisely because of its return through absence. The prefix “ana” implies the idea of retrieving, revisiting, reiterating, as well as repeating. This retrieval or repeating is a movement forward, not backward. It is revisiting the past to move forward. Thus, anatheism is a “returning to God after God,” that is, a critical hermeneutical retrieval of sacred things that have passed but still bear a radical remainder, an unrealized potentiality to be more fully realized in the future. In this sense, anatheism may be understood as “after-faith,” which is more than an “after-thought.” This is a middle way between theism and atheism as it supersedes both. Anatheism is not the presupposition of the divinity in upper case as in metaphysics, a God inaccessible to the ordinary, but rather a reimagining and reliving of the sacred in the ordinary. The call for going back to the past is intended to bring us back to the beginning, to a time before the division between theism and atheism. In this sense, anatheism recognizes the sacramentality of humanity’s multiple ways of divine–human encounter of the past as well as the present, including the so-called de-traditional, post-Christian or post-secular West. Therefore, anatheism proposes a critical and creative engagement with those in contemporary society who proclaim the end of religions and consider all faith as delusional and meaningless. Despite the abandonment of God and loss of faith in our time, Kearney argues that anatheism brings hope by facilitating a radical opening S ee two works of Kearney, The God Who May Be (2001) and Strangers, Gods and Monsters (2003). Anatheism: Returning to God after God (2011). Anatheism is a combination of the prefix “ana” and “theism.” According to Oxford English dictionary, “ana” means “up in space or time; back again, new, etc.” Thus, ana used with theism, that is, anatheism, means “God after God.” 34 Richard Kearney, “God after God: An Anatheistic Attempt to Reimagine God,” in Reimagining the Sacred: Richard Kearney Debates God, ed. Richard Kearney and Jens Zimmermann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 6. 32 33

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to someone or something that was lost and forgotten by Western metaphysics, and he stresses the need for recalling that something back again. The genius of anatheism consists in its hermeneutical effort to recover God-talk again, finding common points of contact between religious and secular sources alike.

Sacramentality and “Anatheism” Anatheism involves the basic proposition that the sacred can be experienced in and through the secular. As Kearney puts it, “the hyphen between the sacred and secular is crucial. Hence, anatheism is an attempt to sacralize the secular and secularize the sacred. It is reimagining the sacred after the secular and through the secular.”35 This calls for the sacramental return to the holiness of everyday, a retrieval of the extraordinary (sacred) in the ordinary.36 This retrieval signals the possibility of a God after God (anatheos), the return of the sacred after its setting aside (ana-thema) or abandonment of God. The sacramental return presupposes an extraordinary sensibility that keeps vigilant toward the signs of the divine, allowing the possibility of encountering a transcendent God in immanence. Thus, anatheism marks an opening toward a God whose descent into flesh depends on our response of recognition of the sacred embodied in the daily acts of eucharistic love and sharing where the highest deity becomes—kenotically—the “very least” among us. The word is continually made flesh, and sacramental presence is encountered as an ineffable gift—immanent in the transubstantiation of the everyday reality of life. In this sense, anatheism is not a new religion whose very end is in itself but rather a third way that precedes and exceeds the extremes of dogmatic theism and militant atheism.37 This involves attention to the divine in the stranger who stands before us in the midst of the world. It is a call to be attuned to the presence of the sacred engraved in every fiber of existence, transforming the finite into infinite, reconfiguring transcendence in immanence and the eschatological in the here and now. The anatheist idea of sacramentality encourages us to engage Christian sacramental experience in dialogue with the experience of the transcendent or sacred available outside the bounds of the Church in various forms of human life and the whole of creation. Since this mediation involves the intersection between divine and human domains, there is a paradoxical coincidence of appearance and disappearance, concealment, and revelation. This paradoxical nature in the unfolding of divine presence is articulated at its best by the term “mystery” (μυστήριον) used to designate the sacramental at its historical origin. The reflection on Christian rituals in the first few centuries of the common era was “characterized by a deep, abiding awareness of the transcendent mystery of God, of the fact that God would always, necessarily overflow the bounds of creaturely language and reflection.”38 Thus, presence was not understood as something available to human objectification, manipulation, and control. Because of its fluidity the term “mystery” was applied to a wide range of things from incarnation to chalice and paten.39 The term “mystery” that was widely applied to Christian rituals is a powerful expression of the Ibid., 17. Kearney introduces a sacramental vision of everyday life undertaking a phenomenological analysis even outside the bounds of Christianity. See Kearney, Anatheism, 85–100. 37 Ibid., 166. 38 Paul F. Palmer, Sacraments and Worship: Liturgy and Doctrinal Development of Baptism, Confirmation and the Eucharist, vol. 1, Sources of Christian Theology (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1957), 55. 39 Geoffrey Lampe, God as Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 891–3. 35 36

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ineffable nature of the mystery being celebrated in sacramental rites, especially the Eucharist. It can be argued that the sense of “mystery” that was present in early Christian and patristic periods was diminished if not lost in the Scholastic-Tridentine synthesis. A major accomplishment of postmodern theology is in recapturing the understanding of “mystery” that has been lost in sacramental theology. Therefore, retrieving the sense of “mystery” in sacramental theology and practice, and reinventing the riches of the sacramental tradition of the early Church, will enable us to engage in dialogue with contemporary/postmodern philosophical, secular, and post-secular cultural realities.

CONCLUSION Openness to other religions and cultures has enabled Christianity to connect with them better and to allow its theology, worship, and life to be shaped by the treasures of those traditions. This is true regarding Christianity’s encounter with Hinduism, as evidenced by efforts of dialogue and inculturation as well as studies in comparative theology, albeit more remains to be accomplished. Comparative theology is a significant way of interreligious engagement. In part one, we explored the significance of Ramanuja for contemporary theology, analyzing the way he is locating the transcendent Brahman within the universe. His theology is robust in upholding the supremacy of Brahman in the origin and sustaining of the universe. However, the supporter of the entire cosmos is not dependent on creation. Nor does Ramanuja conceive Brahman as a transcendent and identifiable being who stands outside the universe. In this sense he rejects any kind of supernaturalism, which extols a Supreme Being on the citadel of the God–world relationship. Thus, Ramanuja’s idea of transcendence can be conceived totally within the universe, though it can never be reduced to the natural world. Ramanuja’s approach to viewing the transcendent within immanence can be beneficial in addressing unresolved questions in Christian God-talk. In part two, we explored the possibility of finding common ground between encountering the divine through ritual modes of worship in Christianity and in Sri Vaishnavism. Vaishnava religious practice, based on the belief in Vishnu as personal god and his availability to devotees in the represented image, is comparable in many respects with the eucharistic epiphany of Christian liturgy. In the third part, we have reflected on recovering the sacred and talking about God again, exploring Kearney’s anatheistic approach to sacramentality. Kearney offers a conceptual framework in which a dialogue between the sacred and the secular can take place. Kearney’s view of the sacramentality of everyday life makes “anatheism” (God after God) a better means for engaging materialism and atheism in our society. For Kearney, this introduction of the sacred into secular devoid of any religious or ecclesial commitment would make his approach unappealing to “militant” theists, but it would serve the interest of a new generation of seekers who attempt to reconfigure God and transcendence in fresh and unconventional terms. In general, sacramentality is a significant area of comparative theological engagement, and it has the profound effect of reaching beyond religious as well as nonreligious borders.

FURTHER READING Bartley, C. J. The Theology of Ramanuja: Realism and Religion. London: Routledge Curzon, 2002. Chari, S. M. Srinivasa. Vaishnavism: Its Philosophy, Theology and Religious Discipline. New Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass, 1994.

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Clayton, Philip, and Peacocke, Arthur, ed. In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004. Jagannathan, Sarojini. Impact of Sri Ramanujacharya on Temple Worship. Delhi: Nag, 1994. Thatamanil, John J. The Immanent Divine: God, Creation and the Human Predicament. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Radical and Sacramental: A Theology for Sacraments in an Age of Pluralism GLENN P. AMBROSE

The twenty-first century is shaping up to be a century of truly urgent planetary issues that threaten not only human society but also the very survival of life as we know it. Whether it is climate change, pandemics, war, or global inequities, the remedies to address these challenges will require international consensus and cooperation. The inspiration for timely coordinated responses will not be found in a single ideology or religion. It is also doubtful that some universal cosmic piety or science alone will encourage everyone to meet these planetary challenges. Instead, we must turn to our cultural and religious diversity that, while one of our greatest strengths, has also historically been a source of misunderstanding, suspicion, and conflict. There is then an urgent need to amplify faith-based worldviews that truly appreciate religious and cultural diversity. This can be accomplished most effectively with theologies that are rooted in the historical origins and fundamental teachings of religious traditions. This would inspire the religious adherents of these traditions to opt for a more inclusive vision of their faith precisely because they are faithful Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and so on, not despite the fact. Without such an inclusive vision, global crises are likely only to increase suspicion and decrease the possibility of effectively responding to the challenges that lie ahead. This chapter will focus on an essential aspect of many Christian traditions, namely sacramentality, on the grounds that the religious phenomena Christian sacramental theology seeks to describe can arguably be encountered in other religious traditions as well, if under different names, and can potentially motivate a genuine engagement with religious diversity that seeks understanding in a true dialogue that values the individual faith commitments of all participants. This goes well beyond mere tolerance in the direction of a respect and admiration that would identify cultural and religious diversity as inherently good and worth preserving. Consistent with the need to remain true to the historical origins and fundamental teachings of a particular tradition, I will engage primarily with the Roman Catholic tradition, which of course has historically emphasized the importance of sacraments and sacramentality. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that digging deeply within a single tradition can bring insights to the larger ecumenical and interreligious conversation. In brief, I aim to show how it might be possible to recognize the efficacy of

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both Christian sacraments that distinctly arise from the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth and sacramental events in other religions. Likewise, it should be possible to affirm a distinct mission for the Church, including a truly instrumental role in God’s saving action, while at the same time being open to the possibility of different missions and instruments at work in other religions.

RELIGIOUS IDENTITY AND THE EFFICACY OF RELIGIOUS RITUALS Although the specific language and conceptual framework of sacraments and sacramentality is not embraced in every Christian tradition, a diverse array of religious celebrations, symbols, and rituals exist within Christianity that have been experienced as mediating efficacious encounters with God. These communal events and liturgies are rightfully confessional and didactic in nature, that is, they are formative in a particular way. As such, they help identify Christians, create community, and solidify a sense of a purposeful and meaningful existence in a way that is unique to the congregations that celebrate them. The particularity of these activities is essential as is the narrative and confessional theology behind them. Therefore, any argument for an interreligious sense of sacrament and sacramentality must come to terms with the fact that the affirmation of particularity is important in the discovery and construction of identity. From a Christian point of view, God’s word is personal and each individual and community is unique. With respect to sacraments, it is necessary to affirm a certain thisness (haecceitas) to every sacrament and to the sacramental nature of the Church in general. As such, it is fitting to recognize Christian sacraments as a privileged means of encounter and response to God’s initiative. Therefore, it is necessary and right to give thanks and praise with officially sanctioned rites exercised in a valid manner. However, a privileged means of encounter and response need not be understood as the only means.1 While it has become more common for Christian churches to be inclusive when considering whether truth can be found in other religions, the affirmation of God’s salvific action mediated by other religions has been more difficult to justify. A notable exception concerns the development of the magisterium with respect to Judaism after Vatican II. Its teaching that the Covenant with Israel is still valid necessarily implies, as Philip Cunningham notes, that Jews through their vocational observance of their covenantal duties are capable of mediating God’s holiness to others.2 This is clearly an acknowledgment of the instrumentality of Judaism or as Cardinal Walter Kasper noted, “Judaism is as a sacrament.”3 But can this sacramentality be extended beyond Judaism? More precisely, Cardinal Kasper argued, “Judaism is as a sacrament of every otherness that as such the Church must learn to discern, recognize and celebrate.”4 Arguably this

Paul Lakeland makes a very helpful distinction between the Mission of God and the Mission of the Church. See his contribution, “Mission of the Church,” in Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes, ed. Serene Jones and Paul Lakeland (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005). 2 Philip Cunningham, “Judaism as ‘Sacrament of Otherness,’” in Jewish Christian Relations: Insights and Issues in the ongoing Jewish-Christian Dialogue, February 29, 2004. http://www.jcre​lati​ons.net/Juda​ism+as+%22Sa​cram​ ent+of+Othern​ess%22.2816.0.html?L=3. 3 The full quote and context is in order and will be expounded in what follows. “We Catholics became aware with greater clarity that the faith of Israel is that of our elder brothers, and, most importantly, that Judaism is as a sacrament of every otherness that as such the Church must learn to discern, recognize and celebrate.” Walter Cardinal Kasper, “Address on the 37th Anniversary of Nostra Aetate,” October 28, 2002. Cited in Cunningham. 4 Ibid. Italics my emphasis. 1

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can be expanded to include other religions, as Cunningham concludes. Therefore, an important goal for ecumenical and interreligious dialogue from this Christian perspective should be “to discern, recognize and celebrate” together what is, in the sense Kaspar and Cunningham use the term, “sacramental.” But centuries of suspicions and hostilities directed toward Jews and people of other religious faiths have created habits of mind and body that make dialogue and cooperation more difficult. Theologians sometimes arouse controversy when they address this issue in a manner that is more affirmative of religious diversity.5 At the same time, magisterial documents like Dominus Jesus that arguably tried to put the brakes on the ecumenical and interreligious momentum inspired by Vatican II are not well received either.6 Often seen as a rebuttal of perceived errors in works like Jacques Dupuis’s Toward a Theology of Religious Pluralism, Dominus Jesus also reveals a tension with some actions and statements of Pope John Paul II.7 Gerald O’Collins, advocate for Dupuis during the investigation of his work by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), aptly summed up the controversy as one centered on professing “faith in Jesus Christ as the one redeemer of all human beings, while simultaneously following Pope John Paul II in recognizing the Holy Spirit at work in the religions and cultures of the world.”8 When considering this controversy and others like it we must not overlook an overall sense of crisis and fear present in the Roman Catholic Church during the last fifty years. The Second Vatican Council did not end the ideological battle concerning how to interact with the modern, now postmodern, world. A greater openness and desire for further inculturation, ecumenism, and interreligious dialogue did win the day in the Conciliar documents, but the interpretation and implementation of the Council in these matters has remained contested. During this time the Church has seen a decline in the active participation of the laity in many parts of the world, a major shortage in clergy, more vocal criticism of the Church from within, and of course the pedophilia scandal. Combined with disturbing developments and events outside the Church, such as 9/11 and more recently the Covid-19 pandemic and all its economic, political, and social fallout, these realities create a stressful situation wherein change is fervently demanded by some and vehemently resisted by others in the Church. We should not be surprised. In a time of fear and uncertainty, human beings turn to their communities, traditions, and shared worldviews—especially religious ones— to provide a sense of place, identity, and meaning. Under these conditions, whether the stranger is even welcomed—a precondition for dialogue—is gravely at risk. In the Christian tradition, however, we can draw on witnesses from the past for inspiration and Tissa Balasuriya, Jacques Dupius, and Peter Phan were specifically targeted by the CDF for their views on religious pluralism. Some censures, such as those of Roger Haight and Jon Sobrino, may focus on Christology or soteriology, but suspicion directed toward their work was connected to their openness to religious pluralism. 6 Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, Declaration Dominus Jesus on the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church, August 6, 2000. http://www.vati​can.va/roma​n_cu​ria/congre​gati​ons/cfa​ith/docume​ nts/rc_con_​cfai​th_d​oc_2​0000​806_​domi​nus-iesus​_en.html. 7 I am thinking here of actions such as John Paul II’s 1986 interreligious gathering at Assisi and his pilgrimages to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and India. Statements referring to the universal presence and activity of the Spirit in all peoples, culture, and religions can be found in his encyclicals Redemptor Hominis (The Redeemer of Man), March 4, 1979. http://www.vati​can.va/cont​ent/john-paul-ii/en/ency​clic​als/docume​nts/hf_jp-ii_enc​_040​3197​9_re​ demp​tor-homi​nis.html. 8 Gerald O’Collins, “A Look Back on Dupuis’ Skirmish with the Vatican,” NCR, February 14–27, 2014. For a fuller account of debate, see Gerald O’Collins, “Jacques Dupuis: The Ongoing Debate,” Theological Studies 74 (2013): 632–54. 5

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courage. For example, the disciples on the road to Emmaus, clearly in a moment of fear and crisis, were able nonetheless to welcome and invite the stranger who as we know could either be a friend or foe (Lk. 24:13-31). The fact that they did not recognize him is significant in our reading of this story today. Like those who fed the hungry and clothed the naked without recognizing Jesus (Matthew 25), they did the right thing by welcoming the stranger. Perhaps this is because in their time with Jesus, a ritualized habit of hospitality settled in that could not be broken even in their state of despair, fear, and uncertainty. As a result of this encounter with a stranger in which they welcomed dialogue—admittedly after giving him an earful—the vision of their mission was deepened and transformed, allowing them to recognize their savior in the stranger. This required both a strengthening of their commitment to the way of Jesus as well as a radical development in their theology about God and Jesus, now transformed by a new understanding of the messianic identity of Jesus and the empty tomb. Of course, in Luke 24 the stranger is presented as the Risen Christ, but the stranger could also be any historically and culturally conditioned human being that facilitates a graced encounter with God in a sacramental way that deepens the Christian understanding of Jesus. This presupposes a theological anthropology that affirms the sacramentality of human existence whereby human beings are continually formed by the fruit of God’s Spirit and the work of human hands. This is well reflected in liturgical and sacramental theology wherein liturgy is commonly understood to be the public work of the people in response to the Triune God. For example, The Catechism of the Catholic Church explicitly calls attention to the work of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in liturgical acts.9 But these doctrinal and pedagogical developments on their own accord do not necessarily address the proclivity of religion in general, especially monotheistic traditions, to manifest an exclusiveness—that is, an “us versus them” mentality hostile to interreligious dialogue in principle. The function of religious doctrine is to provide guidance and lay down some interpretive boundaries for understanding formative encounters with the divine mystery. Without doctrine or some set of collective teachings, there would be an absence of tradition and a shared worldview that is necessary for our sense of identity and purpose. In a time of crisis, which can be brought on by the mere presence of otherness, it is important and inevitable for communities to turn to doctrine and practices that reinforce them. At times this may result in a blind and inflexible adherence to doctrine and tradition or in a brash rejection of them. Neither of those reactions best serve the well-being of the community or the other communities it interacts with. But in the best case, the encounter with the other leads to a rediscovery of the meaning of doctrine, the value of traditions, and even a renewed encounter of that which gave rise to them in the first place. It may also involve a radical transformation of the understanding of doctrine or even its replacement as well as the emergence of new traditions and the fading away of others. At its core, Christian sacramental theology seeks an understanding of the experience of the efficacy of the sacraments and the presence of Christ. Our disciples on the road to Emmaus were invited by Jesus into a movement, became a part of his ministry, and continued it after his death. At each stage, the presence of Jesus and the power of God were real to them—and it should be said this is prior to the demarcation of seven sacraments and without a word about original sin, hypostatic union, or instrumental

Catechism of the Catholic Church (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1994), #1077–1109. 9

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efficient causality. It is not that they were without doctrine and tradition; they were monotheistic Jews, faithful to the covenant and ready to discern, recognize, and celebrate the sacred. Undoubtedly, Jesus was from a conventional point of view unusual and not the kind of messiah they expected. We might even say that for our disciples on the road to Emmaus, Jesus was already a little strange before they encountered him as a stranger. But their time with Jesus, especially the events in the last few days—his death, burial, and the empty tomb—cleared a space that renewed their faith otherwise in the form of another covenant-making and sacramental encounter with God.

ENCOUNTERING GOD AFTER GOD It is important to acknowledge the disorienting nature of “clearing” events such as the death of Jesus. The always ongoing passage to faith is sometimes marked by moments of despair and uncertainty. Indeed, a complete absence of “dark nights,” or at least growing pains, might raise suspicions as to whether faith is honestly and fully engaged in the real world as well as ready to discern, recognize, and celebrate the sacred in the stranger. Events in the twentieth century provided new stimuli for despair and uncertainty about God’s very existence. The senseless brutality, suffering, and horror of the two world wars and above all the Holocaust shook the very foundations of Western theism. God after Auschwitz could never be the same, and there was open talk among theologians of the “death of God.”10 Several contemporary thinkers are articulating a radical theology that is rooted in the postwar “death of God” theologies and buttressed by postmodern hermeneutics. It challenges confessional theology and undermines any theology that presents itself as exclusive, immutable, and unconditional. Two central figures in this school of thought, John Caputo and Richard Kearney, seek to reconfigure the contemporary debate about the existence of God.11 Both are unabashedly critical of imagining God as the metaphysical first cause or highest being who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. As they understand it, this understanding of God as essentially a strong man is too easily associated with and partly responsible for a legacy of xenophobia, misogyny, colonialism, and genocidal violence in Western culture. For them, radical and confessional theology do not present us with an either/or choice. Confessional theology with its doctrine, sacraments, and liturgies helps define a tradition, while radical theology sustains a living tradition by ensuring it is “passed down by going under continual discernment of the

See, for example, Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), Gabriel Vahanian, The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era (New York: George Braziller, 1961), and Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966). 11 Caputo is a philosopher who first made his mark in developing radical hermeneutics. See, for example, Hermeneutics: Facts and Interpretation in the Age of Information. He is significantly influenced by Jacques Derrida and works in the phenomenological tradition. His career follows the path of phenomenology itself, which has increasingly turned to religious themes and language. His works The Weakness of God (2006), The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (2013), Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional, and Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory (2019) are explicitly theological in nature. Kearney is a philosopher influenced by the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur who also applies a phenomenological method to theological thinking. Several of his main works such as The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (2001), Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (2002), and Anatheism: Returning to God after God (2010) are especially relevant for any consideration of the sacramentality of other religions. 10

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spirit in history.”12 Together confessional and radical theology can help facilitate a return to the phenomena of a foundational encounter with the divine, but it presents that event as a moment of decision, not irrevocable proof. Sacramental theology should be recognized as encompassing both confessional and radical elements. The confessional elements are obvious insofar as each tradition develops rituals and/or sacraments that distinctly reflect and express its beliefs. A radical element refers to those kinds of sacramental encounters that surprise, even disturb, us to think in a new way. Sacramental theology must take into consideration what Tillich referred to as a Protestant Principle and a Catholic Substance.13 Caputo emphasizes that “substance” refers to a historical tradition or specific confession and not some metaphysical reality. However, this substance or tradition of a religion is always a conditioned response to the Unconditional and as such needs to be subjected to principled critical reflection. Radical theology can be thought of as a historical variant of the exercise of this Protestant Principle in contemporary thought, and sometimes the exercise of the Protestant Principle is sparked by a sacramental encounter. For example, the disciples on the road to Emmaus were presented with an empty tomb and the stranger that they came to recognize as Jesus disappeared. Neither event presented proof of recognition, but it did call for a decision. Even though they were in despair, their sacramental encounter on the road renewed their hope and restored their faith in Jesus as the messiah as evident in their decision to return to Jerusalem. The return signifies an embrace of the mission and response to Jesus after Jesus, that is, Jesus as understood after his death and resurrection in light of their encounter with a stranger.

SACRAMENTS AND THE WEAKNESS OF GOD Much of the history of sacramental theology has focused on the presence of God and the efficacy of the ritual. This is not unwarranted. If our disciples’ hearts were not set on fire in their encounter with the stranger, then there would not have been a story about the road to Emmaus in the Christian tradition. Moreover, Christians would not have continued to gather in Jesus’ name and break bread together for centuries if these actions did not continue to facilitate a genuine encounter with the sacred. But without radical theology, without any mindfulness of the Protestant Principle, the account of presence and efficacy can fall to the level of first naiveté where it is at risk of idolatrous distortion.14 This is especially true because religion, especially its ritualized activities, has from the start traded in power and has been linked to its legitimization. The political annexation of divine authority has been commonplace in history. This is not a one-way movement of the ruling elite asserting sacred agency. The viability of that claim itself requires at least some buy-in from below and can in fact be a desired and comforting belief for all. The birth of monotheism among the ancient Israelites reflects in

John Caputo, “Tradition and Event: Radicalizing the Catholic Principle,” delivered at The Challenge of God: Continental Philosophy and the Catholic Intellectual Heritage Conference (Chicago Loyola University, April 14, 2016). https://www.luc.edu/ccih/vid​eos/arch​ive/. 13 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 245. 14 We would be wise to keep in mind that sacramental presence is born in conjunction with absence. In the passage to faith absence is prominent. Jesus dies, his body cannot be found, and he ascends into heaven. We want signs, and there is not a shortage of signs to be found. But signs are not to be clung to. They require an interpreted response without which signs remain empty. 12

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part a loss of faith in the divinization of political sovereignty found in the royal cults of that time. The decline of Canaanite culture and collapse of the city-state system, however initially disorientating, was experienced as a clearing event that was also liberating. The Israelites encountered the Spirit of God and were inspired to develop a new confessional theology. Yahweh, God after the gods, was revealed as one who hears the cry of the poor and responds to injustice, not the official rites and invocations of the ruling elite. The new Israelite religion rejected the exclusive claim that some strongman was a god, or the vicar of a god, and eventually adopted the more radical and inclusive claim that every man and woman was created in the image and likeness of God. Drawing on the Pauline concept of the weakness of God and Luther’s theology of the cross, Caputo has proposed a “weak theology” that effectively counters the idea of a divine strong man and would-be human imitators. His phenomenological method construes the divine–human relationship as call and response, not as that between an infinite being and finite being. This leads to a radical incarnational and sacramental theology insofar as God’s existence is dependent upon the human response to God’s insistence.15 In one sense, this insistence is powerful. Reminiscent of the “Great Cry” in Nikos Kazantzakis’s reflection on creation, it never ceases and enables the impossible to become reality.16 But like Unconditional love, it is also vulnerable. It can be distorted, muffled, ignored, or rejected. Nevertheless, Caputo’s theology of an insisting Spirit of God calling all peoples, cultures, and religions resonates with a radical and more pluralistic view of sacrament and sacramentality. Caputo’s image of divine–human relationship as call and response is thoroughly consistent with sacramental theology. We see this, for example, in the primacy of God’s initiative highlighted in the understanding of Jesus as the primordial sacrament.17 When seen in the light of a Trinitarian Christology from below, this sacramental view of the humanity of Jesus portrays sacramentality as an event wherein divine initiative is met with a Spirited human response. Thus, in Jesus the fullness of his divinity is encountered in the fullness of his humanity whereby his perfect response to God’s call is necessarily empowered by the Spirit. Something analogous occurs when the creature made in the image and likeness of God and empowered by the Spirit also responds to God’s call. This sacramental view of Jesus and human nature itself along with the Church as sacrament necessarily moves the discussion of the nature of sacraments beyond the two or seven ritual frameworks that dominated Christian thought about the sacraments after the Reformation. Since every human being is made in the image and likeness of God, the potentiality of any human act—always conditioned by its historical and cultural context— serving as a means for a graced and efficacious encounter with the divine can be affirmed. Beyond this notion of the sacramentality of human existence, we should not lose sight of the Unconditional love of God that coincides with a plan of salvation recognized as universal and operative from the very moment of creation itself. In what is sometimes called the “mystery of unity,” everything, every time, and everyone is touched by this allembracing plan.18 In other words, God as insistence was at work in human history well before Abraham, Moses, and Jesus and is presently at work in communities that do not

John Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 14–19. 16 Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965), 291–2. 17 Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963), 15. 18 Nathan Mitchell, Meeting Mystery: Liturgy, Worship, Sacraments (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006), 254. 15

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trace their history back to Abraham or Jesus. The Church as sacrament must be not only understood in light of this mystery of unity but also recognized as a unity-in-diversity insofar as the Church is only a sacrament of the Reign of God when it responds to God’s call. Moreover, this mystery of unity-in-diversity also presumes that the Church does not monopolize God’s saving action. On this later point, Nathan Mitchell quotes Jacques Dupuis: The one divine plan of salvation for all peoples embraces the whole universe. The mission of the Church has to be understood within the context of this plan. The Church does not monopolize God’s action in the universe. While it is aware of a special mission of God in the world, it has to be attentive to God’s action in the world, as manifested also in the other religions.19

ANATHEISM AND CHRISTIAN SACRAMENTS Kearney’s work may be even more promising for bringing radical theology and a confessional theology of sacramentality together with an eye toward the pluralism of sacramentality. He highlights the necessary role of imagination in discerning, recognizing, and celebrating the sacred. This imagination is a sacramental imagination focused on identifying and encouraging what he calls “microeschatological events” that can be thought of as generating and continually forming the substance of religious traditions.20 Furthermore, his call for the practice of hospitality and attention to the crucial role of strangers in sacred epiphanies encourages ecumenical and interreligious dialogue. He recognizes that the in-breaking of God in history frequently happens with the out-breaking of members in a community. We see this, for example, in Jesus breaking out of the Galilean region into northern territories more populated by gentiles. Outside of his familiar circles, he encounters and eventually recognizes a woman of different but nevertheless great faith, who shares in the mission of caring for children.21 In Anatheism: Returning to God after God, Kearney describes an ongoing process of sacred reimagining that is vital for any living tradition. Anatheism is not a third term that negates theism and atheism or something that eliminates the tension between faith and doubt. Regarding Caputo’s reading of Tillich, we might say anatheism welcomes both moments of critical reflection found in principled atheism and substantial theism. The “a” and “na” in anatheism speak to an atheism and a not-atheism captured by the subtitle Returning to God after God. This he describes as a movement away and back in time and/or space.22 It amounts to a letting-go of an idolatrous certitude over a conditioned construal of a faith but not giving up on the promise of faith. This faith after faith is shaped by absence and principled critical reflection as well as presence and real substance.

upuis 2005; quoted in Mitchell, Meeting Mystery, 253. D Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God after God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 52. 21 Perhaps this also inspires the recognition that her children are no more or no less the children of Adam and Eve (and God) than the children of Abraham. For a more thorough reading of this biblical narrative in light of religious diversity, see Pablo Alonso, “The Woman Who Changed Jesus,” in Jesus of Galilee: Contextual Christologies for the 21st Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 121–34. 22 Richard Kearney, “What Comes after God? Some Anatheist Reflections,” delivered at The Challenge of God: Continental Philosophy and the Catholic Intellectual Heritage Conference (Chicago Loyola University, April 14, 2016). https://www.luc.edu/ccih/vid​eos/arch​ive/. 19 20

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Summoned by the Unconditional and open to the impossible, it is marked by an inclusive moving on whereby retrieval can follow loss avoiding an exclusive circling of the wagons that goes nowhere. Kearney’s anatheism promises not just to bring radical theology and sacramentality together. It can also help us recognize an anatheistic moment in other founding sacred epiphanies. It is worth noting that since polytheism was the status quo in the ancient world, the establishment of monotheism can rightfully be considered the product of a radical but principled critical reflection that resulted in a new substantial and confessional understanding of God after the gods. Likewise, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth led to a radically new way of thinking about God in the Abrahamic tradition. Anatheism even has its place in the road to Emmaus story, as it documents an encounter of Jesus after Jesus and a return to Jerusalem—as the place of his resurrection—after Jerusalem—as just the resting place of Jesus. The Catholic Church teaches that liturgy, especially Eucharist, is the summit of the Church’s activity and the source of its power.23 The consecration of the Eucharist in Mass occurs every day of the year, with one exception, Good Friday, the one day set aside to specifically mourn the death of Jesus. Certainly, at every Eucharist, Catholics are called to remember Jesus’ suffering and death. But the initiation into the Christian faith today does not always have to pass through the work of mourning the way Jesus’ first followers did. Many today have the luxury, but perhaps also the disadvantage, of knowing the end of the story: Jesus rises three days later, the Church is born shortly thereafter, the empire becomes Christian, and Christianity spreads across the globe. “Jesus died for our sins” can be said casually and triumphantly by Christians today, without anything like the clearing experience Jesus’ disciples had with his death.

MOURNING THE DEATH OF GOD Louis-Marie Chauvet is a good example of a sacramental theologian who has not neglected the place of the death of God in the birth of Christianity and the ongoing passage to faith.24 His work resonates with some of the elements found in the radical theologies of Caputo and Kearney. This is to be expected, given the common influence of some philosophical sources—Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger—and theological themes—presence/absence, icon/idol and death of God—in their works. As in radical theology, the event of the cross represents a definitive moment in God’s selfrevelation for Chauvet. This means that faith in the Christian confession is, in Kearney’s terms, an anatheistic faith in a God crucified. The passage to this faith requires in many cases a profound letting-go and the smashing of conceptual idols that we have constructed and are attached to, as exemplified by the disciples on the road to Emmaus, who had to let go of a certain image and expectation of what the messiah would accomplish and how it would be accomplished. The demands they had for what the messiah would do for them turned into a recognition of the demand life would make on them should they choose to follow him.

Sacrosanctum Concilium #2. https://www.vati​can.va/arch​ive/hist_c​ounc​ils/ii_​vati​can_​coun​cil/docume​nts/vat-ii_​ cons​t_19​6312​04_s​acro​sanc​tum-conci​lium​_en.html. 24 See, for example, Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, trans. Patrick Madigan and Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995). 23

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Chauvet’s eucharistic theology shaped by a theology of the cross can accommodate the deconstructive or iconoclastic themes found in radical theology. With his attention to God crucified, an element of principled critical reflection is emphasized in his explication of the eucharistic celebration. As much as we rejoice and celebrate what God has done in Jesus and as much as we respond to God’s presence in this sacrament, Chauvet also finds it necessary to speak of God’s absence. On the one hand, absence means that there is always more to God than what we can humanly perceive. The sacramental encounter with God—no matter what the religious tradition—is always limited and conditional. But on the other hand, and more importantly, absence means there is always more to come and just as important, more to do. In these microeschatological events, sacraments and ethics are intrinsically linked together. In other words, cult and ethics, eucharistic liturgy and the liturgy of the neighbor in this case, belong together like love of God and love of neighbor. The Mass does not come to an end, it leads to a dismissal to be a eucharistic people. Ideally, it is not just bread and wine that has been transubstantiated into the sacramental body of Christ but also the community itself. This challenge to “transubstantiate” is guided by the anamnesis that is a fundamental aspect of the principled critical reflection and founding ritual that Jesus charges his followers to do in memory of him. This is not some nostalgic return to a golden age that would amount to a vacation from the present and relinquishment of the responsibility to discern, recognize, and celebrate the sacred in the current environment. In other words, we are not called to return to the tomb to cling to his body or to look for the living among the dead. Admittedly, in a time of crisis, this is a comforting temptation. But eucharistic remembrance is a vocation that calls us to “retrieve forward,” as Kearney would say. It is a call to action goaded by an encounter with presence and absence that reminds the Christian community not only what it believes but also creates a condition for something new to believe in to emerge—a new dimension of the promise, something previously unthinkable and seemingly impossible that bends the arc forward. The empty tomb was such an event, as the absence within it became an invitation to recognize a new sacramental presence manifested in another instrumental covenant mediating God’s holiness to others.25 We should not overlook the fact that anamnesis can yield an unsettling and dangerous memory. The act of remembrance—always in a new place and time (haecceitas)—reminds us not only how far we have come but also how far and often we have fallen short as well as how far we must go. Such is the always insisting nature of the call of God and the sacramental human vocation. As Caputo emphasizes, the Reign of God is always something that can come, is supposed to come, and for which we have a great deal of responsibility.26 Jesus taught us to pray for “Thy Kingdom to come.” This not only reminds us that even in microeschatological events there is always more to come after but also that, however this event is sacramentally actualized and comprehended in the moment, it is not the Kingdom—at least, in any other way than a conditional, limited presence with absence.

Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 404–8. Caputo, “The Insistence and Existence of God: A Response to DeRoo,” in Cross and Khôra: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo, ed. Marko Zlomislic and Neal DeRoo (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010), 326. 25 26

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SACRAMENTAL THEOLOGY AND INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE Ecumenical and interreligious dialogue is not just a nice thing to do. Radical theology shows us that dialogue is theologically warranted and ethically mandated. It can be and, as Kearney’s work has shown, often has been a “creative and chiasmic estrangement” not just in the Judeo-Christian history but also in other religious histories.27 It certainly was for the disciples on the road to Emmaus. One can imagine that from that day forward they greeted strangers with some enthusiasm and an expectation to learn something new. This creative and chiasmic estrangement requires not just openness to the other but also an openness to other possibilities of being.28 This means that an act of self-dispossession or a letting-go is essential in the ongoing passage to faith.29 The ego that is so full of itself has no room for the other and can only try to reign supreme. Without this openness, we cannot really practice hospitality as either the host or guest. As Kearney observes, “love of self and love of neighbor means love the stranger which is why it is prefaced with love of God”—the ultimate Stranger/Other.30 This intersection of radical and confessional theology leads to a recognition that Christian hospitality needs to be an “interconfessional hospitality.”31 Kearney draws on Ricoeur here who argued that interconfessional hospitality begins with linguistic hospitality but ultimately has eucharistic hospitality as its goal.32 Linguistic hospitality is an exchange between the guest and host languages. This quickly becomes something more than just asking how to say “heart” in Spanish. It probes deeper into the meaning of corazón and often learns that words are not always unequivocal in acts of translation. Something is always lost in translation, as they say. From the perspective of an instrumental understanding of language and an exclusive foundational point of view this can only be seen in the negative light as a treacherous betrayal. But it is easier to acknowledge a positive aspect to this reality when in humility we admit that there is no perfect translation—not just from one language to another but also and especially in any linguistic account of the sacred. Eucharistic hospitality in the context of interreligious dialogue describes a communion that comes about when host and guest start talking about the exchange between humans and the divine. In other words, this kind of hospitality occurs when they share their discernment and recognition of the sacred as well as the different ways in which they have encountered and celebrated the sacred. This interconfessional and eucharistic hospitality is only productive when religious practitioners are committed to share their tradition and listen to others with humility and imagination. All involved must be open to the possibility of revelatory substance in other religions and resist claims of possessing perfect translations or an unconditional understanding of the sacred. Kearney goes so far as to argue that we need to make a preferential option for hospitality, extended especially to strangers and the least among us.33 If not, we risk remaining in the closed discourse of the For example, Kearney refers to the Buddha welcoming those from alien and alienating castes as well as Sufi poets responding to invited guests. Anatheism, 49. 28 Kearney, Anatheism, 47–8. 29 This is also a prominent theme in Chauvet. See Symbol and Sacrament, 46–63 and 531–8. 30 Kearney, Anatheism, 48. 31 Ibid., 49. 32 Ibid., 48. 33 Ibid., 54. 27

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same with all its illusions of power, control, and certitude. This is the place our disciples on the road to Emmaus were initially stuck in until they encountered the stranger who cleared them from this unproductive space as a recipient of their hospitality. For Kearney “love of the stranger is a form of ‘Faith Seeking Understanding,’ knowing all the while that we never have absolute knowledge of the absolute.”34 Encounters with strangers are often effective in exposing the obsoleteness of our absolutes. True, the initial experience of this loss is disturbing and disorientating, but anatheism teaches us that what is lost can be found. In this retrieval, the Unconditional can be discovered anew and something new about it can be discovered. Caputo and Kearney shows us that the letting-go of the strong man and welcoming the stranger is essential. It helps pave the way for a return to God after God and helps keep a tradition alive, honest, and humble. For that reason, interreligious hospitality is vitally important because often it is by “traversing alien faiths” that we uncover the forgotten truths of our religion.35 Confessional theology with its practices and doctrines contain, protect, and bind together the substance of religion but also can potentially conceal it in a variety of ways. Therefore, Christian practices and doctrines need to be broken open from time to time and other religions with their sacramental potential could be instrumental in this regard. Dialogue with strangers, especially those who are religious others, can be especially helpful in the discernment, recognition, and celebration of the sacred precisely because it stimulates principled critical reflection and the imagination in new ways that counter the tendency to become merely self-referential and self-serving. Although liturgical and sacramental theology have historically been wrapped up in what Caputo would call strong theology, sacrament and sacramentality should not be ignored by radical theology.36 At the core of sacramental events, there are phenomena that keep calling for microeschatological responses, even while exposing the limited and potentially idolatrous distortion of our response. Together the Protestant Principle and Catholic Substance should yield a sacramentality with an iconoclastic edge. In this regard, Bonhoeffer’s hope for a religion-less Christianity is not Christianity without substance but rather substance with principle to resist strong and exclusive theology.37 Likewise, religion without religion should be understood as religion after religion. This is not a one and done event. Anatheism creates a pilgrim community that is open to reform while always guided by religion before religion and trusting in the promise of religion after religion.

CHRISTOLOGY AND CHRISTOCENTRIC SACRAMENTS This proposal that anatheism encourages the recognition of the potential sacramentality of all religions may be persuasive at the level of philosophy of religion, but it has yet to address the Christocentric reality of sacramental theology and the real tension between the idea of the Spirit of God at work in all peoples, cultures and religions, and doctrine that defines Jesus Christ as the one redeemer of all human beings. One solution could be to drop the Christocentrism altogether and affirm that it is God who saves by any means necessary. This backs away from claims of Jesus of Nazareth as the one and only

Ibid., 47. Ibid., 51. 36 Caputo, “The Insistence and Existence of God,” 320. 37 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), 280–2. 34 35

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redeemer. This is a possible development and one that some might find attractive, but it also goes well beyond a rereading of confessional Christian theology. The destruction of the Temple in 70 ce is perhaps as significant for the birth of Christianity as was the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Prior to its destruction, the Jesus movement could still be construed as internal to Judaism. Obviously, there were significant theological disputes between Jewish-Christians and their brothers and sisters in faith that led to expulsion and persecution from time to time in the first century. Nevertheless, at this stage of the development of Christianity, we should keep in mind that for many of Jesus’ followers he was the awaited Jewish messiah, the “new” covenant a fulfillment of the covenant, and the designation of the twelve would have only signified a claim of legitimacy for this Jewish movement. After the destruction of the Temple— certainly a clearing event—Judaism after Judaism of the Second Temple arises. But this development after maintains a significant continuity with the before. The Torah remains the sacred text, Yahweh alone is God, and the messiah is still to come. For the Jesus movement, the clearing of the Temple further facilitated the development of Christianity after Judaism—a religious tradition rightfully recognized as distinct from Judaism on account of its additional sacred texts, Trinitarian doctrine, and proclamation of Jesus as messiah and, above all, as the incarnation of God. The point here is that events in the first century created two authentic religious developments, yielding two distinct religious identities and viable covenantal traditions that manifest sacramentality. It may be that we live in a similar time. Speculative Christian theology that entertains multiple incarnations is more likely to lead to a change that is more akin to Christianity after Judaism than Judaism after Judaism. This is a bridge too far for many, if not most Christians. Although it is not hard to imagine clearing events in the near future that could lead to wide-scale loss of faith in old beliefs—such that any religion that came after would need to be radically different—it would be best to do what we can to prevent these events. Since it is likely too late for an entirely new set of religious belief systems to take hold and guide our response to God’s call, it is best to work with what we have. Jacques Dupuis’s Toward a Theology of Religious Pluralism is a promising source for a Christology compatible with a pluralistic theology of sacramentality. For Dupuis, Jesus is the full but limited human expression of the Trinity. This is not a new idea. It is already evident in the presentation of Jesus as primordial sacrament discussed earlier. One of the original architects of this thinking, Edward Schillebeeckx, was careful to stipulate that the humanity of Jesus was the primordial sacrament.38 Caputo and Kearney would certainly concur that the humanity of Jesus necessitates the recognition of the limited and conditional that is congruent with their radical theology. But Jesus as primordial sacrament designates something more than just a mediation of the sacred truth. It affirms the redemptive and therefore instrumental nature of Jesus and his Way. This is also acknowledged in Dupuis’s Christology where Jesus “brings about the opportunity for all of humanity’s coauthorship in the project of divine salvation.”39 This idea of coauthorship affirms the potential instrumental and sacramental nature of other religions. Jesus did not just live and die for members of his tribe. The incarnation shows just how necessary human responsibility is in the plan for salvation. And Jesus’ Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963), 15. Mara Brecht, “The Humanity of Christ: Jacques Dupuis’ Christology and Religious Pluralism,” Horizons, 35:1 (2008): 56. 38 39

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death reinforces human responsibility for the Reign of God even further—something Caputo would wholeheartedly agree with. To avoid the error of Pelagianism, humanity’s role in salvation needs to be understood as a Spirit-enabled practice. This affirms that “humanity’s role in bringing about salvation” is truly “ontological” but at the same time an “utterly graced” practice or way.40 Confessional Christian theology reveals that this grace is universally and unconditionally offered, just as God’s insistence is the persistent cry present throughout all of creation. Keeping with the theme of coauthorship, the Christian tradition teaches that the Triune God not only created human beings with the capacity to express themselves in writing but also inspired them to write in their own tongue and paved the way by expressing God’s self in writing. Christocentrism when divorced from monarchical sovereignty and its Christomonism is not the problem; it is the Christian remedy for more fruitful interreligious discernment and celebration of the sacred. In fact, Kearney argues that Jesus should lead Christians to interconfessional hospitality. If Christians confess that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, this is a way that leads to others.41 Jesus teaches that you cannot reach the Father except through him, which sounds very exclusive if one forgets that Jesus explicitly identifies with and attends to the least among us. This means that hospitality is not an option for Christians; it is an imperative. It is a refusal of exclusive power and knowledge and an acceptance of Jesus’ mission. In conclusion, soon after Jesus heard a voice at his baptism that called him on a special mission, he heard another voice in the desert that tempted him to become a strong man turning stone to bread and triumphantly possessing the cities of the world. He resisted that voice and instead practiced a radical hospitality, receiving bread as a gift and breaking it to share with others. The most prominent image of God’s reign utilized by Jesus was that of a banquet. In his lifetime, the most inclusive microeschatological celebration of this banquet occurs in the feeding of the four thousand that brings together both Jew and Gentile (Mt. 15:21-28). Note that this comes after Jesus came to discern, recognize, and celebrate the sacred in the great faith of the Syrophoenician woman. Going a step further, a radical sacramental theology imagines this banquet as a multicultural and interreligious potluck where everyone brings to the table fruit from their gardens. This fruit, however strange, may very well be something that Christians can recognize as both gifts of the Spirit and work of human hands.

FURTHER READING Caputo, John D. In Search of Radical Theology: Expositions, Explorations, Exhortations. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Fitzpatrick, Melissa and Richard Kearney. Radical Hospitality: From Thought to Action. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Kearney, Richard. “Between the Prophetic and the Sacramental,” in Gazing through a Prism Darkly: Reflections on Merold Westphal’s Hermeneutical Epistemology. B. Keith Putt, ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009: 139–49.

I bid., 56n. 7. Kearney, Anatheism, 55.

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Mackendrick, Karmen. “The Hospitality of Listening: A Note on Sacramental Strangeness,” in Phenomenologies of the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality, edited by Richard Kearney and Kascha Semonovitch. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011, 98–108. O’Connell, Gerard. Do Not Stifle the Spirit: Conversations with Jacques Dupuis. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2017.

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CHAPTER THIRTY

Disability, Human Difference, and the Sacramentality of Access REBECCA F. SPURRIER

Every Friday, our seminary community gathers for a Service of Word and Table. After a prayer of thanksgiving over the bread, wine, and juice, as we prepare for the holy meal, the presider or celebrant communicates a set of instructions regarding participation: All are welcome at this table. Please come forward beginning with the front rows. If you would like to receive communion in your seats, please gesture and we will come to you. Both wine and grape juice are served. Grape juice cups are nearest to the bread. The bread is gluten free and vegan with a touch of honey so that many may partake. We also have individual cups for those who need or want them. If you would like to receive a blessing rather than partake of the elements, please cross your arms as you come forward. Come, for the table is ready. The instructions are sometimes experienced as a disruption to the flow of prayer and the movement of the people to the table as well as a burden on liturgical leaders. Yet in their mundane specificity the instructions gesture to the hope that all who desire to partake of the meal will have access to the table and to the fact that the elements themselves matter. They reflect a desire to share embodiment with other people in our community: those who can only eat the bread if it is gluten free, those who can only share a common meal through individual wafer and cup, those who cannot eat any of the elements provided, those for whom sitting rather than walking or wheeling to the front is the viable or preferable option. They also communicate an understanding of participation together in this ritual as deeply implicated in our collective imagination around the common good. Our instructions indicate a commitment that as many of us as possible can participate as well as a transparency about the current borders of our sacramental practices. As we pay attention to the particular bodies of our community, the instructions and practices of our table change. As a result of restrictions on in-person worship during the Covid-19 pandemic, these complexities have intensified as our commitments to both worship and access have grown to include modalities of worshipping through the means of digital media in both synchronous and asynchronous modes. These modes continue to test assumptions about

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the abilities and practices through which humans share embodiment together through participation in the life of God. What kinds of embodiment can and cannot be shared? Ultimately these questions reveal the ways that sacramentality is necessarily mediated through discursive, spatial, and chronological forms that make possible participation in many different ways. At the intersections of disability, ecclesial practice, and ethical commitments to the environment, former practices are reassessed and options multiplied. And still those in our community stretch us to imagine more expansive practices than those we currently have. For while our songs and prayers communicate the unity of the people of God, in this moment our actual practices communicate the complexities of shared embodiment.

SACRAMENTS AS BORDERED SPACES OF CONFLICT Liturgical scholars Andrea Bieler and Luise Schottroff remind us what happens when the realities of human bodies are taken seriously as a central part of the eucharistic life: sacraments are recognized as places of conflict as well as reconciliation, of the absence of God as well as presence. Communion “points to the presence of God among us and in the world. And yet it simultaneously lifts up the hiddenness of God inasmuch as people experience the absence of God in the body politics related to food … Those experiences are in many contexts highly conflicted.”1 While Bieler and Schottroff focus on the conflicted nature of eating together in a world where many people experience hunger, different kinds of access and differing relationships with all of the material elements of sacraments mark the ambivalence of such symbols. For Bieler and Schottroff “sacramental permeability” requires that liturgical scholars take seriously that “the Eucharistic life, with its celebration of the sacraments[,]‌is a place full of conflict; it creates presence and absence, love and alienation, hunger and abundant life.”2 To take the complexity of human embodiment as necessary for sacraments requires attention to the conflicts that shared embodiment produces. In The Disabled God, disability theologian and sociologist of religion Nancy Eiesland describes the conflicted relationship that many people with disabilities have had with sacraments as “body practices” of the church. She recounts experiences of attending churches where she, as a wheelchair user or on crutches, became a problem for the “normal” practices of Eucharist. Singled out by ushers, she was told that she, unlike other participants, would not need to go forward but would be offered a sacrament at her seat only after others had been served. Such practices affected her engagement with the practice: “Hence receiving the Eucharist was transformed for me from a corporate to a solitary experience; from a sacralization of Christ’s broken body to a stigmatization of my disabled body.”3 Eiesland notes that her experience resonates with experiences of other disabled Christians: those denied entry to seminary because they could not “perform the eucharistic ritual appropriately, meaning without altering the able-bodied practice” or those who were made to receive communion in their homes rather than being invited to join with other peers. Eiesland offers these examples to argue that “for many people Andrea Bieler and Luise Schottroff, The Eucharist: Bodies, Bread, & Resurrection (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 5. 2 Ibid. 3 Nancy L. Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994), 112. 1

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with disabilities, the Eucharist is a ritual of exclusion and degradation.” What should be a celebration of the body is “restricted because of architectural barriers, ritual practices, demeaning body aesthetics, unreflective speech, and bodily reactions.”4 If in sacraments “something from the physical world, joined by human words and actions, points to the presence and grace of God,” ways of understanding human ability as well as access to the physical are essential to understanding both relationships with materiality and divine presence.5 Reflecting on the etymology of the word sacramentum, Ruth Duck frames the questions this way, implicating both divine action and human participation: “How do we make something holy? Or is it God who makes holy? What acts should be considered holy?”6 For belonging to those who are God’s is both impossible to define and always defined in some way by the words, gestures, silence, and practices of those who gather: even if “all are welcome,” as so many Christian churches proclaim, the “body practices” of a liturgy create and maintain a “physical discourse of inclusion and exclusion.”7 Disability thus helps to illumine what liturgical theologian Cláudio Carvalhaes names “the borderless border” of Christian liturgy. As Carvalhaes describes it, Christian worship is an elusive space because liturgy is always embodied and therefore inherently bordered even as those borders are also frequently tested and complicated by the participation and nonparticipation of those who worship together. Carvalhaes names five different kinds of borders that mark any Christian liturgy with a particular focus on the eucharistic table: ecclesiastical borders that articulate the norm and standards of who belongs to the church; theological borders that give content to any given definition of Christian church; liturgical borders that locate worship of God in particular time and space and dictate shared rituals; social/economic borders where social class often determines who is found within a given liturgical border; and political borders that reflect economic, social, and political commitments that affect liturgical identity.8 These descriptions of liturgical borders identify some of the ways that sacramental borders have denied, made difficult, or denigrated the participation of people with disabilities in the sacraments. A few examples of each border may shed light on multiple configurations of these borders. First, through ecclesiastical borders, disability regularly contests the standards and norms by which belonging occurs through sacramental participation. Disability theologian Sarah Jean Barton, who has researched Baptismal practices among persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities, describes disabled people and their families who tried to attend many congregations and failed to find a church home. Participation in the sacrament of Baptism meant first identifying congregations where disabled Christians were welcomed rather than perceived as disruptive.9 Even when people with disabilities are welcomed into congregations, they are often funneled into “special” ministries for persons with disabilities rather than understood as persons who are an essential part of the whole church. Ibid., 113. Ruth C. Duck, Worship for the Whole People of God (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013), 141. 6 Ibid., 141. 7 Eiesland, The Disabled God, 112. 8 Cláudio Carvalhaes, Eucharist and Globalization: Redrawing the Borders of Eucharistic Hospitality (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013), 17. 9 Sarah Jean Barton, “Baptism and Christian Identity: Shaping Liturgical Practice from the Perspective of Disability” (Workshop, Calvin Symposium on Worship, 2019), https://wors​hip.cal​vin.edu/resour​ces/resou​rce-libr​ ary/bapt​ism-and-christ​ian-ident​ity-shap​ing-lit​urgi​cal-pract​ice-from-the-pers​pect​ive-of-dis​abil​ity/. 4 5

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Ecclesiastical borders fuse with theological concerns that emerge from sacramental practice. For example, intellectual disabilities provoke conversations and debates about what it means to know and voluntarily respond to God and other Christians as well as to be able to shape and offer a testimony or grow in discipleship.10 Disability also raises questions regarding incarnation and embodiment; does a body need to be able to participate in the full sensorium (seeing, hearing, as well as tasting or feeling) to engage in the materiality of sacramental practice? At times these theological convictions are articulated explicitly in terms of official church polity or majority consensus; at other times these assumptions operate implicitly, informing decisions made by worship leaders and pastors. Liturgical borders often assume uniform participation in ritual such that access to sacraments and sacramental practice may be impossible. Liturgical borders involve choreographies of worshipping bodies in space and time.11 When spaces, practices of time, and modes of participation present one or a narrow set of options, full participation across disabilities and other embodied differences is prohibited. Exceptions to normative choreographies frequently communicate a failure of recognition, desire, and intention for those who cannot participate in these choreographies to participate. Socioeconomic borders raise broader questions regarding who has access to secure housing, healthcare, transportation, or forms of communication tools that make possible access to and participation in church and sacraments. Such socioeconomic borders are connected to political borders: when particular lives are understood to be more disposable than others, both participation in and the claims of sacraments are challenged.12 Yet these multiple borders of common worship are and always have been contested by the differences of those who gather. These unstable liturgical boundaries are an important place for considering the ways that ableism has functioned in regard to both sacraments and sacramentality. Carvalhaes reminds us, “It is within these blurred, complicated, and interconnected borders that liturgical practices and spaces must engage and be engaged.”13 In many congregations the borders of ableism are ones that frequently go unnoticed and unnamed, let alone negotiated and dismantled in relationship to worship more broadly and to participation in sacraments in particular. In many of these cases, churches or communities refuse to recognize, change, or transform their practices because of reluctance to change for “just one person.” Even when particular forms of access are negotiated or granted on a case-by-case basis, however, the borders of ableism remain because access is made to be merely the concern of the few. Furthermore, when accommodations and access are understood as a charitable gift to those present rather than as essential to the sacramental life of any community, Christian communities fail to grasp the complex materiality present in the sacraments and in the assumptions about shared embodiment and ability.

See Jason D. Whitt, “Baptism and Profound Intellectual Disability,” Christian Reflection: A Series in Faith and Ethics, Disability, 45 (2012): 60–7. See also Melissa Florer-Bixler, “Baptism and Profound Disability,” Anabaptist Disabilities Network ADNotes, December 2011. 11 See Rebecca F. Spurrier, The Disabled Church: Human Difference and the Art of Communal Worship (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 1–3, 16–18. 12 Ibid., 167–93. 13 Carvalhaes, Eucharist and Globalization, 17. 10

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DISABILITY STUDIES AND MODELS OF DISABILITY Disability studies is an academic discipline that asks us to resist, critique, and expand uses of the individual model or medical model of disability. Such resistance is hard work as assumptions about the self-evident nature of disability persist. Disability scholar Alison Kafer notes that in spite of the work of both disability studies and disability rights activists, “disability continues to be seen primarily as a personal problem afflicting individual people, a problem best solved through strength of character and resolve.”14 To address the problems of disability means curing, treating, or rehabilitating the bodymind of an individual rather than addressing policies and processes that create the conditions through which disabled people live.15 Both individual and medical models of disability interpret it as “a problematic characteristic inherent in particular bodies and minds. Solving the problem of disability, then, means correcting, normalizing, or eliminating the pathological individual … The future of disability is understood more in terms of medical research, individual treatments, and familial assistance than increased social supports or widespread social change.”16 Rejecting the medical model, disability scholars and activists frame and interpret disability in social terms. Disability is not a condition that occurs within the bodyminds of particular individuals but rather that which occurs through both built environments and social and cultural patterns that identify some bodies as disabled and exclude, stigmatize, and pathologize other bodyminds and ways of being in the world together. The category of disability can thus only be thought in relationship to the assumptions, practices, and regulations that make able-bodiedness and able-mindedness logical and necessary.17 In response to the individual or medical model of disability, many disability scholars have proposed a social model of disability that distinguishes impairment from disability.18 Impairment designates a mental or physical limitation while disability frames the social exclusions, including the social and cultural meanings given to those impairments. In other words, it is not impairments that disable but the social and architectural worlds that create barriers for disabled people. For example, while blindness is an impairment limiting sight, blindness is a disability because both social and architectural worlds pathologize blindness and create barriers for blind people’s full participation in seeing worlds. Challenging and extending this model, Kafer herself identifies a “political/relational model” of disability, situating disability as a category that is “implicated in relations of power and that those relations, their assumptions, and their effects are contested and contestable, open to dissent and debate.”19 In this model any designation of either “impairment” or “disability” is understood as social in construction (and contested and contestable); bodies as well as environments might be understood as disabling. Framing disability in political and relational terms emphasizes that disability and able-bodiedness are issues that affect everyone, not simply people who identify as disabled. By this Kafer

Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 4. Ibid., 5. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 6. 18 Within disability studies and disability theologies, scholars have proposed a range of models of disability that both share common assumptions and differ in the language and structures used to imagine disability and human futures. For the purposes of this essay, I use and explore Kafer’s summary of models as ones that I have found helpful for constructive theological work at the intersections of disability studies and theology. 19 Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, 9. 14 15

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is not arguing that all lives are disabled but rather that the construction and interpretation of disability and ability have consequences for all of us, not simply because many of us will experience a disability in our lifetime but because assumptions about ability and disability inform every part of our lives. Thus, paying critical attention to disability as a political and relational lens changes the ways we regard and investigate every aspect of the “common good”—even those parts that may not seem to be about disability per se. “Disability” itself becomes a site for “collective reimagining” of the people we are now and want to become, of the ways we participate in, resource, protect, regulate, and segregate our communities.20 Following the models used by Kafer and other disability studies scholars provides a helpful framework for liturgical and sacramental theology. Rather than a focus on accommodating or segregating a few individuals with “special” needs or focusing on removing barriers through “special” practices of welcome and inclusion, however vital those practices may be, attending to disability and the wisdom of disability experience probes basic assumptions about what it means to be embodied creatures who dwell together as we anticipate the world that God desires for us. Liturgical theologian Kimberly Bracken Long argues, To consider worship as an embodied event is to explore all the various ways bodies are involved in meeting God. We are the body of Christ: we are fed by Christ’s body; we encounter the divine in bodily experience; we worship with our bodies; we tend to others’ bodies as part of our Christian vocation. In short to acknowledge the embodied nature of worship—indeed all of Christian discipleship—is to explore the sacramentality of all of life.21 In turn disability scholars might argue that to explore the sacramentality of all of life is to consider carefully the wide range of ways that bodies meet, eat, encounter, worship, and tend to other bodies. For embodied experiences of disability frequently interrogate the ways we represent and imagine “the body” itself. Disability scholar Tobin Siebers describes the challenge of imagining new expressions of embodiment through bodies that simultaneously experience and perform both disability and ability: “Blind hands envision the faces of old acquaintances. Deaf eyes listen to public television. Tongues touch-type letters home to Mom and Dad. Feet wash breakfast dishes. Mouths sign autographs.”22 Rethinking disability and relationships to and among disabled people invariably shifts understandings of what it means to share or participate in the body of Christ through sacraments as well as the sacramentality of lived experiences. Yet to romanticize, exoticize, or turn these ways of representing disability into new forms of “ability” is also to miss that disability as a political and relational category seeks not to invent or invest in new forms of ableism, new frontiers for the abled body, but to challenge common assumptions about ability and disability. Resisting ableism in sacraments and understandings of sacramentality requires not only accommodating disabled peoples’ participation in sacraments but also encouraging critical reflection on social, cultural, and theological assumptions about what it means to have and to be able to share one’s body with others. While the possibilities of doing so are as diverse Ibid. Kimberly Bracken Long, The Worshiping Body: The Art of Leading Worship (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 14. 22 Tobin Anthony Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 54. 20 21

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as experiences of disability, in this chapter I will consider three insights that might inform sacraments and sacramental practice: (1) insights regarding the bodies of those who gather, (2) insights regarding the creation of access to forms of shared ritual and embodiment, and (3) insights regarding our understandings of God’s presence with us in and through the sacraments.

UNCONVENTIONAL EMBODIMENT: DISCERNED AND INCORPORATED In her classic description of church and disability, theologian Nancy Eiesland begins with this assertion: The corporeal is for people with disabilities the most real. Unwilling and unable to take our bodies for granted, we attend to the kinesis of knowledge. That is, we become keenly aware that our physical selves determine our perceptions of the social and physical world. These perceptions, like our bodies, are often nonconforming and disclose new categories and models of thought.23 For Eiesland a disabled body informs human understanding of embodiment both as struggle and as means of witnessing to truth about God and the world. Such wisdom is born out of the rub of disability experience with social, political, and communal worlds that were not made for disabled people.24 Eiesland’s liberatory theology of disability turns to particular “bodies of knowledge” to model this epistemology: the stories of two women discerning how “to inhabit” their bodies well. Disability activist Diane DeVries was born without hands or feet, yet accepted her body as healthy and beautiful, as “compact and streamlined,” in spite of the negative reactions of those around her. As a child, she was encouraged to “normalize” both the way she looked and her body’s capacities through the use of prosthetic limbs but resisted these additions to herself. DeVries developed her own feelings and practices of “independence” that were not premised on physical detachment from others.25 As DeVries grew, she found ways to better incorporate technology into an understanding of herself: “her body doesn’t stop with the bones and flesh. She incorporates devices that promote her self-definition as a healthy, mobile, and intact woman.”26 Maintaining these understandings of and commitments to her own body required her to leave some communities, including churches, struggle within others, and seek out those that helped her to discern and affirm her unconventional body. In contrast with DeVries, poet and activist Nancy Mairs developed multiple sclerosis when she was twenty-nine years old. She initially resisted the transformation she was experiencing until she came to accept that “this body was going to be with her for a long time. She would have to conceive a body that was both habitable and inhospitable—a body of plenty and privation.”27 She gradually came to understand disability as a particular “aesthetic experience”: the body was more than a flesh and bones self—she was brace and Eiesland, The Disabled God, 31. See also Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, eds., About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times (New York: Liveright, 2019), xxiii. 25 Eiesland, The Disabled God, 38. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 42. 23 24

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bones and canes and electric scooter. Eiesland describes it as “performing an authentic alchemy using disability and honesty” and fashioning “a difficult life, in contrast to our constant search for ease and painlessness.”28 In spite of her struggles, Mairs came to understand her corporeal life not as something to be overcome but as her teacher, a source of her wisdom as well as her limitation. Eiesland describes both DeVries and Mairs as performing bodily “incorporation.” They adapted devices into their bodies while also resisting technologies that made their lives less habitable. They extended their sense of embodiment toward the bodies of others (“the disabled body is one that is not occupied alone”). In different ways each one found a means for creative expression in terms of activism and writing.29 Reflecting on her own experiences of disability, theologian Sharon Betcher calls these practices of modifying and incorporating the body in light of disability a “prosthetic erratic” and a rejection of the desire to make a body “whole.” Arguing with feminist philosopher Donna Harraway, who suggested that all human bodies are cyborgs, part human and part technological extensions of self.30 Betcher sees in this cyborg a justification for perfecting the body, another miracle cure that erases persons with disabilities by making them “normal” and “whole” again. Such cyborg ideals, she fears, are an attempt to conform to the perfected bodies of consumer capitalism and its visions for standardized beauty, productivity, and independence.31 In light of these fears of disability, Betcher argues against modifications designed to make others feel better, to “normalize” social relations that allow others to control her body and mitigate their fears. Instead she discerns forms of embodiment that fit her own sense of movement at particular times and within particular environments and sets of relationships.32 In another example of discerning embodiment, disability scholar, rabbi, and activist Julia Watts Belser seeks to describe a complex relationship between her human body and the material means of her movement, practices of “living and loving across the human/nonhuman divide.”33 In contrast to identifying the practice of wheelchair use as something to which users are bound, Belser reveals a grace-filled relationship that changes over time and involves both intimacy and challenge: “Wheelchairs occupy an intimate space: simultaneously an expression of our own body-forms and a distinct, independent entity—a vital, vibrant being.”34 Belser focuses on relationality that conjures complex forms of interdependence of people with the material world and other bodies (those who may at times push wheelchair users) and emphasizes the agency of disabled people simultaneously.35 Such reflections are not forms of sentiment and inspiration for abled people but offer fresh ways of conceiving relationships that trouble conventional understandings of human embodiment and of tools and practices of access. Belser argues for the political power of such practices: “By challenging the prevailing tendency to

Ibid., 46. Ibid., 47–8. 30 Harraway makes these arguments in her famous 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto.” In many ways her project is similar to Betcher’s in that she wants to affirm body as affinity with others. 31 Betcher is arguing not only with Harraway and with consumer capitalism but also with the “transcendent idealisms” of scholars like Plato and Augustine. 32 Sharon V. Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 104. 33 Julia Watts Belser, “Vital Wheels: Disability, Relationality, and the Queer Animacy of Vibrant Things,” Hypatia, 31:1 (Winter 2016): 9. 34 Ibid., 7. 35 Ibid., 13–18. 28 29

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divide the world into ‘dull matter’ and ‘vibrant life,’ wheelers’ queer animacies demand a revaluation of the relations between people and things.”36 Disabled bodies and the relationships they create and maintain thus mark the complex borders of human bodies as well as relationships with human and nonhuman things. Such “bodies of knowledge” suggest some important ways disability experiences provide templates for this task of “incorporating” a body that is both given and discerned over time rather than made to conform to ableist ideals. If we follow Kafer’s lead, understanding disability as a site of collective reimagining of social forms rather than as a problem to be solved, what might it mean for sacramental practice to negotiate and discern rather than assume knowledge of human embodiment? First, discerning rather than assuming embodiment is a call for liturgical communities to pay witness to, call forth, and affirm narratives and testimonies (bodies of knowledge) about experiences of communal participation in sacramental practice. Rather than desiring and requiring uniform participation, narratives of bodily participation bring forth multiple modalities for participation in sacraments as well as understandings of sacramental encounters that occur both within and outside of ecclesial spaces. Different ways of being and sharing a body with others might thus become integral rather than exceptional modes of participation as they stretch understandings of embodiment and disrupt uniform forms of participation as well as understandings of incarnation and revelation. Such narratives might affirm and support a normative plurality of practices, so that congregations anticipate that those present will access and participate in the sacraments in different ways. Such testimonies might also transform a focus on individuals to recognize sets of relationships and social artistries that make possible sacramental participation with and through others. Furthermore, such narratives might reveal sacraments and sacramental participation as an important way in which Christians come to identify and affirm their own bodies through the presence of God and others. Finally, such bodies of knowledge might help communities confess and be accountable to experiences of harm in relation to the sacraments. Such narratives also invite intentional and ongoing communal discernment regarding the material forms of participation. If wheelchairs, sign language interpreters, support animals, and screens are all understood as integral extensions of human embodiment and relationship to, for, and with another and God, this might lead Christians into deeper understandings of the God who is with us in and through multiple fleshly forms. Discussions and debates over sacraments frequently reveal diverse understandings of the means through which we extend and share embodiment together. While many Christians assume unmediated access to one another through conventional forms of embodiment, disability wisdom stretches liturgical and sacramental imagination around forms of bodily engagement and bodily incorporation. To discern shared embodiment and to desire disability within practices of shared embodiment in the sacraments means resisting a desire to normalize or make “whole,” stigmatize or segregate the differences in ability and participation that are present in any community but rather to fashion a dis/abled body of Christ. Becoming the dis/abled body of Christ requires shifting understandings and practices of creating access together from those that are burdensome and logistical to acts of love and relationship.

Ibid., 7.

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ACCESS AS (SACRAMENTAL) LOVE If disability communities emphasize intentional and ongoing discernment as a means of shared embodiment, they also describe the collective work of creating access as one of love. Such love is not sentimental or apolitical but relational and covenantal, a practice of solidarity that shifts the burden away from people with disabilities to communities that engage access as a liberatory practice for the whole community. Disability activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha poses the question this way: “What does it mean to shift our ideas of access and care (whether it’s disability, childcare, economic access, or many more) from an individual chore, an unfortunate cost of having an unfortunate body, to a collective responsibility that’s maybe even deeply joyful?” Describing collective access as “revolutionary love without charity,” she asks how we might reconceive tasks that are often emphasized as burdens on both individuals and societies without romanticizing such struggle: “How do we learn to do this love work of collective care that lifts us instead of abandons us, grapples with all the deep ways in which care is complicated?”37 While many disability theologians have turned to models of friendship to consider the inclusion of disabled people within Christian community or recognition of the imago dei in one another, a number of disability activists turn to the language of love to name the radical collaborative practice of creating access together. Such interpretations of the work of access build on a concept articulated by disability scholar and activist Mia Mingus. Mingus uses “access intimacy” to describe practices of interdependence that go beyond a quest for perfect forms of access to a reorientation of human community in which abled people lean into the shared work of inhabiting disabled worlds and creating new ones: “Access intimacy at once recognizes and understands the relational and human quality of access, while simultaneously deepening the relationships involved. It moves the work of access out of the realm of only logistics and into the realm of relationships and understanding disabled people as humans, not burdens.”38 Mingus notes that such a reorientation invites abled people “to inhabit” the worlds of disabled people because of the value of disability rather than out a sense of charity or through a checklist of accommodations to be met. In defining collective access as a principle of disability justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha also emphasizes some of its prominent features: refusal of shame associated with access needs, creativity, flexibility and a willingness to explore new ways of doing things, recognition that access needs might be met privately or through a collective, holding autonomy within community, and claiming vulnerability while also respecting strength.39 Both Piepzna-Samarasinha and Mingus describe the ways collective experimentations with creating access as love emerge out of shared understandings among disability communities with particular emphasis on disability emerging out of black/brown and queer crip communities. They also acknowledge the challenges that abled persons have embracing such radical understandings and practices of collective access.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018), 33. 38 Mia Mingus, “Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice,” Leaving Evidence (blog), April 12, 2017, https://leav​inge​vide​nce.wordpr​ess.com/2017/04/12/acc​ess-intim​acy-inte​rdep​ende​nce-and-dis​abil​ity-just​ice/. 39 Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work, 28. 37

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While such scholars and activists do not frame practices of collective access within religious terms, disability scholars have both explicitly and implicitly framed “access as love” through images and narratives of the triune God, symbols read through experiences of what Eiesland calls the “hidden history” of disability. For Eiesland, following Jesus means conversion to the disabled God as one who created access through his wounds and the contingency of his own body to share practices of eating together, survival, and mutual empowerment with his disciples.40 For Weiss-Block the Spirit is companion, advocate, and point of ecclesiological entry for disabled communities,41 and for Betcher Spirit is known as pli or one who unfolds possibilities, prepares places, and fosters bonds of social obligation to those with whom we share flesh, space, and time.42 Engaging such images of the triune God places the shared work of creating access as a form of sacramental participation in the life and love of God. Rather than understanding practices of access as necessary but difficult and unwanted disruptions to normed practices or begrudged forms of accommodation that disrupt access to God and one another, participating in collective access is a form of shared embodiment that is both response to and encounter with God who provides access to God-self and to all creation through material objects and human relationships. Collective access as participation in the love of God exchanges a narrow practice of assistance or exception for the practice of responding to God’s grace and love, as well as participation in the grace of access to one another through which the Spirit makes possible shared embodiment. Such practices of collective access require vigilant attention to assumed liturgical borders and perimeters of sacred spaces in order to share in collective responsibility for the presence, absence, and participation of those who claim belonging to one another in and through sacraments. Sacramental access thus begins with reflection on the journeys that those who desire to participate in church must take. Liturgical theologian Alexander Schmemann models this kind of reflection when he identifies the work of gathering as sacramental: The journey begins when Christians leave their homes and beds. They leave, indeed, their life in this present and concrete world, and whether they have to drive fifteen miles or walk a few blocks, a sacramental act is already taking place, an act which is the very condition of everything else that is happening. For now they are on their way to constitute the Church, or to be or eat, to be transformed into the Church of God … a new community with a new life.43 If collective access as love begins with the work of both gathering and sending the bodies of those who gather, sacramental access stretches and extends beyond a particular ritual moment in a liturgy to the politics of shared spaces beyond congregations and recognized liturgical sites.

Eiesland, The Disabled God, 94, 98–105. Jennie Weiss Block, Copious Hosting: A Theology of Access for People with Disabilities, 1st ed. (New York: Continuum, 2002), 138–42. 42 Sharon V. Betcher, Spirit and the Obligation of Social Flesh: A Secular Theology for the Global City (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 165–78. 43 Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 27. 40 41

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TRANSFORMING SYMBOLS: REMEMBERING AND INVOKING THE PRESENCE OF GOD Disability studies invites reconsideration of the sacramental bodies of those who gather as well as practices of access. Disability as a critical lens also invites reflection on symbols at the center of Christian sacramentality, symbols through which we know, name, and respond to divine presence with us. Access to the sacraments begins with transformation of the religious symbols that assume, idealize, and mandate able-bodiedness. For Eiesland and for other theologians, such transformation involves a conversion to different ways of understanding the power and presence of God with us, not a God who is battling for victory over finitude nor an object of pity or sympathy, neither a “suffering servant” nor a “conquering lord” but an ordinary survivor who returns to practice interdependence with his disciples and friends.44 Connecting this transformation to participation in sacraments, Eiesland emphasizes the practice of remembrance: Who is the one we remember in the Eucharist? It is the disabled God who is present … the God who was physically tortured, arose from the dead, and is present in heaven and on earth, disabled and whole … For in Jesus’ resurrection, the full and accessible presence of the disabled God is among us in our continuing human history, as people with disabilities, as the temporarily abled-bodied, as church, and as communion of struggle.45 The act of remembering Jesus as disabled in word and image, through prayer and story, reorients both disabled and abled people to the knowledge of a God who himself rejected compulsory able-bodiedness in order to share human flesh with others. Theologian Thomas Reynolds argues that to imitate this Christ is to choose the same vulnerability and openness to creation that God does. To be made in the imago dei is to be marked by “creativity, relationality, and availability” of a God who chooses to work in interrelationship with God’s creation without coercion.46 While Eiesland and other theologians identify the presence and work of the risen Christ through engaging Scripture and sacrament together in light of disability experience, crip scholar Sharon Betcher focuses on the Spirit as one whose invocation has often been used against disabled people: “In theology, Spirit has often been made the agent of Final Perfection, telescoped in terms of miraculous remediation of disabilities and magnified in purging and purifying the world’s brokenness.”47 Borrowing an image from the poet Emily Dickinson, Betcher evokes Spirit “on the slant,” one whose work is neither perfection, wholeness, or transcendence of the “variations and vulnerabilities” of embodiment.48 Practices of calling down the Spirit’s power imply forms of transcendence that foster rejection of the multiple forms of life and the conditions for their flourishing.49 Spirit “on the slant” is one whose power makes it possible to trust and to mind the world beyond the binaries of wholeness and brokenness that so often frame theological, colonial, and capitalistic narratives of power and progress. To pray for this Spirit’s power is to invoke

Eiesland, The Disabled God, 102. Ibid., 107. 46 Thomas E. Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2008), 178–86. 47 Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement, 3. 48 Ibid., 3–4. 49 Ibid., 1–24. 44 45

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one who helps us engage the challenging realities of embodied existence and trust rather than escape from them or desire an “elsewhere” free of corporeal contingencies. Resymbolizing divine power and presence through a disability critical lens also provokes the symbols of liturgical leadership, the symbolic roles of those who preside over sacraments and interpret sacramentality. Interrogation of symbols draws critical attention to the abilities or qualities that are assumed necessary for those who preside, those who are “called out from the body” in order “to serve that same body.”50 In her meditation on a spirituality of presiding that does not essentialize particular abilities (such as the use of one’s voice), liturgical theologian Siobhan Garrigan suggests that perhaps our understanding of presiding itself must shift not to devalue the materiality of the bodies of those who preside but to expand liturgical imagination around the embodiment of presiders. Transforming her understanding of a particular kind of voice and speech as essential for presiding, Garrigan describes the need “to dwell in a place where that voice that can bear the word of God can speak through a prosthetic … and myriad other bodily ways.”51 Such imagination, argues Garrigan, might move liturgical leaders and assemblies from perception of presiding as something accomplished though the abilities of individuals to an act of mutuality and collaboration among humans and between humans and nonhumans: to the ideal of presiding as “interactive presence.”52 A transformed theology and spirituality of presiding emerges from an awareness of Spirit as “intrinsically mutual and relational reality,” being and appearing as it “works with.”53 Such an antiableist pneumatology of presiding invariably transforms and deepens understandings of the symbolic body of pastor, presider, and liturgical leader as well as the symbol of the assembly.

CONCLUSION: SACRAMENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND ACCESS TO THE ASSEMBLY OF MARKED BODIES Just as there is no single experience of disability or of disabled people’s experiences of the church,54 the wisdom, theory, and theology emerging from experiences of disability and ableism are multiple. The manifold wisdom of disability provides capacious road maps for transforming understandings of embodiment, access, and symbol that are integral to participation in the sacraments as well as understandings of sacramentality. Such wisdom adds dimensions and details to other liturgical maps that emphasize marked differences at the intersection of gift and oppression as essential to sacraments and sacramental life. For liturgical and sacramental borders are places that expand theological imagination, but they are also places of risk and conflict as the marks of particular bodies map sites of power and privilege. Theologian M. Shawn Copeland argues that sacraments themselves are intimately connected with an understanding of the body as “a contested site—ambiguous and sacred, wounded and creative, malleable and resistant—disclosing and mediating ‘more.’ ”55 For Copeland to take the body seriously as a site of theological and sacramental anthropology is See Long, The Worshiping Body, 2. Siobhan Garrigan, “The Spirituality of Presiding,” Liturgy 22:2 (2007): 5. 52 Ibid., 6–8. 53 Ibid., 7. 54 Eiesland, The Disabled God, 69. 55 M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 56. 50 51

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to understand bodies as “marked” by particularities. While focusing on such particularities risks “fragmenting” the human person, these risks are obligatory for minoritized bodies in the context of empire. Yet the risks of marked bodies are also gift, because God chose to reveal God-self in and through the marked body of Jesus Christ.56 In turn Jesus gathered those whose bodies were marked in particular ways, including persons with disabilities.57 These marks were essential to a new people of God formed from those who had been “denied access to restorative moments of celebration, to the material benefits of culture and society.”58 Thus bodily marks themselves are both relativized by the flesh of Christ, the flesh of the church, and at the same time become themselves sacramental. Copeland argues that if our siblings are not with and beside us as we participate in the Eucharist, the flesh of Christ is incomplete: “The sacramental aesthetics of Eucharist, the thankful living manifestation of God’s image through particularly marked flesh, demands vigorous display of difference in race and culture and tongue, gender and sex and sexuality.”59 Echoing the language of incorporation that Eiesland uses to imagine the work of inhabiting a disabled body, Copeland describes “this taking us in, this in-corporation, is akin to sublation, not erasure, not uniformity” as we are drawn through kin-dom practices to new identities that “preserve the integrity and significance of our body marks.”60 Sacraments reveal or disclose that which is hidden: both human persons and the triune God. Sacraments thus function as “counter-imagination” to any society or form of ecclesial authority that would usurp the mysteries and marks of the body of Christ.61 While sacraments have often participated in the dynamics of ecclesial domination rather than the dynamics of love, at the heart of the praxis there is a revelation of the body of Christ: marked bodies have access to one another, not just to eat together but to practice solidarity. Copeland thus echoes Eiesland’s vision of the church as communion of struggle: a political body where people are both “holding our bodies together” and “acting out.”62 Sacraments communicate and create relationships beyond uniformity to a shared vision of humanity that values and assumes difference. As we join in recognition and solidarity with the marks of others, sacraments call us to new ways of understanding marked embodiment. For both Copeland and Eiesland, sacramental participation that acknowledges and binds marked bodies to one another and to God without disappearing difference requires conversion and eros. To accept the materiality, the flesh of Christ, is to be converted to new ways of perceiving and desiring one another. As Christians come to perceive and acknowledge the necessity of marked bodies for the sacraments such transformation is facility and also eros/desire for the marks that make it difficult to accept the body of Christ as it is. The marked body of the Risen Christ returns as the Disabled God to encourage new experiences of embodiment, causing confusion among those he meets who no longer recognize him. For the disciples to discern the body of Christ, to be converted to new ways of discerning the Disabled God, is frightening and challenging but also joyful. Such

Ibid., 57. Copeland’s description of Jesus as healer in this chapter departs from some liberatory theologies of disability. 58 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 62. 59 Ibid., 82. 60 Ibid., 83. 61 Ibid., 125. 62 Eiesland, The Disabled God, 94–5. 56 57

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perception emerges from the wisdom of disability experience and is shared across and at the intersections of other experiences of minoritized embodiment: the spaces in which God chooses to come and dwell with us.

FURTHER READING Betcher, Sharon V. Spirit and the Politics of Disablement. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007. Eiesland, Nancy L. The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994. Kafer, Alison Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Reynolds, Thomas E. Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2008. Spurrier, Rebecca F. The Disabled Church: Human Difference and the Art of Communal Worship. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.

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Sacraments in Migration and Migration in Sacraments PETER C. PHAN

This essay seeks to show how sacraments, when celebrated in migrant communities, are communal and public symbols, that is, efficacious signs and instruments, of God’s saving grace for the community of migrants in their specific condition as migrants. Beginning with a brief survey of global migration as the context in which to explore how sacraments are understood and celebrated, the essay first presents a theology of the Church that celebrates the sacraments as a faith community of migrants, by migrants, with migrants, and for migrants. Next, it elaborates a constructive theology of the sacraments from the perspective of this migration ecclesiology, with special attention to Baptism and the Eucharist (“Sacraments in Migration”). Last, it highlights how sacramentality—the Godwardness and eschatological character of creation—is newly understood and lived in light of the global phenomenon of migration. It is suggested that sacraments fully achieve their sacramentality when they are celebrated as efficacious symbols of the Migrant Triune God (“Migration in Sacraments”). The God who is graciously present in the sacraments is God the Primordial Migrant, the Jesus who mediates this divine grace in them is the Paradigmatic Migrant, and the Holy Spirit who transforms and sanctifies believers through them is the Power of Migration.1

THE “AGE OF MIGRATION” AS THE CONTEXT OF SACRAMENTAL THEOLOGY Theology, especially when it seeks to understand how Christian faith is to be lived and celebrated, such as sacramental and liturgical theologies, cannot be formulated in the abstract, deducing conclusions from the sources of faith, such as the Bible and the Christian Tradition. Rather it needs to critically correlate Christian beliefs with the signs of the time, with the former posing questions and providing answers to the latter and the latter posing questions and providing answers to the former as well. That this approach to the sacraments from the perspective of migration is unusual is confirmed by the fact that the seven hundred-page The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, ed. Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) does not have any discussion of how sacramental theology and especially sacramental celebrations are impacted by the global phenomenon of migration, a lacuna all the more regrettable since the book intends to offer not only historical and ecumenical but also missional perspectives on the sacraments. 1

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Note that this method of critical correlation is different from the Tillichian method of correlation that takes the signs of the time as the question to which the Bible provides the answer. Rather it correlates the question posed by the signs of the time with that posed by the Bible; similarly, it correlates the answer given by the signs of the time with that given by the Bible. Its task is to examine the questions of both the signs of the time and of the Bible to frame the theological question more accurately as well as to listen to the answers of both the signs of the time and the Bible to formulate an adequate theological answer to the question posed. There is thus a positive feedback loop between the questions of the signs of the time and the Bible on the one hand and the answers of the signs of the time and the Bible on the other hand. Doing theology in this way involves three interrelated steps. The first step, which may be called the “socio-analytic mediation” of the theological enterprise, seeks to determine the empirical facts as they are, as objectively and as truthfully as possible, as the context for theology. The second step, which may be called the “hermeneutical mediation,” interprets the empirical data in the light of the Bible and Christian Tradition and vice versa, the Bible and the Christian Tradition in the light of the empirical data to yield a theological theory. The third step, the “practical mediation,” seeks to embody the theological answer in the praxis of the Christian community, which in turn generates new data for theological reflection.2 Concerning migration and sacraments, my thesis is that our understanding of migration is deepened by our understanding of the sacraments; and vice versa, our understanding of the sacraments is deepened by our understanding of migration. “Sacraments in migration,” that is, how sacraments are celebrated in migrant communities, and “migration in sacraments,” that is, how migration affects our understanding of sacraments, mutually condition each other. By any standard, migration is currently a phenomenon of global and immense proportions such that our time has been rightly dubbed “The Age of Migration.”3 According to the UNHCR’s Refugee Population Statistics Database, at the end of 2019, there were 79.5 million forcibly displaced persons worldwide as a result of war, conflict, persecution, and human rights violation, of whom 45.7 million were internally displaced people, 26.0 million refugees, 4.2 million asylum seekers, and 3.6 million Venezuelans displaced abroad.4

On the “socio-analytic mediation,” “hermeneutical mediation,” and “practical mediation” in the theological method, see Peter C. Phan, “Method in Liberation Theologies,” Theological Studies, 61:1 (2000): 40–63. 3 This is the title of the best one-volume study of international migration: Stephen Castles, Hein De Haas, and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 6th ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2020). On migration, the historical, sociological, anthropological, and political studies, in addition to specialized journals and websites, are numberless. The following general works are worth consulting: Russell King, People on the Move: An Atlas of Migration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1010); Paul Collier, Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Alejandro Portes and Josh DeWind, Rethinking Migration: New Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007); Caroline B. Brettell and James F. Hollifield, eds., Migration Theory: Talking across Disciplines (New York: Routledge, 2008); David G. Gutiėrrez and Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo, eds., Nation and Migration Past and Future (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser, and Eveline Reisenauer, Transnational Migration (Malden, MA: Polity, 2013); Joseph H. Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Karen O’Reilly, International Migration and Social Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Alice Bloch and Giorgia Donà, eds., Forced Migration: Current Issues and Debates (London: Routledge, 2019); and Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani, eds., A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2013). 4 See www.unhcr.org, accessed July 2, 2020. A total of 4.5 million Venezuelans have left their country at the end of 2019, including 93,300 refugees, 794,500 asylum seekers, and 3.6 million Venezuelans displaced abroad. 2

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Here I use the term “migrant” to refer to people who have changed residence within their countries of birth (internally displaced persons) or across national borders (international migrants), besides people forced to migrate (refugees). The UNHCR uses the term “refugee” exclusively for people forced to flee from their home or country due to “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”5 It does not use the term “migrant” to designate people of forced migration. While this restricted use of the term “refugee” is rooted in international legal instruments, refugees of course are not the only migrants. In other words, every refugee is a migrant but not every migrant is a refugee. If, however, we consider migration in general, that is, as the phenomenon of people living, temporarily or permanently, outside their places of birth due to reasons other than war and persecution, then the number of migrants worldwide is vastly greater than that of refugees. According to the United Nations Population Division, in 2019, there were 272 million international migrants, an increase of 51 million since 2010, continuing an upward trend in both developed and developing regions. Female migrants outnumber male migrants in the north, whereas male migrants outnumber female migrants in the south.6 In addition to numbers, migration is an enormously complex and varied phenomenon. The UNHCR speaks of forced migrants or refugees as opposed to voluntary migrants. Other dichotomies include temporary vs. permanent, legal vs. illegal or undocumented, skilled vs. unskilled, and internal vs. international. Of these categories of migrants, insofar as the number of migrants is concerned, the internal vs. international migrant dichotomy is the most significant. While there has been a veritable avalanche of scholarly studies of migration in geography, history, anthropology, sociology, economics, politics, and law, only a trickle of literature has begun to flow in religious and theological studies of migration. Let us take the United States as an example of the country of destination. As far as sacramental theology is concerned, the following questions will typically arise on the empirical side: Who are the migrants? Which countries do they come from? Is their migration forced or voluntary, internal or international, legal or undocumented? What are the causes, both structural and personal, that induce them to migrate? What are their gender, age, economic and social status, cultural background, and religion? Why do they choose to come to the United States? What city/states in the United States do they prefer to settle in? Do they settle together to form an ethnic community? What are the challenges and dangers facing the migrant on the way? Which laws and policies does the United States have toward migrants? Which strategies do migrants use to adapt to the United States? On the Christian side, questions such as the following will demand attention: Which faith do the migrants practice? Or no faith? Are there migrants who adhere to nonChristian religions such as Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Chinese religions? To which denomination do migrants who are Christians belong, including Evangelical and Pentecostal? Do migrants join already-existing parishes or congregations in the United States or do they bring their own Churches and leaders with them? Do sacramental practices such as Baptism and Eucharist figure centrally in their lives and worship? How do they celebrate Sunday Mass or religious services? Most importantly, does their experience of migration and settlement shape their understanding of sacraments and

See www.unhcr.org/en-us/what-is-a-refu​gee.html. See www.unpop​ulat​ion.org.

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the ways they celebrate them? More broadly, does migration shape their understanding of God, Christ, Spirit, and Church? These and many other questions will accompany our reflections on migration and the sacraments.

MIGRATION AND THE CHURCH The first issue to be considered is how the Church, which, together with Christ as the High Priest, celebrates the sacraments, is a faith community of migrants, by migrants, with migrants, and for migrants. For most of us who are members of locally circumscribed mainline Churches, it is difficult to grasp that without migrations there would be no Church at all. The migrations that once founded these Churches are forgotten in the collective memory of the past, which imagines that these Churches have existed fully formed from the very beginning. At best, a few members of the Church would migrate to foreign countries, mostly for a time, to “do missions” and then return home. The Church as a whole, however, has little to do with migrating; on the contrary, it settles down in a place and grows into a stable but stationary institution. Nevertheless, Jesus’ “Great Commission” declares: “Go [poreuthentes] therefore and make disciples of all nations [panta ta ethnē]” (Mt. 28:19). Note that in the original Greek, the present participle poreuthentes is used (“going”) and not the imperative (“go”), thus tying the making of disciples intimately to the “going,” the latter being the condition of possibility for the former. Furthermore, this “going” must cross the borders, natural and artificial, of all nations (panta ta ethnē). Without “going,” there would be no Church, more precisely, no universal (“catholic”) Church at all. Migration to all countries is essential to the very being of the Church. Along with oneness, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity, “migrantness,” to coin a term, is a mark of the Church. Without it, the catholicity (universality) of the Church, which must exist everywhere and include everyone, cannot be realized. How can the Church be everywhere unless its members migrate from everywhere to everywhere and thus become migrants in the places they enter? And how can the Church include everyone unless its members welcome each and every migrant who comes to them? To put it concretely, migrants, both those who go out as migrants and those who come in as migrants, make the Church. In a nutshell, the Church is a faith community of migrants, by migrants, with migrants, and for migrants. That the Church is an “institutional migrant,” constituted by a series of mass population movements, is clear from a brief survey of its two-thousand-year history. Some of its migrations are forced by violence and persecutions, the most important of which is the exodus from Jerusalem after the destruction of the Temple in 70 ad, which brought about not only the Jewish Diaspora but also the Christian Diaspora, spreading Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. Other migrations were not caused by persecutions of the Church as such but by secular events that, however, involved voluntary migrations of Christians, such as the Emperor Constantine’s move of the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to the city of Byzantium (Constantinople) in 324, the so-called Barbarian Invasions (Völkerwanderung) in the Western Roman Empire in the sixth century, and the so-called discovery of the New World in 1492. Other voluntary migrations were occasioned by religious missions such as those made by the two Byzantine brothers Methodius and Cyril in the ninth century, Catholic missionaries to Asia in the sixteenth century, Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth century, and Evangelicals and Pentecostals in the twentieth century. One massive forced migration is caused by the transatlantic slave trade from the

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sixteenth to the nineteenth century in which over 12 million Africans were shipped to the Americas. Other events that caused huge mass movements of the Christian population include the First and Second World Wars, and today, the wars in the Middle East and ecological destruction. In each of these migrations, the Church acquired a distinctly new face, shaped by migrants and the places where they migrated. In this Church as an institutional migrant, which aspects of the sacraments need to be highlighted in their celebrations? The answer depends on the empirical data that the socio-analytic mediation unearths on a particular type of migration. For instance, where migration stems from poverty, the celebration may emphasize sacraments as food and drink; if from violence and persecution, the sacraments as promoting justice and integral liberation; if from war and violent conflicts, the sacraments as creating peace and harmony; if from ecological destruction, the sacraments as protecting and healing of the environment; and so on.

SACRAMENTS IN MIGRATION What is being suggested above is that since sacramental and liturgical celebrations are actions of the Church as an institutional migrant, they should be framed and carried out from the perspective of migration. Of course, not all sacraments can express the experiences of migration equally. Nor do all Christian Churches accept that there are seven sacraments, as the Catholic Church does. However, almost all Churches practice Baptism, either infant Baptism or believers’ Baptism, and most Reformation Churches celebrate the Eucharist.7 Using the hermeneutical mediation as explained above, we now turn to a consideration of how these two sacraments can be celebrated in the context of global migration by interpreting the sacraments in the light of the empirical data about migration and the Church mentioned above and vice versa.8 A preliminary word about liturgy and sacraments is in order. By “liturgy” is meant the public celebration and reenactment by Christ the High Priest and the Church the Body of Christ of the Paschal Mystery, the work of the Trinity, that is, God the Father’s plan (“economy”) of salvation for humanity and the cosmos, carried out through the ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension of his Son Jesus, and achieved by the power of the Holy Spirit, through which the Church participates in the heavenly liturgy. The liturgy is therefore Trinitarian, Christological, pneumatological, ecclesial, cosmic, and eschatological in character and movement. The liturgy is celebrated through the sacraments (the “sacramental economy”).9 By “sacrament” is meant the Church’s ritual action believed to have been instituted by Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit to convey God’s grace. Thus, it is an external and visible sign or symbol, through word and material elements, and an instrument of an inward and invisible grace. Because a sacrament is Christ’s and the Church’s action in the

One landmark document is Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, commonly known as the Lima Text, issued by the World Council of Churches (Faith and Order Paper No. 111) (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1982). 8 Needless to say, no comprehensive theology of Baptism and the Eucharist is offered here but only a reflection on the impact of migration on their celebrations. For a survey of the sacraments from the Reformation to today, see “Part IV: From the Reformation Through Today,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, 269–452. 9 Liturgy and the sacraments are intimately connected with each other: Liturgy is sacramental and sacraments are liturgical. On this point, see David W. Fagerberg, “Liturgy, Signs, and Sacraments,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, 455–65. 7

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Holy Spirit, it is efficacious, that is, it conveys grace by itself (ex opere operato), and not by virtue of the spiritual qualities of the human celebrant or the recipient.10 However, to be spiritually fruitful it requires the faith of the celebrant, the recipient, and the community.

Baptism in Migration In the recent past a large number of migrants to the United States, especially from Vietnam, the Philippines, India, Mexico, Central America, South America, and Europe, are already baptized, and if they are not, mostly from China, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Indonesia, they and their children often convert to Christianity. But even when they are already baptized, especially as infants, a catechesis on Baptism that starts from their varied experiences of migration is particularly appropriate for them and their children. It is here that the experiences of migration should be invoked to make the meanings of Baptism real and meaningful for them. A migration-oriented theology and celebration of Baptism can highlight how the Old Testament themes of Noah’s ark during the deluge, the crossing of the Red Sea, and the crossing of the Jordan River recall the physical, at times mortal, dangers migrants have gone through on the high seas to reach their countries of destination. The water, which they thirsted for during their wanderings in the desert or the jungle, is now the Holy Spirit’s living water into which they are immersed or which is poured over the head three times as part of the baptismal rites. More specifically, for migrants who have escaped from deadly violence and war, for whom migration is forced and traumatic, Baptism as burial into Christ’s death and rebirth through water and the Holy Spirit will have a special meaning. As Christ died, was buried, and rose to new life, these migrants have undergone the dangers of death, survived them, and now experience a new birth and a new beginning in their adopted country. This new physical and spiritual life is expressed by the symbols of anointing, the white garment, and the lighted candle, which are parts of the ritual of Baptism. Furthermore, to live this new life in the new country, the migrants need special strength and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. These are given in the sacrament of Confirmation (in the Catholic Church) or Chrismation (in the Orthodox Church), which bestows the special gifts of the Holy Spirit so that the migrants can live their faith and bear witness to it in their new environment.11 Finally, Baptism incorporates the migrants into the Church, the Body of Christ, which includes all particular Churches. By virtue of Baptism, migrants and natives are bound together into the one People of God, irrespective of race, ethnicity, nationality, social class, political affiliation, and Church denomination. This ecumenical dimension of Baptism is particularly important for migrants who come from countries where Christianity is a minority religion or where Pentecostal/Evangelical Churches are the dominant denominations, for whom ecumenical unity does not figure prominently. Migrants need to understand that Baptism constitutes the sacramental bond of unity existing among all

A terse Latin definition of sacrament is signum efficax: signum referring to its visible and symbolic elements, and efficax to its nature as an effective instrument of divine grace. 11 In early Christianity, Confirmation is an intrinsic part of Baptism, administered by the priest. In the West, for various reasons such as the increase of infant Baptism and rural parishes, Confirmation became separated from Baptism and was reserved to the bishop. There are two anointings: the first by the priest in Baptism, and the second, later, by the bishop in Confirmation. In the East, the two anointings are kept united, with the priest performing both the baptismal anointing and the Chrismation anointing with the holy oil (myron) that has been blessed by the bishop. 10

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Christians, in particular with other migrant groups with whom they must act in solidarity, and not compete, with one another.12

The Eucharist in Migration For Churches that celebrate the Eucharist, this sacrament constitutes, to use the expression of the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), “the source and summit of the Christian life.”13 It completes the process of Christian initiation that starts with Baptism and Confirmation. Christians believe that at the Last Supper, Christ instituted this sacrament as “a memorial of his death and resurrection: a sacrament of love, a sign of unity, a bond of charity, a Paschal banquet ‘in which Christ is consumed, the minds are filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us.’ ”14 This brief description of the Eucharist lists its five central elements: the Church’s thanksgiving and praise to God the Father; the memorial of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross and his resurrection; the Paschal Banquet in which the bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit; and the pledge of the eschatological glory. Space does not permit a full elaboration of these five aspects of the Eucharist from the perspective of migration; only some key aspects will be highlighted here. First of all, for Christian migrants, the Eucharist is the highest point of their weekly worship. There is nothing that makes migrants stand out more clearly than their Sunday gathering, in their own Churches or sharing space with white Christians’ Churches, dressed in their ethnic costumes, and celebrating the Sunday Eucharist with their own pastors, in their own languages, with their own songs and dances.15 The Eucharist is the place where migrants can be who they are, be “at home” spiritually and culturally, and can feel that God “hears” them in their own languages. In the Eucharist as thanksgiving to God the Father, migrants give thanks to God for their successful escape, pray for the safety of migrants still on their perilous journeys seeking a better life for themselves and their families, and invoke God’s blessings on their countries. In the Eucharist as the memorial of Jesus’ death and resurrection, migrants can identify their sufferings with Jesus’ passion and death, and their new life with his resurrection. In the Eucharist as “a sign of unity, a bond of love,” migrants build their solidarity with each other and with other ethnic and migrant groups. They also maintain communion with both their Churches in their homelands and the Churches in their new countries. This double unity is most manifest when they make collections to help the victims of natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes in their countries, and when they invite other migrant groups and native Christians to take part in the celebrations of their national For an insightful reflection on the ecumenical dimension of Baptism, see Geoffrey Wainwright, “One Baptism, One Church?” in The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, 466–85. 13 Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium), no. 11. 14 Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium), no. 47. Different Churches use different names for this sacrament: the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, the Breaking of Bread, the Eucharistic Assembly (synaxis), the Holy Sacrifice, Holy Communion, the Holy Mass, the Most Blessed Sacrament, the Holy and Divine Liturgy, and the Sacred Mysteries. 15 In the United States, Christian migrants that have separate parishes or congregations include Vietnamese, Mexicans, and Koreans. Other groups of migrants such as Nigerians, Hmongs, Cambodians, and Indians have separate worship but make use of the space of white churches or nonreligious buildings. Because of their fluency in English, Filipinos tend to worship in white churches. All migrant groups celebrate ethnic and cultural festivals in parishes, congregations, and civic centers. 12

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holidays and cultural festivals. This ecclesial communion reaches its apex in the Eucharist as the Paschal Banquet, where migrants share in the body and blood of Christ, the food and drink for hungry and thirsty migrants on their journeys. In this act of sacramental communion, they truly become with all Christians, foreign and native, what they are in Baptism, the Body of Christ, the Church. Furthermore, when the priest declares the bread to be “gift of the earth and work of human hands” and the wine “fruit of the vine and work of human hands,” migrants whose main backbreaking labor consists in harvesting the wheat and picking the grapes can truly say that the bread and the wine are produced by their very hands.16 It is their “dirty, dangerous, and demeaning” work, their sweat and tears, their bent backs and exhausted legs, that become the body and the blood of Christ. Finally, in the Eucharist as “a pledge of future glory,” the migrants find their hope and joy amidst the harsh reality of discrimination, exploitation, fear of arrest and deportation, separation from their families, lack of healthcare, and loneliness. The “future glory” is not the opium that dulls their pains, the pie-in-the-sky that cannot fill their empty stomachs. Rather it is the reign of justice and peace, where God wipes their tears, heals their wounds, forgives their sins, and reconciles all to Godself. This reign of God is not beyond and above this world. On the contrary, it is already present, albeit not yet fully, in the Eucharist as it is celebrated in the community of migrants, by migrants, with migrants, and for migrants.

MIGRATION IN THE SACRAMENTS In the preceding pages we have shown how sacraments should be celebrated in migration. It remains to examine how migration impacts our understanding of sacraments, and more precisely, our understanding of God. Which kind of God is present and active when the sacraments are celebrated from the perspective of migration? Since the Trinity is present and active in the sacraments, the question becomes threefold: Who is God the Father to whom the sacrifice of thanksgiving and praise is offered? Who is Jesus Christ whose death and resurrection are sacramentally memorialized? Who is the Spirit who is invoked in the epiclesis to make the reality symbolized by the sacraments truly present and effective? A brief answer to these three questions is: God the Father is the Primordial Migrant, God the Son is the Paradigmatic Migrant, and God the Holy Spirit is the Power of Migration.17

God the Father, the Beginning and End of Migration According to the Christian faith, there are three divine acts whereby God as it were freely “leaves” the “home” of Godself (the Immanent Trinity) and “migrates” to another “country,” that is, the “world”—human and cosmic—and assumes a new way of existing and acting (the Economic Trinity). These three acts are creation, incarnation, and consummation. Though these acts are performed in a common and undivided manner In the Catholic Mass, at the Offertory, the priest raises the bread and says this prayer: “Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given and human hands have made. It will become for us the bread of life.” Next, he raises the chalice and says, “Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this wine to offer, fruit of the vine and work of human hands. It will become our spiritual drink.” 17 For an elaboration of these three answers, see Peter C. Phan, “Deus Migrator—God the Migrant: Migration of Theology and Theology of Migration,” Theological Studies 77:4 (2016): 845–68. 16

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by one God, they are “proper” to each of the three divine Persons and express their distinctive characteristics: The Father as creator, the Son as incarnated, and the Holy Spirit as consummator, and it is in these proper and distinctive modalities that the three divine Persons relate themselves to humans and humans to them. The Christian God as Creator may be seen as Deus Migrator or “the Primordial Migrant” or “God-on-the-Move” accompanying all migrants and migrating with them.18 In God’s creative act, not only do the creatures embark upon the “going-out-and-comingback” migration, out of and back to God, but also the Trinitarian God has undertaken the same migratory movement. Indeed, it is only because God migrates out of Godself and in the company of and in solidarity with migrants that human migration is possible. Indeed, it was Yahweh’s first words in history, those addressed to Abraham, that started the first human migration. God’s migration into history is the condition of possibility for human migrations in history. It is not immediately obvious that God the Father’s creative act can be understood as a migratory act. Part of the difficulty in thinking of divine creation as divine migration lies in the fact that in the biblical tradition and especially in later theological developments, God’s creative act is presented as an act of God’s omnipotence and omniscience. Among the many Hebrew terms referring to God’s creative act, bārā, which is exclusively used for the divine activity, bespeaks free and uncircumscribed power. Its Greek equivalent, ktizō, denotes acts of intelligence and free will. The first account of creation, Gen. 1:1–2:4, presents God as the absolute Lord over matter and time, who creates by God’s word alone. Ps. 33:9 proclaims: “Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.” Creation is the deed of God’s power; there is no instrument and no collaborator, a kind of demiurge, no necessity and no process of emanation. Thus, created things, by their coming into existence, proclaim the immensity of divine power and their utter dependence on it. Later biblical texts express this understanding of divine creation as an act of absolute power with the idea of creation ex nihilo (creation out of nothing). However, while this theology of creation is rooted in the biblical and theological traditions, God’s creative act must also be viewed from the perspective of God himself by examining the risks that God undertakes upon Godself by creating an “Other” endowed with intelligence and freedom. Human freedom, though created, remains uncontrollable and unpredictable, even for God; otherwise, it is not genuine freedom. Without creating, God would have maintained God’s absolute power and total independence. On the contrary, in creating humans and endowing them with intelligence and free will, God lays Godself open to being rejected by them and not given welcome and hospitality in the very world God created and continuously creates through the process of evolution (creatio continua). The creating God cannot fulfill God’s purposes without the consent and collaboration of free human beings. Such dependence is voluntarily and freely assumed by God inasmuch as God’s creative act is not done under inner necessity but out of gratuitous love.

For further reflections on God as a migrant, see Peter C. Phan, “God, the Beginning and the End of Migration: A Theology of God from the Experience and Perspective of Migrants,” in Christian Theology in the Age of Migration: Implications for World Christianity, ed. Peter C. Phan (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 101–27 and Ched Myers, Our God Is Undocumented: Biblical Faith and Immigration Justice (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2012). 18

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Whereas the view of God’s creation as an act of sovereign power flounders in the presence of evil, especially moral evil, in the perspective of creation as God’s going out into the world of creatures endowed with finite and fallible freedom, evil and sin are possible, even inevitable (albeit not necessary). Indeed, that is what happened, according to Genesis 3, where Adam and Eve are said to have disobeyed God’s command not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God’s vulnerability to human betrayal is indicated by the fact that he appears to have been taken by surprise by the first human beings’ sinful act. Upon asking where they were, and being told by them that they were hiding because of their nakedness, God asked them who had told them that they were naked and whether they had eaten the forbidden fruit (Gen. 3:11). In this perspective, God’s creation can be interpreted as God’s migration out of what is divine into what is not divine, the “other” of God, a movement that bears all the marks of human migration. In creating that which is other than Godself, God crosses the border between Absolute Spirit and finite matter, migrating from eternity to temporality, from omnipotence into weakness, from self-sufficiency (aseity) to utter dependence, from secure omniscience to fearful ignorance, from the total domination of the divine will over all things to the utter subjection of the same will to the uncontrollability and unpredictability of human freedom, from immortality to death. In the creative act God experiences for the first time the precarious, marginalized, threatened, and endangered condition of the migrant. Like migrants, God enters a new country, that is, the world. Its inhabitants, God’s own creation, not only did not offer him welcome and hospitality but also put him to death. God remains a stranger and a resident alien, even though God has every right to be a citizen in that country, since after all God has created that country and all its inhabitants. Like God, migrants risk not only rejection but also death at the hands of the native people and in their tragic condition they know they are not alone and abandoned, since in the act of creating a world other than God, God assumes the condition of a migrant.

Jesus, the Paradigmatic Migrant If God the Father is the Primordial Migrant, his incarnated Son Jesus may be regarded as the Paradigmatic Migrant.19 To paraphrase Heb. 1:3, Jesus is the “reflection of the glory” of God the Migrant and the “exact imprint of God’s very being” as a migrant. To begin with, Jesus’ status as a stranger and migrant in his own country, his foreign ancestors (Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth), his birth far from home (Lk. 2:1-7), his and his family’s escape to Egypt as refugees (Mt. 2:13-14), his ministry as a homeless and itinerant preacher who has nowhere to lay his head (Lk. 9:58), his fate as an unwelcome stranger in his own country (Jn 1:11), and his self-identification with the stranger (Mt. 25:35)—all these were so many reminders of the day-to-day existence of the migrants in both their homelands and their host countries. Furthermore, Jesus carried out his ministry at the margins of his society. A migrant and border-crosser at the very roots of his being, Jesus performed his ministry of announcing and ushering in the kingdom of God always at the places where borders meet and hence at the margins of the two worlds separated by their borders. A marginal Jew himself, he crossed these borders back and forth, repeatedly and freely, be they geographical, racial, See Kanan Kitani, “Jesus the Paradigmatic Migrant,” in Christian Theology in the Age of Migration: Implications for World Christianity, ed. Peter C. Phan (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 129–50. 19

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sexual, social, economic, political, cultural, or religious. What is new about his message about the kingdom of God, which is good news to some and scandal to others, is that for him it removes all borders as barriers, both natural and manmade. The kingdom of God is all-inclusive. Jews and non-Jews, men and women, the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak, the healthy and the sick, the clean and the impure, the righteous and the sinners, and any other imaginable categories of peoples and groups— Jesus invited them all to enter into the house of his merciful and forgiving Father. Even in his “preferential option for the poor” Jesus did not abandon and exclude the rich and the powerful. These too are called to conversion and to live a just, all-inclusive life. As a stranger and migrant, Jesus gratefully and gracefully accepted the hospitality others showed him. He was the guest at the home of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary (Lk. 10:38-42), of Andrew and Simon (Mk 1:29), and of Zacchaeus (Lk. 19:1-10), and he did not hesitate to share table fellowship with sinners and tax collectors (Mk 2:15). Paradoxically, though a stranger and a guest, Jesus also played the host. In his many parables, he presents the kingdom of God as a banquet to which all are welcomed, especially “the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame” (Lk. 14:21). In the same vein, once, when he was invited to dinner, he told his host, “When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” (Lk. 14:13). At the Last Supper, he put on a towel and washed his disciples’ feet, though he was their “Master and Lord” (Jn 13:120). After his resurrection, he prepared a barbecued breakfast for his exhausted disciples after a night of unsuccessful fishing (Jn 21:4-13). Standing between the two worlds, excluding neither but embracing both, Jesus was able to be fully inclusive of both. But this also means that he is the marginal person par excellence. People at the center of any society or group, as a rule, possess wealth, power, and influence. As the threefold temptation shows, Jesus, the border-crosser and the dweller at the margins, renounced precisely these three things. Because he was at the margins, in his teaching and miracle-working, Jesus creates a new and different center, the center constituted by the meeting of the borders of the many and diverse worlds, often in conflict with one another, each with its own center, which relegates the “other” to the margins. It is at this margin-center that marginal people meet one another. In Jesus, the margin where he lived became the center of a new society without borders and barriers, reconciling all peoples in him: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female” (Gal. 3:28). A marginal person throughout his life, Jesus also died as such. His violent death on the cross was a direct result of his border-crossing and ministry at the margins that posed a serious threat to the interests of those occupying the economic, political, and religious center. Even the form of his death, that is, by crucifixion, indicates that Jesus was an outcast, and he died, as the Letter to Hebrews says, “outside the city gate and outside the camp” (Heb. 13:12-13). Symbolically, however, hung between heaven and earth, at the margins of both worlds, Jesus acted as the mediator and intercessor between God and humanity. But even in death, Jesus did not remain within the boundaries of what death means: failure, defeat, destruction. By his resurrection he crossed the borders of death into a new life, thus bringing hope where there was despair, victory where there was defeat, freedom where there was slavery, and life where there was death. In this way, the borders of death become frontiers to life in abundance. As the Paradigmatic Migrant, Jesus holds up to migrants a way of life that is not exclusively centered on the well-being of oneself and one’s family but is also committed

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to the promotion of the kingdom of God marked by justice and love for all, and by solidarity with other migrants, especially those who are poorer and weaker than themselves. As a gracious host, Jesus reminds migrants, though poor and marginalized, that they must be generous hosts to others, especially to their fellow migrants. Lastly, Jesus’ final victory over his suffering and death in his resurrection is a source of patience and hope for the migrants on their own way of the cross as they struggle for their survival.20

The Holy Spirit, the Power of Migration In the Bible, the Holy Spirit is depicted with various images such as fire, wind, breath, life, power, energy, spirit, gift, grace, and love. Subsequently, Christian theology of the Holy Spirit (pneumatology) highlights the Spirit’s different activities within the Trinity, such as Holy Spirit “proceeding” from the Father and/through the Son, or as the bond of love uniting the Father and the Son, or as the divine gift. Within the history of salvation, the Holy Spirit is presented as the loving and gracious God dwelling in human beings and as the divine power pushing history toward the fulfillment of the kingdom of God. In this sense, the Holy Spirit may be said to be the “push” and “pull” of the kingdom of God. Among the many theories of migration, one traces its origin to the “push” and “pull” of the international labor market.21 The low wages and the high rate of unemployment in the sending countries “push” their people to migrate, while the countries—normally the developed ones—with the decreasing workforce, low birth rate, high labor demand, and better pay exert the “pull” on the migratory flow. From the Christian perspective, the Holy Spirit can be said on the one hand to “push” the migrants out of their poverty and inhuman living conditions, infusing them with courage, trust, and imagination to envision a different life for themselves and their families, one that is consonant with the promise of a world of justice given by the Deus Migrator whose image and likeness they are. On the other hand, the Holy Spirit as the entelecheia of history can also be said to “pull” the migrants toward its final goal that, though inclusive of a minimum of material conditions required for a life with dignity for all, transcends all that humans can ever hope to achieve. Migration not only calls for a new understanding and celebration of the sacraments, especially Baptism and the Eucharist. It also offers a new understanding of the God who is present in the sacraments: God the Creator as the Primordial Migrant, God the Son as the Paradigmatic Migrant, and God the Spirit as the Power of Migration.

FURTHER READING Berger, Teresa, ed. Liturgy in Migration: From the Upper Room to Cyberspace. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012. Carroll R., M. Daniel. Christians at the Border: Immigration, the Church & the Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2013.

For further reflections on Jesus as a migrant, see Deirdre Cornell, Jesus Was a Migrant (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2014). 21 See Michael J. Piore, Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor in Industrial Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 20

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Myers, Ched, and Matthew Colwell. Our God Is Undocumented: Biblical Faith and Immigrant Justice. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2012. Phan, C. Peter, ed. Christian Theology in the Age of Migration: Implications for World Christianity. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020. Suna-Koro, Kristine. In Counterpoint: Diaspora, Postcoloniality, and Sacramental Theology. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017.

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Science and Sacraments E. BYRON ANDERSON

The church has, throughout its history of reflection on the sacraments, developed those reflections often in dualistic, either/or, frameworks such as those of presence and absence.1 Such frameworks were shaped by the dominant philosophical systems of the day. They have often extended to the relationship between science and theology as well, resulting in claims that the two cannot interact, though this has not always been the case.2 What we have largely ignored, however, is the fact that what we today treat only as “philosophies”— the search for and contemplation of wisdom—also functioned as scientific explanations that shaped human understanding of the ordering of the natural world and of humanity’s place in that world. As Jean-Louis Souletie has claimed about the social sciences, so might we also claim about the “hard” sciences as well as of theology: “Every science … since it desires a way of knowing, possesses a conception of reality, a vision of the world and of humanity; in summary a certain belief. This is the reason why they require that everyone think about and objectify the link between their ‘believing’ position and the type of elaboration that they produce.”3 The philosophies and the theologies that emerged in the early history of the church reflected an intertwining of science and theology that largely persisted until the era of modern science. The churches’ sacramental theologies today—both Protestant and Roman Catholic—often carry echoes of those earlier scientific worldviews even as they reflect a modern separation between science and theology. In some cases, especially in sacramental theology, recent theologies carry more than echoes of those earlier views, seeking to sustain or recover earlier philosophical arguments (such as the separation between the earthly and the heavenly or between the material and the ideal, as in Platonism, or the concerns for causation and instrumentality as well with the “substance” of material things as in Aristotelianism) rather than seeking to engage the scientific theories of our own

Portions of this chapter use material previously published by the author as “Entangled with God: Sacraments in Quantum Perspective,” Worship 93:3 (October 2019): 323–44. 2 As Nancey Murphy notes, this dualistic view “has prevailed in theological circles, largely due to Kant, who argued that science and religion have separate spheres and involve different kinds of knowledge. Science is the product of pure reason and is based on sensory experience; religious knowledge is a product of practical reason, and is known by transcendental argument from moral experience.” Nancey Murphy, “Theology the Transformer of Science? A Niebuhrian Typology for the Relation of Theology to Science,” Pacific Theological Review 18 (Spring 1985): 18. As she also notes, such claims of incompatibilism between theology and science continue in various Christian theologies today. 3 Jean-Louis Souletie, “The Social Sciences and Christian Theology after Chauvet,” in Sacraments: Revelation of the Humanity of God, ed. Philippe Bordeyne and Bruce T. Morrill (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2008), 190. 1

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day. In other cases, especially in our understandings of creation, cosmology, and divine intervention, the church has readily engaged conversations with contemporary science. Still others have engaged scientific methodologies as frameworks for theological projects.4 These philosophies and scientific worldviews, whether ancient or contemporary, function as paradigms for our understandings of sacraments, their purposes, and their effects. Paradigms function as agreed-upon rules, often operating in the background of research, that describe and function as “instantiations of standard usage” to enable continuing programs of research, whether in science or in Christian theology.5 “Once a paradigm is accepted, its basic laws and theories are not subjected to testing … but rather are assumed and used for solving the many problems that a paradigm encounters.”6 Yet paradigms also change over time as their ability to serve such research programs diminishes, or as their ability to explain particular phenomena diminishes, or as they are challenged by new information. Hans Küng, following the work of historian of science Thomas Kuhn and his well-known work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, notes how in both science and theology “normal science itself contributed involuntarily to the undermining of the established model” as research within those models increasingly provided evidence that could not be accommodated within those paradigms. Küng writes, The more … the movements of the stars were studied and corrected in the light of the Ptolemaic system of the universe, the more material was produced for refutation of that system. The more … orthodox Protestantism adopted a neo-Aristotelian approach to science, so much the more did it provoke on the one hand the unscientific “simple” biblicism of Pietism, and on the other hand the unhistorical-rational natural theology of the enlightenment. Or … the more the neo-scholasticism of the present [20th] century attempted to uphold certain speculative theses … in the light of historical research, so much the more did it bring out contradictory elements which contributed to their undermining.7 But paradigms do not change simply from critique of or a radical break from the old. As Küng also notes, “in every paradigm change, despite all discontinuity, there is a fundamental continuity.”8 New paradigms share a large overlap with their predecessors even as they result in the reconstruction of knowledge and in changes in our worldview, our research methods, and the goals of our research.9 The result, Küng suggests, is that “some things are now perceived that were not seen formerly, and possibly some things are overlooked that were formerly noticed.”10

On cosmology and divine intervention, see Robert John Russell, Philip Clayton, Kirk Wegter-McNelly, and John Polkinghorne, eds., Quantum Mechanics: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, vol. 5 (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory Publications, 2001). On scientific and theological method, see Nancey Murphy, Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). A concise and useful survey of the implications of contemporary science for Christian theology is provided in Heidi Ann Russell, Quantum Shift: Theological and Pastoral Implications of Contemporary Developments in Science (Collegeville: Michael Glazier/Liturgical Press, 2015). 5 Lee C. Barrett, “Theology as Grammar: Regulative Principles as Paradigms and Practices,” Modern Theology, 4:2 (January 1988): 161. 6 Murphy, Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning, 57. 7 Hans Küng, “Paradigm Change in Theology: A Proposal for Discussion,” in Paradigm Change in Theology: A Symposium for the Future, trans. Margaret Köhl, ed. Hans Küng and David Tracy (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 19. 8 Ibid., 29. 9 See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 84. 10 Küng, “Paradigm Change,” 21. 4

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In sacramental theology, we are no less shaped by scientific and philosophical paradigms. Contemporary sacramental theologies have tended to turn to philosophical and linguistic explanations that either continue earlier paradigms or deconstruct or oppose some of those paradigms. Rarely have they turned to more recent scientific explanations that account for the transformations in our understanding of our world and of human bodies for our theological understanding of sacraments. However, if sacraments are intended to speak to and effect something in material bodied human beings as well as to our spiritual beings, then they also need to speak within a framework of a contemporary understanding of the material world and not just from the life of the mind. Such a paradigm shift does not require setting aside basic beliefs about God’s gracious action in and through the sacraments, but it may open for us some new ways to think about what a sacrament is and does. In this chapter, therefore, after briefly describing some of the historic paradigms that have shaped and often problematically continue to shape our thinking about sacraments, I intend to explore several ways in which contemporary science, particularly some basic concepts that have emerged in quantum theory, might provide a new paradigm for our thinking about the sacraments and contribute a more adequate response to the primary paradigm and sacramental paradox of Christ’s absent presence. Such an exploration is not intended as a scientific explanation of the sacraments but to offer, at the very least, a new analogical system through which we might understand and interpret the God–human relationships expressed by the sacraments, particularly our understanding of “togetherness-in-separation” that, like Christ’s absent presence, serves as one of the constants in Christian understandings of sacrament. It also suggests a way to think about sacramental practice as an “actualization” or “instantiation” of the God–human relationship. To get to this requires a paradigm shift that comes not only from a different scientific starting point but also from a different theological starting point than that prevalent in much historic sacramental reflection. That is, rather than asking what “this” is when we hear the words “This is my body given for you” and how bread and wine are transformed into this body—both scientific as well as metaphysical questions—I want to focus on the presence/absence question. What does it mean for our understanding of sacrament that Christ has promised “to be with us always until the end of the age” (Mt. 28:16) and that we are to “abide in Christ” who now abides in us (Jn 6:56; 14:2021; 15:4-5; 17:21b-23)? How is Christ present with us when Christ is, or seems to be, materially and bodily absent from us? These questions are not new; they are in continuity with previous paradigms of sacramental action. But our answers to them have usually kept theology well-separated from science, even when science might have insights to help us on our way.

MEDIEVAL PARADIGMS: PLATONIST AND ARISTOTELIAN For much of the church’s early history, scientific investigation, such as it was, was pursued primarily for the support it could provide to biblical interpretation, serving as a “handmaid” to theology. By the time we get to the late medieval period, this begins to change, especially as theologians and natural philosophers—often one and the same person—encountered the work of Aristotle as a challenge to the dominance of Platonist or Neoplatonist understandings of the world. To read any discussion of sacramental

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theology throughout the medieval period is to encounter the sometimes-conflicting influence of both Platonist and Aristotelian thought on the church’s belief systems and on the scientific worldviews of the day. Such should not be seen as either the problematic influence of “pagan” writers on Christian faith, as some of the Protestant reformers seemed to argue, or of the “Hellenization” of Christianity, as some nineteenth-century historians have claimed. Rather, the Platonic and Aristotelian influences both reflected and began to transform the paradigmatic understandings of the world and the way it operated. At risk of great oversimplification, the natural and theological sciences of the day attempted to explain how it was possible (a) for those confined in bodies to participate in the spiritual/heavenly life of the triune God (Platonism), (b) how something we cannot see can have an effect on our visible bodies (Aristotle), and (c) how something can change even when we cannot see that change. What we today divide between the physical/ material and metaphysical/intellectual–spiritual were part of single systems of thought about the structure of the cosmos. As Stephen Toulmin suggests, these philosophers and theologians operated from “the conviction that the entire system of the world forms a single, integrated system united by universal principles, that all things in the world consequently share in a common ‘good order’.”11 Doctrines such as transubstantiation were therefore not only theological but also scientific answers to the questions of what sacraments do, what changes they effect, and how they are able to do what they do. And, they came to function paradigmatically in the church’s life and thought. The Platonic or Neoplatonic worldview was relatively unconcerned with the material world, which, “for all its beauty, remained the scene of imperfection and disorder; and it had to be escaped before humanity could achieve its highest good, the contemplation of eternal things.”12 Yet philosophers and theologians understood that we can make use of material sensible things to ascend to that higher reality, in part because material objects do not contain the “real” but participate in it. The real cannot be localized in a material object. From this perspective, the “outward and visible sign” of a sacrament is inferior to though participating in the reality of “inward and invisible” grace, which cannot be apprehended by the senses but only by faith.13 This was a perspective that posed little challenge to accepted Christian beliefs about the ordering of the world and seemed consistent with Paul’s understanding that during our human lives we can only “see in a mirror dimly” (1 Cor. 13:12). Aristotle, in contrast, was primarily concerned with the things we can see and experience, the metaphysical being an abstraction from the material. Aristotle’s science was a form of empiricism, based on direct observation, although it did not extend beyond observation to the kind of testing we expect in contemporary scientific experimentation. Yet this emphasis on observation did not prevent him from proposing a distinction between matter and form, accident and substance, appearance and “reality” that seems more consistent with the Platonic distinction between the material and the ideal or real. For Aristotle, “God is known to human beings only through his [sic] effects, and in this Stephen Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (Berkeley: University of California, 1985), 224. 12 David Lindberg, “Science and the Early Church,” in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 30. 13 Hans Boersma, in Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), provides a contemporary argument for the retrieval of a Christian-Platonist understanding of the sacraments. 11

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life only through his sensible effects, whether in creation, or in the divine sacramental economy of salvation in Israel and the Church.”14 When Aristotle described the kinds of physical changes that occur, for example, through the growth, ripening, and decay of a piece of fruit, he remained confident that the substance, the essence, of that fruit did not change. The question for theologians, however, was how to explain change when the material objects of our consideration—bread and wine—do not show any visible change and when we can no longer simply appeal to “God’s omnipotence or a biblical passage … tantamount to a confession of ignorance.”15 The answer that emerged in this period, codified perhaps in Aquinas’s thought, was that the substance or essence of the object must change. This understanding of transubstantiation was an inversion of Aristotle’s understanding of the material world; it required a shift in reference from the visible object to invisible substance, a shift from seeing with our eyes to seeing “with the eyes of faith,” and a shift in explanatory system from physics to metaphysics. No longer did the material participate in the real, the earthly in the heavenly; now the real came to participate in the material. Questions about the physical became increasingly about the metaphysical and a need to explain how such transformation occurs.

PROTESTANT PARADIGMS Late medieval and early Protestant understandings of Christ’s presence in and through the eucharist operated within these Neoplatonic and Aristotelian frameworks, which from a cosmological and scientific framework reinforced the opposition not only between the material and the real but also between material presence and material absence. Many Protestants, lacking a cosmology that could account for Christ’s post-ascension presence, especially in the eucharist, seemed to settle for some sense of Christ’s “true absence” or an absence mediated by the Spirit, the latter consistent with an Aristotelian paradigm. Such was especially true in the positions Calvin and Zwingli offered to the church. Both operated out of localized and spatialized understandings of bodies in which bodies occupy specific spaces and times and are bound to those spaces and times. Therefore, they claimed, if Christ has ascended to the Father, Christ could not possibly be present at the altar in any physical sensible way. For Calvin and Zwingli, localized bodies cannot be in two (or more) places at the same time, nor can they have agency in a place from which they have departed; they cannot act effectively beyond their specific spaces and times—these were basic principles of the observable material world.16 Calvin and Zwingli were not unique in holding such an understanding of “localized” bodies, nor were they without strong historical precedent for this position, which is easily traced from Augustine through Ratramnus and Berengar to Calvin.17 Even Aquinas concurred that Christ’s body could not be locally present in the eucharist, as such presence

John P. Yocum, “Aristotle in Aquinas’s Sacramental Theology,” in Aristotle in Aquinas’s Theology, ed. Gilles Emery, OP and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 221. 15 Edward Grant, “Science and Theology in the Medieval Ages,” in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 51. 16 See Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 258. 17 See Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 154–80, and William Crockett, Eucharist: Symbol of Transformation (New York: Pueblo, 1989), 108–63. 14

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would require his body to have a “dimensive quality” in the bread and wine.18 Calvin and Zwingli were also not unique in holding shared cosmological perspectives from which they drew very different theological conclusions. As Douglas Farrow writes of Calvin, The concreteness of the incarnation had to be maintained just as carefully with respect to the mediator’s exalted state as it was with respect to his humiliated state. … Heaven—understood as a distant place to which Jesus had departed bodily—was the right answer to the “Where?” question, insofar as that question could be answered at all. Jesus had passed “beyond the whole machinery of the visible world.”19 While setting aside questions about matter and substance, Calvin resolved the “How?” problem with a strong argument for Christ’s real presence in the bread and wine through the agency of the Holy Spirit, providing what William Crockett calls an “objective bond between the presence of Christ in the eucharist and the subjective response of the believer in faith.”20 Zwingli, in contrast, sought to preserve a strong and clear distinction between the sign and that which it signified, the sign being representative rather than participatory. In doing so he negates the Platonic understanding of sacramental participation and concludes with an argument for Christ’s real absence. Because of Christ’s ascension to the Father, “from which none should think to fetch him down again in order to hide him under the consecrated elements,”21 he could only be “truly absent” from the sign. As Thomas O’Loughlin remarks on such a position, “this cosmology silently invokes such a barrier between matter and spirit that it is difficult to see how it could possibly accommodate the incarnation.”22

THE ENLIGHTENMENT: A MECHANICAL WORLDVIEW Even as Protestants and Roman Catholics continued to think about the physical properties of the world within Neoplatonic and Aristotelian paradigms, new forms of scientific research and new theories about the structures of creation were emerging. We need think only of the revolutionary work undertaken in the physical sciences from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries as seen in Copernicus’s reshaping of our understanding of planetary motion, Bacon’s insistence on the careful observation of events in nature, Descartes’s combination of scientific observation and experimentation, and Newton’s work on gravity, the laws of motion, and classical mechanics.23 Some early Protestant theologians thought such scientific theories challenged the sovereignty of God, but Newton believed “that God has a continuing active role in the physical world” and “saw the laws of nature as a continuing expression of God’s sovereignty and will, acting in a regular way.”24 The natural philosopher, therefore, had a religious duty to study

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (New York: Benziger, 1947), III.75.5. http://www.ccel.org/a/aqui​nas/ summa/TP/TP075.html#TPQ​75OU​TP1. 19 Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia, 175. 20 Crockett, Eucharist: Symbol of Transformation, 159. 21 Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia, 173. 22 Thomas O’Loughlin, The Eucharist: Origins and Contemporary Understandings (New York: T&T Clark, 2015), 188. 23 One of the most comprehensive surveys of the relationship between Christian theology and modern science is provided in Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997). 24 Barbour, Religion and Science, 22, 23. 18

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nature.25 Such study revealed God’s design in the universe on both a microscopic and macroscopic scale. Yet, as Richard Westfall has noted, after Newton, natural philosophers increasingly “concentrated on what alone natural philosophy could reveal, God the Creator … given the thrust of the new conception of nature, they found a God who revealed Himself [sic] in immutable laws and not in the watchful care of personal providence or in miraculous acts.”26 As the work continued, there was a growing but far from complete separation—perhaps more a differentiation than separation—between what theology can and should explain and what science can and should explain. This emphasis on the laws of nature, discerned through attention to what was observable in the world, led increasingly to a mechanistic and, to some extent, deterministic understanding of the world. “Powers previously attributed to spirit agencies [or even the Holy Spirit] were now lodged in matter itself.”27 Nature comes to be seen “as a machine whose parts undertook various movements in response to other parts doing the same thing,”28 impersonal and sufficient unto itself. Any understanding that God was somehow the efficient cause of anything became hard to defend and increasingly unnecessary. Wolfhart Pannenberg summarizes this position thus: “The tendency of this principle to emancipate the description of nature from any need for divine intervention or succor was now complemented by the attribution of forces to bodies exclusively. This excluded by definition any divine intervention in the course of nature, because, whatever God may be conceived to be, he [sic] is certainly not a body.”29 Such a position not only had little place for mystery but also left little room for the need, if any, of sacraments beyond their social, ritual, and memorial functions.

A QUANTUM PERSPECTIVE Clearly, science is no longer simply a “handmaid” to theology, but neither is it antithetical to Christian belief. How then might we engage a more collaborative conversation between the two? Recent conversations between theology and the sciences invite us to consider new questions about the structures of creation and about human relatedness to creation. They offer new frameworks for how we think about the specific material means through which we encounter God’s “option for humanity” revealed in Jesus Christ and, therefore, the means through which God in Christ fulfills, or at least makes visible to us, God’s promise to abide with us (Jn 6:56) and to remain with us until the end of the world (Mt. 28:1620). They also enable us to move away from the Platonic focus on our participation in the real but nonphysical world and from the Aristotelian concern for efficient causes and the transformation of substances. These conversations also help us understand sacraments less as “technologies” for communicating some objectified character of grace, as they increasingly become in modernity, and more as a means of encounter and relatedness

John Hedley Brooke, “Science and Theology in the Enlightenment,” in Religion and Science: History, Method, Dialogue, ed. W. Mark Richardson and Wesley J. Wildman (New York: Routledge, 1996), 8. 26 Richard S. Westfall, “The Rise of Science and the Decline of Orthodox Christianity: A Study of Kepler, Descartes, and Newton,” in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 234. 27 Brooke, “Science and Theology in the Enlightenment,” 18. 28 Gary B. Deason, “Reformation Theology and the Mechanistic Conception of Nature,” in God and Nature, 168. 29 Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Problems between Science and Theology in the Course of Their Modern History,” Zygon 41:1 (March 2006): 108. 25

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between God and the human person, an emphasis Edward Schillebeeckx described as “a reciprocal human encounter of Christ and [humanity] even after the ascension.”30 The work of two theologian-scientists, John Polkinghorne and Ernest Simmons, is particularly helpful with this conversation. Their work draws us into a conversation with contemporary science and a cosmology derived from quantum physics. In turning to this conversation, I take Polkinghorne’s claim that “images drawn from science, such as mutual entanglement, may provide a modest analogical resource, however pale they may be in comparison with the brightness of divine reality” as a kind of warrant for the discussion.31 At the same time, others such as Stephen Toulmin suggest caution when pressing scientific terms “into service of a non-scientific kind” that risks taking “isolated pieces … out of a jig-saw puzzle.”32 Taking this caution to heart, my goal in the following is not to provide a scientific explanation of sacraments but to explore how a new scientific paradigm might reshape how we think about sacraments and sacramentality. To proceed with this conversation, we need a basic, though necessarily brief and perhaps overly simplistic, understanding of three concepts within quantum physics: superposition, wave/particle duality, and entanglement.33 As we do so, it is helpful to remember that quantum physics views creation from the “other end of the telescope”—rather than drawing us to contemplate the mysteries of the stars and galaxies it turns our attention to the elemental and interrelated structures of creation at the atomic and subatomic level.

Superposition Superposition relates to the paradoxical character of quantum mechanics in which it becomes possible to consider wave/particle duality as well as the ability of physical “things” to be both “here” and “there.” While such an ability is unthinkable in “classical” metaphysical and physical ways of thinking in which here or there are “mutually exclusive possibilities,”34 quantum mechanics makes it both thinkable and possible. As Polkinghorne explains, “an electron can be in a state that is an (unpicturable) mixture of ‘here’ and ‘there.’ ”35 This combination “reflects the fuzzy unpicturability of the quantum world … a 50–50 mixture of these possibilities is found to imply that, if a number of measurements of position are actually made on electrons in this state, half the time the electron will be found ‘here’ and half the time ‘there’.”36 When some form of measurement is taken of an electron in this state, we will always obtain a definite answer, but not always the same answer. As Polkinghorne notes, “sometimes it will be found ‘here’ and sometimes ‘there’. The theory [of superposition] enables us to calculate … the probabilities of obtaining

Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963), 44. John Polkinghorne, “The Demise of Democritus,” in The Trinity and an Entangled World, ed. John Polkinghorne (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 11. 32 Stephen Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (Berkeley: University of California, 1985), 27 and 32. 33 Two helpful and accessible introductions to quantum theory are provided in John Polkinghorne, Quantum Theory: A Brief Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, trans. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (New York: Riverhead Books, 2016). 34 John Polkinghorne, “Physical Process, Quantum Events, and Divine Agency,” in Quantum Mechanics: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, vol. 5, ed. Robert John Russell, Philip Clayton, Kirk Wegter-McNelly, and John Polkinghorne (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory Publications, 2001), 182. 35 Ibid. 36 John Polkinghorne, Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 18. 30 31

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these different answers, but it is unable to explain how it comes about that a specific answer is obtained on a specific occasion.”37

Wave/Particle Duality Wave/particle duality seems just as unpicturable and nonsensical as the possibility of being both here and there: “a wave is spread out and oscillating, while a particle is concentrated and bullet-like. How could anything manifest such contradictory properties?”38 It can do so because that duality, as is true of the duality of here/there, is a characteristic of probability rather than certainty. A subatomic particle is not both “wave and particle simultaneously, but … it could manifest either a wave or a particle aspect depending on the circumstance.” The wave/particle aspects of a quantum entity are “superimposed on the other,” they exist together, as potential modes of being.39 As Polkinghorne suggests, whether we find a wave or a particle depends on what we are looking or asking for, what we are measuring. If we want to know the position of that entity, we are asking a particle-like question, looking for a particle-like property. If we want to know the momentum of that entity, we are asking a wave-like question and looking for a wave-like property. However, we cannot know both position and momentum at the same time.40 It is not that our asking or measuring brings the specific thing into being (perhaps a kind of nominalism), but that with a specific form of measurement a wave/particle that exists as a persisting potentiality is revealed as a wave or particle actuality. The quantum world, Polkinghorne suggests, is a place of “ontological flexibility.”41

Entanglement The concept of entanglement challenges limited mechanical understandings of causality, especially the necessity of localization. Causality and localization assume that “for one thing to have an effect on another, there must be a physical [and therefore local] connection between the two.”42 This was a primary concern in Newtonian physics in the eighteenth century. Entanglement proves that a persisting local physical connection is not necessary, demonstrating how quantum particles, previously in contact with one another but now separated, continue to influence each other from positions of nonlocality, that is, even when separated by some distance and with no apparent mechanism for communicating with one another. With entangled particles, “a measurement done on one of the entities seems instantaneously to affect the result of a measurement on the other.”43 The basic claim of entanglement seems as improbable as wave/particle duality. Not only can quantum entities interact at a distance, but once they have interacted with each

Ibid., 69. Ibid., 16. 39 Ernest L. Simmons, The Entangled Trinity: Quantum Physics and Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2014), 136. Simmons explains, “The quantum field itself is the foundational wave function that exists everywhere. When energy is dropped into the field, it excites into a particle. Particles are ‘quanta’ of the field excitation, so the wave function is the particle in all its probability amplitudes but has no specificity until measurement occurs” (147). 40 Polkinghorne, Quantum Theory, 25. 41 Polkinghorne, Quantum Physics and Theology, 92. 42 Heidi Ann Russell, Quantum Shift: Theological and Pastoral Implications of Contemporary Developments in Science (Collegeville, MN: Michael Glazier/Liturgical Press, 2015), 59. 43 Abner Shimony, “The Reality of the Quantum World,” in Quantum Mechanics: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, vol. 5, 3. 37 38

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other they “remain mutually entangled, however far they may subsequently separate in space. Effectively, they remain a single system, for acting on the one ‘here’ will produce an immediate effect on its distant partner.”44 Subsequent experiments demonstrated that the interaction between the two entities did not rely on some form of “quantum telepathy,” as if some form of communication between them could occur faster than the speed of light, or on some “preexisting program of correspondence,” as if we were dealing with something like a matched set of gloves.45 What they do rely on is “togetherness in separation,” or what Ernest Simmons and others call “nonlocal relational holism.”46 Obviously, God is not a quantum of measurable energy nor is there some identifiable “god particle” (as popular media have tended to name the Higgs boson but which the scientific community has consistently critiqued as hyperbole47), nor can we somehow “prove” a quantum relationship between God and humanity any more than we can prove “substance” in Aristotelian terms. I am suggesting, rather, that the concepts of superposition and entanglement offer the possibility for a sacramental paradigm that remains faithful to the Christian tradition and that is more consistent with a contemporary scientific worldview. My primary claim is not scientific but theological: in the incarnation God in Christ has actively and deliberately entangled Godself with humanity, establishing a “nonlocal” relationship between the human and the divine. Sacraments are practices of “togetherness-in-separation.” Several theological implications emerge from the principle that entanglement, once enjoined, persists through time and space. First, the entanglement of God with humanity in Jesus Christ did not cease with the ascension; it persists, regardless of where Jesus Christ now is (as is promised in Mt. 28:20). The Christological component of sacramentality cannot be severed, although its trinitarian character needs further attention. Second, rather than understanding the resurrection and ascension as a rupturing of this relationship because Christ who was “here” now must be “there,” we are given a framework in which to see the “middle term” of here and there as well as for understanding the human/ divine duality the church has traditionally affirmed in its confession of the two natures of Christ. Third, rather than either insisting on some form of localization for effective action or some form of ubiquitous presence that seems to disperse the specificity of Christ into the cosmos, we come to see that Christ’s entanglement with us does not require so much a “presence to” but a “relationship with,” an interdependent encounter of presence through interaction. Consistent with this concern for relationship, the concept of entanglement and a quantum worldview also provide a way to understand that the Father who abides in Christ also abides in us, as the Gospel of John repeatedly claims (see Jn 6:56; 14:20-21; 15:4-5; 17:21b-23), even when separated from us in space or time. As Raymond Brown notes in his commentary on John, “the real gift of the post-resurrectional period was a union with Jesus that was not permanently dependent on bodily presence.”48 Abiding, or indwelling, is, in John’s Gospel “an aspect of eternal life that in John’s Gospel is offered to human beings. As a divine quality, abiding expresses the intimacy and reciprocity which, for

Polkinghorne, Quantum Physics and Theology, 21. Russell, Quantum Shift, 62. At one point, Albert Einstein described this phenomenon as “spooky action at a distance.” Subsequent scientific experimentation eventually proved the effect Einstein described. 46 Simmons, Entangled Trinity, 138, 148. 47 For example, see https://www.busi​ness​insi​der.com/why-the-higgs-is-cal​led-the-god-parti​cle-2015-5. 48 Raymond Brown, The Gospel According to John, 2 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1970), II.646. 44 45

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John, lie at the heart of the universe. The relationship between God and Jesus, father and son, is the symbol and archetype of abiding.”49 Might not the same be said, then, of the human/divine entanglement? Through superposition and entanglement, God’s presence with us is actual, real, and dynamic rather than localized and determined.

IMPLICATIONS FOR SACRAMENTS AND SACRAMENTALITY What does this quantum paradigm incorporating superposition, wave/particle duality, and entanglement mean for our understanding of sacraments and sacramentality? Four themes emerge: sacraments are grounded in the incarnation; sacraments are an expression of God’s constant presence rather than signs of God’s absence; sacraments are interactive “events” rather than objects or “mere” signs; and sacraments both express and reveal to us God’s presence across the range of human life.

Grounded in the Incarnation Sacraments are grounded in the incarnation. While Simmons and others find in this conversation the means to press us to a more robust trinitarian sacramental theology, especially to attend more fully to pneumatological themes, the concept of entanglement reaffirms the distinctive character of the incarnation: God is with us. God’s “option for humanity” finds a distinctive expression in the incarnation that continues to be revealed in and reaffirmed through the material practices we call sacraments. In Christ, the triune God has entangled Godself with humanity in such a way that neither space nor time, “nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:39). Superposition provides a framework in which to understand how this is so materially as well as spiritually.

Expressions of God’s Constant Presence Sacraments are expressions of God’s constant relational presence rather than signs of God’s absence. Much sacramental theology remains founded on some notion of, even the necessity of, God’s absence, largely due to a localized/spatial understanding of Christ’s resurrection and ascension.50 Such understandings become expressions of an “otherwise absent” God as found in the Deism and mechanical physics of the eighteenth century. Herbert Vorgrimler describes my concern well: “The error here is in attributing to God a spatial distance from the world and human beings that is overcome by the sacraments … God, in the Holy Spirit, is really present to God’s creation, to God’s humanity, and not in the shape of a static Other, but in the dynamism of God’s loving desire, in constant self-communication.”51 While Vorgrimler, like Calvin and others, turns to the mediating role of the Holy Spirit to bridge that distance, the concept of entanglement offers a way to understand that constant self-communication from a Christological perspective. The Dorothy A Lee, “Abiding in the Fourth Gospel: A Case-Study in Feminist Biblical Theology,” Pacifica 10:2 (1997): 131. 50 See, for example, Lizette Larson-Miller’s discussions of the necessity of absence in Sacramentality Renewed: Contemporary Conversations in Sacramental Theology (Collegeville, MN: Michael Glazier/Liturgical Press, 2016), 104–8. 51 Herbert Vorgrimler, Sacramental Theology, trans. Linda Maloney (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992), 71. 49

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concept of superposition presses against here/there and present/absent binaries, opening to us what Simmons calls “the eternal potentiality of the divine for multiple forms of relatedness and experience by humanity and the wider creation.”52 When Christ is at the right hand of the Father, he seems to be “there,” but in our sacramental celebrations he seems to be “here.” Yet, his promise to abide with us always continues. Outside of these celebrations we do not have a “definitive” answer about Christ’s location, other than the promise that he is with us, abides with us, acts for us. “We find in God, depending on what we are seeking (metaphorically, ‘measuring’), what we need to find as the simultaneous entanglement of divine love finds expression in the creation that has made it possible.”53 We experience in specific sacramental celebrations a revelation of God’s love for us. More, as a momentary marker of that love (a “measurement”), it suggests an intensification—not of God’s presence but of our experience of God’s presence in and to the world through Christ and the Spirit. If, as Carlo Rovelli suggests, quantum mechanics describes “only how a physical system affects another physical system” and that an electron is only known by its interactions,54 we could then say that the saving, redeeming love of the triune God, the presence of Christ and the Spirit, is only known through God’s interaction with the liturgical/sacramental assembly as “measured” or realized through sacramental media.

Interactive Events, Not Objects Sacraments are interactive “events” rather than objects. As Rovelli suggests, quantum events are “happenings” rather than “things,” dynamic rather than static.55 As such, this quantum perspective helps undo our tendencies to objectify the sacraments and the grace they enact, and to make of grace a commodity to be transacted rather than a relationship to be developed. They are manifestations of a relationship in which we participate and in which we are agents rather than an event we attend or observe. The outcome of these events, while “guaranteed” by God’s word/Word, has a probabilistic rather than determined character comparable (analogically) to the measurement of the quantum event. As Polkinghorne suggests of all prayer, It is not a mechanical operation, predictable in advance, but … a personal encounter with God, whose character and outcome are only revealed in the event itself. It is characteristic of all personal encounter that we cannot say beforehand what we shall receive through it. Moreover, it is only those who participate in the encounter who can afterwards evaluate its content.56 Yet, as is true of all interactive events, the interacting entities may not always interact with the same level of awareness or integrity; human actors are rarely perfect partners in these events, nor are our forms of measurement complete. We need to attend, therefore, to two cautions. On the one hand, as William Stoeger suggests, although sacramental events mark and actualize our relationship with God and God’s relationship to us, we are never fully united to God and, therefore, through such interactions still “see through the mirror dimly.” On the other hand, because our knowledge is limited by

Simmons, Entangled Trinity, 153. Ibid. 54 Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons, 20. 55 Ibid., 33. 56 Polkinghorne, Science and Providence, 85. 52 53

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our interaction, our part in the interaction “may so distort or cloud what reality is in itself to generate manifestations completely unrepresentative of it.” Having noted these cautions, Stoeger does offer a sign of hope, at least from the side of quantum mechanical experimentation: based on scientific experimentation “there seems to be every reason to believe that there is a strong connection between how reality manifests itself to us and how it really is, the ‘noumena’.”57

Expressing and Revealing God’s Presence Sacraments give expression to and reveal to us God’s abiding presence across the whole of human life. Through specific forms or celebrations—baptism, eucharist, anointing of the sick, marriage—sacraments enact and make manifest forms of God’s entangled relationship of grace with humanity and human life. As such, they provide distinctive interactive modes of “measurement” of that relationship, which in quantum perspective results in an “actualization” of that relationship, a distinctive place of presence in the world. Through them, the “wave field” of God’s abiding presence is actualized as a “particle” in a specific place and time. Yet even as different sacramental celebrations reveal to us something of God’s work in the world and of God’s relationship to us, they do not reveal identical things. As was said above of waves and particles, so we might say of sacramental events: asking a baptism-like question yields a baptism-like answer while asking a marriage-like question will yield a marriage-like answer. In each specific celebration an aspect of God comes to the fore—the one who redeems, initiates, heals, forgives, blesses, sanctifies. Each sacramental event has its own form or set of characteristics, even as each reveals some distinctive aspect of the relationship between God and humanity at a specific time and place. What does a “baptism-like answer” look like? First, as God’s self-disclosure in the incarnation: Although the incarnation does not begin with Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan, the narratives of Jesus’ baptism by John in all four gospels (Mt. 3:16-17; Mk 1:9-11; Lk. 3:21-22; Jn 1:29-34) provide means by which the gospel writers attest to Jesus as the “Son of God” and as the one on whom the Spirit rests (or in whom the Spirit dwells), which in John connects directly to the promise of God’s indwelling of humanity through Christ and the Spirit. This disclosure of entanglement is summarized in the community’s confession of faith through the Apostles’ Creed (conceived, born, suffered, crucified, and raised) and then again in the thanksgiving over the water such as is found in the United Methodist baptismal rite: “In the fullness of time you [the Father] sent Jesus, nurtured in the water of a womb. He was baptized by John and anointed by your Spirit. He called his disciples to share in the baptism of his death and resurrection and to make disciples of all nations.”58 That entanglement is a sign/sacrament of God’s new creation. Second, as the disclosure of our entanglement with God through Christ and the Spirit and of the interactive character of the event, we acknowledge the freedom God has given us, confess Christ as Lord and place our trust in his grace, and commit ourselves to service in union with the whole church.59 The baptismal rite, then, is a “strong moment” that “actualizes” Christ’s entanglement with us individually as well as with and in the William R. Stoeger, SJ, “Epistemological and Ontological Issues Arising from Quantum Theory,” in Quantum Mechanics: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, vol. 5, ed. Robert John Russell, Philip Clayton, Kirk WegterMcNelly, and John Polkinghorne (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory Publications, 2001), 85. 58 The United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville, TN: United Methodist Publishing House, 1989), 36. Similar language appears in other contemporary baptismal rites. 59 The United Methodist Hymnal, 34. 57

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community of the church. It is the visible “measure” of divine–human entanglement in a specific time, place, and people, “traced” by the shape of our lives in the world. Our being joined to the body provides the means for a “localized encounter” with Christ through specific persons who have put on Christ in baptism. Entangled with Christ, we are entangled with all others who are part of the body of Christ, members of one another (Eph. 4:25). Furthermore, entanglement, with its possibilities for relationship beyond location and time, gives us a framework within which to understand our relationship to the communion of saints, the community beyond location and time that continues to be entangled with Christ. Our encounter with others through other rites—of anointing and healing, marriage, death and resurrection—provides similar though distinctive disclosures of God’s continuing entanglement with humanity.

CONCLUSION Because grace is always available to us as a result of God’s entanglement with humanity in the incarnation, the “sacraments become privileged, but not unique, pivotal, but not exclusive experiences of God through Christ in the power of the Spirit in the church. Sacraments actualize Christ’s incarnation and paschal mystery. Sacraments … become particularly strong moments of God’s self-disclosure.”60 These “trusted and trustworthy carriers of the divine,”61 as Graham Hughes calls them, provide the forms and structures through which we do not merely intuit God’s presence but are provided a means by which we may apprehend that presence.62 Moreover, the revelation of God’s presence through a sacramental event simultaneously reveals the condition of our own presence, of our entanglement, with God and with others. Entangled with the triune God through the person of Jesus Christ, drawn into the “wave field” of the Holy Spirit in which we live, move, and have our being as Christian people, the sacraments actualize in time and space what otherwise seems “mere” potentiality but which in fact is the abiding form of God’s abiding presence to humanity. Symbol, language, and ritual practice converge then, not in response to God’s absence but to God’s presence—here and now as well as in the future.

FURTHER READING Barbour, Ian G. Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997. Polkinghorne, John. Quantum Theory: A Brief Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Polkinghorne, John. Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Rovelli, Carlo. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. Translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. New York: Riverhead Books, 2016. Simmons, Ernest L. The Entangled Trinity: Quantum Physics and Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2014. Kevin Irwin, “Toward a Theological Anthropology of Sacraments,” in A Promise of Presence, ed. Michael Downey and Richard Fragomeni (Washington, DC: Pastoral Press, 1992), 43. 61 Graham Hughes, Reformed Sacramentality, ed. Steffen Lösel (Collegeville, MN: Pueblo/Liturgical Press, 2017), 7. 62 Ibid., 9. 60

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Sacramental Theology and Worship Technology in the Wake of a Pandemic JAMES W. FARWELL AND MARTHA MOORE-KEISH

Worship always occurs in the context of the technological capacities and favored media of its day, and technology has, in turn, an effect on the character of worship. As examples, one needs only to recall the move from liturgical prayers composed extempore based on emergent models shared across communities and regions, through the production of bound volumes for leaders, to the impact of the printing press on the availability of liturgical orders to the whole assembly; or the changes brought to worshiping communities by the advent of electric light; or the development from makeshift forms of amplification to radio and television broadcasting that can “beam” worship services across time and distance. Televised Christian worship in particular has become increasingly common since the advent of the television age in the 1940s. It has been utilized most often among large Wordcentered traditions of the Christian faith, offering people access to preaching, prayers, and music without having to be physically present in the same worship space. For some years now sacramental traditions have also televised their liturgies—in more recent years, “livestreamed”—for the sake of those unable to attend in person, to whom consecrated Eucharistic bread and wine would then be taken by the ordained or by lay Eucharistic ministers either immediately following the service, or sometime not long afterward. In this practice, embodiment and real-time, physical presence remained the primary mark of the assembly’s gathering for sacramental celebrations of Baptism and Eucharist, and with Eucharistic visitation to the sick or homebound. This was consistent with the long history of these rites as concerned with material things—water, bread, wine, oil, and the assembly itself—that served by divine grace, in the context of the church’s prayer, as signs that truly effect or communicate a spiritual reality to and among the gathered assembly. In March 2020, the Covid pandemic forced a sudden and radical shift in the practice of public worship, where again developing technology would play a key role. Along with other public institutions, churches closed to minimize the risk of spreading the virus, and worship was driven online as the way that churches could continue to “gather,” albeit digitally. In a very short period of time, clergy and lay ministers found themselves mastering and adapting the online platforms of Zoom, Facebook Live, YouTube, and the

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like, to livestream worship. This shift from in-person to digital worship led very quickly to a vigorous debate about whether sacraments could be celebrated online and, if so, in what way. Liturgies of the Word, as they engage the senses of seeing and hearing, seemed fairly obviously suited to online formats, and shifting these liturgies online addressed the concern about how singing, speaking, and even being proximate to one another in spaces without high-grade air circulation could spread the virus. Debate about Baptism was not insignificant, but the more occasional celebration of Baptism along with various ecclesial concessions available in many traditions to Baptism in urgent or emergent circumstances helped most churches determine alternate plans for their practice of sacramental initiation. Some ordinations were managed in carefully distanced and executed ways at which the minimal number of required representatives of the community in which the ordained would serve were present. The debate about Eucharistic celebration, however, was another matter. The Eucharist as an entire rite focuses on both Word and Sacrament, and involves many genres of prayer, from praise in word and song, the hearing of Scripture, affirmations of faith, and intercession, to prayers of thanksgiving and petition and receiving blessed food and drink. It is possible to participate in the Eucharist without receiving communion (which we will address further below),1 but the constraints posed by the communicability of the Covid virus around all other genres of the rite meant that these liturgies could not be celebrated in person. Furthermore, the eating and drinking of sacred bread and wine by the whole assembly is both normal and normative in most traditions and is certainly the feature that distinguishes the Eucharist from liturgies of the Word. Given that the Eucharist is celebrated often or every Sunday in many traditions, and that the culmination of the assembly’s engagement is a matter of eating and drinking, the sudden impossibility of gathering physically and simultaneously around the table amounted to a crisis and surfaced a number of contested issues in sacramental theology. The debate and disagreement, sometimes sharp, served in effect as a barometer of the ecumenical impact of the liturgical movement, revealing both the deepest successes of that movement and perhaps some of the catechetical lacunae that accompanied the churches’ shift to active and intentional participation in the Eucharist as the normative act of the church on the Lord’s Day. Several church responses to the inability to gather in person have emerged in reaction to the pandemic, including the most controversial in some circles: a celebration of the Eucharist in which the entire liturgy, including communion, occurs “virtually.” (There is some debate about whether “virtual” or “digital” is the most non-prejudicial term that applies to this question, but herein the terms are used equivalently.) After reviewing the various responses and some of the issues raised thereby, this essay will give particular attention to the most common points that are made in favor of virtual communion and in opposition to it, because this will bring into sharp relief some of the most significant constructive issues in contemporary sacramental theology and the aforementioned catechetical lacunae of the liturgical movement. We write as members of two different ecclesial bodies: the Episcopal/Anglican and the Presbyterian/Reformed. Though we share many of the same theological commitments, we also recognize that our sub-traditions have somewhat different Eucharistic theologies (for

See also Martha Moore-Keish, “Interreligious Ritual Participation: Insights from Inter-Christian Ritual Participation,” in Ritual Participation and Interreligious Dialogue: Boundaries, Transgressions, and Innovations, ed. Marianne Moyaert and Joris Geldhof (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 1

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instance, related to consecration) and that our churches have responded to the question of virtual communion in different ways. This essay will reflect this diversity, even as we conclude with common concerns about Eucharistic theology and practice in a digital environment.

ADAPTATIONS TO PRACTICE IN THE PANDEMIC LOCKDOWN The way that churches adapted to the loss of Eucharistic gathering was partly—but only partly—a function of the tradition in which they are located. For some Reformed churches not invested in a strong doctrine of consecratory change in the elements at a Eucharist there might be one set of issues to address; for Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and the Orthodox who hold to variants of such a doctrine, there might be others, even as these latter traditions differ in subtle ways in their theologies of consecration. That said, because most Christian traditions have some shared convictions about the Eucharist, partly resulting from the twentieth-century liturgical movement, their adaptive strategies in dealing with the pandemic showed overlapping features. Churches for which the Eucharist is not associated with consecration or presence in the elements of bread and wine adapted to the restriction on gathering in a range of ways. Some Reformed communities refrained from any form of digitally mediated Eucharist, out of the conviction that the actual physical gathering of the community is necessary for the full celebration of the Supper, even without a strong theology of consecratory change of the elements. Some of these communities adapted patterns of Eucharistic praying in worship to remember and give thanks for the Eucharist, without actually distributing and receiving the elements.2 Among worshiping communities that sought ways to partake of the elements in situations of physical distancing, however, at least three adaptations were common, though with endless minor variations among them. First, some worshiping communities developed “drive-in” or “drive-through” communion practices, in which people are invited to drive their cars to a central location, pick up prepackaged elements, and remain in their cars while viewing the worship leaders praying and breaking the bread projected on a screen or on a stage, followed by all those gathered consuming the elements at the same time in their separate vehicles. Other communities developed ways of delivering prepackaged elements to members ahead of time, then “gathering” on a synchronous online platform such as Zoom in order to share in the prayer and the breaking of bread before inviting all members to consume the elements at the same time. A variation of this practice was to distribute the same bread recipe to all members, or even to distribute a common sourdough starter to all members, and invite them to bake bread with this common connection in their own homes before bringing that loaf as the Eucharistic bread to consume during the online synchronous worship service at the same time. Many others invited members to gather elements in their own homes and bring them to the screen, in order to partake while viewing the worship service, in either synchronous (e.g., Zoom) or asynchronous (prerecorded) format. Taking communion at home during

David Batchelder, “The Lord’s Supper in a Pandemic: Participant’s Journal from the Front Lines,” Call to Worship 54:4 (2021): 10–19; Ronald P. Byars, “Real Presence,” Call to Worship 54:4 (2021): 44–6. 2

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a prerecorded worship service raises its own particular issues; we will focus here primarily on synchronous celebrations under the heading of “virtual communion.” For churches that hold to the consecratory change of bread and wine and a strong sense of real presence in and through those elements, their response to the impossibility of gathering might best be located on a spectrum from the conservative to the more adventurous, with the latter stirring the most significant controversy. More conservative adaptations included a switch from Eucharist to services centered on Scripture and prayer, whether one of the Daily Offices, the Liturgy of the Word from the Eucharist ending before the Liturgy of the Table, or some other Service of the Word that could be held either with a small socially distanced congregation or in an online modality. There were also some churches that provided rituals and prayers for household worship, seizing the opportunity to deepen a sense of “domestic church” and teach the practices of prayer in the home. Other adaptations, less conservative but still within the frame of some local traditions, included “Adoration (or Benediction) of the Blessed Sacrament” (again, whether distanced in places that health protocols allowed, or online) to some form of “Spiritual Communion.” In Adoration, the consecrated Host (Bread or Wafer) is placed on the altar in a receptacle that holds it in view, and the worshiper, gazing on the Host and praying before it, thus deepens and focuses their desire for communion with Christ. The Host can also be carried in procession, and there were a few reports from around the world, particularly in demographically Roman Catholic cities or countries, where a priest in a mask processed the Host through the streets to this end. The practice of Adoration occurs most commonly in a Roman Catholic context, though it is not unknown in some Anglican circles of a particular piety. Adoration commended itself to the pandemic crisis since it was already a rite in which Eucharistic devotion could be expressed without being coupled to physical communion. However, in some circles, like the Anglican, Adoration is viewed with great caution and defensible only as it encourages physical communion, and so its very strength was also its weakness in an environment where physical communion was not possible.3 “Spiritual Communion,” like Adoration, has a long history in which one participates in the full Eucharistic service, but without communion of the consecrated elements; or in some cases is entirely unable for reasons of circumstance to attend Eucharist at all, or receive. Applied to the pandemic context, in Spiritual Communion the elements were instead either received by the presiding priest or a very few others in a socially distanced manner—or by none—and participants followed the consecration with a prayer expressing to God the desire to receive, and giving thanks for God’s presence through and in response to that desire. The following is an example of such a prayer: In union, blessed Jesus, with the faithful gathered at every altar of your Church where your blessed Body and Blood are offered this day, and remembering in particular my own church community, I long to offer you praise and thanksgiving for creation and all the blessings of this life,

See the agreed statement of the first Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC I) on “Eucharistic Doctrine” (1971) and the “Elucidation of Eucharistic Doctrine” (1979). Available at http://www. chr​isti​anun​ity.va/cont​ent/uni​tacr​isti​ani/en/dialo​ghi/sezi​one-occi​dent​ale/comuni​one-anglic​ana/dial​ogo/arcic-i/ testo-in-ingl​ese.html. 3

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for the redemption won for us by your life, death, and resurrection, for the means of grace and the hope of glory. I believe that you are truly present in the Holy Sacrament, and since I cannot at this time receive communion, I pray you to come into my heart. I unite myself with you and embrace you with all my heart, soul, and mind. Let nothing separate me from you; let me serve you in this life until, by your grace, I come to your glorious kingdom and unending peace.4 This manner of celebration has historical roots in some medieval practice that, on the whole, is not considered in keeping with the value the ecumenical liturgical movement places on the communion of the people as central to the liturgical action. However, it finds a defensible precedent for use even in non-pandemic times by those who would like to receive and are prevented from doing so; for example, military personnel serving in adverse circumstances, or those who cannot partake by reason of illness or infirmity; and the significance of genuine desire to receiving grace has ancient foundations, for example, in the notion that catechumens who died before Baptism were considered to be baptized by desire, and in acknowledgments that the virtue of the Eucharist is, after all, spiritual.5 A more adventurous adaptation in churches with a strong notion of consecratory change was the consecration of the Eucharist with an abundance of bread and sometimes wine, either by the presider or within a very small, socially distanced group, after which the elements were prepared in some hygienic manner for distribution. Sometimes, the consecrated bread was placed in small kits or even “baggies,” which were delivered— again, with hygienic protocols—to members of the congregation at their homes, being left on a front step or even in a mailbox. A few churches experimented with a drive-through distribution of such kits. The relative rarity of these adaptations probably had as much to do with the sense that such a manner of distribution trivialized the significance of the sacrament, although as the pandemic wore on, the pressure increased on churches to try this kind of approach. One can easily see the overlap, in the adaptations described, between traditions with a strong sense of consecration and traditions with less emphasis on it. The most adventurous and most controversial adaptation in most traditions, which will command the attention of the remainder of this essay, was the practice of online Eucharist with virtual communion. This is the practice in which the protocols and assumptions of the digital world challenged the ordinary protocols and assumptions of sacramental theology and norms in practice. As noted above, for the purpose of this essay the term “virtual communion” will refer to Eucharistic celebrations in which communicants supply the bread and wine—either from their own store or preparation, or from elements supplied to them in advance—and then, signing on to a digital platform from their own homes or elsewhere, participate in a Eucharist in which the presider prays the appropriate prayers that are taken to consecrate the elements at a distance. Those watching then consume the consecrated bread and wine wherever they are while watching. The practice in question, then, is communion taken St. Augustine’s Prayer Book (Forward Movement, 2014), 192. See also a description of this practice in Sarah Kathleen Johnson, “Online Communion, Christian Community and Receptive Ecumenism: A Holy Week Ethnography During Covid-19,” Studia Liturgica 50:2 (September 2020): 188–210. Also available at https:// journ​als.sage​pub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/00393​2072​0946​030. 5 See Book of Common Prayer 1979 (New York: Church Publishing, 1986), 457 (rubric); A Prayer Book for the Armed Forces (New York: Church Publishing, 2008), 147; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III.74(1). 4

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simultaneously but separately, in which those “gathered” online can see and hear one another but are not present with each other bodily or in the same material space.

ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST “VIRTUAL COMMUNION” Arguments about “virtual communion” continue even as many places enter into a hiatus between viral surges. Church leaders have offered many reasons in support of the practice of “virtual communion.” Pastoral concern is often at the forefront: in a time of physical distancing and social isolation, it is argued, people need community more than ever, and the Eucharist is a clear celebration of community with Christ and with one another. People are hungry for the presence of Christ and for some kind of connection with one another. Why would we deny them the opportunity to commune in this way?6 To bolster this argument, many people turn to a strong affirmation that the risen presence of Christ is not prohibited by the digital environment. Reformed Christians in particular affirm with John Calvin that the Holy Spirit unites those who are separated by space; this is the mystery of how we ever encounter Christ at table, even though his body is risen and ascended, “the Spirit truly unites things separated in space.”7 If this is already true every time we celebrate the Supper, surely it is also true even when we celebrate on screen: Christ’s resurrected presence that entered through locked doors (Jn 20:19-31) can also encounter us through digital mediation of screens and internet. In addition to the emphasis on the risen Christ, the communion of saints of all times and places is also always part of Christian Eucharistic understanding, challenging the idea that communion is only with those who are physically present to us. Communion with others is not restricted by space and time. There is an analogy with those who are gathered now through digital means. We are always already celebrating with people of other times and places.8 Some even consider that those members of the communion of saints who have already died are still part of the liturgical assembly, and thus even a single person praying at the altar/table would still be part of an assembly, joined by those who have gone before. The digital environment enables us to see and experience community with others with whom we cannot gather physically. This has expanded access to community for many who have long been unable to attend physical worship for a variety of reasons (such as mobility or compromised immune systems).9 Eucharist itself, when celebrated online, might offer access to those for whom sacramental encounter is otherwise unavailable. In particular, and informed especially by disability studies, some church leaders point out that digitally mediated worship helpfully challenges assumptions about the “normate”

See interview with Diana Butler Bass, “Online Communion should be celebrated, not shunned, says Diana Butler Bass” https://relig​ionn​ews.com/2020/05/15/onl​ine-commun​ion-sho​uld-be-cel​ebra​ted-not-shun​ned-says-dianabut​ler-bass/. 7 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1960), IV. xvii.10. 8 This is a common appeal among Presbyterians, also implied in Johnson’s description of Free Church practice as well as Presbyterian/mainline services she attended. 9 See Kay Lynn Northcutt, “Through a Glass Safely,” Christian Century (April 22, 2020): 12–13, and Deanna Thompson, “Being the Body of Christ in a Time of Pandemic and Beyond,” blog post for Lutheran Center for Faith, Values, and Community (April 2, 2020), available at https://wp.sto​laf.edu/lut​hera​ncen​ter/2020/04/ being-the-body-of-chr​ist-in-a-time-of-pande​mic-and-bey​ond/. 6

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human body, and thus what constitutes authentic embodied sacramental participation. After all, what counts as part of the body? Many people have forms of technology that extend bodies and enable participation in worship (e.g., hearing aids, glasses, wheelchairs). If we emphasize the importance of physical bodies being present, what are the boundaries of those bodies? “Can there be such a clear distinction between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ forms of being with one another as embodied creatures of God and between the ways we are ‘present’ to one another?”10 Again, virtual communion enables many kinds of bodies to participate without the obstacles that can inhibit such participation in physical space. Extending this line of argument, some argue that digital assembly is still assembly and is no less real than assembly in person. Finally, and particularly in the free church context, virtual communion embodies a commitment to the priesthood of all believers, the unmediated relationship each Christian has with God. This “creates space for communities to gather online while receiving the bread and cup in their respective locations. Although pastors provide central leadership for communion in each of these settings, participants are empowered to prepare their own elements and to receive physically at home, whether alone or in small groups.”11 In effect, online communion can flatten out ecclesial hierarchy, giving the responsibility for preparation and distribution of elements, in addition to reception, to the communicants in their own homes. Acknowledging the real pastoral need for connection with one another in a time of isolation, the heartfelt desire among pastors and priests to serve, and the hunger for communion with the presence of the risen Christ, we will focus on two key concerns about the practice of virtual communion: what is meant by Eucharistic assembly, and whether virtual communion really does flatten ecclesial hierarchy, or whether it contributes to increased clericalism. To begin with, assembly is at the heart of Christian worship in general, and Eucharist in particular. As Gordon Lathrop notes, “Assembly, a gathering together of participating persons, constitutes the most basic symbol of Christian worship. All other symbols and symbolic actions of liturgy depend upon this gathering being there in the first place. No texts are read, no preaching occurs, no hymns are sung, no Eucharist is held without an assembly, however small or large this gathering may be.”12 The possibility of digital assembly, however, immediately raises the question of what we mean by “assembly.” When one considers assemblies, many others come to mind: an assembly of friends who attended school together and wish to reconnect on an annual basis; an assembly for the conferral of an award; an assembly of family members for an annual holiday; and so on. Social assemblies, ritual assemblies, accidental assemblies, voluntary assemblies, required assemblies—all these are different in a number of ways. Notably, some assemblies are entirely instrumental to their final purpose; other assemblies are the final purpose. This signifies the missed step in arguing that digital assembly is “real” assembly. Even if one grants that “assembly” is the correct descriptor for several persons’ digital presence via an online platform—and that itself is open to question—the critical question for virtual communion is this: what kind of assembly is the Eucharistic assembly, and is digital assembly that same kind of assembly? Put differently, can digital, non-embodied,

ebecca Spurrier, personal communication, July 2020. R Johnson, “Online Communion,” 200. 12 Gordon Lathrop, Holy People: A Liturgical Ecclesiology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999), 21. 10 11

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non-proximate gathering sustain the meaning given to the liturgical assembly as it is understood in the Christian sacramental tradition?13 In most Christian sacramental theology, particularly since Vatican II, there are a number of qualities that attach to that Eucharistic assembly. First, the assembly is itself a sacrament. The gathered assembly is the sign of God’s outworking mission in the world, the context in which those ritual signs and actions known more narrowly as “sacraments” actually occur. As itself sacramental, the gathering of the assembly is constitutive of the sacramentality of Eucharist. Its purpose is both to display and effect the unity of the body of believers in their Lord; bread is broken for many that they may be one.14 The sacramentality of the assembly rests, in turn, on the sacramentality of Christ himself, in whom those who are no people are now made a people.15 Secondly, and crucial to the nature of the assembly as sacramental, is its eschatological character. Those who gather for the Eucharist leave their domestic spaces, their workplaces, the other public and private spaces through which they move, and they assemble by virtue of being one in Baptism. Properly understood, they gather not because of personal affinity, or social convention, or caste, or economic class, or social or racial identity, but because they are baptized members of a church, which is the sign, however haltingly and imperfectly, of the renewal of creation that God is bringing about, when “every tribe and language and people and nation” are gathered in the new city around the divine throne.16 The sacrament, this argument goes, must be celebrated within this context. The gathering of material bodies—whatever the form of the bodies—in one space at one time to celebrate an incarnational faith breaks the normal patterns of association to which we are given. Conversely, “gathering” online, each member in their own homes or some other place of choice, fails to materialize this new order and, in fact, in a society given to consumerism and a spectator orientation, reproduces and reinforces in the church the unreconstructed worldly order that the Eucharist challenges. It also risks amplifying existing disparities between people of different social and economic locations, based on what bread and drink people have access to, rather than heeding Paul’s concern in 1 Corinthians 11 about rich and poor members of the community having separate meals—and thus failing to truly celebrate the Lord’s Supper. Individualized consumption of bread and cup in separate homes can also reinforce the false sense that partaking of Eucharistic elements is my individual “right,” rather than being a meal offered for the sake of the world. A third concern follows this understanding of the assembly: virtual communion risks establishing or reinforcing clericalism. Although some communities have interpreted this practice as a celebration of the priesthood of all believers, there is a real danger that it can have the opposite effect: if the only thing necessary for Eucharist is a person authorized to pray (priest or pastor) and the elements over which they pray, then the role of others is reduced to that of mere observer or consumer. But the baptized assembly is constitutive Sarah Kathleen Johnson argues that “Christian community clearly can and does exist online. I affirm Berger’s suggestion that ‘we forgo arguing whether ecclesial community can exist online—everything indicates it already does.’ ” But to forgo the argument begs the question regarding whether this is the particular kind of assembly that can sustain the particular practice of Eucharistic communion. See Johnson, “Online Communion,” 181–210. 14 1 Cor. 11:17-34; 1 Cor. 10:17, which is rendered as an anthem sung at the time of the breaking of the bread in some traditions. 15 1 Pet. 2:10. 16 Rev. 7:9; Eucharistic Prayer 2, Enriching Our Worship (New York: Church Publishing, 1998), 62. Available at https://www.churc​hpub​lish​ing.org/sit​eass​ets/pdf/enrich​ing-our-wors​hip-1/enric​hing​ourw​orsh​ip1.pdf. 13

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of the sacramentality of Eucharist, and not simply the occasion or place where ordained leaders make the sacrament. In particular, the embodied actions of giving and receiving of bread and wine are constitutive parts of the Eucharistic celebration, and these actions are simply not possible in an online environment. This line of concern about virtual communion can be restated somewhat differently with an eye to the character of ritualization. Ritual is not the acting out with the body some matter of inward disposition or orientation; ritual efficacy is not generated from intention, whether the presider’s or the people’s. Ritual is bodily action that means what it does … means as and how it does. It frames and shapes intention. In Christian Eucharist, it matters that the people eat from one table. The commensality that the body knows in Eucharist is not the desire to be one; it is the being one by eating from the same table, not simply at the same time from our own stores at our own tables (which can actually reinforce the precise opposite to the eschatological values enumerated above). One can think all one wants about how one is doing something with others in a digital space with whom we desire to be one. But from the standpoint of ritual anthropology and sacramental theology in which the meaning is in the doing, the Eucharistic becoming one simply cannot be reproduced, only mimicked, in a digital format. The question of virtual communion, then, has little to do with whether the presider has the power to consecrate from fifty feet or fifty miles or over a fiberoptic cable—a very clericalist preoccupation! It is not about whether digital assembly is real assembly of some kind. It is not even about where God is, which, yes, is unconstrained by material finitude. This is about where the assembly is, and about how God is with the assembly in this particular Eucharistic way by God’s own Word of promise, that when we eat and as we eat of this sacramental food we are made one. Bodily common action, not digitally mediated simultaneous action in which, frankly, the eyes play the greatest role, is not simply the happenstance detail of how and where the sacrament usually occurs— it is bound up to the action’s sacramentality. When this is understood, the issue at hand is not so much whether a “virtual” form of Eucharistic communion is permissible but whether it exists. This argument from the nature of ritualization, the sacramentality of the assembly, and the eschatological character of the common table would suggest that, whatever good comes from this particular adaptation to pandemic conditions, it is not, in fact, and cannot be, what Christians have meant by Eucharist. Closely related to the importance of the eschatological and constitutive quality of the assembly of bodies, a fourth concern, particularly relevant for those who emphasize communion with the risen Christ as a rationale for virtual communion, is the very real danger of “spiritualizing” the Supper. Presbyterian and Reformed Protestants, for instance, have a perilous habit of focusing on “spiritual meaning” that is somehow separate from physical embodiment, effacing corporate embodied ritual in favor of purely individual communing with the invisible Christ. Virtual communion risks reinforcing this habit, implying that gathered bodies are not important, as long as we spiritually commune with the risen Christ. In the process, we can form people in the belief that communion is really about a spiritualized “me and Jesus” moment rather than an act of the assembly gathered to take, bless, break, and give. The notion that the assembly of the Eucharist is always communal given the presence of the dead in Christ faces similar problems, failing to account for the long tradition of distinguishing between, as it has sometimes been put, the “church militant” and the “church triumphant.” The latter are in communion with God under different conditions than those who are living in earthly bodies, to which

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condition God has “condescended in the gift of the incarnate Christ himself and in the sacraments under which he is now met.”17 The earthly church surely joins the praises of those who have gone before, as one rehearses in the words of the Sanctus, echoing the angels of Isaiah 6;18 but those who have gone before have no need of the sacrament. The Eucharistic sacrament’s grace is food for the baptized, that in their mortal bodies they be sustained for participation in the missio Dei on earth, until the fullness of time. Without denying that there is a communion between the living and the dead in Christ, the notion that the dead assemble for Eucharist is a peculiar literalization of that communion, and to follow its logic all the way to the end leaves the presence of anyone physically present at the holy table—or, for that matter, digitally present—entirely superfluous.

CONCLUSION There is no question that much has been learned by the churches during the pandemic about using technological tools to extend their public reach. Healthy debates about which technologies are appropriate to the kind of community the church is; about which ecclesial practices are appropriate to the kind of context the digital world is; and about the ways that technology can deepen the church’s engagement in the missio Dei in that digital world are debates both healthy and necessary. Even in the onset of a late pandemic “new normal” (whether that is our state at the time of this book’s publication remains to be seen) the eyes of many communities have been opened to the power of new media. As a single example, even when churches can regather in person, digital tools can broadcast or narrowcast that gathering to those who are prevented from attending by illness, so the latter can at least see the very assembly from which Eucharistic ministers will immediately and physically bring to them the sacrament, thus extending the experience of assembly in that way. Of course, the possibility of the use of such tools immediately raises a host of important questions of affordability and capacity that lie beyond the brief of this essay. Even if one takes the position that virtual communion does not in fact exist, the debate over it presses broader questions about other kinds of participation in the Eucharist as a full rite of Word and Sacrament, even in person. Participation in the Eucharist occurs in many ways, even when worshipers do not receive the elements themselves. (Consider in pre-pandemic times a Protestant “participating” in a Catholic mass.) When someone comes online with a Eucharistic assembly with whom they are not present, the “observer” may still participate in some way in the rite—through online chat and song, memory, listening to the Word proclaimed, and so forth—and these ways of participating despite the inability to receive the sacramental food needs more carefully to be considered for the sake of digital “outreach,” for helping the Eucharistic assembly worship in ways that allow for that kind of participation. Finally, the present moment invites the churches to consider that all Eucharistic gatherings are limited and incomplete. Eucharistic services in an online environment make us more aware of this. Some people are always excluded, whether because of limited mobility, limited physical access, limited resources, or other reasons. This should make us more aware than ever of the partiality, the brokenness, the absences and insufficiency of our celebrations. Maybe this makes us more alert, even in “normal” times, to who is

eo the Great, Sermon 72:II. L “Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, God of power and might ….”

17 18

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missing at all our meals, how our meals inadvertently reproduce inequities and divisions, how certain bodies are privileged, and others marginalized or excluded. A commitment to honor the fundamental principles of Eucharistic assembly, far from ruling out such considerations, drives their significance home.

FURTHER READING Bass, Diana Butler Bass, “Online Communion Should Be Celebrated, Not Shunned.” Interview: https://relig​ionn​ews.com/2020/05/15/onl​ine-commun​ion-sho​uld-be-cel​ebra​ ted-not-shun​ned-says-diana-but​ler-bass/. Batchelder, David. “The Lord’s Supper in a Pandemic: Participant’s Journal from the Front Lines.” Call to Worship 54:4 (2021): 10–19. Berger, Teresa. @ Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds. London: Routledge, 2017; and “@Worship: Exploring Liturgical Practices in Cyberspace.” Questions Liturgiques 94 (2013): 266–86. Byars, Ronald P. “Real Presence.” Call to Worship 54:4 (2021): 44–6. Farwell, James W., guest editor. “Revisiting Sacramental Theology in the Wake of Pandemic.” Special Issue of Anglican Theological Review 104:1 (Fall 2022). Johnson, Sarah Kathleen. “Online Communion, Christian Community, and Receptive Ecumenism. A Holy Week Ethnography During Covid-19,” Studia Liturgica 50:2 (September 2020): 188–210. Also available at https://journ​als.sage​pub.com/doi/ pdf/10.1177/00393​2072​0946​030. Stamm, Mark. “Online Communion and the Covid-19 Crisis: Problems and Alternatives” (March 27, 2020). https://blog.smu.edu/perk​ins/onl​ine-commun​ion-and-the-covid-19-cri​ sis-probl​ems-and-alter​nati​ves/.

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Sacramentality, Sacraments, and Integral Ecology in Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ KEVIN W. IRWIN

The purpose of this chapter is to explain and interpret a Vatican document for a broad ecumenical audience. The interpretation of documents from the Catholic church can be complex because of the different kinds of documents, the variety of authors, and the diverse circumstances and needs. There is (literally) a “hierarchy” of documents, and the relative authoritative weight is often determined by the document’s rank.1 For example, the constitutions, decrees, and declarations from an ecumenical council (e.g., the ecumenical council called Vatican II, 1962–5) is the highest possible rank. A document from an individual diocesan bishop is a lower rank. The method followed here will be to assess Laudato Si’ as a “papal encyclical letter.” Laudato Si’ was written by Pope Francis in 2015.2 The title “Laudato Si’” means “Praise be to you,” which are the first words of St. Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures. Its subtitle, which deserves discussion, is “On Care for Our Common Home.” The encyclical stands within the historical context of the teachings of previous popes and the teachings of other bishops, especially the teachings of the Latin American bishops. Also important to assess are the particular contributions that Laudato Si’ has made to subsequent Vatican documents and practices on the topics that it treats, including “sacramentality,” “sacraments,” and “integral ecology.”

See Kevin W. Irwin, Serving the Body of Christ: The Magisterium on Eucharist and Ordained Priesthood (New York: Paulist Press, 2013), 1–8. 2 Pope Francis, “Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ on Care for Our Common Home” (May 23, 2015) http://www. vati​can.va/cont​ent/france​sco/en/ency​clic​als/docume​nts/papa-france​sco_​2015​0524​_en ciclica-laudato-si.html. The Vatican’s website provides Laudato Si’ in fourteen languages: Arabic, Belarusian, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian. Almost always the Vatican itself, as well as researchers, cite the Latin text of a Vatican document as the definitive source, often because the Latin is the original text of the document (this is true, for example, of the documents from Vatican II). For Laudato Si’, the language of the first draft was English (completed July 2014). It was then translated into Spanish, evaluated by several authors and groups, definitively revised by Pope Francis himself and published on May 24, 2015. See Kevin Irwin, A Commentary on Laudato Si’: Examining the Background, Contributions, Implementation, and Future of Pope Francis’ Encyclical (New York: Paulist Press, 2016), 96–100. 1

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Sacramentality is a worldview, a way of looking at life and living life fully on this good earth with each other and with all creatures on the earth where even now we are immersed in God.3 It means that through each other and all fellow creatures in our common home God is revealed and discovered. At the same time, God’s revelation is not full and total in us. The act of sacrament always leads us beyond the here and now to when this world passes away and when we will see God face-to-face. In the meantime, we experience God here and now through each other and this good earth, and this is the principle of sacramentality that grounds sacraments. Closely united to the principle of sacramentality is the theology of creation, the Incarnation, and the principle of mediation.4 Integral ecology is a central topic in Laudato Si’. This phrase is used throughout the encyclical, and it is almost universally regarded as its most significant contribution. Early in the encyclical, in paragraph 10, Pope Francis cites St. Francis of Assisi in relation to integral ecology: I do not want to write this Encyclical without turning to that attractive and compelling figure, whose name I took as my guide and inspiration when I was elected Bishop of Rome. I believe that Saint Francis is the example par excellence of care for the vulnerable and of an integral ecology lived out joyfully and authentically. He is the patron saint of all who study and work in the area of ecology, and he is also much loved by non-Christians. He was particularly concerned for God’s creation and for the poor and outcast. He loved, and was deeply loved for his joy, his generous self-giving, his openheartedness. He was a mystic and a pilgrim who lived in simplicity and in wonderful harmony with God, with others, with nature and with himself. He shows us just how inseparable the bond is between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace. Therefore, the underlying thesis of the present chapter is that Pope Francis has uniquely combined some characteristic elements of the Catholic church’s teachings on social justice with the experience of the church in prayer and in action. In this prayer and action the church renews and invites all peoples to appreciate and accept their responsibility for the earth, which is “our common home,” and their companionship with “all creatures great and small.”

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Pope Leo XIII (Pope 1873–1903) The year 1891 is generally accepted as the beginning of the publication of documents from popes on issues of social justice. In 1891 Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical letter Rerum Novarum (“On New Things”).5 This letter outlined the rights of workers to a fair wage, safe working conditions, and the formation of trade unions, and it affirmed the

“Sacramentality” has been a topic of major concern in my writing for two decades: from Kevin W. Irwin, “The Sacramental World—The Primary Language for Sacraments,” Worship 76:3 (May 2002): 197–211, to Kevin W. Irwin, Context and Text: A Method for Liturgical Theology, rev. ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018), chap. 3. 4 See Irwin, Context and Text, 126–31. 5 In Roman Catholicism the first words of a document customarily convey a main point of the document and serve as the document’s title. The title Rerum Novarum means “On New Things” and refers to the social situation in which the church found itself in 1891. 3

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rights of property and free enterprise, opposing both socialism and laissez-faire capitalism. Importantly, in Laudato Si’ Pope Francis speaks out about several human rights—such as the right to potable water (LS 27–33)—and the Catholic teaching that private property is a relative right that is subordinate to the universal destination of goods (LS 93).6

Pope Paul VI (Pope 1963–78) Pope Paul VI issued encyclicals and several other documents indicating his concern for the environment. In 1967 he penned the important encyclical Populorum Progressio (“On the Progress of the Peoples”).7 In this letter, Paul VI asserts, “The development We speak of here cannot be restricted to economic growth alone. To be authentic, it must be well rounded; it must foster the development of each [person] and of the whole [person]” (PP 14). In paragraph 22, Pope Paul continues with a pivotal theme that becomes significant for Francis’s Laudato Si’. He states, In the very first pages of Scripture we read the words: “fill the earth and subdue it.” (Gn 1. 28) This teaches us that the whole of creation is for [humans] that [humans have] been charged to give it meaning by [their] intelligent activity, to complete and perfect it by [their] own efforts and to [their] own advantage. Now if the earth truly was created to provide [humans] with the necessities of life and the tools for [their] own progress, it follows that every [one] has the right to glean what [they need] from the earth. The recent Council reiterated this truth: “God intended the earth and everything in it for the use of all human beings and peoples. Thus, under the leadership of justice and in the company of charity, created goods should flow fairly to all.” A decade later in 1977, Paul VI delivered a “Message” for the fifth “World-Wide Day for the Environment.”8 In this message, Paul teaches that humans have a responsibility to hand over a healthy environment to future generations, and he poignantly asserts that we are “custodians of creation.”

Pope John Paul II (Pope 1978–2005) Because of the length and “style” of his papacy, it is no surprise to see an evolution in Pope John Paul II’s teachings about the environment.9 In his first encyclical,

In LS 93, Francis states,

6

Hence every ecological approach needs to incorporate a social perspective which takes into account the fundamental rights of the poor and the underprivileged. The principle of the subordination of private property to the universal destination of goods, and thus the right of everyone to their use, is a golden rule of social conduct and “the first principle of the whole ethical and social order” [quoting John Paul II]. The Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property. Saint John Paul II forcefully reaffirmed this teaching, stating that “God gave the earth to the whole human race for the sustenance of all its members, without excluding or favouring anyone.” Pope Paul VI, “Encyclical Letter Populorum Progressio on the Development of Peoples” (March 26, 1967), http:// www.vati​can.va/cont​ent/paul-vi/en/ency​clic​als/docume​nts/hf_p-vi_e​nc_2​6031​967_​popu​lor um.html. 8 Pope Paul VI, “Message for the Fifth World-Wide Day for the Environment” (June 5,1977) http://www.vati​can. va/cont​ent/paul-vi/en/messa​ges/pont-messa​ges/docume​nts/hf_p-vi_​mess​_19 770605_world-day-ambiente.html. 9 The word “style” refers to the manner in which he communicated by his person (having been an actor), the breadth of his teachings (having been a philosophy professor), and the way he engaged the world (having taken 104 international trips). 7

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Redemptor Hominis (“On the Redeemer of the Human Race”), written in 1979, John Paul challenges humans to address the destruction of creation (RH 15–16). In his 1984 Laborem Excercens (“On Human Labor”), he asserts that humans have the responsibility to preserve and share resources of the whole earth and all that dwell in it (LE 4). In his 1987 Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (“On the Social Concerns of the Church”), John Paul addresses an “ecological concern” that includes “a fair distribution of the results of true development.” He teaches that humans have a certain affinity with other creatures, he emphasizes that humans have the duty of cultivating and watching over all creatures, and he asserts that humans are subject to both biological and moral laws (SRS 26, 29, 34). Pope John Paul II dedicated his 1990 “World Day of Peace Message” to the theme “Peace with God, the Creator, Peace with All Creation.”10 In this message, he states that the earth’s resources are for the common good, he invites “a new solidarity” of concern about the environment, and he asserts that this “moral crisis” requires “simplicity, moderation, discipline and self-sacrifice.” Given his background as a philosopher, it is not surprising that this pope emphasizes the need to emphasize the “aesthetic value of creation.” The next year, 1991, marked the one-hundredth anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, and Pope John Paul II commemorated it with the encyclical Centesimus Annus (“On One Hundred Years”). In this letter, John Paul challenges members of the church “to safeguard the moral conditions for an authentic ‘human ecology’.” The phrase “human ecology” was widely used and commented upon until Pope Francis replaced it with “integral ecology.” Then in 1995, John Paul wrote the encyclical Evangelium Vitae (“On the Gospel of Life”). Here, he acknowledges that “the growing attention being paid to the quality of life and to ecology” is a sign of hope (EV 27). He then speaks of the distortion that takes place when reference to God is removed from the world; when this happens, he says, “nature itself, from being ‘mater’ (mother), is now reduced to being ‘matter,’ and is subjected to every kind of manipulation” (EV 34). Finally, in the General Audience of January 17, 2001, Pope John Paul II spoke about several interrelated issues about the environment. He called for nothing less than “a global ecological conversion.”11

The years 1989–90 were a watershed for the kind of attention that churches across the ecumenical spectrum addressed ecology. See Kevin W. Irwin, “Ecology,” in Oxford Handbook of Ecumenical Studies, ed. Geoffrey Wainwright and Paul McPartlan. Published online March 2017. DOI:10.1093/oxfor dhb/9780199600847.001.0001. 11 John Paul II, “General Audience, January 17, 2001,” http://www.vati​can.va/cont​ent/john-paul-ii/en/audien​ ces/2001/docume​nts/hf_jp-ii_​aud_​2001​011 7.html. John Paul said, 10

We must therefore encourage and support the “ecological conversion” which in recent decades has made humanity more sensitive to the catastrophe to which it has been heading. Man is no longer the Creator’s “steward,” but an autonomous despot, who is finally beginning to understand that he must stop at the edge of the abyss. “Another welcome sign is the growing attention being paid to the quality of life and to ecology, especially in more developed societies, where people’s expectations are no longer concentrated so much on problems of survival as on the search for an overall improvement of living conditions” (Evangelium vitae, n. 27). At stake, then, is not only a “physical” ecology that is concerned to safeguard the habitat of the various living beings, but also a “human” ecology which makes the existence of creatures more dignified, by protecting the fundamental good of life in all its manifestations and by preparing for future generations an environment more in conformity with the Creator’s plan.

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Pope Benedict XVI (Pope 2005–13) In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI wrote the encyclical Caritas in Veritate (“On Charity in Truth”). In this letter, Benedict directly addresses environmental issues, including the church’s responsibility to foster “responsible stewardship” and the need to strengthen the “covenant between human beings and the environment” (CV 50). He also asserts, “when human ecology is respected in society, environmental ecology also benefits” (CV 51).

POPE FRANCIS (POPE 2013–PRESENT) Pre-Papacy Numberless monographs and media sources have outlined, summarized, and critiqued Jorge Bergoglio’s life and his several ministries as a Jesuit priest, as a bishop, and then as the archbishop of Buenos Aires.12 His last ministry before being elected pope was as cardinal-archbishop of Buenos Aires. This means that he was de facto a member of the Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano (CELAM; the Latin American Bishops’ Conference).13 Like all other national episcopal conferences of Catholic bishops, CELAM meets regularly to deal with particular issues of their people.14 Since Vatican II, CELAM has sponsored five “general conferences” involving all the bishops of the continent. The Fifth General Conference was held at Aparecida, Brazil, in 2007 with the theme “Disciples and Missionaries of Jesus Christ, so That Our Peoples May Have Life in Him.”15 Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio not only participated in the working of this assembly but he was also chair of the committee responsible for drafting the Assembly’s Concluding Document. The Aparecida Concluding Document starkly states that “the church’s mission is to evangelize” (ACD 30), and this assertion is repeated throughout the document. The bishops of CELAM repeatedly reference Benedict XVI’s address that opened the Aparecida Conference, in particular, that “discipleship and mission are like the two sides of a single coin: when the disciple is in love with Christ, he cannot stop proclaiming to the world that only in him do we find salvation (cf. Acts 4:12). In effect, the disciple knows that without Christ there is no light, no hope, no love, no future” (ACD 146). The bishops of CELAM add, “this is the essential task of evangelization, which includes the preferential option for the poor, integral human promotion, and authentic Christian liberation.”16

Among many others, see Elisabetta Pique, Vida y Revolution: Una biografia de Jorge Bergoglio (Buenos Aires: Editorial E; Ateneo, 2013), trans. Life and Revolution: A Biography of Jorge Bergoglio (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2013); Austen Ivereigh, The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope (New York: Henry Holt, 2015). For an important recounting of Bergoglio’s personal, vocational, and intellectual formation outside of the usual European (not to say Roman) philosophically based theology, see Massimo Borghesi, Jorge Maria Bergoglio: Una biografia intellettuale (Milano: Jaca Book, 2017), trans. Barry Hudock, The Mind of Pope Francis: Jorge Bergoglio’s Intellectual Journey (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018). Parts of an initial summary of Pope Francis’s thought by Walter Kasper are also pertinent: Pope Francis’ Revolution of Tenderness and Love: Theological and Pastoral Perspectives (New York: Paulist Press, 2016). 13 Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano: http://www.celam.org. 14 The internal divisions within CELAM, as well as divisions between CELAM and Vatican officials, have been widely documented. See Cristobal Fones, Latin American Episcopal Teaching on Liturgy after Vatican II, STL thesis, The Catholic University of America, 2006. 15 Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano, Aparecida Concluding Document (2007), n. 146. 16 The phrase “preferential option for the poor” is found several times in the Aparecida Concluding Document (nn. 100, 146, 179, 391–6), indicating its importance. 12

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Most notably, the bishops clarify what they mean by “holiness,” stating in paragraph 148, In sharing this mission the disciples journey toward holiness. Living it in mission leads them into the heart of the world. Hence, holiness is not a flight toward self-absorption or toward religious individualism, nor does it mean abandoning the urgent reality of the enormous economic, social, and political problems of Latin America and the world, let alone a flight from reality toward an exclusively spiritual world. The Aparecida Concluding Document also includes a section on “The Formative Itinerary of Missionary Disciples,” which contains the document’s fullest yet rather succinct understanding of liturgy.17 This is followed with treatment of the Sunday Eucharist and the Sunday obligation, specifically.18 Alongside these references to liturgy, the Aparecida Concluding Document raises up the importance of popular piety and devotions. It gives generous attention to “popular religiosity” as “the precious treasure of the Catholic Church in Latin America” (ACD 258, quoting Pope Benedict XVI). The bishops continue that “this way of expressing the faith is present in different manners in all sectors, in a multitude that merits respect and affection because their piety ‘manifests a thirst for God which only the simple and poor can know’ ” (ACD 258, quoting Pope Paul VI). The quotation on the “thirst for God” is from Pope Paul VI’s apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi, which Pope Francis has identified several times as one of his favorite papal texts.19 Examples of popular religiosity include patron saint celebrations, novenas, rosaries, the Way of the Cross, processions, dances and songs of religious folklore, affection for the

In Aparecida Concluding Document, n. 250, the bishops of CELAM assert,

17

We encounter Jesus Christ in an admirable way in the Sacred Liturgy. In living it, celebrating the paschal mystery, Christ’s disciples delve deeper into the mysteries of the Kingdom and sacramentally express their vocation as disciples and missionaries. Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy shows us the place and function of the liturgy in the following of Christ, in the missionary action of Christians, in new life in Christ, and in the life of our peoples in Him. In Aparecida Concluding Document, n. 251, the bishops of CELAM teach,

18

The Eucharist is the privileged place of the disciple’s encounter with Jesus Christ. With this sacrament, Jesus attracts us to himself and makes us enter into his dynamism toward God and toward neighbor. There is a close connection between the three dimensions of the Christian vocation: believing, celebrating, and living the mystery of Jesus Christ, so that Christian existence truly acquires a eucharistic form. In each Eucharist, Christians celebrate and take on the paschal mystery by participating in it. Therefore the faithful must live their faith in the centrality of the paschal mystery of Christ through the Eucharist, so that their whole life is increasingly eucharistic life. The Eucharist, inexhaustible source of the Christian vocation, is at the same time inextinguishable source of missionary drive. In it the Holy Spirit strengthens the identity of disciples, and awakens in them the firm intention of boldly proclaiming to others what they have heard and lived. They continue, in the next paragraph (n. 252): Thus becomes clear the great importance of the Sunday obligation, of “living according to Sunday” as an inner need of the believer, the Christian community, and the parish community. Without active participation in the Sunday eucharistic celebration and on holy days of obligation, there will be no mature missionary disciple. Every great reform in the church is linked to the rediscovery of faith in the Eucharist. Hence it is important to promote the “Sunday ministry,” and give it “priority in pastoral programs,” for a new impulse in the evangelization of the people of God on the Latin American continent. Pope Paul VI, “Encyclical Letter Evangelii Nuntiandi” (December 8, 1975), http://www.vati​can.va/cont​ ent/paul-vi/en/apo​st_e​xhor​tati​ons/docume​nts/hf_p-vi_ex​h_19​7512​08_ evangelii-nuntiandi.html. It is worth mentioning that since becoming pope, Bergoglio has jettisoned the efforts of John Paul II and Benedict XVI on “the new evangelization” in favor of the direct term “evangelization.” 19

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saints and angels, solemn processions, and family prayer (ACD 259). The bishops state that popular piety is “an indispensable starting point in deepening the faith of the people and bringing it to maturity” (ACD 264). The ongoing debate about the merits of popular piety in relation to the “official” liturgy of the church needs to address the deep level at which popular piety and liturgy combine as touchstones for ecclesiology, engagement of bodies in prayer, and the need for transcendence and eschatology.20 Further, ongoing discussions about “sacramentality” (a term not found in the document) should now include popular piety and religiosity, which are often not addressed in conventional treatments of sacramentality. A final comment on the Aparecida Concluding Document concerns how it is constructed. The document uses the “see-judge-act method” (ACD 19). The see-judge-act method views God with the eyes of faith through his revealed word and life-giving contact in the sacraments. Thus, in everyday life we may see the reality around us in the light of God’s Providence; we may judge it according to Jesus Christ, who is the Way, Truth, and Life; we act from the Church, who is the Mystical Body of Christ and universal Sacrament of salvation, in spreading the Kingdom of God that is sown on this earth and fully bears fruit in Heaven.21 In this way, the bishops of CELAM not only follow in the footsteps of preceding conferences of CELAM, where this method was employed, but they also follow Pope Pius XII and Pope John XXIII (Mater et Magistra). Pope John XXIII had adopted the seejudge-act method from Pope Pius XII, who relied on the work of Cardinal Joseph Cardijn of Belgium (1882–1967). Cardinal Cardijn worked with the poor and adopted the triad see-judge-act as his approach to implementing the church’s social justice teaching. In the Aparecida Concluding Document, the bishops of CELAM treat issues of ecology and the environment in a way that integrates them into the larger framework of evangelization at the beginning of the third millennium. The CELAM bishops view reality through a wide-angle lens, sometimes a specifically sacramental lens. As a result, ecology and evangelization; the environment and poverty; creation and the misuse of creation; the beauty of the earth and deforestation; and liturgy, prayer, and sacraments are all of a piece. Therefore, the Aparecida Concluding Document provides the methodological background that Pope Francis will employ in Laudato Si’: namely, the see-judge-act method. This same document from CELAM also provides the background to what will become “integral ecology” in Francis’s encyclical “On Care for Our Common Home.”22

See Peter Phan, ed., “Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy: Principles and Guidelines”: A Commentary (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005); Irwin, Context and Text: A Method for Liturgical Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2019), 389–97. 21 In Aparecida Concluding Document, n. 19, the bishops continue, 20

Many voices from the entire continent, offered contributions and suggestions along these lines, stating that this method has been helpful for living our calling and mission in the church with more dedication and intensity. It has enriched theological and pastoral work and in general it has been helpful in motivating us to take on our responsibilities toward the actual situations in our continent. This method enables us to combine systematically, a faithful perspective for viewing reality; incorporating criterions from faith and reason for discerning and appraising it critically; and accordingly acting as missionary disciples of Jesus Christ. Believing, joyful, and trusting adherence to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and involvement in the church are preconditions for assuring the effectiveness of this method. Among others, the following topics are treated in the Aparecida Concluding Document (and, with some adjustments, in Laudato Si’): 22

• Eucharist (ACD 25, 251) • Creation is good but its beauty is blemished (ACD 27) • natural resources and biofuels, global warming (ACD 66)

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Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ On Care for Our Common Home On Pentecost Sunday 2015 Pope Francis issued the encyclical letter Laudato Si’, On Care for Our Common Home (the title comes from the first words, “Laudato si’, mi’ Signore,” that is, “Praise be to you, my Lord,” which are the first words of St. Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures).23 Francis addresses this letter to “every person living on this planet” (LS 3),24 and he clearly states a desire to forge “a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet” (LS 14). This new dialogue is built on such key phrases as “everything is connected” (LS 16) and “all creatures are connected” (LS 42). The address to “every person living on this planet” and the characteristics of the dialogue (i.e., “all creatures are connected”) reflect nothing less than a “sea change” for the genre of papal encyclicals. Typically, papal encyclicals are addressed to church members, even a particular group. Pope Francis regards the encyclical Laudato Si’ as an important Roman Catholic contribution to the ongoing debate about religion and ecology in the world. As noted above, the document reflects the see-judge-act method of previous papal teachings and the work of CELAM, especially at Aparecida. In fact, the chapters of Laudato Si’ can be viewed through this lens and connected with the concerns here about “sacramentality,” “sacrament,” and “integral ecology.” First, see corresponds with the first



• the unsustainable habits of some industrialized countries (ACD 66) • biodiversity (ACD 83) • the Amazon (ACD 85) • the Antarctic (ACD 87) • good news of human dignity (ACD 104–05) • good news of life (ACD 106–13) • nature under threat (ACD 113, referring to Lk. 12:12 and Gen. 1:29; 2:15) • good news of the family (ACD 114–19) • good news of human activity and work (ACD 120–22) • science and technology (ACD 123–4) • good news of the universal destiny of goods and ecology (ACD 125–6) • creation as from God’s provident love (ACD 125) • quotes St. Francis of Assisi “our sister, mother earth” (ACD 125) • the notion of “human ecology” and transcendence (ACD 126) • episcopal conferences and communion among the churches (ACD 181) • danger of individualist consumerism (ACD 397) • care for the environment (ACD 470–5) • an analysis of the prevailing current economic model (ACD 473) • things to do for and about the environment (ACD 474) • uses of and cautions about the internet (ACD 486–8) 23 It should be noted that the dating of a papal document often carries a theological meaning (e.g., John Paul II chose Holy Thursday as the day when he sent letters to all the bishops and priests of the world, available in John Paul II, Letters to Priests, 1979–2005, ed. James Socias [Downers Grove: Midwest Theological Forum, 2005]). Pope Francis published Laudato Si’ on Pentecost Sunday. Pentecost has several layers of meaning, including the Feast of Harvest, the first fruits gathered as the result of the labor of those who completed the spring grain harvests in ancient Israel (Exod. 23:16; Num. 28:26). Hence the dating of the document itself carries this underlying theme about creation and human labor. 24 In Laudato Si’, n. 3, Pope Francis draws a parallel with John XXIII and his encyclical Pacem in Terris: More than fifty years ago, with the world teetering on the brink of nuclear crisis, Pope Saint John XXIII wrote an Encyclical which not only rejected war but offered a proposal for peace. He addressed his message Pacem in Terris to the entire “Catholic world” and indeed “to all men and women of good will.” Now, faced as we are with global environmental deterioration, I wish to address every person living on this planet. In my Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, I wrote to all the members of the Church with the aim of encouraging ongoing missionary renewal. In this Encyclical, I would like to enter into dialogue with all people about our common home. (n. 3)

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two chapters of Laudato Si’ and can be connected with “sacramentality.” Second, judge corresponds with the third and fourth chapters and connects with “integral ecology.” Third, act corresponds with the last two chapters and connects with “sacrament.”

See—Sacramentality The first chapter of Laudato Si’ is entitled “What Is Happening to Our Common Home” (LS 17–61). Here Francis invites us to see what is occurring in the world. Notably, the Canadian Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan began his book Method in Theology with the admonition, “be attentive” (along with “be intelligent,” “be reasonable,” and “be responsible”). An underlying theme of the encyclical is that we need to “be attentive” and to “see” what is around us that inspires awe and gratitude, as well as sadness and action. That the encyclical begins by quoting St. Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures is no mere stylistic introduction. It lays the foundation for the encyclical’s explicit and implicit understanding that all created beings are just that—beings in relationship with one another. Specific issues here concern climate change, water, biodiversity, and global inequality. Chapter two is “The Gospel of Creation” (LS 62–100). Here Francis invites us to see the beginnings of a theological response. Pope John Paul II widened the use of the term “gospel” (i.e., “good news”), especially in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae (“The Gospel of Life”). This was then adopted in the Aparecida Concluding Document to refer to the good news of human dignity, life, family, and human activity, especially work. Francis follows this path, and in Laudato Si’ he delineates the “gospel” of creation from biblical roots in both the Old and New Testaments, emphasizing the creation accounts in the book of Genesis and “the gaze of Jesus.” Francis also reiterates previous papal teachings about the common destination of goods.

Judge—Integral Ecology Chapter three of Laudato Si’ is entitled “The Human Roots of the Ecological Crisis” (LS 101–136). Technology and globalization are facts of life. Francis judges their strengths and weaknesses in terms of what they contribute to the good of society and how they can also be harmful. The pope consistently uses a wide-angle lens to view all of reality as interconnected and as God’s creation. This lens is a deliberate attempt to balance out the often presumed (and sometimes extreme) anthropocentrism of Catholic theology and life. Drawing from a 1980 document of the German bishops,25 Francis adopts the phrase “tyrannical anthropocentrism” and notes that it can lead to being “unconcerned for other creatures.” Chapter four is “Integral Ecology” (LS 137–162). This chapter contains the most distinctive contribution of the encyclical. Here, Francis combines “environmental,” “economic,” “social,” and “cultural” ecology with the “ecology of daily life.” He then couples these with two foundational concepts in Catholic social teaching: the common good and justice. Finally, Francis applies all of this to the current ecological crisis, offering his integrating approach as a lens through which to judge what is happening in the world.

Zukunft der Schopfung—Zukunft der Menschheit der Deutschen Bishof-skonferenx zu Fragen der Umwelt und der Energieversorgung (1980). See Irwin, A Commentary on Laudato Si’, 43. 25

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Part of the pope’s integral vision is to connect issues and fields of expertise not often understood together: morality, economics, science, spirituality, theology, liturgy, and sacraments. While there is an inherent logic in the way the encyclical unfolds, reading chapter four first helps reveal key aspects of Pope Francis’s contributions, which clearly advance previous magisterial statements and reflect the inclusiveness of his view of creation.

Act—Sacrament Chapter five of Laudato Si’ is entitled “Lines of Approach and Action” (LS 163–201). As the pope moves to act, he reiterates the worldwide audience for this Roman Catholic encyclical. Francis’s call to act is truly addressed to all of humanity in the international, national, and local realms. His repeated invitation to “dialogue” is important. In effect, he “thinks outside the box” in terms of international bodies, politics, the economy, and the relationship of faith and science. Moving beyond the adversarial stance sometimes ascribed to these areas, the pope calls them to be partners for Catholic thinking. The call for “transparency in decision making” is a direct challenge to those who argue from preconceived positions that promote self-interest. Finally, chapter six is “Ecological Education and Spirituality” (LS 202–246). In this final chapter, Francis gives greater focus to his call to act. He also extends the see-judgeact method to include celebrate. The pope adds celebrate by calling on strong suits of Catholicism: conversion to a new lifestyle, conversion to deeper engagement in liturgy, sacraments and the Sabbath, conversion to an appreciation of the Trinitarian communion of all creatures within all of creation, and conversion to deeper prayer. These are part and parcel of the Catholic imagination where a binary “either … or” is replaced by an inclusive “both … and” (prayer and work, contemplation and action).

SCOPE OF LAUDATO SI’ The scope of Laudato Si’ is stunning: • from environment to immigration; • from the dangers of climate change to the urgency of food distribution; • from political action on behalf of our common home to prayer and spirituality steeped in an awareness of God’s gift of creation; • from actions to stop pollution and deforestation to contemplation of the goodness of and praise for the God of all creatures great and small; • from placing the poor at the center of our lives (not the periphery) to our concern for the entire cosmos in which we live.26 Among other important assertions, Francis makes very clear the intrinsic and inherent relationship between ecology and liturgy/sacraments (LS 235–236).27 On this relationship Irwin, A Commentary on Laudato Si’, 100. In Laudato Si’, n. 235, Francis teaches,

26 27

The Sacraments are a privileged way in which nature is taken up by God to become a means of mediating supernatural life. Through our worship of God, we are invited to embrace the world on a different plane.

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and indeed throughout the entire encyclical, the pope’s manner of speaking about fellow creatures of our common home invites a parallel rhetorical change in the way we speak theologically about sacraments and liturgy. In light of Laudato Si’, theological reflection, specifically on sacraments and liturgy, can no longer objectify or reify our fellow creatures. We and all fellow creatures are not things.28 As noted above, “integral ecology” forms the basis and contents of chapter four, which is acclaimed as the central Catholic contribution of Pope Francis to the debate about ecology and the environment. Previously, the Catholic magisterium had utilized such phrases as “environmental ecology” and “human ecology” to describe the church’s developing approach to the environment. With regard to integral ecology, Pope Francis opens his consideration of integral ecology in paragraph 138 by stating, Ecology studies the relationship between living organisms and the environment in which they develop. This necessarily entails reflection and debate about the conditions required for the life and survival of society, and the honesty needed to question certain models of development, production and consumption. It cannot be emphasized enough how everything is interconnected. Time and space are not independent of one another, and not even atoms or subatomic particles can be considered in isolation. Just as the different aspects of the planet—physical, chemical and biological—are interrelated, so too living species are part of a network which we will never fully explore and understand. A good part of our genetic code is shared by many living beings. It follows that the fragmentation of knowledge and the isolation of bits of

Water, oil, fire and colours are taken up in all their symbolic power and incorporated in our act of praise. The hand that blesses is an instrument of God’s love and a reflection of the closeness of Jesus Christ, who came to accompany us on the journey of life. Water poured over the body of a child in Baptism is a sign of new life. Encountering God does not mean fleeing from this world or turning our back on nature. This is especially clear in the spirituality of the Christian East. “Beauty, which in the East is one of the best loved names expressing the divine harmony and the model of humanity transfigured, appears everywhere: in the shape of a church, in the sounds, in the colours, in the lights, in the scents.” For Christians, all the creatures of the material universe find their true meaning in the incarnate Word, for the Son of God has incorporated in his person part of the material world, planting in it a seed of definitive transformation. “Christianity does not reject matter. Rather, bodiliness is considered in all its value in the liturgical act, whereby the human body is disclosed in its inner nature as a temple of the Holy Spirit and is united with the Lord Jesus, who himself took a body for the world’s salvation.” Francis continues in n. 236, It is in the Eucharist that all that has been created finds its greatest exaltation. Grace, which tends to manifest itself tangibly, found unsurpassable expression when God himself became man and gave himself as food for his creatures. The Lord, in the culmination of the mystery of the Incarnation, chose to reach our intimate depths through a fragment of matter. He comes not from above, but from within, he comes that we might find him in this world of ours. In the Eucharist, fullness is already achieved; it is the living centre of the universe, the overflowing core of love and of inexhaustible life. Joined to the incarnate Son, present in the Eucharist, the whole cosmos gives thanks to God. Indeed the Eucharist is itself an act of cosmic love: “Yes, cosmic! Because even when it is celebrated on the humble altar of a country church, the Eucharist is always in some way celebrated on the altar of the world.” The Eucharist joins heaven and earth; it embraces and penetrates all creation. The world which came forth from God’s hands returns to him in blessed and undivided adoration: in the bread of the Eucharist, “creation is projected towards divinization, towards the holy wedding feast, towards unification with the Creator himself.” Thus, the Eucharist is also a source of light and motivation for our concerns for the environment, directing us to be stewards of all creation. See Kevin W. Irwin, “Sacramental Theology after Laudato Si’,” in Pope Francis and the Liturgy. The Call to Holiness and Mission (New York: Paulist Press, 2020), 102–25. 28

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information can actually become a form of ignorance, unless they are integrated into a broader vision of reality. Francis continues, in paragraph 139, When we speak of the “environment,” what we really mean is a relationship existing between nature and the society which lives in it. Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live. We are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it. These are very positive assertions, and they are first steps toward articulating what “integral ecology” is. Further, these assertions should be understood in light of another of Francis’s poignant teachings, found in paragraph 68: “Clearly, the Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures.”29 The challenge to interpret what “integral ecology” is has been taken up by theologians, church leaders, and those in pastoral ministry.30 Pope Francis himself took the lead by gathering bishops and representatives from the Amazon region to a “synod” in Rome. The synod met in October 2019 in Rome with the theme “The Amazon: New Paths for the Church and for Integral Ecology.”31 At the end of the synod, the members published the “final document,” and the document’s five chapters each contained the word “conversion”:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The Amazon: From Listening to Conversion New Paths of Pastoral Conversion New Paths of Cultural Conversion New Paths of Ecological Conversion New Paths of Synodal Conversion32

In Laudato Si’, n. 68, Francis states,

29

This responsibility for God’s earth means that human beings, endowed with intelligence, must respect the laws of nature and the delicate equilibria existing between the creatures of this world, for “he commanded and they were created; and he established them for ever and ever; he fixed their bounds and he set a law which cannot pass away” (Ps 148:5b-6). The laws found in the Bible dwell on relationships, not only among individuals but also with other living beings. “You shall not see your brother’s donkey or his ox fallen down by the way and withhold your help … If you chance to come upon a bird’s nest in any tree or on the ground, with young ones or eggs and the mother sitting upon the young or upon the eggs; you shall not take the mother with the young” (Dt 22:4, 6). Along these same lines, rest on the seventh day is meant not only for human beings, but also so “that your ox and your donkey may have rest.” (Exod. 23:12) Theologians such as the Australian Redemptorist Anthony Kelly and Dr. Vincent Miller from the University of Dayton (among others) offer several ways of exploring what the pope says and means by this phrase. Such efforts are precisely what Pope Francis invited at the beginning and throughout the encyclical by speaking about “dialogue” and the way he addressed the document to the whole world (Laudato Si’, n. 14: “I urgently appeal, then, for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all.”) 31 The official website for the synod is http://www.sino​doam​azon​ico.va/cont​ent/sino​doam​azon​ico/en.html. The preparatory document can be found at http://www.sino​doam​azon​ico.va/cont​ent/sino​doam​azon​ico/en/docume​ nts/prep​arat​ory-docum​ent-for-the-synod-for-the-ama​zon.html. The final document can be found at http://www. sino​doam​azon​ico.va/cont​ent/sino​doam​azon​ico/en/docume​nts/final-docum​ent-of-the-ama​zon-synod.html. 32 Among many others, see Ecologia Integrale, “Laudato Si’ ”: Ricerca, Formazione, Conversione, ed. Claudio Giuliodori and Pierluigi Malavasi (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2016). 30

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Following the synod, Pope Francis also published a document, called a post-synodal apostolic exhortation. Francis entitled his exhortation Queridia Amazonia, which means “My beloved Amazon.”33 Pope Francis’s teachings in Laudato Si’ clearly express that liturgy is a deep and strong ritual expression of the principle of sacramentality. God lives with us and all our fellow creatures on “our common home” prior to celebrations of sacraments, in a unique way within the celebrations, and following upon them. Sacramental liturgy, in its uniqueness, underscores how what we do in sacraments derives from the world and everyday life. At the same time, sacramental liturgy underscores as how we bring what we have experienced in the liturgy into the world in which we live. From the perspective of sacramentality, sacraments are less doors to the sacred than they are the experience of the sacred embedded in and experienced in all of human life, situated in the context of a whole divine creation. This experience is shaped by the liturgical action of the sacraments in which we engage fellow creatures of our common home.

FURTHER READING Hughes, Graham. Reformed Sacramentality, ed. Steven Losel. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2017. Irwin, Kevin W. A Commentary on Laudato Si’: Examining the Background, Contributions, Implementation, and Future of Pope Francis’ Encyclical. New York: Paulist Press, 2016. Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Fratelli tutti: On Fraternity and Social Friendship. Introduction by Kevin W. Irwin. New York: Paulist Press, 2020.

Pope Francis, “Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Querida Amazonia” (February 2, 2020). http://www.vati​ can.va/cont​ent/france​sco/en/apo​st_e​xhor​tati​ons/docume​nts/papa-fran​cesc​o_es​ort azione-ap_20200202_queridaamazonia.html. 33

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Sacraments and Creation: Ecology—A Conversation with First Peoples CARMEL PILCHER AND DONATO KIVI

INTRODUCTION Looking out the window at the Pacific Regional Seminary in Suva, Fiji Islands, there are more shades of green to be seen than most people ever would think existed. Tall, stately coconut palm trees and bushes and shrubs of many varieties bear a profusion of leaves and lush vegetation. The climate can be harsh with steamy oppressively humid days and often torrential rain, and at times major cyclones that leave a path of destruction. But for much of the year the atmosphere is pleasantly cool and refreshing with bright sunshine. Western peoples call this paradise; Fijians call it home, vanua. However, apart from natural disasters that are a fact of nature, Fijians and their neighbors are seriously alarmed. Many inhabitants of the Pacific are seeing their island homes slowly disappearing, and in the case of the smaller atolls, becoming completely swallowed up by the ocean. Villages create new sea walls as the old ones are destroyed, burial grounds become submerged by the sea, and at least one nation is preparing to move an entire people to a new country. At the same time society is becoming fragmented. Pope Francis reminds us, “The human environment and the natural environment deteriorate together; we cannot adequately combat environmental degradation unless we attend to causes related to human and social degradation.”1 Scholars across disciplines and scientists in many fields show evidence that human intervention is largely responsible for our current situation. Ecological theologians such as Denis Edwards tell us, “The human community has never had to face anything like the crisis of life that is already upon us in this twenty first century.”2 We experience evidence of this “cosmic fragmentation”3 of climate change, pollution in waterways, the extinction of many plants and animals, the disruption of whole biological systems. We

Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, On Care for Our Common Home, An Encyclical Letter on Ecology and Climate, 2015, 48. 2 Denis Edwards, Partaking of God: Trinity, Evolution and Ecology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), 2. 3 John Chryssavgis, Creation as Sacrament: Reflections on Ecology and Spirituality (London: T&T Clark, 2019), 1. 1

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are told this “crisis of life” could have been prevented had humanity not stripped away forests and created less waste that litters our earth and toxic materials that pollute our waterways. In this present time, a key issue of global concern is the urgent need to address the future and sustainability of our planet. In response to this concern, but also against the backdrop of new stories of the cosmos that are being imagined, Christian theologians and church leaders, especially Patriarch Bartholomew and Pope Francis, are at the forefront of calling us back to a sacramental practice that affirms the integrity and interrelationships of humanity and all of creation that Pope Francis calls “our common home.”4 This chapter is a dialogue between the Christian tradition’s theology of creation that is celebrated liturgically in the church’s sacraments and first peoples of the Pacific, for whom nature and all things created are part of the very fabric of their being, and who ritualize this connection especially at significant life moments. Our exploration of the church’s understanding of creation and sacrament is enriched by the Orthodox tradition of John Chryssavgis in his recent work “Creation as Sacrament.”5 We also explore Fijian vanua6 that is the foundational identity and context for the indigenous Fijian view of the world. Our conversation includes indigenous students from the Pacific Regional Seminary,7 in Suva, who study the church’s sacraments within the context of Pacifican cultures. Their examples of ceremonies that mark the life journey of a Pacifican will illustrate how vanua has traditionally been celebrated, remembered, and connected ritually. They identify similarities—especially in the use of natural elements—between their own cultural ritual practices and liturgical celebrations of the church’s sacraments. We conclude that by inculturating local indigenous ritual ceremonies into the church’s liturgy and sacraments, right relationships will be restored, and Christian Pacificans might return to a traditional experience of nurturing and sustaining vanua.

CREATION AS SACRAMENT Sacramentality is a characteristic of human experience and for many people, nature brings them to a profound encounter of awe and wonder. Watching a sunrise or sunset, a majestic tree, the sound and sight of a powerful wave crashing in the ocean, or interacting with a gentle domestic pet, feeling a bright shining day can lift people to another plane. While people recognize that such signs can bring about a mystical experience, people who are religious might describe this experience as a meeting with God, a reflection of God the creator—an encounter with the sacred, sacrament. Fijians innately understand this as vanua. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, 2015. We acknowledge also the influence of Alexander Schmemann, whose seminal writings that include a ground-breaking paper “The World as Sacrament” are explored in detail in Mathai Kadavil, The World as Sacrament: Sacramentality of Creation from the Perspectives of Leonardo Boff, Alexander Schmemann and Saint Ephraim (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 164–227. 6 Vanua has an equivalent in many cultures in the Pacific and is known by various names; for example, Moana would mean “ocean” to the Polynesian community. For Fijians, the vanua encompasses all—the land, people, and the ocean. Tongans call it fonua, Samoans—fanua, New Zealand Maoris—Whenua, Vanuatu—vanua, Tahiti—fenua. 7 Pacific Regional Seminary, hereafter PRS. 4 5

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Vanua Vanua is a concept held in high esteem among Fijians. Vanua literally means “land,” but it also means residents, natives, or people of that particular land. It is often used in traditional functions to address groups of people from the same province, tribe, clan, or family. For the ancient Fijians, addressing a particular vanua means the people, the land, and everything that belongs, is related, grows, and is tied in whatever way to that land. All come under the umbrella of the vanua—the trees, animals, rocks, grass, fish, and birds. They are part and parcel of the vanua. For the ancient Fijians, the vanua is the people and the cosmos. The sacredness of a particular vanua derives from the belief that it is the burial ground of the tribe’s founding father. A temple was erected on this mound in preChristian times, signifying that the chief or the founding father was also the embodiment of the gods. Indigenous Fijians call it the yavu, or the origin.

CREATION IS GOOD The origin of creation for the Christian is founded in ancient Hebrew thought expressed in the Judeo-Christian scriptures: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1-26). The act of creating is empowered by the divine command: “And God said.” In the Genesis creation story each element of the cosmos—the earth and sky, trees and plants, light and darkness, sea and animals—is brought about through the divine power of the spoken word. And as each element was created it met with divine approval—and “God saw that it was good.” If God is the source of our universe, then all that surrounds us reflects Godself because it is of God. Just as when a great sculptor completes her work, we recognize something of the creator herself in the work of art before us, it follows that all of creation reflects God, and so is of its very nature, good. In the words of Chryssavgis, “The world’s vocation is beauty. Nothing is intrinsically evil, except the refusal to see God’s work as beautiful.”8 If, as we believe, there is something of the creator in the created then God can be seen as an abiding presence in all of God’s creation, whether a tree, a rock, a sunset, or indeed a human person. “There is a likeness-in-the-very difference between that which sanctifies (the Creator) and that which is sanctified (the creation), between uncreated and created.”9 In this worldview, nothing in life is profane, or not sacred. As the Divine Liturgy of John Chrysostom states, “You are the one who offers and is offered, who receives and is distributed, and to you we offer glory.”10

SACREDNESS OF THE VANUA The sacredness of the vanua was always understood together with pre-Christian indigenous religion. Indigenous cultures were sensitive to the numinous world they inhabited. Jesuit priest Fr. Ignacimuthu described how “tribal people are sensitive to spirit-presence in the world around them,” saying that in these “societies, the Divine is often seen as pervasive, diffuse spirit-presence throughout the Cosmos, the earth and natural phenomena.”11 The Chryssavgis, Creation as Sacrament, 95. Ibid., 86. 10 Ibid. The writers agree with current scholarship that one can only understand sacrament and sacramentality in the context of the church’s divine liturgy. 11 S. Ignacimuthu, Environmental Spirituality (Mumbai: St. Pauls, 2010), 44. 8 9

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divine is manifested in the natural world. Hence the totemic worship and respect for the vanua. Respecting the vanua-earth, one is provided with the amenities and security from the gods for survival, so it was only proper that it is acknowledged, revered, and worshipped. Ignacimuthu emphasized the central belief in many tribal cultures “that the earth is a living conscious being that must be treated with respect and loving care.”12 In this view, tribal people never differentiate between what is religious and what is secular because both are a reality that is connected and viewed as one and the same nature. The traditional Fijians and other Pacifican peoples live with this interconnectivity. Different Fijian tribes have totems that they identify with, such as a particular fish, a tree, or a specific plant. It is often an element from the land and also something from the sea. Children are taught to know their totems from a young age and to learn about them by heart because it is part of their identity. One who knows about his/her identity should also know the following in addition to his/her name and family name: the name of one’s clan, one’s tribe, one’s fish, and one’s tree. Holistically, it sums up one’s identity with the vanua—the people and the land (and sea).

CREATION IS GIFT The Judeo-Christian story is of a creator God who is Father, Son, and Spirit. Creation is the work of the Trinity. The story of the Spirit that begins with creation continues as the story of grace. The Creator Spirit who fills the universe is from the very beginning the Sanctifier, the bringer of grace. From the beginning, the Spirit is present to human beings in selfoffering love. The Spirit of God who graciously accompanies and celebrates the emergence of every form of life delights in the emergence of human creatures who can respond to the divine self-offering love in a personal way.13 Denis Edwards reminds us that creation is the work of a loving God. Leonardo Boff speaks of the Father who “fashions creation, with the Intelligence that is his Son, and with Love, which is the Holy Spirit.”14 And God’s Trinity is a loving community that is a gift. In Schmemann’s understanding, “The goodness of Creation, specifically the world and its history, is a sacrament of the favor of God.”15 Therefore, “Our very createdness is an affirmation of God’s goodness.”16 God gifts humanity with the cosmos and delights in this gift. In the words of Motua,17 “From the beginning the Spirit is active: before the coming of the first missionaries to Kiribati, God already reveals himself through the spirit which the Kiribati believe in. And that is very interesting for me because I realize that the God of the I-Kiribati people is also the one that the Christians believe in.”

Ibid., 45–6. Denis Edwards, Breath of Life, a Theology of the Creator Spirit (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), 64. 14 Leonardo Boff, Holy Trinity. Perfect Community (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988), 105. Leonardo Boff makes mention of the “radiant energy of objects” that is described as mana in Melanesia. He also speaks of the “cosmic force that penetrates everything.” In the vanua, it is also understood by ancient Fijians in a similar way. 15 Kadavil, The World as Sacrament, 202. 16 Ibid., 203. 17 Motua Batiara. PRS. 12 13

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CREATION IN NEED OF REDEMPTION Creation is intrinsically good, “created in the image and likeness of God” (Gen. 1:27). But there is no idyllic paradise. Humankind is by its very nature sinful. We all have a natural tendency to selfishness, and when we set out to harm another human or any part of God’s creation, we sin. “We all sin because we have inherited—from the very first living things on earth—a powerful tendency to act selfishly, no matter the cost to others.”18 In the understanding of Schmemann, sinfulness “is not only alienation from God, but also a failure to accept God’s revelation in all Creation.”19 The Hebrew scriptures record the history of the Jewish people. God said to Abraham, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous” (Gen. 17:1-2). This intimate offer of friendship, of covenant, meant that creation could be restored to its original harmony and integrity if humanity would respond by reciprocating that trust and care, that loving gesture of praise and thanksgiving. The Hebrew Testament records a repetitive pattern of God’s direct intervention in the lives of a fallen people with whom God enters into covenantal relationship at various times in their history. The story of Israel is the story of a God who is constantly faithful and a people who continually break that covenant through faithlessness. When humanity continued to be unfaithful, God offered the ultimate act of faithfulness and love by taking on the frailty of humanity.

VANUA IS FRAGMENTED The brokenness of vanua is sadly reflected in the islands of Fiji. The human environment and the natural environment are the two dimensions of vanua: “as land” and “as people.” The vanua is part of the wounded world that is crying out for healing. Deforestation, overfishing, gravel and sand mining, pollution, and poor farming practices are elements that degrade and fragment the vanua. Rural people and the poor are the ones who are affected most by the environmental crisis, because their daily resources as fishermen and subsistence farmers are sourced directly from the land and the sea of the vanua. For many indigenous Fijians, communal living became difficult because they experienced less support in the rural setting due to its poor development. This led to the rapid urbanization of major towns, leaving many villages empty. The migration of people to towns included the migration of some of their turaga.20 The separation of the chiefs from their people led to further disintegration, with the result that their voices were no longer being recognized by the vanua—their people back in the village. The vanua both “as people” and “as land” were then abandoned, severing the connection: “Today the social and bureaucratic structures are divided, and most chiefs live in towns and cities.”21 Social structures that are intertwined with the environment in the vanua have further consequences. Winston Halapua, arguably the most significant Pacifican Christian theologian, describes the “growing epidemic of domestic violence, rape, incest, child abuse, suicide and other related forms of violence and physical and mental abuse of

Daryl P. Domning, Evolution, Evil and Original Sin. Putting the Puzzle Together. America (November 12, 2001): 19. 19 Kadavil, The World as Sacrament, 204. 20 A Turaga is a Fijian chief, the custodian of the vanua. 21 Ropate Qalo, “There’s a Time When Politics and Chiefs Cannot Mix,” Fiji Times, May 14, 2007, 16. 18

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individuals … (that) indicates that the country is going through a deep social and moral crisis.”22 This disintegration led to a series of military coups in Fiji, the first taking place in 1987.23 There are now projects in place to restore the traditional understanding of vanua, bringing together both traditional culture and Christian values.24 Vanua is broken but vanua is redeemed in Christ.

“COSMIC TRANSFORMATION” The phrase “cosmic transformation” is borrowed from Orthodox theologian John Chryssavgis.25 In Catholic and Orthodox understanding the incarnation was part of the divine plan from the beginning, and not from a certain period in history: “The Word made flesh is in fact intrinsic to the very act of creation, which came to be through the divine Word.”26 From its genesis, the world was brought into being by the Divine Word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God” (Jn 1:1-2). The Divine Word became flesh in human history, when through the power of the Spirit, God took on human nature. While the incarnation is “affirmed” at a certain period in history, with the birth of Jesus, we are told that “Christ … was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for our sakes” (1 Pet. 1:20). In the words of Irenaeus, The Saviour redeemed us with his blood and gave his soul for our soul, his flesh for our flesh; he poured out the Spirit of the Father, in order to effect union and communion between God and man by making God descend to man through the Spirit and man ascend to God through the incarnation. By his coming he surely and truly bestowed incorruption upon us through our communion with God.27 By becoming human through the power of the Father in the Holy Spirit, Christ sealed the relationship between God and creation by becoming the new covenant. Humanity could see Jesus as sacrament, and so again see creation as sacrament. In the words of Thomas Lane, “from incarnation to glorification he touched and ennobled everything in creation, … In this context, all creation is sacramental creation; the exalted Christ has given a new significance to everything in the universe.”28 Karl Rahner speaks of the incarnation as “an unthinkable act of divine mercy and forgiveness” and the whole intent of creation.29 It is “unthinkable” because by becoming Winston Halapua, “Tradition, Lotu, and Militarism in Fiji,” Fijian Studies 1:1 (2003): 105, http://citese​erx.ist. psu.edu/view​doc/downl​oad?doi=10.1.1.198.1190&rep=rep1&type=pdf. 23 Fiji has gone through four military coups, two in 1987, one in 2000, and one in 2006. 24 One of the ways of understanding the vanua brokenness is how it is taught at the Marist Training Centre in Taveuni-Fiji, where they raise awareness of broken vanua in their relationship with the soil in terms of the “world view of creation.” In all their courses, they present the original fall linked to creation, and the effect, the brokenness, the disorder, and the ripple effect with the estrangement of humanity from God’s initial plan. They look at the vanua that is disconnected and not in harmony. They study pollution, tsunamis, and natural or human-made calamities. It is the vanua groaning for redemption, liberation, and freedom. See Adele M. E. Jones and Michael McVerry, Tutu—Another Way through Rural, Adult Nonformal Education: Principles, Processes, and Practice in Marist Training Centre, Tutu (Taveuni-Fiji: Marist Tutu Rural Training Centre, 2012), 12. 25 Chryssavgis, Creation as Sacrament, 2. 26 Chyrssavgis, Creation as Sacrament, 100. 27 Adversus Haeresis, V 1.2., trans. Hamman, “Irenaeus of Lyons,” 95. 28 Thomas Lane, The Sacramentals Revisited (The Furrow 33 (1982), 272), quoted in Kadavil, The World as Sacrament, 74, fn. 288. 29 Denis Edwards, Partaking of God: Trinity, Evolution and Ecology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), 159. 22

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human God takes on the human condition that includes death. However, by taking on humanity God brings humanity to the very precipice of the divine. “This world is the locus of where the incarnate God is experienced. It is there [sic] here and now that, because of Christ, our lives are supremely human and profoundly divine at the same time.”30 In the words of Denis Edwards, the incarnation “tells of a God who enters into matter and flesh, uniting it radically with God’s self, transforming it from within.”31 And this radical act of God is the greatest “expression of the eternal love of God, who wishes to be associated with creation in the most intimate manner.”32 Of course the life of Christ cannot be separated from his death and resurrection. It is through Christ’s death and resurrection that eternal life is possible. “Now everything is filled with light, heaven and earth, and all things beneath the earth; so let all creation celebrate the Resurrection on which it is founded.”33

GOD CONTINUES TO CREATE God’s involvement with creation did not end with the coming of the Son of God.34 God continues to be in relationship in real time with all that God brought into being. And the creation is in a continuing, real relationship with God in its dependence on God for existence. Following the resurrection, early Christians constantly expected the end times; they lived with a sense of urgency that God’s return was imminent. “Therefore, you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour” (Mt. 24:44). John Chryssavgis argues that when we have a sacramental understanding of creation, we understand time as eternally present where God is continuing to act.35 Understanding creation as sacrament recognizes that God continues to “be,” to engage in all aspects of God’s creation. Through this Logos, there came to be both being and continuing-to-be, from him the things that were made came to be in a certain way and for a certain reason, and by continuing-to-be and by moving, they participate in God. For all things, in that they came to be from God, participate proportionally in God, whether by intellect (angels), by reason (humans), by sense perception (animals), by vital motion (plants), or by habitual fitness (minerals).36 In the ongoing existence, although in varying degrees, God continues to engage not only with humans but also with animals, plants, and the very land itself. With a sacramental understanding, God’s creating activity is ongoing and all of creation participates in God’s loving involvement. This not only opens the possibility to meet God but also, in the words of the psalmist, invites all to join in great praise of God the creator:

Kevin W. Irwin, “A Sacramental World—Sacramentality as the Primary Language for Sacrament,” Worship, 76:3 (May 2002): 199. 31 Edwards, Partaking of God, 159. 32 Chryssavgis, Creation as Sacrament, 78. 33 Paschal Canon, 3rd Ode, in John Chryssavgis, Creation as Sacrament, 106. 34 See Mathai Kadavil: The World as Sacrament, for a synopsis of Leonardo Boff ’s understanding of Cosmic Christology and the continuity of creation (138 ff). 35 Chryssavgis, Creation as Sacrament, 89. 36 Ibid., 102–3, fn. 26. 30

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Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth; break forth into joyous song and sing praises. Let the sea roar, and all that fills it; the world and those who live in it. Let the floods clap their hands; let the hills sing together for joy At the presence of the Lord, for he is coming to judge the earth. (Ps. 98) Chryssavgis’s hope is that humanity “retain(s) a sacramental, balanced view of nature and the environment, (thus) proclaiming a world imbued by God and a God (continually) involved in the whole world.”37 When the church is able to make this connection, then all will see interdependence, each with the other and the role of each to bring about healing and wholeness. When this is a reality the “world emerges as a sacrament, where the relationship of humanity to the environment is perceived in terms of communion.”38 If all is gift and interconnected, then Christians seek to open their hearts to live in harmony with creation rather than see it as an object of domination. This is not unlike the concept of vanua for the Fijian or fanua for the Samoan, where all is interconnected and related. This is illustrated in the Fijian way of life. The natural world was treated with respect and each month brought in something new because of its changing nature. In the traditional Fijian calendar, the seasons were meticulously observed because they were based on the time for planting and fishing. To understand the seasons is to understand the language of the vanua, which is an in-depth dialogue with nature. It is simple to survive; one must learn how to read the book of nature. It is the book of life. Indigenous Fijians could also read the language of the natural world and foretell the future, or understand what is happening, and what needs to be done. For instance, during hurricane seasons hornets build their hives close to the ground—almost saying, lay low to avoid strong winds. The flowering of the Doi tree—Alphitonia zizyphoides—in May marks the end of the hurricane season. The months were named after planting and fishing seasons. June and July were called vula i werewere, the month of weeding, July and August were called vula i cukicuki, the month for plowing. There was a time for digging the land, a time for planting, a time for harvesting, and a time for resting the land so it can heal itself. It was treated with the utmost respect because the vanua was sacred.

DIVINE WISDOM AS BRIDGE Chryssavgis suggests that the Wisdom tradition could provide a key to bringing the Christian to consciousness of the mystical and mystery dimensions of creation as sacrament.39 He cites that in the book of Proverbs, we read, “I, wisdom, was the daily delight of the Lord … rejoicing in the inhabited world and delighting in the human race” (Prov. 8:30-31). Chryssavgis reminds us that “Together, Christ and Mary reveal two corresponding and complementary aspects of the divine wisdom; together, they realize and reflect the sacrament of God’s relationship with the world.”40 Divine Sophia personifies the loving creating, redeeming, and sustaining qualities of God. Christ who John Chryssavgis sees this as the Orthodox tradition that he believes needs to be revived. See Creation as Sacrament, 3. 38 Ibid., 97. 39 Chryssavgis develops this idea in a way that would be worth exploring, particularly given that first peoples— Australian Aboriginals, for example—often speak of vanua in feminine terms. Ibid., 69–84. 40 Ibid., 71. 37

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is fully human is redeemer, while Mary as woman is virgin and mother. Mary as mother gives birth and nurtures creation, bringing about wholeness and healing.41 In the words of Chryssavgis, “As virgin, she (Mary) heals the brokenness of the world; as mother she fulfills the barrenness of creation.”42 Mary the woman is fully identified with the created world, and as virgin and mother, she brings opposites together: God and the world. Sophia as divine logos brings about a complete connectedness in all things. While the world is “in” God, it is wholly other than God. By addressing this dialectic, we can live in harmony with the world, and neither control it nor abuse it to our own ends. The Orthodox liturgy proclaims, “Sophia: Let us arise! Let us attend!” Wisdom acts as a bridge between God and the world, between the creator and the created, between the divine and the cosmos that enables us to open our hearts and minds to “hear and proclaim the sacrament of creation.”43

COCREATORS IN LITURGICAL CELEBRATIONS A sacrament in the Christian tradition always remains a historical event where God is encountered in the context of a certain time and place, and elements of creation are involved. The church, as do Pacifican communities, acknowledges and celebrates significant moments in the life journey of its members with celebrations that use water, fire, and oil,44 and the fruit of the earth, bread and wine. In the Christian tradition the pouring of water is essential to baptism; plant oil is smeared on parts of the body for initiation, the healing of the sick, and ordination. Words of acknowledgment and praise to the creator of all of life not only accompany these ritual actions but are found throughout our Trinitarian prayers: “Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the bread (and wine) we offer you: fruit of the earth, (vine), and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life.”45 Eucharistic prayers in the Roman tradition acknowledge: “You are indeed Holy, O Lord, and all you have created rightly gives you praise.”46 For the first peoples in the Pacific, their ancient worldview is the springboard to a sacramental vision of the natural world, to see the vanua as the revelation of God the creator, and to see themselves as cocreators. In the words of Laudato Si’, “The universe unfolds in God, who fills it completely.”47 The understanding of the vanua in this way finds its meaning in a sacramental vision. In Catholicism, this view “sees the divine in the human, the infinite in the finite, the spiritual in the material, the transcendent in the immanent, the eternal in the historical.”48 All reality is sacred. “The abiding protestant

This understanding of virgin and mother in relation to vanua is carefully developed in Donato Kivi, Towards a Marian Ecological Spirituality for the Formation and Re-evangelisation of the Vanua: The People and the Land of Fiji (Rome: Pontificia Studiorum Universitas 2 S. Thoma Aq. In Urbe), 2018. 42 Chryssavgis, Creation as Sacrament, 73. 43 Ibid., 84. 44 Linda Gibler makes an important contribution to our subject by exploring new scientific discoveries of each of the three elements of creation that are the key ritual symbols of Christian initiation. In his foreword to this work, David Power commends the author’s attentiveness to “divine presence through things of Earth” at a critical time, not just as a reminder to Christians of their dependence on God for creation but also the urgent call to eco-justice. Linda Gibler, From the Beginning to Baptism: Scientific and Sacred Stories of Water, Oil, and Fire. Foreword by David N. Power (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, A Michael Glazier Book, 2010), x, xi. 45 The Roman Missal. English translation according to the Third Typical Edition. 2010. 46 Eucharistic Prayer II, Ibid. 47 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, 233. 48 Richard P. McBrien, Catholicism (Great Britain: Harper One, 1994), 9–10. 41

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fear” according to Richard McBrien “is that Catholics will take the sacramental principle to the point of idolatry.”49 Rather, as Pope Francis says, “This is not because the finite things of this world are really divine, but because the mystic experiences the intimate connection between God and all beings, and thus feels that ‘all things are God.’ ” Francis continues: “There is a ‘mystical meaning to be found in a leaf, in a mountain trail, in a dewdrop, in a poor persons’ face.”50 Oceanians can find so much of these mystical meanings in their daily life within the vanua. For centuries, Fijians and other Pacificans celebrated the meaning of what is important in life and where the gods have played their part—for instance, in the birth of a child, in circumcision, in the first harvest. These are all celebrations of joy and thanksgiving. These celebrations are still practiced today to acknowledge the one true God who is the creator and provider of all good things. For example, after the birth of a child, the umbilical cord is buried in the ground and connected to the vanua—to mother earth. Physically disconnected from the biological mother in one sense, in a meaningful way the child is universally connected to mother earth, to the vanua and to his/her ancestor. Furthermore, often many indigenous people after retiring from work in urban areas are drawn back to their place of origin, which today would be a village or settlement. It is common to see people spend holidays in the vanua of origin or asking to be buried together with their forefathers. The church’s sacramental system, its ritual action, symbols engaged with, and texts prayed invite us in a similar way to meet God the creator in the land while at the same time recognizing God’s continuing creative and redeeming action in our world today. In the words of Kevin Irwin, Significantly the Catholic liturgy frequently acclaims and names the God of both covenants as both creator and redeemer in its central prayers of blessing (e.g., prayer to bless water at baptism and the eucharistic prayer). An important contribution which Catholic liturgical theology can make to the theological premise of sacramentality is that proper weight be given to both these liturgical images and likenesses of God in the liturgy and to ensure that these are intrinsically related. The creator God redeems and God’s redemption extends to all creation. The celebration of sacramental liturgy thus is based on the sacramental principle that the God of creation and redemption is operative in all our lives.51 The church’s sacraments, celebrated in the context of liturgy, invite an encounter with the sacred who is both creator and redeemer. “Sacramental liturgy regularly places on our eyes a prism through which to view creation and the world, a prism that is biblical and paschal.”52 In the very celebration we are invited to perceive the mystery of God in all created beings, a tangible mystery that reflects the divine. Sacramental celebrations offer us the possibility to engage again in right relationship with God; “because the human being has this organic link with creation and at the same time the drive to unite creation and to be free from the laws of nature, he can act as the ‘priest of creation’.”53 In the words of Chryssavgis, “The entire universe is a liturgy,

Ibid., 10. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, 234. 51 Irwin, “A Sacramental World,” 210–11. 52 Ibid., 205. 53 John D. Zizioulas, The Eucharistic Communion and the World, ed. Luke Ben Tallon (London: T&T Clark, International, A Continuum Imprint, 2011), 137. 49 50

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a cosmic liturgy that offers the whole of creation before the throne of God.”54 And so by “bringing the world as it is with them, the faithful receive a foretaste of paradise, an eschatological glimpse of the world as it will be, and then are called again to ‘go in peace’ back into the world.”55 This is especially so in the celebration of Eucharist. Alexander Schmemann describes bread and wine as symbols of creation: These things (bread and wine) placed upon the altar acquire thereby a separate and sacred character. They stand close to the veil that separates our world, our daily experience from God’s life, and soon they pass through that veil. But it is bread and wine that make that transition, and they do so not merely as fruits of this world—of this cornfield, that vineyard—but as symbols and even as vehicles of the whole world itself in its entirety.56 Christian sacraments can serve to bring us back into communion with God and the cosmos depending upon how we ritualize these elements. We should be lavish in our use of water and oil, bread and wine. In this way we will recognize that “There is a deep and rich continuity between what we do in human life before and after engaging in sacraments which grounds both the rituals themselves and how we name these rituals as sacraments.”57 Cultural traditional ceremonies have continued to call Pacificans back to right relationships. Might the church’s celebration of sacraments include elements of cultural traditional ceremony in the Pacific, and so bring us to harmony with the cosmos? Might these connections help restore broken vanua? In the final part of the chapter we offer examples of cultural ceremonies and their possible inculturation with the Christian liturgy.

ENRICHED SACRAMENTAL CELEBRATIONS Birthing Rituals and Baptism We have already named that the umbilical cord is ritualized by Fijians. It is also an important birthing symbol in other Pacifican cultures. Lotu58 explains its meaning to Samoans: The cutting of the umbilical cord (pute) signifies that the baby is no longer hidden in the darkness of the womb of his mother but now is a new person with a new life that is full of light, ready to experience pain, suffering, sadness and happiness. The burying of the umbilical cord and the placenta of the mother signifies the connection of the baby to the people and the fanua or creation. It tells the baby that it is his/her duty and responsibility to care, respect and love the creation and keep harmony in his relationships with his/her fellow brothers and sisters. It also reminds us that the baby is created by the earth and will return to the earth. Lastly, it signifies that through his relationship to the whole of creation he/she identifies his close relationship with his God.

Ibid., 123. Ibid., 125. 56 Alexander Schmemann, The World as Sacrament, 222. Quoted in Mathai Kadavil, The World as Sacrament, 219, fn. 286. 57 Irwin, “A Sacramental World,” 202. 58 Lotu Maotapule. PRS. 54 55

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Halaiano59 tells us that in Tonga, the umbilical cord, the fonua, is similarly buried in the soil. Ioakim informs us that in Kiribati the grandmother becomes the custodian of the umbilical cord of a girl child, while the grandfather either buries a boy’s umbilical cord so that he can become a good farmer, or throws it into the sea for him to be a competent fisherman.60 Could the cutting and burying of the umbilical cord become part of the Christian liturgical celebration of baptism? Might the ceremony of baptism begin in the place where the umbilical cord is buried, include the ritual washing and process to the church of which the new Christian has become a member? In the Are Are culture of the Solomon Islands a significant ritual with water occurs after the baby is born and the mother is recovered. Michael61 says that “all gather in front of the house and a messenger presents the baby to the priest and the community, where a prayer for protection is offered. Then the child is given to the chief and the baby’s father where a ritual cleansing takes place.” Could the Trinitarian formula of Christian baptism proclaimed by a pastor or ordained minister be added to this ritual?

Initiation—Cocreators with God Cultural traditions practice initiation ceremonies that ritualize the transition of boys and girls to take their rightful role in the community. This is the case in Kiribati. The initiation ceremony for a Kiribati girl is called te Katekateka. It happens when a girl first experiences menstruation. She is immediately set apart for three days with a female relative who serves as a mentor. During that time, “she can either be taught to weave a mat or make a string. If she is given a chance to weave, this has to be learnt by heart which is also implied in the skills of making a string.”62 Both skills require concentration, time, and effort and ensure the young woman is ready to sustain the needs of the family and the wider society. At the end of this period a meal is shared where the newly initiated young woman is given the place of honor, reflecting her new place in the community. Kabuua63 tells us about male initiation. “A male is put inside a small house called a Te Kabeari. The house is completely closed, and a small fire is lit.” The initiand’s body is covered in oil by his family and he is given a giant sea clam. The understanding is that the young man will be protected by his guardian spirit. When he survives, he is declared a man, “who is now ready to go fishing and will not be afraid of the ocean.” Kabuua continues, “Oil, fire and a clam shell form the essential ritual elements for the adolescent Kiribati boy.” “The oil and clam connect the young man to the ocean, while the fire connects him to the earth.” He asks, “Oil is already part of the Christian confirmation ceremony, could not the clam (or equivalent) and fire, be included ritually also?” Could the weaving and string making also become part of the church’s sacrament? Kabuua suggests that traditional clothing be worn to acknowledge both the traditional as well as the Christian ceremony of initiation.

alaiano Vaohea. PRS. H Ioakim Iabeta. PRS. 61 Michael Nihonipo. PRS. 62 For an extended discussion on women’s initiation in Kiribati see Meeri Iabetti, Te Katekateka as the Key to Embracing and Empowering Women in Kiribati, with particular implications for the Kiribati United Church. http://www.miss​ i ont​ h eol ​ o gya ​ n gli ​ c an.org/arti ​ c le-mt/te-kat ​ e kat​ e ka-as-the-key-to-embrac​ i ng-and-emp​ o wer​ ing-women-in-kirib​ati/. 63 Kabuua Tonganibeia. PRS. 59 60

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The Samoans have a ritual called a tatau64 or mlofie.65 Both young men and young women can undergo this process, but each is different. Before a man gets his tatau he asks for permission from his parents where there will be prayers. If they agree, they then approach the tufuga, Su’a.66 The tufuga will ask the young man to follow certain rules. If he agrees, then the tufuga begins the process by encouraging the young man to be strong. After certain rituals the young man will give himself freely to the tufuga. The work, while meticulous, should go smoothly. Ioane67 is a sogaimiti,68 and has provided this account. He explains that this process can be a very painful experience and calls for great endurance on the part of the participant. It takes at least four hours a day for twelve days. If the young man breaks any of the rules he agreed to, he will feel significant pain and the process will not be completed. Ioane’s designs are va’a (canoe), pula tama (a small pe’a; a kava bowl), pe’a (flying fox), and ulumanu (animal’s head), as well as fa’amuliali’ao (end of a Trochus shell), gogo (frigate bird), alualu (jellyfish), atualoa (centipede), anufe (caterpillar), vaisinago (river). They are all parts of the one pe’a (the whole tatau), and their shapes are all tatau motifs that the tufuga has given to Ioane. The last tatau is respectfully marked on the pute (navel), the sign of his life source, and this is witnessed by all his family. Now that Ioane has completed the process he is greatly respected and is a sogaimiti. He has many different roles in cultural ceremonies. The sogaimiti who serves in a special way in official ceremonies also serves in the church’s liturgy. He dances the gifts to the altar during Eucharist, making a visual connection between the bread and wine, gifts of creation, and elements of creation that his body depicts. His is a visible sign to the community and is a strong reminder that all are similarly called to be stewards of the creation that the sogaimiti bears on his body.

Healing Rites—Anointing Christians anoint a sick person with plant oil that we call Oil of the Sick, while praying over them. Sngebard69 explains healing rituals in Palau: “There are numerous ways we perform healing treatments. People have knowledge of certain plants that are used as medicine, guava leaves for diarrhea, lemons for coughs. Certain plants are boiled with water and inhaled for cleansing and strengthening.” Zulu70 from Papua New Guinea/ Bougainville says of his healing practices: “Preparation of the oil is done only by men and by preparing it, they also use some sacred words to give some power to it when using it on the sick person.” Then “the sick person is anointed with oil by massaging the sick person with it and secondly … with water and some special leaves.” Zulu goes on to explain that two types of anointing, however, have only one purpose and that is to cleanse the person from all sickness inside and outside the body. Pascal71 speaks of the person who prepares the ritual and prayer for the healing oil in Tanna, an island of Vanuatu. “The person who prepares the medicine for the sick, offers prayer in a place called Imaim (Nakamal) where

A tatau is a series of tattoos covering the torso from the waist to below the knees, for a man, and less for a woman. 65 Mlofie is a chiefly term used in the Samoan language. 66 A tufuga is a man who is trained to apply the tatau. 67 Ioane Luafata Lam Dam. PRS. 68 A sogaimiti is one who has completed the tatau process. 69 Sngebard Melairei. PRS. 70 Zulu Serop. PRS. 71 Pascal Yaput. PRS. 64

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men gather every afternoon before sunset to offer Tamava (prayer). First a cup of Nekawa (kava) is drunk to make tamava to offer the medicine to the spirit to make it available to cure the sick.” Jove72 tells us that in Pohnpei it is the mothers who are the traditional healers because “they are more caring, so the tradition of medicine was passed down to them from one generation to another.” Is there any need to repeat these traditional rituals by the anointing of a priest with “blessed oil”? Could not the richness of cultural healing rituals and symbols become associated with the Christian Sacrament of the Sick? Could not the priest or minister speak prayers from the Christian ritual books that accompany the healing ritual?

Sacraments of Healing—Penance Kariti73 tells us, Penance is not something new to indigenous people. In my Kiribati custom the old man (elder) is responsible for bringing peace between them with their enemies. He is the only one who can talk to the other chief from a different clan. In the process both families must bring together their own food; gather around them and start eating at the same time on the same table. Also, they will exchange things to mark the day of peace or unification. Alekesio,74 a Fijian, describes something similar: In my culture when the person disobeys the elders and he breaks the rules of the community he has to be punished. He must come in front of the community for the elders to give him his punishment. Some are forced to leave the village and only return after five years. If they have no other place to go, the penitent has to bring the whale’s tooth which is the Tabua and present it to the elder and say sorry. That way they can be reconciled with the community, but first he must reconcile with his family members because they have had the family name damaged. After he presents the Tabua and the elders accept it his punishment will be lighter, but he must not do anything wrong again for one year. This is not dissimilar to celebrating a communal penance rite. Could not the priest or pastor be involved in the tribal ceremony as one of the elders? Could not the offender publicly acknowledge guilt and the minister speak God’s forgiveness using the ritual formula that the church provides?

Eucharistic Hospitality Meal sharing in the Pacific is all about community, abundant sharing, endless talanoa,75 and an extravagance of time. Food is extremely important, usually fresh from the markets or one’s own garden—and always plentiful. Mataio76 tells of the staple diet in Kiribati, fish, toddy (palm wine), and babai (a root vegetable). It becomes the responsibility for boys and girls to learn how to nurture, catch, and prepare these foods. One constantly J ove Thomsin. PRS. Kariti Nawere. PRS. 74 Alekesio Lesibobo. PRS. 75 A Pacifican word that means “yarning” or extended conversation. 76 Mataio Raimon. PRS. 72 73

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hears “come and eat” when passing a family in a park or visiting friends or colleagues. If there is a table (but it is more likely a mat), it can ever expand to include everyone. DJ77 from the Carolines speaks of the importance of “Feast time.” This is where the whole family or clan comes together in “reunion.” Important features are apologies for mistakes and gratitude for each other. Each brings their own contribution to the feast. DJ connects this to the gifts procession of the Eucharist, and the bringing of ourselves. He sees these as strong connections to Eucharistic sharing. Pacificans’ meal sharing, and especially the Kanavata—a ceremonial feast—flows seamlessly into Eucharistic practice. Through inculturation, the understanding of how one should see the vanua finds fulfillment in the meaning of the Eucharist. “The fruit of the earth” and “work of human hands” is received through God’s goodness and offered back to God in thanksgiving. Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI wrote, “With these words, the rite not only includes in our offering to God all human efforts and activity, but also leads us to see the world as God’s creation, which brings forth everything we need for our sustenance.”78 Therefore, Benedict emphasized that “the relationship between the Eucharist and the cosmos helps us to see the unity of God’s plan and to grasp the profound relationship between creation and the ‘new creation’ inaugurated in the resurrection of Christ, the new Adam.”79 Chryssavgis makes a similar comment: the Eucharist is God’s manifestation in bread and wine “where the world becomes the material and historical sacrament of God’s presence, transcending the ontological gap between created and uncreated.”80 Pope Francis speaks of the need for the sacraments to be seen in continuity with creation. He reminds us of the need to inculturate the sacraments with the richness of cultural traditions of first peoples. In his response to the Amazonian Synod he says, “We can take up into our liturgy many elements proper to the experience of indigenous peoples in their contact with nature, and respect native forms of expression in song, dance, rituals, gestures and symbols.”81 Our few examples offer possible ways forward. Ritual elements that include the birthing umbilical cord, more specific healing remedies, and even the tatua can be combined, inserted into, or even replace ritual elements that are part of the structure of Christian sacramental rites. This will require open dialogue and discernment, responding to God’s invitation to grace. As Francis urges us in that same document, “But let us be fearless; let us not clip the wings of the Holy Spirit.”82

CONCLUSION We have reflected on God’s continuing presence in the world. We have also tried to explore our part in continuing to cocreate with God. Ecological consciousness is now stronger than it has perhaps ever been. As scientists discover our part in bringing about its demise we look to ecological conversion, a much-used term in today’s church, a

J Martin. PRS. D Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis. http://www.vati​can.va/cont​ent/bened​ict-xvi/en/apo​st_e​xhor​tati​ons/ docume​nts/hf_​ben-xvi_e​xh_2​0070​222_​sacr​amen​tum-carita​tis.html. 79 Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis. 80 Chryssavgis, Creation as Sacrament, 87. 81 Pope Francis, Querida Amazonia. Beloved Amazon. Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation. 2020. 82. 82 Ibid., 69. 77 78

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central message of the current leaders in both the East and West. Exploring creation as sacramentality and so linked to the church’s liturgy offers the possibility to bring about this change. The celebration of the Eucharist, in particular, sacramentally makes the connection between heaven and earth, the divine and the world we experience. Exploring inculturation in liturgy and sacraments will bring to consciousness and assist Pacificans to heal their vanua. The early Christian missionaries suffered incredible hardships to bring the gospel to the countries in the Pacific. Sadly, with an often-imperialistic mindset they were unable to recognize that, although the island peoples had no knowledge of Christ, they were truly imbued with the Holy Spirit. Their vanua way of life, which we have shown to be sacred and sacramental, celebrated and affirmed through dance, song, and ritual, reflected an intimate union with their world and its origins. Christianity often became a parallel worldview when it might have become intertwined with a rich traditional and deep respect and collaboration with creation. Now might be the time to restore this understanding. As Lotu83 reminds us, If the church says that sacrament is symbol or sign that signifies the presence of God in us, then there is a possibility that our rituals or traditional ceremonies are also symbolizing the presence of God in our own local context. If we do help our people to make the connections according to our own way of living I think people will come to understand more about who they are as indigenous people and how the Church’s sacraments connect them to their relationship with themselves, fanua or creation and especially their God.

FURTHER READING Ernst, M. Winds of Change: Rapidly Growing Religious Groups in the Pacific Islands. Suva: Pacific Conference of Churches, 1994. Garrett, J. To Live Among the Stars: Christian Origins in Oceania. Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, 1982. Katz, R. The Straight Path of the Spirit: Ancestral Wisdom and Healing Traditions in Fiji. Vermont: Park Street Press, 1993. Krǟmer, Klaus, and Vellguth Klaus, eds. Inculturation God’s Presence in Cultures: One World Theology 12. Quezon City, Philippines: Claretian Communications Foundation, 2019. Raitiqa, L. “Ruth, Redeemer of the Land.” In Weavings: Women doing Theology in Oceania, edited by L. Johnson and J. A. Filemoni-Tofaeono. Suva: Weavers, SPATS, and IPS at the University of the South Pacific, 2003: 99–107. Soronakadavu, Meresiana. “The Traditional role of Fijian Women, with reference to Christian Justice.” In Weavings: Women doing Theology in Oceania, edited by L. Johnson and J. A. Filemoni-Tofaeono. Suva: Weavers, SPATS, and IPS at the University of the South Pacific, 2003: 161–4. Thomson, B. The Fijians: A Study of the Decay of Custom. London: William Heinemann, 1908. Tuwere, T. Vanua: Towards a Fijian Theology of Place. Suva: USP Library, 2002.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Sacraments and the Earth: The Poor, the Clouds, and the Extinction of Animals CLÁUDIO CARVALHAES

THE LORD BE WITH YOU The sacraments present God’s love for the world. I believe that this statement will not be disputed by any Christian tradition in spite of all of the denominational differences. However, nothing is that easy. We differ in our understandings of what these words mean: the ways sacraments, God, love, and world mean. In this essay, I want to linger on the word world and from there move back toward love, God, and sacraments. From geography to theology, trying to map the ways in which the grace of God is marked by any form of cartography, perhaps of an animal prowling, perhaps the tree next to my house, the growth of the wheat, the vastness of the dark seas, the movements of the clouds, or the speed of lizards walking on water. To wander/wonder around the earth being in constant state of alertness, paying attention to our neighborhood, opening ourselves up to all that affects us in our lives in our corner of the earth, which is, at the same time, the whole earth. Every theology is a theology from a territory, from a specific place that evokes feelings, connections, commitments, and forms of awareness that are marked by a certain culture and power of that geography. The where of theology, which also includes with whom, defines what we think. In the span of our lives, the markers of the social, political, historical, and economic conditions of our lives affect the ways we believe and how we write theology. Class, race, sexualities, ableism, cosmologies, and forms of power condition our ways of living. There is a historical reason why we are living now under the power of white supremacy, fascism, neoliberalism, and extractivism, where poverty is rampant, only few lives matter in ongoing rootless class and racial struggles, wars must be a part of the geopolitical arrangements with the stealing of lands everywhere, ethnic cleansing of indigenous people and Palestinians continues, and the whole earth is turned into profit. The fact that our sacramental theologies fail to adequately address these issues gives evidence of our class, our privileges, the where and with whom we write. Covid-19 has changed our lives forever. All of that has taken us to a place where to talk about the end of the world is not a surprise. Can we continue to talk about

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sacraments without considering the real conditions of our world? The topography of our faith cannot be sealed in a world of ideals and disincarnate faith but rather must be radically crossed by the multitudes of disasters, conditions, and forms of life within the world we live in. While it can be said that theology and spirituality of the sacraments have often become preoccupied with abstract ideas or platitudes in the name of God’s love or God’s desires, everything we say has indeed material results. Sacraments have been this fusion of the transcendence and immanence of God but perhaps this schema cannot hold any longer. At baptism, we have the transcendent and immanent presence of the Holy Spirit washing our material bodies in water. The Eucharist holds the immaterial eternity of God and the very materiality of the wheat and grapes is holding, in many ways, the presence of the Body of Christ. The problem, as I see it, is that the sacraments don’t often point to concrete places and the biodiversities of people and natural life but, rather, stay mostly within the bounds of time. The immanence of God’s presence within complex histories of natural–social places has always loomed large around the transcendence of God and the universality of theological claims. After all the Eucharist, for instance, is fundamentally an eschatological celebration and all the sacraments are universal claims. The ritual always happens at a certain place that is mostly irrelevant since the same ritual can be done anywhere, without any historical, social, economic, sexual, racial, class, and natural markers, even in spite of all of the inculturation attempts. It carries deeply a linear sense of time and moves toward a teleological moment where we will be with God beyond time. Thus, what is at stake in the celebration of the sacraments is the Kairos time, the fullness of times, in the chronos of the now, putting together the now with the not-yet of the kingdom of God. However, the now runs the risk of being subsumed by the telos, the not-yet, the eternal gathering with God in the future. Surely the church is blessed every time the celebration of the sacraments happens, but the now of the sacramental is often voided and empty of natural–social markers. In that sense, as eschatological rituals, both baptism and the Eucharist do narrate the history of salvation throughout time with our eyes in the future, without much attention to the cartography of the salvific events or the conditions of the topography where the celebrations happen. Sure, the sacraments are about transformation, but there are no material contours of that transformation. Once we go to the sacraments, the celebration orients the heart of the believer to go and change the world. But the rituals don’t quite name the social situations. For instance, renouncing the devil in baptism never names the racism or the capitalist ruling that marks our time, and the epiclesis in the Eucharist starts from the veiled assumption that the earth is not sacred so we must bless the elements and the presence of the Holy Spirit must be called upon. After all, the universality of God and the sacraments cannot be reduced by the contingency of the earthly, social–political aspects of life. Vitor Westhelle in his spellbinding book Eschatology and Space: The Lost Dimension in Theology Past and Present shows us the prominence of time and the detracting notion of time in theology in the Western world. And I was not really surprised to discover that the deficit of spatial concerns was not an unfortunate neglect, but an intentional and militant bracketing of dimensional reflections from the core of theological scholarship … Eschatological discourse in Western modernity has been sequestered by the dominance of historical thinking.

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Confined to time, and bound to the tropes that we create from the movement of the Earth around the Sun, this thinking offers longitudinal trajectories by which truth and final verifiability is exclusively time bound. But this is in fact a long-lasting Western narrative that predates modernity … Hegel had already pontificated: “The truth of space is time.” For the West, the eschatological question has been a perennial temporal deferment that reached its epic zenith in Wolfhart Pannenberg’s equation of revelation and history, on the heels of the pioneering Old Testament biblical work of Gerhard von Rad and his followers.1 Westhelle shows us at length how Christian theology has been bound to temporal dimensions at the expense of spatial dimensions. As he said, this neglect is not only a simple forgetful note in the line of Christian theology but also an intentional and militant bracketing, which also has power dynamics and conquering reasons for its construction. The whole colonial enterprise and the domination of the new world had to have a sense of detachment from space in the Christian message so the conquering of space could happen. The immutable and eternal love of God had to change hearts but closed its eyes to the colonization and the conquering of people’s lives and spaces. I heard this story in both Latin America and Africa: “When the missionaries first came, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land!” And we still talk about the sacraments as usual, adding layers of new wonderful meanings while forgetting that the sacraments also have a political arm working daily on the lands of the people. Thus, the absence in our sacraments of the world as land, as cartography of movements, and as a contested territory as power is symptomatic of the colonial conquering and the uprooting of millions of people. How can the sacraments present God’s love? Can we think of the Eucharist along with the chains of food production and distribution and baptism along with privatized and clean water? As late as it might be, and perhaps too late, we might come to a point where we learn with the pastor of the poor in Latin America who just died, Don Pedro Casadáliga: “Only later I understood that the ‘signs of times’ need to be complemented with the ‘signs of places.’ ”2 With that notion of the sign of places in mind I want to propose three ways for us to think of the sacraments in a global perspective: the poor, the skies and the earth, and animal extinction. The sacraments as awareness of the life and death of God in a world marked by social events, contingencies, challenges and demands; the sacraments as positionalities in the world, as taking sides, as a way to hold onto God’s fullness in the world, resist the powers of death, cocreate forms of life, and honor life that comes from God. This chapter is thus an exercise in sacra/mentality, in sacramental imagination with a loosened tongue, free use of metaphors, images, and relations where the earth challenges the meanings of the sacraments. The hope is that, by offering a variety of relations and connections, we can expand our sacramental thinking, believing, and living otherwise.

Vitor Westhelle, Eschatology and Space: The Lost Dimension in Theology Past and Present (New York: Palgrave, 2012), xii–xiii. 2 Pedro Casaldáliga, Creio na Justiça e na Esperança (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1978), 211. 1

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TASTE AND SEE With the advent of the novel coronavirus, we have seen a staggering growth of inequality. The financial markets were not permanently hit but the opposite; the market stole more money from the people and put it into the hands of those already billionaires. While 40 million Americans filed for unemployment, a few US billionaires amassed $637 billion with the pandemic.3 If few win, many lose, and poverty is increasing also in staggering ways.4 Just recently, a group of impoverished women in Brazil were offering to work just for rice and beans and nothing else.5 Not only the material effects of the pandemic must be analyzed but also, along with exploitation, hunger and poverty, the feelings this cluster of issues brings to our daily lives must be considered: sadness, exhaustion, anger, frustration, and despair. Is there a way that the sacraments can respond to that? We insist with a strong yes, the sacraments must respond. However, eco-feminist theologian from Brazil, Nancy Cardoso, states our problem very clearly: “The table of God has problems connecting the bread of communion with the words of Jesus ‘this is my body.’ The table/altar also struggles to connect these two with the places that lack bread and the situations where workers produce the very bread we eat.” Churches are either funding big corporations that own the global network of food or are not voicing their prophetic curses on these companies or even not helping its members to be concerned with food security for all. Is it because nothing is said at the Eucharistic prayer? The point here is that, since we don’t name the issues of our time in our sacramental practices, we tend to reify the power systems that disenfranchise the poor. On the other hand, only naming will not prevent us from reifying the problem, which turns us to consider not only our language but also, fundamentally, our ritual actions, the where and with whom we do them. We must go back to the memory of the church and see how theology and action must go together and see how we have lost our prophetic bearings. The dangerous memory6 of Jesus that feeds us today around the Eucharistic tables in joyful celebrations is the same memory that gave life to the Christians in the early churches. Acts 2 says that this new community was born out of the Holy Spirit and they were able to move along, not without problems, sharing all they had. That was the tradition followed by the early Christians. We learn from them that to live the Christian faith is to organize life together through right relationships. In God, the personal and the social relations are intermingled, and all of it is deeply related to this ritual of eating together, the sharing of this table. The Didache from the first century says, Share everything with your brother. Do not say: “it is private property.” If you share what is everlasting, you should be that much more willing to share things which do not last … On the Lord’s Day, gather in community to break bread and offer thanks.

Hiatt Woods, How Billionaires Got $637 Billion Richer during the Coronavirus Pandemic, August 3, 2020, https:// www.busi​ness​insi​der.com/billi​onai​res-net-worth-increa​ses-coro​navi​rus-pande​mic-2020-7; Oxfam, Pandemic Profiteers Exposed, July 22, 2020, https://www.oxfam​amer​ica.org/press/pande​mic-pro​fite​ers-expo​sed/. 4 Oxfam, How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exploits the Worst Aspects of Extreme Inequality, https://www.oxfam. org/en/how-coro​navi​rus-pande​mic-explo​its-worst-aspe​cts-extr​eme-ine​qual​ity; Oxfam, Half a Billion People Could Be Pushed into Poverty by Coronavirus, Warns Oxfam, https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-relea​ses/half-bill​ ion-peo​ple-could-be-pus​hed-pove​rty-coro​navi​rus-warns-oxfam. 5 Luiza Souto, Troco trabalho por comida: sem renda, elas fazem faxina por arroz e feijão, De Universa 10/07/2020 04h00,  https://www.uol.com.br/unive​rsa/notic​ias/reda​cao/2020/07/10/sem-renda-elas-estao-troca​ndo-fax​ ina-por-com​ida-e-mater​ial-de-con​stru​cao.htm?cmpid=cop​iaec​ola. 6 J. B. Metz, Faith in History and Society, trans. D. Smith (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 89–90. 3

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But confess your sins first, so that your sacrifice may be a pure one. No one who has a quarrel with his brother may join your gathering, not until they are reconciled.7 We see St. Basil (330–379) being very harsh on the rich: The rich take what belongs to everyone, and claim they have the right to own it, to monopolize it … What keeps you from giving now? Isn’t the poor man there? Aren’t your own warehouses full? Isn’t the reward promised? The command is clear: the hungry man is dying now, the naked man is freezing now, the man in debt is beaten now, and you want to wait until tomorrow? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry man; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the man who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the man who has no shoes; the money which you put in the bank belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help.8 We also see that St. John Chrysostom was harsh on the Christians and reminded them about the care they were supposed to have for each other and the (re)place(ment) of the altar: Do you wish to honor the Body of Christ? Do not despise him when he is naked. Do not honor him here in the church building with silks, only to neglect him outside, when he is suffering from cold and nakedness. For he who said, “This is my body” is the same who said “You saw me, a hungry man and you did not give me to eat.” Of what use is it to load the table of Christ? Feed the hungry and then come and decorate the table. You are making a golden chalice and you do not give a cup of cold water? The Temple of your afflicted brother’s body is more precious than this Temple (the church). The Body of Christ becomes for you an altar. It is more holy than the altar of stone on which you celebrate the holy sacrifice. You are able to contemplate this altar everywhere, in the street and in the open squares.9 In order to respond to the disasters of accumulation of wealth, we must rethink the table of Jesus Christ. Julio de Santa Ana, lay Methodist Uruguayan theologian who helped shape the ecumenical movement in Latin America, rethinks the sacrament of the Eucharist among the poor. In his precious little book published as Pão, Vinho e Amizade (Bread, Wine and Friendship) he uses the work of Balasuriya (mentioned above) to relate the Eucharist with social transformation and solidarity with the poor: “What is the meaning of fifty two Eucharist rites offered per year in a city, if from these celebrations there is no reduction of the distance that separates the rich and their mansions and the poor in its favelas?” When the participation of the sacrament does not lead us into the union with those who suffer, the Eucharist loses its sense of unity and it becomes only an intellectual, idealist act, without practical consequences.10 In the same way he tells us of other dangers of the Eucharist: First, when the rite becomes a rigid formalism and deprives people from freedom and participation in it with spontaneity, the only thing left for people is to he Didache, Chapter 4, http://www.ear​lych​rist​ianw​riti​ngs.com/text/dida​che-lake.html. T Saint Basil in Tissa Balasuriya, The Eucharist and Human Liberation (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004), 25–6. 9 St. John Chrysostom, in Balasuriya, The Eucharist and Human Liberation, 26–7. 10 Julio de Santa Ana, Pão, Vinho e Amizade. Meditações (São Paulo: CEDI, 1986), 20. 7 8

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watch, making the ritual an unauthentic spiritual event; Second, in societies with bourgeoisie values, the Eucharist becomes more an intellectual event that does not make any change in society … Third, the deviation and danger of excess of emotionalism; Fourth, when social pressures turn the memorial of liberation into a way of domesticating and oppressing the believers. It is no secret that this sacrament has been manipulated according to dominant groups (feudal, capitalistic, racial, sexual, etc.) that have tried to manipulate the Eucharistic practice according to its own values and priorities.11 Our practices are to be created and recreated with the poor around the table, taking into consideration what we have received and what is around us. Our liturgies are often made by those who do not have any experience with poverty. As Tissa Balasuriya says, “When the ‘controllers’ of theology and church discipline have no lived experience of oppression, they are not likely to understand or even listen to the cries of the oppressed masses.”12 Our Eucharistic prayers would be very different if made by those who are hungry or have no place to sleep. Eucharistic prayers must be said with the movements of the bodies that are hurting, in need, oppressed, voiceless, with us all breathing together, being challenged by each other’s prayers and practices, by the needs of each other so we can figure out how we can perform a love so great that we cannot understand or grasp it properly. We need to restore the place of the poor both within the sacramental language and concretely around the table. Without the poor, the celebration of the Eucharist is only an empty ritual meant to nourish our individual lives with the stamp “go in peace.” Without the presence of the poor, there is no celebration of joy, justice, peace, or beauty. Without the poor, the sacrament is a private meal of those who own it, pretending to be public and for all. Without the poor, liberals and conservatives, liturgical and the so-called nonliturgical churches only feed themselves into a sorrowful self-pity, wrapped up in liturgy that serves to feed the material comfort of capitalism. José Moura Gonçalves Filho, a professor at the University of São Paulo, has worked on the notion of public invisibility and describes social humiliation this way: “Social humiliation corresponds to the experience in which we lose a trace or a feeling of humanity. A trace of humanity has its experience interrupted. An impediment that is neither natural or accidental but applied or sustained by other humans … Social humiliation is the suffering held for a long period, ruminated.”13 He goes on to say, “Every culture has an ancestral suffering, repeated in many generations and in different forms. He mentions the black people and the indigenous people who lost their belongings, their rites, their beliefs, their festivities and were forced into labor, living under somebody else’s domination.”14 We are talking about a system that perpetuates humiliation and erases the potentiality for action, any resolution for transformation and combat. The church, fighting its own social class status, understands this situation and empowers the subjugated, offering symbolic and material tools for the remaking of the deepest threads of the self. Now, because the church has shed light on its own sins of racism, white supremacy, and siding

Ibid., 20–1. Balasuriya, The Eucharist and Human Liberation, 60. 13 José Moura Gonçalves Filho, “Humilhação Social: Humilhação Política,” in Orientação à queixa escolar, de Paula Souza, Beatriz (org) (São Paulo: Casa do Psicólogo, 2007), 2. 14 Ibid., 3. 11 12

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with the rich, the church can change and offer a place where the people who are poor can shine their own light in the light of God. The meal of the reign of God is a wonder to behold, a map for the traveler, a safe arrival place for the lost, a resting place for the wanderer, a balm in Gilead for the hurt and bruised, a welcoming space for the foreigner, free food for the hungry, free drink for the thirsty and soup for the sick, a house for the homeless, health insurance for the sick, hugs of affection and words of care for the abandoned, a kiss for the untouchable, a kiss with the breath of life, a soul for the dispirited, a lingering place where the body can catch up with the soul, a safety light for those lost in the dark night of the soul, a port for anyone to arrive and rest, an endless celebration of life, a carnival for the body, a shameless proclamation that a new world is possible and it is offered right here, a promise of new life in our hearts, a band announcing on the streets of the city the arrival of the one who was to come and is now playing in our backyard, a rush of joy never felt, a soft caress for those whose faces were disfigured by fire, accident, or acid, a firm grip on the hand of those fainting, an embrace that shelters children in the midst of crossing bullets, a shout of glory and alleluia to the world, a dancing place for falling angels, a tear of joy and words that beg forgiveness for those who were not accepted at the table because of their sexualities, a place where a barren mother gives birth, where a child and the elderly have dreams, a prison unlocked, people holding hands freely with whomever they love, visibility for the ones placed under the shadow of society, a job that feeds the family, a moment where fear or anxiety is replaced by love and trust, education for every child in the house, universal healthcare, forgiveness of sins, smiles going everywhere, restorative justice, healing for all, songs of all kinds being sung and danced to, an interreligious house where diversity is necessary, a shelter with a real address where anyone can live and receive their mail, a place to be found, cared for, fed, clothed, warmed, protected, healed, made fresh and new. In the name, passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

SURSUM CORDA—LIFT UP YOUR HEARTS We will start not from the lex orandi, credendi or vivendi but rather with a lex naturae,15 which is to say, we are thinking about the sacraments from the perspective of the relation with the earth, from the positionality that we are the earth-humus and to attend to the earth is to attend to God’s real presence. What does the earth have to do with the sacraments? The world as the earth is God’s creation. In John Calvin’s famous words, the world is “a theater of God’s glory,” where every human being is “formed to be a spectator of the created world and given eyes that he might be led to its author by contemplating so beautiful a representation.”16 The earth as a representation of what matters, the Creator, the earth as an instrument to help us find redemption elsewhere, the earth as the weak link to God. Several Christian theologies have understood revelation in two parts: the natural, or partial, revelation of God and the supernatural or complete revelation of God. In that distinction or dualism, we have the natural world not only as lacking God’s full glory but in some ways a possible enemy of God’s glory if taken to the point of God’s full revelation. Cláudio Carvalhaes, “Lex Naturae—A New Way into a Liturgical Political Theology,” in T&T Clark Handbook to Political Theology, ed. Rubem Rosário-Rodriguez (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2019), 449–66. 16 Bernard Cottret, Calvin: A Biography, trans. M. Wallace McDonald (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 265–87. 15

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Since most forms of Christian theology are caught in the immanent/transcendent dualistic structure of thinking and believing, it is hard to see the natural world as a being on its own, fully alive, with its own intention, processes, and sovereignty. Within these forms of dualism, earth was associated with nature and world was associated with culture,17 which sets up a rank of values: culture as human civilization, “man’s” ordered civilization, over against nature as animal, raw, unruly, lifeless, indigenous. That means that everything related to earth must be ruled over, controlled, ordered, and/or tamed. The gospel and the Christ of culture is detached from nature and associated with higher forms of civilization. Moreover, this notion of the world against or opposite to nature is also deeply related to the notion of beings, both human and nonhuman. The world has human beings, all imago Dei, and nature has animals, species, animate and inanimate beings who can’t make it to the imago Dei of God’s creation. This difference establishes the belonging of each “species” in a specific realm. Human beings belong to the realm of God and other species belong to nature, with the caveat that humans, from a higher kingdom, can do whatever they want to nature while nature must accept whatever humans decide to do with this lower realm. Patriarchy, heterosexism, racism, and classism, for instance, make the bodies of women, LGBTQIA, and blacks closer to animals, so they inhabit a natural world that doesn’t have value. How should we consider what we call democracy? Would animals be considered an essential part of this living together? Unless we consider democracy a life where every animate and inanimate being belong, the result is a collective death. What about the Christian assembly?18 Would we consider the earth and the animals as part of the assembly? This is what we hope in this chapter to consider, to take into account, the assembly as a larger body of God, made not only of humans but also of the mineral, vegetal, and animal worlds. That would challenge the ways we understand the church, the world, nature, and the sacraments.19 With the advent of the novel coronavirus we have something to ponder about the asymmetry between humans and nature. Covid-19 is making it evident how we are using our human dominion over nature as we encroach into places that are not ours to enter. The virus is a sign of our own lack of limits. But not only that, we are exploiting the earth in every possible way: we use the soil for fuel, we deforest places to produce pasture for cows, we plant soil and corn for animals in order to kill them, the food industry is poisoning our fields, the animal slaughter is staggering, and fishing is depleting the oceans. The extractivist industry is ripping the earth apart everywhere searching for fossil fuel, with big oil corporations/countries drilling all over the place. Instead of it being a sign of progress, development, and richness, it is in fact the beginning of the end of our common house, much quicker than we could ever imagine. The acceleration of the destructive contact with nature is beyond any notion of care or reciprocity.

For a longer discussion on culture/nature see Cláudio Carvalhaes, “A Theological Shift: From Multiculturalisms to Multinaturalisms,” in Vulnerability and Resilience: Body and Liberating Theologies, ed. by Jione Havea (Lanham: Lexington & Fortress Academic Press, 2020), 159–72. 18 See Cláudio Carvalhaes, “The Christian as Humus: Virtual/Real Earthly Rituals of Ourselves,” in Liturgy, forthcoming. 19 See the wonderful work of Lisa E. Dahill: “Eating and Being Eaten: Interspecies Vulnerability as Eucharist,” Religions 11:4 (April 2020): 204, and “Living, Local, Wild Waters: Into Baptismal Reality,” in Encountering Earth: Thinking Theologically with a More-Than-Human World, ed. Trevor George Hunsberger Bechtel, Matthew Eaton, and Timothy Harvie (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018), 151–65. 17

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Davi Kopenawa is an Yanomami shaman in the Amazon and in his book The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman,20 he warns us that the sky is falling. The reason is that we are taking everything from under the earth, in processes of extractivism that eat everything up for profit and consumerism. What could be dismissed as another indigenous fable is now proved by science. The fossil fuel industry and the burning of CO2 is heating the atmosphere, warming the earth. Climate collapse is on its way. If we listen to scientists, we must grapple with the fact that we are moving too fast toward the end of human life on earth. The temperature of the earth is warming and the balance that sustains all forms of life can’t be kept. While efforts to keep the growth of the temperature of the earth to 1.5 degrees Celsius seem already to be a dream, scientists are talking about what happens if we hit 4 degrees Celsius: At the 4-degree end of the range, we would see not only “the destruction of the world’s coral reefs, massive loss of animal species, and catastrophic extreme weather events,” … but also “meters of sea-level rise that would challenge our capacity for adaptation. It would mean the end of human civilization in its current form.”21 With this scenario, can we Christians offer something to change this situation? For our purposes here, can the care of the earth be part of our sacramental theologies and prayers? Can we listen to the earth and change our prayers? We can start with what we have, perhaps with the sursum corda. The Eucharistic prayer invites us to lift up our hearts to God, and here is a key moment of relationality with God and the earth/universe. To lift our hearts to God is to attend to God’s presence but also to look up! When we look up we don’t look for God somewhere but we see God in the skies and in the real clouds. For God is not only a cloud of unknowing, and we are not only the cloud of witnesses. There isn’t only a virtual network of clouds. Fundamentally, the clouds22 are the visible mass of water suspended in the atmosphere, the circulation of fire and water between the sun’s heat and the waters vaporized from the earth. What would happen if when we say the sursum corda outside of our churches we put our hearts in the material clouds of the sky? Could we think beyond heresy? The clouds are a gift of God to us, God present in our lives. What if the clouds disappear? Doesn’t God also disappear? Scientists are saying that, with the climate collapse, we will have no clouds anymore. Can we imagine life without clouds? Lift up your hearts! This is what Natalie Wolchover in her chilling article “A World Without Clouds” writes. The current loss of clouds now is so “dramatic” that we are moving toward a world without clouds. She says, Clouds currently cover about two-thirds of the planet at any moment. But computer simulations of clouds have begun to suggest that as the Earth warms, clouds become scarcer. With fewer white surfaces reflecting sunlight back to space, the Earth gets even warmer, leading to more cloud loss. This feedback loop causes warming to spiral out of control … when the CO2 level reaches about 1,200 parts per million in the

Davi Kopenawa, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, Bruce Albert (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2013). Natalie Wolchover, “A World Without Clouds,” February 25, 2019, https://www.qua​ntam​agaz​ine.org/ cloud-loss-could-add-8-degr​ees-to-glo​bal-warm​ing-20190​225/. 22 Bruno Latour talks about a Critical Zone that we must pay attention to, which is about a few kilometers above the trees where geoscience tells us all the matter of life ordains the balance of life on earth, where the clouds live. https://www.yout​ube.com/watch?v=2dqN​YHP4​GaM. 20 21

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simulation—which could happen in 100 to 150 years, if emissions aren’t curbed— more entrainment and less cooling conspire to break up the stratocumulus cloud altogether.23 No rain! Burning! This is our future if we don’t change our ways of being, our awareness, and our ways of relating with God and nature. That includes our prayers, our sacramental theologies, and our rituals. We must find a way to be faithful to God as we are faithful to the earth as the body of God.24 Lift up your hearts! As we look to the heavens, we are also looking down to the earth. Davi Kopenawa, Ailton Krenak25 and other indigenous people from Latin America tell us they do their rituals to suspend the sky. Their rituals honor the earth and the sky. Only by honoring the earth can they hold the sky from falling on us. I wonder if our Eucharistic prayers could also become rituals to suspend the sky from falling. Lift up your hearts! If our hearts are in God, the cloud of the impossible,26 and in the waters of the clouds, we can say that the clouds are the presence of the earth on high, or the presence of God on earth as it is in heaven. Would this honoring of the earth happen if we lift up our hearts? I wonder how our very notion of sacramentality can help us gain a new understanding of the earth. As we lift our hearts, can we gain a different awareness of the Gaia as a living being that has its own mind and soul, interacting with us in multiple ways? Would this expansive sacra/ mentality help us consider the earth as beyond the mere notion of nature as an organism without agency, given to us for our enjoyment and the fulfillment of our desires? An earth sacrament where God, embraced in Gaia or Gaia as God in full glory, offers the condition of the possibility for everything that exists, as that which makes everything possible. Bruno Latour says of Gaia, Gaia is presented here as the occasion for a return to Earth that allows for a differentiated version of the respective qualities that can be required of sciences, politics, and religions, as these are finally reduced to more modest and more earthbound definitions of their former vocations.27 In whatever way we interpret Gaia, we must wrestle with what Isabelle Stengers calls Gaia: “the one who intrudes.”28 Gaia has shown us that Gaia can decide what she wants. Gaia is not only watching things from backstage but rather, Gaia decided to enter the main stage of God’s theater, intruding on our lives and now keeping us without control or awareness of where we are heading. That means that we are disrupting the systems of balance of the earth and the earth is coming back to us saying something like this: unless you change I will spit you out of my mouth. Gaia might be inviting us to reconsider again what our allegiances are and where our love is placed. As Latour says, “Gaia is

Natalie Wolchover, “A World Without Clouds.” https://www.quantamagazine.org/cloud-loss-could-add-8 degrees-to-global-warming-20190225/. 24 Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993). 25 Ailton Krenak, Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (Toronto: Anansi International, 2020). 26 Catherine Keller, Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (New York: Columbia University, 2015). 27 Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge: Polity, 2017). Kindle Edition, p. 4. 28 Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism (Atlantic Highlands: Open Humanities Press, 2015). 23

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unquestionably the great empêcheur de penser en rond, the grand inhibitor of circular thinking, a great impetus to thinking outside the box.”29 We can see Gaia as God’s gift to ourselves, but now Gaia has intruded into our daily lives, our religion, and religious rituals. The circularity of our sacramental thinking is now in check. In many engagements with the sacraments, we tend to see an opening of the conversation with the engagement of many issues, thinkers, and challenges, but only to go back to the beginning by reifying the same eternal truths, reinstating what has always already been said. It is as if we need to continue to repeat the same things so we don’t need to actually change. I don’t think we can do this anymore. We must indeed call each other to think outside of the box so we can be real stewards of God’s creation, the ones who care for the soil, for what lives underneath the earth, for the air, the clouds, the waters, and all of the animal, mineral, and vegetable worlds.

BAPTISM—IN LIFE AND DEATH WE BELONG TO GOD Covid-19 has also evidenced that we are all interconnected. Now more than ever. The bats of Wuhan are near our homes, taking away the precious lives of our people. Because we have a ferocious appetite and can’t respect the habitat of animals who have a circle of life of their own, we are now paying the most horrible price. Our appetite has no measure. Look at the shocking headlines from Brazil: One and a half billion: this is the Brazilian army of chickens. There are seven animals for each human being. In fact, much more, considering that most of these birds are slaughtered in less than 50 days. Every quarter, the Brazilian meat industry kills 1.5 billion chickens. We are at the beginning of a chain of events that could lead to the extinction of our species.30 Scientists are saying that we are living right now in the sixth mass extinction in the history of the earth. Five mass extinction events happened over the past half billion years. Elizabeth Kolbert in her book The Sixth Extinction explains this process of extinction. She says, Meanwhile, an even stranger and more radical transformation is underway. Having discovered subterranean reserves of energy, humans begin to change the composition of the atmosphere. This, in turn, alters the climate and the chemistry of the oceans. Some plants and animals adjust by moving. They climb mountains and migrate toward the poles. But a great many—at first hundreds, then thousands, and finally perhaps millions—find themselves marooned. Extinction rates soar, and the texture of life changes.31 This massive movement of extinction is also due to our sense of nature as “natural resources,” something inanimate and without a life of its own that serves us only as resources. The earth is “out there” for beauty and use, available for our needs and desires. While we live beyond limits, we are destroying entire ecosystems and promoting a mass

Latour, Facing Gaia, 6. O Joio e o Trigo, August 2, 2020, https://www.faceb​ook.com/najoe​ira/posts/32639​6441​3669​670. 31 Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Benry Hold, 2014), Apple Books, 10. 29 30

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extinction of species. We do not know how many species are extinct every day; it can go from twenty-four to two hundred or more. But what does extinction have to do with baptism? Shouldn’t we talk about burial and funerals for those species? Absolutely. But here I want to insist on the possibility of gaining a new sacra/mentality about the species other than human through our sacraments. What if we start by asking why we only believe in the resurrection of humans and don’t care for the resurrection of all beings? Is it too outrageous to care for the resurrection, restoration, or worth of animals? Can we consider them as part of our own humanity and the same cloud of witnesses? If baptism is about death and resurrection, then the death of the animals should be our theological concern as well. If baptism means forgiveness of our sins, can we add to this forgiveness, the naming of the slaughtering of animals for our consumption? If baptism is about being washed, can we also wash a certain lack of consciousness that doesn’t care for what is not human and gain a consciousness where the animal, vegetal, and mineral worlds have primacy in God’s whole realm, as much as humans do? If baptism is about renewal, can our baptism be the renewal of all creation, not only the individual human being baptized? If baptism is about regeneration, can the parts of the earth that are already destroyed be claimed for regeneration by the graciousness of our God and the works of our hands? Like the polluted rivers near our congregations? If baptism is about restitution and forgiveness of sins, can we restitute the land to indigenous people and restitute what has been stolen from black people? If baptism is about the union with Christ, in Christ’s death and resurrection, can we see Christ united with the bodies and beings of all species in Christ’s death and resurrection, including the ones being extinct? If baptism is about being sealed with Christ, can this seal expand and wrap up all the nonhuman species? If baptism is being clothed with a new garment, can this garment be like Martin Luther King’s allusion to the garment of our interrelatedness? In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be … This is the inter-related structure of reality.32 Can Christian baptism be this extensive garment, received by God, as an awareness that everything is deeply interconnected and the “we” of God includes the animals, waters, air, animate and inanimate beings, all mutually tied up and dependent on each other to survive? Can our mind be transformed to that point or does this sound only like rubbish? Can the laying of hands be done to and from other species? Can the anointing with oil be the blessing of God through leaves and trees? Can we stretch and see the leaves and the trees not only as a vessel but perhaps even means of grace? Can the healing so present in baptisms in the early church be the healing of our relation with the earth? Can the “oil of gladness” anointing head, ears, nose, and chest be a full transformation of our bodies toward the earth and each other? Can the kiss of welcome be also given to all the earth? When we cast out demons, can the demon of our human sense of dominion be cast away? When we renounce evil, can we name the evils of destruction of our planet, God’s body?

Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail http://okra.stanf​ord.edu/transc​ript​ion/docu​ment​_ima​ges/ undeci​ded/630​416-019.pdf. 32

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Can the fasting and abstention from sex also be the abstention from turning every inch of land into profit? When we do the washing of the feet, can we pay attention to where the water comes from? Can the new identity received by the baptized be the “citizenship” of the earth, shaped and transformed by the identity of other humans and species where we have no borders? What would it take to create a catechesis also from the wisdom of the earth? Can the mystagogy be a way of teaching the neophyte to love in reciprocity with the earth as loving God? In her beautiful and piercing book Migrations,33 Australian author Charlotte McConaghy describes the ways Franny, the main character, decides to travel to the Arctic in order to find and follow the last Arctic terns in perhaps their final migration move, going from their nesting in Greenland to Antarctica. Resembling Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Franny is imagining how to live in a world without birds and their songs. The danger of travel and its challenges makes us consider longing, grief, and the witnessing of fantastic species going into extinction. The notion of creatureliness makes us think of the ways in which we humans relate to other creatures, without distinctions of worthiness. This book made me think of the ways in which baptism is a journey not only witnessing but also diving into death, eagerly hoping for some sign of resurrection. Will the Arctic terns be able to go into another migration? Perhaps the question for us is, how long will we baptize hoping for our human resurrection and dismiss the entire earth? Can the sacrament of baptism help us witness the death of not only those dying of Covid-19 but also all of the daily species being extinguished? What is the power of resurrection if we consider the ways we are killing the earth and so many species? Perhaps, we can learn again and again from baptism that, in life and death we belong to God, and that in a future not too distant, where “there is hardly anything wild left, and this is a fate we are, all of us, intimately aware of,” we might join together not only in devastation, extinction, and death but also in mutuality and reciprocity, that is, life and resurrection together.

POST-EUCHARISTIC PRAYER Louis-Marie Chauvet reminds us that the sacraments are about “the irreducibility of God … to our concepts, discourses, ideologies, and experiences.”34 The irreducibility of God in the sacraments disclosing, “even while concealing it, the difference of God.”35 This difference must also help us see that the earth cannot be reducible to our religious thinking either and our forms of beliefs and relation. Thus the otherness of God meets our otherness, the otherness of the earth and the otherness of each species. How we do that is a work yet to be done. We can also move on with Chauvet and say that we cannot reduce the sacraments to the thinking about the earth for we would fall prey in trying to reduce God to our concepts and discourses. However, the hope here is not to infringe on the irreducibility of God but rather to expand our thinking about the possibility of God in our midst, a midst made neither of marble altars, golden cups, silver patens, nor of unmovable orders of sacramental prayers. Rather, the sacraments as the possibility of God made of seeds, flowers, plants, butterflies, bees, birds, rivers, oceans, rocks, mountains, and

Charlotte McConaghy, Migrations (New York: Flatiron Books, 2020), Kindle Edition, p. 23. Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 403. 35 Ibid. 33 34

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worms as means of grace. The sacraments as stories of people, animate and inanimate beings with their own cosmologies. Stories have been told from a specific space with all its predicaments, challenges, and troubles, who are gathered as an assembly of so many agents, humans and nonhumans, who live in that place, telling their story of God’s presence and life together. The result will be the irreducibility of God into a million stories that will expand the sacraments from each local world to all the worlds around the planet. For God so loved the world(s).

FURTHER READING Balasuriya, Tissa. The Eucharist and Human Liberation. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004. Carvalhaes, Cláudio. Rituals at World’s End: Essays on Eco-Liturgical Liberation Theology. York, PA: The Barber’s Son, 2021. Keller, Catherine. Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances. New York: Orbis Books, 2021. Perkinson, James W. Political Spirituality for a Century of Water Wars: The Angel of the Jordan Meets the Trickster of Detroit. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Westhelle, Vitor. Eschatology and Space, the Lost Dimension in Theology Past and Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Sacraments and Mission: The Unfolding Purpose of God for the World THOMAS H. SCHATTAUER

The sacraments and mission are often understood as inhabiting separate dimensions of Christian existence. The sacraments—principally baptism and eucharist—are signs of God’s grace enacted in the worshiping assembly. They make God’s presence visible and offer to those who receive them the gifts of God’s forgiveness, healing, love, and mercy. They also constitute the church as a community that lives in God’s presence and from these gifts. The sacraments are for the church inside. By contrast, mission is the activity of the church outside, in the world. This includes the evangelical mission of proclaiming the gospel and making disciples and also the social mission of addressing human needs, promoting just societies, and fostering harmony among peoples and peace among nations. Such a dichotomy between the sacraments celebrated and received inside the church and the church’s mission on the outside does not reflect the integral relation between the sacraments and mission—and similarly, church and world—that has developed in contemporary theology and missiology as well as liturgical understanding and practice. In conjunction with the rise of the liturgical, ecumenical, and mission movements in the twentieth century, new perspectives emerged that have brought about a renewed understanding of the sacraments in relation to mission and mission in relation to the sacraments. In what follows, my aim is to identify those new perspectives and to articulate that renewed understanding. We will take particular note of the turn to the world in liturgy, theology, and mission. With this turn, we will see that all people and the whole creation are understood as the object of God’s unfolding purpose disclosed in the sacraments and manifest in the church’s mission.

AN OPENING REFLECTION Let’s begin here: the fundamental connection between the sacraments and mission is the person of Jesus Christ and his proclamation and embodiment of the reign of God. The

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relationship between the sacraments and mission is to be found in Jesus Christ himself. Jesus Christ was (and remains) in his person the One sent from God to dwell among us to be the wellspring of life with God and with one another in the world God has made. Within the community of the church and in the power of the Spirit, the sacraments communicate the presence of Christ and the mission of God in and through him. Jesus Christ is the sacrament of God, the mystery of God’s presence and purpose made visible in the world (Col. 1:25-27; 2:2-3; 1 Tim. 3:16). As Martin Luther suggested with reference to scripture, there is a single mysterion or sacramentum,1 that is, Jesus Christ, who is the essence of the particular sacraments, principally baptism and eucharist. Jesus Christ, himself the Word made flesh, the incarnation of God, is the sacramental reality at the heart of the sacraments. Jesus Christ is also the mission of God (missio Dei), the One sent from God, who in turn sends his followers, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to further God’s purpose in the world (Jn 17:18; 20:21-22). Jesus proclaimed the reign of God come near and embodied it in his ministry. His death and resurrection signaled the unfolding of God’s worldencompassing, life-giving purpose for the whole world, to which the community of Jesus’ followers empowered by the Spirit would make witness. God’s sending of Jesus Christ and the sending of the Spirit are the source of the church’s own sending or mission in and for the world. In Jesus Christ, the sacraments of the church and the mission of the church have their source and their fundamental relation. The words of Leo the Great—“What was visible in Christ has passed over into the sacraments”—capture the Christological import of the sacraments. The sacraments disclose the presence of the crucified and risen One, sent by God to redeem and restore, to reconcile the world to God, and to bring God’s entire life-giving work of creation to completion. At the same time, the sacraments show forth and further the mission of God, God’s purpose in the sending of the Son. They embody Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God come near in him, now witnessed in the lives of those Christ gathers around him in the community of his followers, the church. In the power of the Spirit, the sacraments bear Christ’s living presence and his kingdom purpose to the community of his followers and into the world. The deepest realities signified and effected by the sacraments are these: Christ alive—among his people— for the life of the world. In the liturgical celebration of the sacraments, we witness all the dimensions of the fundamental connection between the sacraments and mission: the Christological center, the ecclesial context, and the cosmic ground with its eschatological trajectory. The starting point for considering the relation of sacraments and mission is the Spirit-generated mediation of God’s presence and purpose for the whole world in Jesus Christ within the community of the church. This is what the sacraments, principally baptism and eucharist, celebrated in the Christian assembly, disclose and make witness. When the whole world is understood as the horizon of sacraments, the missional impulse of the sacraments comes into focus, and the sacramental character of mission becomes clear.

Luther’s scriptural reference point is 1 Tim. 3:16, where the Latin Vulgate translates the mysterion that is Christ as sacramentum; Martin Luther, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), in The Annotated Luther, vol. 3: Church and Sacraments, ed. Paul W. Robinson (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016), 21. 1

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CHRISTIAN ORIGINS AND SACRAMENTAL MISSION The New Testament makes clear that the practices that come to be called sacraments are central to the mission of the church. As reported in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus sends his followers on a mission to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all I have commanded you” (Mt. 28:19-20). In the narratives of the Supper in Luke’s gospel and Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, Jesus commissions his followers to “Do this in remembrance of me” (Lk. 22:19; 1 Cor. 11:24): that is, in the context of a shared meal to give thanks over bread and cup of wine and receive them as his body and blood for them. Paul further interprets this eating and drinking as a proclamation and act of witness to the Lord Jesus: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26). In the book of Acts, preaching and teaching together with baptism and a fellowship in the breaking of bread characterize the mission of the apostles to Jew and Gentile, to the ends of the earth (Acts 2:38, 41-42). The witness of the New Testament writings to the origins of Christianity points especially to the table fellowship of the Lord’s Supper as central to Christian identity and mission. In its essence, the Christian movement is the ongoing table fellowship of Jesus with his disciples, with all who follow him. This table fellowship is their communion (koinonia) with Christ and with one another in his crucified and risen body. This table fellowship shows forth and anticipates the full extent of that communion in the reign of God (basileia tou theou). The table fellowship with Jesus the Christ and the community it forms bears witness to the unfolding purpose of God in and for the world, “that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:20-27; also Eph. 1:20-23 and Col. 3:1-11). The biblical scholar John Koenig has made a compelling case that the New Testament writings support the fundamental connection between the sacrament of the Lord’s table and mission.2 Koenig writes, “The first ritualizations of the supper function in a decisive way both to define and to fuel the emerging mission.”3 The church’s mission was in its origins (and remains) a “eucharistic mission”: We Christians have this meal. It is a meal from Jesus and about him, but above all with him in his mission as Messiah. Indeed, during the composition of the New Testament frequent celebrations of such meals with Jesus were considered basic to full participation by believers in God’s ongoing redemption of the world.4 Jesus’ table fellowship during his ministry, culminating in the last Supper on the eve of his death, was a practice that embodied his proclamation of the nearness of God’s reign. More than sustenance for the body or the formation of social relations, the meal in Jesus’ message and ministry referred partakers to the biblical image and expectation of a great banquet as the consummation of God’s purpose for all things. After his death on the cross, the appearances of the risen Lord to his followers at meals linked the experience of his presence to the meals they continued to share in common. When they gathered to eat and drink together, the expectation of the Lord’s return invested their meals with the promise of God’s reign. It was, in Koenig’s words, “the feast of the world’s redemption.” As such,

John Koenig, The Feast of the World’s Redemption: Eucharistic Origins and Christian Mission (Harrisburg: Trinity Press, 2000). 3 Ibid., 44. 4 Ibid., 215; emphasis added. 2

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for the earliest Christian communities, the Lord’s Supper—the eucharistic meal—shaped their identity and sustained their witness to and participation in God’s unfolding purpose for the world. The table fellowship with Jesus during his ministry and going forward after the resurrection and the consequent outpouring of the Holy Spirit contains the kernel of an emerging sacramental concept in the relationships established: (1) to the person of Jesus Christ, (2) within the community of the church, and (3) in the promise and realization of God’s reign, all in relation to the world as God’s creation (both cosmos and history). Just so, these are also the principal elements of the church’s mission from God, which at its root is a sacramental mission in relation to the unfolding purpose of God for the world— the missio Dei—to reconcile all things in Christ and to fashion a new creation and a new humanity (2 Cor. 2:16-21). The practice of baptism among the earliest Christian communities also witnesses to these same fundamental sacramental realities in relation to God’s purpose for the world. Baptism was understood and practiced in relation to God’s mission (1) in Jesus Christ, (2) through a community of disciples empowered by the Holy Spirit, (3) toward the eschatological fulfillment of God’s redeeming and restoring purpose for all things. Baptism brings people into relation with Jesus Christ. The Synoptic narratives of Jesus’ baptism by John set alongside the practice of baptism among Christian communities suggest that in that washing the baptized are identified with Christ himself, on whom the Spirit descends and the voice of God confirms, “You are my Son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased” (Mk 1:9-11; also Mt. 3:13-17 and Lk. 3:21-22). In the practice of baptism, those who follow Christ take the place of Christ, and in him become beloved sons and daughters of God, made new and empowered by the Spirit of God. The resonances in the accounts of Jesus’ baptism with the creation story in Genesis 1—the Spirit of God moving over the waters and the word of God that speaks creation into being—suggest that through baptism into Christ, God is fashioning a new creation, a new humanity. Paul’s teaching about baptism in Romans 6 clearly states this baptismal identification with Christ. In baptism we are united with Christ in his death and resurrection and so are “dead to sin and alive to God” (Rom. 6:3-11). Throughout the Pauline writings, “in Christ” designates the life that baptism initiates. Other biblical images and language associated with baptism also suggest the identification of the baptized with Jesus. The baptized are adopted as children of God, clothed with Christ, and gifted with the Holy Spirit. Baptism also initiates a person to life in the community of Jesus followers, the church. The New Testament scholar Krister Stendahl has argued that the point of departure for all the many characterizations of baptism in the New Testament is “the fact that baptism in the NT and in the early church is always an act of initiation.”5 However baptism is understood, it always marks the beginning of a life together with other followers of Jesus, including their regular meal fellowship (Acts 2:41-47). One of the principal characteristics of this new community was a unity transcending the accepted markers of human difference. As Paul writes, baptism creates a new community “where there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:27). Baptism creates a community of witnesses Krister Stendahl, “The Focal Point of the New Testament Baptismal Teachings,” in One Baptism for the Remission of Sins, ed. Paul C. Empie and William W. Baum, Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue, 2 (New York: U.S.A. National Committee, Lutheran World Federation, 1966), 24. 5

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to God’s mission in Jesus, including bridging the divides that separate people from one another. Finally, baptism is linked to Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God, especially evident in connection with the gift of the Holy Spirit. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit was understood to be a sign of the last days and the completion of God’s redemptive purpose (see Joel 2:28ff and Peter’s sermon at Pentecost, Acts 2:14-36,38-39). The distinctive character of baptism among Christians has to do with this outpouring of the Holy Spirit. As Aidan Kavanagh has argued, baptism in the earliest Christian communities is first and foremost a pneumatic event.6 In the Synoptic accounts of Jesus’ baptism, John proclaims that Jesus will baptize with the Holy Spirit, in contrast to John’s baptism with water (Mk 1:8; see also Mt. 3:11; Lk. 3:16). In Acts, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Jesus’ disciples gathered in Jerusalem at Pentecost results in the first baptisms, including the gift of the Spirit (Acts 2:1 ff., esp. 2:38); and the narrative of the expanding mission of the church—from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth—depicts a dynamic interaction between the gift of the Spirit and baptism with water. In the power of the Spirit, the apostolic mission established communities of the baptized to bear witness to Jesus and the fulfillment of God’s reign. Koenig’s apt characterization of the eucharistic meal and mission captures equally well the baptismal bath and mission. To paraphrase him, we might say, “We Christians have this bath. It is a bath from Jesus and about him, but above all with him in his mission as Messiah.” The witness of the New Testament to the origins of the sacramental mission of the church is the foundation upon which current understandings of the sacraments and mission are being constructed. That witness points, in the first place, to the personal and ecclesial dimensions of the sacraments that serve the unfolding purpose of God. In the power of the Spirit, baptism joins persons to Jesus Christ (and his gospel mission). Incorporated into his body, the baptized are bound together in the community of the church marked by its ongoing fellowship at the Lord’s table, which enacts and celebrates their communion in and with Christ. The New Testament witness also attests to the world-encompassing scope of the church’s sacramental mission in both its cosmic and eschatological dimensions. The material elements of the sacramental mission—baptismal water and oil for anointing, the bread and wine of the Supper—carry with them the cosmic implications of a new creation. The engagement of human bodies—gathered together, washed and fed, speaking, praising, praying, singing—furthers the cosmic implication in the promise of a new humanity. The New Testament writings also initiate an extensive discourse surrounding “body” involving Christ’s own incarnate, crucified, and risen body; the ecclesial body of Christ, the church; the eucharistic bread as body of Christ; and the bodies of the faithful, created by God and alive in the hope of resurrected bodies. Set alongside this scriptural discourse, the material and bodily practices of the sacramental mission enact a world redeemed, restored, and made anew. The eschatological dimension of the church’s sacramental mission emerges from Jesus’ proclamation of the reign of God. Integral to that proclamation are the prophetic actions of Jesus’ life and ministry that signal the reign of God: his own baptismal washing; acts of judgment, forgiveness, healing, and feeding; his table fellowship throughout and at the end; and ultimately his cross and resurrection. These prophetic sign-acts anticipate

Aidan Kavanagh, The Shape of Baptism: The Rite of Christian Initiation (New York: Pueblo, 1978), 16–34.

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the final judgment of the world and the redemption of all people, indeed all things in the mercy of God. They show the unfolding purpose of God in a reign of justice, freedom, and peace, just as they point ahead to its final consummation. Jesus’ proclamation of the reign of God together with his prophetic actions provide a foundational element of the church’s sacramental life and mission. In the power of the Holy Spirit, the community of disciples carries the proclamation of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth and embodies God’s reign in all the dimensions of its life. If the sacraments are, in Koenig’s words, “from Jesus and about him, but above all with him in his mission as Messiah,” they comprehend the world-encompassing scope of this mission in both its cosmic and eschatological dimensions.

A TURN TO THE WORLD Contemporary sacramental understanding and practice has carried forward the longstanding interest in the personal and ecclesial dimensions of the church’s sacramental mission, but its distinctive contribution lies in renewed attention to the world-encompassing dimension and with that a reframing of both the personal and ecclesial dimensions. From its inception, sacramental theology has explored the personal dimension of the sacraments (what those who participate in the sacraments receive) and more recently the communal or ecclesial dimension (the way that the sacraments constitute and manifest the church as a communion and social body). Current interest in the world-encompassing character of the sacraments is resonant with early Christian understandings and responsive to the pluralistic, post-Christian environment of contemporary Christianity. It has both cosmic and eschatological aspects. The cosmic refers to the world as a created order, as God’s creation. The sacraments disclose the grounding of God’s purpose in the created order, in physical elements of water, oil, bread, and wine, and in the bodies of the faithful who gather to pray and receive. The eschatological refers to the world in its social and historical end (telos), in God’s reign of justice, mercy, and peace. The sacraments disclose the consummation of God’s final purpose in the foretaste of the communion of persons with God and one another established in baptism and envisioned in the sharing of eucharistic bread and cup. In general terms, the sacraments are increasingly understood and practiced in relation to the ad extra mission of the church and not exclusively as matters of the church’s mission ad intra.7 The impact of liturgical theology upon sacramental understanding and practice has moved discussion of the sacraments and mission inside out. As I have previously written, “More than a place for individuals to encounter word and sacrament as institutions of grace, the church in its assembly around word and sacrament enacts a ritual symbol of God’s gracious purpose for the world and so participates in God’s worldencompassing mission.”8 The contemporary impetus to embrace the world-encompassing dimension of the church’s sacramental mission results from two developments: (1) the framing of the church’s mission in relation to God’s mission, the missio Dei, and (2) the orientation The distinction between the internal and the external mission of the church can be found in Stephen B. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder, Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), 394; more on this below. 8 Thomas H. Schattauer, “Liturgical Assembly as Locus of Mission,” in Worship in an Age of Mission, ed. Thomas H. Schattauer (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999), 13. 7

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of the sacraments to the world as the arena of the unfolding purpose of God brought about by a renewed appreciation of the sacraments within the symbolic environment of the liturgical assembly. The missio Dei refocuses the church’s mission on its witness to and participation in the larger purpose of God in and for the world. The symbolic environment of the liturgical assembly shows how the sacraments disclose an encompassing sacramental reality: Christ alive among his people for the life of the world. The unfolding of these insights regarding the missio Dei and sacraments celebrated for the life of the world shows the fundamental congruence between the sacraments and mission in God’s purpose for the fullness of life, for the communion of all people and all things in the divine life. The church bears a sacramental mission. The sacraments are missional, and the church’s mission is sacramental.

Missio Dei From the perspective of the missio Dei, mission originates in the very being and activity of the triune God. In the words of the missiologist David Bosch, “the classical doctrine of the missio Dei as God the Father sending the Son, and God the Father and the Son sending the Spirit was expanded to include yet another ‘movement’: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit sending the church into the world.”9 The fundamental insight of those who have forwarded the missio Dei in theological and missiological conversations since the middle of the twentieth century is this: mission is in the first place about who God is and what God is doing in and for the world to establish the reign of God; the church witnesses to God’s mission and participates in it. Bosch has characterized the shift in this way: In the new image mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God. “It is not the church that has a mission of salvation to fulfill in the world; it is the mission of the Son and the Spirit through the Father that includes the church” [Moltmann]. Mission is thereby seen as a movement from God to the world; the church is viewed as an instrument for that mission. There is church because there is mission, not vice versa. To participate in mission is to participate in the movement of God’s love toward people, since God is a fountain of sending love.10 Commentators point to the initial influence of Karl Barth for this reconceptualization of mission and to its wide embrace throughout the ecumenical movement, as is evident among conciliar Protestants, the Orthodox, many evangelicals, and Roman Catholics, guided by the teachings of the Second Vatican Council.11 This concept of mission establishes the priority of God’s activity, defines the whole world as the arena of this activity, views the eschatological purpose of God as its ultimate aim, and sees the church as an agent of this divine purpose. In contrast to individualistic and ecclesiocentric understandings of David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 390. For a brief but rich account of the Trinity and mission, see John F. Hoffmeyer, “The Missional Trinity,” Dialog, 40:2 (Summer 2001): 108–11. 10 Ibid., 390. 11 Ibid., 389–91; also Stephen B. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder, Constants in Context, 286–95. We should also note the influence of the British missiologist Leslie Newbigin and the impact of the Gospel and Culture Network in North America; see Darrell L. Guder, ed. Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998). Ruth A. Meyers provides an excellent and succinct account of developments in thinking about mission over the last century in Missional Worship, Worshipful Mission: Gathering as God’s People, Going Out in God’s Name (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 16–22. 9

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mission that prevailed in the missionary movements of the nineteenth century, the missio Dei represents a shift to a theocentric (trinitarian) and eschatological viewpoint. The Roman Catholic missiologists Stephen Bevans and Roger Schroeder suggest that the one mission of God shared by the church “has two directions—to the church itself (ad intra) and to the world (ad extra)”: Mission to the church itself is necessary so that the church can shine forth in the world for what it is, a community that shares the identity of Christ as his body. Mission to the world points to the fact that the church is only the church as it is called to continue Jesus’ mission of preaching, serving and witnessing God’s reign in new times and places.12 The sacraments—in particular baptism and eucharist—play a role in this mission in both directions. The ad intra role of the sacraments has long been clear in their Christological and ecclesiological significance. Baptism makes persons members of Christ’s body, the church, and constitutes their common life in Christ. The eucharist is regular nourishment for that identity. The ad extra role of the sacraments in furthering Jesus’ mission in service to the reign of God depends upon enlarging the horizon of the sacraments to include the whole world as the object of God’s purpose. This requires us to attend to the cosmic and eschatological significance of the sacraments as ritual symbols of God’s mission in Jesus Christ for the life of the world.

For the Life of the World “For the life of the world” is a phrase often repeated in liturgical theology to describe the ultimate purpose of liturgical assembly, and so too the sacraments at the heart of liturgical celebration. The influence of this phrase for the sacraments and mission comes most immediately from Orthodox liturgical theologian Alexander Schmemann’s book by that title.13 The phrase is found in the institution narrative of the eucharistic prayer in the Byzantine Liturgy of St. Basil: “For when he was about to go out to his voluntary and laudable and life-giving death, in the night in which he gave himself up for the life of the world, he took bread …;”14 and it originates in Jesus’ own words in the gospel of John: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of that bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (Jn 6:51). Rooted in scripture and sacramental celebration, the phrase crystallizes the central conviction of Schmemann’s work that the church’s sacramental life and mission exist for the sake of the world. Through its life in Christ and in the Spirit, the church is “the sacrament of the world, the sacrament of the Kingdom”;15 more precisely, it is the sacrament of the world in its becoming the kingdom of God. The world and its future are what the church’s leitourgia discloses and enacts, and so the sacraments in their particular ways. This is the wellspring of mission. Schmemann writes,

evans and Schroeder, Constants in Context, 394. B Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: The Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), first published in 1963. 14 R. C. D. Jasper and G. J. Cuming, eds. Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed, 4th ed., ed. Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press Academic, 2019), 177. 15 Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 8. 12 13

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It is our certitude that in the ascension of the Church in Christ, in the joy of the world to come, in the Church as the sacrament—the gift, the beginning, the presence, the promise, the reality, the anticipation—of the Kingdom, is the source and the beginning of all Christian mission. It is only as we return from the light and the joy of Christ’s presence that we recover the world as a meaningful field of our Christian action, that we see the true reality of the world and thus discover what we must do.16 For the Christian, all mission is “the sacrament of the world’s return to [Christ] who is the life of the world.”17 Schmemann grounds the conviction that the sacraments encompass the life of the world in the symbolic significance of the church’s sacramental life. He describes the liturgy as a ritual symbol of the world-encompassing scope of God’s purpose in Jesus Christ: The proper function of the “leitourgia” has always been to bring together, within one symbol, the three levels of the Christian faith and life; the Church, the world, and the Kingdom; … the Church herself is thus the sacrament in which the broken, yet still “symbolical,” life of “this world” is brought in Christ and by Christ, into the dimension of the Kingdom of God, becoming itself the sacrament of the world to come.18 From this perspective, the liturgy of the church with its sacraments is a symbolic arena that discloses the relationship between the three communal dimensions of Christian existence—church, world, and kingdom. In its worship life, the church sacramentally bears the life of this broken world “in Christ and by Christ” into the kingdom of God and the fullness of life available there. For Schmemann, the church in its sacramental life enacts and shows forth both the cosmic mystery of God’s presence to the world as God’s creation and the eschatological promise of God’s reign for the whole world in Jesus Christ.19 The relationship of church, world, and kingdom in the symbolic dynamic of the sacraments offers the framework for the activity of the church and individual Christians in the world. In this way, we see that the sacraments in their liturgical celebration and the mission of the church inhabit the same symbolic environment. The church’s sacraments and the church’s mission realize the promise of God’s reign, in symbol and in act.20 The world-encompassing dimension of the sacraments in their symbolic significance and connection to the church’s mission has become pervasive in contemporary theology— sacramental, liturgical, and ecclesial. While particular construals differ, the common elements remain: the sacraments refer us to the world and its future in God’s reign; the eschatological orientation of the sacraments involves regard for sacrament as ritual symbol; and the sacraments and mission are understood in their integral relation to God’s unfolding purpose. The Lutheran theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, for example, considers the fundamentally symbolic character of the church in direct relation to its eschatological

Ibid., 112–13. Ibid., 113. 18 Alexander Schmemann, “Sacrament and Symbol,” in For the Life of the Word, appendix 2, 151. 19 See Schmemann’s more extended presentation of these ideas surrounding sacrament and symbol in the chapter “The Sacrament of the Kingdom,” in The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, trans. Paul Kachur (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988), 27–48. “A sacrament is both cosmic and eschatological. It refers at the same time to God’s world as [God] first created it and to its fulfillment in the kingdom of God” (p. 34). 20 For a similar perspective from another Orthodox theologian, see Ion Bria, The Liturgy after the Liturgy: Mission and Witness from an Orthodox Perspective (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1996). 16 17

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orientation to the kingdom of God as the future of the whole world. Furthermore, the church’s liturgical and sacramental life and its mission both symbolically enact this same eschatological reality. Writing about the emergence of a new eucharistic piety and its world-encompassing dimension, Pannenberg emphasizes that the church is fundamentally a symbolic community: “The Christian community symbolizes another community, the community of all human beings in a society of perfect justice and peace, the global village, the kingdom of God.”21 The symbolic nature of the church accounts for the centrality of worship, where symbol and sacrament operate in their fullness. In regard to the Lord’s Supper in particular, Pannenberg shows how the communal, sacrificial, and eschatological dimensions of eucharistic symbolism bear the purpose of God for the communion of all things in Jesus Christ. In sum, “The symbolic performance of the eucharistic liturgy and communion anticipates the ultimate completion of the social destiny of all human life … The Eucharist manifests the mystery of the Church, the communion of believers united by the communion of each with Christ, and symbolizes the eschatological unity of all humanity.”22 The church as a community and all of its activities symbolize the reign of God. The sacraments and mission share the same eschatological orientation in different forms of symbolic representation. In their respective ways, they make present the purpose of God in Jesus Christ for the whole world. We see similar understandings of the world-encompassing dimensions of liturgy and the sacraments as the symbolic representation of the world’s eschatological future in the documents of Vatican II (1962–5) and the landmark ecumenical statement Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (1982). The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium [SC]), the first document promulgated by the Second Vatican Council, declared the church’s liturgy, centered in the sacraments, as “the summit toward which the activity of the church is directed; it is also the source from which all its power flows” (SC 10).23 It is, then, both source and summit of the church’s role in God’s mission. Liturgy, with its sacraments, forms and establishes the church and its members in their being in Christ (ad intra) and furthermore makes witness to the fullness of God’s purpose for the world (ad extra): For the liturgy … is supremely effective in enabling the faithful to express in their lives and portray to others the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true church … The liturgy daily builds up those who are in the church … to the mature measure of the fullness of Christ. At the same time it marvelously enhances their power to preach Christ and thus show the church to those who are outside as a sign lifted up among the nations, a sign under which the scattered children of God may be gathered together until there is one fold and one shepherd. (SC 2) The church’s sacramental life in its liturgical celebration enacts the dynamic relation of the church’s mission ad intra and its mission ad extra within the horizon of God’s eschatological purpose. Building on this liturgical foundation, the subsequent Dogmatic

Wolfhart Pannenberg, Christian Spirituality (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1983), 35–6. Pannenberg offers that he could just as well “speak of the sacramental nature of the church” based upon the definition of sacrament as an “efficacious sign or symbol (signum efficax).” He asserts “there is no difference in meaning here” (p. 38). 22 Ibid., 46. 23 The translation of Sacrosanctum Concilium used here is found in Vatican Council II: The Basic Sixteen Documents. Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations, rev. tr. in inclusive language, ed. Austin Flannery (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), 117–61. 21

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Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium [LG]) proclaimed the purpose of the church as fundamentally sacramental: “Christ is the light of the nations … The church, in Christ, is a sacrament—a sign and instrument, that is, of communion with God and of the unity of the entire human race” (LG 1).24 The church shows forth Christ as light for the whole world and discloses the communion in God’s life that ultimately unites all people. The eschatological orientation of this understanding of the sacraments, church, and mission comes to the fore in the reflections on the pilgrim church, which describes the church as directed to the “time for the renewal of all things” when the human race and the entire universe “will be perfectly established in Christ” (LG 48). This is the horizon of both the church’s sacraments and its mission. The ecumenical statement Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (BEM), produced by the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches with broad participation across traditions—Protestant, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic—also evidences the worldencompassing purpose of Christian worship and its eschatological orientation. The focus here is on the meaning and practice of the sacraments of baptism and eucharist as well as the structures of ministry that serve the church in its mission. The relation of these central practices of Christian faith and life to God’s purpose for the world and its well-being—to God’s mission and the church’s role in it—is one of the questions explored: As the churches grow into unity, they are asking how their understandings and practices of baptism, eucharist and ministry relate to their mission in and for the renewal of human community as they seek to promote justice, peace and reconciliation. Therefore our understanding of these cannot be divorced from the redemptive and liberating mission of Christ through the churches in the modern world. (“Preface”)25 The sacraments of baptism and eucharist relate to God’s mission by signifying and making present the eschatological purpose of God in Jesus Christ. Baptism is “sign of the Kingdom of God and of the life of the world to come … Baptism has a dynamic which embraces the whole of life, extends to all nations, and anticipates the day when every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father” (“Baptism,” 7). Eucharist is the “meal of the Kingdom”: “The eucharist opens up the vision of the divine rule which has been promised as the final renewal of creation, and is a foretaste of it. Signs of this renewal are present in the world wherever the grace of God is manifest and human beings work for justice, love and peace” (“Eucharist,” 22). The whole world and its well-being are the horizon of the sacraments, and the words of BEM speak eloquently to the world-encompassing character of each of the principal sacraments (“Baptism,” 7, 9–10; “Eucharist,” 20–26). Baptism makes witnesses to God’s liberating purpose in Jesus Christ for each and every one. The eucharist continually creates and nourishes this body of witnesses in communion with Jesus Christ. In receiving the gift of Christ’s self-giving presence at the eucharist, Christians, as a community and as individuals, are united with Christ in being directed toward the world and its well-being. The impact of the sacraments in the world is both actual in its effect on the actions of persons and communities and symbolic in its representation of the world in light of God’s

The translation of Lumen Gentium used here is found in Vatican Council II. The Basic Sixteen Documents, ed. Austin Flannery (Northport, NY: Costello 1996), 1–95. 25 The English text cited here can be found in Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, Faith and Order Paper, 111 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982) and in electronic form at https://www.oikoum​ene.org/resour​ces/ docume​nts/bapt​ism-euchar​ist-and-minis​try-faith-and-order-paper-no-111-the-lima-text. 24

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creating presence and promised future. In sum, the sacramental life of the church is a “participation in God’s mission to the world” (“Eucharist,” 25).26

THE CONTRIBUTION OF LITURGICAL THEOLOGY Following Schmemann and the ecumenical theological pathways we have noted here, work in liturgical theology has continued to reflect on liturgy and sacraments “for the life of the world.” The ritual and symbolic environment of the Christian assembly, locally gathered, is the context for interpreting the sacraments as practices constituting a communal body to make witness and to further, however imperfectly, God’s life-giving purpose in and for the world. Aidan Kavanagh calls it “church doing world.”27 He has expressed this understanding as a general “law” of Christian liturgy: The Sunday liturgy of Christians addresses itself primarily to the object of the assembly’s ministry, the world. The Sunday liturgy is not the church assembled to address itself. The liturgy … summons the assembly to enact itself publicly for the life of the world … The liturgy presumes that the world is always present in the summoned assembly, which although not of “this world” lives deep in its midst as the corporate agent, under God, in Christ of its salvation. In this view the liturgical assembly is the world being renovated according to the divine pleasure … What one witnesses in the liturgy is the world being done as the world’s Creator and Redeemer will the world to be done. The liturgy does the world and does it at its very center, for it is here that the world’s malaise and its cure well up together, inextricably intertwined.28 In this perspective, the Christian assembly in its liturgical life is a sacramental representation of the world in its relation to God’s unfolding purpose. The sacraments stand at the dynamic center of the church’s mission in and for the world. Gordon Lathrop has richly explored the relation of liturgy and world in his liturgical theology. He is deeply concerned to show how the liturgical assembly and its ritual symbols, most especially baptism and eucharist, function as world-orienting and worldmaking public symbols.29 They shape a liturgical cosmology “capable of holding and orienting us in the actual circumstances of the world” and also freeing us “from the unbroken power of our own actual worldviews.”30 In their renewed understanding and The words quoted here refer specifically to the eucharist. On the relation of baptism and eucharist in the sacramental economy, see n. 46. 27 Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology (New York: Pueblo, 1984), especially the chapter by this title, pp. 52–69. See also his account of Christian discourse as primarily sacramental and symbolic, pp. 41ff. 28 Aidan Kavanagh, Elements of Rite: A Handbook of Liturgical Style (New York: Pueblo, 1982), 45–6; italics in the original. 29 Lathrop’s thinking about liturgy and world—and thus sacraments and mission—is most fully developed in the third volume of his liturgical–theological trilogy: see Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2003). For his initial formulations, see the chapter “Liturgy and Society,” in Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), 204ff. See also Holy People: A Liturgical Ecclesiology (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), which interprets the liturgical assembly itself as public symbol providing orientation in the world and the practice of word and sacrament as patterns for the church’s engagement with culture; especially the chapters “Assembly, Baptism, and Culture,” 161ff., and “Assembly, Eucharist, and Culture,” 183ff. 30 Lathrop, Holy Ground, 12. 26

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practice, the sacraments locate us here in this world, in this place, among these people. At the same time, the sacraments liberate us from the limits of every particular construction of “world” and engage us with the well-being of all places and every people, especially the lost and the least.31 From the liturgical assembly, centered on word and sacrament—and so, gathered around the presence and purpose of God in Jesus Christ—Lathrop traces the “lines that run out into the world.”32 The liturgy offers no particular ethical or political program but “orientation in the world” with “points of reference and directions of significance”: That this is God’s world, not ours; that we are fellow creatures, along with many others; that the care for the earth and its careful use for our need are given to us all in common; that our creatureliness and our insertion in the community of creatures indicate limits on our existence; that none of the boundaries we draw between ourselves are ultimate; that all the boundaries must be judged before God. The cardinal directions in the Christian liturgy are these: toward God, toward each other in the assembly, toward the needy, toward the earth.33 These directions give shape to human action in the world in various forms of personal vocation and ecclesial mission. In Lathrop’s view, word and sacrament in the Christian assembly propose “cosmological sketches, in critically helpful dialogue with the many cosmologies by which we live. They do so simply by doing what they most basically do: hold us before God and bring us to faith in God.”34 The imagination that comes from such faith bears upon life in the world. Baptism bears upon politics: “It is an identification with the crucified Christ who identifies with all the peoples of the world, including especially the marginalized ones of forgotten and silenced sufferings. As such baptism is a constant criticism of politics.”35 Eucharist bears upon economic realities and justice: “Founded upon the astonishing presence of God within the limits of our flesh, it is a sharing of food within limits, enough for everyone and for sending into the streets to the absent and the hungry, blowing a hole in our usual patterns of supply and consumption … It is public order publicly and openly criticized.”36 And baptism and eucharist both bear upon our relation to the creation and care for the earth.37 For Lathrop, word and sacrament create faith and a waiting upon God, not in the first place an agenda for action or mission in the world. Such faith, however, does imagine a world—holy ground before the Holy One—and the faithful imagination funds life in the world through the various callings of individual Christians as well as through the church’s common mission in service of the well-being of this place and every place, this people and every people, this piece of the earth and the whole creation.38

On the “locative” and “liberative” functions of ritual and especially in relation to baptism, see Holy Ground, 99ff. and 104ff. 32 Ibid., 59. 33 Ibid., 63. 34 Ibid., 217. 35 Ibid., 17; see also pp. 115ff. 36 Ibid., 17; see also pp. 148ff. 37 Ibid., 126ff. 38 See Holy Things, 213–14. 31

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The sacramental turn to the world, which brings the sacraments to bear on the full scope of the church’s mission (ad extra as well as ad intra), is also evident in the ongoing teaching of church bodies in guiding the practice of congregations and their leaders. The 1997 teaching document on the practice of word and sacrament in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) is an example.39 The focus of the statement is the presence and purpose of the triune God in the means of grace—Word of God, baptism, and holy communion—within the Christian assembly, and the concluding section concerns the connection to mission: “By God’s gift, the Word and the sacraments are set in the midst of the world, for the life of the world” (application 51B). Elaborating on the teaching document’s claim that word and sacrament carry a missional intention, ten ELCA seminary professors of worship produced a collection of essays on worship and mission.40 From various perspectives, the authors share a common conviction: “The assembly for worship is intrinsically connected to the mission of God in Christ for the sake of the whole world (missio Dei), and consequently worship is integrally related to every form of the church’s mission of witness and service.”41 My own lead essay establishes the liturgical assembly in its relation to the missio Dei and argues for an “inside out” approach to the relation of worship and mission: “The liturgical assembly of God’s people in the midst of the world enacts and signifies the outward movement of God for the life of the world.”42 On that foundation, I describe the eucharistic, communal, prospective (eschatological), and symbolic dimensions of the church’s assembly around word and sacrament as these relate to God’s world-encompassing mission and suggest some concrete implications for the church’s mission in the contemporary North American cultural context.43

SACRAMENTS IN PROPHETIC DIALOGUE On these foundations, a body of writing from diverse perspectives and methods has emerged that addresses urgent matters in our world today with reference to the sacraments. These matters of the world are seen to bear upon our worship of God just as our liturgical–sacramental life bears the potential to shape our individual and communal responses. I offer some examples of the dialogue that is enriching the conversation about the sacraments and mission. The eucharist has been especially generative for reflection on matters of social and economic justice and resistance to oppression.44 The social ethicist William Cavanaugh, The published text can be found in Use of the Means of Grace: A Statement on the Practice of Word and Sacrament (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 1997); also available at https://downl​oad.elca.org/ ELCA%20R​esou​rce%20Rep​osit​ory/The_Us​e_Of​_The​_Mea​ns_O​f_Gr​ace.pdf. Another example is Sacraments and Social Mission: Living the Gospel, Being Disciples (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2013); also available at https://www.usccb.org/pra​yer-and-wors​hip/sac​rame​nts-and-sacra​ment​als/upl​oad/sac​rame​nts-and-soc​ ial-miss​ion-book.pdf. 40 Thomas H. Schattauer, ed., Inside Out: Worship in an Age of Mission (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1999). 41 Thomas H. Schattauer, “Preface,” in Inside Out, viii. 42 Thomas H. Schattauer, “Liturgical Assembly as Locus of Mission,” in Inside Out, 3. See the insightful comments and critique of my proposal by Bevans and Schroeder, Constants in Context, 362–6. 43 Ibid., 1–21. See also the concluding essay by Lathrop, “Liturgy and Mission in the North American Context,” Inside Out, 201–12. The intervening essays take up specific liturgical and sacramental topics in relation to God’s mission: proclamation, baptism, holy communion, liturgical year, liturgical space, music, ritual practice, occasional services. 44 It is important to note that baptism is implicated in whatever claims are made about the eucharistic faith and practice. In the sacramental economy, the eucharist is the culmination of baptism: those incorporated into the 39

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for example, argues that the eucharist embodies a social ethic. Its celebration constitutes the church as the body of Christ, in particular as a visible and distinctive social body that lives within and engages with the particular social and political structures of the modern, secular state. The church as a social body lives from an eschatological imagination that offers a counter-politics and an alternative economics. In Cavanagh’s analysis of the oppression of the Chilean state during the regime of Pinochet, the social body constituted in the eucharist provided a critical counterpoint to the practice of the state’s practice of torture and disappearance of persons.45 In his critique of capitalist market economics and its culture of consumption, Cavanaugh argues that the eucharist creates an alternative economic space marked by communion with others, self-giving, and abundance. In this social space, Christians imagine alternative ways of living that value local practices that concretely enact global good.46 For Cavanaugh, the eucharist in its liturgical celebration creates a social body and shapes a public space with “theopolitical imagination”47 for alternative ways of being in the world. Several recent works further the dialogue between eucharistic understanding and practice with contemporary social and political realities.48 Andrea Bieler and Luise Schottroff have explored how eucharistic celebration engenders a eucharistic life with impact here and now and eschatological imagination for what will be.49 In their view liturgical practices have the capacity to generate “a way of living in regard to food, body politics, economic exchange, and memory practices,” and imagination, by which “we envision, taste, and see what is not yet realized in our personal lives, our communities, or on the global scale.”50 Samuel Torvend’s contribution pushes beyond the personal and communal dimensions of eucharistic practice to what he calls its “worldly trajectory.”51 His argument becomes a plea that eucharistic feasting address the cries of the world’s hungry and poor, the afflicted and oppressed, and the well-being of the earth itself. Mary McGann maps the connections between the eucharist and the global food economy in order to show how sacramental eating relates to matters of social, economic, and ecological justice.52 McGann’s work focuses on reclaiming the symbols and actions of the eucharist as a meal and the capacity of the eucharistic meal to shape Christian life and action in a prophetic critique of the present food economy: “In the sharing of Jesus’ Body

body of Christ in baptism are brought to the table of his body (the eucharistic body and the ecclesial body) at the eucharist. As a repeatable practice, the eucharist is the regular renewal of the relationships to God, to others, and to the world established in baptism. 45 William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.) 46 William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008). 47 William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (London: T&T Clark, 2002). 48 In addition to the writing mentioned here, see the earlier works by Monika Hellwig, The Eucharist and the Hunger of the World, 2nd ed. (Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward, 1992; first published, 1976) and Tissa Balasuriya, The Eucharist and Human Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979). 49 Andrea Bieler and Luise Schottroff, The Eucharist: Bodies, Bread, and Resurrection (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007). 50 Ibid., 4. 51 Samuel Torvend, Still Hungry at the Feast: Eucharistic Justice in the Midst of Affliction (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2019); see esp. 1–16, 30–3. See also Torvend’s earlier work Luther and the Hungry Poor: Gathered Fragments (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2008), which shows the connection between Luther’s eucharistic understanding and his promotion of a shared economy in the practice of the common chest. 52 Mary McGann, The Meal That Reconnects: Eucharistic Eating and the Global Food Crisis (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2020).

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and Blood, those who partake are missioned to be healers of Earth and lovers of all her creatures.”53 In a number of the works already mentioned, we see that the materiality of eucharist— in the elements, the bodies gathered together, and the physical environment of the worshiping community—gives rise to reflection on connections to the creation and to care for its well-being. Benjamin Stewart contributes to this reflection in his survey of the earthly rootedness of baptism, holy communion, the seasons and days of worship, and the funeral.54 In his view, a deepened appreciation for the “ecological dimensions of baptism” can motivate attention to the sources of baptismal water and its generous use, inspire baptismal euchology that names local waters as it gives thanks for all water, and encourage congregational engagement to learn about and care for local watersheds.55 In a similar way the prayer of thanksgiving and communion in shared food at the eucharist should aim to involve those who pray and partake in witness and commitment to the sacrament’s “ecological or economic proposal.”56 Just as the matters of the earth bear upon sacramental understanding and practice, the materiality of the sacraments provides an orientation to the church’s responsibility and mission in the created order.57 In these examples, we see correlations of liturgy and life, liturgy and world, liturgy and mission that reflect the world-encompassing purpose of God. These correlations embrace the specific question of sacraments and mission. The sacraments embody God’s mission in Jesus Christ and create a community of witnesses to that mission. At the same time, the circumstances of life in the world and the movement of God’s Spirit in the world inform sacramental understanding and practice. In this way, the sacraments embody what missiologists Stephen Bevans and Roger Schroeder call “mission as prophetic dialogue.”58 Ruth Meyers discusses the correlation in terms of “missional worship, worshipful mission.” Her work offers a clear account of the biblical, historical, and theological background for this correlation as well as sound practical guidance for how it can shape the liturgical celebration of the eucharist.59 Taking her lead, we can speak of missional sacraments and a sacramental mission. The sacraments are missional. They are the heart of the church’s evangelical mission to proclaim God’s purpose for the world in Jesus Christ and to draw persons into a community of witnesses. The sacraments are also the generative source of the church’s social mission by constituting church as a social body acting in the world and signifying the world-encompassing communion that is God’s ultimate purpose. The mission is sacramental. In the first place, it is so because the church’s mission includes its sacramental life. But more broadly, the church’s mission is sacramental because its missional activity makes visible the life-giving purpose of God and offers signs of hope for the world’s future in the fullness of God’s reign. Sacramentality characterizes the church’s ritual life and its mission; both make God’s love and mercy for the world visible in human life and history. So, too “missionality” (or apostolicity)

Ibid., 202. Benjamin Stewart, A Watered Garden: Christian Worship and Earth’s Ecology (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2011). 55 Ibid., 37. See also Stewart’s essay “Flooding the Landscape: Luther’s Flood Prayer and Baptismal Theology,” Cross Accent 13:1 (2005): 4–14. 56 Ibid., 68. 57 See also a number of very generative essays in Teresa Berger, ed., Full of Your Glory: Liturgy, Cosmos, Creation (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2019). 58 Bevans and Schroeder, Constants in Context, 348ff. 59 Meyers, Missional Worship, Worshipful Mission, cited above n. 11. 53 54

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characterizes the church’s mission and ritual life; both encompass the whole world as the horizon of God’s sending purpose.

CONCLUSION From the middle of the twentieth century forward, developments in theological and liturgical understanding have brought the sacraments—together with their whole liturgical environment—into a constructive and dynamic relationship with mission. New interpretive lenses have helped us to see the fundamental connection between church’s sacramental life and its mission within God’s unfolding purpose. With a theological– Christological lens, we see the church’s sacraments and mission in light of God’s mission in and for the world in Jesus Christ. With a pneumatological–ecclesial lens, we view the church as the Spirit-filled, Spirit-led agent of God’s mission—not its end—and see the sacraments and mission as different but related means by which the church makes visible God’s unfolding purpose. With the cosmic–eschatological lens, we view the whole created order and all its people as the end of God’s life-giving purpose and see the sacraments and mission as witness to and participation in this purpose. In addition, developments in the understanding of ritual behavior have provided a lens for seeing the worldorienting, world-making, and world-critiquing character of Christian rituals, including the sacraments. With the ritual lens we see how the sacraments shape an imagination for Christian life in the world as persons in community, before God, in relation to the earth and all its people. Together, these interpretive lenses have brought into clear focus the generative source and common aim of the church’s sacramental life and its mission: God’s unfolding purpose for the life of the world.

FURTHER READING Bevans, Stephen B., and Roger P. Schroeder. Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004. Koenig, John. The Feast of the World’s Redemption: Eucharistic Origins and Christian Mission. Harrisburg: Trinity Press, 2000. Lathrop, Gordon W. Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2003. Meyers, Ruth. Missional Worship, Worshipful Mission: Gathering as God’s People, Going Out in God’s Name. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014. Schattauer, Thomas H., ed. Inside Out: Worship in an Age of Mission. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1999. Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World: The Sacraments and Orthodoxy. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002 (first published in 1963).

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CONTRIBUTORS

J. Neil Alexander is a bishop of The Episcopal Church having served as the ninth bishop of the Diocese of Atlanta. He is Dean Emeritus of the School of Theology of the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, United States, where he is also Professor of Liturgy, Emeritus, and Charles Todd Quintard Professor of Theology, Emeritus. Previously, he was the Trinity Church Professor of Liturgy and Preaching at The General Theological Seminary, New York City, and has held academic appointments at Wilfrid Laurier, Yale, Drew, and Emory universities. Holding degrees in both church music and liturgical studies, he has published in both fields as well as in pastoral and sacramental theology, homiletics, and ecclesiology. Dr. Glenn P. Ambrose is Chair of the Religious Studies Department at the University of the Incarnate Word where he has worked for the past twenty years. A graduate from the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL (BA, Religion, 1990), Weston Jesuit School of Theology, Boston, MA (MTS, 1992), and the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA (PhD, 2001), his research has been focused on Continental Philosophy of Religion, Religious Pluralism, Theologies of Liberation, and Sacramental Theology. Notable publications include the monograph The Theology of Louis-Marie Chauvet (2012), and articles “Great Faith Abounds” (New Theology Review, 2008), “Religious Diversity, Sacramental Encounters and the Spirit of God” (Horizons, 2010), and “Beyond Atheism and Theism” (New Theology Review, 2015). E. Byron (Ron) Anderson (PhD Emory University, MDiv Yale University Divinity School/ Yale Institute of Sacred Music) is Ernest and Bernice Styberg Professor of Worship and Associate Dean for Institutional and Educational Assessment at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, IL. He is a past-president of The Liturgical Conference and, at the time of publication, president of Societas Liturgica. He is the author of Common Worship: Tradition, Formation, Mission (2017). Timothy Brunk is Associate Professor of Theology at Villanova University. He has a doctorate in Religious Studies from Marquette University and recently completed a Certificate in Theology and Health Care at Duke Divinity School. In addition to questions of ecumenism, he is interested in pastoral/sacramental care of the sick, the relationship between worship and justice, and the problem of consumerism. The latter was the subject of his The Sacraments and Consumer Culture (2020), recognized by the Catholic Media Association as “best book” on the sacraments at their 2021 annual meeting. Cláudio Carvalhaes is Professor of Worship at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Originally from Brazil, Carvalhaes is the author of Inventory, Metamorphoses and Emergenc(i)es: How Do We Become Green People and Earth Communities (2022); Rituals at World’s End: Essays on Eco-Liturgical Liberation Theology (2021); Praying

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Contributors

with Every Heart—Orienting Our Lives to the Wholeness of the World (2021); Liturgies from Below: Prayers from People at the End of the World (2020); What’s Worship Got to Do with It? Interpreting Life Liturgically (2018); (editor) Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspectives—Only One Is Holy (2015); Eucharist and Globalization: Redrawing the Borders of Eucharistic Hospitality (2013). James W. Farwell is Professor of Theology and Liturgy at Virginia Theological Seminary and a priest of the Episcopal Church. He holds a PhD from Emory University and is studying Soto Zen at the Institute for Buddhist Studies in the Graduate Theological Union. His publications reflect his interests in liturgical and sacramental theology, soteriology and ascetical theology, theologies of religion, and the interface of ritual practice and interreligious engagement, particularly in reference to Christian, Zen, Advaita, and Sufi nondualist traditions. His monographs include This Is the Night on the liturgies of the paschal triduum (2004). Recent essays include “Salvation, the Life of Jesus, and the Eucharistic Prayer” (R. Pritchett, ed., 2016), “Taking the Liturgical Turn in Comparative Theology” (M. Moyaert, ed., 2019), “Barth’s Theology of Religion and Dōgen’s Nondualism” (M. Moore-Keish and C. Collins Winn, eds., 2019), and “The Assembly and Eucharist” (E. Scully, ed., 2021). In 2022 he edited the thematic issue of The Anglican Theological Review, “Revisiting Sacramental Theology in the Wake of Pandemic.” Julia Gatta is the Bishop Frank A. Juhan Professor of Pastoral Theology at the School of Theology, the University of the South, Sewanee. She is the author of The Pastoral Art of the English Mystics (1987); The Nearness of God: Parish Ministry as Spiritual Practice (2010); with Martin Smith, Go in Peace: The Art of Hearing Confessions (2012); and Life in Christ: Practicing Christian Spirituality (2018). Joris Geldhof (Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven, Belgium) is Professor of Liturgy and Sacramental Theology, chairs the Liturgical Institute at his university and is editor-in-chief of the bilingual journal Questions Liturgiques. In addition to many contributions to collective volumes and journal articles, he authored Liturgy and Secularism: Beyond the Divide (2018), Liturgical Theology as a Research Program (2020), and Monotheism in Christian Liturgy (forthcoming). Particular interests of his are the Eucharist, liturgical theology, spirituality, and the complex relations between contemporary cultures and the churches’ traditions of worship. He served as president of Societas Liturgica between 2017 and 2019. James T. Hadley is chaplain of Holy Cross Anglican Church, Palermo, Italy. Previously he was an adjunct faculty member at The Catholic University of America, Rome Campus, where he taught Liturgical Art and Architecture. He holds a PhD in Liturgical Studies from St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, and specialized in beni culturali ecclesiastici at the Gregorian University, the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology, and the Vatican Museums. James consults and designs for church renovations and art installations in the USA, UK, and Italy. He is a member of the Society for Liturgical Study, the Liturgy Association of Ireland, and Societas Liturgica. W. Scott Haldeman serves as Associate Professor of Worship at Chicago Theological Seminary. His first book, Towards Liturgies of Reconciliation: Race and Ritual among African-American and European-American Protestants (2007), analyzes the role of racism in the development of US Protestant worship. More recently, he has focused

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on the intersection of liturgical theologies, queer theories, and the lives and faiths of LGBTQIA+ folk. Examples of his work include “The Queer body in the wedding” in Stephen Burns and Bryan Cones, eds., Liturgy with a Difference: Beyond Inclusion in the Christian Assembly (2019); and “A Queer Fidelity: Reinventing Christian Marriage” in Theology and Sexuality (Spring, 2007). Previous work on the sacraments includes “Washed and Ready: Baptism as Call and Gift of Ministry” in Call to Worship (November, 2006). Dorothea Haspelmath-Finatti is an ecumenically engaged liturgical scholar and university lecturer at the Universities of Vienna, Austria, and Bern, Switzerland. She obtained her PhD from the University of Bonn in Germany and is engaged in a Habilitation project with the University of Zurich. She is a secretary of Societas Liturgica. Her publications include Theologia Prima: Liturgische Theologie für den evangelischen Gottesdienst (2014) and “Homo cantans. On the Logic of Liturgical Singing” in NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion (2019). Monsignor Kevin W. Irwin is a priest of the archdiocese of New York and research professor at the School of Theology and Religious Studies at The Catholic University of America, where he has served on faculty since 1985. Msgr. Irwin is the author of twentythree books on liturgy and sacraments, including Context and Text: Method in Liturgical Theology (1994, revised 2018), Models of the Eucharist (2005), 101 Questions and Answers on the Mass (1999, 2012), and Serving the Body of Christ, The Magisterium on Eucharist and Orders (2013, 2021). His books What We Have Done, What We Have Failed To Do: Assessing the Liturgical Reforms of Vatican II (2014) and Sacraments, Historical Perspectives and Liturgical Theology (2016) both received prizes from the Catholic Press Association. Laudato si, A Commentary. Background, Contributions, Implementation and Beyond (2016) received an award from the Association of Catholic Publishers in 2017. He wrote the introduction to the Paulist Press edition of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato si as well as Fratelli tutti. His most recent books are Pope Francis on the Liturgy: The Call to Holiness and Mission (2020), Liturgy and Sacraments in a COVID World (2021), and Ecology, Liturgy, Sacraments (2022). Donato Kivi is a Catholic priest of the Society of Mary (Marist Fathers). He has worked as a parish pastor, formation ministry in a rural training center and as a formator in their Marist formation house in Rome, Italy. He holds a PhD (Sacred Theology) from St. Thomas Aquinas Pontifical University and a Licentiate from the Gregorian University in Rome, Italy. Donato is currently the Formation Director at Marist College Suva and lectures at the Pacific Regional Seminary, Fiji. Rev. Canon Dr. Lizette Larson-Miller is affiliated with Huron University College in London, Ontario, Canada, and serves as the canon precentor of the Anglican Diocese of Huron. She has published widely in sacramental theology and liturgical history, including Sacramentality Renewed, and is currently writing essays on the early medieval liturgical year, Eucharist in the Middle Ages, the sacramentality of ecumenism, and contemporary theologies of anointing of the sick, in addition to a book on the intersection of ecclesial sacramental theology and cultural rituals. She is past president of Societas Liturgica and the International Anglican Liturgical Consultation, and currently serves as book editor in liturgical studies for ATR and on several editorial and professional boards.

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Contributors

Gordon W. Lathrop is the Schieren Professor of Liturgy Emeritus at the United Lutheran Seminary (USA). He has degrees from Occidental College (Los Angeles) and Luther Theological Seminary (St. Paul), a doctorate in New Testament studies from the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and honorary doctorates in theology from the University of Helsinki, the University of Iceland, the Virginia Theological Seminary, and Wartburg Theological Seminary. He is the author of several books, including Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (1993), The Four Gospels on Sunday: The New Testament and the Reform of Christian Worship (2012), Saving Images: The Presence of the Bible in Christian Liturgy (2017), and The Assembly: A Spirituality (2022). He is a past president of both Societas Liturgica and the North American Academy of Liturgy. Kimberly Bracken Long is a minister of Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and former Associate Professor of Worship at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. Her books include From This Day Forward: Rethinking the Christian Wedding, The Worshiping Body: The Art of Leading Worship, and The Eucharistic Theology of the American Holy Fairs. She also served as coeditor of the 2018 Book of Common Worship of the PC(USA), editor of the quarterly journal Call to Worship: Liturgy, Music, Preaching, and the Arts, editor of Feasting on the Word Worship Companion, Psalms editor for Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, and coeditor of Inclusive Marriage Services: A Wedding Sourcebook. Long holds a PhD in Liturgical Studies from Drew University, the MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary, and degrees in voice performance from the College of Wooster and the University of Maryland. Sebastian Madathummuriyil is an Associate Professor of Theology at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, United States. He received his MA and PhD from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. His monograph, Sacrament as Gift (2012), presents a postmodern understanding of the sacrament within a pneumatological and phenomenological framework. With a firm footing in both the Eastern and Western traditions, he has published several articles in top-tier journals, including Questions Liturgiques/Studies in Liturgy, Studia Liturgica, La Maison Dieu, and Indian Theological Studies. His current research projects include “A Hindu-Christian Understanding of Sacramentality,” “The Scope and Limit of God-Talk in Natural and Supernatural Theology,” and “Religion and Social Integration.” Ángel F. Méndez Montoya, PhD, is a full-time professor and researcher at the Department of Religious Studies and is a member of the faculty college in the graduate program of philosophy, graduate program of the arts, and the doctorate program on gender critical studies, at Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, Mexico. He is the author of The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist (2009). He is the main editor of the anthology Paradojas de lo liminal. Cine y Teología (2021), and coeditor of Pan, Hambre, y Trascendencia: Diálogo interdisciplinario sobre la construcción simbólica del comer (2009); Edward Schillebeeckx. Impulse für Theologien (2012); El arte y las provocaciones teológicas. Diálogos emergentes entre las artes, teorías estéticas, teología y estudios críticos de la religión (2020). Méndez-Montoya is currently director of the Research Project Teología, Hemenéutica y Práxis de la Experiencia Religiosa, at Universidad Iberoamericana. Ruth A. Meyers is Dean of Academic Affairs and Hodges-Haynes Professor of Liturgics, Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, California, United States; a member of the Core Doctoral Faculty, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley; and an assisting priest at All Souls Episcopal Parish, Berkeley. Her publications include Missional Worship, Worshipful

Contributors

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Mission: Gathering as God’s People, Going Out in God’s Name (2014); Continuing the Reformation: Re-Visioning Baptism in the Episcopal Church (1997); Praying Shapes Believing, revised and updated edition, with Leonel L. Mitchell (2016); Worship-Shaped Life: Liturgical Formation and the People of God, coedited with Paul Gibson (2010); and numerous articles and book reviews. She is a past president of North American Academy of Liturgy, an associate member of the Council of Associated Parishes for Liturgy and Mission, and a past member of the Steering Committee of the International Anglican Liturgical Consultation. Martha Moore-Keish is the J.B. Green Professor of Theology at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. After earning her PhD in theology from Emory University, she worked in the Presbyterian Church (USA) Office of Theology and Worship and taught liturgical studies at Yale Divinity School and Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Her publications include Do This in Remembrance of Me: A Ritual Approach to Reformed Eucharistic Theology (2008), Christian Prayer for Today (2009), the Brill research guide on Reformed Theology (2020), a theological commentary on the book of James (2019), and the coedited volume Karl Barth and Comparative Theology (2019). An ordained Presbyterian minister, she has served on ecumenical dialogues between Reformed and Roman Catholic churches, most recently as Reformed cochair of the international ecumenical dialogue between the World Communion of Reformed Churches (WCRC) and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. In addition to research on liturgical and sacramental theologies, she has long-standing interest in interreligious issues, particularly Christian–Jewish relations and the religions of India. Bruce T. Morrill holds the Edward A. Malloy Chair in Roman Catholic Studies at Vanderbilt University, where he is Professor of Theological Studies in the Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion. Titles of his books include Practical Sacramental Theology (2021), Encountering Christ in the Eucharist (2012), The Essential Writings of Bernard Cooke (2016), Divine Worship & Human Healing (2009), Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory (2000), plus five edited volumes. His current research and writing projects include a typology of liturgical remembering and a mystical–political theology of Easter. A Jesuit priest, he formerly was a professor of systematic theology at Boston College. His academic degrees include an MA in anthropology (Columbia University) and PhD in religion (Emory University). He has lectured widely and held visiting chairs and fellowships in North America, Europe, and Australia and is a past president of the North American Academy of Liturgy. Rev. Dr. Marcia W. Mount Shoop (MDiv Vanderbilt, PhD Emory) is an author, theologian, and pastor. She serves as pastor/head of staff at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church in Asheville, NC. She facilitates in ecclesial, academic, and community contexts around issues of race, gender, sexual violence, power, and embodiment. Marcia is the author of Let the Bones Dance: Embodiment and the Body of Christ (2010) and Touchdowns for Jesus: Lifting the Veil on Big-Time Sports (2014). She coauthored A Body Broken, A Body Betrayed: Race, Memory, and Eucharist in White Dominant Churches (2015) with Mary McClintock-Fulkerson. Thomas O’Loughlin is Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology in the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. His research has focused on Christian origins, its complex diversities, and on how the memory of those origins have been received by later generations

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Contributors

of Christians. His interest in liturgy began by noting how the issues that Western Christians have fought about so strenuously—as matters on which “the church stands or falls”— since the Reformation have such slender roots, if any at all, in the churches of the early centuries. This has led him, recently, to work on liturgical issues—mainly on whether Western Christians can create a post-Reformation Era common practice/theology of the Eucharist—and on how historical approaches can facilitate progress in ecumenical debates. He is the Director of Studia Traditionis Theologiae, designed to advance the practice of historical theology, and of the Brepols Library of Christian Sources. Peter C. Phan is the Ignacio Ellacuria Chair of Catholic Social Thought in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University. He has earned three doctorates and authored some thirty books and three hundred essays on various topics of theology. Carmel Pilcher is a Sister of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart. She has taught extensively in Dioceses in Australia and also Fiji, where she was recently lecturer in liturgy and sacraments at the Pacific Regional Seminary. She holds a PhD (the prophetic character of Eucharist) from Flinders University of South Australia, and an MA (RE) from the Catholic University of America. Carmel was coeditor of Vatican Council II Reforming Liturgy (2013) and has contributed to other publications including Worship and the Australian Journal of Liturgy. She has served on the Council of Societas Liturgica. At present Carmel is based in Sydney and is engaged in resourcing and supporting liturgical inculturation with the First Peoples of Australia and also Fiji. James F. Puglisi, SA, is a member of the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement and director of the Centro Pro Unione, a Ministry of the Friars. He is Professor of Ecumenism and Dialogue at the Ecumenical Institute “San Bernardino,” Venice, Italy; Professor Emeritus of Ecclesiology, Sacraments and Ecumenism, Pontifical Anselmian Athenaeum, Rome; and Professor and former Director of the Ecumenical Specialization, Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas—Angelicum, Rome. He holds a BA in Sociology and Philosophy and a license (STL) in Liturgical Studies, The Catholic University of America; Certificate in Ecumenical Studies, Boston University; PhD in Religious Anthropology and History, Paris IV-Sorbonne; and is Docteur en Théologie (STD), Institut catholique, Paris. He has been on numerous Commissions of the Dicastery for the Promotion of Christian Unity and of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches. He is founding member of the Societas Œcumenica and past president of the Societas Liturgica. Susan A. Ross (PhD, University of Chicago) is Emerita Professor of Theology at Loyola University Chicago, where she also served as director of the Women’s Studies Program, director of the Ann Ida Gannon Center for Women and Leadership, and chair of the Department of Theology. Prior to Loyola, she taught at St. Norbert College and Duquesne University. She is the author of three books: Extravagant Affections: A Feminist Sacramental Theology (1998), For the Beauty of the Earth (2006), and Anthropology: Seeking Light and Beauty (2012). She has also published numerous journal articles and book chapters. She is a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and a former editor of Concilium: International Theological Journal. Jyoti Sahi is a freelance painter and writer who has devoted his life to nurturing Indian Christian culture. He received the National Diploma of Design from Camberwell School

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of Art in London and an honorary Doctorate in Divinity from the senate of Serampore. Sahi has worked with various organizations including the National Biblical, Catechetical and Liturgical Centre (NBCLC) and United Theological College (UTC) in Bangalore, as well as Christian ashrams and the Asian Christian Art Association. In 1983 he founded an Art Ashram where he continues to live and work. His many publications both in India and abroad include The Child and the Serpent (1980), Stepping Stones: Reflections on the Theology of Indian Christian Culture (1986), and Holy Ground: A New Approach to Mission of the Church in India (1996). Thomas H. Schattauer is Professor of Liturgics and Dean of the Chapel Emeritus at Wartburg Theological Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa, and a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Prior to joining the Wartburg faculty, he taught at Yale Divinity School and Institute of Sacred Music. He holds degrees from St. Olaf College, Yale Divinity School, and the University of Notre Dame. Schattauer has authored numerous articles and essays in liturgical history and theology. His research and publications focus on the liturgical work of the nineteenth-century German Lutheran pastor Wilhelm Loehe and current matters of worship, culture, and mission in the North American context. He is the contributing editor of Inside Out: Worship in an Age of Mission (1999), a participant in the work that led to Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006), and a past president of the North American Academy of Liturgy. Frank C. Senn is a retired ELCA pastor and an affiliate professor at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. He is a past president of The Liturgical Conference and the North American Academy of Liturgy. He has a BA from Hartwick College, a MDiv from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, and a PhD from the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Senn is the author or editor of sixteen books and several hundred journal and encyclopedia articles. Among his works are Christian Liturgy: Evangelical and Catholic (1997), The People’s Work: A Social History of the Liturgy (2006), and Embodied Liturgy: Lessons in Christian Ritual (2016). Frank has been an avid yogi. Rebecca F. Spurrier is Associate Dean for Worship Life and Assistant Professor of Worship at Columbia Theological Seminary. She is interested in a theology and practice of public worship that reflects the beauty and tension human difference brings to Christian liturgy. Engaging ethnographic theology, disability studies, and liturgical aesthetics, her research explores the hope of interdependence and the importance of access for religious practice and Christian community. She is the author of The Disabled Church: Human Difference and the Art of Communal Worship (2019). She is currently leading a collaborative team of researchers and writers to develop a liturgical resource constructively informed by the wisdom of disability experience that responds to ableism in Christian worship. Rev. Dr. Benjamin M. Stewart is a pastor serving in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and a Professor of Worship at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. Ben holds degrees from Trinity Lutheran Seminary (MDiv), Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia (now United Lutheran Seminary, STM), and the Emory University Graduate Division of Religion (PhD). He is the author of A Watered Garden: Christian Worship and Earth’s Ecology and has written widely on ecotheological dimensions of funeral practices. Ben contributes to the Ecology and Liturgy Seminar of the North American Academy of Liturgy and lives in Duluth, Minnesota, United States.

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Contributors

Rev. Dr. Kristine Suna-Koro is Associate Professor and Assistant Chair of the Theology Department at Xavier University in Cincinnati, OH, United States. She is a diasporic Latvian-American theologian who works at the intersection of postcolonialism, sacramental and liturgical studies, and modern historical theology while engaging in migration and diaspora discourses. She has authored the trailblazing study in postcolonial sacramental theology In Counterpoint: Diaspora, Postcoloniality, and Sacramental Theology (2017) and numerous articles and book chapters engaging postcolonial perspectives on sacraments, liturgy, migration, and theological aesthetics. She currently serves as Co-Chair of the Religions, Borders and Immigration seminar at AAR. Since her ordination in 1995, she has served as a pastor in Latvian Evangelical Lutheran communities in Great Britain, Germany, and the United States. Philip E. Thompson, Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Heritage at Sioux Falls Seminary (South Dakota, United States), holds a PhD from Emory University. A minister in the American Baptist Churches in the United States, his scholarly interests lie at the intersection of memory, tradition, and history, particularly as this has shaped sacramental thought and practice among Baptists. His work has appeared in Pro Ecclesia, Baptist History and Heritage, American Baptist Quarterly, and Perspectives in Religious Studies. With the late Anthony R. Cross, he has edited three volumes of Baptist sacramental theology, and is currently working on two additional volumes as sole editor. He serves on the boards of the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion, The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, and The Karam Fellowship. Jaya Therese Vasupurathukaran, CHF, is a professor of theology at Dharmaram Vidya Kshetram, Bangalore, India. She received her PhD from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. Her specialization is on the sacrament of marriage, and a comparative study of the liturgy of marriage in the Roman, Syro-Malabar, and Syro-Malankara rites lies at the heart of her doctoral dissertation. At present she is also the executive director of Family Renewal Centre, Bangalore, which aims at the accompaniment of families for their integral development. Rev. Lisa M. Weaver, PhD, serves as Assistant Professor of Worship at Columbia Theological Seminary, in Decatur, Georgia. Outside of Columbia Theological Seminary, she also serves as a Vital Worship Grants board member for Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, serves on the executive committee of The Hymn Society, and works as a liturgical consultant. Dr. Weaver was the theological consultant on the hymnal One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism: An African American Ecumenical Hymnal and contributed three essays to the hymnal Singing Our Savior’s Story: A Congregational Song Supplement for the Christian Year, Hymn Texts since 1990. She is also a member of the North American Academy of Liturgy and the American Academy of Religion. Rev. Dr. Karen B. Westerfield Tucker is Professor of Worship at Boston University, a position held since 2004. From 1989 to 2004, she served on the faculty of the Duke University Divinity School, and prior to that as clergy in United Methodist pastoral contexts in Illinois. She is the author of American Methodist Worship and coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Christian Worship and has published essays on the topics of liturgical history and theology, sacraments, life-cycle rituals, congregational song, ecumenism, and Wesleyan/Methodist studies. A former president of the international and ecumenical Societas Liturgica, she was, from 2005 to 2013, the editor-in-chief of

Contributors

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the society’s journal Studia Liturgica. For fifteen years she served as a member of the International Commission for Dialogue between the World Methodist Council and the Roman Catholic Church, twelve of those years as co-secretary. Andrew Wymer is Assistant Professor of Liturgical Studies at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, where he earned his PhD in liturgical studies and homiletics. Before returning to Garrett as faculty, he served as Assistant Professor of Preaching and Worship, Director of Mast Chapel, and Assistant Dean at New Brunswick Theological Seminary in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Wymer is ordained in the Rochester/Genesee Region of the American Baptist Churches USA, and his research engages liturgical and homiletical theory and practice with attention to race, power, and justice. Publications include contributions to The International Journal of Homiletics, Liturgy, Practical Matters, Worship and The Yale ISM Review and two coedited volumes, Unmasking White Preaching: Racial Hegemony, Resistance, and Possibilities in Homiletics and Worship and Power: Liturgical Authority in Free Church Traditions. Wymer serves as the vice president of The Liturgical Conference. Joyce Ann Zimmerman, CPPS, PhD, STD, is the director of the Institute for Liturgical Ministry in Dayton, Ohio, United States; an adjunct professor of liturgy; a liturgical consultant; frequent speaker and facilitator of workshops on liturgy, spirituality, and other related topics; and an award-winning author of numerous books and articles on liturgy and spirituality. She is the recipient of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy 2008 Michael Mathis Award; the 2010 Georgetown Center for Liturgy National Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Liturgical Life of the American Church; the Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions’ 2015 Frederick R. McManus Award for her outstanding contributions to liturgical scholarship and ministerial formation; the 2020 North American Academy of Liturgy Berakah Award; and the 2022 Jubilate Deo award given by the National Association of Pastoral Musicians. Her most recent publication is Living a Liturgical Spirituality: Journeying Daily with Christ (2022).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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565

TOPICAL INDEX

absolution 32–5, 207, 209–15, 217 adoration 390, 481 Advent 53, 76, 79, 98, 218 Anabaptists 145–6 anamnesis 303, 313, 430 anatheism 417–19, 428–9, 432 animal world, 258, 313, 323, 444, 502–8, 514–18, 520, 525–9 anointing 14, 70, 106, 384, 396, 476–7 in baptism 15–32, 159–73, 179–82, 456 of the sick 5, 23, 34, 52, 225–34, 293–305, 311, 317–18, 514–36 anthropological studies 113–17, 122, 157–8, 297–8, 300–5, 323–4, 424, 448–53, 486 anti-essentialism 394–7 Aparecida Concluding Document 493–5 apostolicity 337–41, 454, 547 Arcavatara 415 art (visual) 20, 48, 95–102, 113, 324, 355, 417, 504 assembly 20–9, 305, 409, 448, 475–88, 525–33, 537–45 and baptism 160–8 and the book 37 and burial 320–7 and eucharist 172 and liturgy 70 and marriage 271, 275–6, 284, 290 and procession and service 33 and transformation 57 baptism in the bible 24–37, 95, 535–9 and creation 511–14, 519–25, 528–30 and death 317–19, 528–30 and disability 438–9

and ecumenism 183–6, 231, 337–8 and footwashing 308, 314 and gender 383–7 and incarnation 476–9 and marriage 266, 274–5 in migration 456–7, and mission 176–9, 383, 535–9, 542–7 and queer theory 401–3 and race 189–203 rite of 15–21, 40–51, 70–7, 132–3, 142–51, 157–74, 175–87, 205–6 and the rite of reconciliation 207–14 Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry 166, 201, 541–3 baptismal solidarity 188–9, 200–4 benediction 37, 137, 481 Bhagavad-Gita 414 body and music 112–24 as sacrament 104–8 bodily practice 9–21, 536 senses 255, 295 Brahman 411–19 Caritas in Veritate 493 catechism Anglican/Episcopal 50, 170 Lutheran 210–11 Particular Baptist 144 Roman Catholic 53, 175, 225–6, 285, 317, 377, 424 catechumenate 19, 158–80, 203, 207–8, 482 Centesimus Annus 492 chant 12, 120–2 Christian ethics 35, 49, 56, 364, 370, 393, 430 Christmas 73, 78–9, 98, 210

566

Christocentrism 27, 432–4 Church institution of 60, 241, 251, 260, 335–6, 346–7 as migrant 454–5 climate 96 change 317, 421, 497–8, 502, 526 justice 327, 370–4, 490, 546 collective access 445–6 comparative theology 407–19 confession rite of 172, 205–18, 246, 294, 318, 383–4 confessional theology 422–32 confirmation 32–3, 160–3, 169–74, 402, 456 Covid-19 21, 234, 238, 246–7, 250–1, 423, 436, 525–60 denaturalization 394–6 destabilization 394–7 death 11, 76, 98, 120–1, 223–8, 234, 251–3, 376, 456–62, 520, 525 and Jesus, 23–8, 36, 48–9, 74, 134, 166–7, 175–85, 205–6, 247, 256–61, 508 and sacraments, 52, 104, 150, 158–9, 214, 294–305, 317–28, 417, 424–30, 528–30 desire God’s 2, 46, 199, 258, 301, 441, 474, 519 eucharistic 227–30, 250, 254–60, 393, 436, 446, 481 for healing 304, 444 disability 250–1, 436–50, 483 discernment 216, 231, 331–7, 362, 373, 425, 431–3, 444–5, 516 divine logos 83–5, 510 divorce 240, 245, 265–77, 383, 400 doctrine 57, 185, 231, 405, 413, 424–5, 480 atonement 143 creation 410–1 discovery 190–2 ex opera operato 383 incarnation 83, 142 marriage 267 missio Dei 540

Topical Index

preaching 130–1 trinitarian 433 Easter Vigil 20, 58, 159–64, 171, 176 Ecclesia de Eucharistia 228 ecclesiology 23, 49–54, 110, 145–51, 331, 335–7, 380, 398, 451, 495 ecology 49, 100, 325, 489–501, 502–17 ecosacrament 317–25 ecumenism 183, 372, 423 entanglement 471–7 eschatology 77–93, 147–8, 337, 495, 519 Eucharist 21, 24–37, 40–4, 59, 138, 250–61, 294, 387, 390, 447–9, 494–6, 499 and conflict 437 and creation 519–31 and ecumenism 221–35, 330, 337, 339 and hospitality 172–3, 403–5, 515–17 institution of 95, 309–13, 390–2 liturgy of 107, 162–3, 172, 308, 318, 325, 418–19, 510–14, 533 and marriage 267–89 in migration 441, 455, 457–62 and mission 534–48 and ontology 61–3, 172–3, 468, 476 and pandemic 478–88 and racism 236–48, 250, 449 and radical theology 429–31 and space 87, 91 and time 75 Evangelium Vitae 492, 497 footwashing 28, 36, 42, 79, 181, 307–16, 319 forgiveness 71, 515, 524, 532, 536 and baptism 41, 74, 167, 170, 175–8, 529 in bible 26, 28, 30, 205 and death 318, and eucharist 75 and marriage 275–7 and reconciliation 33–4, 205–18, 294–304 full communion 173, 225–7, 228 gender 18, 104, 250–61, 272–3, 362–6, 377–91, 392–406, 449

Topical Index

healing 23–4, 33–4, 52, 90, 104, 108, 144, 277, 405, 532 and anointing 293–306, 318 in Bible 36, 181, 206–8, 215, 228 of creation 455, 506–30 from music 113, 121–4 healthcare 253, 297–300, 439, 458, 524 Hinduism 110, 288, 411–16, 419 hospitality 110, 253–7, 355, 459–61 interconfessional 329, 431–3 imagination 77–9, 96–7, 101–10, 117, 258, 354, 407, 448, 544, 546–8 sacramental 144, 359–60, 358–76, 428, 444, 520 immanence 147, 256–7, 352, 336, 407–20 incarnation 47, 61–2, 84, 338, 369, 409, 427, 433, 533 as avataras 414 and Christmas 79 and creation 148, 507 and disability 439, 444 and gender 377, 386, 399 and science 469, 473–5, 476–7 and space 84–94 and technology 485 indigenous peoples 18, 98, 104, 151, 194–8, 202, 245, 254–60, 363–6 and creation 502–17, 518, 523, 526–7, 529 and death 322 individualism 50, 147, 244, 354, 374, 494 integral ecology 489–501 intercession 53 liturgical 56, 163–4, 277, 304, 479 priestly 217 Judaism 47, 72–3, 128, 356, 408, 422, 433, 453 rites of 25–7, 74, 369 Laborem Excercens 492 language 37, 54, 57, 62–4, 87, 140–1, 147, 270, 362, 368, 418, 521 body 106–7 and ecumenism 311 inclusive 186, 272–3, 387

567

and music 117–23 and preaching 137–9 vernacular 282, 380, 431, 457 Laudato Si 489–501, 510 Lent 19, 76–7, 160, 162–3, 209, 218 liberation theology 49, 188, 202 liturgical movement 9, 39, 54, 60, 148, 297, 375, 389, 479–81 liturgical theology 45–64, 89, 113, 318, 348, 351–3, 358, 385, 398, 511, 537–9, 543 livestream worship 478–88 Lumen Gentium 182, 223, 234, 283, 542 marriage 74–5, 87, 104, 279, 310, 476 and anthropology 157 in bible 26, 28, 34–5, 400 and death 317 and gender 378, 380, 382–4, 395, 400 history of 265–71 interconfessional 222, 227–33 liturgy 265–78 and racism 194 meditation 12, 114, 120–1, 316 migration 451–63, 506, 530 mission activity 150, 161, 164, 191, 286–7, 369, 454, 505, 517, 520 in bible 24, 34, 293, 296, 424 of church 5, 110, 150, 243, 276, 320, 330, 332, 422, 428, 434, 485, 493–4, 532–48 missio Dei 4, 161–5, 315, 487, 538–9 music 55, 83, 112–25, 238, 244, 378, 388, 478 mutuality 203, 246, 255, 270–1, 404, 414–15, 448, 529–31 mystery of eucharist 11, 483, 541 of God 9–10, 24, 37–40, 366, 405, 413, 418, 424, 427–8, 511, 533 of marriage 35, 286–90 paschal 134, 183, 213–14, 477, 494 of sacraments 11, 35, 42, 57, 109–10, 133, 226–7, 240–2, 244, 418–19 natural world 13, 81, 83, 96, 395, 407, 464, 509–10, 524–5

568

neuroscience 113 Nouvelle Theologie 60–2 ontology 61–2, 91, 255, 358–76 orders 21, 329–41, 381–91 ordination 33, 75, 87, 271, 329–41, 379–89, 479, 510 Ordo Celebrandi Matrimonium 281–2, 284 Ordo Unctionis infirmorum eorumque pastoralis curae 302 pan-sacramentalism 84, 368 pandemic 234–5, 238–9, 246–7, 394, 423, 436, 478–88 panentheism 413–14 pantheism 407, 413–14 paradigms 465–9 penance 9–14, 32, 43, 207–10, 212–18, 295, 302, 383, 515 pilgrimage 17, 75, 108–10, 390 pluralism 421–35 popular religiosity 53, 407, 412, 494 Populorum Progressio 491 post-Christian 53, 141, 345–57, 417, 537 postcolonialism 201–3, 358–76 postmodern 304, 346, 365–6, 386, 417–19, 423, 425 poverty 252, 305, 495, 518, 521–3 and migration 455, 462 preaching 126–39, 149 and reconciliation 216, 218 by women 385, 388 quantum theory 84, 86, 466, 470–7 queer theology 49, 250–61, 445 queer theory 392–406 race 18, 361, 363, 376, 394, 397, 453, 518 and pandemic 252, 259 radical Theology 425–33 Redemptor Hominis 423, 492 religions 11, 18, 110, 203, 229, 259, 419, 421 and comparative theology 408, 410–11, 417, 419 and crisis 350 and historical reconstruction 308

Topical Index

and music 115, 120 and postcolonial context 366, 373 and rituals 157 and sacramentality 47, 422–3, 427–8, 431–3 repentance baptism of 25, 95, 205 and confession 212, 214–15 and holiness 371 in liturgy 208, 217, 243 season of 73, 76–7 Rerum Novarum 490, 492 restorative justice 215, 449, 524 ritual and baptism 157–87, 186, 188–204, 308, 456 in bible 24–7, 32–7, 303, 424 and disability 436–9 and embodied practice 9–22, 105–7, 111–25, 251, 442–4, 501, 514, 541 and the footwashing 307–16 and the funeral 317–28 and space 82, 90, 519 studies 49, 55–6, 78, 145 and technology 478–83 and women 377–91 Sabbath 29–30, 43, 73–4, 498 sacramental density 347, 355–6 Sacrosanctum Concilium 135, 234, 293, 297, 541 salvation and baptism 157, 167–9, 176, 178 and bible 23, 30, 88, 207, 327, 331 and creation 92–3, 140, 368, 373–5, 499 and ecumenism 182, 333, 339, 493 in early Christianity 40–2, 56, 132, 181 history 100, 115, 176, 289, 352–3, 408, 460, 517 and liturgy 125 and mission 538, 543 and pluralism 427–8, 433–4 and sacraments 47, 87–8, 97, 134, 293–6, 346, 468 science 297–8, 421, 464–77, 526–7 and embodiment 10–22, 101 and faith 498

569

Topical Index

in history 83 and music 112–24 and ritual 55 Second Vatican Council 4, 135, 380, 385, 423 and ecumenism 180, 222, 384, 389, 538 and Judaism 422 and liturgy 213, 293, 335, 410, 541 and marriage 265, 271, 279–92 and rites of initiation 161–5 secularization 345–9, 374 segregation 190, 194–202, 365 sermon(s) in liturgy 118, 239, 246 and preaching 126–39 signs of apostolic succession 340 ashes as 14 of baptism 16, 20, 175–87 in bible 29–37, 92, 176, 253, 265, 426, 433, 451–2 counter- 145–51 creation as 255, 321 and entanglement 476 gestures as 106–8 and marriage 273–6, 285 and mission 485, 536, 541–8 sacraments as 40, 42–64, 70–1, 242–4, 259–60, 377, 469, 517 and space 91–3, 259, 520, 525 of unity 221–33, 455–7 Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 492 space 16–17, 46–7, 81–94, 95–111, 199, 400, 519–20 and disability 436–50 and entanglement 473–8

private and public 259, 546 spiritual communion 229–30, 481 Sublimus Dei 191–2 Syro-Malabar Church 279–92 technology 12, 251, 299, 442, 478–88, 496–7 time 46–7, 69–80, 84–93, 96, 102–4, 214, 346, 351, 499, 508–9 and entanglement 473–8 eschatological 179, 256, 542 and memory 196, 430 and music 116 signs of the 451–2 transcendence 90, 109–15, 256, 346 and comparative theology 407–20 and ecology 495 and embodiment 447 and eschatology and music 122–5 and post-Christian context 346, 352, 356 trauma 236–46 Trinity 83, 255–6, 398, 433, 505 and baptism 41–2, 181 and migration 455, 458–62 unction 234, 293–306, 379 Unitatis Redintegratio 183, 221, 223, 234 Ut unum Sint 227 virtual communion 483–7 visible words 43, 71, 75, white supremacy 194–201, 236–49, 258, 518, 523

570

NAME INDEX

Abelard 208 Abrams, David 15 Alcuin of York 208 Alexander, Kimberly 144 Althaus-Reid, Marcella 397 Ambrose of Milan 41–3, 51, 59, 217 and baptismal preparation 158 and Mystagogy 181 and the Word 133 Anselm of Canterbury 48 Antonio, David William 281 Appleton, Jesse 91 Aquinas, Thomas 59, 130, 208, 267–8, 378, 468 Aristotle 409, 466–8 Aström, Rickard 118, 120 Athanasius 84–5 Augustine of Hippo 21, 129, 132–3, 167, 468 and baptism 19, 26, 165 and defining a sacrament 1, 9, 23, 43–4, 58 and footwashing 308, 312 and marriage 266–8, 270, 284 and ordination 338 and preaching 136 Bachelard, Gaston 89, 90, 96–7, 101 Bacon, Francis 469 Balasuriya, Tissa 523 Bantum, Brian 197–8 Barth, Karl 169, 378, 538 Bartholomew (Patriarch) 503 Bartolome de Las Casas 191 Barton, Sarah Jean 438 Basavanna 101 Basil the Great 84, 522 Baucom, Ian 196, 200 Bea, Augustine 223–4

Beasley, Nicholas 194–5 Becon, Thomas 270 Bede the Venerable 208 Beer, Wynard de 83 Bellarmine, Robert 223 Belser, Julia Watts 443 Benedict XVI (Pope) 493–4, 516 Berengar 468 Berger, Peter 145 Berger, Teresa 45, 369, 383, 389 Betcher, Sharon 443, 447 Bevans, Stephen 539, 547 Biddy, Walter Scott 144 Bieler, Andrea 437, 546 Bland, Sandra 197 Boersma, Hans 62, 127 Bonaccorso, Giorgio 113–14, 122, 124 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 214, 432 Bosch, David 538 Brandt, Anthony 117 Brewer, Brian C. 143 Bridges, Flora Wilson 188 Brown, Peter 19 Brown, Raymond 36–7, 473 Bryant, Sherwin 194 Bucer, Martin 209, 211, 268 Buddha 104, 110 Bullinger, Heinrich 270 Burns, Stephen 202 Calvin, John 210, 240–3, 245, 468–9, 474, 524 and healing 295 and marriage 269–70 and sacraments 377, 387, 403 Campbell, Alexander 143–4 Campbell, Thomas 143 Cannon, Katie Geneva 138 Caputo, John 425–33

571

name Index

Cardosa, Nancy 521 Carson, Rachel 530 Carvalhaes, Claudio 197–9, 203, 438 Casaldáliga, Pedro 260–1 Casel, Odo 353 Castille, Philando 197 Cavanaugh, William 545–6 Cézanne, Paul 103 Chauvet, Louis-Marie 49, 63, 87, 353, 356, 429–30, 530 Chryssavgis, John 368, 503–4, 507–11, 516 Chupungco, Anscar 282 Clark, Kenneth 109 Clement of Rome, 128 Codina, Victor 188, 202 Cone, James 236, 248, 327 Constantine 41, 179, 454 Copeland, M. Shawn 326–7, 448–9 Corbin, Henri 102 Cowley, Malcolm 193 Coyle, J. Kevin 134 Cranmer, Thomas 268, 270 Crockett, William 469 Cross, Anthony 146 Cyprian of Carthage 40–1, 43 Cyril of Jerusalem 16, 41–2, 132, 138, 180–1 Dahill, Lisa 325, 371 Dalton, Andrea M. 142–3 Daly, Mary 398 D’Aquil, Eugene 11, 114 Delio, Ilia 373 Denisoff, Dennis 396 Depoortere, Kristian 51 Derrida, Jacques 429 Descartes, Rene 14, 85 DeVries, Diane 442 Dickinson, Emily 447 Dorgan, Howard 150 Dix, Gregory 55, 170 D’Sa, Francis X. 372 Duck, Ruth 438 Dupuis, Jacques 423, 428, 433 Eck, Diane 108 Edwards, Denis 502, 505, 508

Eiesland, Nancy 437, 442–3, 446–7, 449 Ekström, Seth-Reino 118, 120 Eliade, Mircea 14, 18 Ellis, Christopher J. 141 Engwall, Mathias 118, 120 Escobar, Arturo 365–9 Eugene IV (Pope) 190 Fanon, Franz 363 Farrow, Douglas 469 Floyd, George 197, 252, 259 Foucault, Michel 17, 93 Francis I (Pope) 231–3, 382–3, 489–503, 516 Fugali, Edoardo 88 Ganesha 104 Gannep, Arnold van 18 Garrigan, Siobahn 448 Gauchet, Marcel 353 Gebrian, Molly 117 Goetz, Rebecca Anne 192–3 Gonçalvez Filho, José Moura 523 Gorringe, Timothy 92 Grappone, Antonio 132 Grasso, Dominic 136–8 Green, Brian 85 Green, Chris 144 Gregory the Great 215 Gribomont, Jean 128 Grimes, Katie 195 Grosseteste, Robert 83 Grundy, Christopher 399–400 Grüter, Verena 113, 115–16 Gudorf, Christine 388 Gustafson, Hans 368, 373 Halapua, Winston 506 Harink, Douglas 149 Harraway, Donna 443 Heaney, Robert 359, 371 Hegel, G. F. 355 Heidegger, Martin 81–2, 87–91, 349, 351–2, 429 Hildegard of Bingen 379 Hooker, Richard 62 Horan, Daniel 373 Hovda, Robert 405

572

Hugh of St. Victor 31, 89 Hughes, Graham 477 Husserl, Edmund 15, 81, 88 Hutcheson, Linda 396 Ignatius of Antioch 317 Inge, John 81, 84 Irenaeus of Lyon 40, 43 Irwin, Kevin 367, 511 Isidore of Pelusium 378

name Index

Kopenawa, Davi 526–7 Krenak, Ailton 527 Krishna 414 Kuhn, Thomas 465 Küng, Hans 465

Jackson, Mark 364 Jagessar, Michael 202 Jennings, Willie 189, 199–201 Jerome, 129–30 John XXIII (Pope) 495 John Chrysostom 41, 158, 504, 522 John Paul II (Pope) 215–16, 227–8, 379, 381, 423, 491–2, 497 and the environment 489–90, 495 John the Faster 209 Johnson, Mark 10, 20 Jones, Kenneth 243–4, 246 Jörnstein, Rebecka 118, 120 Joshua ben Karhah 95 Julio de Santa Ana 522 Justin Martyr 83, 135

Lakoff, George 20 Lampe, Geoffrey 170 Lane, Thomas 507 Lasch, Christopher 50 Lathrop, Gordon 484, 543–4 Latour, Bruno 527 Laughlin, Charles D 11 Lavretsky, Helen 120 Lé, Daniel 20 Leech, Kenneth 214 Leo the Great, 1, 46, 130 Leo XIII (Pope) 285, 490, 492 Lonergan, Bernard 497 Long, Thomas 320 Lugones, Maria 370 Luther, Martin 333, 427, 531 and baptism 25 and confession 210–11 on the eucharist 14 and marriage 268–70 Lynch, Thomas 320

Kabir 103–4 Kafer, Alison 440–1, 444 Kang, Namsoon 363 Kaplan, Mordecai M. 416 Kasper, Walter 422–3 Kavanagh, Aidan 19, 164–5, 536 Kazantzakis, Nikos 427 Kearney, Richard 408, 417–19, 425, 428–33 Kelly, J. N. D. 128 Kelly, Suzanne 321 Kerr, Nathan 150 Kim, Eunjoo Mary 138 Kim-Cragg, Hye Ran 201 King, Martin Luther Jr. 529 Kirschner, Sebastian 122 Knight, Douglas 147 Knox, John 243 Koenig, John 534, 536–7 Kolbert, Elizabeth 528

Macchia, Frank 144 Macquarrie, John 60, 86 Macrina 324 Macy, Gary 379 Magritte, Rene 96 Mairs, Nancy 442–3 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson 361, 365, 369 Malmgrem, Helge 118, 120 Mannion, M. Francis 50 Mannix, Daniel 193 Marion, Jean-Luc 87 Marpeck, Pilgram 142 Mason, Arthur Jones 170 Mather, Cotton 192 Maximus the Confessor 85, 90 Mbembe, Achille 362, 374–6 McBrien, Richard 370 McClendon, James William Jr. 140, 149 McConaghy, Charlotte 530 McGann, Mary 546

573

name Index

McGowan, Andrew 56 McManus, John 11 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 15, 17 Merton, Thomas 102 Methodius and Cyril, 454 Meyers, Ruth 547 Mignolo, Walter 373 Milligan Robert 144 Mingus, Mia 445 Mitchell, Nathan 428 Moltmann, Jurgen 538 Morris, David 301 Muhling, Markus 113–15, 118 Müller, Gerhard 233 Nammalvar 411 Newberg, Andrew 12, 114 Newbigin, Lesslie 140 Newton, Isaac 85, 469 Nicholas V (Pope) 190 Nilsson, Michael 118, 120 Norberg-Shulz, Christian 89–90 Nyberg, Gunnar 118, 120 O’Collins, Gerald 423 Okun, Tema 243–4, 246 O’Loughlin, Thomas 469 Origen 85, 129 Pannenberg, Wolfhart 470, 540–1 Patočka, Jan 85–6, 88, 90–1 Paul III (Pope) 191 Paul VI (Pope) 211, 213, 489, 491, 494 Peacocke, Arthur 82 Peckham, John 172 Peter the Lombard 59, 132, 265, 378 Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi 445 Pius XII (Pope) 335, 493 Plumwood, Val 325 Polkinghorne, John 471–2, 475 Porges, Stephen W. 119 Power, David N. 353 Powery, Luke 136–8 Prosper of Aquitaine 56, 409 Puller, Frederick William 170 Rahner, Karl 133, 353, 409–11, 413, 507 Ramanuja, Sri 408, 411–19

Ramsey, Michael 217 Ratzinger, Joseph 339, 369 Reynolds, Philip 266 Reynolds, Thomas 447 Richardson, Robert 144 Ricoeur, Paul 429, 431 Rothstein, Richard 196 Rovelli, Carlo 475 Saliers, Don E. 385 Sanders, Cody 321 Schama, Simon 96 Schelling, F. W. 345 Schillebeeckx, Edward 281, 349, 353, 409, 433, 471 Schmemann, Alexander 17, 60, 446, 506–7, 512, 539–40, 543 and funerals 318 Schneider, Laurel 395 Schotroff, Luise 437, 546 Schroeder, Roger 539, 547 Seeley, Jeremy 83 Seligman, Adam 19 Semmelroth, Otto 409 Sheets, Maxine-Johnstone 16 Siebers, Tobin 441 Simmons, Ernest 471, 473–5 Simons, Menno 142 Slevc, L. Robert 117 Snygg, Johan 118, 120 Soja, Edward 81 Souletie, Jean-Louis 464 Spinks, Bryan 168 Stählin, Wilhelm 9 Stendahl, Krister 535 Stengers, Isabelle 527 Stephen of Rome 41 Stewart, Benjamin 547 Stockel, Henrietta 191, 203 Stoeger, William 475–6 Stone, Barton 143 Stone, Darwell 170 Stuart, Elizabeth 401 Sweeney, Connor 87 Talley, Thomas 52 Taylor, Charles 348 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 86, 91, 375

574

Temple, William 47 Tertullian 39–41, 43, 51, 132, 135, 266, 378 Theodore of Mopsuestia 41–2, 158 Thomas, R. S. 111 Tillich, Paul 12–13, 93, 373–4, 426, 428, 452 Tomasello, Michael 122 Tonstad, Linn Marie 393–6 Torvend, Samuel 546 Toulmin, Stephen 467, 471 Trulear, Harold Dean 137–8 Tucker, Mary Evelyn 11 Turner, Victor 18–19 Vagaggini, Cipriano 347, 351–2, 354 Vanderwilt, Jeffrey 229–30 Van Dyk, Leanne 387 Vickhoff, Björn 118, 120 Vishnu-Narayana 414–16 Vorgrimler, Herbert 133–4, 474

name Index

Walgrave, Jan Hendrik 349–52, 355 Walsh, Catherine 363–4 Ward, Graham 373, 399–400 Weil, Louis 368 Weiss-Block, Jennie 446 Westfall, Richard 470 Westhelle, Vitor 91–2, 519–20 Wilcox, Melissa 394, 396 Williams, Rowan 2 Willibrand, Johannes 226 Wilson, Jonathan R. 145 Winant, Howard 361 Wirgman, A. Theodore 170 Wolchover, Natalie 526 Wynn, Mark 90 Wyschogrod, Edith 148 Young, Robert J. C. 362 Zagano, Phyllis 386 Zwingli, Ulrich 142, 146, 468–9