(This piece was originally written to be the conclusion to Chapter 10 in my recent book, Who We Were Meant to Be, but I cut it from the final version since it's tangential to the overall argument of the book, and I needed to pare down the final version a bit. It remains, as such, something of a rough draft.)
.jpg)
We should take a quick look at one of the underlying issues in the way Christians understand the meaning of the elements of worship: the question of sacramentalism. Are some of the rituals of worship “sacraments”? That is, do they actually function as physical, material vehicles for the ministration of spiritual grace to the believer?
This is a significant bone of contention between low-church Protestant traditions (like my own) and many of the more high-church traditions, like Roman Catholicism. The Catholic church has seven specific acts which are considered sacraments, while some other groups ascribe that term to only two, communion and baptism (as, for instance, Lutheranism), and the low-church traditions often prefer the language of “ordinance” rather than “sacrament.” Since we are pursuing our study of Christian life and worship under the guidance of the patristic age, we must acknowledge that early Christianity appears to have held a very sacramental worldview. This was not always done in a way that we would consider high-church in terms of ecclesiastical order, liturgy, and hierarchy--sometimes, especially early on, it was just simple gatherings of Christians in one another’s homes--and yet still there was a sense of sacramentalism that pervaded the way they talked about their experience of church.
I would suggest, however, that there is a conceptual bridge in the patristic perspective which may help show that, far from being just a source of division, it is precisely a sacramental worldview that ties all Christian groups together. I would even go so far as to suggest that the traditions we usually regard as anti-sacramental in their conception are, from a certain point of view, perhaps even a bit more sacramental than the sacramental traditions themselves are. That may strike some as a rather outlandish claim, so let me back up a little and explain what I mean.
The basis of sacramental theology is easy to understand: simply and plainly, it is through Christ that we receive grace. Jesus Christ, who is truly man and truly God, took on flesh for us, and thus made the material of his own body--the physical stuff of his incarnation--a conduit of grace for us. It is by the sacrifice of his body that our sins are atoned for, and it is by union with his body (represented by our incorporation in the church, the Body of Christ) that we experience the joy of fellowship with God. Sacramental theology, then, is based on the reality of the incarnation: it is through the body of Christ, given for us, that we enter into the experience of God’s grace. God used physical materials, and not just a set of spiritual teachings, to redeem the world. Both the physical and the spiritual are equally parts of God’s good creation, and he uses both in the accomplishment of his work. Saying or believing anything less would tend to make us Gnostics or Docetists rather than Christians.
The redeemed community of God, the Body of Christ, is in direct union with Christ and is indwelt by the Holy Spirit. And because this is so, everything that is done in the church is done in the Spirit and in union with Christ. Thus everything in the church and in Christian life may be properly considered a sacrament, at least in a certain sense, because everything done in faith is done in the context of our union with Christ. Grace comes from Christ alone, and we, in our daily experience and in the life of our church, are in union with him. That is to say, then, broadly speaking, everything in the church and in Christian life is a sacrament. As Irenaeus wrote, “Where the church is, there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the church and every kind of grace” (Against Heresies 3.24.1). Some Orthodox voices today hold this to be the proper patristic heritage of sacramental theology: not seven discrete acts, but the church itself as the sacrament of Jesus Christ. The church is the Body of Christ, and when we abide in Christ through faith, we are always connected to the blessings of his grace. In this light, everything done in the church becomes a sacrament, and every aspect of one’s Christian life likewise.
Some Protestants might protest at this point and demand a clarification of terms: are we talking about saving grace, or about grace in terms of spiritual blessings imparted in union with Christ (sanctifying grace, sustaining grace, and so on)? Much of Protestant anti-sacramentalism is based on the perception that other traditions, like Roman Catholicism, view certain sacraments as effective means of saving grace, when Scripture teaches clearly that it is faith in Christ, not the motions of any ritual act, that constitute the only effective means of saving grace. This is a legitimate concern as part of a legitimate dispute; but to conceive of it in only those terms will prevent us from understanding the scope of what the ancient Christian perspective on sacramental grace is really trying to say.
Most patristic sources did not make distinctions between various types of grace, since the Bible generally made no such distinctions either (with the exception of Paul’s occasional habit of referring to a grace associated with his apostolic office). Grace was, quite simply, what you got from being in Christ, beginning with your initial conversion. In this view, there’s no real distinction between saving grace and sanctifying grace, because all that there is, at bottom, is union with Christ. There is only one Christ, and no distinction between graces offered by our union with him: it was all grace. In answer to the question, “What saves us?” they probably would not have offered the Reformation dictum of “We are saved by grace through faith in Christ alone” (as true as that is); they most likely would have just said, “Jesus.” Once connected to Jesus, we receive “grace upon grace” (John 1:16, NRSV): an unending flow of spiritual blessing and spiritual life, grace which has brought us to life and keeps us alive, like branches connected to the vine, simply because of our union with him. That said, it may nonetheless still be appropriate to distinguish the effects that grace might have in a particular situation, whether saving or sanctifying, but these things do not constitute different species of grace as such, which is the important thing to keep in mind when talking about sacraments.
So do baptism and communion convey saving grace? To put it in these terms tends to obscure the issue rather than clarify it. It’s true that these two particular rituals were seen as the highest representations of the sacramental life of the church in the patristic age, and for good reason; anyone can see that their symbology depicts the foundational movements of our faith: being born again and receiving Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf. Such rituals, as part of the vessels and fibers that make up the life of the Body of Christ, can convey the living grace of Christ to us when done in faith. To add a bit of botanical terminology to Jesus’ vine and branches analogy, one could say that these rituals, as features of our faith, serve as part of the xylem of our connection to Christ, conduits of living sap that bear and sustain our lives. They are part of our act of faith, just as praying “the sinner’s prayer” is, and so they do--like everything by which we participate in our union with Christ--convey God’s grace to us. It is Jesus who saves us, Jesus who sanctifies us, Jesus who sustains us, and all these means are part of our union with him.
If we must press the point and ask what the specific thing is that serves as the vessel for the grace given at the moment of conversion, then I (a low-church Protestant myself) would stand with the plain and evident sense of the New Testament text, and say, “faith.” It is through faith alone that we are united to Christ and transformed into a member of his New Creation. And the first moment of a person’s expression of faith will often look very much like a classic evangelical prayer of salvation, or something along those lines. But faith is more than just an act of intellectual assent in Christ’s lordship; it is a call on our whole selves and our whole lives, and some of the rituals of the church, like baptism, serve as a way to give our assent to God not only with our mind and our spirit, but with our body as well. All of these things become vehicles for the faith by which we are saved by God’s grace, vessels through which we pour out that faith to God. It is faith that unites us to Christ, and as we abide in Christ, it is faith--embodied in a thousand different acts--by which his grace abounds to us. It is these “thousand different acts” that serve as sacraments to us, continual bearers of God’s continual grace.
So, to return to the main point: in view of much eastern patristic theology, everything done in the church is a sacrament. The church is the Body of Christ, in which we are united to the fountainhead of grace. The church thus becomes, itself, the sacrament of Jesus Christ: a real, physical community in which we experience the blessings of his grace. The preaching of Scripture is a sacrament, the hymns of the church are sacraments, and the prayer of benediction is a sacrament. Even more, since every Christian is a member of the Body of Christ, everything done in faith is a sacrament, whether it’s done as part of a church service or not. Even means of so-called “common grace,” like the beauty of nature and the goodness of God’s provision, become transfigured by faith into conduits of Christ’s very life and peace and love, imparted to us on every side.
Even anti-sacramental traditions are sacramental in this way, whether they know it or not. Ask any evangelical off the street if they ever experience God’s grace through any of the following physical means: their Bibles, communion, a potluck supper, a sunset, a baptism service, a walk in the park, or a hug from a fellow believer. You’ll find that the general response is that all of these things may be avenues of God’s life-giving grace. They would resist the notion that any of these things are what saves us, but there is still a sense, in the heart of every Christian, that all such acts are banks along the river of God’s grace, which flows in torrents through our lives, and at any one of them we may pause and take a drink.
From this particular viewpoint, one might make the provocative claim that these anti-sacramental traditions are perhaps a bit more sacramental than the high-church ones: where the latter only have seven sacraments, the former can claim to have an infinite supply! Even within low-church traditions, though, special priority will be given to certain precious rituals of the church, like baptism and communion. These are not thought to give a different kind of grace than anything else, but they are nonetheless held up as high points in the church’s ritual life. There is nothing disingenuous about trying to hold everything as sacramental while still giving special priority to two particular rituals; it is essentially the same perspective we bring to our experience of Scripture. While all of the Bible is considered “God-breathed,” Christians of all walks of life will focus special priority on a few sections that stand out from the others in special clarity and power. We spend a great deal more time applying the Gospels to our lives than we do the story of the rape and dismemberment of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19, even if we consider both of these biblical narratives to be divinely inspired. Low-church sacramentalism operates in a similar way: anything may be a conduit of God’s grace in our lives if received in faith, as part of our communion with Christ, but certain ordinances of the church, like communion and baptism, reveal this connection in an especially precious and powerful way.
The foregoing theory of sacramentalism will not really clear up many of the disagreements between denominations, but it should, at the very least, give every Christian, even those from traditions who are suspicious of sacramental theology, a way to understand and enter into the sacramental worldview of early Christianity.