The Third Lesson: Learning to Think Sacramentally

By: William Rhea

This series takes an appreciative look back on the Lutheran theological tradition, and unpacks lessons learned from it that helped shape the author’s embrace of Catholicism.

Part of the difficulty of moving from the theologically Baptistic world of American evangelicalism to anything like traditional Christian orthodoxy is that it involves accepting that God works through created matter, binding himself to it and being actively present by means of it. That should not be a surprise, since the core Christian message is that God himself died on a cross for our sins, but the implications of God-become-flesh are rarely pursued in American Protestantism.

Initially, accepting the sacraments was a corollary of accepting the content-rich authority of Scripture: The Scriptures clearly teach that there is one baptism (Eph 4:5), a union of water and Spirit (Jn 3:5), and that in it God actively does something (Rom 6:3-5, Gal 3:26-27, 1 Pet 3:18-22). Likewise, Jesus not only says that the paschal bread is his body and the wine his blood (Mk 14:22-25 and parallels), but he insisted that his Spirit-enlivened flesh must be “chewed” (τρωγων trogon, distinct from the possibly metaphorical “eating”) at the risk of alienating the crowds and losing disciples (Jn 6:52-66). Paul adds to this that those who eat the sacrament unworthily die, as though they were encountering the fullness of the divine presence in the Old Testament (1 Cor 11:27-32). Taking these passages of Scripture seriously is likely what distinguishes Lutheranism most clearly from other forms of Protestantism.

At first, however, these beliefs seemed to sit uneasily with the core Protestant message that Lutheranism elevates to its highest pitch: that the good news of Jesus Christ is that we are justified solely by God by his grace alone through faith alone. Lutheranism, however, teaches that these sacraments are in fact means of grace, such that the grace that God gives is conveyed through the action of the sacraments. There is, therefore, no contradiction between Sola Gratia and sacramental grace, because Lutherans confess that grace always operates in particular ways, coming extra nos, from outside of us. When the minister acts to baptize or to consecrate and distribute the elements, it is in fact God acting through the material elements to accomplish his purposes in the recipients. The sacraments are definitively means of grace, moments in space-time when God is presently active to save sinners.

However, the relationship between the sacraments and faith is more problematic. In Lutheranism, the preaching of the Word is as much a means of grace as baptism or the Lord’s Supper, and the mechanism by which God graciously acts in Word and Sacrament is through conveying the gift of faith, the real criterion for justification. That is, the preached Word itself can produce justifying faith because it is a means of grace all of its own. Given that the Word is itself faith-inspiring, the act of God to save and to assure one of salvation can be, both intellectually and practically, divorced from the sacraments in a way that can be functionally Calvinistic. Seen from the perspective of the already-believing recipient who has heard the Word (again, itself a means of forgiving sins distinct from the sacraments), the sacraments do in fact serve less as direct conveyors of the divine grace (whether the divine energies or created grace or the Spirit, depending on the Orthodox or Catholic school of thought); instead, in these cases, the sacraments merely serve as signs that divinely inspire further faith in the individual. If the Word has inspired genuine faith, and therefore the individual is justified sola fide, what more do baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and confession actually add?

Luther Preaching, from the Altarpiece of the Church of Torslunde, 1561

Many other Lutherans rightly push back against this tendency within Lutheran theology and promote a more objective, Catholic understanding of how the sacraments affect the recipient. I found myself in this camp, and began thinking through other aspects of theology in more sacramental terms. The incarnation and resurrection, the church, and the final redemption of creation are all in some sense sacramental, in that they are instances of God giving his own divine life to and through created, material entities. Perhaps this spilling out of sacramental logic happened because I never accepted Luther’s restriction of the term “grace” to the meaning “God’s action to forgive sins” (an extension of Erasmus’ reduction of charis to “divine favor,” to the exclusion of God’s gift of created graces). Grace, rather, didn’t seem to only be God’s action in forgiving sins; nor did it only describe what is already given by nature (the Reformed “common grace”); rather, grace included God’s self-donation of his divine life. The grace of God’s self-donation seemed, anyway, to be the primary meaning of both the crucifixion and the Eucharist, which took central place in my imagination.

Consequently, and very early on, I began to see the mystical union of Man and Wife in holy matrimony as a kind of sacrament, in that it not only purses natural goods but also serves as an icon of Christ and his church. Chrismation of confirmands is not only an extremely ancient practice, but it seemed entirely at one with the very idea that Christians are little Christs, the Anointed One. It still seems very odd to me that the Apology of the Augsburg Confession dismisses anointing of the sick as a sacrament without even considering the close connection between this practice and the forgiveness of sins in Jas 5:14-15. As I began studying the early history of the church for graduate work, it became clear to me just how much church teaching and, especially, sacramental practice had been formed in the conflict with Gnosticism. This gave me a finely-tuned sense for the inherently Gnostic tendencies within both more radical forms of Protestantism and post-Christian American modernity, and, ultimately, how those tendencies manifested more subtly in Lutheranism. But it was Lutheranism that taught me to think this way in the first place.

God’s whole purpose in administering his grace through visible, material means in conjunction with the word eventually became clear: The purpose is to transform the human being, composed himself of a material body and rational soul tightly knit together, into a living sacrament. It was here that my explorations into the New Finnish Perspective on Luther and the Eastern Orthodox theology of theosis or deification rounded out my understanding of salvation (however valid the New Finnish Perspective, which finds in Luther his own theology of deification, actually is). Lutheranism has a good deal to say about what we are saved from: sin, death, and the devil. It stakes its whole tradition on the mechanism of the individual’s salvation from these realities: we are saved from going to hell on account of our sins by means of God’s free declaration of forgiveness and righteousness. However, Lutheranism has shockingly little to say about what we are saved for. To discover that, I was usually forced to look elsewhere: to N.T. Wright’s theology of the general resurrection and the glorification of creation; to Catholic theology’s eternal contemplation of the Beatific Vision; to Eastern Orthodoxy’s theology of real participation in the divine energies and intra-Trinitarian life. Each of these, in some sense, involves the symphonic transformation of the human person into a kind of living sacrament that both receives and then gives to others the Life of the Father’s Eternal Word. That sort of thinking about created beings and their ultimately divine destiny would have been inconceivable without first slowly digesting Lutheranism’s rich and adamantly realist Eucharistic theology, likely the Lutheran tradition’s greatest lasting gift to former Protestants.