In one of his main articles,“The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence,” Joseph Ratzinger identified the retrieval of the patristic understanding of mystery as “the most fruitful theological idea of our century,” one that “belongs to the field of sacramental theology.” Hence, “one can probably say without exaggeration that not since the end of the patristic era has the theology of the sacraments experienced such a flowering.”
He also noted that “the renewal of sacramental theology is experiencing at the same time a crisis of sacramentality, an alienation from the reality of the sacrament that can scarcely have existed with such severity and intensity within Christianity before. In a time when we have grown accustomed to seeing in the substance of things nothing but the material for human labour—when, in short, the world is regarded as matter and matter as material—initially there is no room left for that symbolic transparency of reality toward the eternal on which the sacramental principle is based. Oversimplifying somewhat, one could indeed say that the sacramental idea presupposes a symbolist understanding of the world, whereas the contemporary understanding of the world is functionalist: it sees things merely as things, as a function of human labour and accomplishment, and given such a starting point, it is no longer possible to understand how a ‘thing’ can become a ‘sacrament’. Let us put it in even more practical terms: the man of today is certainly interested in the question of God, and he is even concerned about the problem of Christ; but the sacraments are something altogether too religious for him, all too bound up with a past stage of faith for him to see any practical reason even to begin discussing them.”
In this interview, Fr Uwe Michael Lang recommends some recent books on sacramental theology that address these problems.
Five Books for Catholics may receive a commission from qualifyng purchases made using the affliate links in this post.
In our previous conversation, you remarked that several good books on the sacraments had been published in recent years. In this interview, we shall discuss some of them. However, the backdrop to these books are the current debates within the Church on the sacraments. The Church defined dogmatically its teaching on the sacraments over various councils in the Middle Ages and above all at the Council of Trent. There have been subsequent magisterial clarifications, such as that of Pius XII on the matter and form of the sacrament of Holy Orders, or that of Paul VI and the John Paul II on the Church’s lack of authority to confer priestly ordination on women. Apart from these recent magisterial clarifications, it seems that most of the major issues have long been settled. Do the more recent publications on sacramental theology add anything substantial that was not already covered by the handbooks that circulated prior to Vatican II? The doctrinal teaching on the sacraments was developed fully in medieval period, thanks to scholastic theology, and was then formulated authoritatively by the Council of Trent. In that sense, there is not much new in Catholic sacramental theology as far as each of the sacraments is concerned specifically.
However, when it comes to general sacramental theology and its principles there have been some very interesting and significant developments in recent years. These developments mainly concern the relationship between the sacramental sign and sacramental causality.
The Church Fathers in general have a strong sense that the sacraments are efficacious for our salvation and sanctification of our soul. They work. They have Christ's promise attached to them. They offer covenanted grace.
During the Middle Ages, especially with St. Thomas Aquinas, that general doctrine of the sacraments received a profound and more intelligible theological expression. St. Thomas defines a sacrament as the sign of the holy thing insofar as it makes men holy. The sacraments are sacred signs which convey grace. They communicate a particular grace that they signify. This is known as sacramental causality. The physical act of washing with water not only signifies, but also effects communicates the invisible washing of the soul from original and personal sin.
St. Thomas managed to hold together these two aspects: sign and cause. During the Protestant Reformation, however, the causal dimension of the sacraments was challenged. The Protestant reformers questioned or denied outright the causal efficacy with which the sacraments work.
The Council of Trent, and above all post-Tridentine theologians, zoomed into this aspect of sacramental theology and emphasized sacramental causality. As a result, we may not have always paid sufficient regard to the symbolic value of the sacraments: their character as a sign and the intimate link between that character and sacramental causality.
During the twentieth century, various theologians—such as Karl Rahner and later Louis-Marie Chauvet—sought to recover their value as signs and reformulate what is essentially an Aristotelian understanding of sacramental causality.
Nevertheless, I and many other theologians would argue that the sacramental theology that comes out of these efforts is not robust enough. It does not account sufficiently for how the sacraments work.
Hence, over the last perhaps ten or fifteen years, there have been various new approaches to sacramental theology that attempt to recover the best of the tradition, especially St. Thomas's synthesis between the sacrament’s character as both sign and cause. In my view, it an interesting time for sacramental theology.
Each of the books that you have selected appears to retrieve classical sacramental theology of the kind that was common doctrine in Catholic faculties prior to the Second Vatican Council, while integrating it with the contributions of biblical, liturgical, patristic scholarship and other disciplines. Each appears to follow what Benedict XVI called a hermeneutic of renewal in continuity rather than a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture. Is this an accurate assessment? It certainly is. Benedict XVI’s hermeneutic of renewal in continuity is bearing fruit in much English-speaking theological work today, and I find this very encouraging.
"The Church is born from the seven sacraments and is really an efficacious sign of the union between God and humanity. The Church is a source of salvation because, through the her and in her, the sacraments are made available."
You have mentioned the efforts of Karl Rahner and Louis-Marie Chauvet to recover the character of each sacrament as a sign. That brings us into the debates followed Vatican II. What have been the main theological debates over the sacraments since the Second Vatican Council? One particular contribution of Vatican II was to broaden the term ‘sacrament’, in the manner of patristic ressourcement.
Since the scholastic period, during the high Middle Ages, we have been accustomed to speaking of the seven sacraments. However, in earlier texts, whether those of the Church Fathers or liturgical texts (many of which are still used in the Roman Rite), ‘sacrament’ is used in a broader, less definite sense.
To some extent, Vatican II recovers that older sense, as when Sacrosanctum Concilium and Lumen gentium speak of the Church as the “sacrament of salvation.” The Church is the universal sacrament of salvation because of Christ's gift of the Holy Spirit at Easter and Pentecost and, above all, because of the institution the sacraments of baptism and the Holy Eucharist. The seven sacraments communicate to the people of God the salvation and life-giving power that comes from God.
That doctrine of the Church as a sacrament of salvation spurred a theological debate on how to relate that teaching with the seven sacraments. Some clarification was necessary because Vatican II did not mean to say that the Church is the eighth sacrament. Rather, the Church is born from the seven sacraments and is really an efficacious sign of the union between God and humanity. The Church is a source of salvation because, through the her and in her, the sacraments are made available.
St. John Paul II made some important clarifications in his post-synodal exhortation on the sacrament of penance. There, he explains that the Church is said to be a sacrament because she is, as it were, created by the seven sacraments. The sacraments give supernatural life to the Church and make it an instrument of conversion and reconciliation between God and humanity. In that sense, the Church is the sacrament. Indeed, it may even be the primordial sacrament, as Karl Rahner argues. However, John Paul II affirmed, the Church is born above all from the sacrament of the Eucharist. As the title of his final encyclical indicates—Ecclesia de Eucharistia—the Church is born from of the Holy Eucharist, formed by it, and lives by it.
1.
Prior to Vatican II, the sacraments were often covered most extensively in the seminary textbooks on canon law and moral theology. Such books considered in detail the conditions required for their valid, licit, and spiritually fruitful celebration. Naturally, priests have a far greater responsibility than the laity to know about all these matters. Still, do any of the books you have selected, besides covering the theology of the sacraments, also cover the casuistry and practical aspects of the administration of the sacraments?
This post is for paying subscribers only
Sign up now and upgrade your account to read the post and get access to the full library of posts for paying subscribers only.
.jpg){kind=link}