444 - Sacraments as Visible Words

Sacraments as Visible Words
By David Willis

"The task of rethinking the meaning of the sacraments is only in mid-course, but already there have been significant advances in helping us experience tangibly the reality of grace."

A STORY HAS it that a frustrated Vatican official lamented, "In the Dutch church, everything changes except the elements!" The reference, of course, is to a widespread unofficial rejection of the traditional doctrine of transubstantiation as an adequate way of pointing to the mystery of Christ's presence in the Lord's Supper. Though a succinct overstatement, the comment does reflect a bewilderment at the extent and rapidity of new developments in the theology of the sacraments today, not only within Roman Catholicism but in almost every denomination. The shift away from traditional approaches to the sacraments does not reflect an abandonment of the role of sacraments in the life of the church. On the contrary, the shift represents a new interest in sacramental living and an endeavor to bring our understanding and practices of the sacraments into line with the results of new biblical, historical, and social-psychological scholarship. The task of rethinking the meaning of the sacraments is only in mid-course, but already there have been significant advances in helping us experience tangibly the reality of grace. In what follows, I will describe the main features of this shift, indicate what this implies for understanding baptism and the Lord's Supper, and suggest some lines along which further sacramental theology may be developed.

I

Until fairly recently, it was a common procedure to begin with a definition of what a sacrament is, and then show how this or that rite fits this definition.¹ A good example, and one of the better definitions of a sacrament, comes from the Westminster Shorter Catechism: "A sacra-

David Willis is Professor of Systematic Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Harvard Divinity School. Dr. Willis taught theology for several years at the San Francisco Theological Seminary where, among other projects, he founded and edited the Pacific Theological Review. Long associated with ecumenical discussion groups, he is cochairperson of the dialogue between the Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. This article continues the Theology Today series on classic doctrines in contemporary theology
¹ For a recent effort at this traditional approach, see B. Piault, What is a Sacrament?, Twentieth Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism, v, 49; Hawthorn, New York, 1963.

445 - Sacraments as Visible Words

ment is a holy ordinance instituted by Christ, wherein, by sensible signs, Christ and the benefits of the new covenant are represented, sealed, and applied to believers."² The only two which fit this definition are baptism and the- Lord's Supper. The Council of Trent carried over an older definition of a sacrament as "a symbol of a sacred thing and a visible form of invisible grace," making it clear that a sacrament contains the grace it signifies and confers that grace on those who do not put an obstacle in the way. According to this Roman Catholic teaching, "If anyone says that the sacraments of the New Law were not all instituted by Jesus Christ our Lord; or that there are more than seven or fewer than seven-that is, baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, extreme unction, holy orders, and matrimony; or that any one of these is not truly and properly a sacrament: let him be anathema."³ The number of sacraments is different for these traditional Protestant and Roman Catholic statements, and a different understanding of grace lies behind the two positions; but both move from a general understanding of sacrament to treat the individual sacraments.

This approach has come under fire from historical and biblical studies. The idea of a general category of "sacrament" is relatively late in the description of how we are saved, and the fixing of the number of sacraments either to seven (which became official doctrine only in the thirteenth century) or to two is a peculiarly Western and juridically colored phenomenon. In Eastern Orthodoxy, the central category was, and is, that of the mystery of God's being for humanity in saving ways, all of which may be considered to be means of participating in the divine life in our midst. In the West, however, a decisive turn was made when Tertullian regularized the use of the term sacramentum to translate the word mysterion.⁴ Sacramentum originally referred to the oath and action which a soldier or a citizen took in pledging allegiance to a new commander. Tertullian's use of the term avoided some of the connotations which would have made the Christian faith appear to be another of the many mystery religions of the ancient world, and vigorously underlined the shift of loyalty involved in becoming and struggling to remain a Christian. The chief disadvantage of Tertullian's word usage was that it tended to encourage conceiving of Christian living in legal and transactional terms. There is, of course, no inevitable connection between the use of the term "sacrament" and a juridical propensity in understanding the Christian life. In fact, the Western church sought to develop, in its sacramental system, a pastoral instrument which would nurture and care for human souls and bodies at the crucial junctures of this earthly pilgrimage. When, however, the sacraments are declared to

² Question 92.
³ On the Sacraments, Canon 1, The Church Teaches, ed. J. F. Clarkson, et al., Herder, St. Louis, 1955, p. 263.
⁴ Cf. L'Esprit Saint, I'Eglise et les Sacraments, text of the Groupe des Dombes, Le Presse de Taise, 1979, pp. 14ff. For a concise survey of the development of sacramental terminology, see K. B. Cully, Sacraments: A Language of Faith, Christian Education Press, Philadelphia, 1961.

446 - Sacraments as Visible Words

be necessary for the individual's salvation and when the power to exercise the keys to these doorways of salvation is understood to be given exclusively to one class in the church (the clergy), then the sacraments can become as much a means of exercising authority over the faithful as a means of freely communicating to them the good news of their forgiveness.

We look in vain for a general idea of sacrament in the Old or New Testaments. What we find instead are certain cultic acts, especially baptism and the Lord's Supper, which Christians are commanded and freed to observe to reinforce their identity as people of God. Moreover the word "sacrament," or the word "mystery" which it translates, is not used explicitly of these rites. Mystery in the New Testament refers primarily to the secret counsel of God which has not only become openly manifest in the reconciling work of Christ but is the central reality in the light of which disciples are to live.⁵ This mystery is not a secret religious truth, but is the content of what has been disclosed. For example: "For he has made known to us," writes the author of Ephesians, "in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth" (Eph. 1:9-10; cf. also Rom. 16:25). The disclosure of this mystery extends from Christ through the apostolate who are to proclaim the mystery of the gospel (Eph. 6:19).

This is not to say that there is not a doctrine of the sacraments in the Scriptures, or to say that sacramental theology is merely the result of subsequent church history. The starting point, however, is not a general definition of a sacrament, for which biblical resources are sought, but a central reality which is disclosed through proclamation and certain cultic acts. These cultic acts have some common features and serve a common function in quickening and strengthening trust that the good news is available.

Before turning to describe the outlines of this new approach to sacramental theology, I must mention another fact besides the results of historical and biblical re-appraisals, namely, an increased awareness of the comprehensiveness of salvation. It is simply impossible in the modern world to conceive of salvation of individuals' souls apart from the correction of social abuses which impinge directly upon their ability to hear, let alone to take to heart, the gospel. Much of traditional sacramentology was addressed to one way of posing the question of salvation, namely, "How is grace mediated so that individuals can be transferred from the mass of those who are damned into the company of

⁵ Cf. R. Brown, The Semitic Background of the Term "Mystery" in the New Testament, Fortress, Philadelphia, 1968, in which he argues (p. 65) that the term's meaning in Ephesians 5:32 probably has no exact parallels elsewhere in the New Testament. On the relation between revelation and mystery, and the relation between a new understanding of symbolism and the sacraments, see chapters one and three of H. T. Kerr, Meaning and Mystery in Christian Thought, Ryerson, Toronto, 1958.

447 - Sacraments as Visible Words

those who are going to heaven after death?" That way of asking the question is undeniably also a part of what must be asked; but a fuller way of posing the question of salvation (that is, one which does more justice to a wider range of biblical descriptions of wholeness and peace and justice, and also to the experienced desperate human longings) is: "What does the disclosed mystery of God's reconciling work in Christ mean for corporate, communal, structural life together now in this world and not just in the world to come?" Again, this way of putting the matter is not to suggest that the experience of wholeness is only, or even primarily, this-worldly, but it is to insist that what a people hope for the future, the content they expect for the consummation of history, profoundly affects the direction and quality of life in the meantime. Then the question about the sacraments is not so much what is transferred or communicated in them so that individuals can be saved from something (eternal damnation), but how the sacraments serve as parts of Christ's own ongoing ministry of reconciliation whose object is also the transformation of life-societal as well as individual-in this world. How are sacraments effective signs of a reality God wills for all of us?

When the question about the relation between salvation and the sacraments is asked this way, we can get at the fact that there can be no possible sharp distinction between what the church does for its members and what it pronounces to the rest of the world by its worship no less than by its social action. The way the church understands and practices the sacraments is not just a churchly matter or a private affair among believers. What it understands and practices sacramentally is an eloquent message to the rest of the world of what the church considers the extent and aim of Christ's saving work.

II

If the shift has been away from beginning with a general understanding of sacrament and treating each as a subdivision, the shift has been toward beginning with the central mystery of reconciliation through the personal encounter of God with us in Christ.⁶ God personally encounters us as the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ. God takes on the human condition and dwells among us personally, and from the life and death and resurrection of this person we experience God as the one who wills and effects our reconciliation to God and to one another.

This reconciling personal encounter by God implies at least three things. It implies that the person and work of Christ are inseparable. Our reconciliation depends on the saving work accomplished by the on

⁶ The major development of this view is E. Schillebeeckx's Christ, the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, Sheed and Ward, New York, 1963. G. S. Worgul's A Validation of Christian Sacraments, Paulist Press, New York, 1980, is a useful survey of recent developments in sacramental theology and a constructive essay in the redefinition of the sacraments in the light of post-Vatican II1 thought. Cf. also E. Jüngel and K. Rahner, Was ist ein Sakrament?, Herder, Freiburg, 1971.

448 - Sacraments as Visible Words

who is the personal union of God and the human condition. It implies, secondly, a relational understanding of God's presence and activity. Encounter involves a going-forth to another, a confrontation and act of solidarity which establish a new relationship between two parties. And it implies, thirdly, that this new relationship be realized and lived out in the tangibility, visibility, corporateness of human existence. Reconciliation is not a private affair but a matter of the new life together of human beings, a new social reality in which the reconciliation between a person and God and other persons is experienced.

The church is that body of those reconciled persons whom Christ joins to himself and engages in his own continuing ministry of reconciliation-who trust, base their lives on, the reality of God's reconciling encounter in Christ and who announce that reality to others. The church is that society of men and women who respond to the accomplished fact of reconciliation and are joined to Christ in his continuing ministry of reconciliation. It is important to put it this way, because their response is not what constitutes reconciliation, and they are not simply given a message about how to be reconciled to God and to one another. The urgency and empowerment arise out of their experience of reconciliation through their co-membership in the body of Christ. It is in that body that they come to know themselves as forgiven sinners living together with forgiven sinners. It is out of the freedom which this new identity gives them that they are enabled to be ambassadors through whom Christ appeals to all men and women. In their life together as reconciled and reconciling community, they are a very embodiment of God's reconciling encounter with the world in Christ.

This reconciliation is experienced and proclaimed through the whole life of the whole people of God. This does not mean that everything that the members of Christ's body do is a faithful response to him. They are forgiven sinners, and their very life in Christ is one of continual repentance and need for renewed forgiveness. In the words of the Heidelberg Catechism, the sin for which one is forgiven includes "the sin against which I must struggle all my life long" (Question 56). This is the Pauline dialectic: I, yet not I, but Christ who lives in me (Gal. 2:20). But because it is Christ who lives in the members of his body, their betrayals, shortcomings, blunderings are not the final word. The final word is the triumph of grace so that the gospel does get proclaimed through these very earthen vessels.

That reconciliation is experienced and proclaimed through the whole life of the whole people of God does mean, therefore, that all areas of their lives are media for communicating the message of reconciliation; and it means that the responsibility for that communication is not delegated to only one group within the church. Surely there is a diversity of gifts, and surely this means that all members of the body are not simply interchangeable; but the deployment of the gifts so that each part performs its service within the whole makes possible a living together which itself is a form of proclamation and which is a proleptic

449 - Sacraments as Visible Words

instance of the quality of life which God wills. The proclamation entailed in continuing Christ's own ministry of reconciliation is not restricted to, however it needs to be linked to, verbal announcement of the good news. The whole life which is proclamatory includes those rites which are ways by which people are recalled to their true identity and engage in that active remembrance of the reconciling initiative of God on which that identity is founded.

It is in this sense that those special rites of the community which the church later identified as sacraments are visible words, or more correctly, are the Word made visible and tangible. These ritual or cultic enactments of the message are forms of proclamation no less than the purely verbal announcement. This point became obscured by the unfortunate and commonly used expression that the gospel is conveyed "by word and sacrament"-as if the sacraments were not a form of the word. What was meant, of course, by the phrase "word and sacrament" was verbal articulation of the message, mainly preaching, and sacred actions. Verbal articulation of the gospel and the enactment of the gospel in those rites belong essentially together, and one is really insufficiently clear or concrete without the other. Preaching and enactment belong together as reciprocally dependent expressions of the same reality, in much the same way as Christ's teachings and his miracles (the signs of the Kingdom's presence) belonged together, or as Jeremiah's prophetic signs were accompanied by his prophetic explications of the meaning of those signs. In every case, the visible, tangible actions and the verbal announcement or instruction are needed if the good news is to penetrate through all the levels at which we receive and respond to the reality which is being communicated.

III

So far we have said nothing about what is special about any one of these enactments of the word, or why there should be two or three or seven. At this point, traditional sacramental theology drew on an analysis of the nature of symbols and how the symbols of these particular acts functioned to convey grace, and often did so with a cause-and-effect scheme in mind.⁷ While there is material in new understandings of symbols and the symbolic character of human perception and imagination to pursue this route for a contemporary sacramental theology, the specialness of certain acts for the early

⁷ K. Rahner, however, reinterprets the causality of the sacraments in a most suggestive way. The ecclesial context is a presupposition for this causality: "The church as the people of God in a socially organized form is the enduring historical presence of the eschatologically triumphant grace of God and of Christ in the world for the individual …" It is the presupposition of the sacraments' factual efficacy (The Church and the Sacraments, Quaestiones Disputatae 9, Herder, New York, 1963, pp. 22, 23). "Because first of all and independently of the usual idea of a sacrament, we envisage the church as the fundamental or primal sacrament, and form the root idea of a sacrament in the ordinary sense as an instance of the fullest actualization of the church's essence as the saving presence of Christ's grace, for the individual, we can in fact obtain from this an understanding of the sacraments in general" (ibid., p. 24).

450 - Sacraments as Visible Words

church lay in the way they linked the new covenant to the old. The apostolic community knew and confessed this new covenant in terms of the history of God's covenanting purposes with the people of the Old Testament, and they understood their new identity in terms of their relation to the one who fulfilled, altered, and gave new meaning to God's ways with Israel.⁸

The Lord's Supper clearly has a special import in the realization of the substance of the new covenant. The Lord's Supper is a passover meal,⁹ but a passover meal with a startling difference. A radically new claim is being made when Christ presides in the passover meal with his disciples and then announces that they are celebrating not just the exodus as definitive of Israel's identity but are now celebrating his own death as decisive for their new deliverance. In the passover meal, Israel acted out its remembrance of the exodus, so that they were made to participate in the liberating significance of that event for giving Israel its identity from generation to generation. This kind of memory was not just recalling the past; it was re-presenting the past so that the meaning of the past event included their own present participation. So strong is the sense of contemporaneity of this re-presented past event that there is a later version of the passover meal in which this exchange occurs: "How do you know this? Because I myself was there." Jesus, as he is remembered and proclaimed by the apostolic witness, claims that even that decisive event has its fulfillment in the establishment of the new covenant in his own offering up of himself: "This is my body" (Lk. 22:19).

When Jesus' followers engage in the meal which Paul describes in I Corinthians 11:23ff., they are doing more than eating and drinking together and remembering mealtime with Jesus. They are engaging in the passover meal of the new covenant, and the decisive event which they re-present by their active remembrance is Christ's offering up of himself. When they engage in this particular eating and drinking, they are doing so in remembrance of him, and their eating and drinking is a sharing in, a participation in, the saving presence and activity of Christ. This is analogous to the way Israel shares in the meaning of the original passover, but once again there is a major difference: the one in whose

⁸ Cf. the centrality B. Haring gives to an understanding of covenant in his treatment of the sacraments, in The New Covenant, Burns and Oates, London, 1962.
⁹ The eucharist is treated as the "sequel to the Passover of Israel, the new paschal meal of the people of God" in One Baptism, One Eucharist, and a Mutually Recognized Ministry, World Council of Churches, Geneva, 1975, pp. 18ff. It is seen this way also by J. Jeremias in The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, Blackwell, London, 1955, and A. J. B. Higgins in The Lord's Supper in the New Testament, SCM, London, 1952. N. Clark, however, argues against identifying the Lord's Supper as a passover meal and contends that it was an ordinary Jewish meal. Clark admits that "passover ideas must inevitably have been in the mind both of Jesus and of his disciples," though the main point is that "if a Jewish festal supper provides it with its form and structure, its content is not deducible from the past" (An Approach to the Theology of the Sacraments, SCM, London, 1956, p. 42 and p. 46). The Lord's Supper was not, either, just an agape meal; the new reality is that of communion in sacrifice, the sacrifice of the one who is the Suffering Servant Messiah (ibid., pp. 64, 65).

451 - Sacraments as Visible Words

saving work they participate by this remembrance is the risen Lord who is presently active by the power of his Spirit and in whom, in fact, they live.

The risen Lord makes use of their cultic remembrance to reinforce their experience of their participation in his death and resurrection and their experience of being a reconciled and reconciling community. Christ is already present with his believers as the head of the body of which they are members, and in this re-enactment of a new passover they are continually nourished and strengthened in that new relationship which has already been established. This means, that, yes, one must speak of Christ's being really present to the believers in this re-enactment.¹⁰ But the focus is shifted away from the question of how Christ is in the bread and wine to how the believers, in the breaking and pouring, the eating and drinking, re-experience their presence to Christ as members of the body of which he is the head, and re-experience how they are present to one another in this body.

IV

The specialness of baptism in terms of linking the new covenant with the old is less clear than is the case with the Lord's Supper. There is not so direct and explicit an equation here between ratification of the new covenant and a cultic act of the old. Much, of course, was subsequently made of the analogy between baptism as the initiation rite of the new covenant and circumcision as the rite of the old. This analogy was especially tightly drawn when it came to defending the practice of infant baptism. The main reason, however, that the early church baptized in the name of Jesus was his own baptism and his commission as contained in the conclusion of Matthew's Gospel.¹¹

Christ's own baptism was at the band of John, who called Israel to repentance in the face of the last times which were at hand and who baptized men and women as a sign of their repentance. In the accounts of Jesus' baptism it is made clear that he does not need to undergo John's baptism. In this act he willingly establishes his solidarity with repentant Israel, is confirmed as the anointed one, and enters into his public ministry-by first being cast into the wilderness in which Israel,

¹⁰ Belief in the real presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper, it should be noted, is not tied to any single effort to account for the mystery of Christ's eucharistic presence. Thus M. Thurian ("The Real Presence," Christianity Divided, ed. D. J. Callahan, et al., Sheed and Ward, New York, 1961, pp. 203-222), among others, has shown that Calvin firmly held to a doctrine of the real presence in the Lord's Supper. While not explicitly rejecting transubstantiation, many contemporary Roman Catholic theologians radically reinterpret that official teaching and use other ways of thinking about the reality: e.g., P. Schoonenberg, "Transubstantiation: How Far is this Doctrine Historically Determined?", The Sacraments: An Ecumenical Dilemma, Concilium 24, Paulist Press, New York, 1966, pp. 78ff.; B. Haring, The New Covenant, pp. 159-164. Cf. also, especially for the role of the epiklesis in the Eastern liturgies, J. Meyendorf, "Notes on the Orthodox Understanding of the Eucharist," Concilium 24, pp. 51ff.
¹¹ N. Clark, op. cit., pp. 16ff.; WCC, op. cit., pp. 9ff.; G. Kehm, "Foundations of a Biblical Theology of Baptism," Baptism: Decision and Growth, ed. D. Willis, Office of the General Assembly, U.P.U.S.A., Philadelphia, 1972, pp. 6-16.

452 - Sacraments as Visible Words

through testing, found its resources for entering and conquering the promised land. He is identified by John as the one who baptizes not merely with water but with the Spirit. He is the one anointed with the Spirit, the one through whom the Spirit will be poured out on many who, by hearing and doing his word, live as the messianic community in the last days.

When Jesus speaks of the implications of his baptism, it is in terms of the ordeal he had to undergo (Lk. 12:50). Hearing his word and being yoked with him in his ministry means that the disciples share in his suffering servanthood. As he fulfills the messianic hope in a very selective way, after the stamp of the suffering servant, they too are entered into a service which involves taking up the cross and following him as the cost of discipleship. To receive the Spirit is to be thrust into a mission which brings them into deadly conflict with the structures of the religion and society in which they operate. That this is the Spirit of the risen and victorious suffering servant means that in and through these conflicts they share in his victory and are enabled to walk in newness of life.

When the Christian community of later generations engages in this baptism in the name of Jesus, what is going on is an act, yes, of initiation. That initiation is, however, not entering into a secret society or a mystery cult. It is above all entering into that fellowship with Christ and those he has joined to himself in his own continuing ministry. By hearing the gospel, repenting, and confessing Christ as Lord, they are included in his reconciled and reconciling body in a public and overt way. This overt act of confession and baptism is not the end of conversion; it is the beginning of their lives with their newly accepted allegiances, the beginning of lives in which they continually experience the need to repent and receive forgiveness as they mature in their Christomorphic service. Here there is a parallel with the rite of initiation of Israel. Circumcision is the sign which ratifies one's belonging to the people of God or, in the case of converts, the sign of their entering for the first time into that people. So baptism is the sign by which one's belonging to Christ and engaging in his ministry is ratified and one's conversion to become a member of Christ's body is made public.¹² In neither case does the sign have the power of being that which causes that new identity. In both cases, the cause is God's covenanting initiative, to which the enactment of the sign is a response.

This is not to say that the sign of baptism in Christ's name is

¹² The multiplicity of meanings of baptism in Christian theology comes, in large measure, from the richness of significance given it in Paul. His views of Baptism constitute "a richly complex unity in which the person of Christ provides the uniting factor" (N. Clark, op. cit., p. 24). "Being in Christ [cleansing and forgiveness], being in the church [initiation and incorporation] and being in the Spirit [being marked with the gift of the Spirit]-these are but different ways of asserting the same one great reality. For the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, and the church is the body of Christ" (ibid., p. 25: brackets mine).

453 - Sacraments as Visible Words

superfluous or to be taken lightly. The public acknowledgment of one's identity sets in motion a vast new network of nourishment, admonition, and encouragement which is an essential part of growing in that new identity. To refuse the outward sign on the ground that what counts is a private and inward change would be to refuse to align oneself publicly with the community which proclaims that Christ is Lord and would be to refuse the strengthening, correction, and discipline of that community. That is the real issue in the often misplaced debate about water baptism and Spirit baptism, as if they were opposed to each other. The church had to face exactly that issue in Acts. Sometimes people repented and were baptized and received the Spirit; others, the gentiles of Asia Minor, had clearly already received the Spirit (as witnessed by the fact that they repented and called on Christ as the Lord) but had not yet been baptized. The church in Jerusalem was so concerned to hold together the reception of the Spirit and baptism by water in the name of Jesus that it sent some of its number up to Asia Minor to baptize those persons. If the question is, "Does the Spirit come upon those who are not yet baptized?"-the answer evidently is "Yes"; and if the question is whether the water baptism functions so that the Spirit is more vitally experienced and operative in one's life, then the answer is also "Yes." This does not mean that the act of baptism itself as a somehow isolated act or transaction causes the Spirit to be present (though that close causal operation was often ascribed to the sacrament in some traditional sacramental theologies). It does mean that the act is an "effective sign," a sign which not merely ratifies an already confessed new relationship but also initiates one into the fellowship, discipline, and encouragement of the community in which one's new identity is reinforced and in which one is continually equipped for sharing in the ministry of the whole body.

V

It is important to be more specific about the relation between the "signs" of cultic remembrance and the reality they serve to communicate. Otherwise, it would be easy to slip into either of two (unfortunately commonly held) extremes: to hold either that what counts is the faith of the recipients, the sacraments being mere symbols to help remind people of important parts of their Christian heritage; or to hold that what counts is the causal power contained in the sacraments, faith being trust that the church has been given the authority to use these saving means of grace. Both extremes contain a partial truth, but both miss the objective-subjective interconnection involved in how these signs are used to enable the recipient to participate in the reality which is Christ and his benefits. In order to get at the connection between the signs and the reality, we need to focus on two things: the nature of believers' unity with Christ, and the covenantal ontology implied in Christ's use of the elements. We can examine the implications of these for an understanding of Christ's real presence in the Lord's Supper.

454 - Sacraments as Visible Words

One of the features of the new covenant being celebrated in the Lord's Supper is the scope and nature of the remembrance involved. We have already noted that the passover meal was an active remembrance of the exodus, that this remembrance was a reinforcement of the identity of Israel when it re-presented the implications of that event, and that the passover meal was a part of the event in the sense that a historical event is not just punctiliar but includes its interpretive consequences. These features apply to the meal of the new covenant in which Christ is the passover lamb sacrificed for the new deliverance.

There is, however, a fundamental and scandalous novelty to the reality being celebrated in the Lord's Supper. The focus is on the person of Christ who is the contemporaneously encountering subject and host at this meal. He lives not just in the special memory of a people whose identity he set in motion with his sacrificial obedience and death. Their memory is of the crucified one who is the very same risen and presently active head of the church and the one who is to come. In this special supper, they proclaim the Lord's death until he comes again. The new life of believers is a life in the one whom they proclaim; they are bound to him and to one another by his Word and Spirit. That is why the fundamental mystery is that of Christ's union with his church, a relationship which transcends chronological, ethnic, cultural barriers and is a reconciling sign, an effective testimony, of the state of affairs, the shalom God wills for all of creation. One can even speak of Christ as the fundamental "sacrament" in the sense that he is the visible and tangible expression of God's purposes for all people,¹³ indeed all things. And one can even speak of the church as a resultant or subordinate sacrament in the sense that his body is a visible and tangible foretaste of the reconciliation of all in him, the aim of God's disclosed purposes.

This mystery of Christ and his church is, however, realized only incompletely in the life of believers. There is an "already/not yet" quality to this life. Reconciliation is the accomplished fact which the church lives out, but the struggle to live out this fact. continues and is always characterized by hope which strains forward to the full manifestation of the reality already there. The humanness of the church does not invalidate its being an effective sign of reconciliation, for Christ is

¹³ Schillebeeckx, op. cit., pp. 13-45; B. Haring, The Sacraments in a Secular Age, St. Paul Publications, Slough, England, 1976, pp. 13-45. According to Barth, God is imparted in a creaturely objectivity and uses a distinct form "in order to be objective in, with and under this form" (Church Dogmatics, II, 1, Clark, Edinburgh, 1957, p. 52). "Revelation means the giving of signs. We can say quite simply that revelation means sacrament, i.e., the self-witness of God …in the form of creaturely objectivity and therefore in a form which is adapted to our creaturely knowledge" (p. 52). Barth goes on to specify that "the humanity of Jesus as such is the first sacrament, the foundation of everything that God instituted and used in His revelation as a secondary objectivity before and after the epiphany of Jesus Christ" (p. 54). Note that for Barth it is the humanity of Jesus which is the fundamental sacrament, which is less than saying that the fundamental sacrament is the hypostatic union of Word and humanity, Jesus Christ, as Schillebeeckx and Haring do and which is a more fully Chalcedonian way of putting it.

455 - Sacraments as Visible Words

faithful to his promises and continually reforms and makes use of his people for his purposes. It is finally the triumph of grace over against and through his people that makes them his ministers in his world.

The mystery of Christ's relation to the church provides an analogy for understanding how he makes use of the elements of bread and wine to communicate his saving presence and action. There is nothing inherent in the signs or actions (bread and wine, breaking and pouring, giving and receiving) which makes them means of grace. But when they are taken up and used by Christ, the signs are given a transformed and transforming significance. The transforming reality is Christ, present by his Word and Spirit, by which the creatures become the communion of his body and blood for the believing and receiving community. Becoming something new out of the material of the old is a relational event. It is another instance of the covenanting act on the part of the one who takes the initiative and is the sole faithful party of the new covenant. Indeed to say that something exists is to say that it results from the covenantal intentionality of God in Christ.¹⁴ Thus human beings become new beings, are continually in the process of becoming new beings, as they are called out of their propensity to chaos and nothingness and given a new identity in God's reconciling purposes. In an analogous way, the signs are consecrated by Christ's Word and Spirit and become in usu-in the actual celebration of the Lord's Supper by the gathered believing community-the tangible and visible ways by which Christ makes himself and his benefits to be re-experienced.

The bread and wine are not persons; the word is not spoken to the elements, believing community or not. For the bread and wine become the effective signs for and within the context of the believing, interpretive, and proclaiming community. This does not mean that it is the community's interpretation and belief which make those symbols into effective signs, for the very existence of that community is already itself the result of Christ's initiative. In the Lord's Supper, he both creates the interpretive context in which the signs are made to participate in the reality to which they point, and he freshly confronts the community through his word in these tangible and visible ways. The elements become those effective signs when Christ's words are proclaimed, the words which specify the use he wills for them and which sets them apart for that special use: "Take, eat, this is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me." "Drink ye all of this, for this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for you and for many, for the remission of sins. Do this, as oft as ye shall drink it, in remembrance of me." When these words are announced again and taken to heart, the covenant is renewed as Christ encounters us, strengthens his bond to us, and moves us to commit ourselves again to him and to each other.

¹⁴ Cf. Barth's treatment of the covenant as the presupposition of creation in Church Dogmatics, III, 1, paragraph 4I.

456 - Sacraments as Visible Words

VI

We have spoken about baptism and the Lord's Supper as effective signs of the reality of Christ and his benefits, and suggested one way of understanding the relation between the signs and the reality in the case of the Lord's Supper. There are other rites which came to be considered sacraments in the church when it began with a general definition of sacrament. It is possible to speak of other ways the church lives out the fact of reconciliation (for example, marriage, anointing the sick, ordaining people to their forms of the ministry) as sacramental expressions of the church's new life in Christ. In these cases, however, the peculiar link between sign and reality is not accompanied by explicit words of institution,¹⁵ but what could be meant by such sacramental expressions is that they are ritual actions by which faith is strengthened and the corporate life of believers is ordered in ministry. In this general sense it is quite arbitrary to fix the number of such sacramental actions; there is a sense in which all the Christian's life and every aspect of the community's corporate worship and mission have a sacramental quality.

Whether or not one considers all of life in a sacramental light, baptism and the Lord's Supper have an ethical significance that goes beyond the way those receiving them have their faith confirmed and strengthened.¹⁶ Engaging in these acts of the new covenant re-engages the community in its witness in the political, economic, social, and aesthetic dimensions of life also outside the church. When the Christian community continues to be divided at the very table which is their place of unity, a false scandal is perpetuated and the church's ministry of reconciliation is enormously hindered. When persons are baptized in communities which appear to be only minimally aware of the content and momentum of the faith, the question is raised whether the act is much more than the self-perpetuation of a religiously-inclined association.¹⁷ That is the way the matter must be put-that the question is

¹⁵ Rahner broadens the idea of institution to mean the institution, the foundation, of the church as the sacrament so that specific words of Christ are not necessary for a cultic act to be designated a sacrament. "The institution of a sacrament can (it is not necessarily implied that it must always) follow simply from the fact that Christ founded the church with its sacramental nature" (The Church and the Sacraments, p. 4 1). Rahner is correct about the priority of the ecclesial setting of sacramental action, though this emphasis should not detract from the importance of Christ's words, as remembered by the proclaiming apostolic community, for setting apart special signs within the receiving community.
¹⁶ Cf. B. de Margerie, The Sacraments and Social Progress, Franciscan Herald Press, Chicago, 1974; J. Segundo, The Sacraments Today, Orbis, Maryknoll, New York, 1974.
¹⁷ J. Moltmann, quite in line with Barth's earlier criticism, argues that "The way to a new, more authentic baptismal practice will be from infant to adult baptism. By adult baptism we mean the baptism of those who believe, are called, and confess their faith" (The Church and the Power of the Spirit, Harper and Row, New York, 1977, p. 240). For the arguments for retaining both practices within the context of a confessing and covenanting community, see the "Statement on Baptism" adopted by the 184th General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., Willis, op. cit., pp. 36-53.

457 - Sacraments as Visible Words

raised-for to give a confident answer of "No" would be to take God's place, who alone can judge, and would be to make human motivation more important than the sovereignty of grace. Moreover, if scrupulousness in either baptism or celebrating the Lord's Supper gets the upper hand, the result would not be a recovery of the vital role of these sacraments in the life of the church but their neglect through fear and finally disuse.

The main point in the ethical significance of the sacraments is precisely that the order of grace, faith, good works not be reversed. The main ethical point of the sacraments is not that they are good works of witness done by good people, but rather that they are effective signs of how God encounters sinners and moves them by Word and Spirit to repentance and assurance of pardon, to equip them for Christ's ministry of reconciliation through them in all dimensions of life. It is out of thanksgiving for their freely given and freely reinforced identity as reconciled and reconciling members of his body that men and women act boldly in politics, in the economic order, in social transformation, in aesthetics.¹⁸ All that they do is an expression of their thankful response, and in all that they do they count on being under both the judgment and the acceptance of the God whom they know in Christ.

In the renewal of the covenant, believers are strengthened and enabled to grow in their unity with him who sided with and continues to side with everyone who is in need of judgment and acceptance. In actively remembering Christ's sacrifice, in renewing its identity as a people united to him who continues to make intercession on their behalf, the members of Christ's body in celebrating the eucharist offer themselves again in his ministry of reconciliation

¹⁸ "Anyone who celebrates the Lord's supper in a world of hunger and oppression does so in complete solidarity with the sufferings and hopes of all men, because he believes that the Messiah invites all men to his table and because he hopes that they will all sit at table with him. In the mysteries, the feast separates the initiated from the rest of the world. But Christ's messianic feast makes its participants one with the physically and spiritually hungry all over the world" (Moltmann, op. cit., p. 258). Cf. also de Margerie, op. cit., chapter six; and the section on "Eucharist and Humanbrotherhood" in G. Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, Orbis, Maryknoll, New York, 1973, pp. 262-279.