One traditional view of the Catholic sacramental patrimony holds that the seven sacraments are channels of God’s grace. Indeed, the Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches:
Through the Sacraments, as through a channel, must flow into the soul the efficacy of the Passion of Christ, that is, the grace which He merited for us on the altar of the cross, and without which we cannot hope for salvation. Hence, our most merciful Lord has bequeathed to His Church, Sacraments stamped with the sanction of His word and promise, through which, provided we make pious and devout use of these remedies, we firmly believe that the fruit of His Passion is really communicated to us.
My point here is not to arm wrestle with this formal teaching of the church. Rather, I note that at times this teaching has been understood to mean that these channels of grace are more or less exclusive means by which believers encounter the grace of God. Additionally, this teaching has been understood at times to mean that these channels are for the benefit of individual believers as individual believers. Outside the wall of the church, the world is quite literally pro-fane (outside the temple). Sacraments nourish believers to make their way in this grace-less world.
Among others, Karl Rahner has argued against this view. (See his seminal “Considerations on the Active Role of the Person in the Sacramental Event” in vol. 14 of Theological Investigations). Drawing in part on the insights of Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, and others, official Catholic teaching at Vatican II moved toward the idea that the church itself is “like a sacrament” (Lumen gentium 1). Subsequent statements, though not possessing conciliar authority, have applied the term “sacrament” to Jesus Christ. Examples include:
- Commission for Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the World Methodist Council. The Apostolic Tradition (Singapore, 1991) 89: A way forward may lie in deeper common reflection on the nature of sacrament. Christ, “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15), may be thought of as the primary sacrament revealing God’s nature and purpose and enabling us to know and serve him.”
- Official German Catholic-Lutheran Dialogue, Communio Sanctorum: The Church as Communion of Saints (2000) 86: “Together we confess that Jesus Christ, true God and true human, is the primal sacrament, in whom the living God shares himself with humanity.”
- Lutheran-Roman Catholic Dialogue Commission for Finland, Communion in Growth (2017) 29: “Just as Christ is called the original sacrament, so the church may be called the fundamental sacrament.”
- Lutheran-Roman Catholic Dialogue Commission for Finland, Communion in Growth (2017) 63: “We agree that Christ is the original sacrament and that the Church is the body of Christ.”
Many sacramental theologians think in terms of levels of sacramentality. Christ is the sacrament of God, the real symbol of God’s efficacious love and grace in the world. The church is sacrament of Christ, a real symbol of Christ’s love and grace in the world. The seven sacraments, then, are fundamental realizations and manifestations of the church. Sacrosanctum concilum 2 put it this way:
For the liturgy, “through which the work of our redemption is accomplished,” most of all in the divine sacrifice of the Eucharist, is the outstanding means whereby the faithful may express in their lives, and manifest to others, the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true Church.
So far, so good. Yet writers such as Kevin Irwin have argued that this scaffolding notion of sacramentality can still imply a world outside of liturgy that is, as such, without God and without grace. Such thinkers have argued for a sacramental vision of the cosmos, for if creation were to lack the capacity to mediate God’s grace and presence, then there would be no seven sacraments nor even a Christ. If matter cannot mediate God, then the Incarnation founders. If matter is, on the other hand, always at least potentially grace-full, a different line of thinking emerges.
Irwin writes:
If these avenues were followed, then sacraments can be understood to mirror a much wider sacramental vision of all of reality and the celebration of sacraments can come to be appreciated as the things which humans need in order for them to appreciate and interpret the world in which they live. What will result is a sacramental theology that combines humans’ redemption and freedom from sin with a deepened sense of sacraments as crucial means which humans need to experience and use in order to revere the goodness of God’s good creation and to see how God is discovered in all of creation and human life.*
Irwin is by no means the only one to advance such claims but the passage above suffices to illustrate the point. The three levels of sacramentality delineated above presume this sacramental vision. What would it mean, I wonder, to celebrate Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, and the Feast of Corpus Christi with this sacramental vision firmly in mind?
* Kevin Irwin, “Sacramentality and the Theology of Creation: A Renewed Paradigm for Sacramental Theology,” Louvain Studies 23 (1998): 159-179 at 165.