Sacramentalism and Authority from Martin Luther to Rowan Williams I gave this talk at Manchester Cathedral, September 2008-09-26
Sacramentalism is an area of theology I’ve always found it quite difficult to think about. Maybe that’s because my instincts are liberal Protestant rather than Catholic, and I’m sceptical of too much emphasis on it – or rather the usual form of emphasis on it. Looking back on my early impressions of religion, the whole area was quite confusing. My family attended a fairly high Anglican church. I suppose I gradually got the impression there was something serious going on up there towards the end of the service, and I quite liked going up for a blessing – everyone seemed smart and proper as they quietly walked up, while the organ played a rather sombre tune. It seemed a serious, grown-up, official occasion. There’s already a link here with my title – taking communion had something to do with authority. And that was partly about the theatre, or staging, of the service.
At school I was involved in a semi-evangelical Christian Union, and of course the emphasis was on fun and fellowship, not the stiff offfical rites of the church. Getting confirmed felt rather dull and dutiful – this was the dry dusty side of religion. I was confirmed by the bishop of London in St Paul’s Cathedral – he put his hand on my head, and then I receieved a wafer and sip of wine for the first time. So again, communion seemed to have something to with authority – a bishop has to initiate you. But it was all very understated. A bit later when I heard about Catholics making a big deal of ‘first communion’, it seemed a bit odd to get so excited about it.
As a student I was interested in religious-socialism. If the whole point was bringing about the kingdom of God, then what was the relevance of the eucharist? Many religious socialists I read were Anglo-Catholics who said that the eucharist has to be reinvented as a sort of revolutionary symbol, a first glimpse of the coming new order. Nice idea, but it didn’t feel like that at any church I tried attending. It felt like the same old obscure traditionalism. I had more sympathy with someone like Tolstoy, who said that the old rituals were in the way of a new understanding of the Gospel. I read Bonhoeffer’s late writings and agreed that the rituals of the church were failing to communicate the gospel to modern people.
Gradually my attitude to sacramentalism changed, or half-changed. I began to acknowledge that sacramentalism, and ritual, is absolutely basic to Christianity. I was influenced by postmodern thought, which emphasises the role of doing things and signifying things. But I remain sceptical of the way in which it is tied up with church authority. My basic question is: does sacramentalism have to be regulated, as the churches suggest?
That’s a brief sketch of where I’m coming from – now I want to discuss a few thinkers’ approaches to the sacraments, and to how they are related to ecclesial authority.
First a word on the origins of this very confusing concept, sacramentalism. It’s from the Latin word ‘sacramentum’, most often used in relation to a pledge of allegiance a Roman soldier gave – or to the mark with which he was branded or tattooed - the logo of the regiment, partly used to round up deserters. It means you are under authority. This suggests that a sacrament was simply a sign – a marker, like wearing a cross round your neck. But actually the word came to refer to rituals, and what were called ‘mysteries’ in the Greek tradition – rites with a mysterious, quasi-magical dimension.
So within the etymology of the word there’s a tension – is a sacrament essentially just a sign, a mark of identity, or is it a ritual miracle? As we’ll see that question keeps resurfacing.
Both things are going on in the early history of baptism and the eucharist. These are rituals in which God is doing something – being present to his followers, and effecting a change in the new member – and they are the community’s acts of self-definition – only fully serious Christians were permitted to attend the eucharist; it was a sign of full commitment. Of course these rites were fundamental to the emergence of the church as a coherent body - a priestly hierarchy gradually emerged to oversee them, and bishops became seen as essential regulators of orthodox practice.
It could be said that baptism and the eucharist justify the emergence of centralised authority. Because these rituals must be done right, there must be a regulating authority. And of course with Constantine this authority became state-backed.
During the medieval era, the Mass was obviously the centre of Church worship. And it was the pinnacle of a priest’s power, that he performed the miracle of transubstantiation. The laity probably only took communion about once a year, and probably just the bread not the wine. Of course priestly power was also expressed in the other sacraments. There were seven sacraments - as well as baptism and the Mass there were marriage, ordination, penance, confirmation, last rites. And of course sacramentlaism in a wider sense was pervasive – in veneration of saints and so on.
Luther was of course deeply embedded in this sacramental culture before he broke with Rome. His aim was to purge sacramentalism, get back to basics. The point of these sacraments is to proclaim God’s promise of salvation. They are like physical preaching. He stripped away all but the main two, eucharist and baptism – for a while he thought penance was authentic, then changed his mind. The rest had no basis in the New Testament.
This is set out in his work of 1520, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. The Roman Church perverts the Mass into a means of lording it over the laity, wowing them with priestly power. He attacks the withholding of the wine from the laity as contrary to scripture. If the laity want to receive the bread and wine, the priest has no right to deny it them. But he doesn’t quite say that the Christian has to receive communion to be authentically Christian. He’s free to choose. And there’s an interesting little aside here: ‘In former times, the desert Fathers for a long period did not receive the sacrament in any form.’
He then attacks the doctrine of transubstantiation – it’s rooted in the flawed philosophy of Aristotle, recycled by Aquinas - the tradition known as scholasticism. It’s a pseudo-science that obscures the need for faith. It claims to explain how the miracle of the eucharist works. But Luther does not deny the miracle - that Christ is really present in the bread and wine. He just rejects the need to have a certain theory about how it happens. It’s an expression of the power of God’s word – because Christ once said ‘this is my body’, and told us to repeat the ritual, it is a re-occurring miracle. And of course the individual needs to have faith in this – to take communion is a demonstration of one’s faith in God’s promise. In a sense he’s making it more important to the Christian life – we all have the right to fully participate in this miracle.
But baptism is a rather different event – the infant has no faith to express. It’s really the congregation that expresses its faith in each person’s salvation – and of course when the child grows up it must have faith in the meaningfulness of its baptism. He says that he favours full-immersion baptism: it is not doctrinally necessary, ‘but I consider it to be a beautiful act to give the sign of baptism as fully and completely as possible.’ So he thought the sacraments should be impressive, pieces of religious theatre perhaps. God decrees that his words of promise are ritually accompanied in this way - God’s word attains a sort of amplification, a sort of solidity. In the rest of the tract he attacks the Church’s other sacraments as tools of control – ways in which it claims divine authority for itself. So his purpose is to liberate the eucharist and baptism from clerical authoritarian error, to make them channels of God’s authority rather than the church’s, to detach them from moral legalism, and clerical power.
In relation to baptism, going back to basics is dangerous. Soon his movement was threatened by radicals who rejected infant baptism, saying it should be a conscious adult decision as in the New Testament. But this is subversive – it creates a voluntary subculture which accuses the wider religious culture of inauthenticity. Luther violently denounced these sectarians – religious culture needs official sanction, the backing of the state. If there’s too much diversity in sacramental practice, there’s a threat of disorder. Just as the state needs a monopoly of violence, it also needs a monopoly of sacramentalism.
So there’s something questionable about his claim to purify the sacraments, restore the New Testament meaning, and reject the meddling of an authoritative institution. The state has to do it instead of an independent church.
Something similar was happening in Swizterland under Zwingli – the reformation had to be official, state-supported. But Zwingli had a different view of the eucharist. He denied the real presence and said that the eucharist was just symbolic. He thought Luther was still infected by Roman superstition when he insisted on the real presence.
Zwingli reconceived the rite in an almost rationalist way: it was the pledge of the congregation’s allegiance; nothing magical happened. He pointed to the origin of ‘sacrament’ in the Roman military practice of swearing an oath of allegiance to the regimental banner, or flag. It was therefore a demonstration of the community’s identity. It’s like the American practice of swearing allegiance to the flag – a sacred act of community. But the idea that a unique miraculous action occurs is idolatry. God had ordained this sign, and that of baptism, for the marking-out of his people.
He said that infant baptism should be seen as the Christian version of circumcision: the sign of God’s covenant with his people. This is a realistic acknowledgement that baptism has changed its meaning since New Testament times, and is indeed more like circumcision. If infants are baptized into the official religious culture it’s not a dangerous act of commitment, as it was in the early church. I think baptism remains caught between these two functions – it’s a bit of a muddle.
Zwingli’s theology of the sacraments reflected his belief in the Christian community, which meant the city-state of Zurich, as the new Israel. This entails a fresh view of sacramentalism – it is everything that marks out the community’s covenant with God. Baptism and the eucharist are taken down from their pedestal, put in a wider context. Zwingli’s followers, including Calvin, weren’t satisfed with his symbolic approach, and moved half way to Luther – this is more than symbolism – there’s a real divine action that accompanies the symbolism, but the real presence of Christ is the wrong idea.
It seems as if the reformed tradition decides it needs to keep these two sacraments on a pedestal, in order to assert its own authority. If they are just signs then why can’t one stay in bed on Sunday morning and make the sign of the cross? And why can’t each local congregation decide on its own symbolic habits? If sacramentalism is rationalised in this way, it becomes open to debate, and loses an air of necessity. If you’re going to impose uniformity you need a pretty high view of the church rituals – it matters that they are performed exactly like this, by the authorised priests.
So it seems that the reformers discovered that a uniform religious culture needs to retain a high view of church rituals – to rethink sacramentalism in more general symbolic terms might be dangerous.
I want to jump ahead to seventeenth century England. The Tudor reformation was largely Lutheran in structure – with the state enforcing sacramental uniformity. The bishop played a central role, and so did the monarchy, which took on a fuller sacramental dimesnion – with more public ceremony, more cult.
Puritanism rose in response, claiming that these strong bishops were semi-Catholic; Puritans put more emphasis on preaching than on the eucharist, and preaching was, and is, much harder to regulate. A lot of popular puritan preachers were not ordained, which was a threat to the hierarchy.
Charles I launched a sort of counter-reformation, with the help of Archbishop Laud. A high, ritualised view of monarchy was tied up with a Catholic movement in the church. Ecclesiastical order was God’s primary medium of revelation; every service should be an awesome performance of this power. And there was a high view of ordained ministry, especially episcoapcy - bishops should be sacramental figures, living symbols of holy order. They were also granted a new level of political power.
And the result was a new level of Puritan resistance, leading to the civil war. I want to look at one particular theological response to this situation which is that of John Milton, who wrote religious prose as well as poetry.
In his first religious tract, in 1640, he begins by attacking Roman Catholicism – its ritualism and its authoritarianism go together – it stages impressive worship which excludes the laity. The Reformation got rid of this model in theory but it’s bounced back, in Laudianism. He attacks the bishops’ pomposity. Why should not we laugh ‘to see them under sail in all their lawn and sarcenet, their shrouds and tackle, with a geometrical rhomboids upon their heads’? There’s a lot more like that.
He hardly talks about the eucharist, but he implies that it ought to be a low-key, democratic thing, not a chance for priests to strut around. He even attacks the idea of any set pattern of worship, any uniformity – congregations should do as they please, with no central institution bossing them round.
He therefore rejects the Prayer Book – worship should be free, and a fixed liturgy is a straightjacket – and worse still it keeps us in thrall to the Roman Catholic model. He was broadly supportive of the Presbyterian, or Calvinist, movement, but began to see that it was rigid and centralizing in its own way. He wanted something more libertarian.
During the civil war and puritan revolution he argued for toleration of different forms of Protestant worship, with no central institution to impose orthodoxy. The only thing that shouldn’t be tolerated is a hierarchical, centralizing church that wants to impose uniformity. The state has to keep this out. That’s the definition of a liberal state – one that keeps out a power-hungry church.
His libertarian attitude to worship is very radical. To want a fixed liturgy is a failure of trust in God. who ‘every morning rains down new expressions into our hearts’, like he sent manna to the Jews: to fix liturgy is to horde manna, to let it ‘breed worms and stink’. So any form of worship that claims to be official, authoritative, orthodox is suspect – it idolizes a particular human tradition.
He wrote a theological treatise that he never published. Here again he shows skepticism towards sacramentalism, and the way in which it’s caught up in authority. The sacraments are ‘merely seals or symbols of salvation and grace for believers’, and therefore ‘not absolutely necessary’. Salvation is not dependent on these signs: so the Christian ‘can give thanks to God and commemorate the death of Christ in many other ways every day of his life, even if he does not do so in the ceremonial way which God has instituted.’ He rejects the idea that only priests can preside at the eucharist: ‘The early Christians are said to have taken part in it regularly and in their own homes . . . So I do not know why ministers should forbid anyone except themselves to celebrate the Lord’s Supper.’ The eucharist is a new version of the Passover meal, at which the head of each Jewish family presided, rather than a priest.
He treats baptism in a similar way - to baptize another Christian takes no magic power: if ‘any believer can preach the gospel, so long as he is endowed with certain gifts, it follows that any believer can administer baptism, because baptism is less important than the preaching of the gospel . . .’ So church tradition has put the eucharist and baptism on pedestals, and tied them to clerical power. They are not the most important forms of gospel-communication – the most important form is verbal proclamation - not just preaching from pulpits but all Christian speech and writing, which we can all do. And he sees his work as author and poet in this light – he is doing something sacramental in a wide sense. And this is why Protestantism elevates verbal communication – it has an intrinsic freedom; it can’t easily be regulated.
So for Milton the two main sacraments are ambiguous – they are scripturally instituted, and therefore we should theoretically do them – but in practice they are very likely to be tainted by institutional power – and to be used as a justification for that power. So we might find it necessary to keep our distance.
So he goes further than Luther or Calvin, in a new liberal direction – it’s not just the Roman church that makes ritual a tool of control, it’s any centralized institution. Ritual gravitates to being dangerous, to getting tangled up with illegitimate power.
His solution is the separation of church and state, so that the liberal Protestant state lets various forms of Protestantism coexist. We need a deregulated religious culture in which a thousand flowers bloom.
The point I want to make in relation to Milton is that the Protestant suspicion of sacramentalism is partly based in this deeply liberal concern – that an authoritarian institution shouldn’t control religious symbolism. Milton wants sacramentalism to be disinfected from this tradition. Milton’s rejection of an official sacramental culture does not entail a total rejection of sacramentalism. As we saw he wants literature to be more engaged in Christian communication, but it’s also wider than that. In one of his first tracts he states his ambition as a poet – it is to help create a new sort of Christian culture, full of art and learning. The state ought to fund a huge programme of religious education – not only ‘in pulpits’, but ‘in theatres, porches, or what other place or way may win most upon the people to receive at once both recreation and instruction.’ Porches refers to church porches where mystery plays used to be performed. So his vision is of religion spilling out of church, into what we now call ‘culture’, ‘the arts’, and ‘education’. So a liberal Protestant state ought to give rise to a new sort of religious culture that could be called a sacramental culture. We also saw a hint of this in Zwingli’s idea that culture as a whole should communicate the covenant.
On the other hand there is some truth to the idea that Protestantism moves away from a sacramental vision; it values linguistic expression at the expense of other forms, and it gravitates to rationalism. There’s a tendency to elevate abstract ideas over actual Christian practices. It gets caught up in the Enlightenment.
In the nineteenth century Newman said that Protestantism was infected by rationalist philosophy – therefore the Church of England needed to return to Catholic sacramentalism. To a large extent he was reviving the position of Archbishop Laud – his Anglo-Catholic followers made this tradition central to the Church.
Rowan Williams is of this tradition – he is a Catholic, or Anglo-Catholic theologian with a high view of sacramentalism. What’s interesting about him is that he also has a very open view of sacramentalism. He wants to rethink all of Christian life in terms of sacramentalism, and he uses recent cultural and philosophical thought in order to do so.
The best guide to his thought in this area is an essay of 1987, called The Nature of a Sacrament, in the collection On Christian Theology.
‘Sacraments are perhaps harder to understand the more we isolate them as a set (let alone a pair) of unique actions prescribed by Jesus as guaranteed and effective signs of the new covenant.’ Actually, he says, good Catholic theology has always had a wider account of sacramentalism. And in recent decades this has become more philosophically acute. Drawing on the Catholic poet and artist David Jones, and on Wittgenstein, he explains that all of human culture is at root about sign-making. This is a physical, bodily activity – it doesn’t belong to an abstract mental realm.
An entire culture can be seen as the sum of its sign-making – and this is evident in the Old Testament. ‘acts performed under the divine law are ‘significant’ of the God who brought the slaves out of Egypt…God’s nature is expressed in the life of his people…Here is a very pervasive and ordered ‘sacramentality’, a sign-making consciously extended to an enormous range of activities…the daily observation of Torah is sacramental to such a vivid degree that it can almost dispense with the cultic…As sign-makers in their observance of the Law, the whole of Israel is a priestly people.’
This helps us make sense of Jesus, who was ‘a sign-maker of a disturbingly revolutionary kind.’ He thus creates a new community, which signifies him, partly through its ritual actions. ‘it is not the fact of doing sacramental things that is special, humanly or religiously, but what the Church signifies in doing these things – the new covenant and new creation in the life death and resurrection of Jesus. In these acts the Church ‘makes sense’ of itself, as other groups may do, and as indiviuals do; but its ‘sense’ is seen as dependent on the creative act of God in Christ.’ Williams says that he is drawing on Aquinas, but there’s also an echo of Luther’s idea that the sacraments are physical proclamations of God’s grace. And before that the discussion of the Old Testament echoes Zwingli’s idea that sacramentalism is a total cultural matter – Williams implies that Christians should echo that general sacramentality. He concludes that God ‘makes the world, in Christ, to be his “sign” a form of living and acting that embodies his nature and purpose. Christian sign-making – in the whole of the community’s discipleship as in ritual acts – is a working in and with that creative energy.’
Elsewhere he writes of Christian ethics as essentially about signifying God – for Paul, he says, ‘the practice of the ethical life by believers is a communicative strategy, a discourse of some sort.’ This is how Christianity moves away from rules, from legalism – the point of religious ethics is to manifest God, and Christianity is freer than its parent religion of the idea that God wants to be communicated by fixed rules.
The question is – is this general sacramental vision still subject to institutional control. Or is Williams advocating an idea that has a centrifugal, anarchic force?
In one essay he applies his sacaramental approach to sexual ethics:
‘Neither legalism nor good intentions will deliver a properly Christian ethic of sexuality. What if we start from somewhere else? The gospel is about a man who made his entire life a sign that speaks of God and who left to his followers the promise that they to could be signs of God and make signs of God because of him..he creates the possibility of things and persons being in some way sacramental in the light of what he has done.’ And he explains that faithful sexual relationships can be manifestations of divine love. The implication, backed up by other writings of this period, is that a homosexual relationship can be authentically sacramental. The significance of this is that church teaching suggests otherwise – so we have an example of general sacramentalism being in conflict with church teaching. So maybe authentic sacramentalism will sometimes be forced outside church walls.
In general, Williams defends the church’s right to regulate Christian sign-making, to say what really counts. It must defend the integrity of its message, by issuing rules about ethics and ritual. Such rules clarify its core message, and protect its core practice, the eucharist. The church is the guardian of this supreme sign. To protect it, it must claim to have a sacramental monopoly - it is committed to the policing of all Christian sign-practice.
Williams often talks about this with reference to the early church – it had to keep out Gnosticism and Arianism and so on, and moral and doctrinal rules were needed. And more recently the church had to protect itself from secular ideologies like fascism. And it still has to protect itself from secularism. It’s through emphasis on the sacraments that Christianity can retain solid concrete form in the midst of secular culture. So to conclude I think Williams’ sacramental theology points in two directions. He is very serious about the postmodern idea that religion should be understood in terms of communicative action. This insight could be developed in a way that’s subversive of institutional orthodoxy, and perhaps it gravitates in that direction. It seems to encourage a new spirit of free-style Jesus-Christ communication. But Williams uses this model of general sacramentalism, or what he calls sacramentality, to do the opposite - to justify the exercise of ecclesial authority. Because there is a supreme sign-making practice – the eucharist – the whole complex and questionable phenomenon of church authority is needed. He has found a new postmodern way of defending the high-church model, but in my opinion there’s something precarious about this. It encourages us to ask whether there might be a better form of Christian sign-culture that dispenses with the ambiguities of ecclesial power.
There’s an interesting contrast between Milton and Williams, who are perhaps theological poles apart. For Milton the danger of ecclesiastical authoritarianism is a reason to be wary of the sacraments. For Williams the truth of sacramentalism is a reason to overcome one’s wariness of ecclesiastical authority.
In final conclusion, I think we should strive to combine Williams’ sacramentality with Milton’s critique of institutionalism. I think we need a new sort of Christian culture in which the old link between sacramentlaism and institutional authority is broken, and the signing of Jesus Christ is free.
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