A Living Text

Why Sacraments are not Means of Grace

 Though the phrase “means of grace” has a long history, it is unhelpful in trying to understand the sacraments with precision. “Is the claim that ‘water is a means for washing’ better than ‘water washes’?“

“Talking about the sacraments as “means” tends to mechanize them, turning the sacraments into machines that deliver grace. [...] Shortly after the apostolic period, theologians began to treat grace as a kind of “created thing,”  “force,” or “energy” communicated through the sacraments. Ultimately, this model rests on a mistaken doctrine of God, for there is no impersonal force in God, nor is there any “energy” that mediates between God and creation.”

“…we should simply say that the sacraments are among the benefits that Christ has graciously given to us. Sacraments are not means of grace, but themselves graces, gifts of a gracious God.”

Writing in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik says of G.K. Chesterton:

In these books, Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis’s intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas’s pedantic religiosity, as Chesterton seems to. His writing suffers from conversion sickness. Converts tend to see the faith they were raised in as an exasperatingly makeshift and jury-rigged system: Anglican converts of Catholicism are relived not to have to defend Henry VIII’s divorces; Jewish converts to Christianity are relieved to get out from under the weight of all those strange Levitical laws on animal hooves. The newly adopted faith, they imagine, is a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time and the cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday. An outsider sees the Church as a dreamy compound of incense and impossibility, and, overglamorizing its pretensions, underrates its adaptability. A Frenchman or an Italian, even a devout one, can see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human institution, the way patriotic Americans see the post office, recognizing the frailty and even the occasional psychosis of its employees without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver the message. Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who has just made his first trip to the post office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will send it anywhere, literally anywhere you like, across a continent and an ocean, in any weather! The fact that the post office attracts time-servers, or has produced an occasional gun massacre, is only proof of the mystical enthusiasm that the post office alone provides! Glorifying the postman beyond what the postman can bear is what you do only if you’re new to mail.

Rod Dreher (Orthodox via the Catholic Church) comments on this:

Boy, does this feel familiar to me, and I can see now (from my own experience) why converts tend to wear on cradle believers (and vice versa: little exasperates a convert more than a cradle believer’s apparent inability to get excited about the Amazing Wonderful Church). Again, I can’t discern the justice of Gopnik’s judgment re: Chesterton’s writing, because I’ve never read enough of his apologetics to know. But this feels right to me. It also gives me insight into why I don’t have and never had that convert’s glow about Orthodoxy. I didn’t believe when I left it that Catholicism was a jury-rigged makeshift system, nor did I believe that Orthodoxy was a uniquely fabulous thing. I’m glad not to have those illusions about either faith, but it does take some of the romance out of the thing.

It took me eight years of on and off reading, but today I finished reading The Institutes of the Christian Religion all 1,258 narrow-typed pages of it! I started the book years ago as a new Calvinist, eager to digest the whole thing. As I do with most books, I put it down and picked it up again over periods of time. Finally, in the past month I determined to finish the thing off and today I crossed the finish line.

The only reason I persisted in reading the work was because I started it and wanted the satisfaction of having read it cover to cover. It was exceptionally tedious in places, and I really got tired of his pejorative language over time. He constantly refers to opponents as impious, dogs, raving, mad, Sophists, and so forth. It is probably a product of the age in which he lived. I suspect that most writers of all sides spoke like that during his day, but it seems really hollow in our age.

The way that the book ended seems odd to me. He made no effort to summarize or tie things together, he just finished up his last subject, and that’s it. He intended the book for theological students as an introduction to the Bible, and it seems crazy to me in our day to think that before someone embarks on studying the Bible, they would first need to read 1,258 pages of Calvin! 

There are sections of great lucidity that shed much light on topics that are common theological flash-points, and there are other sections that are dull and dreary. I think it’s safe to say that he could never get this book published today, at least in its current form. The book is one of those valuable tools to understand, as it is one of the few really foundational texts of Western Civilization. Perhaps someday I will finish the other foundational work that I am stuck in - The City of God. I find it equally dull in many places, and have set it aside for now.

Forbes has an article discussing how relics are still sold today in a way that sound Medieval. This is a pagan practice, pure and simple, that was imported into the church. It is sad that it still persists.

Rushdoony has an insight that I had never thought of before regarding the Ecumenical Councils:

It was this hatred of Biblical certainty that the early councils had to war against. The ecumenical councils of the early church were in their purpose and nature very different from the modern councils and ecumenical efforts of the church. First, the early councils had as their primary purpose the defense and establishment of truth, not unity. Unity had to be established on the foundation of truth, not truth as a product of unity. The councils came together for the purpose of conflict, the battle of truth against error, and any unity on other than the whole truth of Scripture was anathema. Second, the concern of the councils was primarily the faith, not the church. Institutionally, the church suffered because of the conflict, but theologically it flourished and ensured its survival and growth. The modern ecumenical movement, and modern councils, are thus in purpose and work in direct contrast to the early councils: their concern is with unity, and with the institution, not the faith primarily.

The article is called Splitting Up, and says in part:

Last year the Church of the Resurrection in suburban West Chicago closed its doors and put its building up for sale. The Episcopal congregation had suffered membership losses 14 years earlier when some conservative members left to start their own church, also called the Church of the Resurrection, in nearby Glen Ellyn. The new congregation later aligned itself with the Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMIA), which is connected to the Anglican Church in Rwanda.

The new Church of the Resurrection later experienced its own split, with some members leaving to launch the Church of the Great Shepherd—also affiliated with AMIA—in Wheaton. The Church of the Great Shepherd eventually closed its doors, but not before a 2004 split led to the formation of the Church of the Savior back in West Chicago. During this time the ranks of St. Mark’s, an Episcopal congregation in Glen Ellyn, had been swelling—until the Episcopal Church consecrated an openly gay bishop in 2003, whereupon many St. Mark’s members left to form All Souls, still another AMIA church, in Wheaton. Meanwhile, another split at the original Church of the Resurrection in West Chicago, which had experienced renewed growth, led to the creation of the Church of the Resurrection Anglican, a church which is overseen by the archbishop of Uganda. So now there are two Resurrection churches in the area, both formed in exodus from the original—now defunct—Church of the Resurrection, and both affiliated with African Anglican bodies, not with the Episcopal Church in the United States, sometimes abbreviated as TEC.

This is unsettling. I think that the opposition to TEC is the only thing uniting AMiA/CANA and others. You can see from this article that on women’s ordination we are fractured. Obviously on the ground we are
fractured. And I don’t see any way for Anglo-Catholics and Reformed Anglicans to get along in the long run - the doctrinal differences are real, and cannot be hidden.

The author asks: “The question for the Anglican Mission in the Americas is whether antagonism toward the Episcopal Church is enough to shape a coherent Anglican identity in a complex global setting.”

I would answer, “no.” There is no way that antagonism is enough of an identity. The identity is to be found in Biblical saturation and a mature theology as articulated by early Anglican divines - but where is that happening?

Probably not much. He attacks the idea of factions in the church being called by a leader’s name when he writes about monasticism:

And that there might be no doubt as to their separation, they have given themselves the various names of factions. They have not been ashamed to glory in that which Paul so execrates, that he is unable to express his detestation too strongly. Unless, indeed, we suppose that Christ was not divided by the Corinthians, when one teacher set himself above another; and that now no injury is done to Christ when, instead of Christians, we hear some called Benedictines, others Franciscans, others Dominicans, and so called, that while they affect to be distinguished from the common body of Christians, they proudly substitute these names for a religious profession.

LDS professor Richard Sherlock offers a provocative thesis regarding the nature of the LDS Church. He writes:

These remarks are a prelude to a far-reaching claim I wish to make about Mormonism. Mormonism represents a hierarchical ecclesiastical order that holds special powers of priesthood and leadership combined with an emphasis on personal obedience and righteous works as having merit before God, which is at least Annabaptist in its flavor and background. In more traditional terms theological terms, Mormonism combines an authoritative magisterium with an emphasis on righteous works characteristic in Christian theology and history with its exact opposite.

In other words, the LDS Church has a Catholic hierarchy, with an Annabaptist, radically Pelagian theology and practice. In fact, Sherlock offers great honesty when he says:

These [Book of Mormon] passages and others do not articulate a strong theology of grace as clearly as Luther or Calvin may have wished. There is a Pelagian (or semi-Pelagian) ring to a number of the passages, and individuals who have claimed that Mormonism is essentially a modern Pelagianism are not entirely mistaken in such an assessment.

I am reading and thoroughly enjoying English Literature in the Sixteenth Century by C.S. Lewis. The man must have been a voracious reader, because he seems to have a good working knowledge of every work that he discusses. His insights in this book are the sharpest that I have ever seen them. To me, it is far better than his other popular works. He discusses Calvinism and Calvin and writes:

Many surrendered to, all were influenced by, the dazzling figure of Calvin. It ought to be easier for us than for the nineteenth century to understand his attraction. He was a man born to be the idol of revolutionary intellectuals; an unhesitating doctrinaire, ruthless and efficient in putting his doctrine into practice. [...]

Modern parallels are always to some extent misleading. Yet, for a moment only, and to guard against worse misconceptions, it may be useful to compare the influence of Calvin on that age with the influence of Marx on our own; or even of Marx and Lenin in one, for Calvin had both expounded the new system in theory, and set it going in practice. This will at least serve to eliminate the absurd idea that Elizabethan Calvinists were somehow grotesque, elderly people, standing outside the main forward current of life. In their own day they were, of course, the very latest thing. unless we can imagine the freshness, the audacity, and (soon) the fashionableness of Calvinism, we shall get our whole picture wrong. It was the creed of progressives, even of revolutionaries. It appealed strongly to those tempers that would have been Marxist in the nineteen-thirties. The fierce young don, the learned lady, the courtier with intellectual leanings, were likely to be Calvinists.

In the latest issue of First Things is a long letter from N.T. Wright to the magazine responding to some comments made by Fr. Neuhaus. Within this long letter, Wright makes some very telling observations on two churches. First, on Rome, Wright says:

…the “centering authority” in the most ancient church was of course Jerusalem; and then the five great sees, working together; and only gradually, and for a long time controversially, Rome.

Then, discussing the new heavens and new earth that will come when Jesus returns, and Neuhaus’ knock on Wright as sounding like Joseph Smith, Wright says:

I suspect that one of the reasons the Mormons were able to gain credence for their very concrete eschatalogical expectation was that the Western Protestant church, precisely at that period, was eliminating the ancient concrete eschatalogical expectation.