The Red Book on sacraments

This is the seventh and last look at the volume I have been called “The Red Book”. The first post of mine on the book can be found here. And at the risk of “blowing the gaff” of anonymity, a review of book by an Evangelical Protestant can be found here. For now I would like to examine the chapter of The Red Book on sacraments—which for these Protestant authors of course means baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

To my delight and surprise, the authors recognize the saving importance of baptism as “the way someone came to the Lord”. With their customary willingness to jettison their own ancestral Evangelical tradition, Valentinus and Marcion write, “Nowhere in all the New Testament do we find any person being led to the Lord by a sinner’s prayer...Instead, unbelievers in the first century were led to Jesus Christ by being taken to the waters of baptism.” I quite agree. The authors however go on to fault the church for requiring “in the early second century” a “period of instruction, prayer and fasting” before baptism (i.e. a catechumenate). For Valentinus and Marcion, then “baptism became a rigid and embellished ritual that borrowed much from Jewish and Greek culture—elaborate with blessing the water, full disrobing, the uttering of a creed, anointing oil with exorcism...it had devolved into an act associated with works rather than with faith.” It is difficult to understand why insisting that converts be instructed before baptism would be problematic. It is even more difficult to understand why liturgical prayers or full disrobing (did they suppose that converts in the first century were baptized fully clothed?) should make baptism into “an act associated with works”. Once again, it seems that any development in liturgical or pastoral praxis is automatically ruled out of court. The authors of The Red Book seem to demand that nothing should change after the first century—a demand which, if met, would mean that the New Testament canon would not exist.

My guess is that they saw from the New Testament that the apostles did not wait until new converts were instructed before baptizing them (e.g. Acts 8:36-38), and so they concluded that this must be our practice also. It misses the point that the apostles’ ministry was sui generis, a category all by itself. Paul, for example, baptized his converts immediately because he was not in town for that long, and had no other choice. For the same reason he ordained some of his converts right away, without waiting for them to mature (see Acts 14:23). But after the local churches he founded were established, a different praxis immediately came into play, and new converts were not ordained right away, but had to wait until they had matured somewhat (see 1 Tim. 5:22). Doubtless it was the same with baptism, and new converts were not baptized until they were instructed. When The Red Book dates the catechumenate to “the early second century”, it might as well date it to the late first century, since the change happened then. A change in baptismal praxis did not occur in the early second century after the apostles had all died, but when the apostles left town in the first century, and the churches they established were left on their own.

In their analysis of “the Lord’s Supper”, Valentinus and Marcion have little to offer beyond polemic. They correctly note that originally the anamnesis or memorial that the Lord commanded to be made (Lk. 22:19-20) was part of an actual meal (hence Paul’s designation of it as part of a “supper” in 1 Cor. 11:20). They date the separation of the Eucharist from the meal to “the late second century”, whereas it was in fact separated by the apostles in the late first century (see the post on church buildings here). Oddly enough, they quote Dix’s The Shape of the Liturgy to support their late date, whereas Dix himself contends that it took place “before the writing of the first of our gospels” (Shape, p. 101).

Valentinus and Marcion nowhere explain their understanding of the Lord’s Supper; they say “ we cannot concern ourselves with the theological minutiae that surround the Lord’s Supper”. We are therefore left to guess what they believe. All that they say is that “the Lord’s Supper was a festive communal meal... when believers...broke the bread and passed it around. Then they ate their meal, which then concluded after the cup was passed around...The Lord’s Supper was essentially a Christian banquet...a joyful, down-to-earth, nonreligious meal in someone’s living room”. The point of meal seems to be that it provided “a dramatic and concrete picture of Christ’s body and blood”—i.e. a visual aid illustrating the fact that Jesus died for us. Students of “theological minutiae” will recognize this understanding as classic Zwinglianism, or a merely symbolic understanding of the Eucharist.

It seems that for the authors of The Red Book this Zwinglian interpretation is so obvious that it needed no defense (or even clear statement). They accordingly saved their ink for polemic: the Eucharist of the post-apostolic church is “a study in abstract and metaphysical thought”, the result of “the growing influence of pagan religious ritual”, “a priestly ritual that was to be watched at a distance”, influenced by “pagan mystery religions, which were clouded with superstition”, something “taken with glumness by the priest”. The priest “was believed to have the power to call God down from heaven and confine Him to a piece of bread”.

Since Solomon says, “Do not answer a fool according to his folly” (Prov. 26:4), I will not say much in response. Instead, I will only point that the Eucharist was called a sacrifice by the Didache as early as 100 A.D. (earlier than this, Clement of Rome spoke of the clergy as “offering the gifts”); and that St. Paul referred to eating the bread as sharing not just bread but the body of Christ (1 Cor. 10:16), so that to profane the Eucharist by partaking unworthily was to “be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord” (1 Cor. 11:27). People who did this became sick, and some even died (1 Cor. 11:30). None of this sounds like merely “a dramatic and concrete picture of Christ’s body and blood”, but rather of a sacramental sharing of Christ’s actual Body and Blood. St. Ignatius of Antioch, dying a martyr in about 107 A.D. and therefore serving as bishop in the first century, was emphatic that the Eucharist was a sacrifice and was Christ’s true Body and Blood. For him, it was only heretics who “do not confess the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ which suffered for our sins and which the Father raised up” (Smyrnaeans, ch. 7). All of this witnesses to the apostolic tradition of the Eucharist as sacrificial and as the true Body and Blood of the Lord.

To sum up this and all the other reviews of The Red Book in this series, I suggest that everyone, including the authors whose work I have been examining, has a choice—a choice between trusting that God guided His Church as it went through history, or that He abandoned it as soon as the apostles died. The apostolic trajectory we see in the pages of the New Testament continued without a break as the mid-first century became the late first century, and then as the late first century became the early second century. Attentive readers of that history can see an unbroken continuity—a continuity preserved even today in the Orthodox Church. When Christ promised that His Spirit would guide His Church into all truth (Jn. 16:13) and that the gates of hell would not prevail against it (Mt. 16:18), He was making history into the arena in which He would work. We can trust His Church as it progresses through history, because we can trust His promise. To confine our faith in the Lord’s guidance to the first century alone and to reject everything that followed as if it were betrayal and apostasy, is ultimately to refuse to trust the Lord Himself. The issue is not The Red Book (for which reason I have used pseudonyms both for the book and its authors). The real issue is the reliability of the promises of Christ.

A Christmas Meditation

In becoming incarnate as a baby in Bethlehem long ago, God revealed a change in His modus operandi. That is, in all His previous visitations (such as His appearance to Israel on Mount Sinai when He gave them His Law, or His theophanies to Isaiah in the Temple or to Ezekiel by the River Chebar), He came to us from the outside. While residing in heaven, (I am aware of the limitations of using such spatial metaphors and language), He spoke to us on earth from a distance. The old dichotomies, held by Jew and pagan alike from time immemorial, remained intact —dichotomies such as heaven/ earth, spiritual/ physical, divine/ human. God remained out there, in heaven, far away, and we remained on earth, at a safe distance. Indeed, the whole apparatus of Law, priesthood, sacrifice and Temple was created to maintain this distance, allowing us on earth to have limited communion with the heavenly God. Despite all the talk about God’s Presence in His Temple, everyone in Israel knew that God did not reside in His Tabernacle or Temple like a man resided in his house. Even Solomon, who spent a fortune building and beautifying the Temple, knew this: “Will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain You—how much less this House which I have built!” (1 Kg. 8:27). God remained transcendent. His visitations to men and contact with them were visitations from the outside.

God is the God of the unexpected—which is abundantly proven by the fact that He chose to be born of a virgin. He didn’t have to choose such a biological beginning. Jewish expectation was that the Messiah would be born pretty much like everyone else, and the passage in Isaiah 7 often quoted was not interpreted by them as referring directly to the Messiah. In the Hebrew, the text said, “Behold, an almah—a young woman—shall conceive”, and it seemed to refer to events in the eighth century B.C. The word almah was translated into Greek as parthenos, a virgin, and Christians have ever since St. Matthew seen that this could not be a coincidence. But the point is that Jews did not expect their Messiah to be born of a virgin. In choosing a virgin birth for His Son God was not acting simply out of desire to fulfill Jewish expectation. He was doing the unexpected. After such a beginning, it should have come as no surprise to find Him continuing to do unexpected things, such as dying in disgrace on a Roman cross and rising from the dead shortly thereafter.

Perhaps the most unexpected thing God ever did in Israel was this change of modus operandi. For the incarnation meant that now God had invaded and was visiting us from the inside, and that the healing and salvation of the world would occur from the inside out. Everything in Israel’s sacred history had primed them to look upward and outward. Even the posture of prayer taught them this: one prayed by lifting up one’s hands and looking up to heaven. (Kneeling and bowing the head had no liturgical pedigree in Israel.) One looked up to find God, expecting to hear His voice thundering from heaven. When signs came, they came from heaven (see Mk. 8:11), and Jews were trained to think of God as enthroned in heaven far above them.

They were therefore singularly unprepared for His change of approach, and to find that God had come to live beside them. Now God could be found in their midst—going to the same school that they went to, working in the carpenter’s shop that they frequented, attending the same wedding in Cana that they attended, eating and drinking in their presence and teaching in their streets (Lk. 13:26). Poor little drummer boys could approach God on the first Christmas day and say, in the words of the Christmas song, “I am a poor boy too”. God had become a poor boy, a carpenter, a field preacher with nowhere to lay His head. He was now in their midst, Emmanuel, sharing their lot and their load—truly, the God of the unexpected.

This change of approach, this invasion from within, means that the old dichotomies have been overcome and overturned. No more is heaven incompatible with earth, the spiritual incompatible with the physical, God incompatible with Man. In Christ, divinity and humanity dwell as one, and matter has become potentially spirit-bearing. That is the point of the Church’s sacraments. They are physical, and work-a-day and common; they are also Spirit-bearing.

All the sacraments are drawn from our daily existence. Daily and common things like baths, meals of bread and wine, and oil (used as a daily cosmetic—it was only when one fasted that one refrained from daily anointing one’s head—see Mt. 6:17) became the “stuff” of sacraments. In a kind of incarnational extension, these common daily items and activities became the God-ordained means of accessing spiritual power. To receive the new birth, now one took a bath (i.e. received baptismal immersion). To receive spiritual strength and life, one had a meal of bread and wine in the Eucharist. To receive the Holy Spirit and healing, one was anointed with oil. The Church’s life was scandalously secular, in that it used these secular parts of life to a new spiritual purpose. Because of the incarnation, matter was now sanctified, and the physical world saved. Invasion and help and salvation had come—not from the outside, but the inside. God did not appear again on a fiery mountain and speak with the voice of thunder. He appeared as a baby, as one of us, and spoke with a baby’s cry. This is the true scandal and miracle of Christmas.

Admittedly, such a change of modus operandi was of course hard to keep up with. Many in Israel could not keep up, and so rejected Christ’s claim to divinity, and sank into hardness of heart. Keeping up with the God of the unexpected requires spiritual flexibility. Or, to use the Biblical term, humility. Christmas challenges us to be willing lay aside our expectations, our prejudices, our demands. We come as poor boys and girls to God, who has Himself become a poor boy for us in a manger. By coming to Him in humility, (the same way He came to us), we allow His spiritual invasion of the world to reach and heal our hearts also. Christ is born! The saving invasion has begun.