This post has a strange history: it got a lot of attention when I first put it up, but after continuing to learn about the Christian faith I felt that my explanation was inadequate and perhaps even slightly inaccurate, and I wanted to erase it. However, instead of deleting the post as I often do with those with which I am dissatisfied, I left it up so that people could still read the comments, which I thought had merit.
Since then this page has been in my top post list. Most of the hits come from searches and I’m aware that people are likely not following the link to this article just so they can read the comments section. So, unwilling to disappoint my readers, I’ve decided to take another stab at it. This will not be a technical doctrinal thesis. My desire is to be able to tell people how I, as someone raised anti-Catholic, was able to embrace a faith (the Eastern Orthodox Church) that includes a very strong belief in sacraments as a normal, effective part of Christian life.
First of all, the endeavor of my personal religious search (going on 10 years now) has been to discover what is truly Christian. In so doing I have learned that though there are many teachings that are called Christian, they are not all equally authoritative. In our time there are tens of thousands of sects, and all of them claim to be understanding the Bible in the proper way. But there was a time, in fact a very long time, when the Christian Church was so committed to unity that it could travail and struggle through the most serious doctrinal questions and come out not only with a concensus but with a formulation - a way of speaking about the mysteries of the faith - that was specific and that became regulative for all Christians ever after.
We all, including Protestants, benefit from these things to this day. Without the struggles, the councils, the authority of the holy theologians and the faith and obedience of the first Christian millenium, there would be no sense that it’s orthodox to consider Jesus as God, to believe in the Trinity, and to list a specific group of New Testament books as scripture.
In other words, what’s become clear is that if I want to escape the hermeneutic nightmare and resulting fragmentation of modern-day Christianity, I must owe interpretive allegiance first of all to the established Christian teachings of the first millenium.
That means a lot of things, but for now we’re just talking about sacraments. Or, to use the Orthodox word, Mysteries. Today’s queasines about seeing grace attached to a physical object was never thought a Christian idea until very modern times.
There is always something about a Mystery that defies pinpoint definition. That’s why the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation was so odious in the nostrils of the reformers. It’s not that we can’t talk about the mysteries of the church within the church; it’s not that we can’t say what we are meeting there and what it is doing for us. But there will always be more there than we can say. Religion is made to be enacted, lived, and walked in - not primarily to be talked about. A true theologian is a person who communes with God, not one who mistakenly thinks he can define the Almighty. (My reluctance to define God should not be confused with the “Emergent” reluctance to say anything precise and confident on religious subjects at all. They are part of two very different ways of approaching religion.)
A Mystery - what is sometimes called a sacrament in Western terms - is a sort of bridge from the world of our senses to the world of our hearts, where God meets us.
It is an enactment of a religious truth that, through the power of grace, becomes an experience of the religious truth itself. In the Lord’s Supper, for instance, it is not simply the bread and wine that are symbols. Our eating them is likewise a symbol - a symbol for the fact that we must imbibe Christ for the nourishment of our souls, that our life comes from him. What Christians believe is that in participating in this enactment a person is participating not only in the symbol but in the thing being symbolized. Your actons represent “recieving Christ” and at the same time you are actually receiving Christ. You recieve him in eating the bread and wine; and if you want to be as bold as the mystical theologians of times past you can even say that you are eating his flesh and blood and that mystically the bread and wine are his flesh and blood. It is not that far off from a few things that Jesus himself said if you are not afraid to take them in their plain sense. It only requires some faith and a religious imagination that struggles to free itself from the materialistic viewpoint of our modern day.
However, if you want to know what this looks like in an actual service I will say this much. During the service, the bread and wine are brought out to pass between the people of the congregation, established a connection between the Body of Christ in the Church and the Body of Christ in the Eucharist. After much prayer and praising, the elder who stands in the altar for the congregation prays for mercy because of his owns sins, and with a certain amount of fear prays that God will “make” or “show” the bread and wine to be the body and blood of Christ. The people, kneeling, pray “Amen” all through this because it is the offering of all of the congregation. Then, remembering Christ’s sacrifice, everyone comes to eat and drink, believing that they themselves have in a mystery become present at that very sacrifice through their remembrance.
So in the Eucharist a Christian is really recieving Christ. This grace is attached to this form. If he approaches it with faith he will recieve Him to his benefit. If he approach sinfully he recieves Him to his damnation because although the grace is always there, the person has made himself unfit for this grace and it will not agree with him in that state.
Since we are talking about how a Protestant comes to accept such a thing, I think it would be well at this point to talk about The Protestant Sacrament. Yes, they retain one, though they don’t call it that.
Perhaps the most important moment in my spiritual life as a Baptist took place at camp. A rather politic, learned, gentle man in his own sphere was talking to us about how to read the Bible.
“The scriptures” he earnestly intoned “can literally become your spiritual food. You can be reading the page and seeing the Lord beyond the page, and it will literally be for the nourishment of your soul.”
This preacher was unusually articulate and was not in the habit of using the word ‘literally’ for mere emphasis, so I knew he meant it. If wanted to, I could stop reading the Bible as a mere text, and begin to feed upon it. I began to pracitce this and over time I learned to recognize that sense of hunger in myself when I had not fed. To this day I can open my Bible and because of practice I can derive a certain flow of life, if I may so describe it, as I read the words. It is coming through my physical and mental action of reading, but I’m aware that there is a certain presence of God resting upon the whole meeting that gives it such effectiveness. This presence of God, unlike other types of prescence, is no dependant upon the right timing. It is something that is always there. It is a grace that has been given to the scriptures and which I can expect them to retain to my benefit, whenever I choose to expose myself to it. In college I learned that this is an aspect of the word’s identification with the Word - Christ and the scriptures are in a sense one and when you take in the words by faith you recieve the Word.
In other words, I’ve been experiencing mystery for a long time.
Then there was marriage. In studying the scriptures I began to discover that the act of physical union between man and woman was a symbol for the union of God and Mankind. Not only was it a symbol of it, but it partook of the reality in a sense. It was meant to be the same kind of bridge or meeting place.
And finally, there was The Sinner’s Prayer. This was a moment, for those of evangelical stripe, at which your physical action of praying a certain prayer could and indeed must be expected to met with a very real infusion of grace. It was equated with being born again.
As I read the scriptures it became clear to me that it was the protestants who balked at a literal interpretation when it came to Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. It is obvious if you read between the lines that the early Christians used Baptism as we use the Sinner’s Prayer, and that they expected exactly the same results from it. The simplest way to prove this is to get out your concordance; make a list of all scriptures mentioning baptism; and read each of them assuming the interpretation I’ve given above. Suddenly they make sense.
When evangelicals balk at referring to baptism as regeneration, they are forced to substitute another ritual in its place - the sinner’s prayer, or walking the aisle. Only very strict Calvinists sometimes conjecture that God may infuse the grace of regeneration unsuspected when faith is born in the heart, completely independant of any form of action or choice on the part of the sinner. I still don’t think that is impossible in certain circumstance. Orthodox Christians do not believe that God has limited himself to bestow new life in Christ only through Baptism. All the same it is dreadful to knowingly slight the office of Baptism, since Christ has appointed it. It is the normal way to become a Christian and as such God has been so good as to attach a certain grace to it.
I have yet to experience the grace of the Eucharist. But I no longer have any qualms about doing it when the time comes.
I do not fear that it is superstitious to imagine that grace can be attached to a physical object or action. It is in the nature of Christianity that grace is more often incarnated in this manner than not. God is saving physical nature, not discarding it and that is why Christ, first of all, was enfleshed. What’s more I don’t believe in this grace in any “magical” sense, and nor do any Orthodox Christians. That is, even though we believe that the grace for healing and salvation is always present in the sacrament, we do not believe that it automatically saves a person who merely goes through the motions. Where there is no faith and no love that grace will be destructive, not saving. In this light I Corinthians 11 begins to make a lot more sense.
Nor do I feel that I am indulging in “works salvation.” Since the Orthodox Church does not believe that heaven is attained through merit, there is no sense of merit accruing to our account with God when we enact the Christian Mysteries. They are acts of faith and obedience and I expect God, in his kindness, to make it to my salvation simply because he has promised to do so. (I have only to add that when an Orthodox Christian speaks of “salvation” he is not referring to a one-time event that marks the beginning of the Christian life. In Orthodox vocaublary, following the Greek in which the New Testament was written, salvation is any rescuing, healing, santification, or preservation which God gives us through any means - either directly or mediated through other Christians on earth or in heaven, through sacraments, through dreams or thoughts, through icons, through authorities, through our own faith and love, through the ministry of his Spirit that penetrates all these things - in short through everything within his kingdom.)
Because I will be doing so within the Eastern Orthodox Church, I do not feel that I am doing something “Catholic.” Note, I do not consider the RCC to be my particular enemy. I hope I can count as particular friends all who worship the Lord Jesus as the Only-Begotten of the Father and through Him, the Holy Trinity. However, the doctrine of transubstantiation (so intellectually unacceptable to all but those who invented it,) certain confusions about the nature of grace that have sometimes existed within Western Christianity, and the power that authoritarian clergy have sometimes wielded over people through the Catholic sacraments, have created such suspicion that I know it will be to some people’s relief, as indeed it was to my own as well, to realize that the original Christian Mysteries exist outside of the RCC. My Catholic readers will not be able to agree with me in this belief but we will agree in trusting to the mercy of God to save what can be saved and sort all out in the end.
Finally, I am very happy in the thought that I will be doing something that can truly be considered established Christian doctrine and practice. This is not just my interpretation - I have the whole Church behind me. It is what all Christians everywhere did and to a great extent believed, until materialism and modernism enacted the present-day strict division between the spiritual and the material world.
