50 Key Concepts in Theology

Sacrament
A visible sign of God’s grace.
The word ‘sacrament’ comes from the Latin sacramentum, meaning ‘a
pledge of faithfulness’ made by a Roman soldier. But in Christian theology,
‘sacrament’ refers to God’s self-disclosure through specific signs and
ceremonies.
In the widest sense a sacrament is any event which provides us with a
sense of God’s presence or grace. In this general sense, anything or any
experience could be sacramental. Indeed, one might speak in a universal way
about a sacramental dimension in all of creation. Albert Blackwell has argued
in The Sacred in Music that music is sacramental. Urs von Balthasar has
argued that poetry can function as a sacrament and cites Gerard Manley
Hopkins as an example.
In the narrower sense the sacraments are officially sanctioned rites which
are administered by ordained ministers of the Church. In this sense the
sacraments belong exclusively within the life of Church. In the Orthodox and
Catholic churches there are seven official sacraments: baptism, confirmation,
marriage, eucharist, holy orders, anointing the sick and penance. Protestant
churches recognise only two: baptism and eucharist. The official (or ordained)
sacraments are administered by the ordained clergy.
Although the question of how the sacraments work is generally declared
to be a ‘mystery’, efforts have nevertheless been made to explain it. The
classic explanation was offered by Thomas Aquinas, who used Aristotle’s
distinction between ‘substance’ and ‘accident’ to explain that the eucharistic
elements of body and blood are Christ’s ‘substance’ appearing under the
material guise (‘accidents’) of bread and wine.
Jesus himself is described as the primordial sacrament, from whom the
other sacraments derive their divine efficacy. So the sacraments are not
human symbols to express our ideas about God. They are, rather, actual
instances of God’s grace. The sacraments do not function only as signposts to
a God who is somewhere else; they are taken to be the locations of God’s
presence. As the Catholic catechism puts it, sacraments are ‘masterworks of
God’. They are acts of God, not signs of God.
It is also misleading to think of the sacraments merely as ‘windows’ onto
some other world. St Augustine makes this mistake when he says that ‘the
spiritual virtue of a sacrament is like light; although it passes among the
impure, it is not polluted.’ Augustine’s Platonic view gives no value to the

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living material of the sacrament, only to some meaning that passes through it.
A more satisfactory theology of the sacraments sees the sacrament itself as a
living instance of God’s grace.
THINKERS
St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) argued that only the seven ‘ordained
sacraments’ are truly sacramental, although he allowed that many things may
be non-sacramental ‘signs of God’.
Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1675–1751) wrote a book popularly known as
The Sacrament of the Present Moment (originally The Self-abandonment to
Divine Providence) in which he argued that time itself was sacramental, and
that the ordinary Christian has direct access to sacramental experience
without the mediation of a priesthood.
Peter Lombard (c. 1100–1160) wrote about the sacraments in his work
The Sentences. Using Aristotelian theory of causation, Lombard argued that
four ‘causes’ must be operating for a sacrament to exist: there must be a
‘material cause’ (e.g. the bread and wine for the Eucharist); a ‘formal cause’
(the liturgical words that accompany the administration of the sacrament); the
‘efficient cause’ (the presence of a priest); and a ‘final cause’ (the
communication of God’s grace to the recipient of the sacrament).
Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) argued that the sacraments validate the
Church rather than vice versa. The Church becomes itself properly through
the Eucharist.
Karl Rahner (1904–84) described the Church as the ‘primal sacrament’
on which the others are grounded.
IDEAS
Mysterion (‘hidden reality’): a word for ‘sacrament’ used by the Eastern
churches.
Sacramentary: a book containing the prayers that the priest recited at the
celebration of the Eucharist.
BOOKS
John MacQuarrie, A Guide to the Sacraments (Continuum, 1997)
Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God
(Sheed & Ward, 1963)

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