Who Needs the Sacraments?
“Imagine that you're teaching adult catechumens about the sacraments. One of the catechumens raises the following objection: ‘Do I really need the sacraments? After all, can't I encounter God on my own without the rites of the Church?’ Based on your reading of Pieper and Ratzinger, how would you respond?” (This post is one of a series of six assignments in fulfillment of a sacramental theology course at the University of Notre Dame.)
The adult catechumen’s objection contains a glimmer of truth. It’s true that God doesn’t need the sacraments in order to effect an encounter with us. Not only that: it’s worth pointing out that, in a strict sense, God doesn’t need anything – not sacraments, not encounters, and not us. The three divine Persons of the Blessed Trinity are entirely fulfilled in and of themselves; there is no lack or want in the Godhead that created beings exist to supply for.
Rather, all of creation (including us, and the sacraments) is itself an overflow of the eternal exchange of love that exists between the Persons of the Blessed Trinity. And it is precisely this love that is meant to animate humankind, and precisely this love that humankind lost in its primordial fall from grace. For this reason, “when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Galatians 4:4-5).
This coeternal Son of God, the second Person of the Blessed Trinity, took to Himself a human nature in Jesus Christ. While among us, He not only lived, died, and rose from the dead in order to conquer sin and death, but also established a Church (cf. Matthew 16:18, 1 Timothy 3:15, Matthew 18:17) which would carry on His ministry until His triumphant return at the end of time (cf. Matthew 28:18-20, Acts 1:8). The question remaining for us, then, is to ascertain by what means God chose to continue carrying out His ministry in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church that He founded. And the answer, I submit, is precisely through the sacraments: through “efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1131).
Following Pieper (“In Search of the Sacred”) and Ratzinger (“The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence”), I argue that this choice on God’s part is fitting for two reasons: 1) because Christians (and Catholic Christians in particular) are not Deists, and 2) because human beings are not angels. I will now treat each of these two points in turn.
Christians Are Not Deists
What do I mean by this? Well, a Deist is someone who “believes in the existence of a personal God, but in few or none of the more special doctrines of the Christian religion; one who holds to some of the more general propositions of the Christian faith concerning the Deity, but denies revelation and the authority of the church…[or] who holds the opinion that there is a God, but no divine providence governing the affairs of men; one who holds that, God is not only distinct from the world, but also separated from it” (The Century Dictionary).
As you can see, Christians are by definition not Deists, because we believe precisely that God is not separate from the world (this is a metaphysical impossibility, in fact) and that He freely chose to “transcend His own transcendence” (as my old professor Dr. John Cavadini likes to say) in the Incarnation: that is, by taking to Himself a human nature in the Person of Jesus Christ. As Ratzinger says, “To receive the Christian sacraments means to enter into the history proceeding from Christ with the belief that this is the saving history that opens up to man…the unity with God that is his eternal future” (163). The sacraments, I contend, merely extend the logic of the Incarnation. They continue the ministry that Christ entrusted to the Apostles and their successors when He said things to them like “whoever listens to you listens to Me, and whoever rejects you rejects Me” (Luke 10:16).
To those who would deny the supernatural reality of the grace communicated to us by efficacious signs (cf. Pieper 29), I would say: doesn’t it make sense that the same God who took to Himself a human nature in order to “give good gifts to His children” (cf. Matthew 7:11) could just as well continue on that trajectory by, say, making Himself truly and substantially present under the outward appearances of bread and wine in order to do the same (cf. John 6:30 ff.)? Contrary to the fear expressed by our adult catechumen, such sacramental realities are not a constraint or a “boxing in” of God’s ability to act in the world. (After all, as the Catechism says in paragraph 1257, “God has bound salvation to [the sacraments], but he himself is not bound by his sacraments.”) Rather, the sacramental economy is a kind and fatherly accommodation that God makes for us on account of the fact that we are human beings and not angels (cf. Ratzinger 167).
Human Beings Are Not Angels
There are some creatures who experience God directly, without the rites of the Church, as our catechumen expressed. But we call those creatures angels (cf. Ratzinger 166, CCC 328-336)! But we human beings are not angels. We have bodies, we grow and change over time, and we need to see and hear and taste and touch and smell things in order to come to know them. (By contrast, the common opinion of theologians is that angels have their knowledge infused – we might say, directly downloaded – into their un-incorporated intellects.)
This is, for example, one reason why Christ instituted the sacrament of Confession (also known as Penance or Reconciliation; cf. John 20:21-23). The angels had one chance to accept or reject God. Those who chose to love and serve Him do so forever, and those who chose against God suffer the consequences of that choice forever as well (we call these latter, fallen angels demons). But the angels got all of their knowledge at once - they didn’t have to learn and grow over time. On the other hand, we human beings do learn and grow over time, and that also means that we sometimes choose wrongly. As Ratzinger says, “The first [primordial sacrament] arises from the primordial human experience of guilt. Man, who does not fashion his own existence but lives on an ontological endowment, experiences at the same time a sense of being obligated, of being governed by a predetermined form; failure to conform to it makes him guilty” (159).
Even in a merely human relationship (with a spouse, let’s say), we long to hear the other person offer us words of forgiveness after we have apologized for wronging them. Christ, who “searches hearts” (cf. Romans 8:27), knows this human need of ours, and offers us His forgiveness in such a way that we can actually hear it with our ears, in such a way that we can be certain that the infinite mercy that He won for us on the Cross has been in fact applied to us, to our own circumstances, to our very own souls.
Christ takes up this primordial feeling of guilt and offers us a remedy—the sacrament of Confession—which exists to restore our union with Him and with the Church after we have chosen to break that relationship, to kill off by our sin the very “divine life [that] is dispensed to us” (CCC 1131). “In the confusion of human history that initially seems to ensnare man in the inescapability of guilt, the sacraments lead him into the historical context with that man who was at the same time God” (Ratzinger 164), and the essential words of the sacrament are those of Christ Himself speaking through the priest: “I absolve you + from your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
Conclusion
I will make Cardinal Ratzinger’s conclusion my own. He says: “This is the purpose of our going to church at all: so that I in an orderly fashion may take my place in God’s history with men…[God’s] love does not seek merely an isolated spirit, which (as we have said) would be only a ghost compared with man’s reality [or, taking my slightly different tack, an angel!]; rather, it seeks man utterly and entirely, in the body of his historicity, and it gives him in the holy signs of the sacraments the guarantee of a divine answer in which the open question of being human arrives at its goal and comes to its fulfillment” (168).