When discussing "religion" in the modern world there are many dichotomies: religion and science, sacred and secular, mystery and certainty, faith and reason, supernatural and natural, clergy and laity, transcendence and immanence, church and state.
Each of us and the communities that we belong to need to make sense of these dichotomies, as they have profound implications in ethics, education, politics, science, theology, and human flourishing.
I recently found the underlying philosophical issues, particularly about secularism, addressed profoundly by an unexpected source.
For the theology reading group this month we are reading
For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy by Alexander Schmemann
I find it very helpful that this group leads me to read authors and books that I would not normally. I grew up in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. In contrast, my church experience the past forty years has been "low" church. Most of these churches have been dismissive of liturgy and tradition, and have marginalised the Eucharist (holy communion) and any notion of a "sacramental" view of rites such as baptism, marriage, and ordination. I have also not been able to grasp the thinking behind those who are enthusiastic about Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Perhaps, I am just too practical and pragmatic.
However, in the past few years I have come to appreciate liturgy through the Every Moment Holy and Celtic Daily Prayer books of liturgy.
I have been blessed by this book. It is amazing! It is not at all what I expected.
First, Schmemann shares my concerns about the way that liturgy can take on a life on its own, be an escape from the "real" world, and lead to obscure and inane ideas and divisive debates about issues such as transubstantiation.
Second, significant parts of the book are about deep philosophical issues such as I raised in my introduction. His analysis of secularism is brilliant and insightful, and at least fifty years ahead of analysis today. Schmemann contends that secularism is a Christian heresy. This resonates with a view promoted more recently by Tom Holland and Brad Gregory.
Sacraments are not "miracles" but transformations.
A sacrament -...- is always a passage, a transformation. Yet it is not a “passage” into “supernature” but into the Kingdom of God, the world to come, into the very reality of this world and its life as redeemed and restored by Christ. It is the transformation not of “nature” into “supernature,” but of the old into the new. A sacrament therefore is not a “miracle” by which God breaks, so to speak, the “laws of nature,” but the manifestation of the ultimate Truth about the world and life, man and nature, the Truth which is Christ.
page 102
“This is my body, this is my blood. Take, eat, drink.…” And generations upon generations of theologians ask the same questions. How is this possible? How does this happen? And what exactly does happen in this transformation? And when exactly? And what is the cause? No answer seems to be satisfactory.
This leads to a discussion of the problem with a reductionist approach to sacraments.
Symbol? But what is a symbol? Substance, accidents? Yet one immediately feels that something is lacking in all these theories, in which the Sacrament is reduced to the categories of time, substance, and causality, the very categories of “this world.” Something is lacking because the theologian thinks of the sacrament and forgets the liturgy. As a good scientist he first isolates the object of his study, reduces it to one moment, to one “phenomenon”—and then, proceeding from the general to the particular, from the known to the unknown, he gives a definition, which in fact raises more questions than it answers.
But throughout our study the main point has been that the whole liturgy is sacramental, that is, one transforming act and one ascending movement. And the very goal of this movement of ascension is to take us out of “this world” and to make us partakers of the world to come. In this world—the one that condemned Christ and by doing so has condemned itself—no bread, no wine can become the body and blood of Christ. Nothing which is a part of it can be “sacralized.”
True sacramentalism must go beyond a false dichotomy between sacred and secular. A false dichotomy is an fallacy that limits the possible options, reducing complex analysis to either/or choices and not leaving room for both/and or dialectic.
“to free the terms “sacramental” and “eucharistic” from the connotations they have acquired in the long history of technical theology, where they are applied almost exclusively within the framework of “natural” versus “supernatural,” and “sacred” versus “profane,” that is, within the same opposition between religion and life which makes life ultimately unredeemable and religiously meaningless.
Another example is the relationship between Word and sacrament.
“The sacrament is a manifestation of the Word. And unless the false dichotomy between Word and sacrament is overcome, the true meaning of both Word and sacrament, and especially the true meaning of Christian “sacramentalism” cannot be grasped in all their wonderful implications. The proclamation of the Word is a sacramental act par excellence because it is a transforming act. It transforms the human words of the Gospel into the Word of God and the manifestation of the Kingdom. And it transforms the man who hears the Word into a receptacle of the Word and a temple of the Spirit.…”
There is even emergence!
“the Greek word leitourgia. It meant an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals—a whole greater than the sum of its parts. It meant also a function or “ministry” of a man or of a group on behalf of and in the interest of the whole community. Thus the leitourgia of ancient Israel was the corporate work of a chosen few to prepare the world for the coming of the Messiah. And in this very act of preparation they became what they were called to be, the Israel of God, the chosen instrument of His purpose.”
page 25
Beauty is important and should not be eliminated for reasons of functionality.
“Once more, the joyful character of the eucharistic gathering must be stressed. For the medieval emphasis on the cross, while not a wrong one, is certainly one-sided. The liturgy is, before everything else, the joyous gathering of those who are to meet the risen Lord and to enter with him into the bridal chamber. And it is this joy of expectation and this expectation of joy that are expressed in singing and ritual, investments and in censing, in that whole “beauty” of the liturgy which has so often been denounced as unnecessary and even sinful.
Unnecessary it is indeed, for we are beyond the categories of the “necessary.” Beauty is never “necessary,” “functional” or “useful.” And when, expecting someone whom we love, we put a beautiful tablecloth on the table and decorate it with candles and flowers, we do all this not out of necessity, but out of love. And the Church is love, expectation and joy. It is heaven on earth,”
Faith is not just intellectual belief or assent to propositions. It is love, relational, and trust in Christ.
But faith itself is the acceptance not of this or that "proposition" about Christ, but of Christ Himself as the Life and the light of life. (I Jn. 1:2).
In this sense Christian faith is radically different from "religious belief." Its starting point is not "believe" but love. In itself and by itself all belief is partial, fragmentary, fragile... Only love never fails (I Cor. 13). And if to love someone means that I have my life in him, or rather that he has become the "content" of my life, to love Christ is to know and to possess Him as the Life of my life.
(p.104-105)
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