An Awesome and Unbloody Sacrifice

This blog post takes its name from Chapter Two of The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, which my Bible study is reading and discussing this summer. Primarily the reason I am writing this post is because I will be out of town and will not get to discuss this remarkable chapter with the guys in my Bible study. It also gives me an opportunity to reflect on my latest theological struggles.

What is sound thinking? How do we learn it? Modern thought places emphasis on skepticism--if I can't prove it, I can't accept it. Yet even the most extreme skeptics will admit that we all develop most of our common beliefs based on experience. Not just individual experience, but communal experience. If we cut ourselves off entirely from the community to live with only the knowledge we could come up with by our own skeptical methods, we would hardly get anywhere in life.

Early Christian thinkers developed their deepest thought in and through the communal life of the Church, particularly through its worship. Knowledge of God through Christ was experienced regularly, not just through preserving ideas handed down from the Apostles. On this point I think Wilken contributes something not just historical, but epistemological; that is, he tells us something about how we can know what we know about God.

At the same time that it gives inspiration for all of us Christians, Wilken's chapter challenges us Protestants on three major issues of Christian practice: the sacraments, the tradition of the Church, and the communion of saints. I'll talk a little bit about each of these in turn.

Sacraments

As the title of the chapter suggests, one of the central topics here is the Eucharistic sacrifice. Wilken describes it as a genuine re-presentation of Christ's once-and-for-all sacrifice. He explains that the word anamnesis, usually translated "remembrance," really means "recall by making present." (p. 34) Wilken is not presenting his own theological opinion on the matter; he is presenting the understanding of the early Church, for he quotes the Fathers from the early 2nd century onward.

There is some theological wrestling to be done here with our Protestant reaction to Catholicism on this point. Although we have historically rejected transubstantiation, the idea that the bread and the wine literally become the body and blood of Christ, yet many people do not even realize that Calvin and Luther had their own views of the Eucharist that did not constitute mere memorial. They, too, accepted some "mystery" to the sacrament.

In 1 Corinthians 10:16-17 we read, "The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread." This is not an often-quoted text in Protestant evangelical circles, but this is straight out of Scripture. Don't think it proves transubstantiation? Fine, I don't either. But don't tell me it says nothing mystical about the Lord's Supper. "Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body"? Something supernatural is going on, or at least something we can't understand with our rational minds.

Additionally, note the significance this verse has to what it means to be the Church. We are one body because we eat the one bread. Many people argue that they would prefer not to take the Lord's Supper more than, say, once a month, simply because multiple repetition makes it less special. Do people who make such an argument take this text into account? If we understand taking communion together as actually making us one body, then how can we think it wise to take it less often simply because we want to preserve the specialness of it? I can't prove that communion ought to be taken every week, but I do know that many Protestants just seem to be unaware of what all is really at stake in the matter.

Moving onto baptism, I find that here Wilken makes a couple of statements that are rather shocking for their total lack of comment. The first is on page 37: "Baptism was a ritual for adults, not infants..." and the second is on page 40: "Early Christians did not sprinkle or pour, they immersed." Wilken is a Catholic, and as such he must have been pleased to be able to demonstrate the Catholic view of the Eucharist appearing in the early Church. However, on the point of baptism, he seems to have no problem with suggesting that the Catholic Church has clearly veered early Church practice, and moreover he simply has nothing to say about it in this book. That's a testament to his faithfulness to his purpose: he is writing a book about early Christian thought, not about arguing doctrines.

Nevertheless, the uncomfortable thing that all Protestants, both baby baptizers and Baptists, are faced with in this chapter is the core meaning of baptism for early Christians. Wilken is pretty clear that the waters actually meant something. It wasn't simply a sign to let people know that you had converted--though it was certainly that. It was a tangible part of God's grace, which allowed the believer to actually feel the washing of regeneration. Something happened in that baptism, which the early Church would not have rationalized away as "just a symbol." Anyone who came into contact with the waters of baptism came into contact with something transformed by the work of Jesus Christ, filled with the presence of the Holy Spirit, and thus became something holy (see pages 40-41).

We live in a remarkable time in Western Christianity, in which some Christians want to maintain a religion based mostly on truth (by which they mean nothing more than words) while others want to know God through experience. But the experience they pursue is most often through whatever new innovations they can dream up (such as you can see here). Here is a challenge for us Protestants: why not return to the Sacramental vision of the early Church, and embrace those very ancient and tangible parts of God's grace which help us to experience him?

Church Tradition

If there is one word that American evangelicalism can't stand, it's "tradition." And yet at the same time, there has been a growing number of evangelicals in the past several years showing interest in ancient Christians traditions. Why? I suppose it's because many of us are realizing how ridiculous it is that we spend so much time trying to think of new ways to worship God when the wisdom of hundreds of years of Christianity has preserved many traditions that can lead us in the way we ought to go.

When Wilken is discussing baptism, he mentions that new initiates into the Church had to memorize "the creed." At least as Presbyterians, we have heard of this. In many Presbyterian churches, it is not uncommon to hear the Apostle's Creed recited at every worship service. At our church, we recite it at every baptism. The early Church took the creed seriously enough to make all initiates memorize it.

In describing worship on p. 43, Wilken describes the formation of a lectionary of Scripture readings, and then a liturgical calendar year. This was meant to preserve the Christian story by telling it in its entirety through the year-round worship of the Church. But it wasn't just about the story, the ideas, the words. It was about actually experiencing the presence of Christ. "As Christian thinking was grounded in the events recorded in the Bible, res gestae, the things that had taken place, so it was nourished in worship by the res liturgicae, the things enacted in the liturgy." (p. 44)

Tradition was not for the sole purpose of preserving truths, but also for preserving the experience of Christ in the Church. One thing I so often feel I am missing in my Christian life is a sense of organic connection with Christ. Protestants are constantly stressing personal prayer life, personal devotions, personal Bible study. But what about the rhythms of corporate worship that the Church took time to construct those many centuries ago? Maybe we could give the ancients another look.

Communion of the Saints

One aspect of tradition that troubles most Protestants is the idea of actually being connected with those who have gone before, as well as with the supernatural angels in heaven. I admit I don't know what to make of it, myself. I'm a bit of a rationalist by habit; I don't really know how to embrace this kind of connection.

Yet on pages 45-48, Wilken explains quite emphatically that the Church believed that the Church was called to worship alongside both the angels in heaven and the departed saints. This idea is simply dead in all the Protestant churches, and it probably isn't coming back any time soon. That's one of the things that hit me as I was reading about it. We can wrangle over the meaning of communion, but all Christians have communion. The same is true for baptism, preaching, singing, prayer, and most other Christian practices. But praying with and on behalf of the departed saints, as well as with the angels in heaven, is simply gone from Protestantism, so much that you'd never know it ever existed in Christianity unless you learned about Catholicism and/or Eastern Orthodoxy.

Nevertheless I hesitate to make any sort of recommendation on the issue, since I feel I know very little about it.

Seeing Ourselves in the Early Church

Despite all the things that I have to wrestle through while reading about the practices that shaped early Christian thought, I still find I have a lot in common with them. As in the first chapter, Wilken emphasizes the extensive use of Scripture in early Christian thought. He emphasizes the importance of Christian preaching, and the way in which is presents Christ to the believer. And in spite of all of our current doctrinal confusions and disagreements in the modern era, communion and baptism are still very dear to all Christians and constitute a crucial part of our worship.

In terms of intellectual life, Wilken did a good job in this chapter of emphasizing how the practice of worship shaped early Christian thought. But there is also the other side of the coin, which is illustrated by many examples in his writing, namely that early Christian thought did shaped Christian worship. It was not good enough for Christians to simply follow the traditions; the Fathers also explained the traditions so that people could understand. And this is one tradition the Reformation picked up on, and we Reformed have always believed that this is crucial.

As we seek a way forward as Christians struggling with a multitude of complex issues in the 21st century, I'm fairly convinced we ought to pay attention to what shaped the thought of the early Church, which faced a world every bit as complicated and hard to understand as ours is today. I'm not convinced that early Christians were necessarily right about everything, but I do know that their voice is all too easily completely lost. Surely it counts for something that these Christians lived far closer to the time of the Apostles than we do. At the very least, let's look back on the best of early Christian thought and ask ourselves if there's anything we have badly missed.