Book Review: Christ's Gift, Our Response: Martin Luther and Louis-Marie Chauvet on the Connection between Sacraments and Ethics

Abstract

Christ's Gift, Our Response: Martin Luther and Louis-Marie Chauvet on the Connection between Sacraments and Ethics. By Benjamin Durheim. Collegeville, Minn.: Michael Glazier, 2015. xviii + 184 pp. $24.95 (paper).The phenomenological approach the sacrament of the eucharist from the French Catholic theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet (b. 1942) has become somewhat de rigueur among contemporary sacramental and liturgical theologians. In the last decade, a spate of English monographs on Chauvet have appeared and at least two studies set Chauvet in direct conversation with thinkers (Heidegger and Benedict XVI, and Rahner, respectively). Benjamin Durheim s slim volume contributes ably this conversation and with a new methodology: placing Chauvet and Martin Luther, through the Finnish School of Luther Interpretation, side-by-side as sources for each other (p. 145).He offers this as a new sort of ecumenical endeavor see how the others theology might strengthen the theology of ones own tradition. Durheim attempts to read each theologian in light of the and allow the insights of each theologian speak the tensions of the other, thus producing not unity in thought but a new kind of unity of purpose (p. 145). A similar approach birthed the Finnish School through its engagement with Eastern Orthodoxy. The reason for choosing Chauvet is directly tied Durheims ecumenical goal: sacraments and ethics are the two places that embody both the church's internal division and its relationship the world, and they are also central Chauvet's project. The most significant interconnection between these two theologians is precisely what Durheim hopes each theologian and his followers can be the other: gift.Chapter 1 sets up the background for a conversation on sacraments and ethics in the twentieth century. The scope here is quite broad: the American liturgical movement's unique vision; the original sacraments-ethics union in Don Saliers, Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, and Bruce Morrill; the philosophical basis of Chauvet's work (especially Heidegger, and Marcel Mauss); and a summary of the Finnish School of Luther Interpretation with its reading of justification as union with Christ. Durheim's summaries are succinct and extremely clear, particularly his summary of Heidegger.Chapter 2 presents Luther's sacramental theology, which Durheim frames through the interlaced triad of Christ's gift, presence, and promise. Because Christ is truly given the Christian in the sacraments through the mechanism of faith, Christ dwells in the Christian by faith such that ethics becomes Christian (or, he suggests, Christ-in) ethics. Chapter 3 provides an overview of Chauvet's take on the relationship between sacraments and ethics, most especially in his magnum opus, Symbol and Sacrament (French, 1987; English, 1995). …