THE CHURCH AS SACRAMENT

Abstract

Summary Now that in the last two decades convergence and agreement have been formulated at various points, the ecumenical dialogue seems to concentrate more and more on the Church itself. The Catholics who participate in this dialogue will insist on the sacramental nature of the Church. It is the purpose of this article to show that this conception in no way prejudices a central concern of the Reformation, viz. the priority and sovereignty of God's grace. In Part One it is made clear that any consideration of the Church as sacrament has to take its starting-point in the sacraments themselves, lest the sacramentality of the Church be reduced to its ethical aspect (the Church as a “model-community”). In Part Two the problems that Protestants have with a sacramental conception of the Church are summed up. They concern the dreaded identification of the Church and Christ and, connected with it, the idea of the Church as Christus prolongatus, and the theological qualification of the role of the human subject in the sacrament as a symbolic act. Protestant theologians in general insist on the priority of God's initiative, on his Word as eschatological Promise which can only be received in faith, and on the ambiguity of the Church as a sign. In Part Three it is tried to propose some viewpoints that may serve the correct understanding of the sacramental terminology as used for the Church. In a first step it is pointed out that the Incarnation as analogically applied to the Church does not entail the sacralisation of the human element in the latter. It is also argued that the Incarnation, understood as hypostatical union, is inadequate as a starting-point for sacramentology. First, it lacks a fundamental reference to the work of the Spirit. That is why modern Catholic theology emphasizes the epicletic nature of the Church: as the manifestation of its essential and lasting dependence on God's gift (3.-). Another inadequacy of the Incarnation-analogy is its incapacity to account for the specific nature of symbolic presence. Hence, with the help of anthropological insights, it is shown that all thinking on symbolic representation has to start from the bare fact of Christ's absence (Ascension). The symbol is no substitute for the signified; therefore, the latter always remains at a distance and the difference is never overcome (3.2). A third imperfection of the Incarnation-analogy is its abstractness: the scheme of the union of two natures in one hypostasis fails to make explicit who is this man Jesus, and who is the God that He reveals. This revelation takes place on the Cross: there God and man appear to be no longer rivals, as the latter gains his autonomy (sonship) by the recognition of the Otherness of God (Fatherhood) and of his total dependence on Him. This (trinitarian) christology implies that, in sacramentology, there can be no question of synergism, as if the sacrament were partly the work of man and partly that of God. In Part Four some conclusions are drawn with regard to the sacramentality of the Church. Both God's revelation on the Cross and the anthropological analysis of the symbolic act as a language-event ward off the danger of identification or substitution. It is in the sacramental celebrations that it is expressed what the Church is (identity) and what it is not (non-identity, with Christ, or the Kingdom). In this way its eschatological, i.e. anticipatory nature is safeguarded. Contrary to one might think, distance, difference and non-identity are key-words in the sacramental conception of the Church.