Sacramental Practice Research Articles

Skin of an Innocent Lamb: Shakespeare, Sacrament, and the Absence of Sin in Early Modern Literary Criticism

The critical fields of early modern English literature and religion define the term “sacrament” as a range of linguistic, didactic, and metaphorical moves. However, studies of sacramental rhetoric in Shakespeare and others fail to tie linguistic sacramental features to relevant, Reformed, historical notions of personal, answerable sin. This essay responds by considering how Shakespeare reflects on sin, confession, and literary expression through his Henry VI plays. Shakespeare employs the form of the book to stage his characters’ confessional struggles, offering rich articulations of literature’s interactions with sin and the sacramental practices syncopating the lives of readers.

‘Do You Not Know that Your Bodies are Members of Christ?’: Towards a Christian Body Politics and the Cultural Practice of Cosmetic Surgery

The contemporary rise in the West of cosmetic surgery as a cultural practice expresses the story of the late modern self as autonomous renovator, and the body as disenchanted raw material and individual possession. Technological biomedicine offers itself as the institution ready to assist this reflexive self in aligning the body to an individual’s inner identity. A Christian body politics, however, challenges this narrative of the human person, by claiming that gift and dependence more aptly represent human being than possession and autonomy. The rite of footwashing, particularly as articulated by Jean Vanier and practised in the communities of L’Arche, represents a sacramental practice which forms Christians in a different narrative of the body and being human. Footwashing reminds and trains members of the Body in a non-violent gentleness towards all bodies, and a recognition of humans as creatures of a good God rather than mere possessors of inert flesh.

Alternating Currents: Sacramental and Prophetic Imagining and Church Education

This article advocates that education ought to be movement toward a unity of conflicting but complementary forces in the life of the congregation/parish. This paradox is captured best in the two divergent forms of imagination, namely, the sacramental and prophetic, both of which are grounded and united in their commitment to seeing ultimate reality. Church education in and for sacramental and prophetic practices offers the possibility of revitalizing church life from within and, in turn, offers an outward response to repair our social and public world.

Confessing to be an Indian: Penance and the Creation of a Native Self in José de Acosta's Missiology

In his missionary manual, De procuranda indorum salute (written in 1577; published in 1588), Jose de Acosta singled out penance as the cornerstone of a sacramental practice geared toward the soteri...

Religious culture and health promotion: care, practice, object

Religious culture and health promotion: care, practice, object

Book Review: Learning Christ: Ignatius of Antioch and the Mystery of Redemption

Learning Christ: Ignatius of Antioch and the Mystery of Redemption. By Gregory Vail. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2013. xiv + 401 pp. $69.95 (cloth).Gregory Vail introduces Learning Christ as theological exploration of the economy of redemption, based on a historically informed exegesis of Ignatius's letters (p. 1). Vail argues that Ignatius's theology is cohesive, penetrating, and even somewhat comprehensive, despite the occasional nature of his letters. He examines Ignatius's theology through an approach he refers to as a hermeneutic of understanding and empathy (p. 6). He argues that understanding comes through conversation in which the interlocutor genuinely seeks truth rather than the acceptance of his or her own ideas. After this introduction, Vail turns in chapter 1 to what he understands to be the foundation for interpreting Ignatius's letters, namely, the redemptive economy which Ignatius explicates through creative allusions to Pauline, Matthean, and Johannine writings. This position contrasts with much contemporary Ignatian scholarship, which is summarized in chapter 2. Vail is aware that some of what he sees following from an empathetic reading may be understood as maximalist by others, but he acutely applies his methodology without being simplistic.The remainder of the book is divided into two parts. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 examine three aspects of the redemptive economy which Ignatius outlines in terms of unity. First Vail explores the unity of Jesus and the Father by looking at Ignatius's Christology, pneumatology, and incipient Trinitarian theology. Then he turns to Ignatius's understanding of humanity by looking at the unity of flesh and spirit. In chapter 5 Vail looks at the unity of faith and love within Ignatius's writings. Although Ignatius's conception of faith has been read as a deviation from the Pauline conception, Vail argues that Ignatius does not abandon Pauline faith, but understands faith to include a teleological orientation which must be lived through love.In part two, chapters 6 through 10, Vail examines Ignatius's understanding of several aspects of redemption as they occur in history. He first explores how Ignatius understands the relationship between Judaism and Christianity and helpfully situates Ignatius's letters among other secondcentury texts to show that Ignatius is more theologically nuanced than is often recognized, and then looks at the interplay between word and silence. Vail argues that Ignatius articulates his incipient Trinitarian theology through this paradox and teaches bishops to follow Jesus by teaching through action. Vail next explores Ignatius's understanding of Jesus' baptism as a hinge that links the incarnation and passion in Jesus' life as well as the church's sacramental practice. …

Personal, Societal, and Literary Reform in John Colet'sEcclesiastical Hierarchy

The English cleric John Colet (ca. 1467–1519) composed a commentary on theEcclesiastical Hierarchy of Dionysius, the legendary disciple of Saint Paul. Colet approached the Dionysian text not as an artifact belonging to another time and place but as a living document, much as he approached St. Paul's Letters in his commentaries. His goal was to critique lapses in ecclesiastical virtue and to instill a spirit of personal and institutional reform by comparing the sacramental and hierarchical practices of the sixth-century Dionysian Church with those of his Church in England. This essay suggests a new path to understanding the distinctiveness of reforms advocated by Colet. By referring to specific elements, including the practices of baptism and the eucharist and the nature of the office of bishop, Colet was able, via Dionysius, to reveal alternative possibilities of reform by adopting patristic and, although perhaps unwittingly, Eastern Orthodox thought and practice. What has not been appreciated thus far is that Colet'sEcclesiastical Hierarchyproduces for a Latin readership in England a neo-Patristic blueprint that resembles in significant details the living ecclesiology of the Christian East, which was coming to light in the West through the humanist restoration of patristic texts and debates among scholars in Italy over Union and Conciliarism.

Fire in the Water: Baptismal Aptness and Ecology in the Petrine Epistles

Abstract Despite some notable and vocal objections, the claim that Christians bear a responsibility toward the environment is now more or less a truism. In this article, I seek to strengthen, rather than prove, that commitment by an argument ex convenientia (from aptness). I analyze the Petrine epistles' imagery of water and fire. I make explicit the connections between these images and the sacrament of baptism as well as their connection to creation, redemption, and the eschatological consummation. By this analysis, I aim to forge reinforcing symbolic links between biblical interpretation, sacramental practice, and the created order, thereby solidifying and foregrounding Christian commitments to ecological engagement. My primary theological interlocutors are Karl Barth and Sergius Bulgakov, whom I consult to make sense of the imagery of water and fire, respectively. My treatment of Barth and Bulgakov allows me to use their respective theologies to supplement what I perceive as one another's weak points. This gives an ecology that is concretely rooted in the Christ event (from Barth), and which demands human participation and sacramentality (from Bulgakov).

Fire in the Water: Baptismal Aptness and Ecology in the Petrine Epistles

Abstract Despite some notable and vocal objections, the claim that Christians bear a responsibility toward the environment is now more or less a truism. In this article, I seek to strengthen, rather than prove, that commitment by an argument ex convenientia (from aptness). I analyze the Petrine epistles' imagery of water and fire. I make explicit the connections between these images and the sacrament of baptism as well as their connection to creation, redemption, and the eschatological consummation. By this analysis, I aim to forge reinforcing symbolic links between biblical interpretation, sacramental practice, and the created order, thereby solidifying and foregrounding Christian commitments to ecological engagement. My primary theological interlocutors are Karl Barth and Sergius Bulgakov, whom I consult to make sense of the imagery of water and fire, respectively. My treatment of Barth and Bulgakov allows me to use their respective theologies to supplement what I perceive as one another's weak points. This gives an ecology that is concretely rooted in the Christ event (from Barth), and which demands human participation and sacramentality (from Bulgakov).

Sensory Experience and the Women Martyrs of Najran

The account of the Women Martyrs of Najran in the Second Letter of Simeon of Beth Arsham provides a witness to the martyrdom of a Christian community against the backdrop of sixth-century geopolitical conflict. There is a level of detail in these texts that strongly suggests that they are intended to be read and understood in relation to Christian sacramental and liturgical practice. Simeon, in disseminating these accounts to the greater Christian community, wishes to glorify the faith of these women in a way that, leaving their sanctity beyond doubt, will ensure their commemoration by the Church at large. He accomplishes this by means of language that carries liturgical and sacramental meaning, linking the acts of these specific martyrdoms to the larger context of Christian sensory experience.

Toward a Wesleyan Sacramental Ecclesiology

John and Charles Wesley had a developed understanding of and reverence for sacramental practice and theology that suggests a dynamic sacramental ecclesiology and lends itself to a robust concept of sacramentality. Taking seriously Wesley’s imperative of ‘constant communion’, this paper looks to the Eucharist for an underlying, fundamental pattern of participation in the divine life whereby we embody and enact it by the power of the Spirit. The proposed Eucharistic pattern emphasizes a dynamic movement of ever greater participation in God by gathering together, offering all that we have and are, sharing our lives fully in trinitarian communion, and extending the communion we have become to little altars everywhere, especially to the ‘least of these’. To reframe Wesleyan ecclesiology in terms of a dynamic, relational sacramentality, patterned after the Eucharist, overcomes conventional oppositions of communion and mission by integrating them fully in the effort to follow Jesus Christ.

El canon 3 del concilio de Orange (441), el Ad Ecclesiam de Salviano de Marsella y los debates en torno a la penitencia in extremis en la Galia de mediados del siglo V

The third canon of the synod of Orange (441) stated that penance was to be granted to dying men who longed for it. From this moment on, this became the common practice in the Gallic churches under the influence of Arles. Although the Roman bishops Innocent I and Celestine I had once promoted the introduction in Gaul of that sacramental practice, the Roman procedure - consisting on the grant of penance and reconciliation - did not prevail in the aforementioned churches. In fact, the third canon of Orange - which states that deathbed repentants are to be granted penance and the uiaticum without being reconciled - is based on the 13th canon of Nicea as well as the 22nd canon of Arles (314). In the times of Hilary of Arles, this last council was seen as the starting point of a disciplinary Gallic tradition that the “Hilarian synods” aimed to remain faithful to. Soon after the synod of Orange Salvian of Marseilles, a member of the “Lerinian lobby” gathered around the see of Arles, offered in his Ad Ecclesiam a first draft for the preaching of penance in extremis. Salvian outlined that the real effectiveness of this form of penance was to remain doubtful and exhorted deathbed penitents to give their wealth to the Church as the only fructus paenitentiae they could still produce.

Catholic Chaplains to the British Forces in the First World War

This article outlines the complexities facing the Catholic Church in Britain and Ireland as it sought to minister to Catholic combatants in the First World War. Some of the problems arose because of Catholicism's place in British society as a not wholly trusted minority. Nevertheless as the war continued the government made generous provision for Catholic chaplains quite out of proportion to the number of Catholics engaged in the war. The political tension between Ireland and Britain, exacerbated by the 1916 Rising, contributed to difficulties in recruiting chaplains from Ireland, and the shortage of chaplains was a problem throughout the war years. Nevertheless, the service Catholic chaplains provided made a deep impression on combatants and on general public opinion. Catholic padres were not necessarily any more heroic than those of other denominations, but the fact that Catholic sacramental practice necessitated priests being at the side of dying soldiers and sailors meant that their services were more conspicuously in the front line of action than the ministry of other denominations. The pastoral effectiveness of Catholic priests in the services is attested even by non-Catholic sources, but it is here argued that this effectiveness was in virtue of the needs and desires of Catholic combatants themselves, who had been brought up to view the sacraments administered by a priest as the only sure means to salvation. The difficulties of sacramental administration in the circumstances of total warfare were increased by initially chaotic organisation on the part of the War Office and by internal problems posed for the church by Cardinal Francis Bourne, archbishop of Westminster, who wanted complete control over chaplaincy arrangements. This angered his fellow-bishops, especially the Irish, and provoked Vatican displeasure. The War Office was indifferent to papal intervention because of the perception that the pope was pro-German. Ultimately the experience of the war confirmed for the Catholic Church its role in ministering to those engaged in warfare despite the ambiguities arising from Christ's teaching on the matter of violence.

The Formation of Forgiveness in Piers Plowman

This essay shows that the C-text of William Langland's Piers Plowman articulates difficulties with the process of learning to forgive, a process that for medieval Christians requires mutuality and participation in the sacrament of penance. Tracing the terms forgeue and forgeueness through the poem, the essay draws out examples of medieval agents participating in the craft of forgiveness with varying degrees of inadequacy when compared with Jesus Christ, the embodiment of forgiveness. It focuses on two versions of community in the poem: the political model of forgiveness in the Mede sequence and the community of sacramental practice that emerges later. Learning to distinguish among the renderings of forgiveness, from advocating it to seeking it to embodying it, is central to the process of this experiential poem, because it demands the recognition and naming of the debilitating effects of sin.

Sacred plants and visionary consciousness

Botanical preparations used by shamans in rituals for divination, prophecy, and ecstasy contain widely different psychoactive compounds, which are incorrectly classified under a single denomination such as “hallucinogens,” “psychedelics,” or “entheogens.” Based on extensive ethnopharmacological search, I proposed a psychopharmacological classification of magic plants in 1979. This paper re-evaluates this taxonomy in the context of consciousness research. Several groups of psychodysleptic magic plants are proposed: (1) hallucinogens—psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline cacti, dimethyltryptamine snuffs, and the synthetic ergoline lysergic acid diethylamide induce strong perceptual changes, affective intensification, and cognitive enhancement. Their ethnobotanical uses include long lasting divination rituals, prophecy, and sacramental practice. (2) Trance-inducers—ergoline Convolvulaceae and South American Banisteriopsis produce quietness, abstraction, lethargy, mild sensorial and cognitive changes, and salient visual imagery changes used in trance rituals and specific divination practices. (3) Cognodysleptics—marijuana (tetrahydrocannabinol) and other terpene-containing plants induce changes in thought, imagination, and affective functions and are used in short-term divination or oneiromancy. (4) Deliriants—tropane-containing Solanaceae, wild tobacco, and Amanita muscaria (muscimol) induce a delirium characterized by dim and clouded consciousness, stupor, confusion, disorientation, perception distortion, difficulties in recollection, anxiety, irritability, excitation, and behavioral disorganization employed in sorcery, purification, or exorcism rituals. The core mental effects required for a drug to be used in shamanistic rituals include light-headedness, enhanced imagery, and experience intensification. This constellation was the reason why, in his classification of psychoactive compounds, the pioneer German psychopharmacologist Louis Lewin established in 1924 a group of drugs under the appropriate name of Phantastica.

Speaking of Sacraments in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.1.9. The translation used in this essay is by Ford Lewis Battles in John T. McNeill, ed., The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. 2, trans. (Louisville: Westminster Press, 1960). Calvin, Institutes, 4.14.17. Calvin, Institutes, 4.17.46, 4.17.44. Harold M. Daniels, To God Alone Be Glory: The Story and Sources of the Book of Common Worship (Louisville, KY: Geneva Press, 2003), 96–97. Visit http://www.pcusa.org/ sacraments to learn more about Invitation to Christ or to download a free copy of the report. The following are just a few examples of works that have appeared since the 2006 publication of Invitation to Christ: Paul Galbreath, Leading from the Table (Herndon, VA: Alban, 2008); Martha Moore-Keish, Do This in Remembrance of Me (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008); Ronald P. Byars, What Language Shall I Borrow (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008); and Kimberly Bracken Long, The Worshiping Body (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2009). Calvin, Institutes, 4.14.3. Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Book of Order, W-3.3600. See http://www.pcusa.org/sacraments/worship.htm, where other these and other examples may be found. Many more stories may be found at http://www.pcusa.org/sacraments/tell.htm. For baptism: (1) participation in Christ's death and resurrection; (2) cleansing, pardon, and renewal; (3) the gift of the Holy Spirit; (4) incorporation into the body of Christ; and (5) the sign of the kingdom. For the Eucharist: (1) thanksgiving to the Father; (2) anamnesis or remembrance of Jesus Christ; (3) invocation of the Holy Spirit; (4) communion of the faithful; and (5) the meal of the kingdom. See Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry: Faith and Order Paper No. 111 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982). A summary of the findings of the February 2009 Presbyterian Panel survey is available at http://www.pcusa.org/research/panel/summaries/panelsacraments02-09summary.pdf. These figures are not available in the online summary of the survey, but may be found in the appendix containing the complete results. Results of a second survey on sacramental practices in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) are forthcoming. James F. White, Sacraments as God's Self-Giving (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2001), 113. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid GambrellRev. David Gambrell—a minister of word and sacrament—is associate for worship in the Office of Theology and Worship of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and a candidate for the PhD in liturgical studies at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.

The Face of the “Pagan”: Portraits of Religious Deviance on the Medieval Periphery

The Face of the “Pagan”: Portraits of Religious Deviance on the Medieval Periphery

D’un Jansénisme à l’autre. Chroniques de Sorbonne (1696–1713) (review)

Reviewed by: D’un Jansénisme à l’autre. Chroniques de Sorbonne (1696–1713) Joseph Bergin D’un Jansénisme à l’autre. Chroniques de Sorbonne (1696–1713). By Jacques Gres-Gayer. [Univers Port-Royal.] (Paris: Éditions Nolin. 2007. Pp. 573. €45,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-910-48733-1.) With this volume, Jacques Gres-Gayer brings to completion a four-volume project that began with the publication in 1991 of Théologie et pouvoir en [End Page 376] Sorbonne. La Faculté de théologie de Paris et la bulle Unigenitus, 1714–1721.The three volumes published since 1991 have applied the methods used in that first volume to the Paris theology faculty in its dealings with the questions of Jansenism and Gallicanism between 1643 and 1713. Drawing in each volume on a substantial but complex body of manuscript and printed sources, the author has navigated his way with great assurance through some highly contentious theological disputes and their ramifications, religious and political. In each volume he has examined the faculty’s internal politics, assemblies, and working methods through a prosopographical approach that seeks essentially to quantify and evaluate the participation of the faculty’s body of doctors in approving books for publication and censuring books, theses, and propositions already in circulation that were submitted to it for its consideration. This volume focuses on the major crises or controversies of the period under consideration, analyzing the faculty’s makeup that was in constant flux and evolution during the long reign of Louis XIV. It is a history that is highly sensitive to theological, generational, and political shifts within the faculty and that refuses to reify the parties and their ideological stances. Despite its dates (1696–1713) the volume covers a series of debates running essentially from 1696 to 1704, since the faculty was not a major player in the events following the papal bull Vineam Domini Sabaoth (1705), nor in the maneuvers that led to its successor Unigenitus (1713). In 1696, the faculty as an institution was largely becalmed, due to the master clerical politician François de Harlay, who insisted, as did his successor Louis Antoine Noailles, on the ultimate responsibility of bishops for the religious orthodoxy of their dioceses, yet employed doctors of the faculty as advisers or censors. The historical magisterium of the faculty from Jean Gerson to Edmond Richer seemed all but extinguished. The new regime of Noailles was initially more inclined to give the faculty greater leeway, but as Noailles himself was suspected of Jansenist affinities, he was increasingly wary, after 1700, of allowing the faculty to regain its earlier independence. It was Noailles who famously declared in 1702 that bishops were the first casuists of their diocese, a claim that had wider ramifications to theological authority than is immediately obvious. It was all the more paradoxical, therefore, that the incident that sparked the crisis of the so-called second Jansenism involved the faculty engaging in a fairly “standard” exercise in casuistry concerning the actions of a penitent and his confessor with regard to the first papal condemnation of Jansenism. This volume analyzes five particular debates of varying duration and significance between 1696 and 1704. Some were interconnected but discontinuous, as with the 1696 debates over the translation of the work of a Spanish female mystic, Maria of Agreda, and those of 1699 over François Fenelon and quietism. The Saint-Pons consultation of 1699 was triggered by a local dispute over sacramental practices, especially penitential ones, that would resurface with the 1702 “case of conscience.” In between lay the question of the “Chinese rites” (1700) sparked by Jesuit missionary practices in China. In one [End Page 377] way or another, these issues involved conflicts with the Jesuits, Molinist theology, the role of papal authority, and the nature of revealed and natural religion. Gres-Gayer also notes, interestingly, a far greater concern among faculty members around 1700 than in previous generations with the pastoral implications of the issues they debated, if only because many doctors were parish priests in Paris and its environs or administrators employed by bishops. Even though the faculty’s debates were, with the exception of that over the Chinese rites, less momentous than...

Christian texts for Aztecs: art and liturgy in colonial Mexico

Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial is a cultural history of the missionary enterprise in sixteenth-century Mexico, seen primarily through the work of Catholic missionaries and the native populations, principally the Aztecs. Also known as the Mexica or Nahuas, speakers of the Nahuatl tongue, these Mesoamerican people inhabited the central plateau around Lake Texcoco and the sacred metropolis of Tenochtitlan, the site of present-day Mexico City. It was their language that the mendicant missionaries adopted as the lingua franca of the evangelization enterprise.Conceived as a continuation of his earlier, well-received City, Temple, Stage, Jaime Lara's new work addresses the enculturation of Catholic sacraments and sacramentals into an Aztec worldview in visual and material terms. He argues that Catholic liturgy - similar in some ways to pre-Hispanic worship - effectively conquered the religious imagination of its new Mesoamerican practitioners, thus creating the basis for a uniquely Mexican Catholicism. The sixteenth-century friars, in partnership with indigenous Christian converts, successfully translated the Christian message from an exclusively Eurocentric worldview to a system of symbols that made sense to the indigenous civilizations of Central Mexico.While Lara is interested in liturgical texts with novel or recycled metaphors, he is equally interested in visual texts such as neo-Christian architecture, mural painting, feather work, and religious images made from corn. These, he claims, were the sensorial bridges that allowed for a successful, if not wholly orthodox, enculturation of Christianity into the New World.Enriched by more than 280 color images and eleven appendices of translations from Latin and Nahuatl, Lara's study provides rich insights on the development of sacramental practice, popular piety, catechetical drama, and parish politics. Song, dance, flowers, and feathers - of utmost importance in the ancient religion of the Aztecs - were reworked in ingenious ways to serve the Christian cause. Human blood, too, found renewed importance in art and devotion when the indigenous religious leaders and the mendicant friars addressed the fundamental topic of the Man on the cross.An important work on worship, liturgy, and the visual imagination, Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial is a vivid look at a unique cultural adaptation of Christianity.

Medicine as Friendship with God: Anointing the Sick as a Theological Hermeneutic

A THEOLOGICAL BIOETHICS NEEDS, FIRST, A THEOLOGICAL POLITICS. THE thesis of this essay rests on the claim that the contours of a theological poli tics are found in the nature of sacramental practices. More specifically, a the ological politics of medicine is found in the sacramental practice of anointing of the sick. Anointing provides a radically theological hermeneutic—a theolog ically robust vision for interpreting medicine that, if enacted, can powerfully make real God's work in the world. Such a vision is embodied in one particu lar twentieth-century exemplar—the organization called Partners In Health (PIH) and its cofounder, Paul Farmer. Farmer and PIH, I argue, live the theologie and theological politics of medicine embodied in the practice of anointing. What is more, they show—against those who would accuse such an approach of be ing naively idealistic—that such a theological politics is possible, powerful, and can even change the world.