For the Life of the World 6

"O Death, Where Is Thy Sting?": Christian Mission and the Reality of Death

Today, we are concluding our study on For the Life of the World. I hope you all have enjoyed this study as much as I've enjoyed leading it. I hope that this book has challenged you as much as it has me. I hope we have been able to see during the course of it that this world is God's good creation and that the true life of this world is Jesus Christ. He fills everything in every way and because of this, we can enjoy communion with Christ in the sun, the moon, the stars, in the whole created order, in our pets, in our relationships, in our work, in our food, and, most importantly, in Christ's bride—the Church. This sacramental reality was lost in the Fall but it is being returned in Christ—no, has already been returned in Christ.

I hope that something else has come clear in the course of our engagement with this book. How and from where is this sacramental reality flowing back into the world? Where is it on earth that this sacramental reality of Jesus Christ as the life of the world has already in some sense been fully realized? The Church, of course, especially in the Eucharistic ascension but also in its every act. The Church is central in Jesus Christ's work of reclaiming the world as God's Kingdom. This is the very life and mission of the Church. Listen to this final and decisive word on 113 of For the Life of the World on the Church and its central role in this mission:

And it is our certitude that in the ascension of the Church in Christ, in the joy of the world to come, in the Church as the sacrament—the gift, the beginning, the presence, the promise, the reality, the anticipation—of the Kingdom, is the source and the beginning of all Christian mission. It is only as we return from the light of Christ's presence that we recover the world as a meaningful field of our Christian action, that we see the true reality of the world and thus discover what we must do. Christian mission is always at its beginning. It is today than I am sent back into the world in joy and peace, "having seen the true light," having partaken of the Holy Spirit, having been a witness of divine Love.

This is why I chose this study, because it clearly brings across the importance of the Church for Christian mission and Christian life. It takes the Church seriously. It gives it a place of central importance, and this is an emphasis that we as American Protestants have ignored for far too long. We will not take the Church seriously until we teach that it is serious—until we teach that it is central. This idea is present in Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, but it is also present in historic Protestantism. Presbyterianism's Westminster Confession of Faith affirms that the visible Church is that "out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation" (25.2).

We must realize that what we do within the Church, what we do in our mission in the world, in our worship, in our teaching, and, especially in our fellowship and how we treat one another, are all matters of eternal dimensions for ourselves and others. If we object that in our experience the Church does not feel like the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, that it is not satisfying, that it does not excite us and is not the center of our Christian experience, that we are turned away from Christ because of the way that we are treated in the Church, that we are not spiritually responsible for one another, and that, therefore, we must reject ascribing to the Church any saving significance, I counter that it is perhaps because we say that the fundamental reality of the Church is "invisible," because we say that the sacraments are "just" symbols, because we think of our relationship with God as purely individual and personal and not in any way as communal, because we emphasize what the Church is not rather than what it is, because we do not see Jesus Christ in the faces of the people in our churches, that it is because of all of this that we do not experience the Church as the very presence of Jesus, as the love of Jesus Christ. How can we find Him there if we are not looking for Him? How will people come to know the love of Jesus Christ and be saved if we do not love them, if we run them off from the Church by treating them as less than members of the Body and our beloved sisters and brothers? It is a message like what we have heard and discussed in For the Life of the World that can inspire us to take the Kingdom by force and let the Church be—no, make it be—the society for world transformation and renewal that it truly is.

Today, to conclude our study, we will look at how even death has been caught up in the sacramental reality of Jesus Christ as the life of the world, how through the ministry of the Church to the sick and dying even this great evil has become for us a means of union with Christ.

We begin our look at death with Schmemann's observation in the first section of this chapter that Christianity has adopted two basic views of death, two ways of reconciling itself with the reality of death. In his mind, though, the problem with these two basic views is that they are not Christian at all but are really just the basic human attitudes toward death which Christianity has adapted itself to.

The first view we will call the worldly or secularist view of death. The second view we will call the religious view. It's interesting because Schmemann makes this observation that Christian ministers are called upon to use both languages and views of death. It sounds contradictory but it makes sense. The secular view wants ministers to preach Christianity as basically life-affirming, without any reference to sin, to death, or to the death of Christ. This view wants us to pass over the true Christian understanding that death is the fundamental reality of the fallen world. This sounds very much like the way that the great American Neo-Orthodox theologian Richard Niebuhr described early 20th-century Christian liberalism. He said that it was a Gospel in which "a God without wrath called men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." On the other side, however, the religious view wants ministers to comfort people and reconcile them with death by framing death as a good thing, by describing life as a mere preparation for death or by framing death as a release from this wicked, wretched world. The problem with this view is that it wants us to pass over the truth that Christ died for the life of the world and not to give us an "eternal rest" from it. This is the view of death we see reflected in the classic spiritual, "I'll Fly Away." Let's see if the description Schmemann makes of the modern Christian minister's dilemma on the bottom of 96 is accurate:

The worldly man wants the minister to be an optimistic fellow, sanctioning faith in an optimistic and progressive world. And the religious man sees him as an utterly serious, sadly solemn and dignified denouncer of the world's vanity and futility. The world does not want religion and religion does not want Christianity. The one rejects death, the other, life. Hence the immense frustration either with the secularistic tendencies of the life-affirming world or with the morbid religiosity of those who oppose it.

Well, let's explicate the ideas above. What the Church ended up doing in regard to death was simply to accept the old religious views of death, those associated with the world-denying side of pantheism, those associated with Gnosticism and Platonism. These views are all about explaining death, reconciling us with it, and getting us to accept it as a positive good. These views are reflective of the instrumental nature of the old religions. Help for humans, not worship, is the central tenet of these old religions. It was the same with death; the old religions provide a "solution" to the problem of death. The solution is to say that death is preferable to living in a world of change and suffering, that death is better than suffering old-age, sickness, and the loss of loved ones. Death is thought of as freedom from the inferior material world and entrance into the superior spiritual world. Hope is placed in the fuzzy doctrine of the immortality of the soul and death is given the ultimate meaning of either reward or punishment for what one did in this world. That sounds a lot like a funeral sermon, doesn't it?

If we think about Christianity exclusively in terms of death, though, doesn't that take away its significance in this world? Well, as we've been looking at in this study, Christianity also has a strong life-affirming tendency. When the world began to reject the old death-centered religions, which unfortunately Christianity had become, and began to grab a hold of this strong life-affirming tendency in Christian faith, they began to reject Christianity itself and not just the "otherworldly" and death-obsessed baggage that it had assumed. On the bottom of 97 and onto 98, Schmemann says:

Christians often do not realize that they themselves, or rather Christianity, has been a major factor in this liberation from the old religion. Christianity, with its message offering fullness of life, has contributed more than anything else to the liberation of man from the fears and the pessimism of religion. Secularism, in this sense, is a phenomenon within the Christian world, a phenomenon impossible without Christianity. Secularism rejects Christianity insofar as Christianity has identified itself with the "old religion" and is forcing upon the world those explanations and doctrines of death and life which Christianity has itself destroyed.

What do you all think? By the Christianity that leads to secularism, perhaps it would be more accurate to describe this as Christian culture. If people live with a kind of misplaced Christian optimism about the prospects of life, meaning that this optimism is rooted in Christian cultural experience but not necessarily in devoted Christian faith, in an age of modern technology and medicine where death doesn't seem to be such a constant and all-pervading threat like it was hundreds of years ago, Christians who are not just cultural Christians come off as real party poopers with all their talk about what happens after death. If Christianity is all about heaven and hell, well, we'll just worry about that later. Life is good right now. I'm not going to die anytime soon, so why do I need Jesus?

Well, secularism, the Christian variety of it included, has its own "religious" account of death. Secularism says that death is unfortunate, but it's natural, so, let's just get as much out of this one life that we have. We won't think about death right now, though. We'll leave that to God. He might exist, and, if, God in his mercy and love, decides to reward us with immortality, that's his own gracious business, but, in this view, as Schmemann says, "Immortality is an appendix (however eternal) to this life, in which all real interests, all true values are to be found." This is essentially the secular Christian view of death. So, if the old religious view of death and the new secular view of death are not really Christian, then what is the true Christian understanding of death?

Well, it isn't about helping us deal with death; it's about telling us the truth about death. Authentic Christianity teaches that death is not natural; it is not good; it is the enemy. Death is abnormal and horrible. This is why Christ wept at Lazarus's grave and why he was so troubled as he approached his own death. Christianity does not help with death because this world and this life are beyond help if they accept that death is normal. In fact, as Schmemann says, the fact that we as human beings have accepted and normalized death reveals just how wrong things have gotten. Let's continue to deal with this bad news—what we are accustomed to calling Law—and then let us begin to hear the Gospel on 100:

This fall, however, can be truly revealed only by Christ, because only in Christ is the fullness of life revealed to us, and death, therefore, becomes "awful," the very fall from life, the enemy. It is this world (and not any "other world"), it is this life (and not some "other life") that were given to man to be a sacrament of the divine presence, given as communion with God, and it is only through this world, this life, by "transforming" them into communion with God that man was to be. The horror of death is, therefore, not in its being the "end" and not in physical destruction. By being separation from the world and life, it is separation from God. The dead cannot glorify God. It is, in other words, when Christ reveals Life to us that we can hear the Christian message about death as the enemy of God. It is when Life weeps at the grave of the friend, when it contemplates the horror of death, that the victory over death begins.

Is this a big course correction for us? Do you all have any issues with this description? Is this something new or different?

Let's begin to talk about the victory over death. He begins to address this in the context of this discussion of illness and the sacrament of healing. He has a brief reflection on the "secular" and the "religious" responses to disease that sort of goes along the same lines as his reflection on death. You've got hospitals and doctors on one hand, and prayer and faith healing on the other. If one looks at all of the studies that have come out in recent years about how prayer "works" as a treatment for illness, the idea has developed that both the "secular" and "religious" responses are "valid" and compatible approaches to health care. He talks about how today in hospitals it is almost as if ministers and chaplains are specialists, assistants, or therapists brought in to supplement or complement medical treatments. Well, we are certainly not speaking against visiting and caring for the sick and dying by ministers but maybe we need to examine just what it is that the Church is doing in its ministry in this situation. Again, it's not so much that we are providing "help" as we are working to achieve Christ's victory over sickness and death; the Church's ministry to the sick is not for treating emotional or "spiritual" health alongside the doctor's treatment of physical health, but neither is it the signs and wonders and miraculous healings of the "old religions," such as we see in modern Pentecostalism.

This is where the sacrament of anointing of the sick comes into play for the Orthodox. Let's remember that the key idea of sacrament is passage into the Kingdom, the world to come, this life in this world as it will be when it is fully redeemed and restored by Christ; it is transformation from the old to the new. It's not a miracle but a manifestation of the true reality and life of this world—Jesus Christ. The sacrament, which is a sign and seal of the benefits of Christ's death and resurrection, is a transformation of life in this fallen world into the life of the Kingdom, into the "joy and peace" of the Holy Spirit. In the Orthodox view, then, what the sacrament of healing accomplishes is to transform even disease, suffering, and death into means of communion with God, to make of them an entrance into the Kingdom where the only true and eternal healing takes place.

We actually perform this sacrament as Presbyterians, but, we don't call it a sacrament. However, this rite of anointing the sick with oil has a biblical basis. Let's look at James 5:14-15:

Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven.

Now, this passage indicates physical healing, but I think we get a hint of this sacramental idea of passage and transformation. The Lord will raise him up and his sins will be forgiven. This indicates the idea of grace in this act, and, since grace is none other than the presence of Jesus Christ, and the presence of Jesus Christ is the Kingdom, we can speak of the anointing of the sick as a passage into the Kingdom and as a transformation of disease and suffering into the presence of Jesus.

The Orthodox, of course, in affirming this practice as sacrament base it in the death and resurrection of Christ. In this world, we will suffer.

And yet Christ says, 'be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.' Through his own suffering, not only has all suffering acquired a meaning but it has been given the power to become itself a sign, the sacrament, the proclamation, the 'coming' of that victory; the defeat of man, his very dying has become a way of Life. (103-104)

In the Orthodox understanding, and I think we should see it this way as well, the death of any Christian is the death of a martyr. In our own suffering and death, when it comes, we will each bear witness in our own bodies to Christ's suffering and death. Together with Stephen, the first martyr, we will behold and proclaim "the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God" (Acts 7:56).

Schmemann concludes the chapter with a reflection on Christ's death and resurrection and how we are to relate to these realities not as doctrines or even as future hopes, but as something we really and truly experience from day-to-day and especially from week-to-week when we gather on the Lord's Day to partake of the Eucharist. The resurrection of Christ is not just some objective fact we are to accept, but it is something that we are to experience as our very life. We are truly to fill our lives with Him, to have Him as the Life of our own lives. Eternal life is not just later; it is our life now and it flows forth from the Church—the sacrament of the world—and this Life will only grow as we progress forward. I think that this on 105-106 should be the final word on the Gospel of Jesus Christ and on the mission of the Church as we conclude our look at For the Life of the World:

The great joy that the disciples felt when they saw the risen Lord, that "burning of heart" that they experienced on the road to Emmaus were not because the mysteries of an "other world" were revealed to them, but because they saw the Lord. And he sent them to preach and proclaim not the resurrection of the dead—not a doctrine of death—but repentance and remission of sins, the new life, the Kingdom. They announced what they knew, that in Christ the new life has already begun, that He is Life Eternal, the Fulfillment, the Resurrection and the Joy of the world. . . .

In Him death itself has become an act of life, for He has filled it with Himself, with His love and light. In Him "all things are yours; whether . . . the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours; and you are Christ's; and Christ is God's" (1 Corinthians 3:21-23).

Therefore, we can join the Apostle's taunt, "‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’ ‘Where, O death, is thy victory? Where, O death, is thy sting?’" (1 Corinthians 15:54-55). Praise be to God that death has been trampled down in the death of our Lord Jesus Christ.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

For the Life of the World 5

The Mystery of Love: The Sacraments of Marriage and Ordination

In the course of our study, we have talked about the two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, that we as Presbyterians are familiar with, but we have addressed the world, the Church, and time as having a sacramental nature in that they are all means of communion with God. I hope that what has come across so far in our discussion of this book is that everything is sacred. There is no part of life or the world that has not been grasped by the love of Jesus Christ. Everything points to Him and finds its fulfillment in Him. The work of redemption that He has done on the cross and in the resurrection and in His ongoing presence in the Church as a result of that work, is the returning of the whole of creation to the purpose for which God created it, to be for us a means of communion with God. In this sense, everything is sacramental.

There is also the sense, though, that sacraments relate specifically and directly to the Lord's death and resurrection and that in them, that this central event to our faith is signified and that the benefits of the cross and the empty tomb are somehow conferred to us through the sharing and receiving of those signs. Protestants have traditionally limited what they termed sacraments to baptism and the Lord's Supper because it is only in these two rites of the Church that Christ's death and resurrection are directly shown forth and in which we directly receive Christ and share in the benefits of His Passion. This is why we don't recognize the other five things, penance, confirmation, marriage, ordination, and the anointing of the sick, as sacraments the way that Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox do.

To put this difference in perspective, though, Protestants do not deny that these things are important and most perform all of these rites as proper actions of the Church. I think we can even affirm that God is at work in these things when we do them. Also, if we have learned anything by interacting with the liturgical tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy in this study, it is that, for the Church, everything finds its meaning and fulfillment in Christ's death and resurrection and in the Kingdom that His Passion has ushered in. In the sense, then, that everything the Church does ultimately points to Christ and to His Kingdom, we can seek the wisdom of the Orthodox tradition on how marriage and vocation are caught up in the great mystery of Christ and his work in the world.

First, I want us to define what marriage is. What's marriage? Man and woman; commitment; sex; raising a family. What is the "religious" significance of marriage? Divine sanction for sex; spiritual help for the couple; blessing for procreating children. Is marriage simply the concern of those directly involved in it, simply an earthly concern, or, does marriage have cosmic, universal, redemptive significance? Let's look at the last paragraph of 82.

Here is the whole point. As long as we visualize marriage as the concern of those alone who are being married, as something that happens to them and not to the whole Church, and, therefore, to the world itself, we shall never understand the truly sacramental meaning of marriage: the great mystery to which St. Paul refers when he says, "But I speak concerning the mystery of Christ and the Church." We must understand that the real theme, "content" and object of this sacrament is not "family," but love.

What do you all think? I just want to throw a few little niblets out. As far as redemptive significance goes, Martin Luther described marriage "as a perfect school of sanctification." Luther advanced further in holiness in his marriage to Katherine Von Bora than he ever did as a bachelor monk. Also, let's consider the Reformed covenantal focus on the family. In our tradition, the family has been described as a "little church" for the training of children in the faith. In fact, there's the idea that by virtue of being born to Christian parents, we are automatically part of the covenant community. That's why we practice infant baptism and affirm that grace is already working in the infant children of believers. We also see that marriage doesn't just involve a man and a woman and their children but that marriages and families are important for the health and life of the whole Church, that they are almost foundational to the Church and that they are really an extension of the life of the Church into the world. It makes sense that if we’re going to affirm that everything refers to Christ and his Kingdom, this must certainly start in our homes. This points to what Schmemann says about the focus of marriage not being about "family" but about love. Marriage is not just about erotic love and family is not just about familial love; Christian agape love is the focus in marriage. That's why marriage is sacramental. It refers us to and catches us up in the love Jesus has for us and that we are called to have for him and for one another.

Let's look at the words of St. Paul that Schmemann quoted a moment ago. Ephesians 5:21-33:

21 Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.
22 Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. 23For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the Church, the body of which He is the Savior. 24Just as the Church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands. 25Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her, 26in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, 27so as to present the Church to Himself in splendor, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind—yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. 28In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the Church, 30because we are members of His body. 31‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ 32This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church. 33Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband.

Needless to say, this passage is a flashpoint when it comes to the roles of women in the home and in the Church. I must confess, as one who is an egalitarian when it comes to gender roles but who is also rather conservative when it comes to the nature of Scripture, this passage gives me trouble. There's part of me that strongly objects to the words of this passage that men are over their wives and so that women should submit to their husbands. Yet, at the same time, I realize that this is Scripture. God inspired this passage, so we can't ignore it. It's valuable and God gave it to us to teach us something important. Nevertheless, we must handle it with care because it has been used and is still used today to justify the oppression of women.

Just a few things. Notice how most of the instruction in this passage is directed toward husbands loving their wives and giving themselves up for their wives. Also, though some ideas in this passage may seem barbaric to us today, this passage as a whole is really quite progressive in its historical context. Men are called to love their wives as themselves, as their own bodies. I think this is a step up in a society where a man had the power of life and death over his wife and all the members of his household. What we’re after, though, is how marriage refers to Christ and the Church and is itself caught up in the mystery of Christ. What stands out to you? What is the relationship of the husband and wife? What happens to a man and woman when they get married? "'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.' This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church." If the husband and wife are one flesh, then, what is the relation between Christ and the Church? We are one flesh with Christ. The union of the husband and wife is an earthly reflection of our heavenly union with Christ. "Marital love has its roots, its depth and real fulfillment in the great mystery of Christ and his Church."

To show us the implications of all this, Schmemann takes a surprising step but I think it's a good one. The first thing he does in Chapter 5 to roll out this grand Christian vision of marriage is to turn to the Orthodox teaching on Mary. Out of our great Protestant fear of mariolatry, we have neglected, to our great diminishment, to do sufficient reflection on the meaning of her life and mission and what that means for all of us. Schmemann says that the great paradox of Mary as Virgin and Mother is important in understanding her significance.

We'll deal first with Mary as Mother. The reason she is called blessed, according to Schmemann, is that she accepted to be the humanity of God, "to give her body and blood—that is, her whole life—to be the body and blood of the Son of God." He also says that she fulfilled the womanhood of creation by offering her whole self to God as both fully acceptance and fully response. What he has in view here is the biological reality of woman as mother. He makes me a little uncomfortable in how he describes this because it's almost as if he is implying that women ought to be passive, to be like little children waiting for the guidance of their husbands. In fact, at one point in this chapter, he says that Eve messed up precisely because she took the initiative. By such a statement, it's quite apparent that Schmemann is no feminist and that the tradition he represents holds to a rather patriarchical understanding of men and women's roles. But, to be fair, this is two-sided for Schmemann; woman as mother is acted upon by the man, in some sense, as she waits for the male proposal and then accepts it, but she is also active because only she can give life to the man's proposal and fulfill it as life by conceiving and giving birth. This is what he means by Mary's obedience to God being both fully acceptance and fully response to God.

Now, Schmemann doesn't just talk about the differences between men and women, how Mary is the example for women, but he also talks about the equality of men and women, how Mary is the example for all of us in fulfilling the womanhood of creation. He talks about this on 85.

She stands for all of us, because only when we accept, respond in love and obedience—only when we except the essential womanhood of creation—do we become ourselves true men and women; only then can we indeed transcend our limitations as "males" and "females." For man can only truly be man—that is, the king of creation, the priest and minister of God creativity and initiative—only when he does not posit himself as the "owner" of creation and submits himself—in obedience and love—to its nature as the bride of God, in response and acceptance. And woman ceases to be just a "female" when, totally and unconditionally accepting the life of the Other as her own life, giving herself totally to the Other, she becomes the very expression, the very fruit, the very joy, the very beauty, the very gift of our response to God.

That's all very poetic and very beautifully said, but Is it insulting or diminishing of women to refer to the womanhood of creation in contrast to the manhood of the priest, or, to think of Mary the Woman as human in contrast to her Spouse, the Holy Spirit, and her holy Child, both of whom are Divine?

And now for the other side of that equation, we consider Mary as Virgin. Schmemann makes it clear that we are not to think of Mary's virginity exclusively in terms of the absence of sex. The Orthodox do believe that Mary is the ever-Virgin Mother of God, but the key thing about her virginity is that it represents the "totality of her self-giving to God" and the quality of her love. The ultimate meaning of virginity is not absence of sex but "wholeness, totality, and fulfillment." In this world, sex is the ultimate fulfillment of love, but Mary set it aside for something better, the fulfillment of being the Spouse of the Holy Spirit, the Mother of God, the fulfillment of this world and, through Her Son, the birth of the world fully restored and fulfilled. Schmemann describes her as "the goal and the fulfillment of the whole history of salvation, of the history of love and obedience, of response and expectation. She is the true daughter of the Old Testament, its last and most beautiful flower."

We conclude our discussion of Mary by talking about her as the Mother of Christ, the Mother of God, or, Theotokos, in Greek. Schmemann says of her, "And the whole creation rejoices in her because it recognizes through her that the end and fulfillment of all life, of all love is to accept Christ, to give Him life in ourselves." In this sense, I think that a good "high" Protestant mariology must see in Mother Mary the truth about Mother Church, that it is through her that Christ is born in all of us and that it is through her that He continues to be present in His humanity to the world.

Now, we'll turn to a direct look at the marriage ceremony in Eastern Orthodoxy. It's important that we note that the early Christians did not know of a separate marriage ceremony; Christians were simply married by partaking of the Eucharist together. Everything was basically just gathered into the Eucharistic celebration, and in this way, the whole "natural" life of humanity was taken into the Church to be judged, redeemed, and transformed. Of course, this changed over time as we will see.

The Orthodox rite of matrimony consists of two distinct services: the betrothal and the crowning. The betrothal is the reflection in today's Orthodox marriage ceremony of the time when the Church received "civil" authority to perform a rite of marriage, so, it is the Christian form of "natural" marriage. As such, it occurs in the doorway to the church, not inside the church itself. The Orthodox save the betrothal from secularity, though, by referring it to the union of Christ and his Church.

When the rite moves into the church before the crowning, this is the true form of the sacrament. Moving into the church parallels the entrance of marriage into the Church, its inclusion in the Kingdom. Since it is in the context of marriage that humanity continues on, the entrance of marriage into the church is really the movement of this world into the "world to come."

The crowning is next. It has a threefold significance. The first significance of the crowns is that each husband and wife pair is king and queen of creation. Schmemann has a beautiful reflection on how each home is a small kingdom filled with the possibility of fullness. Surprisingly, his icon for this aspect of marriage is not a young couple but an elderly couple. If you get a chance, read that on 89 and 90.

The second significance of the crowns is the glory and honor of the martyr’s crown. Marriage, if it is to truly be Christian marriage, must constantly crucify its own selfishness and self-sufficiency. Marriage is not about self-fulfillment and personal happiness; it must accept the cross in it. Those men who misuse that controversial passage in Ephesians 5 miss this point, that Christian marriage involves sacrifice and deference to the needs of the other from both partners, not just the wife. There are three partners in marriage, the husband, and the wife, and God. Schmemann says that the united loyalty of the two toward God keeps the two in an active unity with each other as well as with God. It is God who calls them to submit to one another in love and thereby practice the agape love that will keep them together and enable their marriage to share in the joy of the Kingdom.

The third and final meaning of the crowns is that they are crowns of the Kingdom, "of that ultimate Reality of which everything in 'this world'—whose fashion passeth away—everything has now become a sacramental sign and anticipation." The new marriage is to be "a growth in that perfected love of which God alone is the end and fullness."

I wish I could spend more time talking about the sacrament of ordination, but the important ideas are the universal priesthood of all believers and vocation. All of us in the Church are priests; we are all called to offer our whole lives and the whole world to God in a sacrifice of love and praise. The priesthood of all Christians and the "official" priesthood in the Orthodox Church exist, in Schmemann's words, "to reveal to each vocation its priestly essence, to make the whole life of all [people] the liturgy of the Kingdom, to reveal the Church as the royal priesthood of the redeemed world." Of course, the Orthodox do have priests in the official sense. The official position of Orthodoxy is that only men can be priests but there are a few Orthodox who advocate the ordination of women. And though Orthodox priests are viewed as being married to the Church, they can also be married to women as well. Schmemann knew what marriage both to the Church and to a woman was from first-hand experience. And though women can't be priests in Orthodoxy, I believe that priests' wives are called upon to take an active role, almost an official role even, in their husbands' ministries.

We conclude with Schmemann's reflection on marriage and ordination at the end of the chapter:

The final point is this: some of us are married and some are not. Some of us are called to be priests and ministers and some are not. But the sacraments of matrimony and priesthood concern all of us, because they concern our life as vocation. The meaning, the essence and the end of all vocation is the mystery of Christ and the Church. It is through the Church that each one of us finds that the vocation of all vocations is to follow Christ in the fullness of His priesthood: in His love for [humanity] and the world, His love for their ultimate fulfillment in the abundant life of the Kingdom.

For the Life of the World 4

I've been given the opportunity by my church to lead a small group study about the Church and the sacraments. We have been reading and discussing For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy by the late Father Alexander Schmemann. If you are interested in issues relating to the sacraments, ecclesiology, and Christian mission in secular society, this is absolutely an essential read. It is, of course, about the liturgical tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy from the perspective of an Orthodox. This book would seem to serve as a good starting point for exploring Eastern Orthodoxy and the sacramental theology of that tradition. As far as the sacraments are concerned, this would also be an excellent introduction to the topic in general and not just the Eastern view of them.

We are into the fifth week of the study. The following represents an expanded transcript of my outline and notes for this morning's discussion on chapter 4 regarding baptism, confirmation, and penance. It has been expanded from my original to incorporate the various directions that our discussion ended up going. It sparked quite a lively discussion about the meaning and effects of baptism. Please note that the following does not represent an Orthodox view of baptism but my own engagement with the material and my response to this morning's discussion. I will be posting my outline from previous weeks as well.

Of Water and the Spirit: Eastern Orthodoxy, Reformed Protestantism, and Baptism

We went out of the usual order of discussion by looking at the Eucharist before we discussed baptism. When I first read this book, I thought that was a little odd, but I thought it was really, really strange when Schmemann jumped to the topic of sacramental time before even dealing with baptism. People usually start with baptism because that marks the beginning of the Christian life. They try to follow the chronological order in which we experience the sacraments. Well, there's a method to Schmemann's madness. He tells us he deals with the Eucharist and the sacrament of time before baptism so we can see the cosmic dimensions of what exactly we are baptized into.

He mentions how baptism is appropriately tied up with the Church. It's the entrance and integration into the Church. Well, what have we affirmed about the Church so far in our study? What is the Church in its full cosmic significance? It is the sacrament of the world, the means by which God is reclaiming fallen humanity and by which the world and time is being returned to the purpose for which it was created, to be a means of communion with God. When we are baptized, then, we are caught up in everything great, awesome, holy, and redemptive that God is doing in the world.

I just wondered if you all noticed that funny little word on the first paragraph of 68, it's kind of a made up word but it's important when we're talking about the Church. "Ecclesiolatry"- "thinking of the Church as a 'being in itself;' not thinking of the Church as the new relation of God, humanity, and the world; thinking of the Church as Savior rather than of Christ as Savior of the world and humanity through the Church." We need to be careful; I've come close a couple of times to going over this line, but we need to be careful not to blur the line between the human and the Divine. Remember what I said in the Orthodox tradition about the statement, "I have become God." Sometimes you'll hear something like that. That's a relative statement. If one meant that literally, that'd be blasphemy, but what an Orthodox would mean by that is simply that he or she is united with Christ, that this person is one with Jesus. Though this "I have become God" business is a really radical way of saying that, we kind of have the same idea in one of our metaphors for the Church. What's the metaphor we used when talking about the Church during our discussion of the Eucharist? The Body of Christ. As the Church, our connection to Jesus is so strong that He is our Head and we are called the parts of His Body. There are a couple of things I want to note about this. The first thing is that, as the Church, we are instruments in the hands of Jesus. He works in us and through us. This means that we should regard our corporate actions as the Church as those of Jesus. The second thing is that the Church is united with Jesus. If baptism incorporates us into Christ's Body, and if Christ's Body is united with Christ the Head, then what does baptism do? Baptism unites us with Christ. And put emphasis on the us, we are united with Christ together, not one by one. Our salvation is corporate.

I don't want to stay long on this issue; I don't want to narrow the discussion on baptism to matters of the salvation of the individual soul, but we need to have a brief talk about the Reformed view or views of baptism and its relation to individual salvation. As a former Baptist, my understanding of salvation had a very revivalistic tone to it. I'm still very much of an evangelical in the sense that I think in our natural state, we are dead in our sins and so need God's redeeming action in order to be saved, but I do not think that there should be a certain type of religious experience that people have to have before they are to be considered "saved." You must be born again, but that doesn't mean that you have to have a definite conversion experience. I've undergone a bit of a spiritual pilgrimage from where I once was, and in the course of that pilgrimage, I have come to see baptism as not just a symbol of being "born again" but as being itself an important part of the way that God washes our sins away and gives us spiritual life. I can now confidently affirm in Peter's words that "baptism now saves you." What do you guys think? Does baptism save us?

I did my reading from several sources in the Reformed tradition the other night to confirm that I didn't just dream it up, and, yeah, this view has a lot of support historically in Reformed and Presbyterian theology. It depends on who you read, though. Calvin, Francis Turretin, most of the Westminster Divines, the Mercersburg theologians Philip Schaff and John Nevin, the great Dutch Calvinist theologian Abraham Kuyper, and contemporaries like Peter Leithart and his "Federal Vision" friends have maintained the biblical teaching on baptism. Unfortunately, most Presbyterians are strangers to their own tradition and are more likely to Gnosticize baptism away according to the fashion of the Swiss Reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, the Princeton theologians Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield, and contemporary mainstream evangelical Presbyterians like R.C. Sproul. What many of these folks would sneer at and call heresy in regard to baptism is really historic Calvinist orthodoxy and the teaching of Scripture and the ancient tradition of the Church. Though you might find it surprising, the Westminster Confession and the catechisms affirm God's saving action in baptism. For instance, take this from the Westminster Shorter Catechism:

Q. 91. How do the sacraments become effectual means of salvation?
A. The sacraments become effectual means of salvation, not from any virtue in them, or in him that doth administer them; but only by the blessing of Christ, and the working of his Spirit in them that by faith receive them.

Q. 94. What is baptism?
A. Baptism is a sacrament, wherein the washing with water in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, doth signify and seal our ingrafting into Christ, and partaking of the benefits of the covenant of grace, and our engagement to be the Lord’s.

Let's also consider 1 Peter 3:21: "And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you—not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ." Now, we can't just use this as a proof text; we have to be much more sophisticated in our scriptural exegesis than just to pick passages pell-mell from the Bible to support our doctrinal positions. We have to look at the context of this passage. Peter is speaking of how Noah and his family were saved through the waters of the flood, which prefigures baptism. Just as Noah and his family passed through the waters in the ark and were saved, so are those in the Church saved by passing through the waters of baptism. Notice how baptism doesn't work like "a removal of dirt from the body" but "as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ." We appeal to God, but God is the prime actor in baptism. It is He who saves us through baptism and not the waters themselves.

This even goes for little children who cannot yet confess their faith. The French Reformed Church baptismal liturgy says it this way:

“Little child, for you Jesus Christ has come, he has fought, he has suffered. For you he entered into the shadows of Gethsemane and the terror of Calvary; for you he uttered the cry ‘it is finished.’ For you he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, and there for you he intercedes. For you, even though you do not yet know it, little child, but in this way the Word of the Gospel is made true, ‘We love him because he first loved us.’”

Of course, we must affirm that God can and does save without baptism. Calvin says this in the Institutes: "We must utterly reject the fiction of those who consign all the unbaptized to eternal death. . . . Baptism is not so necessary that one from whom the capacity to obtain it has been taken away should straightway be counted as lost."

We must also keep in mind that baptism inaugurates us into what is a conditional covenant. It is not guaranteed that all of those who were baptized will persevere and be finally saved. People must have faith in Jesus and persevere in that faith or they will forfeit the benefit of their baptism. There is definitely the idea in Reformed thought that our relationship with God must grow as we do. Baptized children are definitely "saved," at least for the time being, but a small child's faith in Jesus must grow. Faith must be age-appropriate if we are to affirm that it is saving faith.

There is also the fact that God gives many ways of nurturing the seed of regeneration that is sown in our hearts. Baptism can plant that seed, or it can water that seed if that seed has already been planted in our hearts by the Word. The other means of grace are required to make sure that the seed of grace, regardless of how it initially got planted, flourishes and does not wither; that it blooms into the fullness of grace and perseverance. To assure that the seed reaches the end of lasting justification, it must be watered by Scripture, by preaching, by prayer, and by taking the Lord's Supper.

Well, I need to get us back on track. On 68 and 69, Schmemann talks about how much of the life of the Church arose surrounding the baptismal rite and also how the Church finds much of its meaning and significance in baptism. Baptism delivers us from slavery to sin and evil and puts us into a cosmic fight against evil. He talks about the exorcisms that are part of the Orthodox rite. The paragraph that starts on 69 and goes over on to 70 really grabs me. Does the idea of real evil, especially real personal evil, belong in our modern thought? Can those of us who use electricity get ready for the idea of demonology? Schmemann makes reference to the Holocaust, that a civilized nation "used electricity" to murder 6 million people, and, during the time that he wrote this, the Soviet Union had a vast system of prisons and work camps holding tens of millions of people going; he says that in a world where these things go on, "demonic" reality is not a myth. This is what we're up against:

"It is this reality that the Church has in mind . . . when at the moment of baptism, through the hands of the priest, it lays hold upon a new human being who has just entered life, and who, according to statistics, has a great likelihood someday of entering a mental institution, a penitentiary, or at best, the maddening boredom of a universal suburbia. The world from which the human being has received his life, and which will determine this life, is a prison."

This is why the Bible says we must be born again, or born from above, so that we can begin to be freed from the prison that sin has made of the fallen world. Well, there is a society in our world that has been born from above and to which we can flee from the evil and the banality of the fallen world. The good news is that "the Church knows that the gates of this hell have been broken and that another Power has entered the world and claimed it for its true Owner. And that claim is not on souls alone, but on the totality of life, on the whole world."

Baptism brings us into the battle against evil on the winning side. It's not just against fear, frustration, and anxiety we are fighting. It is for the destiny of the world and humanity that we are fighting. It's not comfortable and pleasing, but we are called to war, and that requires discipline. That's why at baptism, we renounce the devil and all of his ways and we confess the Lord Jesus, bowing before the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He says something interesting on the bottom of 71 and 72 about it being hard "to convince modern Christians that to be the life of the world, the Church must not 'keep smiling' at the world, putting the 'All Welcome' signs on the churches and adjusting its language to that of the latest bestseller." Is this how it should be, or do we need to risk becoming unpopular so that we can stay true to our mission?

From baptism so far, then, we've learned that the Church is the society of liberation from evil and that it is a warrior society against evil in all of its forms. When we stop to consider the significance of the water, though, we see that the Church is not just a spiritual solution to the problem of evil in the fallen world, but, that through the Church, the physical world too is caught up in God's plan of redemption. Through the Church, the material world is being returned to the purpose for which it was created, to be a means of communion with God. Just like the bread and wine of the Eucharist, the water of baptism represents the whole world, which we offer to God and he returns to us as the instrumental means of our life in Him.

As we've talked about ad nauseum, there are certain worldviews that have a problem with this kind of stuff. It sounds impractical; it sounds magical that God would use things to save us. This kind of thought is reflected in the Baptist view of baptism; I don't think it's for any biblical reason that they don't believe baptism saves but because of that darned dualism we keep running into; spirit is spirit and matter is matter; they don't really have any relationship to each other; we need to keep them separate. Schmemann talks about the "demythologizers" who have a hard time with this kind of stuff too, the "spooky stuff," as one of my Religious Studies professors would call it. I really think it's a failure of imagination on their part. Life is just so much more interesting and exciting when reality points beyond itself to something bigger and better, when we think about things in a cosmic perspective. Otherwise, as Schmemann has been showing us all along, things as ends in themselves only just end up in death.

There are several important meanings for water in the biblical worldview. What does water represent? Life- there is no life without water, just as we have no spiritual life without God's Spirit. This is why the Bible says we must be born of water and Spirit. Water also means cleansing and purifying. It's the most powerful solvent and cleaner on the planet. What else would God use to wash away our guilty stains and carve a place for himself in our rock-hard hearts? Water also means death and destruction. The water of baptism indicates that we die with Christ, that we are "baptized into His death." We die to sin, to death, to ourselves. And it is in this death to self that we find life, because it is only in sharing God's gifts with Him and with others that we find the meaning of life. After all, it is because Jesus surrendered His life for us to His Father that He lives again and that we live again in Him. Water also means chaos, the disorganized stuff out of which God creates something new. Remember the Creation story, how God "moved over the face of the waters" and how He liberated the dry land from the waters. In the same way, in our descent into the baptismal waters, God remakes us into a new creation, where old things are gone and all is clean and brand-new again. As St. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:17-18, "If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold the new has come." This is what the Orthodox symbolize when they clothe a newly baptized person in a white robe.

Schmemann next moves on in this chapter to talk about the sacraments of confirmation, or what they call chrismation, and penance. As Presbyterians we don't have these two sacraments. We do something called confirmation but we don't consider it a sacrament. Nor do we consider penance a sacrament. We have something like penance that's called absolution but that's not a sacrament. Even though I disagree with the Orthodox on these two things, I think Schmemann is correct to treat confirmation and penance in their connections to baptism. As Presbyterians, we can follow him here in his discussion, but we should apply everything he says about these two things directly to baptism itself. He speaks about chrismation as the fulfillment of baptism, its "confirmation" by the Holy Spirit. The Reformed tradition would say that baptism itself is the "confirmation" of God's forgiveness toward us and that we receive the Holy Spirit in baptism itself. This is where the language in the Westminster Shorter Catechism of baptism as "sign and seal" of our "ingrafting into Christ," our "partaking of the benefits of the covenant of grace," and "our engagement to be the Lord's" comes into play. Baptism is the "confirmation" and "seal" of our forgiveness. We also see the confirming presence of the Holy Spirit in Jesus' baptism,

Matthew 3:16-17: "And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’"

I've also got 1 Corinthians 12:13: "by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free."

Now, what we call confirmation, when young people learn the catechism and make profession of faith to assume full membership, is not the same as what Schmemann is calling confirmation. For the Orthodox, confirmation is when they anoint a newly baptized person with oil, that's why it's also called chrismation, the baptizand is anointed with chrism. We do that too as part of the baptism rite but it isn't considered a distinct sacrament the way it is in Roman Catholicism and, to a lesser extent, in Eastern Orthodoxy. But, the application of the oil is significant. It indicates that we have received the Holy Spirit and that God has commissioned, anointed us, if you will, for Kingdom work. Notice how this doesn't just apply to the soul but to the whole person. It sounds like the Orthodox basically cover a person with oil from head to toe to symbolize the fact that the Holy Spirit touches and transforms every part of our lives. Schmemann talks about how in this commissioning by the Spirit, we truly become ourselves. We truly become what God from all of eternity intended us to be. We don't have to take up a cookie-cutter "good Christian" role but we get to be who we truly are. The Spirit frees us from all need to pretend. How often do we fail to live in this kind of freedom when the Spirit freely offers us such fullness. Where the Spirit is, there's freedom.

And finally, we come to penance. There is a problem with this doctrine, I think. Schmemann mentioned how in a certain theological tradition baptism has been limited to removing Original Sin. Well, I'm not sure if that's the Orthodox position, but the Roman Catholic Church teaches that in baptism God only forgives Original Sin and any sins we committed before baptism but that the sacrament of penance is required to deal with all the sins we commit after baptism. John Calvin and the Reformers had something else to say, though, and I think it was the biblical teaching on post-baptismal sin. Calvin said:

"We must realize that at whatever time we are baptized, we are once for all washed and purged for our whole life. Therefore, as often as we fall away, we ought to recall the memory of our baptism and fortify our mind with it, that we may always be sure and confident of the forgiveness of sins. For, though baptism, administered only once, seemed to have passed, it was still not destroyed by subsequent sins. For Christ’s purity has been offered us in it; his purity ever flourishes; it is defiled by no spots, but buries and cleanses away all our defilements."

Sin isn't dead in us, but, as often as we sin, we can remember our baptism and know that God forgives us.

This isn't permission though because baptism means that we've been given the gift of the Holy Spirit and the Spirit won't let us comfortably go on sinning. Schmemann talks about the Christians on 78 and 79 who have dramatic, revivalistic conversion experiences and never know what it is after that to feel the sadness of being a sinner. Well, if that's their experience when it comes to post-conversion sin, then they ain't the real deal. I think we can affirm that we should be confident that God loves us and that he has saved us, but, we also need to always have that sense of sorrow for sin and of hungering and thirsting for righteousness. I believe it was Martin Luther who said that a Christian is always aware of three things: "A Christian is always sinning; a Christian is always repenting; and a Christian is always forgiven." When we sin, let us always run back to the baptismal fount. We were washed and forgiven once and for all there and the life that we were given there always enables us to do better and will one day deliver us into God's presence without spot or blemish.

To remind us of this, we have a word of absolution in our weekly liturgy after our corporate confession of sin. When we hear that word of absolution on the Lord's Day, the baptized can count it as the Lord's word and so be sure that it is true. I believe we also have absolution in the context of pastoral counseling, where the pastor can declare a personal word of absolution. And this is not a new word; it is simply a restatement of the message that we first heard in baptism: "My child, your sins are forgiven."