Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: The sacraments are not really cold institutional rites, but they are the sources of mediation by which the risen Christ continues to mediate friendship and communion with us as his followers.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Welcome to the Catholic Theology Show, presented by Ave Maria University. This podcast is sponsored in part by Annunciation Circle, a community that supports the mission of Ave Maria University through their monthly donations of $10 or more. If you'd like to support this podcast and the mission of Ave Maria University, I encourage you to visit avemaria.edu join for more information.
I'm your host, Michael Doffinay, and today we are joined by a colleague and professor and provost at Ave Maria University, dr. Roger Nutt. Welcome to the show.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Thanks for having me back on the show. Michael and I heard a rumor that the show has now received over 25,000 listens. So congratulations to you. I love listening to the episodes and I love being on the show.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: Well, thank you so much. And we were very excited to get over 25,000 listens. And thanks so much to our viewers and listeners, and it's really been a delight.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: You're doing a great job.
Maybe when you get to 25 million, I could come back on.
[00:01:32] Speaker B: Well, anyway, today is a good day, and we're grateful for each and every person who listens. Right. It's just like when you teach, each person you teach is all that matters. And I feel like the same thing. The numbers are really just a grouping of individual human souls. And if we can speak I think Newman talked about that idea that when he became a cardinal, john Henry Newman, now Saint Newman said that, right. Core at core locator. Heart speaks to heart. All communication is personal, one person to another. And he even used that image, by the way, for his prayer, which is that heart speaks to heart to God, and God, of course, speaks to us with his sacred heart. So it's really beautiful to be able to participate in that today. I wanted to turn to you have a book, General Principles of Sacramental Theology.
This book was published in 2017 with Catholic University of America Press. And one of the things that was actually I heard is that this book actually became actually sold out a couple of times, which is always fun for a theologian. Right. Theology books don't always sell a ton, but that this book sold a fair amount because it's been used in a lot of classrooms, a lot of seminary courses on the sacraments as well as undergraduate courses on the sacraments of Catholic theology programs.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: That's right. My understanding is that it is regularly used as a course text in colleges and seminaries. I'm very grateful for that, and I owe you a word of thanks. When you were vice President of Academic Affairs of Ave Maria University, you were kind enough to support a Sabbatical that I received, and that book is the fruit of the Sabbatical. So I am indebted to you for the chance to work on the book. And a funny thing about it you'll understand this as an author, is that I had a very sweeping title about friendship and the sacraments. And it's a theme that goes throughout the book. And the publisher, the Catholic University of America Press, saw its potential as a textbook. And so they forbid me from having the more literary title and put the more standard textbook title, general Principles of Sacramental Theology. And I think that they ended up being right in that judgment.
[00:03:56] Speaker B: Well, that is great to hear and maybe just stepping back for a moment and we might have some listeners, maybe who are not Catholic, who wonder about the Church's emphasis on the sacraments. We may have listeners who are maybe more I don't know how to put it, somehow coming from a more maybe more modern, maybe more secular perspective, or Catholics who are listening who aren't quite sure about the sacraments. So what would you say? Like, why the sacraments at all? It seems that our modern world is distrustful of rituals, kind of prefers spontaneous human connection over rituals and kind of feels I feel like that's a predominant mode. And then there is even within, say, nondenominational or evangelical Protestantism kind of an attempt to have Christianity without much emphasis on the sacraments. I know your own before you were a Catholic, you were a Baptist, so you're familiar with that. So what would you say to somebody who just says, like, why are the sacraments important to the life of faith?
[00:05:10] Speaker A: It's a wonderful question, and I might talk for too long in response to that question because a number of avenues of response come to my mind. So stop me if I go on too long. But the first thing that comes to mind is that Christianity is a mediated religion at this point in salvation history. St. Paul does teach that when our pilgrim journey ends, we will see God face to face. But now we are living in the realm of faith, and the Church calls this realm of faith the sacramental economy. So the sacraments are not really cold institutional rights, but they are the sources of mediation by which the risen Christ continues to mediate friendship and communion with us as his followers. So it's true that there can be a scornful attitude towards institutionalized religion, but that scornful attitude fails to appreciate that the seven sacraments are seven gifts that Christ gave to the Church to mediate his ongoing closeness and proximity to us. In fact, there's a wonderful passage in St Thomas's theology of the Eucharist where he's trying to address whether it's true that Christ is really present in the Eucharist or merely in a figurative manner. And his answer to that question is that Jesus is really and truly present in the Eucharist because it is the first characteristic of friends to remain together.
So I think there is a deeper and more profound way of looking at the sacraments visa vis the intimacy that the Lord wants to have with us through these rites. And then another thing that comes to mind is that the sacraments, as rites, as visible rites, are really about the invisible theology of grace. And as you know, because you teach trinitarian theology, when St. Thomas brings his trinitarian theology to a crescendo in question, 43 of the first part of the Summa theologe, he talks about the visible missions of the Son and the Spirit being the way that God, in his omnipresence, comes where he already is in a newer and fuller way. So to the person who says, well, I think I'm saved or I don't think I'm in a state of mortal sin, why receive the Sacraments? The response to that is God can always come in a newer and fuller way, even where he already is. So receiving the Eucharist frequently, going to confession, if we fall after baptism, are ways of opening our hearts to the deepening of God's presence within our lives.
[00:08:16] Speaker B: Wow, that's really powerfully put. And I think in a way, one of those things maybe it's hard to know how God could come to us apart from human institutions because God became human. So he spoke, he acted, right. He called apostles, he perpetuated his life in history and in history it's going to have a bit of an institutional dimension, I think. Father Guy Mancini, who's another professor at Ave mar University who wrote a book on ecclesiology, I remember him saying that when he teaches a course on ecclesiology, he would always just say there is no church other than the institutional church. Right? If we talk about the non institutional church, we're really creating something that is just of our own making. So the difficulty is to see that those human actions that Jesus did are revelatory of his divine nature and are the means through which he accomplishes our salvation. And I love the fact, too, that you connect it to the missions of the Son and the Spirit. In Galatians four, four to six, it says, right, god sent his in the fullness of time, god sent His Son, and then God sent His Spirit, the Spirit of His Son, into our hearts that we might call Him abba Father.
So whatever the sacraments are about, they're really nothing other than that we can receive the Spirit of the risen Lord and become children of God, saying abba Father. And just as though earthly life comes about through certain rituals like birth, child rearing, growing up, being in relationship, motherhood, fatherhood, marriage so also right, our divine life, our divine sonship comes about through things like baptism, being fed, growing up, being confirmed, right, taking on our own vocations either as married or in holy orders or different elements. And then, of course, as we go on to our eternal life, we find another sacrament there. So I think that idea really can help to maybe show how these sacraments create a kind of bedrock foundation for Christ to touch us right.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: As a proclamation of the Gospel.
The point that you just made reminds us that there is no aspect of human life that Jesus is distant from or separated from.
We have biological birth and supernatural birth and all throughout life. When we stumble, he's there. When we are weak through sickness or old age, he's there. He ministers to us through the vocational sacraments. So sometimes it can feel like God is far away, but the sacraments remind us that he is pouring out his risen life to us at every significant moment of our journey.
[00:11:24] Speaker B: Yeah, the theologian Hanser Sfmbalthazar wrote a book one time called in the Fullness of Faith is the English translation. It's actually just called Catholicism or Catholica in the original German. But he gives this image that I always thought was interesting is he says that when somebody receives communion, there's this 2000 year tradition of the Church. There's all of this institutional framework. You have bishops that have been anointed by bishops that have been anointed by bishops. You have over 260 popes. You have all of this buildings that have been all of this stuff, but that all happen so that when the priest says the body of Christ and the believer says amen, that all of that stuff in a way vanishes almost. And the person receives intimately, personally right. Jesus Christ, body, blood, soul, and divinity. And in a way, it's almost as though the Church vanishes and I receive Jesus immediately. That's what the power of the sacraments does is it's an immediate mediation. So I actually receive right, the body, blood, soul and divinity. I receive the Son and the Spirit immediately. Because of all of the mediation of the sacraments.
[00:12:47] Speaker A: Yeah, the Church actually teaches that every sacramental celebration is the highest spiritual activity of the Church. For the point that you just made, we might think that deep mystical prayer or the slow and careful resuscitation of the Rosary are the apex of the spiritual life, and obviously those things are very important. But the Church teaches that every sacramental celebration is the height of the Churches and the individual Christians spiritual life because the primary agent in every sacramental celebration is the risen Christ himself.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: Yeah, and there was a Mexican archbishop in the 50s, Archbishop Luis Martinez, and he wrote a book called Only Jesus, and it was one of his last books. He also has a book called, I think, the Sanctifier on the Holy Spirit. Both just beautiful books of kind of rich, kind of broadly Thomistic theology and yet also so spiritually. Nourishing, Archbishop Martinez. But in this book, Only Jesus, he says in a way that we have to remember that the sacraments are and he's talking here specifically about the Eucharist, that in a way the Eucharist is not the goal, so to speak, jesus does not want to remain in the tabernacle. Jesus does not want to remain in the altar. Jesus wants to dwell in our souls. Right. And in all of the sacraments, they are all ways in which, by the power of the Holy Spirit, jesus Christ risen dwells in our souls so that we can be right in the Spirit through the Son, children of the Father. And so, again, it's that sense that the sacraments are objective real signs and realities of God's presence and his saving presence. And at the same time, they are the means by which God becomes immediately present to each person in really the highest level of this personal acceptance and entrustment of ourselves to our Lord.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: Yeah. One of the controversies around the time of the Reformation that is related to this point is the spiritual significance of all seven sacraments, so to speak, in a very colloquial fashion.
We associate evangelical Protestantism and their understanding of salvation and grace with one category are you saved or not Saved? And the profound thing about the sacraments is that they're not seven redundancies. They are seven sources of unique graces that help the Christian flourish and deepen in each aspect of the Christian life and at different phases of the Christian life. So there is a famous reference by John Calvin, I believe, to Confirmation in which he said, it's a useless piece of ceremony because if you are justified or saved, then the recourse to further means of sanctification would seem silly. But the beautiful thing about the sacraments is that they're not seven redundancies. They're not seven different versions of being saved. They're seven different sources of deepening our relationship with God in ways that we need to open our hearts and grow in different stages of life. And that theology of grace, that it's not simply a univocal category, but something that God pours into us to draw us into deeper union with Him from all kinds of different angles, is a really amazing gift for each Christian to receive in their journey.
[00:16:50] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think maybe both, perhaps for practicing Catholics or for non Catholics, maybe there's a way that sometimes we have this phenomenon that happens in our culture called spiritual, but not religious, where people want to have just their spiritual encounter with God, but that's separated from the religious practices religious, which we would call these rituals in these forms, these organizations. But I think there can also be maybe another phenomenon which is kind of like religious but not spiritual, where the sacraments are seen as something that as long as I do them externally, that they will take care of me. And I think maybe this is often why often non Catholic believers who do have that profound experience of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord can sometimes be suspicious of the sacraments. So could you say a word about how do we elevate the sacraments but avoid falling into this kind of religious but not spiritual, and to kind of maybe just bring all that into one thing. What's the role of faith and the sacraments?
[00:18:06] Speaker A: It's a great question.
I think the sacrament of confession really brings this consideration to a focal point because many Protestants will and sometimes rightly accuse it of being used as a vending machine, that you engage in a certain behavior on Friday, knowing that on Saturday afternoon you can go to confession.
And the response to that is that even though the sacraments and the efficacy of the sacraments depend on Christ and not on the fervent intensity of the recipient, it's also the case that they don't work like vending machines in the sense that we can receive a validly, celebrated sacrament without the fruitfulness of the grace taking root in our souls. So that one really can't be religious, but not spiritual in their interaction with the sacraments. So simply going through the line and receiving communion or going through the motions in the sacramental life, even if the sacrament is validly, celebrated and works in an ex opera, operado fashion, does not mean, according to the theology of the Church, that we're making spiritual progress. And it is faith and our faith in the sacraments and also our understanding in faith that we are giving ourselves over to the Lord with the amen that we utter when we receive communion or we receive sacramental absolution. That is the necessary disposition to receive the sacraments fruitfully. So I can understand the factory type mentality and criticism, but the Church's theology does not only not support that one simply cannot receive a sacrament in the most passive way or receive a sacrament irreverently and be credited with a growth in faith or a meritorious action.
[00:20:28] Speaker B: So in a way, if the sacraments are Christ coming to us, then we are really only going to be able to receive Him fruitfully if we believe in Him, hope in Him, and love Him.
[00:20:40] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:20:41] Speaker B: It's really a question of a purge. Just like if my I don't know, put it like if my wife comes home or something and I've made dinner for her or she's made dinner for me or something along those lines, I can eat the food. But if there's no charity, if I don't believe in her and trust her and kind of have earthly hope in her and love her, there's no nourishment of fruit of the relationship.
And so I think if the more than we recognize that the sacraments are the way that Christ comes to us and the way that the Holy Spirit comes to dwell in us, then it's a real call actually to faith and to believe that Christ is just as he came, he is coming to us now.
[00:21:24] Speaker A: That's right. And there's a continuum that we all live through. We have days where we might have distractions at mass and I don't want to imply to the listeners that one would not receive grace if they're worried about the meeting that they have right after Mass. So there's certainly a continuum, but we have a dispositive impact on the scope to which the grace poured into our hearts in the reception of a sacrament takes root and flourishes. And there's a great example of this in the theology of penance.
If one were to go into the confessional conscious of two mortal sins, but then realize, oh, it's Father Jones, and I just confessed this sin to him last week, and he might be angry, so I'll just mention the one and not the other. The Church actually teaches that one leaves the confessional still in the state of mortal sin, because if one is not willing to open their heart to submit in contrition to the judgment of the priest acting in persona Christi, they're impeding his mercy from ministering to them. So we play a lot of psychological games with ourselves about these things, and they have an objective efficacy, but they also can't be abused in a disingenuous or rote fashion.
[00:23:02] Speaker B: Sure, yeah. And of course, one of the beautiful things is that we don't get a certain punch card on our confessions either.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: Right.
[00:23:10] Speaker B: So if ever we can go back that's right. The confessional door is always open, so we can begin, and especially for some young people who might struggle with scrupulosity as well. One of the fun things about the sacraments is that they put the emphasis on what Christ has done. I always know that, in a way, my own ability to follow Christ is always inadequate. My own ability even to confess my sins is inadequate.
We can't follow Christ as well as we want. I can't even repent as well as I want. And so it's just that sense of, like, turning ourselves over totally to God and recognizing that he has not only left us words that will be our safe, but he's left us kind of these rites, these practices that allow me to kind of even when I'm weak and confused this way, kind of the sevenfold way of the sacraments is the way home.
No matter how lost I feel, So we're going to take a break, and when we get back, I want to go over a few kind of big principles of your book. And also, you've been teaching the sacraments for what, 15 or 20 years now?
[00:24:26] Speaker A: Yeah, maybe 20 years.
[00:24:28] Speaker B: So I'd love also, just to maybe before we get into the book, ask you a little bit about what are some things that when you teach the sacraments, you really want students to kind of take away from the course. Right. So when we get back, we'll talk a little bit about that.
[00:24:42] Speaker A: Wonderful.
[00:24:51] Speaker C: You're listening to the Catholic Theology Show, presented by Ave Maria University and sponsored in part by Annunciation Circle. Through their generous donations of $10 or more per month, annunciation Circle members directly support the mission of AMU to be a fountainhead of renewal for the Church through our faculty, staff, students and alumni. To learn more, visit avemaria.edu. Slash join. Thank you for your continued support. And now let's get back to the show.
[00:25:20] Speaker B: Welcome back to the Catholic Theology Show sponsored by Ave Maria University. I'm your host, Michael Doffine, and today we are with Dr. Roger Nutt, provost and professor of Theology at Ave Maria University, as well as the author of a book on the sacraments. And so we've been talking about the sacraments today and why they are really necessary to the life of the Church and to the life of faith. So thank you for being on our show.
[00:25:47] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:25:48] Speaker B: So we said that you've been teaching this course, our courses on the sacraments, for almost two decades now. When you teach the course, what are things that you really want to emphasize with the students? What are things you want students to take away? Like, what do you want them to remember five years from now? And maybe just to kind of throw it in there a little bit differently? What are some odd questions from time to time or kind of but significant questions that you find students have?
[00:26:19] Speaker A: Sure.
If I could summarize what I really hope the students will take away under one theme.
The theme would be that there is an intelligibility to the truthfulness of the sacraments, that while all the sacraments are revealed mysteries, we wouldn't know about them or have them had Christ not instituted them. It's also the case that mysteries are intelligible and that God is not an arbitrary agent.
So we spend the most time in the class on the Eucharist because the Eucharist is the greatest gift that Christ gave the Church. And I think there are a lot of faithful whose Eucharistic piety somewhat suspends judgment on the intelligibility and profundity of the Eucharist because it is such a mystery. For example, how could every person in the communion line receive the full body, blood, soul and divinity even though there's only one Jesus and there's a hundred people in line? So there are a lot of profound questions. And one of the things that I want my students to see is that, yes, these are profound things, but the Church is able to open up their intelligibility and understandability so. Some of the very significant Catholic doctrines about the sacraments, like transubstantiation, allow us through rolling up our sleeves and wrestling with St. Thomas and the teaching of the Church to see that these aren't really contradictions that we just sweep over in faith, but they can be understood. And there is a coherence to them that actually draws us up to a deeper union with God when we really wrestle with their truthfulness.
Another thing that I think is very important, especially in the culture that we live in today, is to understand that the focal meaning of the sacraments is not horizontal or strictly cultural, but it's vertical. The meaning of the sacraments comes from God's use and appropriation of these types of things in salvation history. So I've heard people give talks, for example, that the Eucharist in the Eucharist were around the table and it's kind of like being at Grandma's house on Sunday and she takes fresh bread out of the oven and it has a wonderful aroma and there's this sacramental symbolism of being fed. And it's true that the sacraments touch us on a human level, but I think those horizontal or kind of imminent engagements with the material part of the sacraments sell them short because the Church teaches that the meaning of the signs or symbols in the sacraments is derived primarily from the significance that God gives it. So the water used in baptism carries with it the Flood, the parting of the Red Sea, christ's own Baptism.
The bread that we use in the Eucharist is not simply one thing among many, like rice cakes that are interchangeable depending on the culture that you live in, but the bread carries with it the significance of Melchizedek, the manna in the desert, the Passover. And when the Church celebrates the liturgy, those things do have a natural meaning. Bread is food, water is a cleansing agent, but they also have a theological meaning. And in the situation that we live in today with a lot of political gridlock, we often see things strictly from the view of taste or preference. And we forget that when it comes to the revealed religion that Christianity is that the primary or focal meaning of things comes from God and his, that's.
[00:30:33] Speaker B: Really that is a very helpful reminder that God is not beginning afresh in Jesus Christ, but that he's fulfilling the promises he made to Israel in a way the promise he made to creation. And so throughout the Old Testament, he's already beginning to reveal Himself and save his people. And so then what gets taken up in the New Testament is even more revelatory and even more saving. But that you're right.
It's not merely on the earthly level. And I think that sense that God has a plan, right? That God worked with Israel through signs. God reveals Himself definitively in Jesus Christ and then continues with new signs to allow his saving presence. And maybe in reading your book, I was struck by the fact that you really put a lot of emphasis on how all the sacraments, in different way, allow us to share in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the sacrifice. And there's a passage from Romans six in which St. Paul says this this is six three. And following, do you not know that all of us have been baptized who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. We were buried, therefore, with Him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in the newness of life. Right? So that in baptism we die with Christ and in Baptism we rise with Christ. So at the heart of that then, is Christ's resurrection and death. So maybe one reason why I think people might have a little kind of hard time kind of out of being overwhelmed by the beauty and power and love within the sacraments is that they may not really have a how do we really recover that notion that it's Christ's death and resurrection, that sacrifice and the fact that he not only takes on death out of love, but then overcomes death in the resurrection?
Why is that the sacrificial mystery of Christ necessary for our salvation? Because it seems to me like all the rest of the everything else we're going to say about the Sacraments depends upon that point.
[00:33:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
As you read that passage, I thought to myself and of course, this is a little glib, but it's as simple as cause and effect. That Jesus Christ's death and resurrection, and even his ascension, we forget that he's alive and seated at the right hand of the Father right now, continuing to minister to us has objective effects in the order of salvation. And the sacraments are the means by which he draws us into those effects through the graces that are caused by the sacraments. So that passage from Romans six is actually a classic text that the Church has looked to in developing her basic doctrine of sacramental causality. And sometimes we forget that the sacraments do have causal agency in the spiritual life, that's what comes the grace that comes from the sacraments is caused by them and that grace is derived from Christ's death and resurrection. So if we were to ask St. Paul, I actually do this thought experiment with my students, if we could sit St. Paul down and say, hey, did you mean to say that baptism causes something to happen to us? It seems to me quite clear that Paul would say, yes, I did. When you are baptized, your old life and your sins are buried with Christ. And when you come out of the water, you are living a new life and baptism causes those effects within you, right?
[00:34:39] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think it's also partly because for the baptism, again, is not merely an external thing that is done, it's also an internal, it's the combination within the willing surrender of my life to Jesus Christ. It's that belief and baptism that go together. So maybe just another question then you describe in your book and this is kind of like, again, stepping back a little bit, but you describe in your book that you say that there's a via moderna a modern way and a via antiqua a classical way. And at times you say that the modern approach, say modern politics, modern technology, we tend to focus on the sensible, the tangible and we valorize and esteem power and the power to. Manipulate Francis Bacon. Knowledge is power.
The test of my knowledge is do I have the power to move things that are visible and tangible in the world?
And you contrast that with an ancient way, which is more wisdom based, which is not how do I manipulate the human being, but how do I understand what the human being is? Not how do I manipulate creation, but how do I understand what creation is? Not how do I manipulate God, but how do I understand who God is? Right. So could you just say a little bit about how that both in terms of studying the sacraments, but also just in terms of thinking about the sacraments and maybe incorporating them into our daily lives, that this wisdom based approach is different than a power based approach?
[00:36:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
Causality today has been reduced mostly to the category that they would have recognized in the ancient world of efficiency.
In the post Newtonian way of looking at the world, the primary way that things are moved is by external objects smashing into each other.
[00:36:58] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:36:59] Speaker A: So what has happened in this via moderna or new way of looking at things is that the Church's language of sacramental causality has seemed like a language of external force and coercion.
[00:37:14] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:37:15] Speaker A: And the more ancient sapiential or wisdom based view sees things within a broader order that is not simply the exercise of the force of external bodies on each other, but the conferral of forms, to use St. Thomas's language, the reduction of a potency within someone to being actual. So the reduction of the power, the human power of being able to know or love to the actuality of faith and charity.
So I think what we struggle with today is that in submitting ourselves to the sacraments, we're not actually engaged in a competitive battle with a higher power, but we're living according to the all wise order that God has established that is meant to lead us to a fuller form of flourishing. But it's very difficult in the power based outlook that we are all confronted with today to step back and open ourselves to a more sapiential or wisdom based appreciation for this profound order that God has established both in nature but certainly within the life of the Church.
[00:38:39] Speaker B: Yeah. It's interesting, right at the very end of Dante's Divine Comedy, he talks about the love that moves the sun and the stars. But interesting, the love that moves the sun and the stars, the creative love of God that willed the universe into being, also wills that Dante may will with the Heavenly Father. Right. Because in the Trinity, he sees the human presence face of Jesus Christ. And so that idea that we would be most full when we are raised by love, not so much pushed from the outside, but drawn from within. And not just drawn with human love, which is a beautiful thing. Right. But drawn with divine love, with the very love of God that allows us to kind of have that love that.
[00:39:32] Speaker A: Overcomes death, right to the point about Christ's ascension and being seated at the right hand of the Father. The Church teaches that eternal life is a new mode of living.
And so what we are receiving in the Sacraments, what Christ is doing as the High Priest from Heaven, is actually sharing that union and heavenly life that he has with God the Father, with us. So he's actually enlivening us. St. Thomas has a strange phrase in Latin. There are all kinds of different know, the efficient, the formal, the final. But when he's talking about Christ's headship over the Church, he uses a Latin phrase, the causa influenz, like the inflowing or the influencing cause. So he has this profound eschatological life as a human hypostatically united to the Word that he is enjoying in Heaven now. And his priestly work is to share it with us through the life of the Sacraments.
[00:40:47] Speaker B: And I think that's really important to remember that although we often talk about the Cross, and the Cross is that upon which our salvation has been won.
But the Cross is never the end of the story. Right. The Cross always goes into the Resurrection, and the Resurrection goes into the Ascension.
And so, yes, in the Sacraments, it's not only the crucified Lord, not only the resurrected Lord, but the ascended Lord. That Jesus Christ right now. So I think Pope Benedict in his book Jesus of Nazareth, said that basically heaven simply is Jesus Christ. Right. Because in Jesus Christ, we have created nature completely unified with the divine nature.
And it's even effective because it's even brought Mary's human nature into its own dwelling. And so we then are tasting in the Sacraments eternal life, right?
[00:41:49] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
[00:41:50] Speaker B: And again, aquinas will say both that not only do the Sacraments grant us eternal life, faith is the beginning of eternal life in us.
And again so I think one thing just to kind of step back one more time, because I think it's just so fascinating. There are a lot of people who have described what they call like this disenchantment thesis about modernity that's kind of complicated for some of our listeners. But the basic idea is that when the Protestant Reformation said that God is present in the Word and in faith, but not present in the institutional sacraments of the Church, that it kind of began to say, like the world previously was enchanted by God's presence and of course, marred by human sin awfully. That being said, the created order could reveal God's meaning and purpose.
So then within the Protestant Reformation, there became the idea that, no, the historical created world, the world of the Sacraments, the world of the Church, could only mediate God's presence through Scripture, sola scriptura through Scripture alone and through interior faith alone.
So then what happened is, okay, that was in the 16th century 17th century. By the 18th and 19th century, we have moving from the Reformation to modernity to post modernity. And then we begin to say, wait a second, let's just say God's presence isn't visible anywhere. It's not visible in history, it's not visible in the sacraments. And scripture turns out just to be another part of the historical church. So we're going to get rid of that and then internally becomes maybe the only place if there's any connection to God, it's only this kind of internal element. And so that in some ways, when we get rid of the sacraments, it kind of changes the way we look at all of creation. No longer as possibly an icon of God's presence when restored in Jesus Christ, but really kind of something that's really empty and related to that is this kind of rise of modern I don't know how else to put it, but modern anxiety. It shows up in the 19th century. Nietzsche talks about it, Freud talks about it. I mean, all these as you get into the 20th century as well, that in a way, it's kind of like what the sacraments do is they show that I can trust in my salvation because God created me. God redeemed me. God baptized me. I pray and I hope that I can love him with the love that he has poured into my hearts. But it's kind of the objective reality, the sacraments, that gives me kind of that's where I hang my hope on because that's Jesus Christ touching me in those sacraments. And when we get rid of that Christ present in the created world or Christ present in the kind of historical world, then the only thing I have left is my inner self. And that just turns out to be like not a very secure place to be.
[00:45:02] Speaker A: Yeah. Our friend and late colleague, Father Matthew Lamb used to joke with me that the Church's doctrine of the ex opere operato efficacy of the sacraments, that is their objective efficacy, that they don't depend on me, but they depend on Christ is the most consoling doctrine. And the Church and I think he had in mind what you're talking about.
We have these visible signs that Christ instituted for the Church to use in her worship that communicate to us invisible and imperceptible graces. And he gave us those visible signs as the sure pledge that he was still active and communicating grace to us so that we don't have to do the work, we don't have to produce the result. It's his work, as you said, on the cross and now from heaven that he is drawing us into. So the sacraments are a great anecdote to anxiety because when we receive the consecrated hosts, when we hear the words of absolution, when we see the baby baptized, we know that the kingdom of God is being realized within us. And I don't know about you, but I take a lot of relief in that monsignor.
[00:46:26] Speaker B: Ronald Knox, who was a famous Anglican priest who converted to the Catholic faith in the early, I think late teens or 19, around 1920, he was just a brilliant author, writer, prose, stylish, preacher. And when he became a Catholic, one of his sermons he says that he said the exciting thing about being when he was a Protestant was that he saw himself as kind of pushing the cart of Christ and he was on a mission and that was what each believer was basically was his job to push the cart. And that created a kind of excitement and enthusiasm.
But he said when he became a Catholic, what he realized his job was just to get on the cart and let himself in a way, be carried. And of course he continued to carry out a very vibrant apostolate. He taught, he wrote he ended up translating the entire Bible, old Testament and New Testament from the Vulgate into English and what's considered by many to still be the Knox translation, one of the most beautiful ones. So he did lots of things for the mission of the church. But it's kind of that idea that it's not up to us. The good we want to achieve is people's friendship with God and we are always utterly powerless to do that. If that happens, that's a grace of God and we are but kind of unnecessary, we're but secondary causes. So I think that's kind of that objective character of the sacraments, kind of like that card. And there are times where we just got to throw ourselves on to them. We got to throw ourselves onto the mercy of God as displayed through the objective character of the sacraments. Well, we're coming up to the end of our time. I did want to just highlight one thing we were talking about. This is just you did say the title is General Principles. Could you just say one last word about a lot of people when they talk about the sacraments or maybe read about the sacraments or liturgy, tend to a lot of it is about the historical development of the sacraments over time. Why did you not follow that approach in this book and emphasize the principles?
[00:48:37] Speaker A: Sure, a couple of reasons.
The first is that the instruction in the general principles of sacramental theology, or what was traditionally called the sacraments in common, was for centuries an essential part of theological formation which has kind of dropped off. And the central part of theological formation that it offered was that you need a certain foundation in basic principles like what is a sacrament? What do you have to intend to bring about a sacrament? What does a sacrament cause? What is sacramental character? How are the sacraments interrelated that apply to all seven of the sacraments? So before one can really appreciate the theology of baptism or the theology of the Eucharist, they have to know what a sacrament is and what all these corresponding basic principles are. So there are certain truths or transcendent essences or principles about the Sacraments that apply across the board. And there has not been a significant book or had not been a significant book on that aspect of sacramental theology for over 60 years.
So it was a gap that I thought really needed to be filled. There's a section in Aquinas'summa questions 60 to 65 of the third part that covers this material, but there wasn't a good one volume companion that really summarized all of the material that was in print, so I wanted to fill a lacuna.
But the second part of your question is that while liturgical studies are very important and I love learning about the historical development of the Church's liturgy, there has been a sense in which those studies have subsumed the principled knowledge that we have of the sacraments. So that sacramental theology becomes a study of the real presence in the 13th century or the theology of baptism in the fourth century. But as a believing Catholic, I believe that the Sacraments are true forms of revealed knowledge and that resourcing their principles so that we can understand the whole sacramental liturgy of the Church is very important for the faithful to understanding what God is doing on our behalf through the Sacraments.
[00:51:15] Speaker B: Yeah, that's so well put. And I think also that especially for believers and theologians and priests, is that when we be there's nothing wrong with, again, paying it with learning about the historical development, but we have to be able to have the eyes of intelligibility, of reason and faith to recognize that there's a continuity. I look a lot different than I did when I was one year old or when I was eleven years old, or if I happen to be alive when I'm 80. Right. But I have the same identity. And in some ways we have to kind of focus on what are the identity of the Sacraments that endures. That in a way is necessary to preach the faith. The historical development is something that we can learn from time to time, but the other one is necessary. So I'd like to just maybe close with one. I love this one quote from St. Thomas Aquinas. This is in his Commentary on the Gospel of John, chapter six, that speaks, of course, about how he will feed us with the bread of life, with his own flesh. But this is what Aquinas says. He says, the Sacrament of our Lord's Passion contains in itself the Christ who suffered. Right? So the Sacrament, especially of the Eucharist, simply contains Christ, but Christ who suffered. And he goes on to say, therefore the effect of the Eucharist is nothing other than the effect of his death and the effect of His Resurrection, right? So the Sacrament is not something other than Christ. It simply is Christ and all that he has done for our salvation and the beautiful thing is that we get to kind of not only meet Christ in Scripture and in prayer, but we get to meet Christ substantially present body, blood, soul, and divinity in the mystery of the Eucharist. And that's a really great gift.
[00:53:06] Speaker A: Yeah, the sacraments are signs, and as I mentioned, they're not merely horizontal signs, that is, signs that have cultural significance, but they're also participatory signs. So water is a cleansing agent, but the water used in baptism participates in the cleansing or sanctification that God has engaged in from the flood through the Red Sea. And that passage that you just read really accentuates that. The Eucharist is not an empty sign, but in Christ associating the bread and wine with his body and blood at the Last Supper, the sacrament that we receive actually participates in and communicates the reality, and that is what makes them such amazing gifts.
[00:53:59] Speaker B: Well, thank you so much, Roger Nutt, for being on our show. I'd like to remind listeners and viewers that Dr. Nut has been on a few prior episodes, one on Catholic universities, another one on the legacy of Pope Benedict XVI. Dr. Nutt has a short course within the Pursuit of Wisdom series sponsored by Abramir University on the wisdom of sacramental theology. I think it's going to be coming out later this year, so hopefully you'll get a chance to listen to that. And for anyone who's interested in picking up a copy of the book or maybe giving it to a student of theology or a priest or seminarian, you can order one from Catholic University of America Press. And if you use a special code that you get on the Catholic Theology Show CT 10, you can get 20% off. So thank you very much for being with us today. And thanks, Roger, for being on our show.
[00:54:56] Speaker A: Thank you for having me.
[00:54:58] Speaker C: Thank you so much for joining us for this podcast. If you like this episode, please rate and review it on your favorite podcast app to help others find the show. And if you want to take the next step, please consider joining our annunciation circle so we can continue to bring you more free content.
We'll see you next time on The Catholic Theology Show.
