Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter With God

by Edward Schillebeeckx

A reprinting of SchillebeeckxOs classic work. A standard in understanding the relationship between Christ, Sacrament and the Church. A positive and constructive ecclesial theology.

Genres: Theology, Christianity

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Edward Cornelis Florentius Alfonsus Schillebeeckx was a Belgian Roman Catholic theologian born in Antwerp. He taught at the Catholic University in Nijmegen. He then continued writing. In his nineties, he still wanted to finish a major book about the Sacraments.

He was a member of the Dominican Order. His books on theology have been translated into many languages, and his contributions to the Second Vatican Council made him known throughout the world.

Reviews

[samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Forward
• B. 1914 in Antwerp
• Most famous book: De sacramentele Heilseconomie
• This work is a “non-technical summary of the projected single voume of De sacramentele Heilseconomie.
• Accd to Fr. Dupuy: Schillebeeckx “rediscovers, as it were from within, the notions forged by scholastic theology, and thus restores us to a theology of the sacraments rooted in the biblical and patristic soil from which it first sprang” (qtd xiv)
• This summary “manifestly possesses the unity of a single vision, [but] it is not merely as a personal vision that it commends itself to the reader, but as the obedience of a trained sensibility to revelation in the Church. It is this insight into the profound intentions of scholastic theology, of what it was trying to ‘fix’ theologically, which allows him to disclose its genetic and original sense, and indeed to modify it and enlarge its scope. (xiv)
• He displays “anthropological” insight into the sacraments (xiv) anthropology in the general sense, as a doctrine of man, bc Schillebeeckx
• “has found theologically fruitful the work of such writers on phenomenological anthropology (xiv)
• All pre-phenomenological philosophy, including scholastic epistemology…conceives of all knowledge on the model of our knowledge of things, physical realities. In their very different ways, philosophy in England since Wittgenstein, and phenomenology, have abandoned this model. It would be a mistake to suppose that phenomenological philosophy is always a personalism, simply substituting personal relationships for the knowledge of things or facts; However, it is true to say that the personal existent and the structure of his existence engage philosophical interest centrally in phenomenology, so much so that ‘knowledge of things’ is seen as derivative from a fundamental being-in-the-world. Now, ‘encounter’ is a fundamental mode of existence of the human existent, a structural possibility inherent in it. We may treat each other as physical objects or mechanisms, but that is to choose to mistreat each other; the misuse, the deficiency, throws light on that preordained openness to our fellows which releases our being into the fellowship if a we. IT may be noted further that our bodily presence to each other is essential to encounter; we may smile at each other or make faces into masks, give ourselves to each other or withhold ourselves. Again, just as there are conventions in any given culture which shake the styles of this bodily encounter, so there is a ritual idiom, continuous with the ceremonial of secular life, which shapes the styles of our liturgical encounter with God—e.g., kneeling.
• Encounter is “not simply a ‘mode-word’ but represents a concept which ahs been the subject of a good deal of careful analysis; and secondly, that its theological application would seem preordained in a religion where God’s personal gifts of himself to man has been consummated in the Incarnation, God addressing man as a man amongst men.
• The value of this concept in theology, then, is the generality of its scope, its power to unify.
• The account of the sacraments offered here is very far from those narrowly conceived treatises, whether technical or popular, where the sacraments are treated f in isolation from the rest of Christian and human experience, either as a matter for specialists or as the object of a purely liturgical enthusiasm. Once the Christian religion is seen as an encounter of God and man in Christ the ‘primordial sacrament,’ the sacraments themselves can be seen as inseparable from a whole economy of revelation in word and reality, a revelation of God in Trinity, of Incarnation, grace, the Church, and indeed of man and his destiny, for it is within this economy of sacramental encounter that we as men achieve the fullness of our personal being. In fact, whaii s offered here is not simply an account of the sacraments but of the Christian religion, the religio Christianae vitae… and through it of non-Christian religion and life.
• With professional theologians, they tend to “lose contact with the living realities with which they are concerned; the mystery tends to disappear behind the problem to which it gave birth. This is not a reproach which can be made against the author of this book. There is manifest throughout a pressure and an urgency which only come from living contact with the mystery of Christ, and explain in part some of the density of the author’s language.

Introduction: Personal Encounter with God
• There is a “unique manner of existence which is peculiar to man” distinct from “The mode of being, mere objective ‘being there,’ which is proper to the things of nature” (3)
• We must redirect to attend to “the intimateness of God’s personal approach to man” (3)
• This “purely impersonal, almost mechanical approach” has consequences to study of sacraments. WE become “passive recipients of sacramental grace”
• Religion: “a saving dialogue between man and the living God”
• Man can reach God thru creation but he cannot establish immediate personal contact with god. Why? Through natural faculties, man reaches God only in and through creation, actually as something belonging to creation; that is to say, as the absolute principle of its being. In our human way, then, we reach God, but not as a person in and for himself. (4)
• This desire for personal relationship with God is a “nostalgia” (4)
• “Only by grace, and not in virtue of our own merits, can we truly serve God as person to person. Personal communion with God is possible only in and through God’s own generous initiative in coming to meet us in grace.
• “The act itself of this encounter of God and man, which on earth can take place only in faith, is what we call salvation. On God’s part this encounter involves a disclosure of himself by revelation, and on the part of man it involves a devotion to God’s service—that is religion” (4)
• Indwelling=the familiar living together of God the three persons and man (5)
• Every supernatural reality which is realized historically in our lives is sacramental (5)
• In this book we are directing our attention to sacramentality in religion in order to arrive eventually at the insight that the sacraments are the properly human mode of encounter with God.

1. Christ, Sacrament of God.
• Uses Aug’s three phases of the Church coming into being: the “church” of the devout heathen; the pre-Christian phase of the Christian Church (Israel) and the emergence of the mature Chuch
• Sacrament in Pagan Religion:
• All humans are called by God to a “communion in grace with himself”—even heathens
• But this inward experience of grace does not encounter visible embodiment of that grace. Heathen religion strives to give shape to this grace
• Result: “motley” (book wrote snobbish LOL) collection of religious forms and asiprations (9)
• They became “a mixture of true devotedness to God, of elements of an all-too-fallible humanity, of dogmatic distortion, moral confusion, and finally even of diabolical influence (9)
• Pagan religious society was the first providential sketch of the true Church of Christ
• It is a fragment of unconscious Christianity.
• Israel as Sacrament of God:
• Clear shape of life-giving grace became explicit only in special divine revelation (10)
• Israel, the first phase of the Church, is the fruit of God’s merciful intervention (11)
• Gods purpose was to call a faithful people into life. There would be failure intil God raised up a man in whom was concentrated the entirety of mankind’s vocation to faithfulness, and who would himself keep the faith with the Covenant (13)
• In Jesus, grace became fully visible (13)
• Christ as the Primordial Sacrament: Encounter with the Earthly Christ as Sacrament of the Encounter w God
• Chalcedon tells us Christ is one person in two natures. So the second peson of the trinity is personally man and this man is personally God (13-4)
• X’s humanity is a messianic reality, a fulfillment of Gods promise of salvation
• Because the saving acts of the man Jesus are performed by a divine person, they have a divine power to save, but because this divine power to save appears to us in visible form, the saving activity of Jesus is sacramental. For a sacrament is a divine bestowal of salvation in an outwardly perceptible form which makes the bestowal manifest; a bestowal of salvation in historical visibility (15)
• The man Jesus, as the personal visible realization of the divine grace of redemption, is the sacrament. 15
• Because the inward power of Jesus’ will to redeem and of his human love is God’s own saving power realized in human form, the human saving acts of Jesus are the divine bestowal of grace itself in visible form…they cause what they signify, they are sacraments (16-7)
• The Actions of Jesus’ Life as Manifestations of Divine Love for Man and Human Love for God: Bestowal of Grace and Religious Worship
• By being saved from sin we enter personal communion of grace and love with God. This means that the fullness of grace which properly belongs to Jesus was meant for us all as a source of grace
• God revealed to us the embodiment of religion, the countenance of a truly religious man.
• Jesus is the offer of divine love and the prototype of the response to the divine offer! 18
• To be man is a process of becoming man; Jesus’ manhood grew throughout his earthly life, finding its completion in the d+r
• Mystery of X= mystery of saving worship, mystery of praise, mystery of salvation (19)
• Jesus’ Humiliation in the Service of God and His Heavenly Exaltation: The Redemptive Mystery of X
• His human embodiment is his redemptive mystery. There are phases
• 1. The initiative of the Father through the Sn in the HS.
• 2. The Human response of Christ’s life to the Father’s initiative in sending him
• 3. The divine response to Jesus’ obedience in the humiliation of his life
• 4. The sending of the HSP upon the world of men by the glorified kyrios
• Force of redemption came fully into operation when X was exalted at God’s right hand.
• The dogmatic content of the Passover, Ascension, and Pentecost:
• 1. Passover is mystery of X’s loving attachment to the Father unto death itself; it is the fidelity of the Father of the Son made man
• 2. Ascension is the investiture of Christ risen and the glorification of Christ
• 3. Pentecost is the eternally continuing actuation or application of this mystery in and through the Sp who now realizes and perfects in us that which was completed in Christ.
• The Significance of the Saving Mysteries of Jesus, the Christ:
• The Mystery of the Earthly Adoration of God the Father by God the Son Incarnate.
• Earthly Christ lived in estrangement from God because he was our representative, took the place of sinful mankind.
• But he wasn’t acting as if! He was really feeling—“vivid and fearful” (26)… “living in utter truth, through to the very end, the experience of the estrangement from God belonging to our sinfulness” (27)
• The Father’s Response to the Son’s Life of Worship on Earth: The Resurrection and Glorification of Jesus and His Establishment as Lord and Sender of the Holy Spirit
• The resurrection IS God accepting the sacrifice (32). With the resurrection and exaltation, Christ becomes unconditionally the messiah.
• Christ of Heaven, Sender of the Spirit of Sanctification
• Christ can only give us SP when he’s been consummated, when he’s been resurrected (34)
• THE POINT HERE: the mysteries of the Passover and of Pentecost are the representation in human form, realized in the mystery of Christ, of the mystery of the redeeming Trinity. Passover and Pentecost are the interpretation on the human place of the divine relations of Son to Father, and of Son in unity with the Father to the SP.
• The Mystery of Christ’s Love for the Father as the Foundation of his Unfailing Gift of Grace.
• The two inseparable aspects of Christ’s life: humiliation and glory. In humiliation we see redemptive worship. In glory we see grace
• We become by grace what Christ is by nature: Son of God. We are caught up into the special providential relationships which hold between the Father and the incarnate Son
• The Necessity for the Extension to Earth of the Glorified Christ, the Priomordial Sacrament
• Our Need to Encounter the Christ of Heaven
• Christ’s bodily absence is conducive to actual encounter with him 40
• Christ makes his presence among us actively visible and tangible too, not directly through his own bodiliness, but by extending among us on earth in visible form the function of his bodily reality which is in heaven. This is precisely what the sacraments are: the earthly extension of the “body of the Lord” 41
• Why do we need this sacramental extension? Without it the human qualities of incarnation would be lost to us. God offers us the kingdom of heaven in an earthly guise (42)
• The Real Possibility of This Encounter from Christ’s Side
• We can only interact with each other (mutual human availability) through the body. On the side of Christ the man, it is the resurrection which makes it possible for him precisely as a man to influence us by grace.
• The Necessity for Earthly Sacraments so that the Encounter between the Glorified Christ (Sacraments are OUR SIDE) and Men on Earth Might Take Place in Terms of Mutual Human Availability
• Christ’s side is ready for human encounter. BUT HIS GLORIFICATION HAS MADE HIM INVISIBLE TO US. So Christ needs to make his heavenly bodiliness visible in some way to our earthy sphere so that redemption can turn its face towards us 43
• If he’s not going to show his flesh, he can take up non-glorified realities into his glorified saving activity. This is the sacraments: the face of redemption turned visibly towards us. 43
• Summary: “considering the redemptive mystery of Christ as the revelation of the redeeming Trinity made real in the man Jesus” (57)

2. The Church, Sacrament of the Risen Christ
• The Mystery of the Church, The Earthly Body of the Lord
• The Church, Earthly Sacrament of the Christ in Heaven
• Jesus had to make his own community, this happens through his death.
• Earthly church= visible communion in grace, consisting of members and a hierarchical leadership (47). So the community of the church is the realization in historical form of the victory achieved by X
• The visible church itself is the Lord’s mystical body. The church therefore is not merely a means of salvation. It is Christ’s salvation itself, this salvation as visibly realized in this world. Thus it is, by a kind of identity, the body of the Lord
• The sacramental functions of hierarchy and faithful differ within the Church and show the distinction
• Ecclesiastical Character of the Office of Hierarchy and Laity
• In its entirety, church is the sacramental or mystical Christ.
• Twofold manner of visible presence of grace and consequent bestowal of grace: through the apostolic office in virtue of the character of the priesthood, and through the faithful in virtue of their character of baptism and confirmation. 50
• Visible church is yet another way of making visible the invisible body of Christ, this sign.
• Office and Charism in the Church
• Church is not only saving institution. It’s a saving and sanctifying community. As the earthly representation of the sign of salvation in heaven, the Church in its entirety is itself a sign already containing the redemptive reality of Christ. 51
• Church is manifestation of Gods love for us and our love for God—so its not only community of salvation, but also of worship.
• Grace of redemption becomes visible in Church in two ways: office (hierarchy) and charism (both hierarchy and laity). BOTH MUST WORK
• A Sacrament: Official Act of the Church as Redemptive Institution
• Sacrament: visible action proceeding from the Church as redemptive institution, an official ecclesial act performed in virtue either of the character of the priesthood or of the characters of baptism and confirmation.
• All seven sacraments are fundamentally and primarily a visible, official act of the Church. Each sacrament is the personal saving at of the risen Christ himself, but realized in the visible form of an official act of the Church. In other words, a sacrament is the saving action of Christ in the visible form of an ecclesial action. The validity of a sacrament is therefore simply its authenticity as an act of the Church as such.
• “seven possible ways” (54)
• The Sacraments as Ecclesial Celebration-in-Mystery of the mysteries of Christ’s life: The Presence of the Mystery of Christ in the Sacraments
• Okay so how is the heavenly mystery of grace present in the sacraments? This problem is Mysteriengegenwart, or presence in mystery.
• A. Christ’s Mystery of Redemption As Eternally Actual
• Incarnation is the personal entry of the Eternal into the boundaries of time.
• Two important aspects of Jesus’ redemptive acts: they take place in history, yet have a perennial character. To deny the former is Docetism. To deny the latter means theres no mystery in sacraments OR to deny that Jesus is a god-man. Redemptive acts as “trans-historical” (56)
• B. The Sacramental Presence of the Enduring Mystery of Redemption
• It is precisely the eternally actual mystery of worship, Christ himself, who becomes present to us and is active for our benefit in the sacraments. This is the authentic and essential factor of the presence in mystery (60)
• C. The Eternally Enduring Actuality of the Redemption and the Historical Perspective of Salvation in the Sacraments
• Sacraments are effective at saving because of the eternally actual redemptive act of the mystery of Christ.
• Sacraments are mediative “not between the historical sacrifice of the Cross and our twentieth-century situation, but rather between the Christ who is living now and our earthly world. More precisely, what takes place in the sacraments is the immediate encounter in mutual availability between the living Kyrios and ourselves. The sacraments are this encounter 62
• Threefold historical orientation of the sacraments: anamnesis, visible affirmation and bestowal of the actual gift of grace, and a pledge of eschatological salvation and a herald of the Parousia. 62
• Church is not prolonging the earthly life of Christ (because hes here now). Church is prolonging the heavenly Christ, specifically by prolonging the function of the earthly body of Jesus. 63
• 2. The Sacraments as Ecclesial Manifestation of Christ’s Divine Love for Men (Bestowal of Grace) and of His Human Love for God (Worship)
• Sacraments aren’t just visibility of Christ’s redemptive act, but also visibility of the inner worship and holiness of the ecclesial community itself.
• A. Ritual Activity in General
• Rituals and symbols are man gr

[Claudio Laferla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Schillebeeckx is one of my faviourites. This is a 'must have' for every christian. Very challenging.

[Sean Loone · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding book.
Yes it does draw upon the work of Saint Thomas Quinas but places it firmly both within the context of the Second Vatican Council and the demands of the modern world. It is deeply scholarly but rooted in pastoral care. There is much her to aid the catechist, teacher and preacher. Essential reading both for those in formation and the clergy. Take your time though and reflect on the practical implications of such a body of work.
Reading this book is time well spent.

[graceofgod · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superb piece of sacramental theology.

[Anton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book indeed an outstanding book on Sacramental Theology. I read this book during my theological studies in 1969. I loved the book. Fr. Schillebeeckx is one of my favourite theologians.
Anton

[Gab Nug · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to give this a 2/5, but there are some good nuggets here and there.

[Matthew Purt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit suss and dated in some parts but in many other parts it was brilliant. Worth a read.

[Brandon · Rating 2 out of 5]

A concise statement of the modern Roman Catholic doctrine of the Sacraments. Schillebeeckx explains the incarnation of sacramental life in the Roman Catholic Church. His book surveys Rome's seven sacraments. Each of the seven receives some discussion though Baptism, the Eucharist, Confession and Confirmation seem to get the most face time. Schillebeeckx's perspective is heavily influenced by Thomas Aquinas. The reader will find Aquinas referred to throughout the volume, with footnotes in Latin. Schillebeeckx refers to many other theologians as well (especially Karl Rahner) showing the spectrum of views on some of the finer points of sacramental theology within the Roman Communion. The prose is clear with many engaging passages while others are a bit dry. There is also some unnecessary repetition of certain ideas. Schillebeeckx develops his doctrine with both Scripture and Tradition in mind, but the latter sets the agenda and provides the terminology. Protestants, especially those of the Reformed persuasion, will find his section on the validity of Protestant sacraments interesting. Schillebeeckx seeks a fair statement of the Protestant position, with special attention to the Reformed view. It's likely he focuses on the Reformed churches due to his context in the Netherlands. He even gives a detailed outline of a Reformed communion service he attended. I would recommend this book to those with theological background that want to better understand the Roman Catholic view of the sacraments. That said, the grid through which this book handles sacramental theology is disappointing from an Evangelical perspective, both in scope and methodology.

[Shari · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a classic of sacramental theology, and though much of it was over my Unitarian head, even I could appreciate the thoroughness and detail with which Schillebeeckx lays out his arguments. This was written pre-Vatican II and was intended to persuade the Church to think of sacraments in a new way. He succeeded.

[Michael Mayor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Radically changed my understanding of the incarnation when I first read this in seminary almost 20 years ago. Important ideas about sacrament, myth, and symbol brought together in the human event of Jesus of Nazareth and the intersection of his life and those who followed him.

[Marcus]

I didn't technically read this, but you understand.

[Jason Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an incredible book. One of the few class readings I've had so far that really changed the way I FEEL (not think) at Church.

[Steve Gambino · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not easy to read but worth the effort.