by CCW | 26 March 2019 21:00
This text speaks profoundly to our Lenten theme of thinking sacramentally. It embodies, I use the term intentionally, the harmony of intellect and sense that lies at the heart of our thinking sacramentally. A text familiar from the Advent and Christian pageants and seasons, it belongs primarily and essentially to the Feast of the Annunciation which marks the very beginning of the Incarnation. The Annunciation is the conception of Christ in the womb of Mary, not biologically through sexual intercourse but intellectually and spiritually, and not by the denial of nature but by virtue of the grace which does not destroy but perfects nature.
“Those who are not good Marians are often Arians”, as a 17th century maxim notes, suggesting something about the essential role of Mary in the understanding of orthodox Christianity. Arianism, named after Arius, denies the essential and absolute divinity of Christ, treating Jesus as something less and other than “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God”, as we say in the Nicene Creed. She is the theotokos, the God-bearer; in short, the mother of God. A celebrated (and contested) term, it belongs utterly and entirely to the essential doctrines of the Christian faith, to the doctrine of God as Trinity, to the hypostatic union of God and Man in the Incarnation of Christ Jesus, and to the doctrine of human redemption; or perhaps should I say, the central dogmas of the Christian Faith. This means that they are the essential and fundamental features of Christianity which embrace a number of different though not necessarily opposed doctrines, meaning ways of thinking about these essential principles of the Christian faith, and which are central to any form of principled engagement with other religions. Mary is therefore not an extra, not a sentimental add-on. She is altogether essential to the understanding and life of the Christian faith and in its engagement with other religions, to boot.
With Mary we are obliged to look back to the Jewish Scriptures to Hannah and Miriam and others even as we can also look ahead to the Islamic Qur’an. Mary, the mother of Jesus, as the Qur’an puts it, is mentioned more times there than in the New Testament. But the number of mentions of her name is altogether secondary to the essential role Mary plays in the economy of salvation. In the New Testament, for instance, Mary appears at all the essential moments in the story of Christ and is always to be understood in relation to Christ.
What is that relation? She is the source of Christ’s pure and true humanity. As such she is inescapably an important part of the Chalcedonian definition which argues for the full and perfect humanity and divinity of Christ united in the one person of Christ. Mary embodies the fullest truth of our humanity qua human. She shows us something of what it truly means to be human. She embodies the very idea of one who having heard the Word of God keeps it in her heart and gives birth to the Incarnate Word. At once unique – none of us are without sin and as Augustine and others after him have thought, there is something special about Mary on this score – yet she is totally and perfectly human, fully human we might say.
She has to be sinless in order not to give sin to her son, Jesus, in order for him to be like us in all respects save sin. As with Jesus, so with Mary. In nutsche, there we have the singular virtue of Mary and Jesus. And yet, Mary embodies as such the real and essential truth of our humanity which as intimately joined to Christ means that she is what we hope to be, namely non posse peccare, not able to sin because our wills are fully at one with God’s will. “Be it unto me according to thy word”, she says. That defines her and signals what should define us. She embodies our human vocation. She shows us what it truly means to be human. This is why Mary exercises such a significant role in Christian thinking. There have been, to be sure, times when her role has been overstated and exaggerated, by making her into something divine, which she is not, and there have also been times when it has been understated and ignored, by forgetting her place in the Incarnation altogether. Mary demands our prayerful and thoughtful attention and in ways that transcend the divisions between so-called catholics and so-called protestants, not to mention the many so-called social and psychological scientists looking at Mary through the lens of social psychology and its theories of power in terms of sex and gender.
Mary warrants our attention theologically. In terms of our Lenten programme she is a significant figure with respect to thinking sacramentally. The point made by a number of Anglican divines is that Mary cannot be thought about apart from Christ. She is, I want to suggest, a critical figure with respect to Chalcedonian orthodoxy and to what has been called (Fr. Crouse) chalcedonies sacramentalism, which is ‘mere Anglicanism’. So what do these things mean?
The first six to eight centuries of the Christian Church is sometimes called the Patristic period, the age of the Fathers who largely work out the essential nature of the Christian faith. It is worked out by way of councils and creeds amid a cauldron of controversies and necessarily so. What drives things in all of its marvellous complexity is the demand to be able to say who Christ is in himself and who he is for us and to be able to say what is the Christian faith. That there is a struggle to come to understand is important because the struggle is about theological reasoning. The Fathers ultimately come to determine the Canon of Scripture, namely, what books constitute the Scriptures at the same time as they determine the creedal essentials of the Faith. The two aspects – establishing the canon of Scripture and the creedal essentials – are necessarily interrelated. Indeed, as John Bramhall brilliantly observes, the rule of faith – that which is to be believed – is one rule, dilated in the Scriptures and concentrated in the Creeds. In other words, it is extended or spread out in the vast array of books which constitute the Scriptures of both Old and New Testament as well as Apocryphal or Deutero-canonical text belonging to the intertestamental period, and then distilled in the Creeds. The Creeds are the distillation of the Scriptures, (a bit like good Scotch) with respect to the essential doctrines about God and Man in Jesus Christ.
It is not possible to provide even a brief history of creedal and scriptural developments but it is important to add that the being of the Church itself is subordinate to those developments, as a much a product of the process as well as participating in it. The point is that the Church as an institution is not prior to it while the Church as creedally identified is very much part of the Faith. The Church, if I may put it this way, gives birth to the Scriptures and the Creeds and in turn is given birth by them, in short, defined by them.
The great Anglican divine, Richard Hooker, offers a very powerful doctrinal prologue to his treatment of the sacraments in his magisterial work, The Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity. It is build around the doctrine of Chalcedon that emerges from the fifth century council of Chalcedon. “There are”, he notes, “but four things which concur to make complete the whole state of our Lord Jesus Christ: his Deity, his manhood, the conjunction of both, and the distinction of the one from the other being joined in one”(Bk. V, ch. Liv, p. 237).
Those four things are summed up in the words “αληθως, τελεως, αδιαιρετως, ασυγχυτως, truly, perfectly, indivisibly, distinctly”. The first, truly, applies to Christ as being God which we profess in the Nicene Creed where Christ is “very God of very God”, that is to say, truly God. The second, perfectly, applies to Christ in his being Man; perfectly man as well as truly God. The third term, indivisibly, refers to his being of both natures, divine and human, one divine person, and the fourth,distinctly, refers to his still continuing in that personal unity as both God and Man distinctly. Hooker says that “by way of abridgement” this “comprise[s] whatsoever antiquity hath at large handled either in declaration of Christian belief” and with respect to refuting all heresies about Christ (V, ch. Liv, p. 238). It is a powerful summary of the developments in doctrine that arise out of the Councils of Nicaea (325), Constantinople (371), Ephesus (431), and Chalcedon (451). Those four general or ecumenical councils are generally received as in some sense authoritative by most of the Christian churches throughout the world. They are the basis, too, of the next three ecumenical councils which build logically upon these four.
But our interest is in thinking sacramentally. What does that mean in relation to Mary? She is the God-bearer, the one who bears God into the world and in so doing does not cease to be human; if anything she embodies the radical truth of our humanity in having heard the word of God, and keeping it. She is not passive in this but active. As Lancelot Andrewes argues it is not recepiet or decepiet but concepiet. It is the active yielding of herself to the divine initiative that is paramount. In a way, the Incarnation is sacramental. The invisible is made known through the visible and in ways that turn the world on its head for the simple reason that God cannot be reduced to the world or simply collapsed into it. The Athanasian Creed argues that Christ is “one” … “not by conversion of the flesh into God”, in other words, one not by the embodied humanity being swallowed up into divinity and losing its humanity, but “by the taking up of manhood into God” and preserving his humanity. That means Christ is both God and Man, that his divinity and his humanity are united in his divine person. This is the same logic that belongs to the idea of the sacraments. Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.
A sacramental understanding seeks to maintain the integrity of the natural elements of water in Baptism, and of bread and wine in the Holy Eucharist while allowing them to be the vehicles of a supernatural or spiritual reality, radical new birth and life in the one, the body and blood of Christ in the other, Holy Communion. All of the questions about Mary, about the virgin birth, about her perpetual virginity, about her holy motherhood, about her assumption, all turn on this sacramental logic about how the outward and the visible, the body, are one with the inward and invisible. Mary herself as the Theotokos is a kind of sacrament; the invisible grace of God is made visible, made man through her active attention to the word and will of God. She embodies in the fullest possible way the real truth and dignity of our humanity. In relation to the Chalcedonian doctrine, she is perfectly human in order to be the source of Christ’s perfect humanity and as such she participates in the fourth principle, the way in which Christ is both God and Man distinctly.
Thinking sacramentally means attending to what is made known to us through the natural things of the world and our engagement with the natural world. What is made known are the things of God which do not destroy nature but perfect it. The purity of Mary derives from the divine will. In Irenaeus’ poignant and potent phrase Mary is the pure womb who gives birth to that pure humanity that belongs to the perfection of our humanity in Christ. Christ is “that pure one opening purely that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure.”
Mary symbolically and sacramentally represents the Church. Our task is to be Marian in our openness to God and his word, letting it take root in our hearts and minds and to be made visible in our lives. In other words, in and through the Church we learn to live sacramentally and in so doing discover the real truth and dignity of our humanity. It means to take to heart Mary’s wonderful words of service and sacrifice. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.” Such is the perfect harmony of intellect and sense. Such is Chalcedonian sacramentalism. Such is the nature of our thinking sacramentally.
Fr. David Curry
Lenten Programme: Thinking Sacramentally III
Feast of the Annunciation (transf.)
March 26th, 2019
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