Reformed Sacramentality

Graham R. Hughes Collegeville: Liturgical, 2017. 264 pp. $34.95 Reformed Sacramentality is the posthumously published work of Australian liturgical scholar Graham Hughes. This important book, constructed and edited by Steffen Lösel, draws on part of an unfinished manuscript and collected essays that Hughes had been working on until the time of his death in 2015. The book raises important questions for Reformed Christians about our historical and theological understanding of the sacraments. In the following essay, I will briefly outline Hughes’s approach to these questions, compare and contrast his approach to key liturgical resources and documents, and offer my own critical assessment of this work.

Building on his earlier work on Worship and Meaning, Hughes sets his sights on pressing Reformed Christians to reclaim the central role of materiality in our theology and practice of the sacraments. Hughes defines the distinctions by contrasting a Roman Catholic emphasis on “condensed sacramentality” versus a Reformed commitment to “disseminated sacramentality.” For Hughes, the condensed approach underscores the role of the church’s sacraments as the means of grace. In contrast, he describes the Reformed movement as “a style of Christian awareness that locates God, or the sacred in everyday experience” (1). ¹ Hughes presents these contrasting views as defining a theological spectrum and liturgical approach along which he seeks to locate diverse communities of faith. As a Reformed theologian, he is quick to ground a disseminated sacramental approach in his reading of the Gospels (“What we have in Jesus’ proclamation is pretty much the paradigm of ‘disseminated sacramentality’”; 4) and to his analysis of contemporary culture with its desire for immediacy and emphasis on individuality. At the same time, Hughes underscores the major challenge of a distributed approach to sacramentality: namely, the lack of a controlling center that is guided by a commitment to tradition and becomes captive to “an ideology of novelty” (33). Hence Hughes’s work represents his attempt to find mooring for a Reformed commitment to dispersed sacramentality.

In order to traverse this vast landscape and find a way to connect these different approaches to sacramentality, Hughes weaves together a selection of liturgical definitions of sacramentality (“the fusion of spirit and physical form,” 37) representative of a Catholic approach with the classic Reformed suspicion of the dangers of idolatry. In some ways, it is a clever dialogue guided by a particular anthropological approach that begins by naming sacramentality as that which responds to the universal needs of the human condition, but one that is guarded by a Reformed commitment (via Barth) to Jesus as the primordial sacrament. For Hughes, “images occupy an intermediate point between the spirit realm and the physical world” (57). Here the image of Jesus becomes the controlling factor in mediating the experience of sacramentality by the participants and offers a distinct advantage of recognizing the material forms of sacraments apart from conceptual understandings of the sacraments as key to their meaning. ²

For Hughes, the solution to challenges facing the Reformed emphasis on a dispersed sacramentality is to call for a recognition of “particular bearers of holiness” (109) that provide hermeneutical lenses through which one interprets and discerns a broader diversity of religious and spiritual experiences. These challenges are heightened in these postmodern, individualistic times by the weakened form of ecclesial guidance that connects the experience of sacramentality with communal Christian discipleship. Hughes holds on to the dispersed sacramental emphasis while also designating three significant criteria: (1) the “physicality must be able to bear the significance we want to attribute” to the sacramental event; (2) a particular meaning is “invested” in these events; and (3) the events are designated through an “order of canonicity” with a received Christian view of God (109–11).

Perhaps Hughes’s strongest contribution is his insistence on balancing the historical emphasis on spirituality with a strong commitment to the materiality of the sacraments. It is here that Hughes insists that physicality should not be confused with idolatry. The Reformed tradition’s insistence on the Word and its accompanying stress on language comes with its own commitment to the possibility of transformative encounter in the events of worship. The experience of encounter provides Hughes an important bridge to reclaiming an active place for sacraments and sacramentality within the Reformed tradition. However, in opening this door to materiality, Hughes wants to guard against what he perceives as the dangers of our postmodern times. Ultimately, the presiding minister provides the “pivotal role” in mediating the encounter of the transcendent God with the community gathered for worship through the material gifts of the sacraments.

Clearly, Hughes leans heavily on the liturgical renewal movement, which served as an ecumenical impetus that brought a renewed emphasis on Word and Sacrament to diverse communities of faith in the twentieth century. The results of this movement are evident in denominational worship books that dramatically changed the ways in which we worship on Sunday mornings. For the Roman Catholic Church, Vatican II demonstrated the fruit of this movement’s growth and influence. One hears it in the call to open up the riches of the Scriptures that led to the adoption of a new lectionary, and one sees it in the commitment to the full, conscious, and active participation of the assembly that lead to a transformation of the mass.

In the wake of these seismic changes, many Protestants reexamined our own worship practices and joined in the work for a common lectionary along with insisting on a significant commitment to reclaim the role of the sacraments in our Sunday assemblies. One need only point to the dramatic revisions of denominational worship books that are the fruit of the liturgical renewal movement. For Presbyterians, the 1993 Book of Common Worship and the newly revised BCW provide great evidence of the influence of this movement. In fact, the success of this movement leads one back to the important question raised by Hughes: Is there a distinctively Reformed approach to the Sacraments?

Over fifty years ago, Jean-Jacques von Allmen provided a response to this question in his classic work, Worship: Its Theology and Practice (Oxford University Press, 1965). Von Allmen begins his investigation of Reformed worship by asserting that the fundamental commitment is to a christological foundation recalled through the recapitulation of the history of salvation. It is important to highlight the contrast in approaches between Hughes and von Allmen. While both offer distinctive arguments for a Reformed understanding of the sacraments, von Allmen locates his approach firmly within the Reformed insistence on scriptural grounding for sacramental actions. One finds both an insistence on biblical warrants to justify certain liturgical practices as well as a commitment to a meta-narrative of salvation history from which the sacraments both draw on and point towards. In other words, the sacraments of the Lord’s Supper and Baptism reinforce a particular way of reading Scripture. It is not surprising that at the height of the theological discussion of Heilsgeschichte that von Allmen would rely on this as a basis for his own articulation of a distinctive Reformed approach to the sacraments.

On this point Hughes offers a critical perspective out of his awareness of the danger of linking a Reformed sacramentality to theological insights grounded in modernity. Hughes clearly recognizes the need to reorient sacramentality from what was at times a circuitous reading of Scripture to provide adequate biblical support for a sacramental act. (For example, what does infant baptism really have to do with Jesus’ welcoming of the children in Mark 13:10ff.?) Equally important, Hughes is keenly aware of theological and philosophical shifts that make the reliance on a constructed narrative like Heilsgeschichte highly problematic. However, Hughes also remains anxious about allowing a dispersed notion of sacramentality to roam free. Thus, the turn to catholic authority represents the compromise that he is willing to make to preserve the integrity of the sacraments while maintaining space for a more qualified understanding of dispersed sacramentality.

While I am convinced that Hughes is asking many of the important questions in terms of what Reformed liturgical praxis has to offer in light of its approach to the sacraments, this is not a deal that I am willing to make. Nor is it one that I believe is representative of the normative strains with the Reformed tradition. To locate the significance of the sacraments in the “order of canonicity,” that is, to cede their proper location to the ecclesial locations and the primary actors (in this case the presider) is, in my estimation, to give away the distinctive Reformed practice and understanding of the sacraments and to allow the dictates of a catholic, liturgical renewal movement to take precedence. Calvin clearly articulated that our experience of grace in the sacraments was solely a result of the Spirit’s presence as we gather around these ordinary gifts of creation that point us to Christ. To be fair, Calvin’s own willingness to accept certain aspects of a hierarchical understanding of ministry within the church when it comes to Word and Sacraments opens a pathway for Hughes to explore. Granted, a classic Reformed approach to sacramentality is filled with risks and missteps. The central commitment to balancing form and freedom has followed conflicting paths from those who gleaned important insight from the liturgical renewal movement and who insist on a fixed textual approach to preserve the meaning of the sacrament to those whose dalliance with extemporaneous utterances cause one to wonder what theological messages are received by the participants. Somewhere, though, in the midst of these divergent options, I continue to hold hope that a recovery of the sacraments, sacramentality, and a sacramental life can take root in our liturgical communities in ways that are distinctly Reformed and increasingly local. The historical evidence of the sacramental practices during the early centuries of the church shows a highly diverse and adaptive approach to theological understandings of both the acts of washing (Baptism) and shared meals (Lord’s Supper). Equally important is the growing recognition of a much broader range of biblical texts from which to draw in terms of our liturgical actions. For instance, the study of Greco-Roman meals as a template for the Christian assembly provides for both cultural continuity and Christian particularity in its celebrations of meals that brought together the early followers of Jesus. Similarly, the diverse patterns of bathing across the ancient world clearly influenced the ways in which the Christian washing ritual took shape. Here the antecedents of a Reformed liturgical commitment to form and freedom can be clearly found. Yes, there are immense dangers to this approach to the sacraments. The question that we must ask (which I think is what undergirds Hughes important work) is this: Are these risks worth taking? Or, given the cultural zeitgeist, is this simply too great of a risk for liturgical leaders and communities of faith?

In the end, Hughes’s willingness to accept the strictures of canonicity and structural authority provides him with the safeguards that he so desperately wants to identify. There’s another way, though, that we could pose this question: Do the sacraments actually need us to protect them? Is there an inherent sacramentality that Reformed Christians can identify and reclaim from our theological history that might serve us well in the twenty-first century? I believe that Calvin’s theological and liturgical commitment to a prominent pneumatology provides an important clue: Can we trust the Spirit’s presence in the actions of the assembly’s gathering around Word, water, bread, and wine to bring definition to our experience of the sacraments and sacramentality? I offer this insight not just as a naïve riposte to Hughes’s assessment but as a broader question of our assemblies. In my estimation, to champion such an approach requires a form of fierce bravery that we let go of our carefully constructed texts and our rigidly prescribed routines in order that the Spirit might actually bring new life to us. I fully acknowledge such a move is one that will lead to mistakes, failed experimentation, cultural misappropriation, and at times theological heresy. Thus, the question for a contemporary Reformed approach to sacramentality is whether to put the emphasis on the role of presiders in mediating proper and primary experiences of grace at the table and font or whether to trust the primacy of the Spirit as that which brings new life in a surprising abundance of ways and forms.

While I differ with Hughes’s conclusion, I believe that we are deeply indebted to this significant work that presses us to sift through critical theological and ecclesial options in order that we can reclaim our theological identities and renew our liturgical practices. I strongly commend this book as an essential text for seminarians and pastors who long for an important conversation partner as we reflect on ways that the sacramental practices can enliven our congregations.