Communion 201: Means Of Grace

“Wow, still sticking with that whole communion thing, ain’t ya?”

Yep. Holes need plugging. The good news is, though, I am nearing the end of the exploration and will soon transition from writing the book to the formal editing process. After, I plan to resume normal blog function, documenting the ephemera of life.

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As the magisterial reformers were hashing out their differences with the Catholic Church, it was incumbent on them to provide an alternative explanation for how Christ is present with us in the Supper, other than the morbid and illogical implications of transubstantiation. If the essence of the elements did not change into his flesh and blood, what did they do? What were they for? In what way was the grace of God special in the sacraments that was not present, say, an hour before or after we partook?

The answer they provided is that the sacraments are a “means of grace.” One cannot help feeling the answer to one enigma is to be given another equally puzzling. What does means mean? Thankfully, we do have more familiarity with means than we may realize. Means are just the stuff through which something happens. The means of growth for a flower are sunlight, soil, and water; the means of carpentry are wood, a hammer, and nails; the means of swimming is water. Through these means, growth, construction, and dog paddling are manifested and made possible. 

All God’s covenants are accompanied by means through which the covenant is apprehended, physical evidence communicating a spiritual reality. Noah was gifted the rainbow, Abraham was given circumcision, and husbands and wives consummate a marriage covenant through intercourse, sealing in the “oneness” of their flesh the spiritual commitment of oneness they made before God. In the same way, God’s grace is transmitted to us through the stuff-ness of water, bread, and wine. They are God’s appointed channels through which He communicates grace and blessing to His children. Since our souls are implanted in a body of flesh, and not disembodied gobs of ectoplasm floating about, He confirms His grace by physical means so that we can have a tangible experience of an invisible reality.

God does not need to confirm His word through the sacrament, as though He were untrustworthy. As a merciful Father, He knows our slender faith and feeble constitution, and provides physical sustenance to strengthen His word in us. Our gracious Father, “with boundless condescension, so accommodates himself to our capacity” (Institutes, 4.14.3), for He knows we need to be buttressed on every side with encouragement and fortitude for our journey through the world. The means of grace are in themselves gracious.

So much for the means, what about the grace? God’s grace is the unwarranted charity He has extended to all flesh by not counting their sins against them; it is His loving us in return for our hatred of Him. His billowing wrath against the hubris of man that considered what is Most Valuable worthless, He removed, not by fiat nor by offering us a repayment plan, but by fulfilling the requirements of justice in the slaughtering of His Son. Somebody had to die. In God’s economy, blood is the only acceptable payment for befouling the Beautiful and vilifying what is most valuable. Which is why ingratiating oneself to God by “good works” is like trying to fuel a rocket ship to Mars with mustard packets: it’s a categorical mistake. No amount of mustard equals any amount of thrust, and no amount of positive actions equals any amortization of our debt. But God, knowing the meagreness of our blood and incapacity of desire, spilled the blood of His Son, satisfying His wrath and conferring on us the eternal inheritance of sonship. This grace, the swapping of our crappy life with Jesus’s eternal life, and all the winnings and blessings of God, are conferred on us through faith. It is to this grace the sacraments testify.

Importantly, the means of bread, wine, and water are not the cause of God’s grace, just as the vibrations of a preacher’s vocal chords do not magically save sinners. Yet through these means, the message of the cross is apprehended –  it does not create faith but gives it something to grab onto. Neither spot of wine nor crust of bread is imbued with saving power, but through them the Spirit makes effective the gospel as a real means of God’s grace that nourishes believers.

And these means do have a measurable effect. We have all experienced the power kind words have on our disposition and attitude. If, after viewing a friend’s paintings, I were to tell her that she is a singularly gifted artist, and she believed me, she would feel approved in her gift and encouraged in her work, perhaps taking greater risks in innovation and attempting more complicated pieces. My words are the means of my gracious compliment, and her belief in the sincerity of my words would benefit her in real and tangible ways. The words themselves do not make her into a Rembrandt, like casting some sort of spell, but through them, she is affirmed in a gift that was already present.

Sacraments are the gospel with props. Just as preaching is the audible gospel, the Sacraments are, as Augustine observes, the “visible gospel” (Contra Faustum 19.16). John Calvin expanded on Augustine, saying that a building’s foundation is to God’s word as its pillars are to the sacraments, adding increased support to the entire structure. “For just as a building stands and leans on its foundation, and yet is rendered more stable when supported by pillars, so faith leans on the word of God as its proper foundation, and yet when sacraments are added, leans more firmly, as if resting on pillars.” (Institutes 4.14.6).

If the sacraments do not bestow salvific grace, in what way are they a means of it? They are not means in which the grace of God is applied to us in salvation, only faith holds that role, but rather reveal and confirm the grace. Like a lamp illuminating an unseen path, sacraments shine light on the grace that is already there. When I give flowers to my wife, the peonies do not create love for my wife, but display the love that is living and present. If I do not give flowers to her, that does not mean I do not love her, but my affection would be otherwise invisible unless there is some means through which that love is made manifest. Her confidence in my love would be emboldened, and the flowers would act as a booster shot to inoculate her from any doubts about my love. Our belonging to God as part of His covenant family is verbalized by the Word and visualized through sacrament. Through these means, God “testifies his love and kindness to us more expressly than by word” (Institutes 4.14.6).

Not only are the sacraments signs, pointing us to the heavenly reality they signify, the reformers also described their role as seals. If a king wrote a message to be sent by his dispatch, he would press his ring into hot wax, imprinting his royal signet onto the document. This would authenticate the message as a royal decree, identifying the document as legitimate and not a forgery. The seal does not create the message, but verifies its authenticity; it bears witness to the truth that what has been written is binding and true. 

Signs point us beyond reality to the promise, and the seal confirms that promise to us, authenticating our belonging to God’s family. And so God, being gracious and knowing our needs, gives us both signs and seals of our faith through stuff with physical and chemical qualities to make the invisible reality visible. These are not random symbols that we attach meaning to; they are created by God specifically – He made them the way He did in order to carry the symbolic freight He intended.

Mystery Of Magnetism

So the sacraments are neither the grace itself, as though Christ’s flesh is hidden under the wafer, nor is the grace imaginary, such as memorialism would imply, existing only in the mind for the length of time our hummingbird imaginations can hold it there.

A profound, divinely instituted union exists between the sign and the signified that transcends human comprehension. It is a mystery, held together by unseen forces, by unknowable physics in that thin slice of ether between heaven and earth. As such, we must be comfortable in the discomfort of holding the two in tension, cautious not to overemphasize or underemphasize the union. If we smash them together such that the sign and the signified are one (ie, the bread is His flesh), we err on the side of idolatry and superstition. Disconnecting the sign from the signified (ie, wine is an arbitrary symbol), we land in the ditch of bare memorialism and meaning loss on the other side of the road. 

The Belgic Confession summarizes the mystic union between the sign and the signified in a way that protects us from both the slippery slope of idolatry and the bleak, waterless path of bare memorialism:

“We believe that our good God, mindful of our crudeness and weakness, has ordained sacraments for us to seal his promises in us, to pledge his goodwill and grace toward us, and also to nourish and sustain our faith. He has added these to the Word of the gospel to represent better to our external senses both what he enables us to understand by his Word and what he does inwardly in our hearts, confirming in us the salvation he imparts to us. For they are visible signs and seals of something internal and invisible, by means of which God works in us through the power of the Holy Spirit. So they are not empty and hollow signs to fool and deceive us, for their truth is Jesus Christ, without whom they would be nothing.”

Beligic Confession, Article 33

Like pushing together two same-poled magnets makes tangible the invisible magnetic force, so drawing together the sign and the signified makes tangible the invisible grace, though the two can never truly touch. The same force that makes the magnets slip around an invisible field between our fingertips is the same one that shields the entire Earth from the Sun’s unceasing microwaving of the planet. So the sacrament is a tiny visible indicator of a vast cosmic reality we cannot fathom. Somewhere in between these two tensions is the reality: we must avoid ritualism by believing there is efficacy in the things themselves, and avoid rationalism that robs the elements of their meaning. 

If we are not satisfied with this mystery or feel cheated out of certainty, let us take consolation in the befuddlement of the brightest theological minds of Church history. Calvin himself is rendered speechless when he considers the sacrament, and demonstrates for us the proper awe and reverence with which we are to receive them. Puzzling how Christ is present in the sacraments, he seems to reach the end of his ponderous intellect, and stands at the ledge of God’s fathomless mystery, confessing:

Now if anyone should ask me how [Christ’s presence in the sacrament] takes place, I shall not be ashamed to confess that it is a secret too lofty for either my mind to comprehend or my words to declare. And, to speak more plainly, I rather experience than understand it. Therefore, I here embrace without controversy the truth of God in which I may safely rest. He declares his flesh the food of my soul, his blood its drink [John 6:53ff]. I offer my soul to him to be fed with such food. In his Sacred Supper he bids me take, eat, and drink his body and blood under the symbols of bread and wine. I do not doubt that he himself truly presents them, and that I receive them.

John Calvin, Institutes, 4.17.32

CS Lewis, another incandescently brilliant mind, reached the same conclusions as Calvin, where his vast intellect reached the crashing waves of the sacrament’s oceanic mystery. He could go no further and didn’t dare attempt it, content to feel the warm surf lap over his toes. In Letters to Malcom, he writes of the Eucharist:

Yet I find no difficulty in believing that the veil between the worlds, nowhere else (for me) so opaque to the intellect, is nowhere else so thin and permeable to divine operation. Here a hand from the hidden country touches not only my soul but my body.  Here the prig, the don, the modern, in me have no privilege over the savage or the child.  Here is big medicine and strong magic…the command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand.

C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcom

Understanding is not the goal, but experience through faith. Our Enlightenment-soaked minds that have been trained for centuries to elevate reason above all else and demand to see the math. We must resist the temptation to consign to nonexistence what cannot be known. Math, logic, and prosaic certainty cannot tread in the realm of divine symbols. They melt at such temperatures. Only God-permitted symbols can cross the threshold and carry us into the holy experience of grace. And we must let them do their assigned work.

The reality of the means of grace must be held in tension. The means do not create the grace, nor are the means arbitrary; they are neither a memorial nor magical. The Lord’s supper is as vital to our spiritual health as your mother’s supper was to your physical constitution and growth, yet they are not the mechanism that removes sin and confers grace. We must beware of thinking them optional, dispensable, or alterable; we must beware of hanging salvation upon them. It is not a practice through which we declare our “willing and running,” but a gift through which God expresses His willing and running for us (Romans 9:16). They are the visible expression of the Father’s love, as a gentle father playfully wrestles and embraces his children as a physical display of his affection. They are signs that point to the signified, and not the signified itself.