In response to Colwell

Online sacraments are filling my Twitter feed for the second time this week, and responding intelligently in that format is quite hard. So here's my most sustained attempt to critique the status quo and propose an alternative perspective, in the form of a review of John Colwell's "Promise and presence". Bonne lecture!

Review and response to "Promise and presence : an exploration of sacramental theology", by John Colwell

By Mark Howe, 17^th April 2011

In this book, by a baptist theologian, which pursues an agenda not traditionally associated with baptists, Colwell pleads for a rediscovery of the mediated nature of God's presence through which "the instrumentality of Christian ministry can be re-asserted." (p13).

Ch 1: Sacramentality and the doctrine of God

As might be expected from a self-confessed disciple of Colin Gunton, Colwell starts with the doctrine of the Trinity, which is a theological response to the revelation of the gospel (p22, see also Moltmann on p37). The Trinity enables God to express love without creation, which is necessary for God's love to be authenticallly loving (p23). Continuing with the theme of God's freedom, he quotes Barth saying "God is always free; is subject not object" (p25). God's freedom is not arbitrary because he acts in accordance with this character (p28). This is relavent to the sacraments because "... God cannot be manipulated; he is never at our disposal; he is not capricious, but neither is he subject to necessity; a sacrament may be a means of grace but is never his prison" (p29).

BUT how prescriptive is character? It it easy to see how character traits proscribe certain categories of behaviour, but harder to see how they can decide, for example, which Iraquian nomad to choose as the starting point for his people. Indeed, if character was alone sufficient to explain God's acts, a list of his character traits would effectively be prescriptive, like a rule-based computer program. So, while we must surely affirm that God acts in a principled way, we must surely also avoid suggesting that his principles totally constrain his behaviour.

Ch 2: Sacramentality and the doctrine of creation

Iraneus argues that creation has a goal - man in the image of the Son (p45). Ex nihilo creation is vital if God is not to need creation (p48). "God in everything" panentheism decays to monism, while deism descends into dualism. "To contrast nature and grace is to imply an 'ungraced' nature." (p48)

Berkeley and Edwards sees perception as crucial. Edwards contends that the Spirit grants perception to man, so all knowledge is mediated (p54). BUT in that case, man as creation is pretty much a puppet of the Spirit, who not only can but must create perception ex nihilo and will presumably only do so in accordance with the divine will. To control perception is ultimately to control decision.

"Even a cursory reading of Scripture identifies God's apparent predilection, not just for bushes, but for physical, material means of mediating his presence and action." (p56). Nevertheless, "pansacramentalism emasculates sacramentality" (p55). SO, Colwell seems to want God's presence, freely given, to be mediated through creation, but for this to happen in ways that are, if not contractual, at least extremely formulaic. There is surely a false dichotomy here between "God in everything" and "God uniquely in between two and seven sacraments".

Ch 3: Sacramentality of Church

Talk of gathered church tends to ignore that church is "gathered to" more than "gathered from" (p70). Church is defined by baptism (p73) and church membership courses are "simply a departure from Christ" (ibid). The universality and catholicity of the church are defined by the Lord's Supper (p75), and also penance (p76) and ordination (p77). There is an eschatological focus to the church and its sacraments (p86).

BUT, the Church is the Body of Christ, not in the sense that it is Christ on Earth, but that the church as a whole experiences and expresses something unique about Christ. The sacrament here is surely "Where two or three..." (Matt 18:20) rather than any centralized notion of church defined in terms of specific rites. (Colwell appears to dismiss this verse as irrelevant on p79.) Viewed sacramentally, "Where two or three" is the basis for seeing local "gathering from" as a sign pointing towards eschatological "gathering to". There is no formula that guarantees the sign will always function this way, but then this is true of all sacraments, according to Colwell.

Ch 4: Sacramentality of the Word

Colwell suggests that Scripture should also be seen as a sacrament (p88 ff). The assumption that the Bible is "at our disposal", shared by the historical-critical tradition and fundamentalism, fails to take account of our distance from the biblical text, and indeed from texts in general (p91). "Speech act" theory provides a way to "shift the focus from meaning to performance" (p94) but does not solve the underlying problem: "Post-structualism has pronounced the death of the author, and merely to refer to the author as a speaker does not constitute a resurrection" (p94). Here Colwell again turns to Berkeley and Edwards for help. The scriptural text can communicate to us directly because, uniquely for any text, the Spirit is both the author and the mediator (p96).

BUT in this case the distance between God and his creation collapses, which makes the wide range of interpretations of Scripture all the more perplexing, unless we resort to "Anyone who disagrees with me does not have the Mind of Christ" reasoning. Furthermore, since, for Edwards, all perception of texts and everything else is mediated by the Spirit, it is not clear in what sense Scripture is special - it would seem that the Spirit mediates perception of the Daily Mail too, and presumably does so in a way that is faithful to the intentions of the original journalists.

Colwell is on surer ground when he identifies the close relationship between Scripture, which is given to the church, and church, which is the community within which Scripture is heard and performed (p104).

Ch 5 and 6: Baptism and confirmation

Colwell's chapter on baptism begins with Peter's injunction to the Pentecost crowd to 'repent and be baptised' with its adjacent promise of the Spirit (p109). This shows that receiving the Spirit is linked to baptism (p111). While acknowledging episodes such as the "re-baptism" of Samaritans and Ephesians in Acts 10 and 19 (p135), Colwell insists that on this link between baptism and Spirit (p111) and laments both paedobaptist dilution of the promise by the practice of confirmation (citing Calvin on p138) and the frequent demotion by baptists of baptism to mere witness to a previous, felt conversion (p145). In both cases Colwell sees a risk that we "restrict the the perceptibility of [reception of the Spirit] to the vaguaries of felt religious experience" (p120). It is through baptism we are "in Christ" (p120).

In view of all this, Colwell concludes "What disingenuity beguiles us to abandon [God's ordained means of grace] and invent our own (as if such were possible)? (p125). YET he also argues, when speaking of the Samaritan baptism that "The New Testament is not a blueprint for ecclesial practice" (p136), and that salvation is effected by God alone, with or without the sacraments (p144). He suggests that the Baptist practice of infant presentation should be viewed as "truly sacramental" (p144), argues that confirmation could be salvaged as "truly sacramental" (p152) and insists that "God is not ultimately hampered by our sacramental indiscipline." (p153). Paedobaptism cannot be considered "entirely unsound" because all sacraments depend on God (p152) - and, I would add, because Colwell's working definition of baptism seems to be "Something done by a group calling itself a church that involves some water" - otherwise it is very hard to see how infant baptism is an appropriate way to receive the Spirit following repentance as Peter describes while, say, the Pentecostal "Second Blessing" is not.

Colwell's conclusion that baptist churches could offer confirmation to those baptised as infants as a way to avoid re-baptism and thus become more orthodox (p152) seems to me to bring together all the problems with his approach in general. It combines dogged insistance upon the non-negotiable primacy of the sacraments with boundless flexibility in terms of how those sacraments are defined operationally, to the point where catholicity depends on a conjuring trick with words. He also completely ignores issues over which committed, evangelical paedobaptists struggle, such as the relevance or otherwise of the faith commitment of the parents to the validity of paedobaptism.

Ch 7: The Lord's Supper

On the subject of the Lord's Supper, Colwell argues strongly for some form or real presence in the elements. For him, passages such as 1 Corinthians 10 establish a parallel between the Christian shared meal and pagan sacrificial meals (p155). The passover meal was more than memorial - it also involved participation in earlier oppression and liberation (p157). Thomas, Luther and Calvin, while differing on philosophical details and terminology, share more common ground than is often recognised, and all reject mere memorialism (pp163-172).

Sacerdocalism (where the priest becomes an agent of grace), is an unfortunate but peripheral distraction (p172ff). As with baptism, the Lord's Supper creates rather than expresses Christian unity, and all too frequent schism over the details of the shared meal is "the greatest irony, the greatest tragedy and perhaps the greatest apostasy of the Church" (p176).

HOWEVER, Colwell's argument seems to assume from the outset an established scriptural model that can surely only be sustained at the conclusion of such an argument. The shocking absence of any explicit mention of the Lord's Supper in John's pascal scene is dismissed because of the 'obvious' sacramentality of John 6 and the preaching account of the feeding of the 5000 (p162). The notorious difficulties in agreeing how to reconcile the chronologies of the gospel accounts and the their relationship to the Passover are dismissed as irrelevant (p156). Colwell asks how 1 Corinthians 10 can speak of participation in the body and blood of Christ unless there is some form of real presence (p156), but fails to mention that two chapters later Paul speaks of the body of Christ as the united people of God (I Co 12:12ff). He sees sacraments as a means of "indwelling the gospel story" (p158), but fails to explain what 'physical indwelling of a story' or even 'real indwelling of a story' could possibly mean.

Ch 8-11: Other sacraments

In these chapters Colwell considers the "Catholic" sacraments. It is hard to resist the impression that the driving force at this point is ecumenical dialogue more than canonical exegesis. "There is no difficulty in affirming absolution as a sacrament" (p194), despite no explicit scriptural justification for this conclusion. Decision-card conversions that claim to confer eternal security are dismissed as belittling "the seriousness of sin and the graciousness of grace" (p185), but it is not clear why the same criticism would not apply if the card was replaced with a jug of water and a trinitarian pronouncement by a third party.

Colwell appears to see Christian ministry as the third essential sacramental expression of the sacrament of the church. He argues - convincingly in my view - for the "given-ness" of ministry as the basis of Ephesians 4:7-13 (p211ff). "The essence of Christian ministry [...] simply cannot be acquired - it is a matter of calling and of promise" (p219). However, his attempts to apply a sacramental understanding of ministry result in a quixotic call for free church ministers to retro-fit apostolicity to their ministry by being re-ordained by the Pope (p230). At points Colwell seems to be saying, rather like Lloyd-Webber's Joseph, that any symbol of unity will do, the Pope being the most pragmatic starting point, while at others he argues, for example, that protestant protestations about papal application of "upon this rock" "... have the ring of special pleading" (p230). (Of course Roman Catholic theologians such as Küng also adopt such special pleading, on the basis that there is no evidence of any Christian in the first few centuries of the church interpreting this verse as a support of the primacy of Peter.)

Here, more than anywhere else, it seems to me that the two fundamental problems with Colwell's sacramental agenda become apparent. On the one hand, he needs the specifics of each sacrament to be given, in order to avoid pansacramentalism. On the other hand, the definition of those given sacraments must be extremely flexible in order to fit the widely divergent ways in which each sacrament has been practised across time and denomination. Ultimately, his demonstration of widespread conformity to the "given" promises without requiring any adherence to any ritual specifics is only sustainable by intellectual gymnastics that, whatever their merit in logical terms, simply do not work at a deeper level. Colwell appears to concede this point partially in his concluding remarks, where he recognises that post-denominationalism has achieved more on the ground in terms of practical Christian unity than a generation of formal ecumenical dialogue (p256).

Response

In my view, Colwell's thesis begins well by recognising that God is distinct from but not separated from his creation. Throughout Scripture, YHWH acts within and interacts with the world. Starting with Genesis 12, he does this in a special way with respect to a chosen people who are to bless the nations. In other words, the call of Abram can be seen as a call to sacramental nationhood.

Subsequent events show that YHWH is not imprisoned by his specific commitment to a chosen people - in Colwell's terms, Israel is not his prison. Yet, notwithstanding the Naamans, Ruths and Rahabs, YHWH's choice of Israel for service continues into the New Testament, where the unexpected (though prophesied) nature of the Messiah and the unexpected gift of the Spirit to culturally-gentile gentiles redefines Israel around the incarnate Son. Thus sacramentality - to use that loaded vocabulary - therefore finds its origins not in temple sacrifice, nor in circumcision, but God's calling of a people since pre-history.

Whichever understanding of causality we opt for (causality being a topic that Colwell returns to frequently in relation to the sacraments), it is very hard to conceive of a coherent system with multiple levels of causality, each of which is "given". For example, what does it mean to say that the church is formed through baptism, and united through the Lord's Supper? Does baptism without communion give us one disunited church, while communion without baptism promises several united church (sic)? Colwell attempts to sidestep this problem by reminding us that God's grace is bigger than the sacraments. But, in that case, the sacraments are neither necessary not sufficient, and there is every reason to expect to find God with or without those sacraments. I simply cannot see how, on a logical basis, Colwell can have it both ways.

An alternative understanding would affirm the sacramentality of church, and see all specific sacraments as culturally-shaped expressions of that underlying church sacramentality. This does not equate to pansacramentality because church has form. In particular, church is always community-shaped, which is the antedote to the primacy of unmediated, "felt" immediacy of God that Colwell is so keen to avoid. God gives his people to each other and to the world. He gives his Word to that community. That community lives out the gospel, and God is present as the community does this.

The origin of both baptism and the Lord's Supper are at least partially cultural. The gospels show that baptism existed before Jesus began his ministry, and the way the gospels use the term without explanation, along with the reaction of Jews to the call of John to be baptised, surely suggest that the rite itself was not novel. It has been suggested, for example, that there is a natural link with Jewish ritual washing, and the healing of Naaman is one OT example of a baptism-like rite in Jewish culture. John gives that pre-existant rite new meaning, and the church extends that meaning further in due course. Thus baptism becomes central to Christian praxis as an expression of the "given" gospel, but the rite itself has a large cultural component.

The Lord's Supper is clearly derived from paschal practices and, more generally, from the practice of Jesus who was criticised for spending too much time at table with the wrong sort of people. Table fellowship was one of the key issues in the First Century, where those invited shared an intimacy from which others were excluded. It is therefore unsurprising that Jesus tells the first disciples to share a meal with him at the centre, that this meal contains elements of a typical mediterranean menu, and that this meal had connections to Jewish culture's ultimate salvation narrative. The shared meal of the first Christians had history, but it was also instantly comprehensible to their contemporaries.

Jesus says "Do this in remembrance of me!" to his first disciples. The meaning of "this" is as important and contested, while the assumption is generally that Jesus is announcing a specific rite for all future generations. But the very ambiguity and lack of detail in the gospel accounts is surely problematic. Old Testament rites are described in great detail - does "do this" really cover the same ground? As Colwell says, the New Testament is not a blueprint for the church. What if Christ's command is addressed to his first disciples, in the expectation that successive generations will seek expressions of the sacrament of church that are evocative in their culture?

Would a re-evaluation of sacraments along these lines require the rejection of the sacraments that have served the church during twenty centuries? Maybe not, because the very act of perpetuating the dominical sacraments has made them part of the people of God's shared cultural. Viewed this way, the cultural case for maintaining baptism and communion largely replaces the conventional sacramental case.

However, if the church is the sacrament that God has given to the world, we need not be surprised if God's presence is found within our own intentional cultural practices that reflect God's relationship with his people. It is not a question of expecting God to jump through hoops of our making. God travels before his people when his people are nomadic. He indwells their temples when they settle in cities. The incarnate Son learns Aramaic and begins his ministry with a statement about the Kingdom of God that engages directly with Jewish aspirations over the preceding 400 years. God meets us through the sacrament of his gathered people. He does so in an enculturated way, because it is oxymoronic to speak of an acultural people. Such a perspective allows us to embrace the historical culture of God's people, while freeing us to create new ways in which God's presence can be experienced - including ways that are appropriate to the culture of virtuality.