18 Edward Schillebeeckx and Louis-Marie Chauvet

The Belgian-born Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx (1914–2009) spent most of his teaching career at the University of Nijmegen, where he became one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the second half of the twentieth century. Schillebeeckx arrived in Nijmegen in 1957 after spending ten years at Louvain, where he taught the full range of theology courses for young Dominicans. He would remain teaching in Nijmegen until his retirement in 1983. As a student studying at the French Dominican house of studies at Le Saulchoir, Schillebeeckx was influenced by Marie-Dominique Chenu, a leading figure in a movement known as “ressourcement Thomism.” Schillebeeckx undertook his own work of returning to the sources in his dissertation on the sacraments De sacramentele heilseconomie in 1952. Many of the ideas developed in the dissertation were eventually published for a wider audience in 1963 as Christ, the Sacrament of the Encounter with God. Very soon thereafter the Second Vatican Council began its work of bringing the church up to date, or aggiornamento. Schillebeeckx played a significant role in moving the reforming agenda of the council forward through his work with the Dutch bishops, and he joined other leading theologians in continuing to push for reform after the council by establishing the theological journal Concilium. Schillebeeckx went on to publish major studies in Christology, including Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (1974) and Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord (1983), as well as in ecclesiology, including The Church with a Human Face (1987) and Church: The Human Story of God (1990). His later works, grounded in historical and biblical studies, consistently emphasize the ethical and political demands of Christian life in the contemporary world. Schillebeeckx’s works were not without controversy. He was called to Rome on three occasions to defend his positions before the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, however he was never formally censured. He is widely regarded as one of the most prolific and influential theologians of his generation.

Louis-Marie Chauvet (1942–) hails from Vendée along the Atlantic coast of France. Chauvet was educated in the seminary at Luçon and ordained to the priesthood in 1966. Animated by a concern to make theology speak on the level of the time, he undertook historical and biblical studies in the hope that these might help him better address contemporary theological questions. He defended a thesis on the priesthood of Christ in the Letter to the Hebrews in 1967, earning his licentiate in theology. While at seminary Chauvet developed an interest in Martin Heidegger and his critique of metaphysics. In 1973, having completed a dissertation on the role of penance in the thought of John Calvin at the Sorbonne, Chauvet returned to parish life. Not long after he was contacted by Pierre-Marie Gy to teach in the Superior Institute of Liturgy, and in 1974 he began his teaching career at the Institut Catholique in Paris. Chauvet published his initial research on symbol and sacrament in Du symbolique au symbole. Essai sur les sacrements in 1979. His dissertation, Symbol et Sacrement: une relecture sacramentelle de l’existence chrétienne, attracted international attention when it was published in 1987. With the publication of an English translation, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, in 1995, interest in Chauvet’s work among North American theologians increased significantly. Chauvet’s other major work available in English translation, Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body, makes his ideas available to a broader, nonspecialist audience. His most recent work is a series of four essays on the understanding of mediation in sacramental theology published in Italian under the title Della Mediazione. Quattro studi di teologia sacramentaria fondamentale (2006). He has authored dozens of articles, regularly contributing to the French theological journal La Maison Dieu. Throughout his career Chauvet served the church as a parish priest. He retired from teaching in 2007. Chauvet’s work has earned both praise and criticism for its content, but his unique contribution to a contemporary sacramental theology is universally recognized.

At the turn of the twentieth century Catholic theology was dominated by a Neo-Scholastic theology derived from Pope Leo XIII’s 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris. While Neo-Scholastic thought, coming on the heels of Vatican I, promoted the Pope’s vision of a perennial philosophy and theology able to combat the errors of modernity, it also adopted a rationalist approach to theology and a meticulous separation of nature and supernature. Over time, however, Leo’s promotion of Thomas Aquinas would lead to a revitalization of Catholic sacramental theology. By returning to the patristic and medieval sources, leaders of ressourcement Thomism (a movement its opponents called “the new theology,” or la nouvelle théologie) began to develop a sacramental ontology that would repair the breach opened between nature and supernature, theology and life, by Neo-Scholasticism.¹

Representatives of the nouvelle théologie like Jean Danielou (1905–74), Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), and Marie Dominique Chenu (1895–1990) were concerned that the Neo-Scholastic tendency to separate nature and supernature ended up embracing an Enlightenment view of nature as an autonomous and purely secular sphere. This posed a problem for sacramental theology insofar as the sacraments seem to transgress the boundary set up between nature and supernature. The Catholic theological manuals used to train seminarians treated the sacraments in strictly supernatural terms as “containers” of grace given to human beings by church officials. As a result, sacramental theology in the Neo-Scholastic mode was primarily concerned with matters of validity and efficacy, and the ancient notion that one encountered divine mysteries in the sacraments receded into the background. From the perspective of nouvelle théologie, on the other hand, nature was God’s creation and therefore already sacramental. Furthermore, the incarnation reveals that God is intimately involved with human history, transforming it through concrete, historical human expressions of divine love, first in the life of Christ and then in his body the church. These developments provided the foundations for major developments in Catholic sacramental theology in the second half of the twentieth century.

In introducing Christ, the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, Edward Schillebeeckx laments the state of Catholic sacramental theology under the influence of Neo-Scholasticism, noting that the emphasis on objectivity common to the theological manuals led to a “purely impersonal, almost mechanical” theology in which sacraments “were considered chiefly in terms of physical categories.”² The sacraments wound up being subsumed under the rationally demonstrable laws of cause and effect. The net result was that the faithful “appeared to be merely passive recipients of sacramental grace, which seemed to be ‘put into us’ automatically.”³ In order to counter this prevalent view promoted by the manuals, Schillebeeckx, building on his interpretation of Thomas Aquinas, emphasized that sacraments are instances of personal encounter grounded in the saving work of God in the incarnation and therefore proper to a distinctly human world. Throughout his work on the topic, Schillebeeckx reorients sacramental theology in order to take the human world of history and subjectivity seriously.

Louis-Marie Chauvet also felt that the prevailing Neo-Scholastic theology of the sacraments failed to address the symbolic character of the human world shaped by language and culture. He was concerned that “the insistence on the objective efficacy of the sacraments is done at the expense of the concrete existential subjects, who are not taken into account.”⁴ Chauvet describes this theology as “objectivist.”⁵ It was a theology concerned with the objective effects of sacraments in terms of the production of grace in the individual recipient. In his major work Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Chauvet criticizes the metaphysical presuppositions of classical sacramental theology and proposes a fundamental theology of sacramentality grounded in contemporary explorations into the nature of language and culture.

Though certainly not the only theologians to make major contributions to the reorientation of Catholic sacramental theology during the twentieth century, Schillebeeckx and Chauvet are two of the most innovative, and sometimes controversial, voices in Catholic sacramental theology in the past fifty years. Although separated by nearly thirty years, they share a common concern that contemporary sacramental theologies take the concrete historicity of human subjects seriously rather than rely on abstract philosophical categories. Both Schillebeeckx and Chauvet (1) employ theological methods that intend to take human subjectivity and culture seriously; (2) stress encounter with the paschal mystery of Christ in the sacraments; (3) emphasize the ecclesial dimension of sacramental life; and (4) underscore the connection between sacrament and ethics in the lived practice of the Christian community in imitation of Christ and anticipation of the Kingdom of God. Taking each thinker in turn, we will explore their methodological, Christological, ecclesiological, and ethical concerns and thereby develop a clearer understanding of the major themes of contemporary Catholic sacramental theology.

In Christ, the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, Schillebeeckx explains that he intends to take “the concept of human, personal encounter as the basis of our consideration.”⁶ The notion of personal encounter, echoing developments in existentialist criticisms of rationalism, animates Schillebeeckx’s treatment of the sacraments. He derives his notion of sacramentality from this emphasis on personal encounter. Grace is a matter of personal encounter with God in history, not simply a quality attached to a soul. For Schillebeeckx, the “sacramental” refers to the way in which personal encounter with God in the sacraments “makes history.” The sacraments are those events where supernatural reality is realized in history.⁷ Sacramentality therefore derives from the fact that we exist “in an I-Thou relationship, in a situation of dialogue with God” who enters into history.⁸ Because our being as human subjects is a process of becoming, we are historical beings whose becoming occurs through encounter with other persons in time. For Schillebeeckx history is the site of revelation. Participation in the sacraments is not an escape from history, but a transformation of history through personal encounter. By attending to the historical context of sacramental encounter, Schillebeeckx argues that sacramental grace is better understood in terms of a developing relationship with God, rather than an automatic infusion of holiness. Furthermore, to be human is to be an embodied being living in a material world.

Human embodiment and materiality are fundamental to contemporary sacramental theology. The symbol-making capacity of the human is due precisely to our lives as embodied beings, because symbols mediate between the interior and the exterior lives of human beings. In his earlier work, Schillebeeckx holds to the Thomist notion that human symbol making is an expression of interiority such that our bodies mediate our interior being.⁹ Developing this notion further in The Eucharist, Schillebeeckx complicates the picture through increasing attention to phenomenological approaches to embodiment. There he notes that developments in phenomenology offer an understanding of the human person that is nondualist, in which interior and exterior exist in a dialectical tension in the human subject. Schillebeeckx explains, “According to this anthropological conception, man is not, in the first instance an enclosed interiority which, later, in a second stage as it were, becomes incarnate in the world through bodiliness.”¹⁰ Our being as embodied is fundamental to our being as human. Schillebeeckx resists any depiction of the subject as an “enclosed interiority” that mediates itself to the outside world by way of signs. Instead, the human subject is present to herself only through encounter with what is other than the self. Unlike matter, however, other persons not only appear to us but also speak.¹¹ They make demands. Consequently, Schillebeeckx suggests that “on the basis of these anthropological considerations, then, the sacraments can be dissociated from the material sphere of ‘things’ and taken up into the personal sphere. They are interpersonal encounters between the believer and Christ.”¹² Sacraments are not simply encounters with brute matter, but words addressed to the recipient by Christ. The Christian subject becomes aware of herself, indeed becomes herself, through these bodily encounters with Christ in the sacraments.

Thinking in terms of interpersonal encounter liberates sacramental theology from reliance on categories related to material things that had been common in the Neo-Scholastic method. If sacraments are personal encounters, an entirely new series of questions emerges for theological reflection. Rather than be concerned primarily with cause and effect in terms of validity, for example, one might more closely attend to the conditions for fruitful reception of sacraments in terms of the transformed living of a person. While such questions were not simply foreign to the mind of Thomas Aquinas, their importance can easily be diminished by a strictly apologetic and juridical approach to sacramental theology focused on matters of validity. Basing his sacramental theology on the notion of encounter, Schillebeeckx turns his attention to the person Christians encounter in the sacraments. The grace mediated by the sacraments is ultimately an experience of personal encounter with Christ.

For Schillebeeckx, Jesus is the way one encounters God. Christ is the sacrament of encounter with God because he reveals the fully human attitude of “existence toward God.”¹³ To encounter Jesus is also therefore to encounter redemption. We can talk about Jesus as sign and cause of grace because “the human acts of Jesus are the divine bestowal of grace itself realized in human form.”¹⁴ In this sense one can say, using scholastic categories, that sacraments cause what they signify. Schillebeeckx explains that it is through the life of Christ that human beings encounter and experience redemption in history, and in the sacraments, the life, death, and resurrection of Christ presented in ritual symbolic form continue to mediate the grace of redemption in history.¹⁵

Schillebeeckx elaborates his position by attending to the ascending and descending aspects of this understanding of Christ as the sacrament of encounter. Ascending from below upward, by attending to the historical life of Jesus, Schillebeeckx interprets the human actions of Christ as the perfection of human living toward God the Father: “Jesus became the redeemer in actual fact by freely living his human life in religious worship of and attachment to the Father.”¹⁶ This total fidelity to God is Jesus’s true worship of the Father. Moving from above down, Schillebeeckx interprets Jesus’s life as the revelation of the Father’s love in a human way. Jesus therefore acts as a mediator insofar as he is both the “offer of divine love to man made visible” and “the supreme realization of the response of human love to this divine offer.”¹⁷ Schillebeeckx concludes, “In the Hypostatic Union we are confronted with a divine way of being human and a human way of being God.”¹⁸ Both the divine way of being human and the human way of being God involve the cross.

At the center of Christian ritual life we find the cross. This is the event Christians proclaim until the Lord comes again.¹⁹ Therefore, if the sacraments are understood in terms of encounter with Christ, Schillebeeckx suggests that this encounter begins with the cross.²⁰ Through the cross Christ intervenes with the Father for the grace of redemption and makes “reparation for our disobedience” and failure to render proper worship to God.²¹ Schillebeeckx interprets the cross here in terms of the total self-dispossession of Jesus to the Father. Insofar as it is an act of pure fidelity, the cross puts sin to death, with the result that Jesus becomes the head of a redeemed humanity, the new creation. Schillebeeckx goes on to interpret the cross as a historical manifestation of the eternally active redemptive work of the Son. The sacraments derive their power from the Cross, indeed “the sacraments are that very sacrifice made visible.”²² The sacraments are “the face of redemption turned visibly toward us, so that in them we are truly able to encounter the living Christ. The heavenly saving activity, invisible to us, becomes visible in the sacraments.”²³ But the sacraments become visible only within a historical community Christians call “church.”

In his groundbreaking research into the notion of the Church as the “mystical body” in the Middle Ages, Henri de Lubac found that over time theologians had reversed the titles given to the Church and the Eucharist.²⁴ While the patristic tradition referred to the Church as the verum corpus, or true body of Christ, and called the Eucharist the “mystical body of Christ,” the medieval Eucharistic controversies led to a reversal. In order to remove any doubt about the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, medieval theologians employed a term that had referred to the Church to describe the consecrated host. Shaped by de Lubac’s research, Schillebeeckx concludes that “the Church is a prolongation primarily of the heavenly Christ, and therefore it prolongs the function of the earthly body of Jesus.”²⁵ Like the humanity of Jesus, the Church is the body of Christ in history.

The Church is integrally involved in the saving work of God in history made human in the incarnation. As a sacrament, the Church makes the salvation accomplished by Christ visible throughout history.²⁶ The Church is embedded in history, not an escape to an otherworldly plane, so it makes the saving work of God in history explicit in word and sacrament. In his later works, Schillebeeckx affirms that the Church participates in the saving work of Christ whenever it lives out a liberative practice of justice and mercy in solidarity with the suffering.²⁷ The Church mediates salvation both to the individual and to the world.

In his earlier works, Schillebeeckx reflects on the ethical dimension of sacraments in terms of personal holiness. Sacraments issue in the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love expressed in the “moral behavior” of persons who have encountered God in the sacraments.²⁸ He notes, “moral virtue comes to depend on personal communion with God; it becomes the embodiment of our divine communion on every plane of human living.”²⁹ The church makes the saving work of Christ visible in history, both in its liturgical and sacramental life, but also in the daily living of each person formed by the church. Holiness in daily life is never simply personal. For Schillebeeckx, by living holy lives the faithful become sacraments of grace for others.³⁰ Citing the prophet Amos, Schillebeeckx warns that until Christians make holiness a reality in the world, they are obscuring the purpose of the sacraments in history.³¹

In his later work, Schillebeeckx increasingly connects sacraments with a liberative praxis of the reign of God in history.³² In Church: The Human Story of God, he writes,

Confession and word, sacrament and praxis of faith, action which heals and opens up communication, following Jesus, do not make the experience of the world superfluous, while events in the so-called outside world in turn necessitate talking in the language of faith and Christian praxis. Precisely for that reason, historical and indeed social and political praxis in the world cannot be separated from the action of the church in proclamation, pastoral work and the sacraments. Anyone who severs this connection damages the internal structure of religion and being the church.³³

That is to say that for Schillebeeckx there is an integral connection between the church and the world; the church exists in dialogue with the world. This is perhaps the most consistent emphasis of his entire corpus. The constant temptation to separate faith from daily life undermines the Gospel call to transform history and reduces the sacraments to private channels of an “automatic” grace.

Building on his research into the sacramental theology of Thomas Aquinas, Schillebeeckx reaches out to the contemporary believer through the phenomenological language of encounter. While he normally avoids scholastic jargon throughout his discussion of sacraments as encounter, he remains committed to the notion that sacraments are infallible works of grace, and in that sense instances of efficient causality. The sacraments are the grace-giving encounter with the love of Christ incarnate in the words and gestures of the Church. They are effective signs (signum efficax) because, like Christ’s human love, they are able “to effect an answering love.”³⁴

Unlike Schillebeeckx, who remains in dialogue with Aquinas, Chauvet seeks a new way forward in sacramental theology that departs from the metaphysical commitments of classical sacramental theology. Chauvet grounds his approach to sacraments in an analysis of the symbolic order. To be human is to live in a symbolic order.³⁵ By “symbolic order” Chauvet means the convergence of meanings and values in which human identity is formed and through which human experience of the world occurs. Our experience of the world and of ourselves is mediated, and indeed constructed, by that order through language. For Chauvet, following Martin Heidegger, reality comes to be through the evocative power of language.³⁶ Classical metaphysical categories on the other hand attempt to shoehorn all of reality into a totalizing theoretical construct using terms like causality and presence.³⁷

Chauvet finds the notions of causality and presence employed by classical sacramental theology particularly problematic. First, the notion of causality, which he argues is inevitably involved in a productionist view of reality, seems incompatible with the understanding that sacraments are signs.³⁸ Talking about sacramental signs as causes ignores the complex context of human becoming in which sacraments participate. The language of cause and effect may help us to understand the interactions of billiard balls, but can it have anything to say about the life of grace? Second, Chauvet maintains that the conception of divine presence in classical sacramental theology ultimately leads to an idolatry in which God is conceived as a permanent, static presence. Therefore, Chauvet urges us to consent to “the presence of the absence of God.”³⁹ The absence of God is revealed on the cross where God “‘crosses himself out’ in the crushed humanity of the crucified One.”⁴⁰ Consenting to symbolic mediation involves a conversion, in both our theologizing and our worship, to a God beyond any human conception of “God.”⁴¹ Within this horizon, grace refers to a way of thinking and being, neither an objective divine presence nor a thing to be earned or hoarded, but a gratuitous gift that comes without any reason other than the sheer graciousness of a God fully revealed in Christ’s kenotic self-giving.⁴²

Chauvet takes the paschal mystery as his point of departure for understanding the connections between the Christ event and the sacraments. The paschal mystery refers to the entire drama of salvation.⁴³ Chauvet opposes any attempt to separate elements of the drama, including the incarnation, historical life, death, and resurrection, ascension, Pentecost, church, and Parousia.⁴⁴ Each of these elements can be understood only in relation to the others. Attempts to isolate one moment can have major theological and pastoral consequences. For example, many Christians, preferring to focus on the moment of incarnation, find in the nativity their preferred way to imagine Jesus. This popular image can easily be domesticated, enabling whole cultures to project onto the Christ child their own sets of meanings and values. But Chauvet reminds us that whatever we say about Jesus, including about his birth, we say, following the biblical witnesses, from the perspective of the resurrection, and therefore also the death of Christ. At the center of the paschal mystery is the cross, which provides the hermeneutical key for interpreting all the other events of the drama, because only the cross fully reveals who God is.

The cross challenges whatever preconceived or parochial notions of “god” we might have and reveals the true God “in the disfigured human being on the cross.”⁴⁵ The self-effacing God made known in Jesus Christ crosses out “god.” In Christ, God enters into solidarity with the human condition even to the point of death—even to the point of not being God—and finally reveals the fullness of divinity in the poverty of Christ’s broken humanity.⁴⁶ The flesh and bone of the incarnation are destined for death. From the perspective of the cross the nativity already reveals the human poverty of the kenotic God. But to know God in this way, as wholly other, is the fruit of the Holy Spirit.

Chauvet argues that the Christological pole of sacramental theology must necessarily be accompanied by a Pneumatological pole. Chauvet explains, “the Spirit is the third term which works to subvert in us every idolatrous attempt at manipulating God (whether at the conceptual, ethical or ritual level …), and to keep perpetually open, as ‘the question of questions,’ the question of God’s identity: God crossed out, never so divine as in God’s erasure in the disfigured humanity of the Crucified.”⁴⁷ The Spirit that raised Christ from the dead also raises up the body of the Church in whom the Word is made flesh in history, concretely in the ethical praxis of Christians.⁴⁸ Sacraments inscribe in the faithful the Word to which they testify with their bodies.

The Church is the fundamental sacrament of the risen Christ. In order to make this point, Chauvet turns to the story of the supper at Emmaus. The disciples recognize Jesus in the ritual performance of blessing and breaking bread. Like those disciples, all who live in the time of the Church encounter Christ in the proclamation, liturgy, and life of the Church. Whenever the Church proclaims his death and resurrection, blesses and breaks bread in his name, lives in his justice and mercy, Christ is present. This presence is a symbolic presence, a presence of absence, and therefore also an eschatological presence calling the Church forward in history toward the Parousia. In this sense, the Church is not a privileged place in which one is granted special access to God, but the body of believers who consent to the presence of the absence of God in order to give God a body in history.

Without the ethical moment of verification, a sacrament is easily reduced to idolatry—an idolatry of the self.⁴⁹ Chauvet engages the social sciences to develop a way of thinking about the sacramental economy that integrates the ethical. He calls his theory “symbolic gift exchange.”⁵⁰ Unlike market exchange, which functions according to a logic of value and calculation (how much for how many?), symbolic exchange operates according to a logic of gift wherein having received a gift, one incurs an obligation to give to some other in turn. As opposed to the binary transaction of market exchange, symbolic exchange includes a third, setting up a cycle of gift, reception (obligation), and return gift (other).⁵¹ Chauvet uses this model to think about the Eucharist. The gift of God’s love is neither coerced nor constrained according to the logic of value and calculation, it is radically gratuitous. If it is received graciously, the Eucharist inspires a loving response of thanksgiving manifest in the desire to freely share this same love with another. Chauvet interprets the relationship between the “three moments” of Scripture, sacrament, and ethics through this theory of symbolic exchange.⁵² The moment of Scripture tells the story of God’s gift of salvation in history culminating in Christ’s self-offering in death of his life to the Father. In the moment of sacrament, human beings gratefully receive the gift of salvation mediated by the memorial of Christ’s passion. In gratitude for the gift they have received, Christians offer a return gift of love for others made concrete in practices of justice and mercy in imitation of Christ.

Chauvet’s larger goal is not a sacramental theology per se, but what he calls a “foundational theology of sacramentality.” He argues that traditional approaches to the sacraments that employ metaphysical categories have been discredited and that what is needed today is a theology of the sacramental.⁵³ Chauvet’s goal is to compose a “theology which opens up a sacramental reinterpretation, initially modest but ultimately global in its potential extension, of what it means to lead a Christian life.”⁵⁴ He proposes that the change in language regarding sacraments “constitutes a fundamental revision of the terms with which we approach theproblem: those of language and symbol, and no longer those of cause and instrument.”⁵⁵ Chauvet proposes a new method as reflection on the “arch-sacramentality” of embodied Christian existence. In the process, he deconstructs the theology that makes the sacraments into something Christians do, rather than enactments of who Christians are.

Schillebeeckx and Chauvet have dramatically reoriented contemporary Catholic sacramental theology over the past fifty years. Learning from developments in twentieth-century philosophy and social sciences, they tried to help contemporary Christians think about sacraments in a new way. Schillebeeckx urges his readers to see sacraments as the way to encounter God’s saving grace in daily life. Chauvet invites his readers to a conversion to the presence of the absence of God made known through symbolic mediation. Both ask that we take the sign character of sacraments seriously and avoid talking about them in terms borrowed from physics like cause and effect. As signs, sacraments operate in the world of language in which Christian identity takes shape and the life of grace is lived in response to the gift of God’s saving love manifest on the cross of Christ.

Schillebeeckx and Chauvet both follow Thomas Aquinas in affirming that the power of the sacraments comes from Christ’s passion, but they interpret the paschal mystery in distinct ways.⁵⁶ For Schillebeeckx, the cross and resurrection reveal the reign of God in history, and the promise of its eschatological fulfillment. The cross, which he interprets in his earlier work as Christ’s proper worship of the Father, is the symbol par excellence of the reign of God in the life and ministry of Jesus. Jesus’s prophetic and liberative confrontation with the powers of the world leads ineluctably to the cross, and yet the resurrection confirms that this praxis of the reign of God, to which all Christians are called, is grounded in the hope of a world transformed and fully alive in God. For Chauvet, the cross reveals the humanity of the kenotic God of Jesus Christ. The cross liberates us from subservience to an idolatrous image of God that is really no more than a projection of our desire for mastery of what is other. The cross calls into question all our speaking about God, and asks us to undertake a work of mourning the presence of the absence of God.⁵⁷ Taking Chauvet and Schillebeeckx together on these points we might think about sacraments as encounters with the presence of the absence of God that ask the faithful to give God a body in history.

The body of Christ in history, for both Schillebeeckx and Chauvet, is found in the Church. The Church is the fundamental sacrament because it is only through the witness of the Church that one comes to know the risen Christ in faith. The ecclesial mediation of sacramental encounter is fundamental to both thinkers, but not for reasons of canon law. Both freely admit that the Church regularly fails to be God’s body, because it is a collection of fallible human beings. But this does not require that we abandon the Church for some more pristine, extra-ecclesial way of living. Instead, both Schillebeeckx and Chauvet call for an evangelization of the Church. This does not mean, as Schillebeeckx puts it, mere propaganda.⁵⁸ Rather it is a call to reinvigorate the sacramental life with an ethical practice.

Attention to the ethical is fundamental to the sacramental life. Both Schillebeeckx and Chauvet were concerned with the implications of earlier sacramental theologies that spoke about the mediation of sacramental grace in purely private and automatic ways. Is there any need to live a holy life if one is already made holy by the mediation of sacramental grace? What is our proper response to the gift of grace? Is grace something for me alone? Schillebeeckx was particularly concerned that today many people “pass Christianity by” because the grace of Christ is hidden by the counterwitness of so many Christians.⁵⁹ Chauvet, for his part, calls for an ethical verification of one’s gracious reception of divine love in the sacraments in a gratuitous sharing of love with others.

Catholic sacramental theology after Vatican II unfolds in two stages represented by the protagonists of this chapter. The 1950s and 1960s produced a number of developments in sacramental theology based on developments in phenomenology and existentialism. Increasing attention to the place of the sacraments in the daily life and self-understanding of Christians expanded on the renewed emphasis on active participation among the laity in the liturgical life of the Church. These theologies often employed methods of correlation to talk about the relationship between the faith tradition and contemporary daily life. From the horizon of Vatican II, “the world” was not to be held in suspicion, rather it was the place where one meets God in nature and culture. Lieven Boeve notes, however, that theologies of correlation like that of Schillebeeckx suffered “when the still-existing overlap between Christianity and culture progressively disappeared.”⁶⁰ Schillebeeckx’s global and compact claim that everything is “grace made visible”⁶¹ seems an inadequate description of the fragmentation and ambiguity of contemporary human experience. Schillebeeckx intended to return to sacramental theology toward the end of his life. His recently published collected works include a final essay, “Towards a Rediscovery of the Christian Sacraments: Ritualising Religious Elements in Daily Life,” in which Schillebeeckx acknowledges Chauvet’s developments and begins to chart a new development in sacramental theology with special attention to theories of ritual performance.⁶²

While he rarely refers to Schillebeeckx explicitly, Glenn Ambrose suggests, “Chauvet’s fundamental project, to provide a sacramental reinterpretation of the Christian life, can be seen as the continuation of Schillebeeckx’s work.”⁶³ And in many ways it is, as we have seen. Where Chauvet departs from Schillebeeckx is on the questions of foundations. Chauvet is rigorously antifoundationalist in his method in a way that Schillebeeckx never was. Nevertheless, Chauvet’s postmodern method may be more adequate to twenty-first-century concerns.⁶⁴

Like all important thinkers, both Schillebeeckx and Chauvet have received some share of criticisms. Boeve has drawn attention to a residual premodern religious horizon in Schillebeeckx’s Thomist commitments, which may be foreign to many contemporary readers.⁶⁵ Bernard Blankenhorn probed Chauvet’s interpretation of Thomas Aquinas on the question of causality and found it wanting.⁶⁶ He clarifies that for Thomas grace is, indeed, not a thing, but a quality. He also shows that Thomas’s understanding of causality is not properly understood on the model of production Chauvet tries to force on him. Vincent Miller, on the other hand, questions whether Chauvet’s work of deconstruction has been radical enough, especially as it regards the received tradition of liturgical practice.⁶⁷ Miller wonders whether one should really allow oneself to be formed by the symbolic mediation of the Church when the Church and its liturgies reflect deep-seated prejudices. My own criticism of Chauvet targets his Heideggerian method.⁶⁸ Criticisms notwithstanding, Schillebeeckx and Chauvet established themselves as leaders in the ongoing transformation of Catholic sacramental theology following Vatican II.

The twentieth century witnessed epochal developments in religion and culture that are still working themselves out. In the domain of religion, one of those developments was a fundamental reorientation of the way modern Christians relate to the sacred through symbols. Twentieth-century theologians confronted a sacramental crisis. If the enchanted world of the premodern horizon had disappeared, would sacraments go with it? In the midst of the Second Vatican Council, Romano Guardini wondered aloud whether “modern man” could celebrate the liturgy.⁶⁹ Schillebeeckx and Chauvet urge contemporary theologians to talk about the sacramental life of the church in a way that reaches contemporary people. Their legacy is a permanent part of ongoing conversations in sacramental theology today.