The church is said to be a place which makes you. “living-in-grace between brothers and sisters.” This is an expression used by Louis-Marie Chauvet, a French theologian, in his book Symbol and Sacrament. For Chauvet, a Catholic must live the three poles of scripture, sacrament, and ethics. The question he says is always, “Of what God are we speaking? God arrives on God’s own terms, in fragmentary moments, in spite of our desire that it might be otherwise. The disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-32) supremely demonstrate the logic to which we must assent if we are to receive God’s gift and thus enter into the divine gift economy. This narrative serves as a stark reminder that we do not tell God’s story, but must make room to encounter God as given, a God who arrives as “a glorious body still bearing the wounds of his death.”
We exist sacramentally: “In the sacraments, God alone, and not faith is the measure of the gift…the ‘validity’ of the sacrament depends on God, its ‘fecundity’ depends on the believing subject.” Henri de Lubac framed this claim in terms that arguably have become the most familiar mantra in sacramental theology: “If Christ is the sacrament of God, the Church is for us the sacrament of Christ.” Or, as Karl Rahner prefers: Jesus Christ is the “primordial sacrament of salvation.” Chauvet has broken new and significant ground in the contemporary understanding of sacraments and sacramentality. Chauvet’s idea of Jesus’ active “presence in absence,” which compels “assent to the mediation of the church,” leaves too much to the institutional church as the mediation of the “Absent One.” Chauvet’s treats faith as an “assent to loss,” or sacramentality as symbolic mediation of “presence in absence.” Chauvet’s idea of “absence,” offer us one example of ecclesial sacramentality.
If today both theology and liturgy have ceased, at least to a substantial degree, to perform within the Church the function which is theirs, thus provoking a deep crisis, it is because at first they have been divorced from one another as lex credendi has been alienated from the lex orandi. The crux of the matter is the over-glorification of reason, which is then divorced from mystery. If the entire sacramental tradition of the church is viewed through a metaphysical and epistemological lens—ultimately scientific—the existential, experiential, and celebrative aspects of all theology are relinquished. This western captivity consisted primarily pseudomorphosis, the adoption by it of western thought forms and categories of the western understanding of the very nature, structure, and method of theology. It represents the demise of the inner-connectedness between the belief and prayer of the Church. To become prayer, it must make the world into a temple of adoration, into a cosmic liturgy. The decline of ecclesiology is another symptom of the current crisis. The Church is shown and seen as too much of an institution. This decline is manifested in the eventual objectification of the church through the medium of the institution. It would be a great error directly to apply the scriptural and traditional term Body of Christ to the Church as institution or society. In itself, institution is the visible, militant, hierarchical Church. She is indeed instituted for the world and not as a separated religious institution existing for the specifically religious needs of men.
She represents the whole of mankind, because mankind and creation were called from the very beginning to be the Temple of the Holy Spirit and the receptacle of Divine Life. We are losing sacramental grace of living together. We are simply people living with calculative rationality. As an institution the Church is in this world the sacrament of the Body of Christ, of the Kingdom of God and the world to come. In the “locus Ecclesia”, the place of the Church, is the sacraments must be seen means of grace, aimed at individual sanctification rather than the edification and the fulfilment of the Church. A Christian is liturgical being-before-God as the most human mode, which we can exist in the world. Life becomes immortal in redemption’s eternal hymn of praise. Existing before God does not mean sensing God. Rather, the relationship of the human and God is most often accomplished as an affective non-experience. Liturgy is the place of the “hour”. Prayer establishes the human world order.