“Framing” Sacramental Theology: Trinity And Symbol

by Peter J. Leithart

Peter J. Leithart is a fellow of theology and literature at New St. Andrews College, Moscow, Idaho.

J. P. S. Uberoi has argued that modern culture emerged from Reformation disputes about the nature of the eucharistic presence. According to his account, the “modern concept of time in which every event was either spiritual and mental or corporeal and material but no event was or could be both at once” was a product of the “double monism,” the separation of symbol and reality, inherent in Zwingli’s eucharistic theology. Implicitly, all sides in the Reformation debate accepted Zwingli’s assumption of “two separate and distinct spheres of spiritual and mystical versus material and corporeal presences.” Even the Tridentine doctrine of transubstantiation was “no longer a normal transaction of God and man in this world” but a “kind of miraculous transference by God’s agency between two separate places and two different times.” Modernity, in short, was born at Marburg in 1529.[1]

Henri de Lubac places the rupture between reality and symbol several centuries earlier, noting that during the medieval eucharistic debates, the orthodox gained a monopoly on “truth” while the heretics retained symbol: “Au mystice, non vere repond, non moins exclusif, un vere, non mystice.” In de Lubac’s detailed retelling, Berengar rather than Zwingli is the harbinger of the future.[2] Alexander Schmemann agrees.[3] Similarly, Henning Graf Reventlow finds the origins of modern critical biblical studies in late medieval Spiritualism, which placed such stress on the possession of the Spirit as to render “superfluous both the letters of Holy Scripture and all external forms of the communication of salvation … above all the sacraments and the clergy.” Antipathy to external ceremony among English Puritans was likewise a “stimulus in later biblical interpretation for the denigration of all that was priestly” and for the notion that Hebrew religion declined from “a pure and natural form to a final form distorted by ritualism,” a notion later developed into a basic hermeneutical principle by Julius Wellhausen.[4]

Colin Gunton, by contrast, traces the origins of various dilemmas of modern theology and culture to an incipient Unitarianism in the western doctrine of God. Paradoxically, while modernity has presented itself as a Heraclitean assertion of the rights of the many against the monistic Parmenidean past, it has produced forms of oppression of the many to the one far more brutal than anything the premodern world could have imagined. Once they had rejected the conviction that the universe finds its coherence in God, modern thinkers embarked on a search for an immanent unifying principle. Modern individualism, collectivism, and postmodern anarchism are all incapable, however, of sustaining a vision of “otherness-in-relation” or a sufficient appreciation for particulars. In sum, “Parmenides and Heraclitus have called the tune and so have obliterated the trinitarian categories which enable us to think of the world—and therefore also culture and society—as both one and many, unified and diverse, particular and in relation.” Western theology, with its tendencies toward monism, homogenization, and authoritarianism, bears significant responsibility for this situation. There is hope only in a revival of a robust trinitarian theology and practice.[5]

Both of these narratives attribute the rise of modern thought and culture to theological sources and therefore raise the question whether the two accounts might be integrally related, two aspects of a single, complex development. Is there some inner connection between Zwinglian anti-sacramentalism and the implicit Unitarianism of western theology? One possibility is that both tendencies are traceable back to Augustine, whom Gunton holds responsible for the unitarian trajectory of western theology. For Gunton, Augustine’s “neoplatonic assumptions of the material order’s incapacity to be really and truly the bearer of divinity” raise difficulties for Christology and support an ontological trinitarianism disconnected from the revelation of the Trinity in the economy of salvation. As a result, personality never quite attains full ontological status in Augustine. Gunton supports his interpretation by citing Augustine’s claim in De Trinitate (5.12): “The particulars in the same Trinity that are properly predicated of each person are by no means predicated of them as they are in themselves (ad se ipsa), but in their relations either to one another or to the creature, and it is therefore manifest that they are predicated relatively, not substantially.”[6] As a result, the particular persons, Gunton says, “tend to disappear into the all-embracing oneness of God,” and he endorses H. A. Wolfson’s conclusion that Augustine “identifies the substratum [of the Godhead] not with the Father but with something underlying both the Father and the Son.”[7]

On this reading, it is no accident that Augustine employs psychological, rather than social models for the Trinity. To say that the persons are analogous to functions of the human mind suggests that the persons are only formally distinct. Psychological models, furthermore, are consistent with Augustine’s neoplatonic tendency to separate salvation from history. As Gunton says, “The crucial analogy for Augustine is between the inner structure of the human mind and the inner being of God, because it is in the former that the latter is made known, this side of eternity at any rate, more really than in the ‘outer’ economy of grace.”[8] Person, and hence community, are relegated to a secondary and even epiphenomenal level, both in the nature of God and in the history of salvation.[9] Here Augustine’s trinitarianism intersects with the concerns of sacramental theology, for if Augustine locates the primary divine-human encounter in the human mind he can be expected to have problems carving theological space for the “external” operation of sacraments.

Gunton’s critique of Augustine has been challenged by Rowan Williams,[10] and F. Bourassa defends Augustine against the charge of ignoring redemptive history.[11] Against Gunton, it is difficult to see how Augustine could have emphasized the economic revelation of the Trinity more strongly that he does in the early books of De Trinitate, which give detailed attention to OT theophanies, the incarnation, and the Spirit’s descent. Suffice it to say that there is a great deal more discussion of biblical history in Augustine than in any of Gunton’s works on the Trinity. At least, the case against Augustine must be judged not proven; it is likely that the search for the origins of western Unitarianism would be more fruitfully pursued along other pathways.

It is not my purpose to locate these pathways. Rather, with this historical suggestion lingering unanswered in the background, I attempt in this essay a constructive theological account of the relations between a fully trinitarian doctrine of God and sacramental theology; practically, the conclusion is that a vigorous sacramental theology and practice requires a renewed trini tarianism, and vice versa. This effort is particularly relevant to the Reformed churches, since Reformed theology has never been able to fit sacramental theology convincingly into its overall system. Even when the importance of the sacraments has been affirmed, it has often taken the form of concession rather than implication: In spite of who God is, and in spite of his sovereign distribution of grace in salvation, and in spite of his normal way of operating, God also communicates his presence to his people in signs and seals.[12] Yet the very idea of a systematic theology suggests that there can and should be demonstrable consistency among various truths, in particular some consistency between the nature of God and how he makes himself known in the church. Therefore, there must be some way to show the consistency of theology proper and sacramental theology in order to develop a trinitarian theology of Christian symbols and rites.

John Frame has underscored the importance of this kind of consistency in his exposition of the thought of Cornelius Van Til. Van Til, Frame points out, does not relate doctrines to one another with an “in spite of” formula, but with a more boldly paradoxical “because of” formula. Thus, Van Til formulates the classic Reformed problem of relating God’s sovereign control with human responsibility by insisting that human beings are morally responsible creatures because of divine sovereignty:

As Christians we hold that determinate human experience could work to no end, could work in accordance with no plan, and could not even get under way, it if were not for the existence of the absolute will of God. 

It is on this ground then that we hold to the absolute will of God as the presupposition of the will of man. Looked at in this way, that which to many seems at first glance to be the greatest hindrance to moral responsibility, namely the conception of an absolutely sovereign God, becomes the very foundation of its possibility.[13]

The argument that follows is this: God’s trinitarian character is the “very foundation of the possibility,” or the “foundation of the inescapability,” of sacraments. Sacraments are not “exceptions” to God’s typically “non-symbolic” means of communicating and communing with creatures. Rather, the Creator, because he is Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity, draws his people into fellowship with himself through symbols, of which the sacraments are a particular kind. To develop this thesis, I draw on two modern theologians outside of the Reformed tradition: the Roman Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, and the Greek Orthodox writer, John Zizioulas. Despite the problems that arise in their theologies, these theologians offer biblically sustainable formulations that assist a constructive trinitarian sacramental theology.

I. Theology of Symbol

In his essay, “The Theology of the Symbol,” Karl Rahner offers a trinitarian ontology of symbol. In the initial section of the essay, entitled “Ontology of the Symbol,” Rahner defends the thesis that “all beings are by their nature symbolic, because they necessarily ‘express’ themselves in order to attain their nature.”[14] Beings, Rahner argues, are not fundamentally simple but multiple: “a being is, of itself, independently of any comparison with anything else, plural in its unity.” Even the unity of a being is a unity that “unites the plural,” so that the unity that is ontologically ultimate is the unity of a unified plurality, not a “hollow, lifeless identity” (227). As a unified entity “emerges into a plurality,” it is not alienated from itself, because the “plural is in agreement with its source in a way which corresponds to its origin,” and therefore the plurality is an “‘expression’ of its origin by an agreement which it owes to its origin.” Plurality thus is the way that a being fulfills its unity (228–29).

Given the correspondence between plurality and unity, the plurality has the character of a symbol of the origin, and this symbolic expression is essential for the realization of the being’s unity and self-knowledge. Rahner claims that being is known only insofar as it is in actu, and hence a being comes to knowledge of itself only in the act of expression. A being knows itself through its symbols:

It expresses itself and possesses itself by doing so. It gives itself away from itself into the “other,” and there finds itself in knowledge and love, because it is by constituting the inward “other” that it comes to (or: from) its self-fulfillment, which is the presupposition of the act of being present to itself in knowledge and love (230).

A being is “‘symbolic’ in itself,” not merely in expressing itself to others. By constituting itself as “other,” it “communicates itself to itself” (230).

Mutual knowledge of one being and another, further, is dependent on this same dynamic of symbolic expressiveness. This is not simply because the inner being is inaccessible to us, and must be externally expressed. Rahner does argue that a being’s symbolic projection outside itself is a condition for the possibility of being known by another, but this kind of symbolic expression is “in addition” to the symbolic expression that is present in the depths of the thing known. Thus, knowledge depends not only on the reception of symbols by the knower, but on the internal symbolization of the object known. To be known, the object must be in act, which is to say, the object must be symbolically expressing itself to itself. Somewhat cryptically, Rahner states that “a being can be and is known, in so far as it is itself ontically (in itself) symbolic because it is ontologically (for itself) symbolic” (231). Putting these two dimensions of symbol together, Rahner concludes that the primordial meaning of symbol is that 

as a being realizes itself in its own intrinsic “otherness” (which is constitutive of its being), retentive of its intrinsic plurality (which is contained in its self-realization) as its derivative and hence congruous expression, it makes itself known (231).

To sustain this thesis about the ontology of symbol, Rahner has to show that God himself “expresses himself in symbol,” and he thus moves on to the “Theology of the Symbol,” where he focuses on the relation of Father and Son. According to Rahner, “the theology of the Logos is strictly a theology of the symbol, and indeed the chief form of it” (235). The Logos is the self-expression and image of the Father, and, since the Father is never without his word, he eternally expresses himself in and through his word and image. It is in the Son that the Father comes to know himself: Without the generation of the Son, “the absolute act of divine self-possession in knowledge cannot exist” (236). Thus, “the Father is himself by the very fact that he opposes to himself the image which is of the same essence as himself, as the person who is other than himself; and so he possesses himself.” The Logos is thus a “symbol” in the sense described above: “the inward symbol which remains distinct from what is symbolized, which is constituted by what is symbolized, where what is symbolized expresses itself and possesses itself” (236). The Father’s self-expression in creation and redemption is grounded in this eternal and essential symbolic act. “It is because God ‘must’ ‘express’ himself inwardly that he can also utter himself outwardly; the finite, created utterance ad extra is a continuation of the immanent constitution of ‘image and likeness’” in the Logos (236). Rahner applies this model also to the incarnation, so that the humanity of the incarnate Christ is the “self-disclosure of the Logos,” the symbolic exteriorization of the second person of the Trinity (239). From the incarnation as symbolic expression Rahner derives the further principle that created things in general are symbolic expressions of the Father (239).

In particular, the church is the continuing symbolic expression of the Logos in the world. Because it is the expression of the Logos in real human life, it goes “with the grain” of human existence, and thus takes an institution, juridical, and social form. But the church is not merely social and juridical, but the “primary sacrament,” possessing and not merely signifying the “irrevocable eschatological grace of God which conquers triumphantly the guilt of man” (240–41). Specific sacraments make the symbolic reality of the church concrete, and are thus, like the church itself, symbols in Rahner’s sense. Because the sacramental signs are “symbols,” it is impossible that they can be seen “apart from what is signified” (242).

There are several problems with Rahner’s argument, but first a pseudo-problem needs to be addressed: Is it true that the Father “realizes” his nature in generating the Son? At first blush, this seems problematic, since it appears to make the Father a being in process who has not fully attained his nature until he has expressed himself in the Son. But Rahner is speaking of the ontological Trinity, so that the Father “realizes” his nature in the Son eternally and essentially. Rahner’s formulation does highlight the fact that the Father is not the Father, and hence not fulfilled in his personal subsistence, except as he eternally generates the Son, and also puts emphasis on the “dynamism” of the relation of Father and Son. Neither of these emphases, however, violates orthodox formulations of the Trinity. To say that the Father is dependent on the Son for his fatherhood is simply to restate the doctrine of aseity in a trinitarian frame; God (the Father) depends only on God (the Son and the Spirit). And the notion that the relation of Father and Son is dynamic is consistent with a long tradition that defines God’s esse as moveri (movement).[15]

Second, a genuine difficulty: while Rahner may be able to show that the Father realizes himself in the generation of an “image,” the same cannot be said for the Son and Spirit, neither of whom “generate” a symbol. It is not, therefore, true without qualification that beings realize their nature by expressing themselves through symbols. To press this claim without showing how it is true for the Son and Spirit leaves Rahner open to serious trinitarian difficulties, suggesting that only the Father is fully a “being,” or that he alone is God. One might suggest in response that there is a reflexive “image-making” on the part of the Son. In the economy of redemption, the Son does only what he sees the Father doing; he is realized as incarnate Son by his “imitation” or “imaging” of the Father (John 5:19). If we can press this relation back into the ontological Trinity, it would imply that the symbolic expressiveness of the Father in generating the Son does not reduce the Son to passivity, for the Son eternally and actively “symbolizes” the Father. Rahner’s thesis that every being realizes its nature in symbolizing can be preserved, so long as “symbolizing” is broadened to include not only “generation of an image” (the Father) but also “actively imaging” (the Son).

This leads to another genuine problem. Despite his claim that the unity of a being is fundamentally a unity in plurality, Rahner’s language sometimes suggests that divine plurality is secondary to a prior unity: “Being as such, and hence as one (ens as unum) for the fulfillment of its being and its unity, emerges into plurality—of which the supreme model is the Trinity” (227). The term “emerges” is problematic, indicating that first there is unity, and then the plurality that comes at some secondary stage by the Father’s expression and projection. In the case of the Trinity, Rahner hints at a unity logically prior to and “behind” the plurality of persons, a view that either implies subordinationism or a quaternity in which there is some undifferentiated essence anterior to the three persons. That Rahner’s statements imply this is very odd, given Rahner’s complaint elsewhere that western theology has illegitimately separated the treatises on the unity of God from treatises on the Trinity, unduly privileging God’s oneness to the detriment of a full trinitarian theology.[16]

Despite these and other problems, one of Rahner’s main points is a true and fruitful insight, namely, that God is by nature a “speaker” and a “producer of symbols.” Rahner is especially focusing on John’s title for the Son (John 1:1). The fact that the Word is eternally with God means that the Father eternally expresses himself, eternally “speaks,” eternally produces uncreated “language.” The eternal divine speaking is not, however, limited to the Father. To be sure, the Father alone generates Word but the Word is also a person who has personal fellowship and communion with the Father and the Spirit. He is “toward God”; the Word spoken by the Father speaks back to the Father. This intertrinitarian communication is the uncreated original of human communication, and is reflected in the intertrinitarian communication revealed in the economy of redemption (e.g., Matt 11:25–27; John 17). Thus, both the Son and the Spirit also eternally “speak” or “communicate,” and in this sense, the Son and Spirit are also employing “symbols.”

“Word,” moreover, is not the only way that the New Testament describes the Son’s relationship to the Father. The Son is also the “express image of his nature” (Heb 1:3), a description already implicit in the name “Son,” which is sometimes interchangeable with “image” (cf. Gen 5:1–3). To say that the Father has a Son, therefore, is to say that he has and generates an eternal “image.” Thus, we can say not only that the Father eternally speaks and eternally generates the Word, but also that the Father eternally generates his image, an uncreated “symbol” of himself, and this insight was the basis for medieval view that the Logos, or Word, is the “Art” of God. For the Father, symbol-making, like speaking, is a primordial eternal activity.

These trinitarian reflections can be brought to bear on sacramental theology by an anthropological route. Insofar as we are made in the image of the Son, we are created images as the Son is an uncreated image of the Father, created to symbolize actively the Father as creatures. Insofar as we are made in the image of the Father, we are symbol-makers who generate other humans and cultural artifacts “after our own image, according to our likeness.” Since we are made in the image of a trinitarian God, a God who eternally speaks and symbolizes, a God who eternally is spoken and is symbolized, generation of symbols is inseparable from human existence. Semiosis is a basic human, and uniquely human, process.

Rahner says that the “expression” of beings in symbols is the means by which beings attain their natures. In trinitarian context, this means that the Father’s eternal generation of the Son is the basis of his personal character as Father. As Rahner points out, it is not merely that the Father eternally generates the “symbol” of himself, but that the Father is Father only because he does so. Since there is no Father without a Son, the Father’s personal particularity is constituted by his generation of an image.[17] The image is what makes the Father Father. Hence, the Son is the “generator” of the Father, for the symbol made makes the symbol-maker. It is impossible to apply this directly to human nature. Being creatures in time, we do not eternally generate “images” and we are not eternally what we are. Analogic ally, however, human beings become what we are through the generation of symbols, images, and words. Scripture says, for example, that the words have a formative effect on the speaker. According to Prov 12:14, “a man will be satisfied by the fruit of his mouth” and Prov 13:2 adds “from the fruit of a man’s mouth he enjoys good.” Our words not only “feed” and “water” others also produce fruit for us. If we speak good words, the fruit we receive back will be good. If there is poison under our tongues, we will suffer its effects. The symbols and words we generate become distinct from us, turn toward us, and make us. Our words and symbols, like the eternal Word and image, speak back “toward” their “father.”[18]

We thus generate symbols not in spite of who God is, but because of who he is, and this leads us to expect that in communicating his life to us, he will also employ symbols. Thus, we move from a trinitarian (and semiotic) anthropology to sacramental theology proper. Rahner builds a bridge from a trinitarian theology of symbol to sacramental theology by positing that the church is a continuation of the incarnation or the “sacrament” of Christ. Unfortunately, this bridge lacks adequate support. Both of Rahner’s ecclesiological conceptions are problematic. If the church is a continuation of the incarnation, the NT’s distinction between head and body is blurred; instead of submitting to her head, the church, or some sector of it, is competitive with it.[19] As Miroslav Volf notes, the notion that the church is the sacrament of Christ leaves unanswered the question of the nature of a “sacrament”: “is the church an instrument in God’s hands in such a way that Christ remains the sole subject of saving grace, or not?”[20] By contrast to Rahner, I do not wish to build a bridge with the materials of Christology but with the materials of anthropology, and that will require rather different engineering. Still, if Rahner does not take us to a satisfying trinitarian sacramental theology, his efforts toward a semiotic anthropology bring us several steps closer to our goal.

II. Being and Communion

The second theologian whose work helps “frame” sacramental theology is John Zizioulas, a Greek Orthodox theologian. In Being As Communion,”[21] he argues that the early Greek Fathers broke decisively with Greek metaphysics and ontology and invented, through their reflection on the doctrine of the Trinity and their experience of the Eucharist, an ontology in which personhood and interpersonal communion have ontological ultimacy. For the Greek Fathers, then, to be is to be in communion.

As in Rahner, there are difficulties with Zizioulas’s account that must be examined before moving to his more productive claims.[22] First, Zizioulas several times implies that there are inherent flaws in creation, that the human problem is not merely ethical or covenantal but metaphysical. In spite of his insight that Heidegger is a gnostic, Zizioulas himself falls into a form of gnosticism. Discussing what he calls the “biological hypostasis,” i.e., man as created and finite, he claims that biological hypostasis limits freedom. All men are born into a state of necessity, situations of givenness, so that the world that confronts us is not a product of our free choice. Moreover, we are subject to a variety of natural instincts and necessities that inhibit our achievement of the absolute freedom of personhood:

if, in order to avoid the consequences of the tragic aspect of man which we have discussed, the person as absolute ontological freedom needs a hypostatic constitution without ontological necessity, his hypostasis must inevitably be rooted, or constituted, in an ontological reality which does not suffer from createdness (54).

Thus, for Zizioulas, being born from above means receiving a new birth into a life dominated not by necessity but by freedom. Grace does not restore nature but elevates it: “True life, without death, is impossible for us so long as our being is ontologically determined by creaturehood” (108).

He explains this whole line of thought briefly in his introduction:

Between the being of God and that of man remains the gulf of creaturehood, and creaturehood means precisely this: the being of each human person is given to him; consequently, the human person is not able to free himself absolutely from his “nature” or from his “substance,” from what biological laws dictate to him, without bringing his annihilation. And even when he lives the event of communion either in the form of love or of social and political life, he is obliged in the last analysis, if he wants to survive, to relativize his freedom, to submit to certain natural and social “givens.” The demand of the person for absolute freedom involves a “new birth,” a birth “from on high,” a baptism. And it is precisely the ecclesial being which “hypostatizes” the person according to God’s way of being (18–19).

Christ has been sent to overcome createdness.

Zizioulas’s notion that the givenness of human existence is a flaw sits oddly with his emphasis on the reciprocity of personal relations within the Trinity. On his own premises, it would seem, reception as much as giving characterize the intertrinitarian relations. At this point, the western theolo gians that, according to Zizioulas, paid insufficient attention to the personal relations within the Trinity actually offer a much stronger account of reciprocity. Augustine’s view that the Father and Son are engaged in an eternal traditio and redditio of the Spirit of love makes it impossible to think of receptivity per se as an imperfection.[23]

Doubtless, Zizioulas’s failure to recognize the reciprocity of the persons is related to his tendency toward subordinationism. Reciprocity of the type that Augustine describes suggests that the Father is conditioned by the Son even as the Son is by the Father, but this undermines the eastern view that the Father is the causative principle of the Godhead. Some of Zizioulas’s reasons for defending this eastern form of subordination are worthy enough. He wants to avoid any implication that there is anything impersonal in God, and he recognizes that positing a divine substance as a “source” of the three persons runs the risk of de-personalizing the Trinity. To ensure that the principle of the Godhead is thoroughly personal, he claims that the Father is this source. Zizioulas concedes that this involves a kind of subordinationism, but says that the church accepts this as the price of securing the full personality of God. But this avoids one problem by creating another, equally serious one. In the end, Zizioulas must admit that “God owes His existence to the Father” (18).

Finally, Zizioulas’s language is often vague and confusing, though part of this difficulty is doubtless due to differences in the ethos of eastern and western theology. Yet, a reader is put off by undefined discussions of how this is “rooted in” that and how that is “prior to” this. Obscurity of this sort affects Zizioulas’s historical judgments. He repeats, for example, the common claim that western trinitarian theology makes the “one God” prior to the Trinity, and complains that Augustine along with the scholastics is responsible for saying that the “ousia” or “essence” of God, rather than the Father, is the “causal” principle of the Godhead. As noted briefly above, this is questionable as a historical judgment, and it is questionable too whether the beginning point of the doctrine of God makes all that much difference. Frame, following Calvin, has suggested that there are many different starting points.[24] Especially with the doctrine of the Trinity, any starting point leads, perichoretically, in several directions.

Yet, Zizioulas offers a number of insights that are useful for “framing” sacramental theology and the theology of symbol. He does this by developing a trinitarian account of personhood. According to Zizioulas, Greek philosophy could not, given its monistic ontology, ever make personhood and personal relationship an ontologically weighty category. Monism undermines personality in two ways. First, for the monist God and the world are locked together in a single chain of being. Not even God is genuinely free and personal, for he does not stand sufficiently outside of the world to “dialogue” with it. If freedom is the essence of personhood, then there is no being that is fully personal in the Greek view, including whatever God there might be. Second, if everything is ultimately one, the multiplicity of the things that we experience is secondary and even a fall from true, unified being. This makes relationship an effect of a fall from true being, for relationship requires separation and difference. “Person” cannot, on monist premises, be an ultimate ontological category.

Because of their monist assumptions, neither Plato nor Aristotle were able to give full significance to human personhood. Significantly, Zizioulas says, only a doctrine of an eternal person can provide a basis for a full philosophy of personhood, and none of the Greek philosophers conceived of an eternal person. For Plato, the soul, which ensures the continuity of personal identity, is not permanently united to an individual man but can migrate to other men. For Aristotle, the hylomorphic unity is dissolved at death, and thus he too fails to secure personal identity. Zizioulas also sees significance in the linguistic fact that the Greek and Latin terms for “person” originally referred to the mask worn by an actor or to the role one played in legal and social relations. In the context of drama, man struggled against necessity and achieved a measure of freedom, and hence there he was truly “person.” But this was only temporary, and it was only a mask or a role. Once he removed his persona and steps outside the theater or the court, necessity and fate return. In both the theatrical and the legal usages, a “persona” is something that one adds to a basic underlying substance, as the “persona” is added to the actor (31–34).

The Greek Fathers produced a double revolution in philosophy. By insisting on the doctrine of creation, they broke the links that bound God and the world in a single determined continuum. God is separate from creation, stands over against it, and therefore can relate to it as an “other.” The Greek Fathers, therefore, were capable of giving full ontological weight to relation, freedom, and personality. In the doctrine of the Trinity, Christian theology went a step further to claim that personhood is not merely a feature of created reality but ontologically ultimate. The Greek Fathers identified “hypostasis,” the concrete entity of the particular being, with “person,” an identification never made in Greek philosophy, where “hypostasis” referred to the individual subsistent thing to which a persona might be added. Substance, as the name suggests, was something “underlying” the surface appearance, the public “persona.” For the Greek theologians, however, God himself is persons in relation; there is no underlying substance because the essence is enhypostatized in the Father, Son, and Spirit, and that without remainder. Instead of separating “being” from “being a person,” Christian theology, especially against Sabellianism, taught that, for God, to be is to be personal. Not only is there a difference between God and the world, there is difference and plurality within the being of God, and this inner-divine difference never collapses into a higher or more basic unity. This constitutes a decisive and revolutionary break with Greek monism, for it means that multiplicity is not the product of a tragic fall from primordial unity. Multiplicity is itself primordial.

As a result, love becomes the most ultimate ontological reality. God is eternally love because he is eternally persons in relation. The love and communion of the three persons of the Trinity constitutes the being of God. Relations of one to other also become ontologically ultimate, such that each person is constituted in his individuality by his relation to the others. The Father is the Father only because he has a Son, the Son is Son in relation to the Father, and the Spirit is unique and distinct only by relation with the other two. Relationship constitutes the personal character, the particular uniqueness of each member of the relationship.

For human beings too, personhood, love, and relationship are given full weight in making human beings what they are. Zizioulas’s anthropological claims here are as challenging to modern thought as to ancient Greek philosophy. It seems common sensical to moderns that one first is and then enters into relation, but this is not true. For God, neither the Father nor the Son have any existence that is not existence-in-relation, and the same is true, analogically, in human life. At a purely biological level, no human being exists except through sexual relations between a man and a woman, and we grow to mature humanity only in relations with others.[25] For Zizioulas, the essence of original sin is trying to cut oneself off from relationship and communion, attempting to live as an individual, autonomous and isolated. In redeeming us, Christ restores true personality by opening us up to communion. Just as the uniqueness of the divine persons is dependent on their relations, so also we achieve personal uniqueness and individuality only in relationship with God, other persons, and the world.

It follows that a person’s unique identity is not somehow hidden behind his external social interactions. Zizioulas’s trinitarian account of personhood challenges the Cartesian dualist conception of the “ego” as a ghost in a machine, as well as the ancient notion of an inviolable soul lurking behind the various social roles and masks that we take on. He urges instead that we actually are what we are-in-relationship. I have a particular connection with a certain (rather large) group of children; I am their father. It is not the case that the real me is an underlying someone that can be isolated from that particular role, that the real me is not a father. Nor, obviously, is it the case that I am a father whether or not I have children. I am a father because of my relation to my children, and that relation-defined role is one among many that constitutes my identity. The same points applies to other roles and relations, whether constituted by biology or by covenant. I fulfill the roles of son, brother, husband, neighbor, teacher, church member, theologian, friend, and the real me is at least the sum of these roles and relationships. To be sure, there is a surplus beyond these roles since the fundamental relation that constitutes my identity is my relation with God. But even my relation with God is mediated through a relation with others—with Adam and the incarnate Son, with the apostles and prophets who announced the gospel and wrote the Scriptures, and with the community of the church in which I first heard the gospel. The inner and outer me cannot be separated into the “real me” and the “social self.” The “real me” is my social self as much as my inner self.

Zizioulas’s recognition that personal identity and existence are constituted by relationships has profound implications for sacramental theology. Let us consider baptism to follow through some of the implications. Despite vigorous disagreements on other matters, there is a consensus across Christian traditions that in baptism one becomes a member of the visible church and is publicly committed to Christ as his servant and disciple. When the question of baptismal efficacy is pressed beyond this, however, the consensus disappears, and, within the Reformed churches, the traditional ambiguity toward sacraments comes to the fore. How can an external application of water affect my “spiritual” standing before God? How can it have any real effect on me? But these questions themselves assume that “I” am separable from the communities of which I am a member and the roles I have been commissioned to play. In Zizioulas’s framework, by contrast, it becomes clear that the “external” obligations and relations imposed by the rite of baptism have everything to do with my real self. If I have been baptized, I am a member of the royal priesthood, and that relational fact is part of what constitutes my identity. I may be faithful or unfaithful in that role, but the role has defined me. Since, further, God relates to me as me, the fact that I have been baptized into the visible community of believers means that God relates to me differently than before I was baptized. After I pass through the water, I have a standing before God and man that I did not have before. Thus, a trinitarian framework leads to a strong affirmation of baptismal efficacy that is as far as possible from anything “magical” or “sacerdotal.”

More broadly, Zizioulas’s discussion highlights the necessarily social nature of man made in the image of a “social” God. If redemption means reversing the effects of Adam’s sin and re-making humanity as it was created to be, it necessarily implies the gathering of a community of the saved. Were God to redeem isolated individuals, he would not be redeeming man as he actually exists. Redemption is the remaking of man, and therefore the remaking of man in his relationships. Salvation is necessarily social salvation. Thus, the church is necessary to the achievement of salvation because God created man in his image, as “beings in communion.”

Once the soteriological necessity of the church is made clear, Rahner’s theology of symbol can be brought back into the discussion. For Rahner, semiosis is primordially human, and it is only in and through symbols that knowledge of and fellowship with others can exist. Human beings are external to each other, and the doctrine of the Trinity implies that this differentiation is basic and will never be dissolved into an undifferentiated unity. Yet, the doctrine of the Trinity also implies that we are made for communion. Rahner’s argument suggests that the only way for a human to communicate what he thinks, feels, hopes and desires is through external means. If people are to be united in community, therefore, there must be common symbols. It follows that if there is to be a church, there must be sacraments. And since the triune nature of God implies the necessity of the church, the triune nature of God also implies, at a second remove, the necessity of sacraments.

In summary: God is triune, three persons in interpersonal communion and love. Made in God’s image, we are made for communion. Sin violates community, and redemption necessarily involves God’s gathering of a people, the restoration not only of individuals in their unique integrity, but of relationships and the institutional structures that give form to relationships. These relationships among men and between God and men can exist only through the use and exchange of symbols. Therefore, because God is triune, sacraments are necessary to the achievement of salvation.

III. Conclusion

Though I have relied here on two modern theologians, the argument is not a modern, much less a modernist, one. On the contrary, I mean to challenge the modern tendency to disrupt symbol and reality and to collapse the Trinity into unity. And I take encouragement from the fact that this argument is anticipated in a compressed form in one of what Calvin considered the more sober scholastics, Thomas Aquinas. Sacraments are necessary for salvation, Aquinas argues, because, given the nature of God and of man, it is fitting that God makes use of sacramental signs and rites in redemption. In developing his argument, Thomas first quotes Augustine’s statement (from Contra Faustum 19.11) that it is impossible to unite men in a religious association without the use of symbols or sacraments. Since it is necessary for salvation for men to be bound in one true religion, Thomas argues, sacraments are essential to the achievement of salvation.[26] While the Reformers rightly rejected many aspects of the mechanistic medieval sacramental system, Thomas’s insight is compatible with a Reformed anthropology and soteriology, and points toward the best of Reformed sacramental theology. And it provides support for the “framing” of sacramental theology offered here.

Notes

1. J. P. S. Uberoi, Science and Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978), 25–34. E. Brooks Holifield begins his history of Puritan sacramental theology with a reminder of the two-front war that the Reformation bequeathed to its successors: “In 1520 Martin Luther sharply challenged the entire sacramental system of medieval Christendom, but within five years he was struggling to save the sacraments themselves from radical reformers who wished to push beyond externals into a realm of pure spirit” (The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570-1720 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974], 1). Particularly in the Reformed wing of the Protestant church, various theological emphases have conspired to produce a pronounced anti-sacramental tenor. Among the important factors have been an emphasis on the primacy of the intellect that exalted verbal communication above non-verbal forms; a sharp metaphysical distinction between spirit and flesh, which shaped a metaphysical interpretation of Jesus’ statement that the “flesh profits nothing” (John 6); the related principle that finitum non capax infiniti; and the doctrine of election, which implies that sacraments could be assuring signs of God’s favor and means of grace only to the elect, a circle within the circle of the church. The dominical authority for the sacraments has been too weighty for Reformed churches ever to consider abandoning the sacraments, and there have been periodic outbreaks of strong sacramental piety, informed more by Calvin than by Zwingli, yet the Reformed churches have never escaped profound ambivalence toward the use of material objects, symbols, and rites in worship. On this question generally, see Carlos M. N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). On Calvin, see B. A. Gerrish, Grace & Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1993); Ronald S. Wallace, Calvin’s Doctrine of Word and Sacrament (Tyler, TX: Geneva Divinity School, 1982).
2. Corpus Mysticum: L’eucharistie et l’église au moyen age: É historique (2d ed.; Paris: Aubier, 1949), 251, 254. On medieval eucharistic controversies, see also Gary Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period: A Study of the Salvific Function of the Sacrament According to the Theologians, c. 1080-c. 1220 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984); Charles E. Sheedy, The Eucharistic Controversy of the Eleventh Century Against the Background of Pre-Scholastic Theology (Catholic University of America Studies in Sacred Theology, 2d series, #4; New York: AMS Press, 1980); N. M. Haring, “Berengar’s Definitions of Sacramentum and their Influence on Mediaeval Sacramentology,” MedStud 10 (1948).
3. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 128, 138.
4. Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (trans. John Bowden; London: SCM, 1984), 17, 412.
5. The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Brampton Lectures, 1992; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 124.
6. Quoted by Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991), 41.
7. Ibid., 42.
8. Ibid., 45.
9. Ibid., 53. Gerald Bray repeats this criticism of western theology and attempts to redress it by insisting, in a discussion of Calvin’s trinitarian theology, on the primacy of persons over essence (The Doctrine of God [Contours of Christian Theology; Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1993], 167, 197-224). Bray’s discussion is unfortunately vitiated by his fairly rigid distinction between the “levels” of person and substance. The distinction itself is of course unobjectionable, but Bray employs it in singular ways. It appears, for example, in his classification of God’s attributes: incommunicable attributes are “attributes of the divine essence,” while communicable attributes are “attributes of God’s personal character” (213-14). Even posing the question of “priority,” however, is based on the false assumption that the divine essence exists anhypostatically. If, by contrast, the divine essence is only as it is in the Father, Son, and Spirit, then the issue of priority simply evaporates. Moreover, Bray’s use of this distinction in the end either collapses or undermines his effort to give due prominence to God’s personal character, as the impersonal pronoun in the previous sentence illustrates. The point can be made less abstractly if we ask whether God’s “omnipotence,” which Bray classifies as an attribute of essence, is a personal omnipotence. If not, then what has happened to the primacy of persons? If so, then how is it not an attribute of personal character?
10. “Sapientia and the Trinity: Reflections on the De Trinitate” in B. Bruning, et al., eds., Collectanea Augustiniana (Leuven University Press, 1990), 317–32; and “The Paradoxes of Self-Knowledge in the De Trinitate” in Joseph T. Lienhard, et al., eds., Collectanea Augustiniana (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 121–34.
11. “Theologie trinitaire chez saint Augustin,” Gregorianum 58 (1977) 675-725.
12. In his classic statement of Reformed soteriology, The Plan of Salvation (rev. ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), B. B. Warfield first distinguishes between naturalistic and supernaturalistic notions of salvation, that is, between those that claim that God saves and those that teach some form of self-salvation. Within supernatural religion, he distinguishes between those in which God operates “indirectly” on the soul through mediators and a sacramental machinery (sacerdotalism) and those that teach that God works “directly” (evangelical). Finally, within the “evangelical” category, he distinguishes between those that introduce some form of universalism and the one, Calvinism, that is consistently particularist. True and consistent Christianity, he says, teaches that salvation is by a supernatural operation of God directly on the souls of particular human beings. It is not clear how the sacraments, church, or even the “external” preaching of the gospel can fit into this scheme. If room can be made for sacramental mediation, it will be in spite of the overall thrust of soteriology. And, since the nature of salvation reflects the nature of God, Warfield will affirm sacramental means of grace in spite of what we otherwise affirm about God. In criticizing Warfield on these points, I am not affirming a “sacerdotal” view of salvation, but suggesting that the antithesis between sacerdotal and evangelical is a false one that a trinitarian account of sacraments (and salvation) will help us to escape.
13. Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of His Thought (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1995), 83; cf. 162–63.
14. “Theology of Symbol,” in Theological Investigations, Volume IV: More Recent Writings (trans. Kevin Smyth; Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1966), 224–52. Page numbers will appear in the body of the text. To avoid unnecessary confusion, I am taking “beings” here to refer to “human beings.” Rahner may intend it more broadly, but the symbolic expressions of arachnids or primates fall outside the scope of this paper.
15. Bray, Doctrine of God, 169–70.
16. The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel, (1967; New York: Crossroad/Herder, 1997), 15–21.
17. “Theology of Symbol,” 235–36.
18. Perhaps a Trinitarian response to the Marxist idea of alienation lies along these lines.
19. This is the burden of G. C. Berkouwer’s still-relevant discussion of Roman Catholicism in The Conflict with Rome, trans. David H. Freeman, (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1958), esp. 20–37.
20. After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 164 n. 29.
21. Being As Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, [1985] 1993). Page numbers appear in the body of the article.
22. See also the penetrating criticism offered by Volf, After Our Likeness, 73–123.
23. Augustine, On the Trinity, 15.17.29. See also Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, 35, 2.
24. Frame, Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1987), 89–90.
25. Zizioulas is ambiguous on this point. He writes at times of the autonomous, separated, independent individual as if such a being could exist.
26. Summa theologiae IIIa, 61, 1.