If sacramentalism is undercut, sacerdotalism is bound to fall. Luther with one stroke reduced the number of sacraments from seven to two. Confirmation, marriage, ordination, penance, and extreme unction were eliminated. The Lord's Supper and baptism alone remained. The principle which dictated this reduction was that a sacrament must have been directly instituted by Christ and must be distinctly Christian.

here i stand by roland bainton, ch.8 p.106

st. thomas aquinas

Et ideo convenienter divina sapientia homini auxilia salutis confert sub quibusdam corporalibus et sensibilibus signis, quae sacramenta dicuntur.

my translation of aquinas

And therefore it is fitting that Divine wisdom gives the help of salvation to men through these various corporeal and sensual signs, which are called sacraments.

the newadvent.org translation, "literally translated by fathers of the english dominican province"

Divine wisdom, therefore, fittingly provides man with means of salvation, in the shape of corporeal and sensible signs that are called sacraments.

while i fully realize that it's my word here against the fathers of the dominican order, i've never seen auxilia used to denote anything other than an aid or help. while "means" could easily fall in this realm, "means" has an entirely different connotation with regards to salvation. i believe aquinas meant for the sacraments to be aids or helps of salvation, not vehicles, causes, or purveyors of it.

It can be said that God in the first creation of things decided to produce effects regularly in the presence of, and not in the absence of, certain things and each thing of the same species. And it belongs to these things to be a cause by their nature, i.e., by that nature in which they were constituted at their creation. And the term 'regularly' is used because God did not tie His power down to the creatures.

gabriel biel, whether the sacraments of the new covenant are effective causes of grace p. 4

And so it is not the case that heat is a cause of heat because of some other power that exists in it; rather, it is a cause of heat solely because God has so determined Himself that in the presence of heat-- and not unless it is present--He regularly wills to produce heat. And if He had not so decided, then the very same heat, which would in that case exist without any change, would be heat and yet would not be a cause of heat. Hence, God does nothing through a secondary cause without its being the case that He does it through Himself just as principally and no less so than if He were doing it alone.

gabriel biel, whether the sacraments of the new covenant are effective causes of grace, p.3

This argument seems strong to me and sufficiently plausible for us to conclude that if God were to decide that from this day forward He is going to will to send rain at the utterance of some word pronounced by someone, then that word, once uttered, would be just as properly a cause of the rain brought about by God at its utterance as heat is a cause of heat. And this seems altogether true. For a creature has nothing except from God's will alone, which grants it to the creature freely and contingently.

gabriel biel, whether the sacraments of the new covenant are effective causes of grace, p.3-4

In our perspective, however, the 'original' sin is not primarily that man has 'disobeyed' God; the sin is that he ceased to be hungry for Him and for Him alone, ceased to see his whole life depending on the whole world as a sacrament of communion with God. The sin was not that man neglected his religious duties. The sin was that he thought of God in terms of religion, i.e., opposing Him to life. The only real fall of man is his noneucharistic life in a noneucharistic world. The fall is not that he preferred world to God, distorted the balance between the spiritual and materical, but that he made the world material, whereas he was to have transformed it into 'life in God,' filled with meaning and spirit.

alexander schmemann, for the life of the world, ch.1.4, p.18

When we see the world as an end in itself, everything becomes itself a value and consequently loses all value, because only in God is found the meaning (value) of everything, and the world is meaningful only when it is the 'sacrament' of God's presence. Things treated merely as things in themselves destroy themselves because only in God have they an life. The world of nature, cut off from the source of life, is a dying world. For one who thinks food in itself is the source of life, eating is communion with the dying world, it is communion with death. Food itself is dead, it is life that has died and it must be kept in refrigerators like a corpse.

alexander schmemann, for the life of the world, ch.1.3, p.17

All rational, spiritual and other qualities of man, distinguishing him from the other creatures, have their focus and ultimate fulfillment in this capacity to bless God, to know, so to speak, the meaning of the thirst and hunger that constitutes his life. 'Homo sapiens,' 'homo faber' ... yes, but, first of all, 'homo adorans.' The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God - and by filling the world with this eucharist, he transforms his life, the one that he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion with Him. The world was created as the 'matter,' the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and man was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament.

alexander schmemann, for the life of the world, ch.1.2, p.15

Man must eat in order to live; he must take the world into his body and transform it into himself, into flesh and blood. He is indeed that which he eats, and the whole world is presented as one all-embracing banquet table for man. And this image of the banquet remains, throughout the whole Bible, the central image of life. It is the image of life at its creation and also the image of life at its end and fulfillment: 'that you eat and drink at my table in my Kingdom.'

alexander schmemann, for the life of the world, ch.1.1, p.11

It is very difficult, without getting entangled in theology, to explain the full-page miniatures in a Missal in the traditional terms of art history ... But a Missal is a unique kind of book. It is the vehicle for a Sacrament.

christopher de hamel, history of illuminated manuscripts, pg.210

For My Mother, On Her Birthday.

Once, when I was in my early twenties, either twenty-three or twenty-four, I remember driving somewhere with Mom. I was depressed. I don’t remember what had depressed me, but I was very sad. Mom and I were alone in the car. Mom could tell that I was depressed and was trying to cheer me up, although I didn’t want to be cheered up. Mom said, “I want some ice cream. Do you want some ice cream? I do.” I told her that I didn’t want any ice cream and Mom continued driving passed the restaurant where she had suggested we get ice cream. “Were you going to get some ice cream?” I asked, as we drove passed. She smiled and said, “No, that’s okay. I don’t want any.” I recall thinking, at that exact moment, that Mom loved me more than I loved her and that she knew this and that it did not bother her. I recall thinking that surely this was what love was— knowing that you loved someone more than they loved you and not being bothered by it. It was a wonderful moment. It was the first time in many years that I learned something very obvious and yet very true about love, and I told myself then that I should always remember that moment, lest I forget what love was.

by The Inimitable Gibbs

MINISTRY TO DEATH, MINISTRY OF LIFE

by Dr. Peter Leithart

Pastors are specialists in death. Wherever death is, pastors are: Waiting beside the hospital bed, sharing a couple’s bewilderment over their third late miscarriage, reading Psalm 23 as the earth swallows up the casket.

But the pastor’s ministry to death doesn’t stop with the obvious. As a marriage disintegrates, as two who have been one split in two again, trust and love die, and it’s only a matter of time before hope too is a corpse. The Dow plummets, and before they know what happened a couple on the verge of retirement finds a lifetime of restraint and prudence deleted. A company downsizes, and a man whose identity has been bound up with his work stumbles around to find a new self to replace the one he lost. A child’s apostasy wounds more deeply than death.

Whatever form they take, crises are deaths, and to this we can add all the daily deaths that flesh is heir to. Pastors are wherever death is, and in our world death is everywhere.

In all these circumstances, the pastor brings a word of life. To be a real gospel, good news for a world of death, that word has to be a promise of life on the far side of death – or, more properly, the promise of life throughdeath. A message of life that skirts the edge of the grave is not the gospel of Jesus because it is not the gospel of the cross. The word we speak is good news that the Father of Jesus is faithful even to the grave, and yet again faithful. But it has to be at least about God’s faithfulness to death.

Pastoral ministry has a Eucharistic shape: We offer the Bread of life, but only after the bread is broken, after the blood is poured. The Bread of life is the bread that proclaims the Lord’s death until He comes.

At the beginning of Matthew’s Passion narrative, a woman pours oil over Jesus’ head (26:7). It is an anointing, acclaiming Jesus as King and Priest, but Jesus says that it is in preparation for His burial. Jesus is ordained for the grave, anointed to pass through death and out the other end.

This is the great privilege of pastoral ministry, to follow Jesus into the tombs that litter our world to announce the triumph of life.

via Credenda/Agenda