We’ve discussed how some Greek guys theologizing about the
Trinity said that being isn’t what we are, it’s how we are. My being is how
I relate to people and communities.
We’ve applied this to ordination via the work of Hahnenberg. The change in being that occurs through
ordination is a changed relationship to the church. The minister is repositioned within the
community so that new relationships are formed and thus the minister
experiences a change in being. Finally,
I posed the question: Is this compatible with contemporary Roman Catholic
theology?
Let’s build some context here:
Sacramental Character[1]
has its origins in the fourth century with Augustine. When the bishop’s seat in Carthage was empty,
Caecilian and Donatus were candidates to fill the position. The Donatists argued that Caecillian was not
a valid bishop because the bishop that ordained Caecillian had denied the
faith. The question was: Can a bishop still ordain bishops even though
he had previously denied the faith?
Augustine argued that sacraments do what sacraments do because Christ is
the one who does them! He said of
baptism that if a murderer, drunkard, adulterer, or even Judas were to baptize, the baptism would be valid because it is
actually Christ who acts in the sacraments.
It’s not the priest/bishop who does it, but Christ. If sacraments depend
primarily on the grace of Christ and not the
ability/honor/character/moral-integrity of the priest, or the person who
receives them, then Christ puts a seal on our souls that we cannot undo because
it never depended on us in the first place!
Aquinas compared sacraments to a military seal. Soldiers received a mark on their bodies that
showed that they belonged to this or that army.
Even in the case of discipline, the mark is never removed. So Aquinas said that the sacramental seal is
more lasting than a mere military bodily seal.
The Council of Trent (and Martin Luther for that matter) affirmed an
irremovable sacramental seal. Vatican II affirmed the seal. The Catechism of
the Catholic Church affirms the seal!
Ordination is an “indelible spiritual character and cannot be
repeated or conferred temporarily.”[2]
Much could be said about this Western approach but one thing
is certain: baptism, confirmation, and
ordination seal the recipient. This seal
is permanent and thus it cannot be repeated or undone. Ordination as changing relationships
fails to account for this permanence. If a priest is a priest through being in
a priestly relationship with the Church, it would follow that he would cease to
be a priest if he were to be separated from the Church (through choice or
discipline). What is needed is a
relational approach to the sacramental character combined with permanence.
This is where I think I’ve made some contributions by
turning to a postmodern context.
In our contemporary situation, there is a rising awareness
that my experience is not normative for everyone. With globalization came instant access to
people who are strikingly dissimilar to me.
Even categories that we once believed were so certain have encountered
wide diversity. It is obvious today that
to be a Christian no longer means living in the North-Western part of the
world, singing European hymns, reading the Bible in English, and having cozy
church buildings. The dominant image of
the Christian person has been challenged because of the awareness of the huge
diversity of Christian experience around the world. It is now impossible to speak with certainty
about THE Christian experience. This
awareness saturates and transforms every all-encompassing image and story that
tries to make sense of EVERYTHING. An
example of this can be found in something like the book by John Eldridge, “Wild
at Heart.” It purports that all men have
an intrinsic nature or desire for x,y,z.
We all like to fight or something wild like that. The book tries to have an over-arching,
all-encompassing understanding of masculinity. But the reality is that the
experience of men is so diverse that I cannot boil down the “experience of Men”
to my experience or the experience of most men.
What we end up doing is telling a story in which “all men” is actually
just “me.” Postmodernity rejects these grandnarratives.
It is exceedingly difficult to try to describe the “human
experience” that is actually common to all humans. Even the North American human experience is
impossible to capture with a single narrative.
The more honest I become, the more I realize that I can hardly capture
my own human experience with a single narrative. With what certainty can we begin to discuss
the substance of the human? What is the overarching
ousia that every human shares in common?
Is there a substance that every priest around the world shares in
common? The Greek concept of substance seems altogether insufficient to capture
the wide diversity of experiences today.
A theologian named Friedrich Schweitzer discussed the
postmodern life cycles. In Modernity, adolescence
was the time to develop the “self.” Who
you are, what you value—in short: your identity. It was expected that you would form one
single coherent identity within which you would enter adulthood. In postmodernity, we have many roles and in
each role we sometimes have a different identity. All of the identities may not form a cohesive
whole so we are sometimes living in a paradox of identities. We begin to be formed by our
relationships. In Postmodernity we
should not speak of the individual or whole self, rather we should speak about
the relational-self or the plural-self.
As a relational/plural-self, the one who is ordained enters
into new roles and relationships that will form new identities within the
church. A Modern perspective may expect
the identities to be smoothly incorporated into the unified self so that we can
distinguish a total change from one being to another (Unified Baptized
Christian=>Unified Ordained Priest).
The relational/plural-self of Postmodernity is repositioned in the
community through ordination thereby forming new relationships. The new relationships would form new
identities that are added to the already existing plurality of self. In
Postmodernity the sacramental character of ordination may consist not so much
in a transformation of being, but an addition to being. The new identity formed in the Church community
creates additional ways to be.
I would like to turn for a moment to the concept of narrative
in Postmodernity. My narrative is the
particular story that I entered into at birth.
There is an inevitability to my narrative—I was born at a particular
time and place into a context that I had no control over. In a way it belonged to other people. As soon as I entered, it became my narrative
through which I experience the entire world. As it becomes my own it becomes
utterly unique, though it is shared with others. In Postmodernity there is an
awareness that truth is only meaningful to me within my narrative. This is what Hahnenberg calls a radical
contingency. My narrative encounters the
Christian narrative in a way that is meaningful, but it could have been
otherwise. Think for a moment what it
would be like if you were born on the opposite side of the world. You’re narrative would be completely
different and you would probably find meaning through a different religious
experience.
Looking at the work of Lieven Boeve, Hahnenberg explains the
significance of the “open narrative.”
The open narrative is sensitive to the otherness of the other. The other is so other that I cannot fit their
narrative neatly into mine. “To do so is
to destroy the other as other, to make ‘you’ into some version of ‘me.’”[3] It is an abuse, and a reduction. What they mean is something like this: I am a John Eldridge Wild-at-Heart man. I see another man who is chronically
depressed, dissatisfied with his job, and seems to lack purpose. A closed narrative would assume that my
narrative contains all I need to know about manliness. To be happy this guy needs adventure in his life.
I decide what this guy needs is to come backpacking in Colorado
with me. We’ll fish, hit the trails, and
set up camp when our hearts decide. What does this guy need to be content? He needs to be more like me! In that closed narrative, I did not allow the
man to be different than me. I did not
allow him to be other.
For Boeve, the Christian narrative is an open
narrative. Basil insisted that the
substance of God is veiled in light so incomprehensible that we cannot
contemplate it. Christianity is at its
root an open story to the inexhaustible mystery of God. “Precisely because Truth transcends our narrative,
our story must remain open.”[4] The Christian story must remain open to God
who is Other, but it must also be open to other human narratives. Christ called his disciples from the closed
confines of their own limited experiences to embrace the other in love.[5] “We meet the mystery of God in the mystery of
the other.”[6]
Boeve speaks of the intersection of two narratives as the
“interruption” of the other.[7] This sometimes happens without
intentionality. The other’s narrative meets our narrative, and we are faced
with an interruption in our own story.
“Thus an interruption is not destructive. It is transformative—if we are
open to it. Our stories go on, but they go on changed.”[8]
A Christian may encounter the depressed guy and think that
her narrative can fix him up. What he
needs to come out of his depression is to find Jesus. If he has a saving faith in Jesus, he will
have a better outlook, and he may look for opportunities to minister at
work. But that closed narrative will destroy
the man as “other.” To have an open
narrative capable of interruption is to have the humility to say, “I don’t know
what this guy needs. I suppose I should
get to know him.” Perhaps at the end of
your encounter with him, it will be your narrative that has changed, not his.
(Probably both narratives will change)
 |
| This represents a closed (but optimistic) narrative. The Church has been given all Truth. |
 |
| This represents an open narrative. The Christian narrative has enough truth to be meaningful, but certainly not all Truth. To try to make the red narrative fit into the blue narrative would be to make it cease to be its own unique story all together. |
This is what I’m suggesting with all this open/interruption narrative
talk:
Ordination in postmodernity can be seen as the intersection
of two narratives—an interruption. Dennis
is ordained within a Christian community.
This means that his relational/plural-self is put into a new
relationship with the Church. New
relationships mean new identities. He’s
experienced a change in being. Not only
has his being been changed, his narrative has been interrupted. His narrative has been interrupted by the
narrative of the community, the narrative of the Church, and the narrative of Christ. Having experienced an interruption, his
narrative, indeed his identity, will always remain changed. In
this way, the postmodern person experiences an indelible change in being
through ordination. Roles may change
within the Church, relationships with ecclesial institutions may grow or be
severed. Still, the narrative of the
relational/plural-self will forever be changed.
This is my suggestion of reconciling the ontological change
through changing relationships with the indelible sacramental character that is
so potent in the Western Church. Let me
know what you think.
As for you, I encourage you to open up your narrative. Unless you’ve attained, contained, and
comprehended the vast mystery that is God, you must keep searching. Your tiny little narrative (however
vast/universal you may think it is) has only begun to probe the depth of God’s
truth. Allow other people to be other
than yourself. You will never know
another person by fitting them into your narrative. Allow them to interrupt your narrative, to
broaden your scope, to help you see the world differently.
[1]
The idea that we are permanently sealed/changed by the Grace of the Holy Spirit
through the sacramental encounter.
[2] Catechism of the Catholic
Church, 2nd Edition. Paragraphs 1581-1584.
[3] Edward Hahnenberg. Awakening Vocations. (Minnesota,
Liturgical Press. 2010, 170.
[4] Ibid 171.
[5] Ibid 172.
[6] Ibid 173.
[7] Ibid 177.
[8] Ibid 177.
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