What motivates practice of the liturgy and sacramental rites of the church? Does the worship of God begin and end within each ritual enactment, or does the truth and value of sacramental celebration reside in the broader context of Christian life in church and society? For more than two decades, prominent Jesuit sacramental-liturgical theologian Bruce Morrill has explored the promise and problems inherent in the Second Vatican Council's call to renew liturgy's basic purpose--namely, the glorification of God and the sanctification of people. Morrill's fundamental argument is that this ancient Christian principle is of a piece, that divine glory and human holiness are, so to speak, two sides of a single coin. The value of liturgy and sacraments is depleted, if not lost, unless they function within a holistic practice of faith that seeks the upbuilding of ethical lives, personal and social. With numerous real-life examples plus references to current sociological studies, the chapters address both modern challenges to and biblical and traditional resources for the celebration of sacramental rites today.

Both resistance to and renewed interest in the sacraments mark current theological thought. This work acknowledges human limitations of the sacraments but stresses that God's relationship to human beings cannot be other than sacramental." Sacramental structures and events constitute salvation history, and thus permeate all theology. What makes this sacramental view comprehensible is faith; faith is an indispensable precondition for a sacramental theology. Therefore, the author first demonstrates the preconditions of faith on which sacramental theology rests, and what place it holds within the whole of theology. Following this, he briefly presents the concept of sacraments and the history of that concept, the teachings of Church tradition on sacraments in general, and the basic features of a sacramental theology. Next, he explains from a theological perspective the traditional sacraments of the Catholic Church, including related topics such as indulgences and sacramentals.

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, sacramental theology has evolved as a discipline advancing comprehensive theories of sacraments and sacramentality as integral to the Christian faith while also studying the history and theology of the particular rites. Now, in the twenty-first century, the need for attention to the actual performance and specific social settings of sacramental worship has become well established. This makes the work of sacramental theology necessarily engaged with multiple, cross-disciplinary theories attentive to particular contexts, whether local, national, or global. Still, the divine human encounter at the heart of Christian symbol and ritual likewise beckons to philosophical–theological reflection. The essays in this volume begin with profound philosophical perspectives on the personal and communal sacramental experience, expanding from traditional cosmology to evolutionary and chaos theories of our planetary existence, continuing with shifts, especially among youth, to interreligious and non-institutional perspectives, consideration of change in popular notions of guilt, and social–ethical issues in relation to liturgical theology and practice, so as finally to return to fundamental theological reflection on human sacramentality and divine revelation.

A general introduction to the whole study of sacraments that analyzes them from the perspective of the sacrament that is Christ and the Church. Ecumenical in its presentation, it sets out the complete teaching of the Roman Catholic Church and relates this to a wide range of Anglican and Protestant thought as well. The author brings together the teaching of Vatican II on the sacraments with the rich tradition of sacramental theology through the centuries.

As a multi-faceted introduction to sacramental theology, the purposes of this Handbook are threefold: historical, ecumenical, and missional. The forty-four chapters are organized into the following parts five parts: Sacramental Roots in Scripture, Patristic Sacramental Theology, Medieval Sacramental Theology, From the Reformation through Today, and Philosophical and Theological Issues in Sacramental Doctrine. Contributors to this Handbook explain the diverse ways that believers have construed the sacraments, both in inspired Scripture and in the history of the Church's practice. In Scripture and the early Church, Orthodox, Protestants, and Catholics all find evidence that the first Christian communities celebrated and taught about the sacraments in a manner that Orthodox, Protestants, and Catholics today affirm as the foundation of their own faith and practice. Thus, for those who want to understand what has been taught about the sacraments in Scripture and across the generations by the major thinkers of the various Christian traditions, this Handbook provides an introduction. As the divisions in Christian sacramental understanding and practice are certainly evident in this Handbook, it is not thereby without ecumenical and missional value. This book evidences that the story of the Christian sacraments is, despite divisions in interpretation and practice, one of tremendous hope.

Baptismal fonts were necessary to the liturgical life of the medieval Christian. Baptism marked the entrance of the faithful into the right relation, with the Catholic Church representing the main cultural institution of medieval society. In the period between ca. 1050 and ca. 1220, the decoration of the font often had an important function: to underscore the theology of baptism in the context of the sacraments of the Catholic Church. This period witnessed a surge of concern about sacraments. Just as religious thinkers attempted to delineate the sacraments and define their function in sermons and Sentence collections, sculptural programs visualized the teaching of orthodox ideas for the lay audience. This book looks at three areas of primary concern around baptism as a sacrament – incarnation, initiation, and the practice of baptism within the institution of the Church – and the images that embody that religious discussion. Baptismal fonts have been recognized as part of the stylistic production of the Romanesque period, and their iconography has been generally explored as moral and didactic. Here, the message of these fonts is set within a very specific history of medieval Catholic sacramental theology, connecting erudite thinkers and lay users through their decoration and use.

Ganoczy provides a complete overview of the history of Catholic sacramental theology and a clear explanation of contemporary theological developments. The "classical" teaching of the Council of Trent and its later theological formulations are compared to the new theological language of the Second Vatican Council and the "personalist" theologies of modern thinkers such as Karl Rahner and Edward Schillebeeckx. Introduction to Catholic Sacramental Theology moves clearly from (1) a sketch of the historical development of the sacramental concept, to (2) the basic elements in a general theory of the sacraments, to (3) discussion of the individual sacraments. In the last chapter, the author introduces his own expanded understanding of the sacraments. Using the concepts of modern communication theory, he envisions the sacraments as events of communication in the life of the concrete faith community in which each sacrament has its own particular form and purpose.

Catholic sacramental doctrine has lost much of its credibility. Baptized people leave the church, adolescents stop attending shortly after they are confirmed, supposedly indissoluble marriages regularly dissolve, few go to confession, and many do not believe in transubstantiation. Drawing upon his decades-long study of the sacraments, Martos reveals how teachings that seemed rooted in the scriptures and Catholic life have become unmoored from the contexts in which they arose, and why seemingly eternal truths are actually historically relative. After carefully constructing Catholic teaching from the church's own documents, he deconstructs it by demonstrating how biblical passages were misconstrued by patristic authors and how patristic writings were misunderstood by medieval scholastics. The long process of misinterpretation culminated in the dogmatic pronouncements of the Council of Trent, which continues to dominate Catholic thinking about the church's religious ceremonies. If the sacraments are released from their dogmatic baggage, Martos believes that the spiritual realities they symbolize can be celebrated in any human culture without being tied to their traditional rites.

Introduction to Sacramental Theology presents a complete overview of sacramental theology from the viewpoint of the body. This viewpoint is supported, in the first place, by Revelation, for which the sacraments are the place where we enter into contact with the body of the risen Jesus. It is a viewpoint, secondly, which is firmly rooted in our concrete human bodily experience, thus allowing for a strong connection between faith and life, creation and redemption. From this point of view, the treatise on the sacraments occupies a strategic role. For the sacraments appear, not as the last of a series of topics (after dealing with Creation, Christ, the Church), but as the original place in which to stand in order to contemplate the entire Christian mystery. This point of view of the body, which resonates with contemporary philosophy, sheds fruitful light on classical themes, such as the relationship of the sacraments with creation, the composition of the sacramental sign, the efficacy of the sacraments, the sacramental character, the role of the minister, or the relationship of the sacrament with the Church as a sacrament. As a result of this approach, the Eucharist takes on a central role, since this is the sacrament where the body of Jesus is made present. The rest of the sacraments are seen as prolongations of the eucharistic body, so as to fill all the time and space of the faithful. This foundation of the theology of the sacraments in eucharistic theology is supported by an analysis of the patristic and medieval tradition. In order to support its conclusions, Introduction to Sacramental Theology examines the doctrine of Scripture (especially St. John and St. Paul), the main patristic and medieval authors (St. Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas Aquinas), the response of Trent to the protestant challenges, up to modern authors such as Scheeben, Rahner, Ratzinger, or Chauvet, including the teaching of Vatican II about the Church as a kind of sacrament.

Introducing readers to the contemporary field of sacramental theology, this volume covers the biblical and historical foundations, a survey of the state of the discipline, and a collection of constructive essays representing major themes, practices and approaches to sacraments and sacramentality in the contemporary world. The volume starts with a set of foundational essays that offer broad introduction to the field of sacramental theology from contemporary scholars, analysing a number of historical figures in order to illumine and inform contemporary sacramental theology. The second part of the volume is dedicated to a series of essays on sacramentality, and includes attention to elements of space, time, ritual action, music, and word, all as aspects of what Christians have termed “sacramental” reality. The third set of essays includes attention to each of the seven practices that have most commonly been termed “sacraments” in Christian traditions: baptism; eucharist/Lord's Supper; confirmation; confession, forgiveness and reconciliation; marriage; ordination; and anointing. The final part of this volume features scholars who are working on sacraments in conversation with contemporary academic disciplines: critical race theory, queer theory, comparative theology, and disability studies.