The sacrament of order (sacramentum ordinis) remains a difficulty for the ecumenical movement. The contemporary importance of this sacrament for the project of ecclesial reconciliation, especially in conversation with the Catholic Church, is best explained in terms of the reception of Unitatis Redintegratio (UR). The decree distinguishes between “churches” (ecclesiae) and “ecclesial communities” (communitates ecclesiales). It explicitly recognizes the Orthodox as churches, while both terms are applied to Western Christians not in communion with the Roman See.Footnote 1 Because UR uses both terms when describing the communities of the West, a distinction is needed to differentiate between these groups that is more subtle than “the products of the Eastern and Western schisms.”
While several council fathers and periti have argued convincingly that the distinction was intended to honor the self-definition of some paraecclesial groups—like the Salvation Army—and to follow the usage of the World Council of Churches, the Congregation of the Doctrine for the Faith (CDF) has consistently interpreted the council as intending to make a theological division between churches properly speaking and groups lacking constituent aspects of ecclesiality.Footnote 2 In this article I will prescind from the question of the council's intent and merely seek to propose how the sacrament of order within Reformation ecclesial communities might be received in light of the situation determined by the CDF's now-normative reading of the council.
The typical criterion for dividing churches from ecclesial communities has been the presence or absence of a valid sacrament of order and Eucharist.Footnote 3 This benchmark is not unreasonable, because the sacraments and the church are intrinsically related to each other. As one may say that the sacraments make the church, the presence of valid sacraments is a reasonable standard by which to gauge the presence of the church.Footnote 4 In effect, however, it means that the single criterion of ecclesiality is the presence of a valid sacrament of order, because according to Roman Catholic thought, the canonical validity of the celebrant's ordination is necessary for the validity of the Eucharist.
A larger problem with this criterion is that while it is clear, limited in scope, and readily applicable, all of which may make it good law, it causes an insoluble problem on the ecumenical front. Validity is a black-and-white, binary decision. It cannot allow for degrees, and the gulf between a church and a not-church is therefore unbridgeable. The very distinction, however, that we are attempting to define recognizes a (wounded) ecclesiality in these communions by calling them ecclesial communities.Footnote 5 The council is clearly ruling out the possibility that the distinction between the Catholic Church and the separated brethren is the unbridgeable gulf between Lazarus and Dives. Neither can it be merely reflecting the 1917 Code of Canon Law's recognition of individual Protestants as members of the church (and therefore subjects of the law) because of their valid but irregular baptisms,Footnote 6 for the Protestant groups are called ecclesial communities. The council recognizes in the historical confessions of the West something more than a collection of individual heretics who each have a legal attachment to the true church but share no common ecclesiality with each other.
There is another problem with using the contemporary criteria of validity for order in order to determine ecclesiality. They are predicated on demonstrating an unbroken historical chain of validly ordained bishops. This is the assertion made by Leo XIII's 1896 declaration on Anglican orders; it is strengthened by the determination of the Second Vatican Council that the episcopacy represents the “fullness of the sacrament of order” rather than a jurisdictional addition to the priesthood.Footnote 7 Within the current theology, any judgment of invalid order cannot practically be overcome. A break in the chain makes ordinations beyond that point invalid and internal attempts at reestablishment impossible. The only solution would be reordination by those validly ordained. This makes it a condition of ecumenical reconciliation that many of our dialogue partners admit that they and their ancestors have been at most recipients of the crumbs fallen from the church's table while we have been, properly speaking, church.Footnote 8 The need to find a way to recognize the at least partial ecclesiality of the separated churches in line with UR is a recurring theme in the dialogues.Footnote 9
In his 1974 Vorfragen zu einem ökumenischen Amtsverständnis (Preliminary Investigations for an Ecumenical Agreement on Office), Karl Rahner proposed that a distinction should be made between sacramental and canonical-sacramental validity regarding the sacrament of order.Footnote 10 Rahner developed the distinction on the model of the canons regarding matrimonial validity, proposing a different understanding of how the sacrament of order works validly within the church. His proposal is possible in part because of his complex understanding of the relationship between history and causality.
Rahner revisited the question of Protestant ordinations several times in the last decade of his life.Footnote 11 Best known among these works is his 1983 Unity of the Churches: An Actual Possibility, coauthored with Heinrich Fries.Footnote 12 This later work deals with the question primarily in Theses V and VII. Thesis V, “Episcopal Office,” treats the question of episcopal succession as one of several signs of the apostolicity of the whole church. It sets aside the question of historical validity for the sake of finding a common way forward.Footnote 13 Rahner does briefly touch on the proposal he made in the Vorfragen in Thesis VII, but it remains largely unexplained and largely unexamined in the wider literature.Footnote 14 Since the publication of the Vorfragen in 1974, and of Unity of the Churches in 1983, the question of the validity of Protestant ordinations has become more important and more difficult, especially after the CDF's letters of 1992 and 2000. Rahner's proposal could provide Roman Catholics a means of explaining how the church can be recognized among our separated brothers and sisters.
In what follows, after describing the proposal in Vorfragen, I will explain the logic of Rahner's proposal and show how transformative it is through comparison with a superficially similar distinction proposed by George Tavard. I will then propose that the surprising character of Rahner's logic can be best explained through application of the concept of double- (or multi-) scope blends, borrowed from cognitive science. Rahner, in effect, proposes a new blend that suggests a different kind of ontological reality in the sacrament. His application of canon law results in more than a juridical ruling on the validity of Protestant order; it creates the possibility of saying something truly new, and nonetheless real, about the ontological reality of the sacrament among Protestants. Finally, I will examine how Rahner's proposal, and its potential for a retrospective causality, build on the tectonic logic that he has proposed for understanding the Incarnation. Although this proposal initially seems modest, it contains within it a prompt to reconceptualize sacramental causality. It could not only make an ecumenical approach to the sacrament of order possible, but could also serve as the starting point for a reappropriation of sacramental theology that avoids the problems of an implied technological causality diagnosed by such contemporary thinkers as Louis-Marie Chauvet.
I. Rahner's Argument in the Vorfragen
This book responds to the concrete circumstances of Germany's two-church ecumenical reality. Catholics in Germany encountered communities of Protestants that they experienced as loci of God's grace, despite being led by ministers who were understood to be ordained invalidly. The standard canonical account would have to say that these were not, properly speaking, churches, and would have difficulty accounting for the presence of grace in their liturgical actions.Footnote 15 As an attempt to keep the particular histories from clouding the question, Rahner relates a thought experiment proposed to him by one of his Protestant colleagues involving two Christians trapped in Siberia without priests. It would seem that one is caught between affirming that the necessary grace of the Eucharist is forever denied to them, or that the Eucharist is possible without a validly ordained clergy.Footnote 16 Rahner recalls giving the typical Catholic answer to such a problem, distinguishing between the conditions that make a sacrament valid and those in which God's grace is available (leading to the Tridentine distinction between spiritual and sacramental communion). In revisiting the question, Rahner finds himself somewhat unsatisfied by his very traditional response because it does not distinguish between the situation of the non-Christian and the proposed community of baptized Christians deprived of a priest. Our putative Siberians are not, to use his famous term, merely “anonymous Christians,” for the church is present in their koinonia. To insist that their eucharist is merely “eucharist,” the location of a merely spiritual communion, seems wrong because it does not recognize the ecclesiality of our hypothetical Siberians and ends up equating the church with the historically traceable chain of priesthood. Rahner writes:
Here are baptized Christians, they live in an existential situation marked by explicit Christian belief, the scriptures, the connection to the church historic and communal concrete body of Christ, they speak the words remembering the death of the Lord, they have a common celebration in prayer and Christian love. And in this way they encounter, in any case, the res sacramenti of the Eucharist. And what they do when celebrating, has a connection to this res sacramenti, and this res sacramenti has a connection to the concrete ecclesial representation (Zeichenhaftigkeit) which they compose, and so, these Siberians are in this way the church in this place (at least as much as a house church of the New Testament was). And so I ask myself: where then lies the difference between this and a valid Eucharistic celebration?Footnote 17
This is clearly a hard case that would make bad law; non-Siberian Catholics cannot merely stay home and celebrate the Eucharist. But modern Protestants, from a Catholic perspective, can be said to be in a situation not unlike Rahner's hypothetical Siberians.Footnote 18 They are not personally culpable of the sin of schism, but are prevented by family and cultural bonds from coming into communion with the Roman Church, as surely as our hypothetical Siberians are prevented by distance.Footnote 19 The potential solution of validly reordaining all Protestant ministers is problematic for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it requires contemporary Protestants to judge their own order and those of their ancestors to be invalid, and therefore to describe themselves and those who taught them the faith as less than fully church.Footnote 20
As this schism is a historical problem, Rahner then asks about the historical aspect of proper ecclesial acts. He inquires whether all legitimate (rechtlich) ecclesial acts can be traced back to the authority of the episcopal college or the papal office. He argues that they cannot because these offices are lacking at the earliest strata of the church's history; it is impossible to trace an unbroken line of sacramentally ordained bishops going back to Jesus, which is the only place that order could legitimately enter the church “from outside.”Footnote 21 Therefore, the lineage that we consider necessary to a valid sacrament of order also developed within ecclesiastical history. This does not mean for Rahner that it is dispensable, or that it is not de iure divino. In several articles, Rahner explicitly argues that developments in history can be irreformable or even described as being of divine law:
Our conception of a decision made by the primitive Church in conformity with her nature and made irreversibly—a decision which is revealed in both of these respects—satisfies these demands made on a ius divinum positivum in the Church, even if it is conceived as having originated out of a greater number of juridical possibilities which were in themselves present and “available” and thus are still historically tangible. The revealed character of such a ius divinum does not exclude the observable nature of its development from empirically verifiable tendencies and causes which were in a kind of competitive combat with other existing tendencies of development.Footnote 22
Even though some of the options open to the early church may be foreclosed to the contemporary church, it would seem that if order were established once, it could possibly, by the grace of God, be established again, at least as a special work of divine grace. This presents an opening to see God's definitive action for the church in history after the apostolic period. Rahner does not thereby want to be rid of the regular canonical requirements. Irregular recognition of Protestant order need not supplant the church's usual judgment codified in canon law.Footnote 23
Rahner suggests that an analogous case with a helpful solution can be found in the realm of marriage law, specifically the judgment of sanatio in radice (radical sanation).Footnote 24 This judgment is rendered by either a bishop or the Holy See in cases where, despite an impediment, an invalid marriage had been contracted, the parties have continued to live as if married, and the impediment no longer remains. In such cases, marriages are usually convalidated by a simple renewal of consent. A radical sanation, however, validates the sacrament without the renewal of consent and does not require the knowledge of one or even both parties. By virtue of the church's judgment, the marriage is recognized to be valid not only from the moment of the decree's effect, but also retroactively, applying from the moment of the original consent (ad temporalia). This is an example of church law recognizing the unusual character of an already existing situation and revising its usual judgment in light of particular circumstances:
The situation is apparently simple: the earlier impediment made the marriage (existentially and also societally) not simply invalid; the sanatio in radice recognizes quite explicitly that the existing impediment to marriage in this case did not make the marriage invalid; the lawgiver does not change the state of things, rather he specifies his own relationship to it. Therefore one can see that one and the same social status in the church can arise in different ways or at least come to be recognized in different ways.Footnote 25
Applying this idea to the Reformation communities, then, would involve recognizing that there is a common action of grace in the sacraments validly celebrated and in the “liturgical actions of the Christian religion” as practiced by the “ecclesial communities.”Footnote 26 This recognition could be grounds for understanding the liturgical actions of Protestants as truly valid, in an analogous manner to a radically sanated marriage.
Radical sanation requires the prior removal of the impediment in the case of an impediment of divine law (such as previous marriage, close consanguinity, or impotence). The impediment is removed by virtue of the decree itself in cases of ecclesiastical law (such as insufficient age, prior vows of chastity, or wider degrees of consanguinity).Footnote 27 Rahner argues that as the root of schism is bad faith toward the church (mala fides), the presence of good faith (bona fides) toward the Catholic Church could be understood as the removal of the root impediment.Footnote 28 In arguing this, he is recalling UR §3, in which the council attests that “large communities came to be separated from the full communion of the Catholic Church—for which, often enough, men of both sides were to blame.” This blame cannot be imputed to the contemporary members of either the Catholic Church or the separated communities. Considering the ecumenical rapprochement of our times, Rahner sees reason to assume that bona fides exists. We live in a time when the pope receives the leaders of the separated communities in Christian brotherhood and is received in good faith by them in return. In such a situation, Rahner suggests that it may be possible to speak of a situation of mere schism rather than heresy.Footnote 29 Schism is, in any event, the problem at stake in our question of the validity of order, because to claim that heresy invalidated order would be a form of Donatism.
To say that schism invalidates order implicitly accepts the medieval, jurisdictional understanding of the episcopal office, which we will examine below. The contemporary church, for example, recognizes the ordination of bishops without papal approval to be valid, although it constitutes an act of schism (consider, for example, the Society of St. Pius X, which was brought into formal schism precisely by the ordination of four bishops in 1988, having existed within the church since 1970). This does not trouble the current argument, however, as Rahner would recognize the right of the church to redefine the conditions by which a sacrament is valid without thereby changing the prior decisions of the historical church.Footnote 30 Considering the break of communion inherent in schism, then, mala fides seems a reasonable candidate for the role of impediment, especially given the polemical atmosphere of the sixteenth-century schisms. If mala fides plays the role of impediment, the contemporary bona fides would then signal its removal.
An aspect of declarations of sanatio in radice that Rahner does not emphasize, but that nevertheless plays a role in his proposal, is the matter of the petitioner. Declarations can be granted in cases in which neither party to the marriage is aware of the impediment; this of itself must allow that another can petition on their behalf.Footnote 31 In Rahner's engagement with such decrees, this is important, because he understands them as the lawgiver reorienting himself in relationship to the marriage, recognizing its validity retroactively. In Rahner's ecumenical parallel, a Protestant minister would not need to believe his ordination invalid for the Roman Church to reorient itself to that ordination and recognize a retroactive validity. Furthermore, the close connection between decrees of radical sanation and the papal legitimation of children of invalid marriages offers an obvious parallel to the recognition of sacramental acts at which these ministers presided prior to a decree of radical sanation.Footnote 32
Rahner's basic proposal is that recognizing the grace of God to be present in the sacramental actions of these divided Christians might allow for a kind of recognition akin to a ruling of sanatio in radice. The sacrament of order that must be ruled historically invalid, because of the break, can be retroactively recognized because of the fruits it has borne and a changed situation that does not now require division.Footnote 33 A lawgiver such as the pope, could, thus, respecify his own relationship to Protestant ministers in such a way as to recognize their order as sacramentally, but not canonically, valid.Footnote 34
II. Two Ecumenical Proposals Regarding Order
On the surface, this sounds very much like a distinction that George H. Tavard has made between two historical understandings of validity. Explaining the difference between the two distinctions will both clarify what Rahner is saying and show just how radical the proposal in Vorfragen is. Tavard develops his historical distinction in the context of reexamining Leo XIII's 1896 declaration of the nullity of Anglican order, Apostolicae Curae. Tavard rightly emphasizes that a fundamental change in the understanding of the consecration/ordination of a bishop occurred between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. While the nineteenth-century pope was considering whether the ontological change of the sacrament was present among Anglican clergy, his sixteenth-century predecessors were concerned with the jurisdictional authority of English bishops to ordain:
The modern conception [of the validity of sacraments]…identifies validity as an inherent metaphysical or ontological quality of an action and its result: when used according to the rules of the Church, by persons properly designated for the corresponding function, the ritual is capable of truly making priests or bishops, by conveying to them the essence of priesthood or episcopacy.
The older conception…did not touch on metaphysics or ontology. Whether the ontological reality of the sacrament and its grace has in fact been given and received is not the question. The matter was one of recognition. Invalidity meant invalid in our eyes, not necessarily invalid in itself.…Simply, the Church, through its lawful authority or magisterium, did or did not recognize [a particular ordination as] its own action.Footnote 35
This distinction is historically important, especially for understanding the historical arguments about the validity of the order of the ministers of communities of the Reformation. It could even produce a reading of the Vorfragen, but this reading would not be robust enough to describe Rahner's quite stunning proposal. Such a reading might argue that because the Roman Church's definition of the necessary conditions for order had changed since the schism, Protestant actions must be judged as to validity according to the sixteenth-century rules. As Tavard notes, however, this actually makes the problem more difficult to solve because the very fact of being out of communion with the pope, according to the sixteenth-century understanding, removes the jurisdiction necessary to ordain priests properly.Footnote 36
Both Rahner's Vorfragen and Tavard's A Review of Anglican Orders are proposals that engage the question of the validity of Protestant ordinations in light of the role of canon law and the experiences of history. Both attempt to open some space for recognizing those ordinations, and both make a distinction between a legal and a sacramental reality. Nevertheless, equating the two proposals would distort both of them. While Tavard is making a distinction between an older jurisdictional and the contemporary ontological understanding of validity, Rahner distinguishes between an (ontological) sacramental and an (ontological) sacramental-canonical understanding.Footnote 37
The historical question with which A Review of Anglican Orders is engaged is complicated by changes in Roman Catholic understandings of what makes a priestly ordination valid (particularly the matter of the sacrament) and whether consecration to the episcopacy is a sacramental or jurisdictional action.Footnote 38 Within Tavard's argument, then, a distinction between a legal and an ontological understanding of validity is required primarily for reading history properly and for not importing contemporary ontological understandings of validity (“Is the grace of the sacrament present?”) into historical judgments by ecclesiastical officials (“The act lacked jurisdictional authority, and as such was illegal and unrecognized”). As he points out, we now habitually recognize as valid (if illicit) unapproved ordinations by bishops whom we recognize as validly ordained themselves, ordinations that would have been considered invalid according to medieval Scholastic theology.Footnote 39
Rahner, however, is working within a different framework. Instead of arguing that we misunderstand the judgments of the past, he is making a constructive argument about the contemporary situation according to contemporary norms. His canonical-sacramental validity is not a mere recognition of a bare legal reality, but the church's recognition that the “fulfillment of the conditions imposed for validity by ecclesiastical authority” has been met in excess of the “fulfillment of those conditions inexorably required by the very nature of the sacrament.”Footnote 40 Legal recognition assumes a sacramental underpinning that is missing in Tavard's distinction precisely because the medieval theology of order he articulates did not recognize episcopal ordination to be a sacramental question, but one of delegated authority and legal jurisdiction.
Rahner is suggesting a way of thinking about sacramental validity that restructures how we consider the sacraments in relation to each other. When theologians attempt to consider sacramental validity in general, they consider the workings of various sacraments within a larger frame and propose categories to make sense of them. We do this differently in different situations, producing what cognitive linguists Giles Fauconnier and Mark Turner have called a “blend.” In order to make clear the logic of what Rahner is proposing, it will be helpful to examine the blend under which validity is usually considered, and the new blend proposed in Vorfragen. I will begin with a summary of the cognitive linguistic proposals I will be using. This will allow an analysis of Rahner's logic that demonstrates how his proposed blend allows him to make new claims about the retrospective action of a judgment of sanatio in radice.Footnote 41
III. Blends, Tectonic Logic, and Rahner
The concept of tectonic logic arises out of a proposal from Mary Gerhart and Allan Russell as a description of the process by which human cognition arises.Footnote 42 Conceptual knowledge can be understood to inhere in a field of meanings that makes it sensible, intelligible, and cogent. Gerhart and Russell suggest that there are three kinds of transfer that allow new concepts to be understood. The first is simple application, by which a meaning is applied in a way that is “rigidly embedded in its field” of meanings.Footnote 43 Such language is sometimes called the “literal” use of language.Footnote 44 The second kind of application they call “analogy,” in which one concept is applied to another, lesser-known concept in such a way as to be illuminating of the second without distorting the field of meanings in which both inhere. Finally, they suggest that there is a kind of meaning in which two disparate, known concepts are equated, although they remain in tension. In this process, neither concept is ruled by the other. The tension of holding them together distorts the field of meanings in which they both inhere, allowing new possibilities of meaning to be articulated in light of the newly distorted field. Gerhart and Russell call this kind of process “metaphoric.” Tension is necessary for a truly metaphoric character, although the field of meanings can become so realigned that the tension is relieved through acclimation. In this case, the connection between the concepts remains, although it ceases to have a metaphoric possibility for reorienting other meanings within the field because it has been fully assimilated.Footnote 45
Another, somewhat similar, proposal for how this process works is made by Fauconnier and Turner.Footnote 46 While Gerhart and Russell describe the process of discovering new understanding from the point of view of a theologian and a physicist, Fauconnier and Turner are linguists considering how meaning is created in the structures of language. Their entirely independent proposal suggests that meaning is best described through what they call “blending.” Fauconnier and Turner's model complicates metaphor theory by explicitly allowing the blending of multiple conceptual spaces and concepts. Whereas Gerhart and Russell describe the connection of two previously existing concepts, Fauconnier and Turner propose that our language is built of blends of two or more “inputs.” These inputs may themselves be constructed blends of two or more inputs, and so on.
In mapping such blends, Fauconnier and Turner make use of diagrams such as figure 1 to visually represent how a particular meaning is produced. A double-scope blend, which we will be using in what follows, contains at least two “inputs” that are represented by equal circles. Two other circles, usually above and below, represent the “generic space” mapping what is in common between the two terms and the blend itself.Footnote 47 Dotted lines connect particular aspects of both inputs to their inferred meanings in the generic and blended spaces, while solid lines are used to connect related aspects within the inputs themselves. Not every inferred meaning has to be mirrored from both inputs. We refer meanings from each input onto the blend. A good theological analogue to this process can be found in the communicatio idiomatum in Christological statements; that which is properly applied to divinity or humanity may be proposed of Christ's person. It may also generate useful, new ways of speaking.
Figure 1. Basic Diagram of a Blend
Fauconnier and Turner see in this process not only a potential for describing how humans think, but also an explanation of why it is relatively easy to program an artificial intelligence (AI) to do complex computational tasks, but surprisingly difficult to program an AI to do many things that come easily to humans, such as inferring how to exit an unfamiliar room.Footnote 48 If they are correct, and this is a basic structure of human knowing, then it may demonstrate the ability to make clearer the implications and assumptions of Rahner's proposal in the Vorfragen.
Indeed, Rahner's thought may be a particularly good candidate for testing Fauconnier and Turner's double-scope blend, as the Vorfragen is both the systematic working out of several fundamental insights and yet programmatically unsystematic, having been written primarily in response to particular questions. Rahner often makes use of classical terminology and ideas, but combines them in ways that are entirely new, as we will see below in considering his interaction with the sacrament of order and historic causality.
Robert Masson has investigated the tectonic logic of Rahner's thought at length, and argues that an application of Gerhart and Russell's model, along with that of Fauconnier and Turner, allows a reading of Rahner that avoids common misreadings. Among these, Masson includes foundationalist and nonfoundationalist interpretations.Footnote 49 Instead of allowing the dichotomy, Masson suggests that the internal logic of Rahner's theology builds what Gerhart and Russell called metaphor, and what he has called “tectonic logic.”Footnote 50 Because Rahner describes all knowledge of God as Vorgriff, calling it “knowledge” is itself a metaphor in Gerhart and Russell's sense. It creates meaning within the tension inherent in equating “knowledge” with the sort of transcendental presence to self and to other that Rahner calls Vorgriff. Footnote 51 This tension is at the heart of Rahner's system for Masson, and allows a kind of speech that makes real claims to know God while also speaking of God as Holy Mystery. Rahner's discourse about God therefore finds its logic within a tectonic blending of meanings, which Masson argues is equivalent to the Thomistic notion of analogy.Footnote 52 Applying this method for investigating meaning has the potential to make Rahner's proposal clearer in both its structure and its implications, and it is to this that we now turn.
IV. The New Blend Proposed in the Vorfragen
The basic component ideas of sacramental theology have a long history of development. Not only did the number and the precise list of the sacraments themselves change, but the concepts by which we make sense of them in the West (e.g., validity, matter, form) are relatively late additions to the theological dictionary, developing primarily in the High Middle Ages. The concept of validity, not surprisingly, comes from the realm of law, having been developed to describe the binding or nonbinding character of particular marriage contracts. The developments in sacramental theory by which validity is usually judged (matter, form, minister, intent) develop not from marriage law, but from the canonical requirements for recognition of a particular event as a Eucharist.Footnote 53
We have generally considered order and Eucharist in connection with each other. This is not surprising, given their internal coherence. Order is oriented to Eucharist; the giving of the chalice and paten was considered to be the matter of the sacrament of order in the Middle Ages. Moreover, the importance of the Eucharist can lead to its being treated as the basic sacrament on whose pattern all the others must be understood.
If we consider Eucharist and order as mutually related, and describe the blend for validity, the mapping that will result is represented in figure 2. This is our habitual blend, which we can call “substance ontology.” It is often the blend by which we consider sacraments in general, leading to an emphasis on the sacraments as examples of “ontological change”; the Eucharist is the locus of the real presence—we do not reordain those once ordained, just as we do not rebaptize or reconfirm. The emphasis is understandably on the change in being, and we tend to picture the sacrament as a kind of “changed thing” by means of “effective words” made by an “empowered actor” who confects the sacrament. Despite being our habitual way of thinking, there are some inconsistencies, such as the fact that the priest/bishop being ordained is not the matter of the sacrament on the pattern of bread and wine. Such inconsistencies may indicate room for an improved theology of sacraments in general.
Figure 2. Double-Scope Blend Substance Ontology
Rahner's proposal indicates a different blend, beginning with order and marriage. The mapping changes, even if the generic space is unaffected, as shown in figure 3. Marriage and order do both create ontological change, but we do not envision these changes in terms of a different substance, or an indwelling something. Instead, we understand this ontological change to be a permanent change in the relative position, or relationship, among people, effected by the actors in a speech act. By the grace of God, these speech acts create a new relationship that actually changes those involved.
Figure 3. Double-Scope Blend Relational Ontology
It is important to note that because these are double-scope blends, neither term describes the other unidirectionally. Rather, each is described in terms of the other. The question is not whether order is more like marriage or more like Eucharist, but how our more complete understanding of “the sacraments in general” is blended from our theologies reflecting on the individual sacraments. Such a theology of the sacraments is in reality a multi-scope blend, which is built from the church's experience of and reflection on all seven sacraments and other, less central, examples of sacramentality. Practically, however, a multi-scope network of blends (like a theology of the sacraments in general) will never be entirely equally determined by its parts, so there may still be a kind of weight given to either substance—or relational—ontologies in our consideration of the whole. The Eucharist, for example, may be considered to be truly the location of the real presence, but in terms of a relational ontology that narrates this presence within the relationship between the three bodies of Christ (historical, ecclesial, and eucharistic).Footnote 54
By positing the application of the canonical judgment, sanatio in radice, Rahner proposes that our canonical and ecumenical engagement with the sacrament of order can be freed by an application of a different canonical principle. More than that, however, his proposal effects a new sacramental understanding of order, which allows a renewed understanding of the sacrament itself. It suggests that the retrospective causality of such a decree may also be possible in order. When this proposal is added, it looks like the diagram in figure 3a.
Figure 3a. Double-Scope Blend Rahner's Application of Radical Sanation
Because marriage and order are understood in terms of each other, with neither term being the single source of meaning, ideas from one field of meanings can be proposed as modifying both inputs, albeit in ways that are appropriately reconfigured for each. The input sanatio in radice is drawn from marriage law, but in terms of the blend, can be related to order. The judgment invented to solve an impossible canonical situation with its retroactive causality (originally, how to make children legitimate), allows a blend in which both the historical determinations of the invalidity of Protestant order and a contemporary ruling that the present groups have a recognizable sacrament of order can be accepted. The fact that it has the possibility of effecting not only the contemporary situation but also our understanding of the prior history reorients our understanding of the sacrament itself, insisting that God's action in the sacrament of order is ongoing, rather than as a mere first-cause on Holy Thursday. Holding together the two ideas (marriage law and order) creates a tension in our habitual ways of thinking about both sacraments. This tension is, however, a productive tension that allows the church to say something true, which would not have been possible before. As such, it is what Masson would call tectonic. One of the surprising outcomes of this tension is that causality can work backward in time, a claim to which we will now turn.
V. The Incarnation: Reordering Prior History
That causality can only ever move forward in time seems to be obvious. “Time flows unidirectionally” is one of the axioms on which both our everyday lives and our scientific engagements are based. Nothing in our scientific understanding allows for a causality in which something can produce an effect anterior in time to itself.Footnote 55 This possibility is raised in classical Western sacramental theology, but that such a possibility exists is not enough to explain how the logic works in Rahner's thought, despite the obvious parallels.Footnote 56 For Rahner, suggesting that a later event changes the past is not merely a theological necessity for the sake of avoiding Pelagianism, as in the medieval consideration of the grace of contrition necessary to approach the sacrament of penance. Instead, it is central to his understanding of the logic of the Incarnation, which lies at the heart of his theological project. The Incarnation, understood as the entirety of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, is not merely the next logical, historical step in the process of God's self-revelation to humanity. It is “the finality of revelation,” an irrevocable divine action that was not foreseeable and that changed both later history and the prior history of revelation.Footnote 57 Rahner recognized that he was doing something different here from his medieval predecessors, who, in his words, were “afraid of the historicity of revelation, [and] always postulated an explicit belief in the coming Savior at least on the part of the ‘Patriarchs’”; he remarks, “Such a merely quantitative growth of revelation is insufficient as a model for its history for many other reasons as well.”Footnote 58 Such irrevocable moments of decision are not an unusual feature within Rahner's thought. They figure prominently in his consideration of the church's development, particularly as articulations of how items that logically could have once been optional are now irreformable.Footnote 59 As Rahner argues, however, irreformable does not mean incapable of development. Ecclesial decisions can be binding, and even irreformable, but they remain historical because humans (and therefore the church) are always historical beings.
The underlying idea that grounds these moments of decision is Rahner's conception of grace and nature. As we cannot find chemically pure grace or nature, we cannot separate salvation history and “natural” history. Moments of revelation or of decision take place in history; indeed, there is nowhere else for them to occur. Even if history becomes transparent to salvation history in particular places, most specifically in the Christ event, the workings of grace cannot be isolated from the natural location of their occurrence:
Salvation-history, which of its nature is a hidden history, works itself out in the dimension of profane history in which it takes place. God, who grants salvation, addresses man within the profane dimension of history.… The same man who in his whole and entire being is faced with the decision regarding salvation in his historical existence has ultimately only one history…. Anyone who asks for salvation and reckons with the possibility of a personal self-exposure will find that profane history contains hints and “signs” telling him where this salvation has taken place in his own history and where it is to be found. Salvation-history takes place within profane history.Footnote 60
It is important to emphasize that while God had revealed himself to the people of Israel before the Incarnation, he had not done so in a way that made the final revelation of the Incarnation necessary.Footnote 61 This is important because of Rahner's concern for the freedom of humanity and of God. Revelation cannot be the product of necessity, but must come from God's ongoing free self-gift to humanity, who must also receive it in freedom. While humanity was created so as to be able to receive God's free self-gift, that creation cannot of itself require that God provide self-revelation.Footnote 62
Once the gift has been made and received in freedom, the prior history is reordered. While prior to the Incarnation, that history was sufficient on its own as revelation, the gift of the Incarnation completes it. This happens in a way that could not have been foreseen, but that in retrospect is a fulfillment of what was prior. The Christian truth “consists in the open-ended movement to God arising from God's own self-communication and the grace and revelation it contains.”Footnote 63 Thus, the Old Testament is properly both the prehistory of Jesus and the true self-revelation of God to the people of Israel that did not require that God reveal himself finally in the Incarnation.Footnote 64
VI. Order, Out of Order: An Ecumenical Path Forward?
What, then, does this mean for Rahner's proposal regarding the sacrament of order? For one thing, Rahner's understanding of history allows his proposal to be sensible without thereby negating prior ecclesial pronouncements regarding the validity of the order of Protestant ministers. The mala fides of the sixteenth century can be understood as an actual impediment to the historical validity of the sacrament. This judgment is analogous to the marital situation that canon law describes as an impediment existing to valid consent. The special grace by which the church may be recognized as being fully reestablished among the separated brethren is a different situation, requiring the church to speak outside of the usual manner and discern whether the sacrament is present by God's grace.
On the other hand, a bishop's judgment of sanatio in radice declares a marriage that is actually canonically invalid (because of a real canonical impediment) to be nonetheless valid from the time of the consent. This need not be understood as merely a legal fiction, despite the presence of that language in the 1917 code.Footnote 65 Rahner's understanding of salvation history provides a model within which we can articulate how a later reality can reshape the meaning of a prior occurrence even to the extent that something that was lacking in the past can be said to have been already present in light of the trajectory of history.
The proposal in the Vorfragen suggests that the chain of sacramental ministers among Protestants was truly broken in the sixteenth century by virtue of the schism, although Rahner does not engage the question of how the sacrament was invalidated beyond his suggestion that mala fides acts analogously to a marriage impediment. On the broader question of how to understand the actual ordinations that took place in the sixteenth century, whether Anglican or Lutheran, Rahner's proposal is of little help. The issues involved are multifold, involving the historical understanding of validity, as mentioned above regarding Tavard's work, the possibility of presbyteral ordination in extreme cases, which is related to the theology of the sacrament of order in general, and others.Footnote 66 In a sense, how Protestant order was invalidated is immaterial to the proposal in Vorfragen. It is concerned with responding to the contemporary ecumenical partner, and recognizing the work of God's providence in their midst.
The contemporary Catholic Church could recognize that the removal of the impediment to validity (mala fides), and a recognition of a real ecclesiality in the churches of the Reformation, allow a change in the Roman rulings regarding the order present in those communities.Footnote 67 According to Rahner's proposal, the Roman Catholic Church would be free to recognize an actual ecclesiality in the separated brethren, and even among their “schismatic” ancestors, just as it recognizes validly contracted marriages in places where it previously had understood them not to exist. The Protestants’ intention to do what the church does in ordaining ministers, and the recognition of the action of God in their sacramental actions, can allow a recognition of sacramental validity, even though the canonical norms would not.
Rahner's proposed blend regarding the sacraments in general provides an ancillary benefit; it reorients our understanding of validity, suggesting a blend in which we can speak of real, ontological change in persons and the Eucharist, but which locates this ontology within a broader frame of relationship instead, or at least alongside, of the frame of metaphysical substance. The work of articulating all the implications of such a theology of the sacraments in general remains to be done, although a number of theologians have made proposals for relational ontologies.Footnote 68 Rahner's blend clearly demonstrates some of the ecumenical benefits of pursuing the proposal.
While the proposal found in Vorfragen does not engage the question of who may be appropriately ordained to any of the offices of the church, it may serve to defang discussion of the question in ecumenical circles, because it lowers the stakes for any particular judgment of invalidity. Whereas our general account of ordination requires that a single ruling of invalidity of an episcopal ordination ends the possibility of recognizing ecclesiality in that “line” without intervention from the outside, Rahner's account does not.
His proposal, then, could have several major benefits for the official ecumenical dialogues. First, as just mentioned, it can lower the stakes for any particular historical judgment of invalidity because such a judgment need not be rejected to be overcome. Second, it can provide a means by which the proposals of the dialogues and the judgments of the Second Vatican Council can be explained without requiring the Catholic Church to reject its previous decrees of nullity. Finally, it can allow a future acceptance of the partners’ sacrament of order without requiring that they accept the historic decrees of invalidity as applied to their ancestors in the faith. The possibility of a declaration of radical sanation applied to Protestant order, while not solving all problems, does keep a discussion of the sacrament of order from becoming a zero-sum game in which each side's historical commitments rule out those of the other.
