A common notion in studies of Christianity and the arts\u00a0 is \u201cthe sacramental imagination.\u201d\u00a0 It goes like this:\u00a0 Christians with a high view of the sacraments believe that spiritual realities are mediated by means of physical things.\u00a0 Christian artists with those beliefs, therefore, can easily employ images derived from the material world in order to communicate their faith.\u00a0 This is also why so many Christian artists are Roman Catholics, a church whose sacramental theology encourages this kind of imagination.<\/p>\n
That may be.\u00a0 But it occurred to me\u2013while contemplating that \u201cLuther and the Body\u201d article I blogged about earlier in the course of this road trip that I\u2019m still on (driving long hours giving time for just thinking)\u2013that Lutheran sacramental theology offers a basis for this sacramental imagination more than Roman Catholicism does.<\/p>\n
The Roman Catholic view of Holy Communion teaches that the physical bread and wine is no longer present.<\/em> We receive Christ\u2019s Body and Blood only.\u00a0 We perceive the \u201caccidents\u201d of bread and wine, their appearance, but the only \u201csubstance\u201d is that of Christ.\u00a0\u00a0 This take on the physical material reality seems to be more that of Eastern monism\u2013that the physical realm is an illusion\u2013than an actual affirmation of the physical as a vehicle for the spiritual.<\/p>\n The mode of Christ\u2019s presence is explained not in terms of different \u201csubstances\u201d but in terms of \u201cthe ubiquity of Christ.\u201d\u00a0 That is, just as God is omnipresent without displacing the existence of other objects, Christ, because of His personal union of the divine and human natures, can be, in His body, present in bread and wine.\u00a0\u00a0 Not that He is in the Sacrament only in the sense of God being everywhere, but in a unique sacramental union in which He is present specifically through the Word of the Gospel, his body and blood being given and shed \u201cfor you.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, this kind of teaching first of all is going to encourage those who believe it to think of God in Christ as being not far above the universe, looking down, as the imagination of many Christians has Him, but, rather, as being very close.\u00a0 God, of course, is both transcendent and immanent, but the latter often gets minimized, which it can\u2019t in Lutheran spirituality.<\/p>\n Furthermore, Lutheran theology also teaches the presence of God in vocation.\u00a0 (It is God who gives us this day our daily bread through the vocation of the farmer and the baker; God milks the cows through the work of the milkmaid; God creates new life by working through mothers and fathers; vocation is a mask of God, etc., etc.)\u00a0 This again encourages people to see the spiritual dimensions of the physical world.<\/p>\n For artists, it means that not only physical images can manifest the spiritual realm, the very act of creating\u2013whether by paint, words, film, or whatever medium one\u2019s vocation involves\u2013manifests not just the presence of God but His activity, that He creates by means of human creation.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A common notion in studies of Christianity and the arts\u00a0 is \u201cthe sacramental imagination.\u201d\u00a0 It goes like this:\u00a0 Christians with a high view of the sacraments believe that spiritual realities are mediated by means of physical things.\u00a0 Christian artists with those beliefs, therefore, can easily employ images derived from the material world in order to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,28,33,47,48],"tags":[458,1031,1346,1943,4359],"class_list":["post-5698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-literature","category-nature","category-theology","category-vocation","tag-christianity-and-the-arts","tag-holy-communion","tag-lutheran-sacramental-theology","tag-sacramental-theology","tag-vocation"],"yoast_head":"\n