Speaking Our Judgment

Photo by Jacob Bentzinger on Unsplash

About the Author: Morgan Bell is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto (Emmanuel College). His research explores the doctrine of the First Person of the Trinity in the theology of Karl Barth. He was a Resident Visiting Scholar in Theology at the Atlantic School of Theology earlier this year. He is a minister in The United Church of Canada and an adjunct faculty member at the Vancouver School of Theology.

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For some decades, sacraments and sacramentality have been in vogue for many Christian theologians. Liturgical theology enjoyed something of a renaissance after the Second Vatican Council, with thinkers from even supposedly “non-sacramental” Christian traditions meditating at length on the means of grace that Christ gives to his Church.¹ They are struck with wonder that God would communicate God’s glory, splendor, mercy, and grace through the ordinary media of our lives—water, wine, and wheat. Increasingly (it seems), theologians emphasize the sacramentality of reality beyond the dominical sacraments of the Church—the pluriform ways in which God daily shows God’s mercy afresh.

One sphere of theology that this expansive understanding of sacramentality has notably marked is that which has to do with religious and theological language: how creaturely language can be understood to refer to God. Creaturely words—frail and finite as they are—cannot, by their own constitution, refer to the God who remains shrouded even in God’s self-revelation. Yet, by grace, God elects and reconstitutes the creaturely medium of human speech to become for us a “sacrament” of God’s truth: a means by which God speaks of God’s own self through human utterance. As Barth put it, “At every point, the divine sign-giving in which revelation comes to us has itself something of the nature of a sacrament. For in its totality, it is always a signum visible, a symbolum externum, a sign both in the realm of nature and also in an action executed by [humans].”² To the extent that human language is taken up in the divine economy, God blesses our words, breaks them open, and by them shares the divine glory.

In many (perhaps most) of these sacramental assessments of creaturely realities and human experience, the emphasis is laid on the boundless gratuity of God in raising up for us tokens of God’s own grace. And this is, to be sure, as it should be. We ought to marvel before the impossible possibility “that with revelation itself the signs of it are always made new, as much because they are God’s act as because they extend to the Church that lives in time.”³ That Christ would give his own Body for our feasting in faith, that the Spirit would hover over the face of the Cup to make of it the covenantal Drink of forgiveness, that waters would be stirred up that all who enter them would die to sin and live to righteousness, that even human words could somehow be reconstituted to speak of the unfathomable Mystery that is the Almighty—we are right that we lose ourselves in wonder, love, and praise before such signs and wonders.

Yet there is a danger to an exclusively doxological account of the sacramental. In a world still beset by sin and brokenness, the glory of the sacraments and the sacramental is not uncompromised. As Lauren Winner has it, even these good gifts that God gives to grateful creatures are nevertheless accompanied by a “characteristic damage”⁴; even the graced media of God’s own choosing are chronically warped by human creatures such that they acquire a “propensity for violence, for curvature, for being exploited for the perpetuation for damage rather than received for its redress.”⁵ The reality—or, better, profound unreality—of sin is so pervasive that even the miraculous, the impossibly possible, is tainted by maleficence.

Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth confirms that from the beginning, the church has been aware of the damage that can characterize even the good gifts of God. The Corinthian congregation abused the gift of the Lord’s Supper, each proceeding to eat their own meal rather than sharing in a collective feast. One went hungry while another became drunk at a sumptuously laid table (1 Cor 11:21). Paul asserts that this behavior and congregational state of affairs bespoke “contempt for the church of God” and further humiliated “those who have nothing” (11:22). This fractious Eucharistic behavior demonstrated a profound ignorance of the Lord’s Supper as the mystery by which the community reencounters the saving grace of God in Christ who suffered contempt and humility—who bore the brunt of nothingness—so that by his grace those who have nothing might become rich (2 Cor 8:9). The actions of the Corinthian community stood in profound incongruence with the inner meaning of the Paschal feast.

Though the congregation does “not really come together to eat the Lord’s Supper” (11:20), Paul does not suggest that such abuse nullifies the Supper; it is not reduced to a mere meal void of Christ’s presence. But taken unworthily, the Cup becomes for them “the wine of God’s wrath, poured unmixed into the cup of his anger” (Rev 14:10). To misuse the gift of the Supper in this “unworthy manner” renders one liable “answerable for the body and blood of the Lord” (11:27). It is to bring the judgment of the LORD upon oneself and one’s community. To eat and drink the Supper without “discerning the body”—without due reverence for the Body of Christ in its sacramental form and by deforming his Body in its ecclesial form through a divided and inequitable common life—is to eat and drink judgment against oneself (11:29).

This has, of course, several implications for a “sacramental” view of Christian language. Important among them, I believe, is the assurance that unfaithful and indeed sinful Christian speech—speech or speech acts that do not befit the God who speaks to us in Jesus Christ as attested by the Scriptures—is not void of revelatory power. Such power is in the gift of God alone and cannot be earned nor revoked by creaturely actions or intentions.

But such assurance must be accompanied by warning. Christian speech may be a medium by which God communicates God’s truth. It may prove a means of grace by which God salutarily speaks of Godself through and to creatures. Nevertheless, the Christian speaker—the one who participates in such a sacramental economy of God’s self-communication—is answerable for the grace that is communicated through their words. The Christian community bears the burden of propriety for its speech. The Church is charged to examine itself, to discern the mystery of its speech in faith, and to conform its conduct with fear and trembling to the mystery into which the Spirit ushers them. The consecrated words of faith, when used in ways that do not befit the glory of the Word made flesh, become for us the judgment of God. We become people of unclean lips, and our words about God become live altar coals that cauterize our mouths (Isa 6:6f). For the Word our words convey “is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb 4:12).

It is not so much that Christian deeds falsify the word we proclaim (though this may sometimes prove the case in practice),⁶ but that the living Word falsifies the actions and lives of the ones who dare speak it.⁷ It, therefore, behooves Christians to be reverently careful in their speech. Damage will attend our speaking; that is our lot in a fallen world. God’s grace will act restoratively; that is our God in a fallen world. And yet part of that repair is the judgment of God by which “we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned” (1 Cor 11:32).

To be sure, this caution has pertained to people of faith throughout the ages. Consider the biblical injunction against false or violent speech throughout the Scriptures’ wisdom literature: “The mouths of fools are their ruin, and their lips are a snare to themselves” (Prov 18:7). The Church has long worried about the theological danger of even its correct words. But in an age where words are produced with accelerating intensity—tweets and TikToks, stump speeches, and even (God help us) blogs—we do well to remember the disciplinary judgment under which we, who partake of the mystery of God’s truth, stand. Our words of faith do not merely serve to bless; they also have the propensity to break and to batter.

Those who speak words of testimony to the Word made flesh, then, must conform our words to that living Word—to allow our signs and wisdom to take on the character of the Crucified (1 Cor 1:22); to allow the foolish weakness of God to prevail over the “wisdom” of our “strength” (1 Cor 1:25), to discern the Word that we have been given to proclaim and partake in its mystery in a manner that shows honor for the church of God and dignifies those who have nothing.

1. See the Methodist Geoffrey Wainwright’s magisterial Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine, and Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). See also John Colwell, Promise and Presence: An Exploration in Sacramental Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011) for an example of an extraordinarily high sacramentality of a theologian in a “low church” milieu.

2. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, 231.

3. Barth, CD I/2, 228.

4. Lauren F. Winner, The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).

5. Winner, Christian Practice, 14. On one level, the “characteristic damage” of theological speech is addressed by George Lindbeck in his landmark Nature of Doctrine. Lindbeck famously considers the Christian who nullifies his own confession that “Jesus is Lord” by lobbing off the head of an enemy combatant; his violent action coupled with his confession that the nonviolent Prince of Peace is Lord issue in incoherent speech. Compelling though this account of theological speech is, it is not itself a theological account of theological speech.

6. For instance, see Barth’s account of how faith-defining dogma may prove idolatrous and false in CD IV/3, 655.

7. George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 171.