I'm not interested in convening a Sacramental Inquisition to adjudicate which sacramental practices are legitimate or illegitimate. My concerns about sacramental beliefs and practices concern spiritual formation and evangelism within modernity. As I've shared, I think Christ is really present in memorialist practices of the Lord's Supper. Jesus said he was really present, and he is. The Body gathered at the Table participates in ontological realities, there in a way found nowhere else. That said, memorialist practices of the Lord's Supper are vulnerable to moralization and to becoming functionally atheistic, a sacrament of ourselves. Consequently, we need to become more intentional in bringing ontological realities into view in regard to our sacramental practice.
Now, some readers will jump in here to say, "See, this is the problem, this appeal to intentionality. In traditions with robust sacramental practices and theology we don't have to appeal to intention and choice. The real presence of Christ, that ontological reality, is simply a given. Building a sacramental theology upon mere intention is erecting a house of cards, building upon a foundation of sand."
To respond.
First, I'm with you. A cultural givenness and taken-for-grantedness has enormous advantages over appeals to intention. That said, these sacramental cultures (e.g., Catholicism, Orthodoxy) do not escape the need for intentionality. Consider the three-year Eucharistic Revival in the American Catholic Church (2022–2024), prompted by surveys showing that the majority of Catholics no longer believed in the real presence. Sacramental drift had occurred, a disenchantment, in a tradition with a robust sacramental liturgy and theology. The response was a call for intentionality, a Eucharistic Revival, to bring ontological realities back into view.
My point here, one I made in a recent series, is that intentionality is inescapable, even in richly liturgical and sacramental traditions. This is a point so obvious it shouldn't need repeating. Just ask a parish priest what their number one problem is when it comes to their parishioners. It's the exact same issue Protestants face: intentionality. Showing up for confession. Coming to Mass. Taking the moral imperatives of the faith seriously. Cultivating a rich devotional life. I don't care what church you go to, the Christian life is entropic. Without constant intentional engagement we drift away, in both belief (like losing touch with the real presence) and practice.
But more importantly, the appeal to intentionality is to create habit, givenness, and culture. Even the lowest of the low-church Protestant denominations have a liturgy and a culture. This has been a joke in my tradition, the Churches of Christ, for a few generations now: how, as very low-church Protestants, we didn't believe in "liturgy." But in point of fact we did have a liturgy, exact and traditional ways of conducting our worship services. We didn't have rote prayers, but we had rote stock phrases: "Guide, guard, and direct us" in our prayers, and "separate and apart from the Lord's Supper" to ritually sever the passing of the collection plates from Communion. And the vast majority of our celebrations of the Lord's Supper began with a reading, from the NASB, of 1 Corinthians 11: "For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night when He was betrayed, took bread..."
The point here is that, while we begin with intentionality, the goal is to create culture, givenness, and taken-for-grantedness.
And if this is so, then an intentional approach toward our liturgies is how we bring ontological realities into view. Or back into view, like with the Catholic Eucharistic Revival. In the face of sacramental drift and functional atheism, liturgy is the lever we can pull. In our liturgies we can pivot away from moralization and toward ontology. We can point toward God and not ourselves. We can bring the spooky and the supernatural into view. We can keep the sacraments strange and weird.
