Answer the following questions on your blog (be sure to
write the questions as well):
Are
Sacraments Narrow? By Mark Shea
1.
What is Ludwig's problem?
Ludwig doesn't know
what it means to say grace is imparted through sacraments. He thinks that it’s
a narrow way to see grace. Because he’s protestant, he doesn’t understand why
grace needs to be shown through the sacraments. To him grace is simply
unmerited favor.
2. Explain what the Church is not
thinking about when it comes to “sacramentality”.
The
Church does not propose sacraments to deny God’s universal love and will to
save. It does not hold that unbaptized people of good will (like the good thief
cruicied with Christ) are necessarily denied salvation simple because they
missed out on the “magic spell” of baptism.
3. Explain what Church is thinking
about when it comes to “sacramentality”.
a. Both the universal redemption of
Christ and the possibility of salvation for each person is forcefully
maintained by the Church against carious Christian sects who assert that Christ
has only redeemed a few or that God actively desires the damnation of certain
people.
4. How does God reveal and give to
each individual human being his universally offered grace?
a. The Church refers us to the
primal Sacrament of Sacraments, the Incarnate Son of God. For as we shall see,
all the Church’s sacraments are simply extensions of his power and work in the
world.
5. Which Christian doctrine is the
foundation for the Sacraments?
a. “The Word became flesh and dwelt
among us.” God revealed himself to us through Jesus. He poured himself into his
son and made him human just like us so we can relate and understand him even
more.
6. Explain what the gobs of modern “spirituality”
tell us.
a. For such spirituality oftens
speaks as though God is a sort of extended ether in the cosmos that He would
never sully himself with the crudeness of matter. To be spiritual is to be more
or less disembodied, to well in the realm of intuitions and concepts and secret
mindset. It is assign of barbarism.
7. Explain the Christian repudiation
of “such spiritual snobbery”
a. God likes matter. He not only
declared it “good” at the beginning of creation, but he continued to manifest himself
through it right up until the time that He took upon himself a real, life
physical body of matter and united himself, not only to our spirits but to our
whole beings.
8. “But that was so that he could
put this gross body of flesh to death on the Cross and revert back to pure spirituality,
wasn’t it?” Answer and explain:
a. It was so that he could rise from
the death bodily. It means not only that we will live again, but that we will do
so as human beings, not as disembodied spooks floating in the ether. God gave
up his life on earth so that we could live on Earth peacefully. If not we would
have all died, it was because of his sacrifice that we are living today.
9. Explain: “That is why the
sacramental worldview sees more than just a symbol in a sacrament.”
a. They impart grace as the physical
hands and breath of Christ imparted healing to the bilnd man and the Holy Spirit
to the apostles. For they are the divinity of Christ. They are the physical
means of grace that both signify what they do and do what the signify.
10. Explain what G.K. Charleston
said:
a. Sacramentality comes from the odd
nature of Christianity itself with its stubborn insistence that the world was
saved when God, who had always been omnipotent and universal, became small and “local”
so that he could touch us and call us by name.
11. What does grace do?
a. Grace touches us personally and
that’s exactly what God did through Jesus Christ. He came to us, person to
person, face to face, so that he might touch us spiritually and physically (so
that we can fully believe that he is real).
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