Copernican Revolution

In the introduction to his Meditations on the Sacraments, Karl Rahner describes what he calls the “Copernican revolution” in sacramental theology. To explain the shift in perspective, he asks how Christians have generally experienced the sacraments. According to Rahner, “the average Christian” believes “both externally and internally, human life is lived in a profane world.” Christians want to be oriented to God, but they are oriented to God within what is essentially a profane world (x).

The mysterious quality that enables this orientation is “grace,” imparted to us in events called “sacraments.” We know of grace only “from the outside,” through the church’s instruction. Grace is beyond our experience, yet it is this that “sanctifies us, makes us pleasing to God, and unites us to him.” Because it is “supernatural,” grace “cannot be the object of ‘profane’ awareness” (x).

The “Copernican revolution” unsettles this view and experience, but not, Rahner insists, because it is entirely novel. It is grounded in the tradition, yet is opposed to these “traditional” ways of experiencing the sacraments. Rahner states two fundamental assumptions of this new view: First, that grace is everywhere, and, second, that while grace is not a “discrete datum within consciousness,” but that is not because it is wholly outside our experience. It is rather, in Rahner’s transcendental Thomist formal, a “radical opening of man’s total consciousness in the direction of the immediacy of God, an opening up that is brought about by God’s own communication of himself” (xi).

If grace is not an isolated moment in a graceless world, then what we need is the acceptance of that grace that smiles through everything. That grace is ultimately uncreated grace, God’s self-offering, His self-imparting that makes God both man’s goal and the force that impels us toward that goal (xi). For Rahner, a man can say Yes or No to his graced condition; he cannot be as an ungraced being (xiv).

Rahner calls Jesus the “primordial sacrament” since in Him “God’s will to save men, which triumphantly succeeds in its purpose in spite of all the sins of men and which from the beginning was implanted in the world as grace, brings about its own unmistakable historical manifestation and establishes itself in the world and not just in the transcendent will of God.” The church is sacrament because it is the “socially constituted presence of Christ in every age up to the end.” It is the “sacrament of the salvation of mankind” (xv).

Rahner is right that we need a Copernican Revolution in sacramental theology, and he gets some of the moves right – his attack on nature/grace dualism, grace as God’s own self-gift in the Spirit, the elevation of the church as the “sacrament of salvation.” But these necessary arguments fit badly in a theology where consciousness plays so large a role and where grace is (reduced to?) an opening of consciousness to God’s favor that is always already bestowed. A sacramental theology that stresses the former without the baggage of the ladder hold potential for a real sacramental revolution.