Sacramental Realism and the

Historicity of the Faith

DANIEL HAUSER
University of St. Francis

This paper is about the historicity of the faith as discussed in the

writings of Donald Keefe, S.J. From its very beginning, Christi-
anity has struggled with the issue of the historical nature of the
faith. Gnostic interpretations of the faith and various other here-
sies have threatened Christianity from the first century up until
the present day. In many instances, these dualisms called into
question the historical nature of the faith. Yet it is precisely the
scandal of the Incarnation and the Cross and Resurrection that
are the very heart of Christian faith. It is the event character of
the faith, as revealed in the Eucharistic worship of the Church,
that alone can provide a Catholic framework that represents the
true historical nature of the faith. For Donald Keefe, recaptur-
ing this historical a priori is essential to a recovery of theology
today. Only in the recognition of the free covenantal presence of
Christ in history is one able to overcome the cosmological thinking
that challenges the faith in every age.

PART I: INTRODUCTION

I was listening to a radio talk show a few months ago, and the host
was discussing recent radical attempts to extend abortion, not only
to later term abortion, but also to free doctors and others from aiding
children who were born alive after an attempted abortion failed. A
caller, who described herself as an Irish Catholic, said that she was a
practicing Catholic and was for the right of women to abort their chil-
dren—claiming the freedom of the women to have control over their
bodies. The radio host politely tried to tell her that the Catholic
Church defended the sanctity of human life and that her position was
at odds with the moral teaching of her Church. As the conversation
went on, the woman grew more and more indignant and finally she
hung up. Yet today such a position does not surprise any of us. We see
examples such as this in many Catholic political figures and in our stu-
dents and, well, pretty much everywhere. Why are there so many

63
64 SACRAMENTAL REALISM

“Catholics” like this? How can one claim to be faithful Catholic and
yet reject one of the most fundamental teachings of the faith? What has
happened to the moral authority of the Church? Perhaps we can get
some insight into this problem from a recent letter written by Pope
Benedict XVI, a letter written to the Catholic bishops gathered in
Rome (February 21–24, 2019) to discuss the sex abuse crisis.1
In the first part of that letter, Pope Benedict writes about the
social context of the last fifty years and how that came to influence the
present situation in the Church. As a way of helping Catholics to
understand the issue of sexual abuse, he noted that moral theology has
undergone a dramatic shift during that period. He said that many
moral theologians came to accept that the Magisterium of the Church
“should have final competence [infallibility] only in matters of faith
itself,” but that the Church lacked the “competence [infallibility]”2 in
moral decisions. This split between matters of faith and matters of
morals required that theologians discover some “other” foundation
for a morality no longer linked to the truth of the faith. In the essay,
Pope Benedict notes that one of the directions that moral theology
took was to hold that “In the end, it was chiefly the hypothesis that
morality was to be exclusively determined by the purposes of the
human actions that prevailed. . . . Consequently, there could no longer
be anything that constituted an absolute good, any more than any-
thing fundamentally evil; (there could be) only relative value judg-
ments. There no longer was the (absolute) good, but only the rela-
tively better, contingent on the moment and on circumstances.”3 Such
moral theology rejects the claim that acts have an intrinsic intelligibil-
ity, i.e., that there could be intrinsically evil actions. The morality of an
act is “situational.”
Against these attempts to separate the moral life from the faith,
Pope Benedict points out that the connection between the truth of the
faith and what “one must do” is an essential point of the faith. One
sees this most clearly worked out by Pope John Paul II in the encyclical
Veritatis Splendour in which he exhorts us to “do the truth.”4 For
Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul II there is a clear connection
between the truth of the faith and the moral life.

1. Pope Benedict XVI, “The Church and the scandal of sexual abuse,”
catholicnewsagency.com/news/full-text-of-benedict-xvi-the-church-and-the-
scandal-of-sexual-abuse-59639, April 10, 2019.
2. Ibid., I (2).
3. Ibid., I (2).
4. Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendour, 84.
 DANIEL HAUSER 65

Now if we return for a moment to the talk-show caller that I men-

tioned at the beginning of this paper and think about her position, we
see that she is one of the many Catholics whose inheritance has been
less the teachings of the Church and more the theology of the day. In
effect, she claims for herself allegiance to the faith of the Church and
yet cannot see the relationship of the Church’s teachings to some basic
human goods. Joyce Little describes the situation well when she says
that the Church today is “embattled as it is both from without and
from within by people whose fundamental views of reality are radically
opposed to the Church’s.”5 She later adds that it is most often the case
that “That view of reality rests, in the final analysis, upon a rejection of
the sacramentality of the good creation as the Catholic Church under-
stands that sacramentality.”6 It is precisely at this point (the problem
raised by the “caller” and the manner in which Pope Benedict XVI
describes the state of moral theology after Vatican II) that we see the
key issue. There are several ways the one might state the problem, but
it comes down to this: Can history mediate the truth? If not, what hap-
pens to the faith? Is not the truth of the faith the foundation for the
moral life? Or, do we need to find “another basis” upon which to build
a moral theology? Is human life to be reduced to a power struggle—
to a struggle as to who defines human life? Or, is there a truth that can
be mediated by history and lived out in history?
Of course, the examples of ways of thinking that despair of histor-
ical mediation of the truth are legion. Many today have abandoned the
idea that there is truth or that truth can be mediated by history. I teach
at a Franciscan institution and they hold that one of the primary cate-
gories for understanding their charism is “relationality,” and they
spend a lot of time describing the nature of what that means. When
they describe our relationship with God—which they call sacramen-
tal—it is usually understood in terms of God being present in creation
and we can “access” him in the created order.7 Yet their view of “sacra-
mentality” is seemingly less historical and more cosmological. It shies
away from any particular ecclesial or sacramental mediation. What is
the significance of such a “broad” sacramental mediation, and what is
the historicity of such a mediation? How does that affect the nature of
the way one understands the faith and the manner in which one comes
to encounter God? Is such a “sacramentality” ultimately a retreat into

5. Joyce Little, “Naming Good and Evil,” First Things, May 1992.
6. Ibid.
7. Many Franciscan scholars look to Teilhard de Chardin as model for this
approach to theology.
66 SACRAMENTAL REALISM

s sort of cosmological thinking, a pantheism, that despairs of the sacra-

mental significance of history?
Before moving on, I would like to give one more example of how
Catholic sacramental thinking is being challenged today. A few year
ago, at a Synod on the Family (2015), the question of the pastoral care
of Catholics who were divorced and then remarried was examined. Of
special concern was the issue of their reception of communion. In
commenting on this, R.R. Reno notes that some bishops argue that
the Church need to be “historical,” “and thus its teachings must take
a new form in our era.” Yet Reno argues that “these and other false
truisms turn the Church’s sacramental life into a plastic resource to be
deployed and redeployed to encourage ‘spiritual growth’—or worse,
to promote an atmosphere of ‘inclusion.’ Instead of God coming to us
in and through Word and Sacrament, we use the ‘Christian tradition’
to engineer our way toward him.”8 In order to achieve the goal of
allowing the divorced and remarried to receive communion, Reno
identifies three possible changes that one might make for this to
happen. The first option would be to reject the sacramental view of
marriage and claim that marriage is not permanent and a remarried
person is not committing adultery. Second, one could claim that adul-
tery is not a serious sin. This would of course require a substantial
rethinking of the Church’s teaching on human sexuality. Third, one
would have to argue that Christians have always misunderstood the
gospel, and we need not renounce our sins to unite ourselves with
Christ.9 He notes that such a view of the faith—a historicist view—
undermines the real sacramental nature of the faith. “It erodes confi-
dence in the objectivity of grace and the power of God in Christ to
claim territory in the world—and in our lives.”10
In his reaction to such claims, Reno points out that the unity of
the Church is not merely “spiritual” as a shared belief, but is objective
and historically present in the Eucharist. He says. “For this reason,
Catholic sacramental theology has treated as obvious a fundamental
discipline of the altar. Those who receive the Eucharist must be in vis-
ible unity of faith, doctrine, and discipline. Put more succinctly, those
who receive communion must be in communion; otherwise, the sacra-
ment of the Eucharist is contradicted in its very enactment.”11

8. R.R. Reno, “Sacramental Realism,” First Things, August 2018.

9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
 DANIEL HAUSER 67

I bring up this last example to note the importance of the question

of the historical/sacramental faith and its significance for living a
Christian life. Here, explicitly, the objective nature of sacramental
life—the freedom to enter into the sacrament of marriage and the real
presence of Christ in the Eucharist—raises the issues of the historical
nature of the faith. Can space and time mediate the divine? What is the
nature of the mediation? Can marriage really participate in the New
Covenant? How does the nature of God’s presence in history affect the
significance of all historical existence? Hopefully, some possible
answers to these questions will be clearer at the end of this paper.

PART II: COSMOLOGY AND HISTORY

When I first studied with Keefe some years ago, he guided me into
his own study of theology by framing it in terms of the philosophical
question of the one and the many.12 In this process, he had me read
the various works of Mircea Eliade who divided religions into two
groups: the cyclic religions and historical religions. Eliade holds that
human experience is primarily that of the profane, fallen time and
space, and the goal of religion is to live in the sacred, the real—a reality
that is liturgically mediated. In the cyclic religions, space and time are
erosive of the real and are unable to mediate the divine and so one had
to escape space and time to enter the sacred—ab origine, in illo tem-
pore, the beginning.13 Only by participating in those primordial events

12. Like Keefe, Hans Urs von Balthasar begins his book A Theology of History
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994) with the question of the one and the many.
He notes that “Since man began to philosophize he has sought to grasp things by
distinguishing two elements; the factual, singular, sensible, concrete and contin-
gent; and the necessary and universal (and, because universal abstract), which has
the validity of a law rising above the individual case and determining it” (9). He
points out that the emphasis can shift in such ways that either the universal is
emphasized and the particular “is regarded simply as the point where the rationally
ordered lines of being rather untidily intersect,” and all is reduced to the essential.
Or, as the “empirical tradition” holds, the unique is emphasized as real, historical,
and concrete, and abstract thought is unable to master the factual world. In con-
trast to these two options, the Christian claim is the existential union of God and
man in a unique “subject” (14ff.). By virtue of the “hypostatic union, there is noth-
ing in the person of Christ that does not serve God’s self-revelation” (20). Jesus
Christ is the center of world, who by his existence unites the historical and essential
being (21).
13. See Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and Profane, trans. Willard R. Trask (New
York: Harcourt and Brace, 1959) and The Myth of Eternal Return, trans. Willard
R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949). Keefe argues that in cosmological
68 SACRAMENTAL REALISM

“outside of space and time”—in the “escape” from history—can one

find that salvation that alone can fulfill human life. Here the unity of
being, the sacred, could not be mediated by the particular. In fact, the
particular obscures the real, the sacred.
In contrast to the cyclic view of time, what Eliade called the his-
torical religions (Western religions) held that God acted in space and
time. The worship in these religions, the encounter with the divine,
was linked to those events in which God acted in history.14 In the his-
torical religions space and time are able to mediate the divine and
therefore creation was thought to be “good.” Since one can encounter
the sacred in this world, in our lives, it was thought that what happens
here matters and that the material world is therefore good.
Building upon this foundation, Keefe then argues that our funda-
mental concrete expression of our consciousness, whether cosmologi-
cal or historical is “grounded in symbol and liturgy.”15 It is precisely
in the liturgical act that one enters into the real—whether mythical
time or historical. It was in their worship that a people entered into the
divine. Keefe holds that our consciousness is ordered by this liturgical
mediation and that the choice is between a cosmological liturgy and
the free historical covenantal liturgical mediation.16 The norm for
Keefe’s emphasis upon and understanding of the liturgical appropria-
tion of reality is the Eucharist.
Keefe uses an analysis “like” that of Eliade and extends it to an
analysis of philosophy and to intellectual history in general—using the
metaphysical question of the “one and the many” as the basis for his
analysis. Keefe sees instances of this problem in “every dimension of
creation,”17 and he returns to it time and time again in his work. As
noted, the question of the one and the many raises the problem of the
universal unity of being and the significance of the particular. As Keefe
notes, he is in particular concerned for the “tension between the indi-

thinking, the central desire was the “reintegrating of experienced reality.” There is
no historical resolution for this metaphysical dualism. As a result, it is necessary to
escape history in order to find the underlying unity of reality. See Keefe, Covenan-
tal Theology, 381ff.
14. Eliade, The Sacred and Profane, 28ff.
15. Donald Keefe, S.J., “Toward a Theology of History,” Unpublished Man-
uscript, April 24, 1988, 14.
16. Donald Keefe, S.J., Covenantal Theology (Novato, CA: Presidio Press,
1996), 3ff, 249. It is precisely the need to return to the historical liturgical worship
of the Church that is the focal point of this book.
17. Donald Keefe, S.J., “The Relation of Nuptial Symbolism to Eucharistic
Realism,” The Pacific Journal of Theology series II, issue 21 (1999): 88.
 DANIEL HAUSER 69

vidual exercise of personal freedom and the communal demand for

social unity.”18 But the question is even further shifted for Keefe in
that as a Christian he needs to account for the Incarnation and the free
response to God’s presence in history, e.g., the Church, Mary’s fiat, or
sacramental marriage. He holds that the solution to this problem is the
New Covenant—the prime analogate for understanding the metaphys-
ical question of substance. This continued historical presence, this
covenantal unity, is given in the Eucharist. For Keefe, “The theology
of the Eucharistic is the theology of history.”19
We will return to an analysis of this sacramental historicity in a
moment, but it might be helpful to make a couple of points before
that. First, as Keefe continues the liturgical analysis of history, he holds
that the alternatives in human history are two different interpretations
of historical existence: the cosmological and covenantal orders. In his
analysis of the cosmological view he includes the ancient liturgical cos-
mology, but he also includes under cosmological thinking his under-
standing of autonomous reason. Keefe finds in both an expression of
the pessimism of the cosmological perspective.
In the cosmological view, historical reality is fallen. Keefe notes
that “The fall from this unutterable fullness is the emergence of a
divided and contested cosmos whose materiality is understood to be
antagonistic to its unity.”20 Simply, history is experienced as ambiva-
lent: caught between the formal principle of unity and permanence,
the Monad, and the material principle of multiplicity and change, the
Dyad.21 In this cosmological thinking, human history is a fall from the
fullness of reality, from life to death. Furthermore, Keefe holds that
“Because the cosmos was sustained liturgically, its ambiguity was expe-
rienced liturgically, as a fatality, a fact intrinsic to finitude not by any
logical necessity or immanent rationale.”22 In the cosmological view of
existence the temporal and spatial order is suffering, whose end is
death. The pagan liturgical order strives to overcome this fundamental
irrationality of historical existence. But the solution to irrational histor-
ical existence was not to be found in history. The escape from history
and absorption into the “One” was achieved in their worship. In the
myths that guided these religions, the divisions of history were consid-

18. Keefe, “The Relation of Nuptial Symbolism to Eucharistic Realism,” 94.

19. Donald Keefe, S.J., “Rescuing History from Historicism,” The Saint
Anselm Journal 13.2 (Spring 2018), 84.
20. Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 211.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
70 SACRAMENTAL REALISM

ered unjust and only overcome by the mimetic liturgical appropriation

of a monadic unity that transcends time and space.23
In like manner, the rationalism that replaced mimetic liturgical
cosmology of the ancients with the unity of autonomous reason
sought to bring monadic unity to reality. Keefe argues that those who
use this autonomous critical reason are in fact a “surrogate” for the
ancient mimetic liturgical consciousness.24 For example, in the Greek
use of Logos and Nous, Keefe recognizes efforts to overcome the frag-
mentation of historical existence by means of abstract autonomous
reason.25 It is precisely this “ideal quest” that forms the community—
the communal “we”—sin which the individual is subordinate to the
“impersonal and non-historical Nous and Logos which as the formal
unity of the rational cosmos is the new cosmogonic ‘center.’”26 Keefe
writes that the quest for “rational salvation can accept no historical
mediation. Its sole end is to ‘conform’ to the rational or ‘objective’
requirement of the new autonomous intelligence.”27 And as is the case
with the cosmological liturgy, the resolution of the problem of the
One and the many is achievable only in the annihilation of history. The
particular must be subsumed under or annihilated by our autonomous
rationality. As a result, one is left with a dualism, an incoherence that
marks historical existence, that awaits its annulment in monadic unity.
Keefe goes on to say, “For the human truly to image the One, it is nec-
essary to become identical with it: only thus is the lonely anguish of
autonomous existential reason relieved.”28 The significance of personal
existence is annulled.
This pessimism, whether articulated as liturgical or as an
autonomous rationality, cannot abide the significance of a free his-

23. Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 379–380. Also see Donald J. Keefe, S.J.,
“Authority in the Church,” Communio 7.4 (Winter 1980): 344.
24. Ibid., 381. One sees a like analysis of much of modern thought in Eric
Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Washington, D.C.; Regnery Gateway,
1968). In this work he describes the modern imposition of reason on reality.
25. Ibid. Here Keefe notes that liturgical symbolism of marriage is the most
profound expression of the pagan experience of history. These symbols are trans-
formed by the autonomous reason “into the radical expression of the standing
problem confronting the new metaphysical quest: the unity of the One and the
many in all its manifestation” (Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 384). For Keefe
autonomous rationality cannot ever overcome the dichotomies of historical exis-
tence and so remains ultimately irrational.
26. Ibid., 380.
27. Ibid., 383.
28. Ibid.
 DANIEL HAUSER 71

toricity of a sacramental order. God, the divine, the ground of being,

etc., cannot be mediated by the historical particular. Whether ancient
or modern, this cosmological thinking leads to a nullification of
human significance. To symbolize this destruction of human signifi-
cance Keefe often references C.S. Lewis’ “the abolition of man.”29
If the first point here is the fundamental problem of cosmological
thinking, the second one has to do with Keefe’s use of the marital sym-
bolism. Keefe argues that marital symbolism is basic to human
thought.30 Keefe further notes that there are two fundamentally differ-
ent interpretations of this marital symbolism. Either one’s interpreta-
tion of those symbols is covenantal or it is cosmological. Keefe notes.
“It is interesting that the liturgical symbolization of the quest for sal-
vation is in each case marital; within paganism, that symbol is the exis-
tential expression of the fundamental dilemma of the pagan experience
of history as ambivalent, intrinsically contradicted, while within Chris-
tianity, in the ‘one Flesh’ of the New Covenant of Christ and the
Church, the marital symbol utters sacramentally the experience of the
free order of creation.”31 There are no other alternatives. He notes
that in the former case, this marital symbolism is “the most profound
expression of the ambivalence of the pagan experience of existence in
history. In fact, most of the history of human thought is reduced to
the cosmological thinking—seeing time and space as an alienation that
needs to be overcome. In those instances, the marital imagery was
descriptive of the dualism that constitutes fallen irrational existence.
In his article “The Sacrament of the Good Creation,” Keefe states
the problem this way: apart from the “mediatorial character” of the
covenant, the “God-man polarity” results in either the suppression of
man in God—where salvation is extinction—or in modern thought
controlled by Enlightenment rationality, Marxist and secularism, in
which God is suppressed by man. When the divine-human covenantal
order is rejected, the sexual divisions must be placed within God, “set-
ting up a primordial dualism between irreconcilables, or a primordial
monism in which one pole is or the other of the God-man polarity is
reduced to illusion or non-being.”32 Although even in this cosmolog-
ical interpretation of sexuality, the masculine and feminine still do
stand in relationship with the other, that relationship, that tension, is

29. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (San Francisco: Harper, 2001).

30. Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 384.
31. Keefe, “Toward a Theology of History,” 14.
32. Donald J. Keefe, S.J., “The Sacrament of the Good Creation,” Faith and
Reason 9 (1983): 129.
72 SACRAMENTAL REALISM

not complementary nor salvific. It is a symbol of the ambivalence of

historical existence. When characterized as a dualism, the feminine is
usually understood to be the negative principle, standing in contrast
with the fullness that this given in masculinity This marital symbolism
is experienced as negative, reflecting the ancient liturgical participation
in the primordial event. This reality is not historical.
In the modern monadic rationalism, all such historical differences,
such as male and female, must be annulled by an abstract autonomy,
often reified in a non-historical utopia: an escape from the absurdities
of history. Yet according to Keefe, autonomous reason “cannot tran-
scend its own intrinsic ambiguity,” since the truth it seeks cannot be
found in history.33 “Modernity, forced to construct the world anew on
principles of abstract rationality, could only condemn out of hand as
fundamentalist, as obscurantist, whatever and whomever would
oppose the utopian project. Indeed, within that deterministic world-
view there could be no freedom to oppose it, hence the opposition
could only be irrational, the act of an enemy of humanity, an obstacle
to progress.”34 Within this cosmological perspective, there is no hope,
no salvation, and history “must be overcome” by subsuming all of his-
torical existence under the autonomous rationality.
Of course, today that abstract rationality finds its natural enemy in
the Roman Catholic and Orthodox sacramental views of marriage and
family, which (according the modern utopians) as the source of alien-
ation and injustice are in need of redefinition and deconstruction in
order to satisfy the monadic utopian reasoning. Again, all historical
distinctions need to be overcome if the new world is to be achieved.35
I spent quite a bit of time on these matters for a number of rea-
sons. First, what is at stake in Keefe’s thought and for a Christian the-
ology of history is seen most clearly in the light of Keefe’s extensive
description of cosmological thinking, ancient and modern. Second, it
is the problem of the one and the many that is important in Keefe’s
thought. It is in that intellectual discussion that he situates himself. It

33. Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 384. See a like analysis of Marxism and other
modern thought in Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism, 23ff.
34. Donald Keefe, “Rescuing History from Historicism,” 88. It should be
noted that historicism would at first appear to be a means by which the particular
time or age or historical period is given significance. But in the end history is ide-
alized and subject to the either an pattern; e.g. historical dialectics or to an “ideal-
ized end’ that gives a comprehensive account of reality which undermines the free-
dom and significance of personal human freedom.
35. Keefe, “The Sacrament of the Good Creation,” 133.
 DANIEL HAUSER 73

is central to understanding the historicity of the faith and sacramental

reality. Third, it is important to examine the significance of marital
symbolism as it pertains to understanding the nature of the historicity
of the faith. It is precisely in that symbolism the truth of the Christian
historical revelation is most clearly expressed.

PART III: A CONVERSION, A THEOLOGY OF HISTORY

According to Keefe, there is only one response to cosmological

thinking. The only solution to the cosmological dilemma “must be by
way of a revision of its most fundamental symbol, which can only come
about by a revision of that most fundamental experience.”36 As noted,
Christians are heirs to this cosmological thinking and need to convert
it to the “Christian revelation,” i.e., to the free historical truth of the
faith given in the New Covenant. Contrary to the pagan pessimism,
according to the Judeo-Christian tradition, the divine is no longer iso-
lated from time and space, but acts in time and space and eventually
becomes incarnate. God not only creates and sustains the world, but is
present in it. So one does not need to seek salvation from history,
because the Lord of history is present in history. In the light of this
truth, the problem of the one and the many is “solved,” because the
universal becomes present in the particular.37 Consequently, the
dilemma of the separation of man from God no longer results in the
extinction of one or the other, but is overcome in the free covenantal
order of the good creation. Keefe writes, “The covenant is then the
mediation of God to his creation, to humanity, to history; only when
the covenant is thus understood is the creation which it specifies
good.”38 This covenant is the fundamental order of created reality by
which God is present in history. Therefore, the creation is good—it
can mediate the divine.
Like the cosmological view of history, the Christian experiences
reality as fallen. But two important differences are immediately clear.
First, even though the world is fallen, that is only part of the story.

36. Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 384.

37. “It must be emphasized that this is a nuptially ordered human freedom, for
it is fidelity to the nuptially-ordered Covenant, the One Flesh of Christ and his
bridal Church, instituted on the Cross: here alone is the ancient dilemma of ‘the
one and the many’ resolved.” Keefe, “Rescuing History from Historicism,” 96
38. Keefe, “The Sacrament of the Good Creation,” 129–130. Note that as
created the covenant reflects the goodness of creation in that it is capable of medi-
ating the divine.
74 SACRAMENTAL REALISM

Keefe writes. “But the flesh, sarx, is only one dimension of historical
existence, of the economy of salvation, not the whole of it; for de
Lubac as for the Catholic tradition, this whole, the gratuitous econ-
omy of salvation, is the only meaning history has, and that meaning is
free: the intrinsically, sacramentally, efficaciously-signed interrelation
of the Old Covenant and the New Covenant to the Kingdom of
God.”39 The “Flesh” is the “first moment,” it is simply fallen history,
which as fallen is fragmented and unfree. In the “flesh” we are aware
of our inability to choose freedom and redemption. This fallen human-
ity in the “flesh” (sarx) longs for what is lost—the freedom and unity
lost in the Original Sin of the first Adam and Eve. Only a free covenan-
tal order can account for such a fall. The fall, then, is from the fullness
given in the Good Creation, which as historical is mediated by the
Eucharistic worship of the Church. The result of this free rejection of
our created existence in Christ has not been annihilation but the
“diminution of being” the loss of the free original order of existence.40
Such a fall is substantial.
A second point to be made here is that the fallenness of creation
is not “structural.” There is no inherent principle or principles that are
the cause of the “fallenness” of the world. The source is moral. Of
course to say that the fall is moral presupposes that reality has an order
that is ultimately not monadic, but relational/covenantal. This
covenantal order would hold that human existence is not condemned
to the necessary order of an unfree reality; but, as free, humans freely
fall in the first Adam and in the second Adam are freely offered salva-
tion. Both the fall and the New Covenant are primordial. As Keefe
writes in reference to St. Paul’s letter to the Romans: “There the fall
of the first Adam is interpreted in the context of the restoration
effected by the last Adam who is Christ: the fall and the restoration are
alike Adamic, and are therefore alike primordial.”41 It presupposes that
the primordial creation in Christ, the New Covenant, is the metaphys-
ical foundation from which the “first Adam” fell. Since it is covenantal,
this creation is free, and the fall is a result of the refusal by the first
Adam of the order of the Good Creation. This rejection is free, it
needs to be ex nihilo, with no prior “cause.” We can choose either the
goodness of the free covenantal order for which we are created or the
unfree, servile existence that ends in death.

39. Keefe, “The Relationship of Nuptial Symbolism to Eucharistic Realism,”

106–07.
40. Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 218ff.
41. Ibid., 215.
 DANIEL HAUSER 75

Again, in Keefe’s terms creation is covenantal—the free gift of

God offered to the free people, the Church. It is this free unity of
Christ and his Church, the New Covenant, that is the very source of
this covenantal unity and freedom. This freedom and unity as historical
are understood to be nuptial.
Before proceeding to a closer analysis of this sacramental historic-
ity, I would like to comment briefly on what I think is one of the more
interesting facets of Keefe’s thought. I am not an expert in Christol-
ogy, but one of the strengths of Keefe’s theology always seemed to be
his ability to show the “metaphysical” aspects of Christ’s being. That
is, he does not simply articulate the nature of Christ and the Trinitarian
relations in traditional metaphysical terms, but he explores carefully
what it means to be “created in Christ”—Christ as the key to under-
standing reality. In fact, at one point in his Covenantal Theology,
Keefe—referencing “what Bonaventure knew”—says that “meta-
physics is Christology.”42 He follows this by stating that “all of reality
is thus signed by the Trinity, and is consequentially Christological, his-
torical and personal.”43 This Christological approach enables Keefe
(better than any modern theologian I know of) to deal with those New
Testament Christological hymns found in John 1: 1–13, Colossians
1:15–20, and Ephesians 1:8–10, in which Christ’s role in creation and
redemption of the fallen created order are proclaimed. Using this
analysis of the covenantal order he is able to reconcile the free histor-
ical events of the coming of Christ—his incarnation, death and resur-
rection—and the significance of creation, a creation in Christ. If all
things are created in Christ, there is no dimension of that creation that
is not signed by the historical reality of the New Covenant, given in
the perfect sacrifice of Christ.
It should also be noted that Keefe is critical of those Christologies
that abstract from the incarnate Christ to some pre-existent logos. He
argues that one only knows the Son as sent by the Father to give the
Spirit. That is, the fullness of the revelation is only given in Christ.
There are no “stages’ in the mission of the Son. That sending implies
unity of Persons in the Trinity, which is reflected in his mission. That
mission is historical, covenantal and free.44

42. Ibid., 386.

43. Ibid.
44. Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 187. Here Keefe briefly discusses the primor-
dial nature of Christ. Also, see Donald J. Keefe, S.J., “Mary as Created Wisdom,
The Splendor of the New Creation,” The Thomist 47.3 (1983): 401–402.
76 SACRAMENTAL REALISM

PART IV: WORSHIP AND HISTORY

As previously noted, worship is the means by which we enter into

and “appropriate” the sacred. Yet different religious liturgies reflect
differing views of the sacred and therefore the real. In the Christian
faith, that worship is historical, it is in the historical order that Christ
is present to us. The worship of the Church, therefore, is ordered to
those events by which we are saved. As Gerhard Ebeling points out,
“What is essential for the existence of the Church is that its proclama-
tion and faith have constant reference to the historical event which
constitutes the origin of the Church not only in the historical sense,
but simultaneously in the sense that is the basis for the Church’s exis-
tence today.”45 Note that in Ebeling’s description of worship, the
faith not only has its origin in the events of Christ’s life, but those
events continue to nourish and sustain the faith today. Most Chris-
tians would hold that the death and resurrection of Christ are the
foundational events of faith, the means by which we are saved. Yet,
the questions remains how do we continue to “participate” in those
events? In what manner are they salvific for us? What is the nature of
that mediation?
In general, within Christianity there have been two basic liturgical
interpretations of Christian worship: the liturgy of the word and the
liturgy of the sacrament. In the former, the sacraments are understood
to be at the service of the Word, the proclamation of the Gospel. In
the latter, the Word is interpreted within the sacramental worship of
the Church—primarily within her Eucharistic worship. There is, of
course, quite a range of interpretations among those who accept the
primacy of the liturgy of the Word, but in general they hold that the
presence of Christ is mediated by scripture—sola scriptura—which
governs the worship of the Church. The historical nature of this medi-
ation is reflected in the scriptures being the means by which we are
called to faith in Christ. In this worship, the believer hears the Word
of God and is “called” to respond. Within these traditions, the preach-
ing of the Gospel is the most important dynamic in Christian life, but
what is the historical nature of this call and response? What is the
nature of the historicity of the worship of the church in this instance?
How is Christ present, and what is the historical locus of such a pres-
ence? Notably, one can see the effects of the Protestant liturgy of the

45. Gerehard Ebeling, The Problem of Historicity, trans. Grover Foley (Phila-
delphia: Fortress Press, 1967), 84.
 DANIEL HAUSER 77

word in its theology of the sacraments and its understanding of the

nature of the church.46
The Catholic liturgy of the sacrament, on the other hand, has its
foundation in the Eucharist. One might argue that from the very begin-
ning this Eucharistic worship has been the center of the life of the
Church.47 Perhaps the clearest recent expression of the central impor-
tance of the Eucharist to the life the Church is found in the encyclical
Ecclesia de Eucharistia. In this work, Pope John Paul II reaffirms the
central importance of the Eucharist for the life of the faith. He notes that

46. Keefe, “Authority in the Church,” 352–353. Keefe here briefly notes that
the Reformation pessimism leads to a dehistoricized faith. “The discovery of the
absolute unworthiness of all of the structures of finitude, the proclamation of their
inability to mediate the infinity of God, these light our contemporary return to the
ancient denial of the goodness of the human condition, our contemporary reappro-
priation of a pagan pessimism and of the salvation which is extinction. This redis-
covery belongs to the Reformation.” These comments reflect Luther’s insistence
upon the total corruption by the Fall. Further, Luther’s rejection of the sacrifice of
the Mass further empties history of any sacramental significance.
47. See Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 44–49, 88, 104, 108. The Eucharist
offering of the One Sacrifice of Christ is the free cause—ex nihilo—of the Church.
Keefe notes that this has been a common Catholic emphasis since Vatican II. At
the same time, this doctrine has been found to be an affront to those promoting
the ordination of women and ecumenism. For it is the Eucharist as sacrifice that
sustains the priesthood and the holiness and therefore the authority of the Church.
Apart from this foundation, one would have to define ministry and “remake” the
Church in order to avoid the inherent injustices of the sacramental order. It is here
that many contemporary theologians after Vatican II tried to impose a “cosmolog-
ical” rationality of the faith. One result of this is the politicization of theology and
much of the public life of the Church. The examples of such reductionistic efforts
are plentiful and provide the proximate background for Keefe’s writing his
Covenantal Theology. See the introduction to Covenantal Theology, 3–117.
From this perspective, the Eucharist was not only established at the Last
Supper, but literally becomes the central worship of the Church at that point. There
has been some dispute about the significance of the Eucharist in the worship of the
early Church. See Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1966), 220ff. In this work, Jeremias argues that from the very begin-
ning the Eucharist was the central worship of the Church. The Church precedes the
writing of the scriptures, and scripture reflects the influence of a community whose
central worship is that of the representation of the one sacrifice of the cross. As an
example of this “Eucharistic” influence, one need only note the Eucharistic refer-
ences that pervade the gospel of John. Jeremias also argues that the Church has
always understood the Eucharist as a sacrifice. He defends the sacrificial nature of
the words of consecration. In a like manner, Durrwell argues that the Eucharist is
essential to any understanding of the parousia in the early Church. See Francois-
Xavier Durrwell, “Eucharist and Parousia: The Fundamental Basis of the Interpre-
tation of the Real Presence,” Lumen Fidei 26 (June 1971), 273–315.
78 SACRAMENTAL REALISM

the Eucharist is not only the “source and summit of the life of faith,” but
that “the most holy Eucharist contains the Church’s entire spiritual
wealth: Christ himself, our passover and living bread. Through his own
flesh, now made living and life-giving by the Holy Spirit, he offers life to
men.”48 Pope John Paul II notes that this “wealth,” this truth, is “reca-
pitulated” in the One Sacrifice of the Cross and “re-presented” in the
sacrifice of the Mass. “The Church was born of the paschal mystery. For
this very reason the Eucharist, which is in an outstanding way the sacra-
ment of the paschal mystery, stands at the centre of the Church’s life.”49 It
is in the Eucharist that the gift of the paschal Triduum is “concentrated”
and entrusted to his Church. “With it he brought about a mysterious
‘oneness in time’ between the Triduum and the passage of centuries.”50
So in effect, the one event of our salvation is sacramentally represented
in the Eucharistic sacrifice. “The sacramental re-presentation of Christ’s
sacrifice, crowned by the resurrection, in the Mass involves a most special
presence which—in the words of Paul VI—‘is called “real” not as a way
of excluding all other types of presence as if they were “not real,” but
because it is a presence in the fullest sense: a substantial presence
whereby Christ, the God-Man, is wholly and entirely present.’”51 What
Pope John Paul II does here is reaffirm the importance of the sacrifice of
the Mass in the Church and, in the process, assert the event character—
the real and substantial presence of Christ, a historical presence.
In like manner. Keefe sees the Paschal Mystery as the key to under-
standing the Eucharist. Following Augustine, Keefe notes that “the
meaning of the sacrifice is grounded in the death on the Cross which
had as its effect the One Flesh covenantal union (the sancta societas) of
the risen Christ and his bridal Church, by which alone we can be in

48. Pope John Paul II, Ecclesia De Eucharistia (April 17, 2003), 1. Here he
is quoting Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Decree on the Ministry and Life
of Priests, Presbyterorum Ordinis, 5. What is interesting in this encyclical is the
extensive emphasis placed on the relationship of the Eucharist to the passion of
Christ. The pope emphatically reaffirms the Catholic doctrinal teaching that the
Mass is a sacrifice, the representation of the one perfect sacrifice of Christ. He
teaches that the faith lives by its unity with the paschal event, and that the sacra-
ments are instituted to mediate those salvific events. Pope John Paul II explains
that “This sacrifice is so decisive for the salvation of the human race that Jesus
offered it and returned to the Father only after he had left us a means of sharing in
it as if we had been present there” (11).
49. Ibid., 3.
50. Ibid., 5.
51. Ibid., 15. Here the Pope quotes the encyclical letter Mysterium Fidei (3
September 1965): AAS 57 (1965), 764.
 DANIEL HAUSER 79

union with God.”52 The Eucharistic worship is the offering of the sac-
rifice of Christ that “creates” the Church: “santa societas qua inhaerrea-
mus Deo.”53 It is this sacramental order, as event, that is central to
Keefe’s thinking. It is in events that God is present in history. “In short,
it is the faith of the Church that the Eucharistic One Sacrifice is the
same historical event as the Sacrifice offered on the Cross by Jesus, the
eternal Son of the eternal Father, and the Son of Mary, one and the
same.”54 It is precisely in this event, mediated by the Eucharist, that we
image God by entering into the one Sacrifice by which we are saved.
Again, it is important that Keefe sees this as an event and not a
structure. As event this sacrifice is free and covenantal, the historical
presence of God in fallen history. It reflects the tri-relationality of the
divine economy: the Father sending of the Son to give the Spirit.55 It
is in this event that the “conversion” of the cosmological marital sym-
bols to the free unity of the New Covenant takes place—the One Flesh
union of Christ and his Bridal Church. “These symbols of creation,
sacrifice, and marital covenant coalesce in the Eucharist, the creative
union, una caro, of him who is God with his covenanted and elect
people, the Bridal Church.”56 It is in the concrete and integrative
nature of this event that the true nature of reality is revealed.
The Church receives her life from its participation in the New
Covenant. The Church can trust no other security than the Eucharist
to guarantee her “perdurance in Truth.”57 This reaffirms the primacy
of the liturgy over theology. This liturgical participation in these
events, then, is never abstract, but always concrete, always historical.
For the Christ, the Truth, is immanent in history. Therefore the faith
cannot be reduced to abstraction. As Keefe says, “For such a Catholic
theology, history is time concretely qualified by the immanence of
Christ, by the worship of the Church.”58 Theology must begin and
end in this historical truth.

52. Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 66, fn.37. Here Keefe references an article by
G. de Broglie, S.J., “La notion Augustinienne du sacrifice ‘visible’ et ‘vrai,’”
Recherches de Science Religieuse 48 (1960): 135–165. Broglie defends the tradi-
tional notion of sacrifice.
53. Keefe, “The Sacrament of the Good Creation,” 129.
54. Keefe, “Rescuing History,” 82.
55. Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 391.
56. Keefe, “The Sacrament of the Good Creation,” 130.
57. Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 398–399.
58. Donald J. Keefe, S.J., “Toward a Renewal of Sacramental Theology,” The
Thomist 44.3 (1980): 366. “So to regard theology, however, is to place it in the
context of worship, only as correlative to worship, as fides quaerens intellectum, can
80 SACRAMENTAL REALISM

Not only does the Eucharistic celebration of the New Covenant

have the character of an event, but that event is integrative of the
whole of historical reality. In fallen creation, the integration can only
be sacramental. Keefe describes this as “Eucharistic time.” Only in the
Eucharistic worship does time mediate the Kingdom of God, the
eschatological fullness of the Good Creation. It is in this worship that
the Church finds its unity amid an “otherwise relativized and disinte-
grating temporality.” It is by this worship that “time is history.”59
There is no other possible unity, a unity in Christ, in whom all things
are created and redeemed. Keefe describes this sacramental unity in
terms of the ex opere operato unity of fallen creation. “In all of these
classic integrations of historical reality, the same ordering, integrating
event is objectively effective ex opere operato: the Eucharistic Sacrifice,
the New Covenant accomplished in history as the One Flesh of Christ
and his Church, the center, the source and the unity of history.”60 The
objective presence of the redemptive act of Christ on the Cross, re-pre-
sented in the sacrifice of the Mass ex opere operato, is the source of the
unity and continued presence of Christ in history.
In his theology, Keefe notes (and uses) several of descriptions of
this historical integration in his theology. For our purpose it is the res
sacramentum, res et sacramentum, res tantum that sign history as the
history of salvation. In particular it is the res et sacramentum—the
infallible, objective, historical presence of the New Covenant that once
again is the foundation and source of Keefe’s understanding of the
nature of this historical presence.61 In the Eucharist, this integrative

theology exist, for only there is the mystery given to the mind in a posturing of
questioning inseparable from faith.” Keefe, “Mary as Created Wisdom,” 397.
59. Keefe, “Authority in the Church,” 361.
60. Ibid., 391. Some of the “classic integrations” of the sacramental integra-
tion to which he refers are: the Old Covenant, the New Covenant, and the King-
dom; sarx, mia sarx, pneuma; res tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum; and the
three senses of scripture—the literal, allegorical and anagogical.
61. “There is no salvation that is not thus Eucharistically and therefore eccle-
sially mediated: the Spirit is given on no other basis. This does not mean that one
must be a Catholic in order to live and die in the grace of Christ; it means only that
Christ’s Spirit is given to the world only in consequence of the offering of his One
Sacrifice, on the Cross and on the Altar, inseparably.
These three moments of the Eucharistic liturgy are distinguished as (1) the
sacramentum tantum which is a sign only, pointing to and signing that which it is
not, has no proper significance of its own but was instituted by Christ efficaciously
to sign, and so infallibly to cause, a historical effect, the Event of the One Sacrifice
instituting the New Covenant, which would itself be also an efficacious sign. This
infallible effect, the One Sacrifice instituting the New Covenant, is (2) the res et
 DANIEL HAUSER 81

process unfolds in such a way that all of creation and history is “drawn
into” that worship. Apart from this Eucharistic worship, the event of
the Cross would recede into the past as any historical event.62
This historical unity in the worship of the Church is not merely a
unity of past, present and future, but it unites all dimensions of the
covenantal creation. As Keefe notes, “Historical consciousness, onto-
logical realism, and sacramental worship are at one with existence in
Christ, and cannot be isolated from it; the event of the Eucharist and
the event of Gift of the Creator Spiritus are inseparable. This is the
event of creation in Christ, at once historical, ontological and sacra-
mental.”63 For Keefe, then, “sacramental efficacy is in the order of sub-
stance, i.e., of creation, not some lesser kind of change or accidental
transformation.”64 Keefe once again links this to the ex opere operato
doctrine in which he says that the sacramental event is identified with
the event of the New Covenant, which is creation in Christ.65
Finally, as Keefe holds the event character and the integrative
nature of a sacramental order of history, he insists that that order must
also be nuptially ordered and therefore free. As we have seen, for cre-
ation to have a covenantal order means that the union between Christ
and his Church is not merely organic, but marital and free. When
speaking of this covenantal presence, Keefe says “it is clear that this
presence must be free if it is to be historical; a divine immanence ex
machina, so to speak, cannot be historical, for it is neither human or
free.”66 The New Covenant, the perfect sacrifice of Christ, is the free
gift of the Father who sends the Son to give the Spirit. This covenantal

sacramentum, the One Sacrifice instituting the One Flesh of Christ and his Church,
which is the objectively given, concrete historical effect of the sacramentum
tantum. Yet it is itself liturgically visible under the signs of bread and wine, and so
is itself a further sacramental sign, with its own inherent causality: it signs and by
its signing causes the fulfilled Kingdom of God. This effect, (3) the res tantum, per-
sonal union with the risen Christ in his fulfilled Kingdom, is effect only, the final
effect of the Eucharistic signing. This final effect, the res tantum, is not visible, and
therefore it is not a sign, but it is that final result of sacramental realism to which
all sacramental signing points and, by which signing, history itself is freely signifi-
cant of salvation, of the achieved Kingdom of God. This final effect, the effect
which is only an effect, is the full gift of the Spiritus Creator which the Son was sent
by the Father to give: it is the fullness of the Good Creation, the goal of all histor-
ical freedom.” Keefe, “Rescuing History from Historicism,” 91.
62. Keefe, “Rescuing History from Historicism,” 83.
63. Keefe, “Toward a Renewal of Sacramental Theology,” 370.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. Keefe, “The Sacrament of the Good Creation,” 130.
82 SACRAMENTAL REALISM

reality is ex nihilo, free as the creation in Christ. It is only in the free-

dom of covenantal fidelity, nuptially ordered, that we image the
Triune God.67 It is the free historical unity of the New Covenant, the
Second Adam and the second Eve, that restores fallen history, the
Good Creation, mediated by the Eucharist.
Further, it is in the nuptial image of the relationship of Christ and
his Church that this communion is triune, not monadic. Keefe notes
“It is then a community of free persons, subsisting sacramentally, with
historical significance and intelligibility, in the free irrevocable interre-
lation which is the marital covenant.”68 Only in such freedom in Christ
do our lives and the moments of our existence take on “significance.”
Only in the New Covenant is there a free intelligible sacramental order
offered to us. We see this in the sinlessness of Mary and her “fiat”—
her free response. As the New Eve, she accepted on the part of the
whole creation the incarnation of Christ. That offer is free and contin-
ues to be mediated by the Eucharistic worship of the Church. This
worship holds the only hope for our lives, the truth of creation. As
free, we can refuse this covenantal love for the multitude of idolatries
that are offered to us daily. Yet, it is only in this faith, by our free con-
version to this truth, that we “enter into the freedom and the truth of
the Good Creation; we become ourselves in the appropriation of our
creation.”69 Only in this sacramental worship are we saved.

67. Keefe, “Rescuing History from Historicism,” 83.

68. Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 388.
69. Keefe, “Mary as Created Wisdom,” 398.