Beyond sacraments

De Lubac quotes Thomas a Kempis to the effect that “when the consummation comes, the sacraments will be employed no more,” and explains: “Human mediation, now indispensable and of primary importance, will have no raison d’etre in the Heavenly Jerusalem; there, everyone will hear God’s voice directly and everyone will respond to it spontaneously, just as everyone will see God face to face.” This will be a “regime of perfect inwardness.”

It is difficult to see how this squares with de Lubac’s view that salvation is “essentially social.” It appears that salvation is only essentially social in time, but that it sheds this externalism when we reach the glorified state (earlier, he quotes Fr. Liege saying that the “Church’s process of becoming and the structures which have built up her eternal reality” will be taken up “into the community of glory under a new and wholly interiorized form.”

Insofar as essence is what a thing is in the end we should say that de Lubac’s eschatology simply contradicts his assertion that salvation is “essentially social.”