Sacramental piety

Some believe that an emphasis on sacraments must produce an externalized, mechanical form of the Christian life. That is no doubt partly the fault of high-church Christians who have permitted their participation to become externalized and mechanical. It’s incumbent upon high-church Christians to demonstrate that sacramental piety is indeed piety.

But it is also the fault of low-church Christians who operate with a simplistic (I would say “modern”) duality that assumes a necessary polarization between heart-experience and ritual. The slimmest exposure to medieval Eucharistic thinking should be enough to show that this is nonsense. Superstitious as medieval piety may have been, no one can accuse it of being cold.

But we don’t have to go outside Protestantism, or modernity, to find examples.

Methodism is all about heart-piety, but for both Wesleys and their followers the Eucharist was central to Christian experience. Liturgical historian James White writes of John Wesley, “The Lord’s Supper was of great importance. At a time when frequent celebration of the eucharist was rare in most parish churches, Wesley preached on ‘The Duty of Constant Communion,’ insisting that ‘do this’ meant it should be done as frequently as possible. Wesley himself received communion on ‘an average of once every four or five days’ throughout his lifetime.” Wesley believed that “for many lukewarm Christians the eucharist could be both a confirming and converting ordinance.”

In 1745, the Wesleys published a 166-hymn volume entitled “Hymns on the Lord’s Supper,” consisting of hymns composed by Charles Wesley. White calls these hymns “the chief document for Wesleyan eucharistic theology. With their emphasis on the eucharist as sacrifice, the work of the Holy Spirit, and strong eschatological flavor, they seem to belong much more to the early church or the present than to the eighteenth century.”