G. K. Chesterton began Orthodoxy by describing the plot of a book that he had never written. Taking a page from Chesterton, below I will briefly map out the territory of a book (or books) that need(s) to be written. Had I but world enough and time–and a small army of research assistants–I would embark on the project. It is, however, always easier not to write a book, and I’ll probably take the easy way out and not write this one. Besides, by next Tuesday, I’ll probably lose interest. Nevertheless, convinced that such a book would be useful, I offer this map in the hope that it will provide stimulation and guidance to someone with more perseverance, discipline, and intellectual energy than I.

Over the past several years, I have had the growing conviction of the need for a Reformed, Vantillian theology of ritual. This conviction arises partly out of my reflection on the provocative and still growing body of writings of James B. Jordan. Another stimulus has been my study of Roman Catholicism, as this study has forced me to try to determine precisely where the fault lines between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism lie. Also influential has been my work on Calvin and the Reformation generally. Questions of the usefulness and efficacy of rites form the subtext for many of the Reformers’ contests with Rome, but to my knowledge no Protestant has ever dealt with ritual in a comprehensive manner. Almost every Reformed work on ritual (or “ceremony”) has been an anti-Roman polemic; I know of no attempt to provide a positive biblical assessment of the place of ritual in the Christian worldview and in practice of the church. (Of course, I may well be ignorant of a huge body of literature; if I am, please someone let me know.)

In terms of systematic theology, I think the question of rites gets to the heart of a central tension in Reformed theology. At least popularly in Reformed churches, I have the impression that election tends to cancel out the covenant, the church, and the sacraments; in modern evangelicalism, personal experience of regenerating grace tends to have a similar effect. By insisting that salvation is a matter of personal knowledge of God through the only mediator Jesus Christ, Reformation theology seems to undermine any need for the church, ritual, sacraments, or clergy; all mediators but Christ are not merely superfluous but idolatrous. Five hundred years after the Reformation, many Protestants live with a bad conscience in regard to the Anabaptists, the nagging question of whether the Reformers really completed the Reformation.

Bad conscience or no, the Reformers were absolutely correct when they insisted that Christian life is life in the church, and that the church cannot escape rites and governments. The Anabaptist solution is not a solution, or rather, it is a solution that conflicts with clear biblical requirements. In fact, the early Reformers seem hardly to have sensed any tension between their excision of superfluous mediators and their insistence on the significance of the church and its orders. Calvin combined a high Augustinian predestinarianism with a high Augustinian churchmanship (as, obviously, Augustine also did). But if the Reformers did not sense the tension, the tension exists today; at least I feel it. Evidence that others feel it as well is provided by the fact that any Reformed theologian who talks too much or too reverently about the Supper is suspected of being on the road to Rome. Part of the proposed project thus would involve an attempt to understand how the Reformers and post-Reformation dogmaticians systematized the doctrines about which we (or I) feel tensions.

A theology of ritual would address the questions posed above from the standpoint of sacramental theology. The question might be formulated concretely as follows: If Jesus brings us into direct communion with the Father, what need do we have of water, bread, and wine? If we are baptized in the Spirit, what use is baptism in water? If we feed on Christ by faith–Augustine said of John 6, “Believe, and you have eaten”–, why feed on bread and wine? It is sufficient as a practical matter to answer, “Because Jesus commands us to.” But a theology of ritual would attempt to provide a more systematic explication of the logic of the sacraments. It would attempt to answer the question: Why, in the New Covenant, when the shadows and types have passed away, do we still have sacraments at all? And what efficacy do they possess?

The sacraments would also be central to a theology of ritual because the sacraments in fact are rituals. It is inadequate to say that sacraments are signs; “sign” connotes something altogether too static. The sacraments are dynamic rites; facta (act) is as essential to the sacraments as res (element) and dicta (word). Thus, a theology of ritual would attempt a refinement of traditional Protestant formulations concerning the sacraments. In addition to treating the sacraments per se, a theology of ritual would address questions of liturgical theology more broadly considered.

It seems to me that it would be most potentially fruitful to approach this refinement of sacramental and liturgical theology from the perspective of the sacrificial system. It seems likely that the biblical understanding of rituals and hence of sacraments would emerge most clearly from texts that deal directly with rituals, which are mainly found in Exodus-Deuteronomy. The meaning and efficacy of the sacraments, then, need to be understood according to the categories and patterns of the Levitical system. For example, a number of the New Testament images associated with baptism (washing, clothing, anointing) hearken back to the rite of priestly ordination. If we wish to deepen our understanding of baptism, Exodus 29 would be a good place to begin. Armed with my extremely limited knowledge of the history of the church, I don’t know of anyone who has ever attempted to formulate sacramental theology from this standpoint in any rigorous way. Especially given some important recent work done on the Levitical system (eg., Jacob Milgrom), this seems like a useful project.

Finally, ritual has for the past century been a subject of considerable interest in the fields of anthropology (Claude Levi-Strauss, Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, Edmund Leach, Clifford Geertz), sociology (Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, a few hints scattered through the work of Peter L. Berger), literary criticism (Rene Girard), comparative religion (James Frazer, Mircea Eliade, Jonathan Z. Smith) and historical studies (medievalists such as Johan Huizinga, Ernst Kantorowicz, Marc Bloch, and their more recent, mostly French, successors; historians of early modern Europe such as Natalie Davis; classical scholars such as Walter Burkert). A fully developed theology of ritual would interact with this literature. Much of this literature studies the relationships between ritual, culture, and social behavior. A theology of ritual would thus not only impinge on sacramental theology, but also shade into the area of Christian social and political thought.

Peter Leithart is President of Theopolis. This post originally appeared at Biblical Horizons.