Efficacious Engagement: Sacramental Participation in the Trinitarian Mystery by Kimberly Hope Belcher (review)

Book Reviews Kimberly Hope Belcher Efficacious Engagement: Sacramental Participation in the Trinitarian Mystery Collegeville MN: Liturgical Press, 2011 xi+199 pages. Paperback. $29.95. In both theory and practice, sacramental action and its ongoing effects can easily become detached from the larger horizon to which they are oriented, that is, toward incorporation of recipients into the divine life of the Trinity and God’s direction of salvation history. Moreover, that engrafting of the recipient into the triune life is one that embraces and conforms the whole human person, body and soul. In her book Efficacious Engagement, Kimberly Belcher makes commendable strides toward enriching our understanding of sacramental action with a sense that sacraments shape persons in the image of the Trinity, disposing them, first, to participate in the ongoing work of God in the economy and, second, to enter fully into the divine life, particularly through reception of the Spirit as “givenness” itself. Efficacious Engagement advances its thesis in three important stages. In the first (chapters one and two), Belcher sets the horizon for her work by clarifying the way in which the sacraments “can be thought of as those human rituals that the church has recognized as part of God’s plan to save human beings” (32). To that end, chapter one explores the “Trinitarian Dynamic of Salvation History ” through a careful reading of both Rahner and von Balthasar, arguing that “[t]heir work strongly suggests that as the sacraments are means of grace and the work of Christ incarnate in his church, they cannot be considered otherwise than in a trinitarian context” (18). She summarizes: “Sacrament is a theological concept that developed gradually in order to account for the church’s early and abiding experience, in which certain rituals were a particularly significant participation in the economy of salvation, the great plan by which God the Father was reconciling human beings to himself through the work of the Christ in the Holy Spirit” (23). Given their trinitarian character, Belcher argues that the sacraments facilitate growth into the triune image through ritual action, which “enables their participants to enter into the trinitarian mystery of salvaAntiphon 17.3 (2013): 276-293 277 Book Reviews tion: to be conformed to Christ and be filled with the Holy Spirit” (27). In chapter two, the author importantly extends sacramental participation to the entire person. While Belcher notes and appreciates the power of sacraments as signs that shape embodied sense perception, she also critiques a sacramental theology reduced to symbolism for its failure to efficiently conform a person—body and soul—to inhabit the Christian world. Drawing on notions of ritual discipline and identity construction, the author argues that a deeper appreciation for ritual practices “allow practitioners to transform their identities” according to the sacramental system and its orientation to life in and through the Trinity (52). The first part of the book culminates in a proposal for “ritual folding” which can “focus on [ritual’s] body-forming meaning, its sensory phenomena, and its power to develop one’s being-in-the-world” (55). By attending to such aspects of ritual—especially those embodied aspects of human identity—a deeper sense of the “efficacious engagement” of sacraments can emerge that facilitates ongoing conformation to the triune life of God. The second part of Belcher’s book (chapters three to five) applies the conception of ritual folding to the Roman Rite of Baptism for Children. Attention to infant sacramental action is particularly striking because it tests ritual folding against the identity development of infants, persons who might seem least able to be actively conformed to the triune life. Chapter three surveys Christian history and the development of the sacrament of baptism to suggest that adult baptism, as experienced in the modern period, need not be seen as the solely normative form of baptism. Armed with a stronger historical warrant for infant baptism, Belcher argues that infants possess a dynamic “zone of proximal development,” which makes them apt subjects of ritual action, particularly when such action avoids a narrowly-conceived view of symbolism as the primary channel of sacramental efficacy (90). Infants can in fact “be subjects of culturally determined ritual processes,” which means that ritual...