For the Life of the World — Alexander Schmemann

Occasionally one will stumble upon a book so filled with simple Christian wisdom as to take one’s breath away. Such is the case with For the Life of the World by the late Orthodox writer Alexander Schmemann. Originally written as a study guide on the Sacraments for a conference, the impact was so great it was decided to make the study more widely available in book form. The decision to publish has certainly been vindicated – the book has been influential not just with the Orthodox but throughout the Christian world and has profoundly affected (for the better) the Christian understanding of the Sacraments.

From the first sentence we are taken into a view of the Sacraments immersed in the historic liturgy of the Church. For Schmemann, the Western Church commits a fundamental error in attempting to analyze the Sacraments as “objects” in isolation from the liturgical context that gives them meaning. Instead, the Sacraments are the act of the Church within its liturgy to transform the world through Christ by offering the world and ourselves to the Father.

Each of the recognized Sacraments of the Orthodox Church are considered within the liturgical life of the Church. This incarnational understanding of the Christian Faith presents the world itself – created by God and declared good – as something to be redeemed through Christ. Rejecting both the semi-gnostic anti-Sacramentalism of some Protestants as well as the view of medieval Roman Catholicism that bordered on “magic”, Schmemann returns to a patristic view of the Sacramental life. This is no Eastern Orthodox polemic – Schmemann criticizes his own Church for abandoning the true understanding of the Sacraments for alien concepts – but a plea for the followers of Christ to appropriate a truly Christian understanding of life.