Kevin Irwin has been teaching and writing about sacraments and liturgy for decades, and has now produced a work specifically for classroom use. He has three audiences in mind: college juniors and seniors who are taking a course on sacraments or liturgy, Catholic adults who want to learn more about the church's worship, and graduate students preparing for service in the church as priests, deacons, or lay ministers.

Part 1 summarizes the history of sacraments and sacramental theology from their scriptural foundations to the Second Vatican Council. Of great value are summaries of and direct quotations from historical sources such as Tertullian, Cyril of Jerusalem, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, the Council of Trent, and the Second Vatican Council.

Part 2 introduces liturgical sacramental theology as something different from the systematic sacramental theology that dominated Catholic thinking from the time of the medieval Scholastics until just before Vatican II. Instead of employing philosophical reasoning to explain the sacraments and how they work, this approach uses liturgical sources themselves to understand more deeply the God who is worshiped, the worshiping community, and what happens during sacramental liturgical worship.

Part 3 builds a liturgical sacramental theology primarily on the liturgy of the Eucharist and the liturgies of the Easter Vigil. Special attention is given to the nature of sacramentality, human involvement, symbolic elements (bread and wine, holy oils, liturgical books, vestments, architecture, and music), the proclamation of the Word, types of prayers, Trinitarian implications, the paschal mystery, the communion of saints, and the liturgical year.

The book is, in effect, an apologetic for Roman Catholic worship in Europe and America at the turn of the twenty-first century. It explains Catholic beliefs by appealing to the religious texts that Catholics hear when they go to church on Sunday and when they participate in baptisms, confirmations, and other sacramental rituals.

But doesn't more need to be done? Doesn't the magisterium need to be thinking about developing appropriate religious rituals for people in the many diverse cultures of Asia and Africa? Shouldn't liturgists be thinking about making Catholic ceremonies more relevant to the lives of postmoderns in Europe, America, and Australia for whom the contemporary liturgy has become meaningless? Shouldn't theologians be addressing the concerns of liberation theologians who discovered how the gospels are heard by the poor and who pointed out how religious ceremonies easily support structures of oppression?

Focusing on religious texts can open up new worlds of understanding for adult believers who are committed to the Catholic Church, but it does so only by avoiding any critical examination of the texts. We are told what Tertullian and Augustine and Aquinas said, but how do we know that what they said was true? Should contemporary theologians simply accept what was said in the past, or should they critically examine it? For example, does the concept of a baptismal character of the soul have any validity outside a Neoplatonic thought world?

Time and again, Irwin takes the words of the liturgy literally, affirming that we “experience both salvation and redemption in the celebration of liturgy and sacraments” (23), that the sacraments “were given to us by God for the purpose of causing grace” and that “they are required for salvation” (101), that “the celebration of the sacramental liturgy is an experience of the life and action of the Trinity” (301), and that the liturgy causes us to participate in the paschal mystery of Christ (318). One can reach such conclusions by taking at face value the words of liturgical prayers and of venerated theologians. But are such claims literally true? Is this really what most Catholics experience when they go to Mass or attend a baptism?

Irwin and other liturgical theologians make much of the saying Lex orandi, lex credendi, which is attributed to Prosper of Aquitaine in the fifth century. Often translated as “What we pray is what we believe,” it may have been true when bishops both composed liturgies and indoctrinated new converts, but who can say what Catholics today believe? What they actually believe is not necessarily what they hear in church, so it is a mistake to think that the words of the liturgy correspond to the faith of a billion Catholics, conservative and liberal, Western and non-Western, around the world.

Catholics are no longer biblical literalists. Why assume that they are liturgical literalists?