Augustine's rule that a sacrament works because the Church has performed it, not because the soul receiving it inwardly willed anything.
The Church as External Ordinance in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the moment when Latin Christianity stopped asking what a soul inwardly wills and began asking only whether a rite had been performed. Steiner set it out in the second lecture of European Spiritual Life in the 19th Century (GA 325), at Dornach on 16 May 1921, tracing how Augustine of Hippo answered Pelagius and the Donatist priests, who held that a person's relation to sin must come from the person. Augustine held the opposite: infant baptism forgives regardless of preparation, because an ordinance of the Church exists and has been fulfilled. What counts is not what is in the child but what the Church bestows upon it. Steiner dates from this the passing of the Church into an outward institution, the arrangement the Christian Community answered in 1922 by keeping the sacrament and dropping the creed.
The Church as external ordinance is the principle that a sacrament holds because the institution has carried it out, whatever the recipient intends. Steiner treats Augustine's defeat of Pelagianism as the decisive turn. From that point the Latin Church could spread across Europe because its authority rested on rite and dogma rather than on what anyone receiving them had experienced.
In Steiner's Own Words
He rejected a conception of sin connected with human subjectivity. He rejects the view that a relation to the spiritual world or to Christ can come from an individual human impulse. Hence he works to bring about gradually the passing over of the Church into the external institution. The important question is not what is in the child, but what the Church as external ordnance bestows upon it. The point is not that baptism signifies something for the soul's experience, but that there exists an external ordnance of the Church which is fulfilled in baptism. The value of the human soul living in the body matters less than that the universal spirit that lives in the sacrament, so to say an astral sacrament, should be poured out over mankind.
What it Means Today
The most exact modern answer to Augustine's ordinance is not an argument but an institution. In September 1922, at Dornach, Steiner helped a group of mostly Protestant theologians and pastors found Die Christengemeinschaft, the Christian Community, and gave it a full sacramental ritual: the Act of Consecration of Man (Menschenweihehandlung), celebrated at an altar with vestments, seasonal colours and a lectionary that turns through the year. Its first leader was Friedrich Rittelmeyer (1872 to 1938), who resigned one of the best-known Lutheran pulpits in Germany to take the post. What Steiner did not give the new body was a creed. It asks no confession of faith from those who attend and binds no priest to a doctrinal formula. Women were ordained from the beginning.
That combination is the point. Rite without dogma is exactly the arrangement Augustine ruled out when he argued that the child's inner condition is irrelevant beside the ordinance fulfilled upon it, a position the Council of Trent later fixed in law at its seventh session in 1547: a sacrament confers grace ex opere operato, by the work worked. Thalira synthesis: an ordinance is not undone by abolishing the ritual, it is undone by handing the ritual back to a conscience free to receive it or refuse it, which is why the Christian Community kept the altar and let the creed go.
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