Eucharistic presence - a further exploration
Author: John Schofield
John Schofield is a former Chair of St Mark’s CRC, and past Principal of an Anglican Ministry Training Scheme. |
This contribution to the debate about Eucharistic Presence is in response to an article written by Ian Wallis,
Christ’s presence in the Eucharist: rediscovering an ancient paradigm and practice. I’m writing because I follow the argument set out in his article with my head, but not wholly with my heart. Let me try to explain why.
For many years, when pushed to fit myself into the sort of box that people like to use to categorise what sort a Christian a person is, I have described myself as a Liberal Catholic; as such of course I value the open and questioning approach of CRCOnline. Instinctively I settle for an understanding that is more ‘that’ than ‘how’; and this is because all theological positions are subject to provisionality. That is to say all theology is provisional: one question doesn’t lead to an answer, only to another question, and every theological door against which you push only reveals another door.
For all my catholic background (my father was a priest in what used to be called the Prayer Book Catholic tradition; and I trained at a very Anglo-Catholic theological college, though even then I was questioning and straining at the leash) the reason my heart (and therefore to some extent my head) questions a part of Ian’s argument is that I’m not aware of ever having separated the elements of bread and wine from what I might characterise as the consequences for me – and for all others – of receiving the Eucharistic bread and wine into my physical being. One result of this is that I place as high a value on the eucharistic elements as I do on their consequences for how I live my life.
So I want to take issue with this statement:
an authentic improvisation of Jesus’ ministry of hospitality must be animated by the spirit of its founder as the locus for Christ’s risen presence is identified not with bread and wine, but with those who seek to follow his example and embody his way.
I want to say both/and, rather than either/or.
The many different names we use for the Eucharist – Holy Communion, the Lord’s Supper, the Mass, the Divine Liturgy – remind us of what we are sharing together, of Jesus disclosing himself to us, of our union with each other and with God, of thanksgiving, of the work of worship and of being sent out. But though all this is of huge significance, what is of ultimate importance is the idea of remembrance, of memorial.
In Greek the word for memorial is anamnesis (anamnesis). This is word which doesn’t occur in Ian’s article, though he makes much of the concept itself (see below).
It is anamnesis that is critical for my understanding of the eucharist, and of Christ’s eucharistic presence. It’s there in the very words so central to the eucharist: το?το ποιε?τε ε?ς τ?ν ?μ?ν ?ν?μνησιν (
Do this in remembrance of me. Luke 22.19; 1 Corinthians 11.24)
Anamnesis is about making present, in the same way that, as Ian points out, the Seder and the Passover made present something that
extended well beyond recalling what happened to their forebears during the Exodus centuries previously to embrace personal re-enactment and, through doing so, active participation. It was about making that act of deliverance present within their experience through reliving it in memory, ritual and performance so that its efficacy – its capacity for mediating blessing – could be realised afresh.
This active making present is not just a making present in a ‘spiritual’ way; the physical is a visceral indicator of
a kind of commissioning as he entrusts his life into their hands and, with that, his vision, vocation and ministry.
‘That is what the physical is all about’. And that is why I cherish and value the physicality of the bread and wine; but I do not idolise it. I suppose that I am sympathetic to Luther when, sitting at the table in Marburg in 1529 at which he and Zwingli were debating the issue of the Eucharist, he chalked the words ‘Hoc est enim corpus meus’ (This is my body). No mere memorialist position, such as Zwingli held to, would suffice for him. For Luther ‘is’ means ‘is’, and not ‘signifies’. His version of both/and is commonly called consubstantiation; because of the ubiquity of the Body of Christ, the bread and wine are both bread and wine and the body and blood of Christ; and therefore to be accorded ‘honour’.
Equally, I would not want to say that the vision, vocation and ministry is mediated without the communal meal, regardless of how ritualised and remote from the Upper Room that has become. Presence is through shared meals, and shared food: the whole of the Eucharist is performative speech and action through which the Body of Christ is fed by the Body of Christ to be the Body of Christ in the world. And, of course, there are consequences for liturgical ‘performance’ here to ensure that the new relationship with God and one another is both central and honoured in a way that speaks to each generation.
I’m very aware that there’s much more to be said to surround this particular discussion with the roundedness of eucharistic theology and practice. This is merely a response concerning a small part of it.
Sacrificial language
However, there is one thing with which I do want to agree wholeheartedly with Ian. He writes:
the Lord’s Supper became a ritualized remembering of Jesus’ sacrifice or an atoning sacrament through which the salvific benefit of that sacrifice is communicated
and later
From then on, the interpretative context for the Lord’s Supper increasingly became what happened after that final meal Jesus shared with his first disciples, namely his death. And … that death increasingly became invested with salvific potential in terms of constituting a perfect sacrifice for human sin capable of securing at-one-ment with God…
From this, I’m led to consider the appropriateness of much of the sacrificial language associated with the eucharist. I think that it is necessary to decouple the eucharist from the sacrificial language that accompanies, especially it in catholic circles. To do so would not, I agree, be consonant with accepted catholic teaching about the Mass (I wonder whether transubstantiation is the catholic equivalent of so much of evangelical theology’s promotion of penal substitution as an article of faith?). But I increasingly understand the cross in terms of God reaching out with the appeal of love from the cross, and Jesus’ ‘work’ on the cross as being that of solidarity with humanity rather than judgement of and sacrifice on behalf of humanity. This understanding of the atonement is well illustrated by Abelard who wrote in the 11th/12th centuries: ‘Jesus died as the demonstration of God's love’. This demonstration sets the loving act of God over against the satisfaction theory developed by Anselm, which hardened over the centuries into the theory of penal substitution.
Putting all this together has led me to believe that the sacrificial language associated with the Eucharist needs to be treated with great care. That the sacrifice of Christ on the cross put an end to the transactional sacrificial system is, to my mind, clear.
Unlike other high priests he [Jesus] has no need to offer sacrifices day after day … this he did once for all when he offered himself. (Hebrews 7.27)
And similarly
Nor was it to offer himself again and again, as the High Priest enters the Holy Place year after year with blood that is not his own; for then he would have had to suffer again and again since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself. (Hebrews 9. 25, 26)
It is by God’s will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. And every priest stands day after day at his service, offering again and again the same sacrifices that can never take away sins. But…Christ has offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins (Hebrews 10. 10-12).
But that does not mean that our sacrifice of self-offering in response to God’s grace in Christ is something of which we should lose sight. Yet even allowing for this, and for the biblical and early church use of sacrificial language for understanding the cross, there is no warrant for saying that the sacrifice of Christ on the cross is something to be repeated week after week at high places - the word altar means high place, which has unhelpful connotations with the old sacrificial system, as it was in high places that many of the sacrifices we read about in the Hebrew scriptures were offered.
Instead, and bringing us back to where this article started, what we are called upon to do is to sit round a table, to eat and drink and be transformed ε?ς τ?ν ?μ?ν ?ν?μνησιν, ‘in remembrance, anamnesis, of me’.
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