The Eucharist

Origins and Contemporary Understandings

Thomas O'Loughlin

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780567384591
• eBook ISBN: 9780567213136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

Theological reflection upon the Eucharist is dominated by two paradigms: One approach interprets the Eucharist almost exclusively in theological terms, shaped by Scholasticism and the Reformation. Most discussions about the nature of the Eucharist, Eucharistic presence or the role of the priest follow these categories, even if they come in modern disguise. The other reads the Eucharist as an event which can be explored empirically. O'Loughlin develops a new understanding of the Eucharist. This can be done by looking afresh at the historical evidence and bringing it in dialogue with modern theology. In the past decades, historical research and new discoveries have changed our view of the origins and the development of the Eucharist. By bringing history into a fruitful dialogue with sacramental and liturgical theology, he shows not only ways how theology and practice can be brought closer together again, but also how current ecumenical divisions can be overcome. His book makes an important contribution to eucharistic theology, both for individual church traditions as well as for ecumenical dialogues.

1

Starting points for a study of the Eucharist

Anyone embarking on a book on the Eucharist needs to ask him/herself at the outset whether there is any need for yet one more book on the topic: ‘of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh’.¹ As it stands, no one today can keep abreast of the quantity of material written either on its history, its current praxis or the theological speculation that it generates. Moreover, because the Eucharist has figured so prominently in both Christian preaching and worship, as well as a source of bitterness in controversies between Christians, there is for every historical event, be that a practice or a text or a point of teaching, and for each period and tradition, a wealth of material that produces specialties within specializations. Conversations cutting across disciplines are rare. Meanwhile theology, in its explanatory mode, produces a steady stream of textbooks, alongside works of pastoral communication and spirituality, such that anyone wanting material on ‘the Eucharist and . . .’ need never look far. Indeed, any new work can be little more than an added whisper in a crowded discussion! It is this question that animates this first chapter as I seek to set out my stall while trying to make a bid for a perspective on the Eucharist that I do not hear, or hear only dimly, when I listen to historians, liturgists and doctrinal theologians.

Historical contingence

This book’s perspective takes as its starting point the actual practices of Christians in their historical particularities, here and there, in this culture and that, in this period and in another. It holds that these should always have primacy in theological investigations; not least because the Eucharist belongs to the domain of human ‘doing’ before that of ‘believing’ or reflection. It will assume that within the study of such particularities an approach can be found towards examining not only the larger questions that not only animate theologians today, but also those questions which affect the way that we Christians behave and understand ourselves and our activities in churches. So my approach, beginning with the succession of Christian praxis, gives priority to what actual followers of Jesus have done, their activity as disciples and their self-understanding of what they were/are doing. This involves assuming that ‘theology’ – formal doctrine and preaching – emerges as a way of making sense of that discipleship and communicating that identity. Doctrinal formulation is thus viewed as a function of the activity of discipleship, and which to be appreciated properly must be located within the situation of its formulation within a specific context of living as Christians.² I am, consequently, distancing myself from the notion that any specific theological presentation of the Eucharist can be seen as ‘classic’ or held to have within itself the basis for an absolute claim to be ‘the theology of the Eucharist’. Similarly, I am distancing myself from the notion that there was any ‘original’ (and thereby privileged) doctrine of the Eucharist that could form an a priori in discussion today. The starting point is among ‘the pieces’ of what we find in the activity of Christians, and which, taken together, can be seen as the legacy of generations of effort, practice and thinking.³

This starting point is not only radically historical, but also deliberately subordinates formal reflection and doctrine to praxis and common understanding on the basis that the activity of disciples we refer to by the term ‘Eucharist’ belongs within Christian praxis and is never, despite the pleas of many systematicians, actually studied apart from such activity. The Eucharist is, first and foremost, a doing both conceptually as the act of ‘thanking’ the Father, ‘offering’ praise and ‘sacrifice’, and also empirically as an action performed by Christians: the doing of liturgy, the carrying out of a ritual, the performance of that action which is part of the living out of discipleship whether it is held to be central or peripheral or granted status for some other reason. It will, at once, be objected that no action is free of its conceptual framework – which is true: we act with purpose and deliberation as human agents – and that that framework is supplied by faith given form as doctrine or theology, and so the Eucharist is a working out of that understanding, and, consequently, we must start with doctrine! However, practical activity has its own dynamics within human societies, and it is this that is the primary communication between those who take part, and it is the demands of practice that shape developments. Doctrine does play a part but as we shall see, time and again, it tends to follow practice – as explanation – and when it is used as the rational driver of practice – most famously in the period after the Reformation – it often merely mutated practice and produced practical ends very different from those intended.⁴ Moreover, the Eucharist is a ritual action, and within the sphere of human action ritual has a specifically repetitive function of its own – the Eucharist is acted out repeatedly with a constancy and consistency that is quite independent of theological reflection upon the action.⁵ In short, Christian praxis has an integrity and dynamic of its own, and this deserves to be seen as a key to understanding what the Eucharist has meant to groups of Christians over the millennia. This approach will strike many Christians as strange, indeed suspect, who, by contrast, would wish to designate the Eucharist as a ‘mystery’ to be grappled with from their perspective as observers. This reifies the Eucharist while ignoring the fact that its development, both in practice and explanation, has been within the structures of community action and repetition. Hence that legacy of practice cannot be excluded from a study of the Eucharist.

At this point an example may clarify the approach. The Venerable Bede (673–735) never elaborated a formal theology of the Eucharist while his exegesis of ‘eucharistic passages’ is not very enlightening theologically; yet it is clear from his historical writings that the Eucharist was at the centre of not only his own life and identity as a priest-monk, but also his community’s liturgical practice, while he saw it as central to the work of the church and the salvation of the English people. However, before one see this centrality in terms of the centrality ascribed to the Eucharist in Vatican II, one should note that the two key reasons for interest were radically different. First, a Mass, and so by implication a multiplicity of Masses, was the most sure and powerful spiritual force by which someone in painful waiting post mortem for the Second Coming could be transferred to ‘sweet and pleasant pastures’ while waiting for all purgation to be complete. Therefore Masses, note the plural,⁶ allowed one to rest in peace, literally, while awaiting one’s final entry to paradise. Second, all nations, baptized or not, had a system of sacrifice: it was part of human cosmology, but these were either defective (in the time of the Old Testament) or deranged, that is, offered to demons (among pagans); and these were replaced by a system by which sacrifices could be offered that were pure, holy and acceptable.⁷

Returning to the starting point of this book with actual practice, we could note that the reasonableness of such a starting point follows from the fact that when we look at the earliest historical references we possess having a bearing on the topic – the references by Paul when writing to the church in Corinth – we have an account of a memory of an activity by Jesus which is intended as giving guidance to the performance of an activity in the community in Corinth.⁸ It is the activity, rather than anything that can be said about it, that has primacy: Paul can encourage, explain, justify and correct, but these actions only have significance given that there is a recurrent activity in that community which has caught Paul’s attention. The key concern then in Paul’s letter, as in the Didache,⁹ or the Letter of Jude¹⁰ is that the activity be performed properly, and references to significance are tied to appropriateness of activity. Likewise, today, a theological position is only as good as it is an adequate expression of what a group of Christians believe about the nature of their activity in celebrating the Eucharist. The Eucharist is located in the realm of Christian praxis, irrespective of the status of that activity within the larger framework of discipleship, and so ‘eucharistic theology’ exists as reflection on practice, and, as shall be argued later, needs to be tested, revised and envisioned in terms of that relationship.

But such a starting point carries within it many other implications. Discipleship is a matter of tradition: it endures over time and it changes as an individual’s life and the make-up of the group to which she/he belongs changes; while the context of discipleship relates both to the social situation of the church to which one belongs and the history that church has inherited. The concerns about the Eucharist of a Christian growing up in a western Reformed tradition, except as a matter of academic appropriation, will not be those of someone who grew up in an eastern Orthodox church. Indeed, an outsider observing a modern western liturgy of any of the main western denominations and then an non-western liturgy – be it Greek, Armenian, Coptic, Syriac (of either form) or Ethiopian – would probably not recognize that all concerned would make claims to being engaged in an activity they all would trace to a common moment: the ecclesially formed ‘origin’ moment of the meal of Jesus before he suffered which became, as a memory, a standard part of the common didache of the churches¹¹ in the early second century (if not earlier).¹² Likewise, many of the debates and actions that have caused bitter divisions between Christians since the tenth century (between Greek and Latin Christians) or the sixteenth century (between various groups of western Christians) were not even issues a century or two before some specific development in practice emerged which then acted as the spur to comparisons and so one or other side being seen as deficient by the other. The subsequent work of theologians then justified those differences and so embedded them within their own group’s identity that they became issues on which they would rather see the body of the Christ rendered than to give way on them! What became bastions in controversy were often accidental, and idiotic, developments in practice, but which were transformed into ‘doctrines’ when fought over with all the tools that forensic rationality, philosophical insight and spiritual rhetoric could provide. The debate over the cup and the laity – ‘Subutraquism’ – which emerged in the west with Jan Huss (c. 1372–1415) in the early fifteenth century¹³ and which rumbles on still among Roman Catholics¹⁴ – is just the most obvious example from many instances of this phenomenon.

Such disputes should remind us that the Eucharist not only exists in the realm of praxis as a human activity, but also alert us that as such it changes over time. It is a phenomenon open to all the factors, good and bad, intended and unintended, which shape human lives and activities. This means that every manner of celebrating the Eucharist, and the theologies produced alongside those activities, needs to be identified as the product of a particular setting with a unique set of possibilities and limitations. Moreover, when this is inherited by another time and situation; it is then received as a datum, and like it or not, with the potential to be as much a distraction from a fruitful understanding of Christian tradition as it is to being the bearer of further enlightenment. All celebrations being the work of a moment are deficient in one way or another; and every group, whether as small as a specific gathering or as large as a denomination, has much to learn from each other and from the experiences of communities in the past. The churches are, to paraphrase Karl Rahner (1904–84), always remembering and always forgetting.

While the notion that doctrine is a function of communities’ histories is often acknowledged within the history of theology as a fact (hence there can be a history of theology and a history of liturgy), the key implication of that obvious assertion is less frequently grasped. A practice that was once life-giving and an expression of the best inheritance of the churches can become corrupt, while that which was at one time an imperfect expression of discipleship can, in a different world, hold out precious insights for renewal. Both practice and reflection can both improve and decay – and while there have been many desperate attempts to claim immunity from the ups and downs of history in the form of appeals to infallible traditions or inerrant texts, or more vague appeals to the work of Providence or the Spirit’s presence, the fact of the rich diversity of practices and understandings sets the factual limits to such doctrinal claims. Many valuable insights have been lost; many crucial aspects of Christian experience in relation to this practice have fizzled out as historical dead ends. While many of the developments that have gained prominence can be seen, by comparison with other practices, to have been mistaken paths.

There is a misleading tacit assumption in many theologians’ works to the effect that ‘our now [perhaps with a little tweaking] is as it was intended to be’; but even a cursory scan of the diversity of Christian practices shows that this cannot be the case – we have to accept that our practice may have gone down side-road after side-road – and have embedded results in both practice and debate which are far from the best practice of the churches. It was this recognition that ‘the now’ could not simply be assumed as the ideal – and such an assumption is the human default setting: that which I have done since childhood must both be ‘ok’ and in continuity with the ideal moment I associate with it – that was the driving force behind such work as John Henry Newman’s tests for ‘authentic developments’ in the nineteenth century.¹⁵ But while those tests might have seemed adequate to many then, they fail now given our far more complex understanding of the history of the churches, our more nuanced perception of how ‘theology’ is formed within human understanding, and the manner in which we approach the early literary products of the churches that form the anthology labelled ‘the N...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Starting points for a study of the Eucharist
• 2 The focus of eucharistic thinking: Thanking the Father
• 3 Locating our ritual: Food, community and prayer
• 4 Locating the Eucharist
• 5 Meals and Christian memories
• 6 Distinctive memories: The acts of blessing and their recollection
• 7 The common meal and the common good
• Bibliography
• Index
• General index
• Copyright