Eucharist and Ecclesiology

Essays in Honor of Dr. Everett Ferguson

Willis

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781498282932
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In the late twentieth century and since, ecumenical discussions on the nature and unity of the church have often centered on the Eucharist. This book is focused on that intersection of church and Eucharist in current Christian relationships.In the first part of the book representatives of the Orthodox tradition (Paul Meyendorff), the Roman Catholic tradition (Denis Farkasfalvy), and the Protestant tradition (Gary Badcock) discuss the relationship of Eucharist and church. These essays are followed by an overview and response to these theme essays by Everett Ferguson, who has published often on the topics.The second part of the book contains essays on particular issues important for understanding the Eucharist and Christian faith. These essays also come from the three theological traditions of the featured essays but focus on more specific issues behind the larger discussion. The essays address the New Testament texts on Eucharist and important later Christian writers.This book will be of value to scholars studying the Eucharist in the New Testament and the early Christian church, as well as to clergy who need to instruct congregations on the ecumenical discussions of the Eucharist.

part 1

Plenary Presentations

1

“Cheap Grace”

Ecumenism and the Problem of “Inter-Communion”

—Gary D. Badcock

Historically, eucharistic theology has served not only as a stable point of reference in Christian theology, but also as one of the key points around which controversy and tensions have tended to focus. Here both the substance of the faith, and the contradictions of theological theory, come to expression. The theology of the Eucharist was, for instance, used by Irenaeus of Lyons in the second century to ward off Docetism, on the grounds that it is precisely the body of the Lord that is communicated in it. Given the centrality of the Eucharist to early Christian worship, any implied denial of the words of Christ, “This is my body . . . ,” could be taken to be a danger and a lie, something alien to the Apostolic tradition and hostile to the true import of the gospel of Christ. Again, in the context of the scholastic revival of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the hold of the new scientific and metaphysical theories introduced from the Aristotelian tradition were nowhere more emphatically sealed than by the development of the doctrine of “transubstantiation.” Transubstantiation had become definitive Latin teaching by the early thirteenth century, after the eucharistic controversy of the twelfth, and on this basis was explored and extended by such theologians as Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Again, at the time of the Protestant Reformation, the theology of the Eucharist served as a focal point for divergent understandings of the meaning of justification, and therefore of sin, grace and salvation. Everything at issue, indeed, could be understood through the lens of divergent views of the Eucharist: the Eucharist as the church’s sacrificium on the one side, and the Lord’s body and blood offered to faith as pledge of Christ’s righteousness on the other.

In our time, however, debates about the Eucharist bring to focus a rather different, and in fact in many ways an entirely distinctive set of theological questions, clustered around ecclesiology. This is in and of itself an important observation, for it reveals the importance of the ecclesiological question in recent theology. The twentieth century saw, among other things, the “rediscovery” of the Christian East by the Christian West, the rise of the World Council of Churches, and the developments surrounding the Second Vatican Council, so that by the nineteen sixties, it seemed that earlier divisions between Christians, which had once been understood to relate to the whole nature of the gospel, now had come overwhelmingly to be concentrated in one question—ecclesiology.1 We are thus heirs of a century of ecumenical engagement that has brought about a transformation in Christian thought; indeed, in many ways we stand at a unique juncture in Christian history, in a situation that would have astonished our forebears. However, for all the effort, we have not arrived at a common eucharistic table; indeed, that goal is as elusive today as it was a half-century ago. This has led some even of the ecumenical movement’s most prominent representatives to conclude that failure beckons, and that ecumenical passion is now largely spent—Paul Avis, for instance, has ruefully written that today, “Inertia and apathy confront ecumenism on every side.”2 Perhaps it would be fairer to say simply that some of the most important questions have not yet been raised, and that there is much work to be done in entirely new phases of ecumenical labour. It is unrealistic to expect that a situation of division which has developed over long centuries should be resolved within the space of a few decades. Furthermore, new forms of Christianity have emerged, having little sense of an organic relation to the older Christian tradition (e.g., the house churches of Asia or the many global forms of Pentecostalism), with memberships that exceed those of many of the older, ecumenically engaged churches. These also must somehow be drawn into the ecumenical project. The fact that at the Eucharist, the church remains scandalously divided, therefore, merely reflects at this one point of intensity what is actually the case, and what ought not to be swept under the carpet.

It is in this context that I wish to consider a dominant, peculiarly Protestant approach to the overcoming of eucharistic division—the practice of “inter-communion.” It is difficult, of course, to speak of the Protestant world as a whole, since Protestantism is comprised of many hundreds of sects and sub-sects, not all of which say the same things or value the same practices. However, the relation between Eucharist and ecclesiology within the various Protestant churches is nowhere better expressed than in the widespread practice seen in Protestant churches of showing eucharistic hospitality to Christians of other traditions. Such hospitality is today not infrequently enjoyed by Roman Catholics in Protestant settings, even though for Roman Catholics such practice is strictly illicit and the sacrament is officially deemed to be fundamentally flawed. The same hospitality would no doubt also be extended to Orthodox Christians in certain settings, though there a similar prohibition is also in effect. Protestants themselves, of course, are technically excommunicated still by the Catholic and Orthodox, though there is the category of “pastoral necessity” that some individual Roman Catholic priests employ to permit a Protestant to receive. The general situation tends to entail today that Protestant Christians very often take offence that the same eucharistic hospitality shown to Catholics is not extended to them. Thus inter-communion tends to be, perforce, an inter-Protestant matter, and it is this particular feature of the Protestant tradition that is our immediate concern in what follows.

I use the term “inter-communion,” rather than its sibling, “open communion,” because it seems to me to represent more accurately the peculiar theological meaning of the practice. Rather than the Catholic or Orthodox “full communion” that involves at heart the idea of belonging to a single ecclesial body gathered around the bishop, in a church with a single sacramental structure, Protestant inter-communion conversely insists, generally on the basis of baptism and faith, that members of one church can share the Eucharist with members of another church, all the while retaining their distinct identities as members of quite separate institutional churches, with different ministries and often with discrete points of doctrine and practice that are not only mutually incompatible, but that as often as not are explicitly defined as such.

There are, of course, a variety of mechanisms by which this interchange at the sacramental level may be achieved, from informal arrangements that prevail among Christians at the local, congregational level; to more formal bilateral agreements existing between, let us say, Lutherans and Anglicans in a number of jurisdictions; to the common view that the true church is invisible, and therefore that the visible structures that we bump up against in “inter-denominational” relationships and rivalries ought not to matter ultimately, since they cannot be assumed to matter ultimately to God. However, what is common to them all is the notion that there can be one denomination, which itself exists as a “communion,” that celebrates something in the eucharistic meal commonly called “communion,” and that can share the latter but not the former with members of another denomination, which again exists as a separate “communion.” Thus, amid the resulting thicket of theological ambiguity, one can share the one sacrament of the body of Christ, without any expectation of visibly existing as one body in Christ. Let us ponder the significance of this practice.

To begin with, there is historical precedent—of a sort—within Protestant theology for the practice in view, though the point of it needs to be carefully qualified over against contemporary Protestant polity. It was, for instance, commonly understood in the sixteenth, seventeenth and even the eighteenth centuries that an Englishman abroad in Germany or Switzerland could rightly communicate in another Protestant church—in the case of the Englishman, allowing only for occasional scruples, this might regularly have involved an Anglican receiving communion in churches ordered without episcopal ministry. By the nineteenth century, English attitudes had hardened, particularly in connection with the Oxford Movement; by then, the religious position of the Englishman abroad had changed fundamentally, and the expectation that an Anglican gentleman should never receive the Eucharist from a Presbyterian—or worse still, a Congregationalist—became a commonplace. The original practice, curiously, is reflected in the ordinary expectations laid upon the British Crown. Most Anglicans, for instance, seem unaware that when Her Majesty the Queen (who is formally not simply a member but the Head of the Church of England) visits Scotland, she attends Presbyterian worship and is a communicant in the Church of Scotland. The practice in view is not a constitutional ruse, intended to keep unruly Scots happy with an English sovereign; it rather reflects the older expectation of which I have been speaking, an expectation embedded in Protestant liturgical practice at its origins.

There is, however, a key difference between these older forms of Protestant inter-communion, and what we (for the most part) know today. Our tendency is to think that the point of such practice was essentially one of mutual recognition, and so that the effect was to sanctify the differences between the Reformation churches, rather than to unite them. In fact, however, the reality is rather different, and its implication much more interesting. The rationale was (as is often the case) most clearly set out by John Calvin in the ecclesiological sections that dominate the overall structure of the Institutes of the Christian Religion. According to Calvin, who at this point is by no means unrepresentative of the broad sympathies of...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Contributors
• Part One: Plenary Presentations
• Part Two: Presented Essays