In the two previous sections – on the relationship between Eucharist and Christ event, and on the nature of sacrifice – we began by exploring the grounds of disagreement between revisionist and traditional theologians. We then introduced ideas drawn from non-theological studies of the phenomenon of religion in order to cast light on those issues and outline a theological position grounded in a broader anthropological perspective.
On the issues discussed on this final section, there appears to be no theological disagreement – not at least among the Catholics and orthodox Evangelicals who write on the Eucharist. Regarding the role of Christian sacrifice in the reproduction of community, Walker and Parry pretty much sum up the theological consensus to which I refer when they cite the words of John Zizioulas: ‘the Church constitutes the Eucharist while being constituted by it’. They then enlarge on this formulation as follows:
Theologically speaking, without the body of Christ (which is both the body of the individual man, Jesus, and the community that exists in him) the Eucharist is nothing – no church, no Eucharist. But by the same token the Eucharist is the sacramental means by which the Spirit enables us all to participate in an ongoing way in the one body of Christ (1 Cor 10:17) – no Eucharist, no church.
When it comes to the role of the Eucharist is reproducing Christian values, the same authors cite Rodney Clapp: ‘the Eucharist teaches and forms the church to sacrifice itself for the sake of the world. And in that sacrifice, of course, to gain its own life’. They go on to conclude that:
Holy Communion is ortho-praxia, right practice in terms of worship and formative for right practice in terms of Christian living.
I find little disagreement amongst my theologians on either point. Yet the question remains why the Eucharist should have this role in the reproduction of both the ecclesial social body, and its distinctive values. There are those who are very helpful on the questions treated earlier (e.g. Dix or Schmemann) yet leave us entirely in the dark on this.
The reason for this explanatory deficit, I suspect, is the same as the reason for the theological divergences on symbolism and mediation. Essentially, it is because the issue relates once again to matters pertaining, not specifically to Christianity, but to the whole religious phenomenon. In other words, to matters which exceed the domain of theology proper and which theologians are not, therefore, best qualified to explain.
I propose, therefore, to launch straight into an examination of anthropological discussions of the sacrificial phenomenon concerning the role of sacrifice in the reproduction of community and values.
Sacrifice and the reproduction of community
Let us restate, for the sake of clarity, the question we want to address. That question presupposes the idea that the Eucharistic sacrifice involves giving back to God out of what we have received, and it is as follows: Why this symbolic giving back invariably results in the reproduction of the Christian community of the Church.
Few theologians ask this question. So, it is hardly surprising we rarely find the question answered. It is altogether more surprising, however, that, in the one case known to me of the question being put in a theological context, the answer given is so very satisfactory – especially given its early date. That theological context is F.C.N. Hicks’ book, The Fulness of Sacrifice (1930).
Hicks approaches the question by distancing himself initially from the Christian theological context of the Eucharist, and considering it in relation to religious sacrifice more generally. This is precisely the approach I have advocated in this study.
Hicks’ answer is contained in the notion that the central action of religion, i.e. sacrifice, consists in the giving and sharing of life. This life is not just biological life, and its ‘giving and sharing’ is about more than nutrition and sexual reproduction. After all, we are fundamentally social creatures, no baby being able to feed itself. In practice, the sustaining of life includes the maintenance of those relational and social structures which enable human lives to continue, and the perpetuation of those structures down the generations. As Hicks puts it, ‘life’ means ‘life in society’. And by society, he doesn’t just mean states and kingdoms; he also means ‘micro-groups’ such as lineages and families.
Now, ultimately, sacrifice (or the giving and sharing of life) emanates from God; it lies in his hand and cannot by commanded by us human beings. But sacrifice, as we have already observed, is an operation – the central operation of religion – whereby, according to Hicks, human communities come to share in the giving that is initially God’s. Through sacrifice, in other words, we, as social beings and communities, become involved in God’s giving and sharing of life. And this includes the ritual production and reproduction of social structures like families as well as – indeed, simultaneously with – the production and reproduction of bodies. The idea Hicks clearly has in mind here (clearly derived from one the nineteenth-century pre-cursors of social anthropology, Robertson-Smith) is that of the totemic feast at which the sacrifice of the totemic animal (the animal that embodies the identity of the group) disseminates the clan spirit to the participants while at the same time giving meat to nourish their bodies.
If Hicks is right about all this, then we have an answer to our question. Unfortunately, what he supposes to be the empirical proof of his ideas – the evidence cited by William Robertson Smith in The Religion of the Semites – would now be dismissed by social anthropologists as very insubstantial, if not entirely fictitious. Of course, this does not necessarily invalidate those general intuitions about religion and society for which Hicks (or, for that matter, Robertson Smith and other anthropological precursors) claim such feeble support. In fact, I am going to argue that those intuitions are indeed sustainable, and find more solid ethnographic basis in the work of more recent social anthropology.
Before looking at that evidence, however, I want us to consider why Hicks’ answer to our question is not more self-evident to us – why, that is, it should be necessary to appeal to these anthropological theories in the first place. Once again, it goes back, as in the case of the symbol, to our contemporary tone-deafness regarding the phenomena of religion, and to the displacement of our religious sensibility by an alternative anti-religious – or, at least, anti-ritualist – ideology. What is so counter-intuitive to us today about the views of Hicks regarding religion and society has to do with the fact that he places sacrificial ritual at the heart of the production and reproduction of kinship relationships (i.e. family and lineage). This offends our sense of an absolute separation between, on the one hand, ‘genetic’ or ‘biological’ relationships, on the other, relationships that we can remove ourselves from at will (such as those of religion or political grouping). Hicks’ notion of sacrifice sits uncomfortably athwart this fundamental distinction. As we say, ‘You can choose your friends, but not your family’.
Our society sees the forging of a genuine kinship bond as necessarily engaging a natural (i.e. physiological) process, the modality of which is not subject to any human alteration – or not at least before the arrival of genetic engineering. God – or Nature – has ordained that it involves the encounter of a sperm and an egg. Thus, there can be no doubt or confusion over the boundary between natural and cultural processes – between what is ultimately binding and what can be freely exited from.
Yet, sacrificial societies, according to Hicks, see the forging of kinship as potentially engaging a far wider range of modalities, none of which can claim to the extra-cultural exclusivity of genetics. Kinship may, for example, be viewed as something transmitted through a range of means (e.g. the sharing of blood, or food) that have none of once-and-for-all-ness of the fertilized egg, and sometimes require extended cultural activity down the generations. The kinship relations thereby created carry obligations and are certainly not ones that can be freely exited from. But the resulting kinship bond does not necessarily overlap with genetic relatedness. It is also not an either/or thing but may be present to varying degrees. In short, ‘nature’, on this understanding of sacrifice, may be sacrosanct; but it is also something that humans participate in reproducing through extended ritual processes that constitute the most significant element of we might consider their ‘culture’.
The relevance of all this, for our purposes, is that it introduces a perspective from which the kind of engendering (for want of a better word) that assures the reproduction of, say, Robertson Smith’s West Semitic clan would not necessarily be qualitatively distinct from the kind of engendering whereby the Church reproduces herself through the ritual nourishment of the Eucharist. We have, in both cases, social reproduction through ritual. Now if Hicks is right that such social reproduction is at the heart of what religious ritual seeks to achieve, then we have our explanation of the relationships between Eucharistic ritual and the reproduction of the Church.
The question remains whether Hicks’ counter-intuitive view of the role of sacrifice can be justified on the basis of an ethnography more up-to-date and less fanciful than Robertson Smith’s.
The evidence of social anthropology
I would argue that, to a remarkable extent, it can. Furthermore, that Hicks’ understanding of the place of ritual in social reproduction can be shown to be remarkably prescient of developments in social anthropology since the 1960s. Before then, many ethnographic studies had brought to light the parallelism between religious and social structures. But the dominant strand of that discipline had tended to regard the social structures of kinship as foundational, and the religious practices as following in the groove of those structures. All this was about to change. Partly, because of the encounter of anthropologists with apparently more fluid and less hierarchized social structures in Melanesia which did not appear to fit the established pattern. Partly, because of new developments in anthropological theory which questioned the ‘essentialization’ of kinship. As a result, kinship identities came to be seen, not as a genealogical ‘given’, but as the product of an ongoing collective ritual ‘work’, sometimes extending over generations.
It is obviously impossible in a few words to give an adequate impression of the developments in social anthropology to which I refer. But a ground-breaking paper by Andrew Strathern gives us a snap-shot, as it were, of social anthropology at this decisive moment. The author takes stock of where anthropology had reached by the early 1970s, and sets out what he sees as the conclusions to be drawn from recent ethnography. Those conclusions, I would argue, have been corroborated, to a remarkable extent, by developments in social anthropology since that time.
Commenting on the way that kinship is not restricted to genealogical descent, he posits that clansmen ‘share substance in some way’; even that descent may often be more appropriately thought of in terms of shared substance (i.e. semen or blood) than of genealogical inheritance.’
Another way in which they (the tribal peoples of Melanesia) share substance is through consumption of food grown on clan land. Food builds their bodies and gives them substance just as their father’s semen and mother’s blood and milk give them substance in the womb and as small children. Hence it is through food that the identification of the sons of immigrants with their host group is strengthened. Food creates substance, just as procreation does ….
Strathern proceeds to make extensive reference to a then recent ethnography of a New Guinea Highlands people called the Siane. Kinship here is essentially patrilineal (ethnographic present), and is associated by the Siane themselves with the possession of ‘paternal spirit’ (korova). However, membership is open to sons of sisters of the clan, and also other men, whether kinsmen or not, who have been brought up in the clan village. The following passage from the study by Richard Salisbury describes the multiple ways in which this is achieved.
A child at conception is composed of paternal spirit (semen) and maternal spirit (blood). Ritual is performed to remove maternal spirit and infuse paternal spirit. Techniques of doing so are to play flutes before young male novices – the flutes represent the ancestors – and to give them flying-fox meat to eat (i.e. they eat creatures which also represent ancestors), and to expel maternal spirit in the form of blood through their noses … Paternal spirit may be introduced into a person in many ways. It may come from ‘the father’s semen, food eaten during childhood which contains spirit from the land on which it is grown, from pork, from a name, or from proximity to objects such as sacred flutes which symbolize korova … The individual has a direct relationship to the original clan ancestors, sharing their material essence … most of which is acquired through ceremonial or growth’.
Strathern evidently cites this instance because, on the basis of his knowledge of the New Guinea Highlands, he regards it as representative of how the tribesmen themselves understand social identity, and he wants to bring contemporary theorizing about kinship by social anthropologists into line with the lived experience of these peoples. Having myself personally read some of the more famous anthropological studies produced since this date I can attest that more recent studies in this domain have, if anything, further thrown the spotlight on the dependence of social structures of belonging on an ongoing process of collective ceremonial work to ensure their reproduction over the generations.
The rituals of which we are speaking do not, of course, much correspond to how Hicks, back in 1930, would have understood sacrifice. But that hardly matters. More important, I believe, is the way in which they demonstrate the central role of symbolic ritual in reproducing social structures.
From the perspective of the kind of symbolic ‘engenderings’ of which we have just been speaking, we can better appreciate the social significance of what goes on at Mt Sinai when Moses is described by the Exodus narrative as ‘dashing’ the blood collected from the covenantal sacrifice upon the assembled people. The perspective of social anthropology broadly supports the interpretation of Hicks (and later, John Dunnill) that the blood of the covenant is a kinship substance whose ritual dissemination amongst the participants in the ceremonial institutes in them a covenantal community – indeed, it constitutes them as that community. Yes, the process is symbolic. But in that respect it is, as we have just seen, no less an engendering than the process by which ‘blood’ comes to be shared through marriage. Either way, kinship is extended through symbolic means. It is because a covenantal identity is inaugurated at Mt Sinai that the people ‘beheld God, and ate and drank’.
Nor, from an anthropological perspective, is there any qualitative distinction between the manner of social engendering we see at Mt Sinai and the production of the ecclesial community through the ritual action initiated by Jesus at the Last Supper. Here, by a ritual process that seems to elide the two phases of the Mosaic covenantal sacrifice (first: sprinkling; second: drinking and beholding), the sacrificial blood of Christ becomes a shared ritual substance that renders God visible in the midst of a new sacrificial community. In all these cases – the tribe, the Jewish people and the Christian Church – it is a collective ritual action that ‘engenders’. And the recognition of this ritual production of kinship introduces a perspective from which the mode of reproduction of the tribe and that of the Christian Church do not stand on either side of a divide. The opposition of nature and culture is something introduced by our contemporary Western ideology of kinship. Rather they stand on a continuum of ritual symbolism that extends from largely genetically-linked groups at one end to groups in which the element of genetic inheritance is largely absent at the other. Correspondingly, there is, from this perspective, no absolute qualitative distinction between the social entities engendered through these symbolic operations. The West Semitic clan and the Christian covenantal community are, in equal measure, social entities reproduced through concerted socio-symbolic actions involving the use of blood.
From this perspective, the association of Eucharist and Church is something that no theologian – or anyone else – need scratch their heads over. And it is perspective that becomes available to us from the moment we allow the findings of social anthropology to introduce a little chink of doubt into what is an ideologically derived belief, where kinship is concerned: namely the contemporary dichotomy of nature and culture that effectively relegates all non-biologically-derived cultural structures to the class of mere voluntary associations.
Sacrifice and the reproduction of values
So much then for community. What then of the role of the Eucharist in reproducing values?
What, in other words, does the Eucharistic ritual have to do with that dedication of our whole lives to which Paul refers when he speaks in Romans of ‘living sacrifice’ and ‘reasonable/spiritual worship’?
There is some disagreement among our theologians here, as there was not in regard to the role of Eucharist in constituting the Church. This is rooted in the divergent attitudes to the nature of sacrifice discussed in the previous section. We can view the Eucharist as a participation in sacrifice – as a sacrifice that is, or becomes, both His and ours. In that case it must be possible, in principle, for those actions, His and ours, to be aligned. It follows that His – divine – action offers a ritual paradigm or pattern for our human actions. Alternatively, we can stress the uniqueness and unrepeatability of the initial divine sacrifice, and view the Eucharist as a mere commemoration of the Christ-event. In that case, we may apply the term sacrifice both to the Christ-event and our own ritual action of thanks and praise; but what is meant in the two cases will be very different – something expiatory in the one case, and an act of pure gratitude on the other. On this analysis, the idea that Christ-event could serve us as a paradigm for our own human actions becomes more problematic.
We have already, in the previous section, put the theological case for the first of these theological options – and it is not my intention to re-run that argument here. In the following paragraphs I want to show that, at the level of what can be said anthropologically about the way religious rituals have operated at all times and places, the formative relationship in Christianity of right worship to everyday practice, of Eucharist to St Paul’s ‘living sacrifice’ of our whole lives, appears entirely comprehensible. This is how religion works everywhere.
Think back to my example of the Merina tsodrano in the previous section. This little ritual hardly corresponds to most people’s idea of a sacrifice. There is no slaughter of domestic beasts, it will be remembered, just a coin offered up to a senior, who confers blessing on his juniors by sprinkling them with water that he blows across its surface. The Merina also performed the grander kind of rituals to which the term sacrifice is more normally applied. In fact, Maurice Bloch, our ethnographer here, introduces the tsodrano ritual on account of its analogies to those grander rituals, and as a means to explicating their meaning. For the anthropologist, the small everyday practice seems conveniently to encode the socio-religious structure he sees deployed on a larger scale elsewhere. The material wealth in this case may be just a coin, but the relationship signified by its upward movement, is one which, in other, more ceremonial contexts, could find more substantive material expression.
Now this example of the tsodrano can help us to understand what happens to the practice of sacrifice in confessional religions. What we find – along with the emphasis on individual intention, discussed in the previous section – is a decline or disappearance of ritual practices of sacrifice involving the consumption, often ostentatious, of substantive wealth. As the sociologist, Marcel Mauss, put it:
The gods and the spirits accept that the share of wealth and happiness that has been offered to them and had been hitherto destroyed in useless sacrifices should serve the poor and children.
But this is not to say that all kinds of ritual practice disappear. There often remain ritual practices that involve little conspicuous consumption (like the tsodrano). These ceremonially encode structures of socio-religious relationships that are then materialized in substantive religious generosity outside the ceremonial sphere. There is an obvious logic to all this. With the new emphasis on intention (described in the previous section), religious agency becomes the responsibility of every individual, rich or poor alike. This effectively requires the severing of the link between ritual observance and the capacity to expend substantive wealth on the public behalf. Accordingly, we see a split between the ceremonial and the substantive aspect of sacrificial giving. Ritual without substantive giving encodes a paradigm in the ceremonial sphere, which then finds substantive expression in everyday, generous actions of a non-ceremonial kind. The result is that the spiritual value of the gift is no longer seen as proportionate to its size in absolute terms. The ‘widow’s mite’ is superior to the much larger gifts of those who can easily spare what they give. From the spiritual perspective, it is the intention of the donor that counts, and the everyday (i.e. non-ceremonial) expression of that intention will depend entirely of on that donor’s material circumstances.
The Eucharist, therefore, stands in the same relationship towards St Paul’s ‘spiritual sacrifice’ as do the rituals of other confessional religions towards the everyday practices that they serve to inculcate. As, therefore, in the case of symbol and mediation, the explanation we are seeking lies in a universal characteristic of confessional religion. In the following paragraphs I shall illustrate this characteristic using the instances of Islam and Christianity. At the same time, their juxtaposition will throw into relief the diverseness of religious paradigms encoded in the ritual, and expressed in the everyday practice, of the two faiths.
We have already described the fundamental pattern of Muslim sacrifice as we find it expressed in the rituals of prayer (sadaka) or in the celebration of Eid. The offering of the whole self is made by each Muslim individual for themselves, and is made exclusively in relation to the one God, who, in his capacity of recipient of that offering, is sharply distinguished from any human being. Community is therefore only invoked, as it were, incidentally – in the sense that the common behaviour of all other Muslim individuals also addressing themselves exclusively to the same God marks out a cultural space centring on a common symbolic axis.
Does this fundamental paradigm of sacrifice find any expression in substantive everyday actions outside the ceremonial sphere? The answer is – surprisingly – yes. ‘Surprisingly’ – because the gift of what is not just the unseen devotion of one’s heart (indeed the gift of anything involving stuff in the outside world) will inevitably implicate some human recipient. After all, God, so the Qu’ran informs us, does not require our ‘stuff’. So, what would count as an everyday substantive expression of such a paradigm?
In a word, it is sadaka, a form of gift which is regarded by Muslims as having a religious intent. This giving is not ceremonial and includes an enormously diverse range of generous practices such as: giving assistance with the loading of a beast; every step taken towards prayer; lawful intercourse with one’s wife; greeting with a smile – in fact, just about any conceivable act of kindness, not excluding, of course, generosity involving substantive expenditure. The idea that such everyday actions are the practical outworking of what is manifested symbolically in ceremonial action is fundamental to the Muslim faith. Popular etymology associates sadaka with the idea of the sincerity (sidk) of the almsgiver’s religious belief. ‘Our symbolic act finds practical expression in benevolence’, remarks one well-known Qur’anic commentator.
How does this generosity express the paradigm manifested in worship – seeing that God Himself does not directly benefit from any of these actions? Well, actions that are genuinely sadaka are so by virtue of the intention of the individual Muslim to offer worship to God in performing them. They involve the offering of self by the individual – an offering that every individual offers for themselves. That, it will be remembered was the first point of the paradigm. They are also addressed exclusively to God, who, in his capacity of recipient is sharply marked off from any human being. That was the second point. But how can such conditions be realized, given the content of the offering is no longer pure ‘devotion’ (taqwa), as in prayer, but involves things in the world? The answer is that the relationship established with the human recipient of this content is seen as incidental to the gift’s intention, which is to honour God. The gift of sadaka may – indeed, probably, will – end up meeting the material or spiritual need of some human recipient; but that is not the important thing for the giver, whose primary motivation, if the gift is genuinely sadaka, will be to offer himself to God, and ultimately, gain a purely spiritual reward. Needless to say, any hint of reciprocity in the gift would annul its status as sadaka. The conditions for that status have been set out by Muslim jurists. In addition to the renunciation of any prospect of return (other than a heavenly reward), they stipulate the irrevocability of the gift. The implications of this latter condition are very evident in the practice of the particular form of charitable giving constituted by the religious bequest or legacy (waqf). These post-mortem donations (prior to modernity, the chief means of supporting the institutions dominated by the Islamic social elites (ulema)) were tied up under legal provisions (i.e. waqf) that had to reflect the requirements of sadaka. As such, these resources served the purposes of religion, and were controlled by trustees bound by the conditions of the original donor. In other words, such resources were inalienable.
A value system is reflected not only in individual and collective behaviour but in the structures that derive from it. As with the ritual, so in the substantive giving, the kind of community implied by these arrangements emerges almost as a by-product of a religious activity that is primarily individual but directed in each case to a similar goal. This was our third point. In practice, the resources given fund a kind of religious culture rather than a bounded political entity – an apparatus of mosques, madrasas, courts and markets, broadly comparable throughout the pre-industrial Islamic world, staffed largely by ulema supported out of waqf endowments and ministering to common perceived material and spiritual needs. A more political form of corporate identity emerges only out of the need to safeguard this instinctive and apparently natural form of individually-motivated religious behaviour against the wilful perversity of those non-Muslim enemies who might seek to curtail or restrict it.
So much, then, for the relationship of ceremonial ritual to substantive giving in Islam. It now remains to demonstrate that a similar relationship exists in Christianity. In so doing, we will achieve our initial goal of finding an explanation for the role of Eucharistic ritual in the reproduction of Christian values. Simultaneously, we will bring into sharp relief the contrasting nature of the paradigm encoded by Eucharistic ceremonial and substantively expressed in the ‘spiritual sacrifice’ of Christian charity.
The fundamental pattern of Christian Eucharistic sacrifice has already been restated a number of times. The most important points are as follows.
First, the Eucharist is not (unlike salat) a kind of sacrifice that each believer offers for themselves. Christianity does not believe that any such unmediated sacrifice on the part of human beings would be acceptable to the God of Holiness – let alone meritorious. The Eucharist is essentially Christ’s sacrifice before it is ours. Indeed, our ‘sacrifice’ only properly becomes sacrifice at all through its participation in the one sacrifice of Christ – a participation effectively guaranteed by its Eucharistic form.
Second, the divine recipient of the ceremonial gift is not sharply distinguished from any human party (as it is in any form of Muslim giving). On the contrary, every aspect of the ritual speaks of a union of divine and human – or, rather, perhaps, we should say (following Athanasius), a taking up of the human into the divine; there is our offering of bread transformed into the divine body of Christ, and then the incorporation of that divine body once again into our physical human bodies. In the early Church (and even later on in the Eastern church) the bread used for the ceremonial originated from the lay worshippers, and was never very sharply distinguished from the offerings intended for the poor and needy in the Church. It was given to ‘deacons’ who had the everyday responsibility for administering charity as well as the ceremonial one (at the Eucharist) of conveying the offering plate to the presiding bishop for him to place on the altar.
Third, the element of community, which is evoked only incidentally in the Muslim rituals, is foregrounded by the Eucharistic paradigm. Indeed, one might say that, whereas in Islam the need to give to God comes first, and a community of giving only emerges as a kind of inevitable by-product of the individual duty of sacrifice, in Christianity practically the contrary holds: the possibility of a community of giving, guaranteed by the sacrifice of Christ, precedes that of an acceptable sacrifice to God.
When it comes to substantive giving outside the ceremonial sphere, we see these various Eucharistic characteristics clearly imprinted upon it.
First, the necessarily mediated nature of the Christian sacrifice articulated in the Eucharist produces, when it comes to daily acts of charity, the acute reaction – almost allergic in some variants of the faith – against any suggestion of salvation being earned, or even of merit being accrued, by the our ‘works’. From the perspective of Christianity, not only the Muslim ritual practices but the attitudes towards charitable giving have the air of a ‘works-based’ righteousness that is antipathetic to our sense of ‘Grace alone’.
Second, the human recipient of the substantive gift, far from being a third-party whose involvement threatens the purity of the donor’s intention, enjoys a status no less ennobling than that of the donor themselves, as someone whose role offers the donor an opportunity for religious giving. As Christ himself puts it, ‘Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me’. In other words, Christ identifies himself with the role of the recipient of the religious giving as much as he does with the donor.
Third, community is primary where sacrificial giving is concerned, not just invoked incidentally (as in Islam). This is exemplified, in the case of the substantive expression of the paradigm, by the gift described by St Paul in a passage of the Second Letter to the Corinthians – a gift he intends them and other gentile Christians to send to the Jewish home church in Judaea. Yes, in practice, Muslim sadaka responds to the needs of believing Muslims and, so, maps out a community in a notional kind of way. But, in principle, at least, Muslim identity is conferred by individual belief, and that belief is, in any case, the self-evident obligation of every human being. So, the sense of a community is not foregrounded. The Christian religious gift, on the other hand, seeks to respond specifically to the material and spiritual needs, not of every right-minded individual (‘for in thy sight shall no man living be justified’), but the defined group of those who have responded to God’s call, and whose sacrificial giving is mediated through Christ. Christian charity flows between different parts of that sacred community which is ‘the body of Christ’, effectively marking out its bounds, and nourishing all its ‘members’, both donors and recipients. It seems inappropriate to speak of reciprocity in the Christian context – but for very different reasons than in the context of Islam. If the Christian recipient is not exactly seen as a ‘reciprocal’ partner, it is not because they must be contained within the role of a distant ‘third party’, but, quite to the contrary, because they are too close – just as informal everyday relationships between family members are sometimes distinguished from ‘reciprocal’ relationships, for the reason that they are considered as sharing an identity. Christian charity is like the blood that flows around the body of Christ, sustaining every member in its common purpose.
It will already be obvious that, at the structural level, what distinguishes Christianity from Islam and other faiths is the particular form of social organization we term the Church. The Church is not about propagating certain principles that all men would agree to be self-evident – as is the Western Enlightenment, or Islam, for that matter. The Good News of the Gospel is clearly signalled by Scripture itself as ‘new’, and is certainly not reducible to any pre-existing principles. Instead, the Church is about modelling to those outside a new way of living and a new form of community. It does this in the hope that those who do not share its way of life will be attracted by what they see, and themselves take the step of conversion. It follows that the Church needs to be clearly demarcated from the world around; by nature, it is a bounded community. Provisionally, at least, this condemns it to being a community within a community; but its ultimate aspiration is to leave no human soul beyond its boundaries.
I have spoken of Christian values in terms of a ‘paradigm’ that is ‘encoded’ in ceremonial and ‘expressed’ in substantive giving outside the ritual sphere. This is a sociological or anthropological way of talking. It seems to identify the ultimate goal of religion with observable social behaviours and structures, and to place ritual in a secondary relationship to those behaviours and structures as a kind of blueprint or plan that finds is goal through actualization in the non-ritual sphere. There is, I believe, a real value in such a perspective. If we want to demonstrate what a religious ritual like the Eucharist might have to do with the reproduction of individual and collective practices such as those associated with Christian charity, then this kind of approach will help us achieve this. Hence the methodology we have adopted in this section.
On the other hand, there is a sense in which it falsifies the true relationship between ritual and practice, as perceived by believers – at least in Christianity. Actually, the relationship between Eucharist and our present individual and collective behaviour is not that of a blueprint to its realization – rather the contrary. We need to bear in mind the grand vision with which we concluded the first section of this chapter, where we claimed that, in the Eucharist, believers quite literarily ascend into the heavenly tabernacle in order to return from the experience transformed. From a Christian perspective, it is the Eucharist itself that already constitutes the consummate realization of that sacrifice of which our everyday practices are destined to offer only a faded approximation. In other words, what we have termed the ‘paradigm’ is actually the full reality – not the other way round.
But neither does the language of ‘blueprint’ and ‘realization’ really apply very well to the relationship of our present Eucharist to the future Kingdom of the eschaton. For our Eucharistic sacrifice is not a shadow or foretaste of that future reality, it is already a full manifestation of it – albeit in the only mode in which that reality can yet be fully manifested. The time is yet to come when it might be said as of present reality that ‘The City of God is also His Temple: worship and service …. are only two sides of an inseparable whole’. It is not just that our individual and collective service falls short; the ‘City of God’ will only wholly be the ‘City of God’ when it achieves that universality that is God’s ultimate intention for it. Until that time, the world is fragmented, and that state of fragmentation itself impacts on our individual and collective attempts to realize our worship as service and to transform our City into His Temple. But no theoretical limit is set on the extension of that City, nor on sanctification of our individual and collective lives. And, pending the eschaton, the Eucharistic worship of that Temple remains, not just as a sign of the Kingdom still to come but as the reality of that Kingdom, such as we are able already to experience in it in the present time – namely, in our Eucharistic worship.
How strange, then, that it has been sacrificial status of the Eucharist itself that has, historically, been a point of contention amongst Christians. There might perhaps be some reasonable grounds for refusing the term sacrifice to the non-ceremonial offering that Christians make of the everyday lives, the ‘spiritual sacrifice’ of Paul’s Letter to the Romans – given that it always falls short. But the form of the Eucharist is not something sullied by such human imperfection; it is entirely of God, as was the blueprint of the temple cult given to Moses. Here, if anywhere, our human hearts are refashioned after the divine model, our values transformed, so that we convey something of that light into the everyday realities of our lives in the world. Let us just remind ourselves at this point of what we said in the second section of this chapter about the sacrificial modality of this crucial ‘refashioning’:
In the Eucharistic bread and wine (‘work of human hands’) we offer ourselves – our livelihoods, our projects, all that we are. But we offer them not individually, but collectively as the Church. And we offer them in order that we ourselves (as symbolized by our gifts laid on the altar) may become, in actuality and at this moment within time, what notionally we already are before God: the body of Christ. In this way, the actuality of our individual and collective lives, now no longer held back in rebellious independence from God, but offered up in unity with the sacrifice of Jesus, is transformed into the living body of ascended and glorified Christ. When we then receive this living body back from the altar, and we take it into our physical bodies, we become what we truly are. ‘If you have received well,’ says Augustine, ‘you are that which you have received’. ‘Your mystery is laid on the table of the Lord, your mystery you receive. To that which you are you answer “Amen”, and in answering you assent. For you hear the words “the Body of Christ” and you answer “Amen”. Be a member of the Body of Christ that the Amen may be true.’
[1] Hicks, p. 272
[2] Mascall, p. 95, citing Vonier; Colwell, p. 168
[3] Bouyer, p.85
[4] p. 86
[5] Pp. 178-185: ‘The Eucharist and the order of creation’
[6] P.106
[7] P.107
[8] P.121
[9] Colewell, p. 121
3. WHAT’S WRONG WITH PENAL SUBSTITUTION
4. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: THE ‘MULTI-MODELS’ APPROACH
5. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: TOM WRIGHT