1: How does our Eucharist ‘participate’ in the Christ’s sacrifice?

How can participation in a two thousand year old event be ‘real’?

There have broadly been two approaches taken to answering this question.

The eucharistic sign/symbol as traditionally understood

The first is the one adopted by the majority of theologians both Protestant and Catholic. They tell us that that sign/symbol (in the theological sense) does NOT mean what in other contexts we might expect it to mean.  The symbol in question is a ‘sacramental’ symbol – and, as such, something so mysterious as to exceed our intellectual capacity to grasp.

As to what can be said of it in positive terms, there is not much it would seem – other than the mysterious property sometimes attributed to it of ‘bringing about what it signifies’.

Further, these theologians candidly admit that the eucharistic symbol/sign is indeed unique – and in every respect.  Constant recourse to the term sacramental is testimony to this.  This is, without doubt, the most abused word in the theological dictionary, being so rarely employed outside the context of liturgiological discussions of Christian rituals that it conveys no positive content beyond the attribution of an exceptionality that Christian rituals are assumed to possess by virtue of being Christian. Hence formulations such as the following:

The sacramental world is a new world created by God, entirely different from the world of nature and even from the world of spirits … Sacraments are a new creation with entirely new laws. …. To speak of this sacramental presence is to say something entirely distinctive, something entirely other than any general spatial presence: Christ’s presence here is unique; he is present here in a manner in which he is present nowhere else; he is present ‘sacramentally’(18)

If this is the best theology can do on the eucharistic symbol, then we should just forget about a eucharistic soteriology, and return to a non-sacrificial theology on the lines N.T. Wright (with or without penal substitution).

But, actually, there IS an alternative ….

A better understanding

You will find it in well-known studies of which the most influential for me have been: Gregory Dix (The Shape of the Liturgy); F.C.N. Hicks (The Fulness of Sacrifice); Alexander Schmemann (Eucharist); Edward Kilmartin (History of the Eucharist in the Latin West); Louis Bouyer (Eucharist); Henri de Lubac (Corpus Mysticum).  It claims to go back to an earlier, pre-Reformation, understanding of the eucharistic symbol, and seems to have been arrived at by progressive-orientated theologians from across the denominational spectrum (Anglican, Roman Catholic, Orthodox).

This and subsequent chapters will make out a case for what these authors claim about the eucharistic symbol. But they will do so in a novel way, making use of the relevant evidence from non-theological disciplines.

Why?

Theological writers, including those mentioned above, fail to make any distinction between characteristics of the religious symbol common to every case of religious symbolism and those specific to Christianity. As a result, we end up with a concept of symbol that is constructed on the basis of how the theologian understands the Christian Eucharist, re-applied – would you believe? – to the Christian Eucharist.

I hope, in following posts, to do something better than that. I shall begin by drawing on non-theological sources for an account of the religious symbol that has more general application. Then, I shall re-examine theological accounts of the eucharistic symbol in the light of this material with a view to distinguishing aspects of symbolism that are common to every religion, and those that are unique to Christianity.

I foresee major gains from adopting this approach. For a start, the accounts of the religious symbol to be found in adjacent (non-theological) disciplines lend considerable non-theological support to the accounts of the eucharistic symbol of our theologians.

Second, the perspective of comparative religion and anthropology challenges the universality of the presuppositions of Christianity’s interlocutors, according to which the strangely non-symbolic world of contemporary secularism constitutes the human norm, when it is, in reality, a cultural outlier.  This challenge, I believe, can serve the interests of Christian apologetic; but it requires us to stress what Christianity has in common with other religious belief-systems, rather than trying to make out that our faith is exceptional in every respect.

 

Entering the forest of symbols

Religious symbol vs. metaphor

What then, in the context of religion, do we mean by the ‘symbol’?

In answering this question, we face a problem not widely recognized either by theologians or by the general public.  I mean the dominance in our modern Western culture of a competing mode of semiotic relationship that is not, properly speaking, symbolic. For various complex reasons the symbol has been progressively upstaged in our culture by the metaphor, with the latter increasingly tending to frame our conceptualization of the entire field of semiotic relationships. This development has reached the point that even language which would more correctly be characterized as symbolic (such as religious language) comes to be re-classified by us as metaphorical. It is not just a matter of the symbol ceasing to be widely used or understood; it is one of metaphor acquiring cultural prestige: it has become ‘cool’ – and, as such, a source of temptation hard for the theologians to resist.

For all that, there exist studies of religious language (and not just theological ones) that combine an appreciation of the salience and prestige of metaphor in contemporary Western culture with an awareness that this privileging of metaphor has not been a feature of every time and place, and may not offer the most appropriate framework of interpretation in certain non-contemporary, and non-Western contexts.

A good case is the study of the role of metaphor in religious language by the feminist theologian, Sally Macfague.(19) Like many advocates of metaphor, she locates the distinctiveness of metaphor in the way it brings into relation terms – or rather, referents of terms (i.e. the realities to which those terms refer) – that are seemingly unrelated.  Let us take, for example, the metaphor contained in Shakespeare’s famous line from Macbeth: ‘Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave (stet) of care’. The distinctively metaphorical nature of the expression resides in the fact that the referents of the terms ‘sleave’ and ‘care’, brought by Shakespeare into such felicitous union, are ontologically so distinct. On the one hand, we have a piece of material; on the other, a mental state. Their fusion by Shakespeare into a single image is a subversive act of the human imagination which produces a temporary shock. Such metaphorical statements involve an equivocation – or as Macfague puts it – they ‘whisper’ that such a thing both is and is not so.

We should note, however, that it is the distinctiveness of metaphorthat Macfague defines in this way, and not metaphor itself.  Macfague knows, of course, that, in everyday language, the term metaphor can refer to figurative language that doesn’t involve equivocation. Consider, for example, the case of the conventionalized ‘dead’ metaphors that pepper our everyday discourse: e.g. ‘the leg of a table’, ‘the head of an organization’, ‘the heart of a problem’, etc.. Everyday speech would be impossible without the faculty exemplified by these expressions to stretch literal language to cover a range of objects and situations. Yet, they are, for all intents and purposes, uni-vocal, not equi-vocal, since they constitute the only way to name the things to which they refer.  What Macfague is actually doing, therefore, through her own use of the term metaphor is to privilege equivocal over univocal metaphor.  As, indeed, we all do when we refer to properly univocal metaphorical language as ‘dead’ – as if such expressions were once innovative juxtapositions, and had since become jaded.  Actually, there is nothing self-evident about this priority attributed to equivocal over univocal. It goes along with the cultural prestige of metaphor, mentioned earlier, and points to an underlying cultural bias (actually quite specific to the contemporary West) that places a high value in certain contexts on the mode of semiotic relationship manifested in equivocal, or live, metaphor.

So far, so uncontroversial.

Less familiar, and more interesting, is a passage towards the beginning of Macfague’s study where, in outlining the scope of the phenomenon she wants to analyse (i.e. metaphor), she makes a sharp distinction between the ‘creative tension’ of the metaphorical relation, and the symbolic relation, characterized as one of ‘ontological participation’. That is to say, with symbol, we have to do, not so much with of a thing being like another as about a thing, in some degree, actually being another.

What is this alternative mode of semiotic relation?

Essentially, semiotic relations of ontological participation are relationships inherent in things themselves, not relationships merely attributed to things by the human imagination. In other words, with ontological participation, we are speaking of an inter-connectivity between things that is humanly significant. An example of this familiar to many English speakers, is the analogy of humours and planetary influence so prevalent in the poetry of William Shakespeare. Poetically speaking, this language can function like metaphor. Yet, for those who shared Shakespeare’s worldview, the influence of planets on the human temperament constituted a natural phenomenon deriving from the interconnectivity of things in the world. Such relations can be the basis for human intervention in the world – for healing people, for example – not just for poetry.

At stake, then, with the possibility of symbolic, as opposed to metaphorical, relations is an entire worldview. With the former, we have a world where things outside us, like humours and planetary influences, can relate to each other in ways that implicate us. This Macfague describes, rather beautifully, as ‘a silent ontological web which reverberates with similarity within dissimilarity out to its furthest reaches’.  With the latter, the worldview presupposed by the contemporary dominance of metaphorical relations is one in which the interconnectivity between things is evacuated of all human significance, leaving, on the one hand, just things in themselves, on the other, the possibility of a kind of human significance imputed to those things by the imagination of a human subject.

The case of religious language

So much then for Macfague’s distinction of metaphor and the symbol. We now have to determine on which side of the metaphor:symbol distinction religious language belongs – i.e. language such as: ‘This is my body’. There is, as we have said, a fashionable tendency to revel in the ‘poetry’ (= metaphoricity) of such language. Others, more mindful of historical context, including the theologians mentioned above, insist on the essentially univocal character of the religious symbol.  

In this situation, there is much to be said, in my view, for turning to social anthropology, religious studies, and the discussions of religious language influenced by those disciplines in order to see how they characterize the symbolic language of religion. Admittedly, the religious language under discussion is often not that of Christianity.  Yet, I would argue, the clear parallels between the use of religious language we find there and the use of language in Christian ritual confer an obvious relevance on the discussions of religious language that we find in those disciplines.

We have seen how the language of planetary influence to be found in Shakespeare’s poetry might, in some contexts, form the basis of practical interventions in the world, such as attempts at healing people.  We find this corroborated by the studies of social anthropologists.  When Victor Turner famously analyses the symbolism of red, white and black, for example, it is in the context of ritual procedures designed to bring about a humanly significant transformation of the world.(20) These interventions are not purely verbal (unlike metaphor) but involve a fusion of word and act. And the effect they seek to bring about generally involves a transformation in human social and political realities. The example discussed by Turner revolves around the initiation of girls into the role of adult members of the clan – a process that brings about a collective transformation on the level of the clan as well as a personal transformation for the initiate.

The parallels with Christian sacramental symbolism here are evident. The symbolism of the Eucharist is no more ‘purely verbal’ than the language of the Ndembu ceremonies, but involves just such a fusion of word and act. Furthermore, the Eucharist, like the Ndembu initiation rite, effects a transformation of socio-religious realities, producing and reproducing in the assembled worshippers the mystical body of Christ which is the Church.  

How religious symbolism works

Yet these intuitions are confirmed when we turn to the fuller analysis of the symbolic relation offered by the religious studies scholar Catherine Bell, in her book Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice.(21)

Bell’s is an entirely secular analysis – one which, as I explain below, no believer could accept as it stands.  As an account of the structure of the symbolic relationship, however, it is entirely convincing, and based on the evidence of social anthropologist and specialists in comparative religion. If we want to approach Christian eucharistic symbolism from a more general comparative anthropological perspective, it offers an excellent point of departure.

She argues that symbolic relationships are characterized by their circular nature.  Ritual actions, including verbal actions (e.g. ‘this is my body’), project ‘organizing schemes’ on the ‘space-time environment’, and then re-absorb those schemes as the nature of reality itself.  The two poles of ritual act and environment – symbol and symbolized – become ‘homologized spheres’, which are ‘orchestrated’ (or ‘confused’ and ‘collapsed’) so as to produce ‘an experience of their basic identity or coherence’. 

Let us see how this works in the case of the Eucharist 

The ‘physical and verbal act’ of offering and consecrating the bread projects onto the ‘space-time environment’ of the assembly of a representative crowd of believers the ‘organizing scheme’ of Christ’s offering up of his own life to the Father.  The naturalization of that ‘organizing scheme’ comes about with the ‘homologizing’ of the two spheres: the offering of the bread at the Eucharist becomes the self-offering of Christ.  That we really have ‘homologizing’ here, rather than the ‘tension in union’ characteristic of metaphor, is reflected in the conviction participants have that the body Christ is ‘really present’ in the bread, and thus capable of being shared among the communicants.  There is no sense of the tensive opposition of metaphor between vehicle and tenor such as might make us re-conceptualize the one thing (bread) in terms of the other (body of Christ). Indeed, the focus is precisely not on the properties of the referents of the words bread and body of Christ, but on the transformation through those things of the assembled worshippers.

Two points stand out in relation to our discussion. 

The first is the extent to which Bell’s understanding of the symbol, based on ethnographical analyses, corroborates Macfague’s definition of it as a relation of ontological participation.  For both authors, symbolism is about one thing being or becoming another, not about the two things resembling each other. 

The second point is the way in which the structure of the symbolic relation described by Bell inverts the relational structure that Macfague attributes to metaphor.  With metaphor, we have a ‘tensive’ relationship which maintains the distinction of the two terms of the relationship, accompanying the assertion that something ‘is’ with the whisper that it ‘is not’; with symbol, we have ‘collapse’, ‘confusion’ or ‘homologizing’ of the poles with a view to producing an experience of ‘basic identity’ or ‘coherence’.

These considerations clinch our general argument that specifically religious language – such as that of the Eucharist – belongs in the category of symbol, not metaphor.  The concept of symbol pre-dominates in discussions of religious language by social anthropologists.  Bell mentions some who explicitly eschew the term metaphor, on the grounds that it is inappropriate to the uses of language that constitute the object of their study.  Her analysis of the phenomenon enables us to see why.

They also cast a helpful light on the phenomenon that confronts us in the Christian sacrament, allowing us to appreciate the very particular difficulties it poses for a contemporary world, governed, as we have argued, by the very different philosophical presuppositions involved in the culturally dominant concept and practice of metaphor.

The ‘reality’ of Christian symbolism

We stated earlier that, for all its usefulness, Bell’s understanding of symbol is not one a Christian can accept as it stands.  Its deficiency, from a Christian perspective, has to do with the religious stance of Bell rather than any shortcoming in her analysis.  All her talk of ‘projection’ and ‘organizing schemes’ tends to give the impression that what the religious participant sees cannot really be there.  Beyond the cultural ‘projections’ lies a world of things in themselves without humanly significant interconnectivity – the same world that confronts humans of any culture prior to their socially and culturally orchestrated attempts to make sense of it. 

Here, I think, we are up against a fundamental prejudice common to any comparatively-orientated discipline. Anthropologists are professionally committed to taking equally seriously all the diverse ‘realities’ they encounter when studying human cultures, while effectively bracketing out considerations of relative ‘truth’. This habit of thought is inevitably conducive to the notion of a religiously and culturally neutral object of experience beyond the lived realities of religion and culture – even if it doesn’t logically impose it. After all, it is hard to imagine how the ‘truth’ of our space-time environment could correspond to all the diverse ‘realities’ of human religions and cultures.  Yet, to privilege some over others runs counter to the anthropological instinct to take all of them equally seriously.  

Contrary to Bell, therefore, we need to insist that symbolism – at least in its Christian manifestation – does not operate on an exclusively subjective level.  From a Christian perspective, we are speaking of a fundamental real-life interconnectedness of things which is genuinely ‘there’.  It is not a question, then, of ‘organizing schemes’ in our collective imaginations projected onto reality and re-absorbed as though they were the nature of that reality.  For Christians, those projected and reabsorbed projections actually are the nature of reality.  In other words, the ‘organizing schemes’ are principles already active in the space-time environment prior to our recognition of them; our ‘projections’ are the human discernment of those principles; our ‘reabsorption’ of them is an appropriation of them as the reality of our individual and collective life. 

In the case of the Eucharist, there is something about ‘offering up the work of human hands’, though an instinct common to all humanity, that anticipates the redemptive self-offering of Christ; and there is something about food and drink itself that points to the body and blood of Christ. After all, God so ordered the world in creation that it should be capable, when the time came, of reflecting his purpose of redemption.  The same God who gives us the redemptive offering of Christ gives us the offering of the work of human hands through which it may be symbolized; and the same God who gives us Christ gives us food and drink.  There is consequently a real-life ontological connectedness between actions & experiences common to humanity and the redemptive action of Christ. 

Other religions would no doubt claim as much for their own symbolism, of course. But that does not disqualify the claims of Christianity – or oblige Christians to limit their claims, as Christians, to what comparative anthropologists would feel able to assert in their capacity of comparative anthropologists.

How Judaeo-Christian symbolism is different

There is, however, one aspect of Christian symbolism that is more specific to Christianity – if not perhaps unique to it. This is an aspect to which we refer when we describe some Christian symbolism as typological.

Typological symbolism involves ontological participation, like all religious symbolism. But the ontological participation is, in this case, a participation of phenomena over time, not just space. There is typological symbolism wherever we speak of earlier moments as ‘prefiguring’ or ‘anticipating’ later ones, or later moments as ‘fulfilling’ earlier ones. The sacrifice of Isaac and the sacrifice of Christ, for example, are often claimed to stand in this relation to each other, with the former ‘prefiguring’ or ‘anticipating’ the latter, and the latter ‘fulfilling’ the former.  The symbolizer in this kind of relation (i.e. Abraham’s sacrifice on Moriah) is termed the type, and the symbolized (i.e. Christ’s sacrifice at Golgotha) the antitype.

Typological symbolism is commonly assumed to be a peculiarly Christian phenomenon. Yet, I would argue that, at least in the broad sense we have attributed to the concept, it was already an established mode of Jewish thought and practice before Christianity.  I even believe there are instances we could point to outside the context of the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition. But that is not a widely accepted view, and demonstrating it would take us well beyond the intended scope of this essay.

Like other forms of symbolism, typological symbolism often occurs in the context of interventions designed to bring about a transformation of social reality.  A case that is well-known to me (from studies of the early development of the Eucharist) is the the symbolism associated with the Jewish concept of the memorial (Hebrew = zikkaron), such as we find exemplified in the act of blessing a ceremonial cup that concluded the Jewish meal (berakah), or the Passover meal itself.(22) 

The effect of such interventions, according to the liturgiologist, Louis Bouyer, is to make past events present.  The past events are the faithful acts whereby God had ratified his covenant promises to his chosen people – their deliverance from the Egyptians or their entry into the promised land.  The making present of these past events was – and is – done with a view to bringing about the future event of the ultimate, once-and-for-all, realization of those covenant promises through the coming of a messianic kingdom at the end of the age (eschaton).  Behind the ritual intervention is the idea that the God who had sealed his promise to make Israel a people for His own possession by opening the waters of the Red Sea could, on the basis of that miraculous act, be trustingly supplicated to accomplish that promise in full, and one day make Israel everything He had intended her to be.

What do we mean here by ‘to make present’? Clearly, not just ‘to evoke’ or ‘to prayerfully remind oneself’ – or ‘to remind God’, for that matter.  For, by making this kind of memorial the prayers of the suppliant Israel are aligned with the promises of her God.  As Bouyer puts it: ‘The people here is itself consecrated to the accomplishment of the divine plan’. To make present the promise of past event in this way is to forestall the future, through an alignment with the purposes of God that reproduces the community (i.e. ‘the people’) for whom, and through whom, the original promises are to be fulfilled. Thus, it could be said that the past moment of deliverance (of Israel out of Egypt) forestalls the moment of memorial (through which that past moment is integrated into the present reality of the Jewish community). This past-made-present moment of community anticipates, in its turn, a future moment at which God will at last bring to fulfilment what the past-made-present moment currently promises. This is an example of symbolic participation.  It is a relationship that is as ontological & participative as we find in cases of non-typological symbolism, yet one that links over time: past, present and future.

The relevance to Christianity of this Jewish instance of typological symbolism is obvious.  Indeed, the liturgiological studies from which I have drawn it see the Jewish memorial (both berakah itself and Passover) as a direct antecedent of the Christian Eucharist.  But let us briefly summarize the structural parallels between berakah/Passsover and Eucharist. The past moment that occupies the place of the redemption out of Egypt is, of course, the sacrificial self-offering of Christ – from incarnation, through resurrection, to ascension and Pentecost. No less than the deliverance out of Egypt, this constitutes a faithful act of God, calling a people to Himself. The present moment that occupies the place of berakah/Passover is, of course, the Eucharist. This ‘makes present’ the self-offering of Christ, and, through an alignment with the purposes of God, reproduces the community for whom and through whom the promises of the messianic Kingdom are fulfilled. Finally, the past-made-present moment of the Eucharist also has an eschatological dimension, and in this respect, recalls the Jewish hope of a restored community – though, as we shall see in the next chapter, the eschatological moment is no longer, strictly speaking, a future one.

The typological relationship and eschatology

Characteristic of typological symbolism wherever it occurs is a potential for eschatology.  By this I mean the understanding of time as progressing towards a putative moment of fulfilment (eschaton).  In this respect, Judaeo-Christian culture differs from cultures in which religious symbolism takes a non-typological form.  To summarize very briefly what it would require a whole chapter to explain at all adequately – the understanding of time in those other cultures is one, not of historical progress, but of cycles that invariably take society back to a primordial first moment of inception and renewal.  A good example would be the way ancient Egyptian culture saw the ritually maintained procession of each day, and each year, as a constant renewal of that primordial struggle of light over darkness that we see reflected in the origin myth of the triumph of Osiris and Horus over the powers of chaos.(23) 

The very different, eschatological, understanding of time implicit in typological symbolism is set out by, among others, the liturgiologist Gregory Dix.  Dix makes the point that the event which, in both cases, past and present events foreshadow – the event, in other words, which they symbolize typologically (i.e. the eschaton) – is not just an earthly event standing at the close of a historical sequence.  Of course, the moment of fulfilment in the coming of the messianic Kingdom is indeed that; yet it is also a moment that transcends history, marking the advent of ‘God’s time’, which is eternal, and, to that extent, outside time and history altogether.  The relevant passage is worth citing in its entirety:

The completion of history, ‘the End’ which manifests the ‘kingdom’ of God throughout history in all its parts, does not interrupt history or destroy it; it fulfils it.  All the divine values implicit and fragmentary in history are gathered up and revealed in the eschaton, which is ‘the End’ to which history moves. …. ‘The End’ is at once within history and beyond it, the consummation of time and its transmutation into what is beyond time, the ‘Age to come’.  Thus, the prophets both foresee the eschaton as a definite event, and yet are forced to describe it in the fantastic language of myth, for no merely temporal conceptions framed from the events of time can describe it.(p.258)(24)

Dix’s analysis enables us to see how the idea of a ‘completion of history’ goes along with the typological nature of Judaeo-Christian symbolism, as its inevitable corollary. 

It is because of the existence of an ultimate moment that is both in history and beyond it, located both in our time and God’s – and because of the extra-temporal dimension introduced by the possibility of such a moment – that we can say that one moment participates ontologically in another.  Why? Because the eschatological moment is eternal. Being eternal, it contains other moments, and, correlatively, those other moments are contained in the eschatological moment. It is in this sense that Passover/Eucharist participates in the eschaton. And because the eschatological moment is also a moment in history, the participation of the Passover/Eucharist in the eschaton is logically also its participation in another historical moment. One moment in time can therefore be said, as we stated earlier, to symbolize another.

(22) My discussion of zikkaron here is indebted to: Louis Bouyer, Eucharist (1966)

(23) For an excellent account of the cyclic view of time in Pharaonic Egypt, see: Francoise Dunand & Christiane Zivie-Coche, Gods and Men in Egypt (2004), pp.66ff.

(24) Citations from Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy [1945], Dacre Press, Westminster (second ed. 1945)

 

When Heaven meets earth

We have now reached the final stage of our exploration of the symbol.  We have discussed both symbolism and typological (or eschatological) symbolism.  It finally remains to consider the distinctiveness of the form of typological symbolism that characterizes Christianity. 

Christian typological symbolism

In the area of symbolism, as in other matters, I am wary of Christian particularism.  The distinctiveness of a Christian form of something – symbolism or sacrifice, for example – is not a conclusion to which I would want to leap prematurely.  In fact, the method I have pursued (and will continue to pursue) has been the very opposite: to avoid introducing the idea of Christian particularity for as long as it is practical to do so.  Yet, at the end of the day, the Christian form of typological symbolism is, I believe, distinctive.  Once again it is Dix who best explains how.

Broadly, things can be summed up as follows. 

For Jews (and, possibly, Buddhists and others), ‘the End’, or eschaton, comes – as might be expected – at the end of history.  Christian eschatology, on the other hand, achieves the curious feat of moving it to the middle. The moment that, for Christians, corresponds to the Jewish eschaton – the moment that sits both within, and yet beyond, historical time – is the moment of Christ’s ascent into glory.  This marks the culmination of a sequence of events securely anchored in history – incarnation, Cross, Resurrection – but itself transcends the frame of historical time.  It is within history, in the sense that the Ascension and Pentecost, were witnessed by human beings (the Apostles) who could presumably have reported the day and the hour of their occurrence.  Beyond history, in the sense that the sacrifice in the heavenly tabernacle inaugurated by Christ’s ascent into glory (as described in the Letter to the Hebrews) is eternal, and, as such, beyond our time and space. 

There is an important contrast to be drawn with Judaism here.  For Jews, the Last Day may be historical, but in the somewhat putative sense of an event that is yet to happen – and is destined, while history lasts, always to remain so. For Christians, the Last Day is an event that, for all its transcendent and eternal dimension, has already fully happened, and was witnessed to have happened on a given day of human history. 

More bizarrely still, it follows that the Eucharist, which enables us – as Christ’s followers – to participate in that moment, thereby brings us fully into union with something that is properly outside time itself.  For Christians, God’s time – ‘Heaven’ – is already united with the human history; it has come to earth.  The eschatological moment is no longer divided, as in Judaism, between a present ritual moment which points forward and a future realization to which the ritual points; it is fully expressed in the ritual present of our Eucharist.  The implications of this are mind blowing.  As Dix remarks somewhat staidly: 

The eucharist is the contact of time with the eternal fact of the Kingdom of God through Jesus.  In it the church within time continually, as it were, enters into its own eternal being in that Kingdom, ‘in Him’, as Body of Christ …(p.265)

The staggering reality of this is brought home altogether more arrestingly by Schmemann, who speaks of the Eucharist as the church’s ascension into Heaven to join the worship of the angels of Heaven:

The early Christians realized that in order to become the temple of the Holy Spirit they must ascend to heaven where Christ has ascended …(For the Life of the World, p.28)

It is this ascension, he claims, that the early Christians knew they were accomplishing in the Eucharist – and which Christians, whether or not they know it, still accomplish today. 

It is not ‘grace’ that comes down; it is the Church that enters into ‘grace,’ and grace means the new being, the Kingdom, the world to come.  And as the celebrant approaches the altar, the Church intones, the hymn which the angels eternally sing at the throne of God – ‘Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal’ …(p.31)

Dix and Schmemann – from the Anglican and Orthodox wings of the Christian Church, respectively – bring out the implications of Christian eschatology most clearly.  But a very similar understanding seems to underly the conclusions of the Roman Catholics, Edward Kilmartin and Robert Daly.  All of these theologians express the view that the Eucharist does not so much ‘re-present’ Christ’s sacrifice to the Christians assembled in an earthly temple as it does ‘re-present’ the sacrifice of the Christian assembly in the heavenly tabernacle. 

They (the early Christians) realized also that this ascension was the very condition of their mission in the world, of their ministry to the world.  For there – in heaven – they were immersed in the new life of the Kingdom; and when, after this ‘liturgy of ascension’, they returned into the world, their faces reflected the light, the ‘joy and peace’ of that Kingdom and they were truly its witnesses.(p.28)

Question 2: What is it for the Eucharist to be a sacrifice? Do we give, or just receive?

Dix vs. Maschall

We now come to the second of our three difficult issues. This goes back to my claim that our Eucharist is itself a sacrifice – in fact, that it is the continuation of an on-going sacrifice. This implies that Christians, acting as the Church, have sacrificial agency. In other words, we don’t just commemorate a past sacrifice that is Jesus’s – a sacrifice in which the agency belongs wholly to Christ, and the Church is only a recipient; we offer a sacrifice that is Jesus’ and our own. As such, we are participants in the sacrifice, not just recipients.

This is fully in line with the whole range of theology on which I have based this presentation; but it is so far against the grain of standard understandings of Christian sacrifice in Protestant Evangelicalism that further discussion seems called for.

Standard vs. alternative position on Christian sacrifice

The standard position more or less identifies Christian sacrifice with the atoning death.  It follows that the sacrifice is exclusively Christ’s.  

The alternative position proposed here holds that sacrifice is not just ‘atonement for sin’, but a counter-gift to the source of our being – albeit a counter-gift which, given human sinfulness, can only possess an atoning character. Needless to say, even in its quality of counter-gift, the sacrifice remains something decisively achieved by Christ through his Cross and Resurrection.  However, sacrifice when understood as counter-gift, suggests an action in which we can – and are required – to participate, whereas, understood uniquely as atoning death, it implies a once-for all transaction whose agency belongs exclusively to Christ  

The notion of participation is signalled by various respects in which the alternative position reflects a broader understanding of sacrifice.  In comparison with the standard position, the alternative one proposes a definition of sacrifice which includes: 1. not only a sacrificial death (Christ’s) but an act of self-offering in life and death (Christ’s and our own); 2. not only the atonement of Cross and altar (Christ’s) but an ongoing action of worship and praise (Christ’s and our own); 3. not only a relationship of Son to Father (Christ’s) but a movement of love and giving within the Trinity that spirals out to include ourselves.  In all these respects, we introduce a dimension of participation in sacrifice – by Christ’s followers acting in the Holy Spirit.

Of course, none of this is to deny either the indispensability of the sacrificial death, nor the necessity of atonement, nor the exclusivity of Christ’s role as our priestly redeemer.

Why, then, is the alternative position with its expanded notion of sacrifice, still so controversial?

Above all, I believe, because the possibility of sharing Christ’s sacrificial agency seems, from the point of view of the standard position, to undermine our sense of the necessity of his mediation. It suggests the idea of a direct sacrificial approach to God – the kind of thing we have been taught to associate with the pagan religions. Christianity is unique, we have all repeatedly been told, because it squares up to the reality of human sinfulness, and our inability, sinners that we are, to offer up anything of own that could be acceptable to a holy God. This is the kind of thing well encapsulated in Cranmer’s famous post-communion prayer:

And although we be unworthy, through our manifold sins, to offer unto thee any sacrifice, yet we beseech thee to accept this our bounden duty and service; not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offences, through Jesus Christ our Lord …

We can summarize the issues as follows.

Everyone agrees that in taking part in the Eucharist we offer up Christ’s sacrifice, his body and blood. But, in so doing, are we also offering to God the bread and wine itself – and, under those material symbols, the work of our own hands, and the substance of our own earthly lives?  Or do Christ and his Church have complementary roles in this sacrifice, such that Christ alone gives and the Church receives on the basis of his once-and-for-all gift?

The Church is unquestionably very divided on this.  Which side of the divide any church or denomination falls will be evidenced, as liturgiologists rejoice to point out, by the role in the liturgy it assigns to the offertory.  Where the theology is strongly ‘Christ alone’, the offertory will be seen as a mere preface to the sacrifice proper, not a part of the sacrifice itself.  So argues Eric Mascall, for example:

I would not describe (the Eucharist) as an offering of bread and wine, in the strict sense of an offering made to God’.(pp.182-183)(26)

We should therefore, he says, resist the tendency which ‘runs throughout the (pre-1970 Roman Catholic) Canon’ and is also implied by ‘the extreme prominence given to the offertory procession in many churches that have been affected by the Liturgical Movement’. Consider, he goes on, the four actions of Christ at the Last Supper: ‘He took, he blessed, he broke, he gave’. ‘The first of these, which corresponds to the offertory of the liturgy, was not an act of offering, but of reception: he took.’ Properly speaking, therefore the ‘offering’, is only a bringing of the elements to the altar for the sacramental rite. It does not, therefore, constitute a part of the rite itself (as it would, apparently, in pagan sacrifice). In this regard, aspects of some Catholic eucharistic celebrations blur an important distinction: they would suggest we make an offering of our own, whereas in reality what we offer is exclusively Christ’s.

From the other side of the theological divide, Alexander Schmemann cites the Eastern tradition of the proskomide or prothesis, in which gifts, including the bread and wine, were brought by the laity before the liturgy. ‘What’, he asks, ‘is the connection between this “preliminary” sacrifice and the offering that constitutes the essence of the Eucharist?’

In the consciousness, in the experience and in the practice of the early Church, the eucharistic sacrifice was offered not only on behalf of all and for all, but by all, and therefore the real offering by each of his own gift, his own sacrifice, was a basic condition of it.’(Eucharist, p.107)(27)

Is this a blasphemous presumption to offer directly, and of ourselves, what can be offered only once and for all by the cross of Christ?

No, Schmemann responds, because the gifts of the laity lying on the offering plate (diskos) are already sanctified by dint of their forward reference to the eucharistic rite that is to ensue.

When, preparing for the eucharistic mystery, we take the bread into our hands and place it on the diskos, we already know that this bread, like everything in the world, like the world itself, has been sanctified by the incarnation of the Son of God, by his becoming man, and that this sanctification consists in Christ’s restoration of the possibility for the world to become a sacrifice to God and for man to offer this sacrifice. What is destroyed and overcome is its “self-sufficiency”, which constitutes the essence of sin and which made bread only bread – the mortal food of mortal man, a partaking of sin and death. The element of ‘self-sufficiency’, in other words, is already overcome through the intention of the offerer, who avails himself of the possibility of sacrifice opened up by the self-offering of the Son of God.(p.110)

Thus, on both sides of the question we see the theological importance attributed to the question of the role of the offertory. For Gregory Dix, that seemingly arcane argument encapsulates the decisive issue between Eastern and Western strands of Christianity:

The difference between these two ways of receiving the people’s offerings may seem a mere question of convenience, something quite trifling; and so in itself it is. But if any young liturgical student seeking a useful subject for research should undertake to trace the actual process of development of structural differences between the Eastern and Western rites …, he will find that they all hinge upon this different development of the offertory in the two halves of Christendom. And if he should go further and seek to understand the much more sundering differences of ethos between the two types of rite …. He will find himself on point after point being led back by his analysis to this trivial original difference between East and West in their treatment of the people’s offerings …(pp.120-121)

Dix certainly brings out the theological issue underlying the difference of practice.  But one may doubt whether the theological difference is best characterized as an East vs. West thing.  For a start, what of Dix’s OWN theological position? Is he not an influential Westerner?  As, presumably, are those proponents of the Liturgical Movement berated by Mascall for their offertory processions, as well as many Catholics. 

I would suggest, therefore, that, for the West as for the East, there are now TWO widely held theological positions.

(26) Citation from Corpus Christi, Longmans, Green and co. (1953)

(27) Citations from The Eucharist, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press (1987)

19 What is at stake?

I want, at this point, to say a brief word about the position of some Protestant Evangelicals who claim to be attracted by a sacramental theology – largely because, as an Evangelical myself, this is the position I have personally been most exposed to, on the relatively infrequent occasion when I have heard the question of the ‘Lord’s Supper’ addressed.  How closely do the views I hear match up to a properly participatory understanding of the Eucharist?

Not, on the whole, very closely at all, I would suggest.  Let me here pick up on a couple of tendencies I have observed in studies which, while seeming to demonstrate an openness to sacramental theology, in reality indicate a blindness to the real issues.

First, there is a focus on sacraments in general, rather than what pertains to the Eucharist specifically, with the emphasis placed on what the sacraments have in common as sacraments.  Attention is diverted from those aspects of the Eucharist that set it apart: its distinctively collective orientation as a sacrament, not of individuals, but of the Church. Second, a widespread habit of explaining eucharistic participation in terms of a ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ that we ‘inhabit’ or ‘indwell’.  This tends to conflate ritual participation with the kind of empathy aroused by literary and cinematic fiction.

John Colwell’s Promise and Presence offers us the perfect illustration of the kind of thing I mean:

We are buried with him and raised with him; we become part of his story; his story becomes our story. In response to the question posed by the song, Were you there when they crucified my Lord, the answer is ‘Yes: (for me) 2 December 1962 when I was baptised into his death and, subsequently, whenever I share in the bread and wine of Communion.(p.121)(28)

The above passage is evidently intended as an emphatic declaration of the author’s sacramental sympathies. For our own purposes, it demonstrates the limitations of Evangelical theology at its most accommodating, and the degree to which it often falls short of a participatory position.  In Colwell, we find no inkling of a concept sacrifice that goes beyond the traditional focus on the atoning death; let alone any hint of the idea that the Church could collectively share in Christ’s mediatory and priestly role in regard to the world.  Rather, the appearance of a sacramental theology conceals a strongly individualist tendency that first characterizes the communion in the bread and wine as a repetition of what was initially accomplished by the author’s baptism, then roots it in a moment of his personal life-story. The song he cites places us as witnesses in the crowd, and nudges us towards an understanding of participation (‘his story becomes our story’) as empathy.

Broadly, Colwell’s position is fairly representative here of what I have found to be the dominant view in my own branch of the church.  Needless to say, that dominant view places it firmly on the traditional (non-participatory) side of the debate.

Two understandings of the Eucharist

What is at stake in this difference of understanding regarding the Eucharist, and how important is it?

Above all, the issue is theological.

For the likes of Dix and Schmemann, the Eucharist is about more than forgiveness of sins. It is about the whole people of God being caught up in the worship of Christ and the angels. This is not just the promise of a divine presence to be experienced at the eschaton, but the fulfilment of that promise here and now, as on the Mount of Transfiguration at Caesarea Philippi, moulding us individually and collectively through a sacrifice that is Christ’s and, by association, ours. 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’.(Dix, p.247)  Proponents of the standard position, even sacramentally-minded ones, would, I suspect, reject this vision. Chiefly, on the grounds that it encroaches on the role of Christ as sole mediator and arrogates to the collectivity of Christian believers a sacrificial agency that belongs to Christ alone.  

But there is also a more practical – we might say ecclesial – issue, at least where Protestant Evangelicals are concerned.  I shall say a few words about this before returning to the properly theological issue of mediation in the next chapter.

I am referring to the danger of an ‘over-realized eschatology’.  The fear, in other words, that the Church will seek ‘to be Christ’ in the here-and-now rather than contenting herself with her proper role as a sign or promise of Christ to come. Behind those words ‘over-realized eschatology’, loom, no doubt, time-consecrated memories of the pre-Reformation Church, with its political pretentions and clerical abuses: also, closer to home, unwarranted practices of the more recent Protestant past as ‘fencing the altar’ – necessitated by the same overweening ambition to embody the glorious reality to which, properly, the Church should only point.

How do we respond?

There is, I would argue, a distinction to be made – between the divine ‘blueprint’ constituted by the religious symbolism itself and its practical realization in the collective and individual lives of our ecclesial communities.  Of course, there is no question, prior to the eschaton, of a full and perfect realization of the Kingdom of God in any ecclesial institution. It goes without saying that, in the here-and-now, neither our individual actions nor those of our Church will altogether show forth the anticipated glory of the eschaton. Anyone advocating ‘fencing the altar’ on a regular basis (as against an exceptional measure directed against some particularly egregious sin) has clearly failed to grasp the role and importance of religious symbolism in our collective life.  Yet, surely the one place where our present life brings forward that anticipated state is that of our eucharistic worship. The blueprint, after all, is instituted by God, not by ourselves. It presents in the here-and-now the ideal pattern of sacrifice to which the whole of our lives (not just our worship) will one day be conformed.  So, here, at least, if nowhere else, we would seem already to be participating pre-emptively in the city of the world-to-come. There is much of Scripture (not to speak of eucharistic liturgies) that challenges us to see the praise of God’s people on earth as united with the praises of Heaven – the worship of the ‘four living creatures’ and the ‘twenty-four elders’ whose words have rooted themselves in our eucharistic rites:

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts/Heaven and earth are full of thy glory,/Hosannah in the highest.

After all, what, other than union with Heaven, could be the goal of our worship here on earth?

(28) Citation from John Colwell, Promise and Presence, Wipf & Stock (2005)

20 On mediation: a short ethnographic excursus

Now let us come to the key theological issue: the role of mediation and sacrificial agency.

Since disagreement here inevitably raises the question of what constitutes the basis of Christian uniqueness, I propose in what follows, to explore sacrificial mediation across the range of world religions. I shall do as I did in my exploration of the first of our three issues.  I shall take a step back from the theological discussion in order to consider the Eucharist in the broader context of other (non-Judaeo-Christian) forms of sacrifice. Such reflection will allow us to achieve a more objective grasp of just where the Christian understanding of sacrificial mediation stands on the spectrum of human religious practices and whether – and just where – Christianity speaks with a voice uniquely its own.

1. Mediation in archaic religions

The basic pattern of mediation – in complex and hierarchical societies – is as follows.

Generally, the gods to whom sacrifice is made are ancestral spirits, and are worshipped by their descendants. But – and here is the critical point – not all ancestors, and not all descendants of those ancestors, have the same religious status, or, for that matter, any status at all. There tend to exist dominant lineages with known ancestors who perform, in religion, a mediatory role in respect to other members of the community. The ancestors of dominant lineages are invoked by their descendants. But those on behalf of whom that ancestral favour and protection are invoked can extend well beyond the descendants of the dominant group to include a wider community in respect to which the dominant ancestors exercise a tutelary role, and their descendants a religious service.

The most well-known instances of this are large-scale politico-religious structures (now largely defunct), such as – to name just a few that happen to be known to me – the pre-revolutionary Chinese empire, African kingdoms like the Ashanti or the Zulu, or the Polynesian chiefdoms.(29) In these cases, the ancestors of the royal clan are the divine protectors of whole nations, and are approached as such by their royal devotees. But, in such strongly hierarchical states, this pattern of religious (or politico-religious) representation extends downwards to multiple subordinate levels.

So, for example, the mediatory function of the Zulu king in relation to those throughout the kingdom who are not members of the royal clan is (ethnographic present) mirrored at a microcosmic level in the role of the local dominant lineage head (umnumzane). The latter invokes his dead grand-father or great-grandfather on behalf of those not of his lineage who inhabit the lineage territory. Among the Ashanti, this replication of politico-religious mediation takes place at no less than four subordinate levels: division; sub-division and village. At each level, a dominant lineage head exercises a sacrificially-instituted authority over a territorial unit based on the tutelary role of his ancestral gods with respect to the local community that person represents.

The religious status of the mediator role generally goes along with socio-political, and economic, perquisites. Indeed, the case has frequently been made – not implausibly – that religious hierarchies lie at the origin of those socio-political and socio-economic inequalities invariably characteristic of more complex human societies. At all events, without the economic perquisites of religious status, sacrificial mediation of this kind could hardly be maintained. In effect, the structure of religious mediation generates an upward flow of resources from the community to those representatives who exercise a mediatory role through their sacrifices on the community’s behalf. This is what anthropologists have sometimes termed pooling. In practice, it can take very different forms in different societies: the expectation of prerogatives owed to seniority, an entitlement to embargo certain productive resources of the community for religious purposes, a claim to the first fruits of the harvest, the receipt of what is effectively a regular tribute, or even the right to corvée labour. The degree to which religious hierarchy hardens into political power, and a more-or-less obligatory offering becomes a tax, varies. But underlying such ‘gifts’ is a system of shared ideational belief which renders them in some sense consensual, though not voluntary. This is the faith in the tutelary role of the ancestors of the dominant group.

Corresponding to this upward movement of gifts and sacrifice is a downward movement of resources which anthropologists call redistribution. It is this element of reciprocity between the community and its representatives (and those representatives and the gods) that mitigates somewhat the sense of a tributary imposition. The principle invariably manifested by this downward phase of vertical exchange is that the humans who through their mediation channel the benevolence of the gods to their communities come to share in the aura of their sanctity. This, for all intents and purposes, is a fundamental law of human society. To exercise the power of the sacrificial giver is to acquire supernatural status. In practice, such sanctity is materialized in the largesse that the mediator – the divinized giver – then returns to the community through feasting and patronage. As with the upward arm of this vertical circuit, it is, in practice, hard, if not impossible, to distinguish human agency from divine, and religious gift from sacrifice.

A perfect illustration of the circuit of sacrificial reciprocity is to be found in an account by an eminent anthropologist of a small everyday ritual – the tsodrano – practised by the Merina of Madagascar, and apparently still current today.(30) A senior person positions his juniors in front of him. Placing a coin which they have offered him in a saucer of water, he raises the saucer to his lips and blows across the surface of the water, so as to sprinkle his juniors in an act of blessing. (Water is associated with the gods in various Merina rituals). He subsequently pockets the coin. Here, on a small scale, is the upward movement of material resource, balanced by the downward movement of divine blessing. The superiority of the gods manifested in sacrifice is reflected in the reciprocal but asymmetric relationships of the religious gift between represented and the mediator. At both levels, divine and human, the piety of the junior party is met by the benevolence of the senior.

This is the fundamental sacrificial schema.

2. Mediation in confessional religions

If what I have said sounds unfamiliar, this may be because it does not altogether apply – or applies only in part – to the pattern of socio-religious relationships that have prevailed over the last two thousand years in cultures and societies founded on – for want of a better term – confessional religions (i.e. Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and others). These show important modifications to this basic structure of sacrificial mediation.

These modifications are mainly owed to a new emphasis on intention – what the Bible calls the heart. There continues to be religious giving, but the motivation of the gift comes to matter more than its material content or its conformity to ritual protocol. Thus, in the case of Buddhism, for example, pious giving matters, because it manifests, on the part of the donor, an intentional disposition associated with the overcoming of attachment to the world – in effect, with good kamma.(31) Good kammatic states tend to engender good kammatic states in the future, drawing the giver into a virtuous circle of personal spiritual progress.  In Buddhism, this comes to matter more than the effect of the gift on the external world – for example, the alleviation of poverty or the propitiation of the gods.

What we see here has been described as an internalization or ethicization of the gift. It involves a sharp demarcation between the gift’s spiritual and its worldly value – and, corresponding to this, a demarcation of its spiritual and worldly beneficiaries.(32) Foremost is generally the spiritual value of the gift, which consists in the spiritual progress of which the donor is the primary, though by no means exclusive, beneficiary.  Of course, there is also a material level at which the gift benefits those to whom it is given, such as ‘virtuous recluses’ (i.e. monks) and other needy recipients. But the strict separation of these two levels divorces the gift from any expectation of reciprocity and material return on the part of the religious giver. To confuse spiritual and material levels by seeking a material return from a spiritual gift nullifies the spiritual value of the gift.

There are also certain hugely important social and political corollaries of this ideational revolution – above all, an individualization of religious agency. Essentially, if it’s the dispositional intention of the religious giver that matters, wealth in absolute terms comes to matter less. One no longer needs to be wealthy in order to participate in religious giving. Sacrifice now lies within the capacities of every individual, and pooling is no longer required.

Islam offers us a particularly good example of this.(33) The most important sacrificial offerings of Muslims, it is said, are those of prayer and charitable giving (sadaka). In these, each and every believer takes religious action on their own behalf – albeit around a common spiritual axis, materialized in prayer by the orientation towards Mecca (qiblah).  Animal sacrifice also takes place – every year at Eid, both in Mecca and in Muslim households.  And here too, a distinctively Muslim pattern of individualization prevails, with sacrificial animals associated with named donors, and adhering to a fixed, and relatively uniform, prescription.  Systematically excluded by all Muslim religious practices is the possibility of the agency of one person on behalf of another. Indeed, the whole idea of religious mediation, associated as it generally is with the divinization of the giver, implies for the Muslim a violation of the principle of God’s unity (shirk).  Devotion belongs to God; the material content of the offering goes, as a rule, to the poor and needy.

(29) For a concise account of these socio-religious structures: Leslie Goode, ‘”Creating Descent” after Nancy Jay’, in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 21.4 (2009)

(30) Maurice Bloch, ‘The Royal Bath in Madagascar’, in Rituals of Royalty, ed. David Cannadine & Simon Price (1987), pp.271-297

(31) For ethicization in Theravada Buddhism, see Richard Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism (1988)

(32) On ethicization in confessional religions, see Jonathan Parry, ‘The Gift, the Indian Gift , and the “Indian” Gift’, in Man, new series, 21.3 (September 1986), pp. 453-473

(33) Overview of ethicization in Islam given in Leslie Goode, Re-evaluating the relationship between Christian salvation event and ‘history of religions’ sacrifice, PhD Thesis (2018)

21 So where does Christianity stand on mediation?

Christianity demonstrates an internalization of sacrifice such as I described for other religions in my last chapter (Theravada Buddhism and Islam). This is a tendency which was probably present in Judaism from the outset, but becomes strongly marked in prophetic texts which attack the idea that the outward forms of cultic ritual can be pleasing to God when unaccompanied by a disposition of the heart towards obedience and justice. In this respect, Christianity conforms to the pattern of other confessional religions.

Strangely, though, internalization here is not accompanied here, as in Buddhism or Islam, by the individualization of religious agency. The role of mediator remains central.

The relationship between God and humankind manifested in the covenants recounted in the Old Testament is always one that binds the deity to a people – albeit, in the case of the patriarchs, with a people still, as it were, within the loins of its ancestor.  Things are no different in the New Testament. The sacrifice whereby Christ wins a people places him in the role of their ultimate religious mediator – a role expressed by Scripture in terms both of kingship and priesthood. In fact, there is no question of any proper relationship to God outside the collectivity constituted by such mediation. This strikes me as a fundamental difference between the tradition of the Old and New Testaments and confessional religions that devolve agency on the individual.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­On the other hand, by comparison with archaic societies, there is, with Christianity, a very distinctive form of mediation, and this distinctiveness has important implications for social and political structures.  For the mediation, in this case, is no longer that of a current, mortal bearer of a religious agency passed down through the ancestral line; it is that of the dead and resurrected Christ. On the social and political level this precludes – or should preclude – the kind of priestly mediation condemned by the Qur’an whereby a differential status is secured through the role of religious representation. The kind of ‘sacral’ kingship characteristic of archaic hierarchical societies is hardly a possibility where ultimate religious agency is monopolized in this way.

Yet, does this monopolization of religious agency by God in Christ necessarily involve the elimination of mediation from the field of human relations?

It certainly does so on one possible understanding of Christian mediation. On this view, the absolute sovereignty of Christ flattens all pretentions to hierarchy by confining all Christians in the role of non-reciprocation in the face of a grace that belongs exclusively and absolutely to God and no other.

There is, however, an alternative understanding.  On this view, Christ’s mediation – his sacrificial agency – is universally shared by his Church as a whole where it acts (as it must do – or cease to genuinely be ‘Church’) in the Holy Spirit.  Sacrificial agency involves, as we have seen, participation, and invests the whole Church with the priestly and kingly role of sacrifice and religious mediation.  On this alternative understanding, the kind of mediation we see in the case of those pagan religious mediators who act as the channel of divine blessing to their communities does not disappear in the case of Christianity. Rather, it belongs to the risen Christ himself, and, along with him, to all those disciples who constitute his ‘body’. There is therefore a collective divinization of all who share that agency.  Needless to say, such status belongs only to those who are incorporated into Christ, and act in the Holy Spirit. And, of course, it is not an agency that would enhance the status of certain members of the body through its differential exercise by some on behalf of others.

It will be evident to you by now that these two understandings of mediation in Christianity –   its restriction to the God-man, on the one hand; its sharing by the whole body of the Church in the Holy Spirit, on the other – correspond to the two understandings of the Gospel-event to be found, respectively, in the standard and alternative positions on eucharistic sacrifice.

If I am right about the possibility of an alternative take on mediation, then, to adopt a participatory understanding of the Eucharist is by no means to compromise the distinctiveness of the Gospel. Far from it. On this view, Christianity is distinct from other confessional religions precisely in respect to its retention of the notion of mediation – albeit in the novel form of a mediation shared by the whole body of Christ. The elimination of religious mediation from the field of human relations, however, would tend to make Christianity resemble other confessional religions like Islam and Buddhism.

Which of these two positions on mediation is the more authentically Christian one?  The ultimate criterion is, of course, the authority of Scripture and Tradition.  So let me briefly mention two groups of Scriptural passages that, to my mind, favour the alternative position.

The first group includes various potentially ‘difficult’ sayings of Christ, in which he appears to assure his disciples that he himself will be present, and their prayers answered, as though they were Christ’s own, when prayed collectively, ‘with faith’, or ‘in his Name’. Christ really does seem to envision the future Church as assuming his sacrificial agency. Why else would he promise his disciples: ‘Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven’? This view of their role is, of course, entirely consistent with the place assigned to the Eucharist by the early Church in the economy of salvation – at least, as we find that view expounded by Dix, Schmemann, Hicks, Bouyer and others.

The second group are the passages in Paul’s letters that relate to the role within the community of ‘spiritual gifts’. What is remarkable here is their dissemination throughout the community of believers. 

Here, again, a comparative ethnographic perspective can help us appreciate what we might otherwise take for granted.  For these ‘charismata’, taken individually, are the kind of religious phenomena that in non-Christian communities typically mark religious and socio-political leadership: they are the appurtenances of socio-religious power. Consider, for example, the dependence of forms of such authority – from the authority wielded by Sufi saints to the influence of Siberian shamans or the charisma of prophetic leaders among the Nilotic peoples – on miraculous powers, healings, prophetic utterance or the discernment of spirits. It seems utterly remarkable that, far from restricted to the roles of Christian leadership, these are claimed by St Paul to be ‘allotted to each one individually as the Spirit chooses’. On the one hand, this is to render all believers possessed of a sacred authority; on the other, the potential discriminatory social effect of such attributions is effectively neutralized by their dissemination to the entirety of the community. In view of this, Paul’s subsequent words about the unity of the one body acquire their significance and importance. It is only in relation to the service of the whole body that such gifts find any role (they are not given, for example, to command authority outside that body). Their complementarity in respect to each other give each member a significant role in relation to the rest. In short, the authority that such charismata lend belongs ultimately to the community as a whole, and only to the community as a whole. Not, that is to say, to the individual who exercises them on the common behalf. I suspect that there is no other example among the world’s religions of such collectivization of religious agency.  From an anthropological point of view, I find it remarkable.

Elimination vs. generalization of sacrificial agency

Let us return to the initial formulation of the issue that we find in Mascall:

I would not describe it (the Offertory) as an offering of bread and wine, in the strict sense of an offering made to God. If we go back to the last Supper and consider the four actions of our Lord – he took, he blessed, he broke, he gave – we see that the first of these which corresponds to the Offertory of the liturgy, was not an act of offering, but of reception: he took.

Frankly, I believe Mascall is wrong here. Seen against the background of our discussion of non-Christian forms of sacrifice, Mascall’s two-stage break-down of the sacrificial offering (i.e. bread and wine simply brought to the altar, then offered to God as Christ’s body and blood) resembles rather too closely the archaic ritual pattern: resources are first pooled in an initial act of giving in order subsequently to be sacrificed on the community’s behalf. The danger here lies in the quasi-mediatory role this assigns to the priest enacting Christus solus (Christ alone) in relation to the laity, and the way it obscures the sense of a collective sacrifice of the whole Church acting in the Spirit.(34)  If the distinguishing feature of Christian sacrifice is not, as we have just seen, the delegation – still less the exclusion – of sacrificial agency, but the collective form of that agency as the action of the whole Church in the Spirit, then let us, by all means, have more prominence given to offertory processions. Personally, I love the moment, preceding the Eucharist proper, when the minister gives thanks as he raises up the collection plate in full view of the congregation; it makes what follows our sacrifice. Which, of course, is by no means to deny that this sacrifice takes the divinely instituted form according to which our bread and wine, the offering up of our daily lives, participates in the one and only sacrifice acceptable to God which is that of Christ’s body and blood.

(34) This is essentially Robert Daly’s main argument in Sacrifice Unveiled (2009)

Question 3: How does eucharistic ritual sacrifice reproduce the Church and encode Christian values?

22 The Church gives the Eucharist and the Eucharist gives the Church?

We come to the third and final of the difficult issues arising out our proposed presentation of the Christian basics.

Let us begin by recalling to mind an assumption I made throughout that presentation: that ritual produces and reproduces community, and that right ritual will produce right forms, and wrong ritual wrong forms.

Here to remind you are a couple excerpts from that presentation (which you will find in chapter 15):

By means of it (sacrifice), all the actions of our human lives can become a means of expressing a relationship to the divine. This gives our lives purpose; simultaneously it institutes bonds of communal living with those who share the same relationship to the same perceived source of existence. In a very real sense, sacrificial worship has always formed the basis, not only of individual fulfilment, but of community itself.

Christ offers his sacrifice on OUR behalf. And the implication of this ‘on our behalf’ is that he simultaneously offers US the possibility of participating in his perfect self-offering. By this, I mean nothing less than that he allows US to share in his sacrificial agency, so establishing, for the first time, the possibility of a universal human community – a community in his sacrificial offering.

Among theologians, the proposition that the Eucharist produces the Church is hardly unfamiliar.  Walker and Parry in their book Deep Church Rising cite the formulation of John Zizioulas: ‘the Church constitutes the Eucharist while being constituted by it’.(35) They helpfully enlarge on this 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.(p.161)(35)

Needless to say, such theological statements would probably surprise many contemporary enquirers into the Christian faith, as well as of Protestant Evangelicals not used to according the Eucharist such importance. I can imagine their sceptical response: ‘Well how exactly does that work?’

I come now to the second half of our question – how the Eucharist encodes Christian values.  In response to this, the authors cited earlier, Walker and Parry, turn to the sociologist, Rodney Clapp.  The latter claims: ‘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’. Our authors go on to conclude:

Holy Communion is ortho-praxia, right practice in terms of worship and formative for right practice in terms of Christian living.(p.164)

Few would disagree. It sounds like the kind of thing that ought to be true.  Still, there are some inclined to ask: How on earth does that work?

The authors on whom we have relied for answers to our earlier questions (Dix or Schmemann) have little to say to say on this.  And the reason is not far to seek.  Neither of our questions are, properly speaking, ‘theological’.  In broaching such issues we are leaving behind the areas of enquiry traditionally assigned to theology, and raising issues which pertain to the entire religious phenomenon – in particular, questions pertaining specifically to religious sociology. The proper theological response here is: Go and ask the sociologists – or, better still, the social anthropologists.

That is what I now propose to do.

Sacrifice and the reproduction of community

Let us restate, in more precise terms, the question we want to address.

We have already established that eucharistic sacrifice, like all sacrifice, involves giving back to the source of our existence out of the blessings we have received. Why does such symbolic giving back invariably result in the reproduction of a community? What is the mechanism by which it does so?

Given few theologians ask this question, it is hardly surprising we rarely find the question answered.  But it surprises me even more that, in the one serious instance known to me of the question being seriously addressed by a theologian, the answer we receive is, in my view, so very satisfactory – despite its early date. This single prescient individual was the Anglo-Catholic theologian, former bishop of Lincoln, FCN Hicks in his study The Fullness of Sacrifice (1930).

Hicks’ approach is, like our own, to distance himself initially from the Christian theological context of the Eucharist, and consider the matter in relation to religious sacrifice more generally.

The socially productive function of sacrifice (i.e. its production of community), Hicks argues, follows from its very essence.  That, he claims, consists in the giving and sharing of life.  For Hicks, life means more than ‘biological’ life, and the giving and sharing of life more than nutrition and sexual reproduction. The vulnerability of the new-born, he reminds us, requires the maintenance of those relational and social structures that enable nutrition and reproduction, and must therefore also involve the perpetuation of those structures down the generations. As Hicks puts it, ‘life’ is, of necessity, ‘life in society’. And by ‘society’, he means families as well as wider social groups.  It is the perpetuation of life so understood which he claims to be a function of sacrifice.  Life emanates ultimately from God; but sacrifice is an operation by which human communities come to participate actively in that divine gift through giving and sharing it.

(35) Citations from: Andrew Walker & Jonathan Parry, Deep Church Rising, SPCK (2014)

23 On the sacrificial sharing of life

There is a mental image that clearly underlies this conception of sacrifice.  That image, derives from an eminent nineteenth-century pre-cursor of social anthropology, Robertson-Smith.  It is the image of the ‘totemic feast’ – a feast at which a representative of the animal-type that is seen to embody the identity of the clan group (the ‘totemic’ animal), through being eaten, disseminates the clan spirit to the participants while at the same time giving meat to nourish them physically.

According to Robertson-Smith, the totemic animal is designated as a kinsman by being normally taboo to its clan. But on the occasion of a ritual feast the taboo is violated, and members of the clan kill and eat their totemic animal.  Thereby, they come to realize their bond both to their totemic deity and with other members of the tribe, through ingesting its flesh. For Hicks, at least, there is, between such ancient pagan ceremonies and the Christian Eucharist, no impassable distance.  After all, do we not all ‘share in the one body because we all share in the one bread’?

So much for the theory.

Unfortunately, the empirical evidence for Robertson-Smith’s ideas – the ethnographic evidence cited by The Religion of the Semites – hardly meets the standard of modern social anthropology.  That discipline has, since the twenties of the last century, developed its theories on the back of a laborious practice of participant observation, unknown in Robertson-Smith’s day. The basis of Hicks’ concept of sacrifice nowadays looks flimsy – to say the least.

Should we therefore discard Hicks’ intuitions as to the nature and function of sacrifice?

Not necessarily – and we will return to the review of their evidential basis in a moment.

First, we would do well to reflect on the intuitions themselves: above all, on what is – if we are honest – most surprising about them. This is surely the challenge to contemporary commonsense posed by Hick’s notion that the social bond is realized through an act of ritual sacrifice.  That chiefdoms and kingdoms might be constituted in this way, we can accept.  But the social bonds that Hicks has in mind include bonds of kinship, even those of the nuclear family group. For Hicks, as for Robertson-Smith, every social bond is created through social ritual.

There is, truth be told, something shocking about such a proposition, something that flies in the face of our common sense.  It overrides contemporary notions of an absolute separation between, on the one hand, genetic or biological relationships, and, on the other, relationships that we can remove ourselves from at will (such as those of religion or political grouping). As we say, ‘You can choose your friends, but not your family’. Hicks’ notion of sacrifice sits uncomfortably athwart this fundamental distinction.  It brings us back to a fundamental presupposition of our own culture: namely that the forging of a genuine kinship bond necessarily engages 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 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.  Nor is it 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 might not necessarily be considered 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.

So, if we suppose Hicks to be correct regarding the centrality of religious ritual to the production of social relationships, we may be on the road to understanding the nature of relationship 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 ….(36)

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 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.(37) 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 an unbridgeable divide.

The truth is rather that the opposition of nature and culture is a fundamental presupposition our contemporary Western ideology of kinship.  To adopt a less ideologically motivated (i.e. properly anthropological) perspective is to be forced by the ethnographic evidence collected over many decades to recognize that nature and culture 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 – namely the assumption of a dichotomy of nature and culture that relegates all non-biologically-derived cultural structures to the class of mere voluntary associations.

(36) This and the following citation are from: Andrew Strathern, ‘Kinship, Descent and Locality’, in The Character of Kinship, ed. Jack Goody (1973), pp.21-31

(37) An interesting parallel for the extension of kinship through blood sacrifice is given in Susanne Kuechler, Malanggan (2002)

24 The symbolic paradigm of ritual and its relation to everyday religious practice

We now move on from the question of how ritual sacrifice (e.g. the Eucharist) produces community (e.g. the Church) to the question of how this symbolic sacrifice relates to the kind of practice that the New Testament knows as agapeic love.  

Of course, if the Eucharist is entirely about an unrepeatable atoning transaction that benefits rather than actively involving us, there is no room for any such relation of symbolic ritual to everyday practice.  Our actions may be transformed as a result of Christ’s sacrifice, but not in a way that renders those actions ‘sacrificial’ in the same sense.  St Paul’s use of the term sacrifice in Romans 12.1 is therefore just a metaphor.

But we have already put the case against that understanding of the Eucharist. And it is not my intention to re-run that argument here.

Rather, in the following paragraphs I shall assume what I have already sought to demonstrate in previous chapters – namely, that there is a sense of sacrifice that can properly be applied to both Christ’s action and our own, and that the ritual action of Eucharist is the moment where our action and his are brought to engage with each other. We will, on that basis, now proceed to consider how that engagement works.  Once again, as in the case of the reproduction of community, I shall assume that the manner of this engagement reflects a function of religion itself – and religious sacrifice, more particularly – rather than anything specifically Christian.   To this end, I shall once again step back from Christian theology and attempt to adopt a broader anthropological perspective encompassing other confessional religions.  We will begin by establishing the common ground of how such symbolic ritual functions in relation to the rest of life, once again using Islam as our example.  Then we will go on to consider the distinctiveness of the Christian form of sacrifice as manifested both in symbolic ritual and everyday practice.

So, what is the nature of the engagement between ritual symbolism and everyday non-ritual action?

In what follows, our concern will chiefly be with what, in the last chapter, I defined as confessional religions. But in order to illustrate the nature of this engagement, I want to begin by taking us back to the case of the Merina ritual of the tsodrano as described earlier.

You will remember, this little rite hardly corresponds to what we would normally think of as sacrifice. There is no slaughter of domestic beasts, 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, before pocketing the coin. We have an upward flow of resources in the shape of the coin; and the downward flow in the shape of blessing conferred.  Piety meets benevolence. The Merina do, in fact, also perform the grander kind of rituals to which the term sacrifice is more normally applied.  Indeed, Maurice Bloch, our ethnographer here, introduces the tsodrano rite for its helpful analogy to those grander rituals, and as a means to explicating their meaning. In the eyes of the anthropologist, the small everyday practice seems conveniently to encode the socio-religious meaning 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 embodiment.

Now the way in which such largely symbolic ritual encodes a pattern of relationships manifested elsewhere in more substantive giving can help us understand the function of symbolic ritual in contexts where that more substantive giving takes place outside the ritual sphere – i.e. in confessional religions.

We have already described the evolution of the latter – how, in the words of the sociologist, Marcel Mauss:

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.(38)

Yet, as we saw, even in confessional religions not all kinds of symbolic ritual disappear. There often remain ritual practices that involve little conspicuous consumption (like the tsodrano) which ceremonially encode structures of socio-religious relationships that are 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 severs 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’ principle now prevails.

We can see how this works in the case of Islam.

The fundamental paradigm of Muslim sacrifice we have already described. We find it encoded in the rituals of prayer or in the celebration of Eid sacrifice. Its features you remember were:  1. the offering of the whole self by each Muslim individual; 2. the exclusive direction of that offering to the one God – who, as the recipient of that offering, is sharply distinguished from any human being. If we broaden our focus from the individual to the collective, we might add to these features a third: 3. the elimination of all priestly mediation.

How does this paradigm find expression in substantive everyday actions outside the ceremonial sphere?

In a word, the answer is sadaka – a form of gift regarded by Muslims as having a religious intent. This giving is not itself ceremonial, and includes an enormously diverse range of generous practices.  One dictionary of Islam mentions: 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.(39) In other words, actions of sadaka are so because: 1. they involve the offering of something to God on the part of each individual; 2. that offering is addressed to the one God who, in his capacity of recipient is sharply marked off from any human being; 3. they require no priestly mediation.

How can such actions be addressed to God if He is not the material beneficiary?

The key word here is ‘intent’. Such actions evidently require human addressees, and will generally end up meeting the material or spiritual need of some human recipient.  But their primary intent is as an expression of the believer’s response to God.  To the extent that a return is sought, it is a spiritual reward in the Hereafter.  Needless to say, any hint of reciprocity between donor and human recipient of 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 on the grounds that it has been given to God. 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, were the chief means of supporting the institutions dominated by the Islamic social elites (ulema).  But they were not made directly to other people, and do not presuppose an institutional addressee (e.g. ‘church’).  They were tied up under legal provisions (i.e. waqf) that had to reflect the requirements of sadaka, and were controlled by trustees bound by the conditions of the original donor. 

On the institutional level, the consequence of this form of charitable giving – and this leads us to our third point – is the non-emergence in the Islamic world of anything resembling priesthood or ‘church’.  The givers of sadaka support an apparatus of mosques, madrasas, courts and markets, broadly comparable throughout the pre-industrial Islamic world, staffed largely by ulema supported on this basis; but they do not endow an independent religious institution.(40) This, I would suggest, can be seen as a concrete institutional expression of the principled exclusion of all religious mediation.  It offers an interesting example of the power of ritual symbolism to give a distinctive shape to institutions through its shaping of everyday social behaviour.

(38) Marcel Mauss, The Gift [1950], Routledge Classics (2002), pp.22-23

(39) Sayyid Qutb, Tafsir Fi Zilalil Quran, S.22 (Al-Hajj) pp.103-4

(40) For some excellent accounts of pre-modern Islamic institutions and elites: Scholars, Saints and Sufis, ed. Nikki Keddie (1972)

25 The symbolic paradigm and everyday religious practice of Christianity, as contrasted with Islam

The case of Islam demonstrates the encoding of a distinctive paradigm of sacrifice in symbolic ritual, and the expression of that distinctive paradigm outside the ritual sphere in practices of substantive giving.  I believe this to be how the ‘engagement’ works between symbolic and everyday religious action – not only in Islam, but in other confessional religions such as Buddhism, Judaism, or indeed Christianity.   

What we now have to say of Christianity and its divergence from Islam, will corroborate what we have already claimed regarding the workings of the ritual process (i.e. the process whereby symbolic ritual engages practical religion) in confessional religions.  We will observe – in support of our explanation of the ritual process – how the everyday practices we observe in the two faiths differ in precisely the manner that their respective paradigms would have led us to expect

But it will also give us the opportunity to present the content of the Christian paradigm and the character of the everyday practice through which that paradigm is expressed – against the background of their Muslim equivalents. Where Christianity is concerned, the symbolic ritual in question is, of course, the Eucharist, and the everyday sacrificial practice is the kind of charitable action that the New Testament knows as agapeic love.  These we will now characterize in relation to the ritual and everyday Muslim practices of salat and sadaka, described in the previous chapter.

We will begin with the paradigm.

The Eucharist is, above all, not a sacrifice that each believer offers for themselves. Christianity does not believe that unmediated sacrifice on the part of human beings would be acceptable to the God of Holiness – let alone meritorious. The Eucharist is God’s sacrifice in Christ before it is ours. Indeed, our ‘sacrifice’ only becomes sacrifice at all through its participation in the one sacrifice that is Christ’s. 

Second, within the frame of an action which is wholly God’s in Christ, the parties to the sacrifice, divine and human, find themselves alternating in the roles of offerer and addressee/recipient.  Christ offers to his followers (‘this is my body’), so that they may in turn join their offering with his.  Christ’s followers offer to the Father, under the form of bread, only to become, at communion, the recipients of what is offered.  As a result of these ritual alternations, sacrificial agency – and, along with it, sacrificial status – are not so much asserted over another party as communicated to that party in such a manner as to allow them sacrificial agency themselves – and hence without the loss of status associated in other religions with being on the receiving end.  The process is reminiscent of a dance in which someone who has occupied a certain role in relation to one partner comes to occupy the complementary role with someone else.  In fact, dance (perichoresis) is a term sometimes applied to the give and take of relations between the persons in the Trinity – a dance in which, as we have said, the Eucharist allows us to join. 

Third, the ecclesial community is not just a means to this sacrificial worship, or its outcome, but belongs to its very essence. For what each worshipper offers and receives – i.e. ‘the body of Christ’ – is also the addressee of their worship.  Moreover, that ‘body’ is a kind of corporate self insofar as it manifests the ‘body’ of which those offerers and receivers are the members: in giving and receiving it, they offer themselves up in order, as Augustine puts it, to ‘become what they are’. 

Now let us consider how these characteristics of the Christian paradigm show up in the form of agapeic generosity outside the ceremonial sphere.

Just as the symbolic act is perceived to be Christ’s, so, for Christians is the agapeic love.  This leads to a characteristic modesty when it comes to claiming charitable actions as one’s (human) own, a strong reaction against the idea of a ‘righteousness’ based on one’s own works, and a corresponding disinclination to think in terms of rewards – even heavenly ones.  For Christians, such works are indications of the Spirit of Christ working in them rather than being anything for which they are entitled to claim credit. 

The alternation in the roles of donor and recipient encoded in the symbolic rite leads to a revalorization of the role of addressee/recipient.  The latter comes to represent ‘Christ’ in relation to the donor, just as much as the donor represents ‘Christ’ to the recipient. This has important social implications for the status of the recipient of any form of generosity.  The elevation in the status of the recipient is a feature of the Christian gift (‘almsgiving’) often highlighted by ancient historians as strongly contrasted with the status implications for the recipient of Graeco-Roman beneficence (euergetism).(41)

Finally, the priority of community is reflected in the fact that the obligation to charitable action, and its scope, flow from the revolutionary institution of an ideal society ‘in Christ’ – i.e. ‘the body of Christ’ or Church. They are not universal, and they do not pre-exist the Church. They are the flow of blood that nourishes the members of that institution.  In this respect, the Church resembles archaic sacrificial institutions. However, it differs in respect to the fact that the direction of that blood flow is freed from considerations of traditional hierarchy in order to respond to those of relative material need within the body.

(41) For the comparison of Christian charity and pagan euergetism, see: Richard Finn, Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire (2002)

26 Code and expression

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 talk. 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 finding its actualization in real-life. Such a perspective has some value, I believe, 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 of Christian charity.

Yet, there is also a sense in which it falsifies the true relationship between ritual and practice, as perceived by believers – at least in Christianity. Actually, that relationship is not so much that of a blueprint to its realization – rather the contrary. Remember the grand vision which 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 into the world transformed.  From this perspective (the perspective of Christian belief), it is the Eucharist itself that already constitutes the consummate realization of a sacrifice of which our everyday practices offer only a faded approximation. Hence, what we have termed the paradigm is actually the full reality – not the other way round.  As for its relationship to the future realization of the Kingdom at the eschaton, even that is not properly one of a ‘shadow’, but of a genuine foretaste – a full manifestation in other words, albeit in the limited mode in which that reality can yet be fully manifested.

The time, of course, is yet to come when it might be said of the Church in its entirety that it is the Kingdom of God on earth. It is not just that our individual and collective service falls short; the city of God will only fully become 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 capacity to realize our worship as service and to transform our city into His Kingdom. Needless to say, no theoretical limit is set on such a transformation, nor on the sanctification of our individual and collective lives.  Meantime our eucharistic worship remains, not just a sign of the Kingdom still to come but its full reality, as we are able already to experience it in the present age.

How strange, then, that it has been sacrificial status of the Eucharist itself that has, historically, been a point of contention amongst Christians.  One could imagine 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.

I can find no better way to conclude this chapter than by re-stating the words of Dix, citing Augustine, on the way the eucharistic sacrifice functions to enable 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.’***

(18) Citations from various liturgiological studies given by E.L. Mascall, Corpus Christi (1953), pp.81-110

(19) Sally Macfague, Metaphorical Theology (1982)

(20) Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols (1970)

(21) Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (1992)

(25) Citations from here on are from: Alexander Schmemann,  For the Life of the World [1963] St Vladimir’s Seminary Press (second ed. 1973)