Our sacrifice-centred account places the Eucharist at the heart of the Gospel. It is through the Eucharist that Jesus’s sacrifice becomes our sacrifice. The Eucharist is, therefore, pre-eminently the place where our lives engage with Christ’s death and resurrection – the means of our participation in his sacrifice.
It is in regard to the Eucharist, more than anywhere, that our account diverges from the official one.
For the proponents of the official account, sacrifice has a primary and literal sense strictly reserved for the cross of Jesus, and a secondary, and strictly metaphorical one which refers to the offering Christians make of their own lives. Where the term would never be used is in reference to the ritual of the Eucharist.
To accept this restriction is, I would argue, to break the crucial link between the sacrifice of Christ and our own daily lives – which is why the advocates of this theology have to fall back on the implausible explanation of the Christ-event as the payment of a penalty or debt incurred through human sin.
However, allow the Eucharist to take its place at the heart of the Gospel event, and everything falls into place. What is accomplished in the cross and resurrection is no longer the end of the story. (That would be to turn the Gospel event into a ‘Jesus’ event.) It is the end of one thing – i.e. Christ’s earthly mission – and the beginning of another – i.e. our completion of his sacrificial mission as the Church. Something definitive is indeed accomplished in the sacrificial life and death of the Saviour. But that thing has still to be actualized historically in the response of the community of his ‘body’. This happens when the Church, united with its ‘head’ (i.e. Christ), and acting in the Holy Spirit, offers the sacrifice that Father initiates through the Son. In this way, our Eucharist as the Church becomes an integral moment of the sacrifice of God.
A participative theology
I am aware this understanding of the Eucharist is unfamiliar to proponents of the official account, and may be contentious.
At one stage it was equally unfamiliar to me. There was a point where I had already found my way to a sacrifice-centred understanding the Christian salvation-event, but was relatively uninformed about the Eucharist. After my reading in religious studies and social anthropology, I was pleased to discover a strand of ‘atonement theology’ which appeared to share my openness to understandings of sacrifice in adjacent disciplines, and, like me, saw Christian sacrifice as the specifically Christian form of a universal human practice – namely that of giving to God.[i] However, this theology didn’t necessarily focus on the Eucharist. It was only considerably later that I came across the liturgiological literature devoted to the study of the Christian sacraments – and the Eucharist in particular. Given I was primarily concerned with the theology of sacrifice and atonement, it hadn’t occurred to me this material could be relevant. Besides, it emanated from scholars who did not share my own Evangelical background.[ii] What was my surprise, then, to discover that the eucharistic theology of the liturgiologists provided the perfect exemplification of the notion of sacrifice required for a sacrifice-centred understanding of the Christian salvation-event.
Most important among its characteristics – at least for my own purposes – was the notion that it was the means of our participation in the sacrifice of Christ. Participation involves, first of all, the idea that our Eucharistic action is united with, and makes present, the two-thousand-year-old event of the Passion – not just as a memory, but as an ongoing reality. Although it might come as a surprise to my fellow Evangelicals, this is far from being an exclusively Roman Catholic doctrine. Both Luther and Calvin had their own understanding of a ‘real presence’ of Christ in the Eucharist. But – far more controversially – participation, for our account, also means that we come, in the Eucharist, to share Christ’s sacrificial agency. By this I mean that in offering his sacrifice we also offer our own.
This theology of eucharistic participation is, you will have noted, absolutely essential to our account. It is probably also the most controversial aspect of it, at least for Protestant Evangelicals.
In the following chapters, I will demonstrate, through relatively extensive reference to these liturgiological sources, that this theology of participation is no figment of my own imagination, but solidly grounded in scholarly work on the early church and its liturgy, as well as making good theological sense. For me, the most influential of these studies have been: Gregory Dix (The Shape of the Liturgy, 1945); F.C.N. Hicks (The Fulness of Sacrifice, 1930); Alexander Schmemann (For the Life of the World, 1963; Eucharist, 1987); Edward Kilmartin (History of the Eucharist in the Latin West, 1998); Louis Bouyer (Eucharist, 1968); Henri de Lubac (Corpus Mysticum, 2006). Underlying disputes over matters of historical detail, there is, as to the underlying theology, a reassuring consensus among these scholars, which would appear to have been arrived at independently by progressively-orientated theologians from across the denominational spectrum (Anglican, Roman Catholic, Orthodox).
Further aims
However, I will not simply be re-stating the conclusions of these authors.
As someone who has approached the Eucharist from a ‘comparative religions’ perspective, I was particularly impressed by the apparent ‘fit’ between an understanding of sacrifice developed by non-theological disciplines in their study of other faith traditions and the conclusions of the liturgiologists as to the role of the Eucharist in Christianity. As stated earlier, Christian sacrifice is exceptional in certain respects; but not – contrary to what is sometimes claimed – in all. The purpose of isolating what is genuinely unique in Christianity is therefore better served by a comparative approach than by proceeding on the assumption that it is unique in every conceivable way. Besides, the realm of ritual practice, rooted in our common experience of the everyday, is one that lends itself especially to comparative treatment. In the following chapters, I shall no longer limit myself to the case of biblical religion, but will introduce material from studies of other religions in adjacent disciplines.
There is also, given my goal of contributing to popular understanding of the Christian faith, another, more specific, reason to favour a comparative approach, when it comes to characterizing the Eucharist. The whole matter of religious ritual is opaque to the contemporary mind. Purely theological explanations risk being dismissed by non-believers as mystificatory – or, at best, arcane. By enlarging the focus of our enquiry to include religious symbolism across cultures we draw attention to a near-universal human phenomenon that is harder to dismiss out of hand. We also challenge the hegemonism of that weirdly non-ritual and non-symbolic world that is secular modernity.
The next two chapters will be devoted to justifying our characterization of the Eucharist as participatory. The first stage involves defending the seemingly bizarre claim that the ‘symbolism’ of the Eucharist involves a real participation in a two-thousand-year-old event; the second, justifies the controversial idea that this participation also involves the sharing of believers in Christ’s sacrificial agency.
A third chapter enlarges, in relation to the Eucharist, on the hopefully now familiar idea that sacrificial expenditure produces identity. I shall consider whether, and how, it is legitimate to claim that a ritual (i.e. the Eucharist) produces the Church (a claim made in my summary above). I shall then investigate what it is about a ritual – as opposed, say, to Church teaching – that gives it an essential role in the formation of Christian values.
[i] F.C.N. Hicks, The Fullness of Sacrifice, SPCK, 1953 [1930]; Francis M. Young, Sacrifice and the Death of Christ, ; Godfrey Ashby, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Purpose, SCM, 1988; John Moses, The Sacifice of God, Canterbury Press, 1992; Ian Bradley, The Power of Sacrifice, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1995; Bruce Chilton, The Temple of Jesus, Pennsylvania State U.P., 1992; John Dunnill, Sacrifice and the Body, Ashgate, 2013
[ii] Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Eucharist, Dacre Press, 1945; Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987; Henri Cardinal de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, trans. Gemma Symmonds, SCM, 2006; Louis Bouyer, Eucharist, trans. Charles Quinn, University of Notre Dame Press, 1968 {1966]; Edward J. Kilmartin, The Eucharist in the West, Liturgical Press, 1998; Robert Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, T&T Clarke, 2009; Eugene Schlesinger, Sacrificing the Church, Fortress, 2019