I argue elsewhere that the Eucharist, like other religious symbols, participates ontologically in what it symbolizes. In this essay, we are concerned with participation in another sense: I mean not just the ontological engagement of the Eucharist with the Christ event, but the joining of believers in Christ’s sacrifice as fellow-agents. One could imagine that the Eucharist could be ‘participative’ in the first sense, without being so in the second. For example, if Christ and his followers held distinct roles in the sacrificial action, with Christ being the active party, and his followers just beneficiaries. This is, in fact, what some Christians actually do believe (see below). The first sense of participation may strike us – initially at least – as weird; the second – that of shared agency – could be considered theologically incorrect. So, what we have to say here is more contestatory in character. The correctness of one theological position implies the incorrectness of the opposed position.
To repeat – our concern here is with sacrificial agency as expressed in the Christian Eucharist. Are we just recipients and beneficiaries of a sacrifice which Christ offers alone? Or do we offer our sacrifice along with Him?
Theologically speaking, Christians who hold the first view do so because they identify Christian sacrifice exclusively with the atoning death. We are excluded, on this view, from an active, agentic, role, because, on any recognizably Christian theological doctrine, only Christ can atone for sin. Christians, who hold the second view do so because they favour a broader understanding of Christian sacrifice. To the extent that the work of sacrifice also involves a return made by the forgiven to the source of their collective and individual being, there is space for the participants in the Eucharist to be sacrificial agents acting alongside their great forerunner. I will refer to these two positions as exclusivist and inclusivist respectively. It is important to insist that, even on an inclusivist understanding of sacrifice, humans do not act on their own initiative (i.e. independently of God in Christ). We are no more capable of offering back worthily to the source of our being than we are of atoning for ourselves. In both cases, Christ makes the gift on our behalf. The difference is that, on an exclusivist understanding of sacrifice (as pure act of atonement), there is a transaction between God the Father and God the Son from which we humans benefit; on the inclusivist understanding, there is an ongoing action that begins with the Father and Son, but spirals out to include ourselves.
Given the difference in the importance that the Eucharist assumes depending on whether or not it is seen as the principal means through which sacrifice takes effect in our lives, it is no surprise to find these differences of sacrificial theology reflected in diverse theologies of the Eucharist. Inclusivists see the offering of the eucharistic elements as the offering of their own individual and collective sacrifice alongside – and as part of – Christ’s offering of Himself. Exclusivists fall into two categories. There are those (i.e. Protestants) who would not see the Eucharist as a sacrifice at all; others who would see it as a sacrifice, but a sacrifice in which we offer Christ – and not ourselves. In the words of a proponent of the latter view, the Anglo-Catholic, Eric Mascall:[i]
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)
Diverse theologies: diverse liturgies
These differences should not be seen in exclusively theological terms. For a start, the Eucharist is, of its nature, a collective action – often said to be constitutive of the Church. It follows we would expect the adherence to either inclusivism or exclusivism would have a significant impact on liturgical practices.
And so it turns out.
Both the Orthodox theologian, Alexander Schmemann, and the Anglo-Catholic, Gregory Dix highlight fundamental differences – as they see it – between the Eastern and Western churches over the role and importance of liturgical practices surrounding the offertory. At issue here are the proskomide and prothesis common to the Eastern churches. These require the laity themselves to contribute the wine and bread for the rite, along with their gifts of alms. The conveyance of these items to the sacristy constitutes a ‘preliminary’ offering, forming an indispensable first stage of the ritual that culminates in the acts and words of the priest at the altar. These practices, says Schmemann, go back to the early Church, by whom it was clearly understood that the eucharistic sacrifice was offered ‘not only on behalf of all and for all’, but ‘by all’, and that ‘the real offering by each of his own gift, his own sacrifice’ was a basic condition of it. (Eucharist, p.107)
Social anthropology has shown how considerations around the socio-symbolism of giving take us to the heart of how religious institutions see themselves and their relationship to the world. It is no surprise, then, to discover that, in Christianity, differences of offertory practice – corresponding to diverse notions of sacrificial agency – characterize different ecclesial traditions. As Gregory Dix, puts it:
The difference between these two ways of receiving the people’s offerings (i.e. the presence of these practices in the East and their absence in the West) 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.(pp.120-121)
Here, then, is a fundamental divide, not only between theologies, but between different churches over sacrificial agency. But I would question whether that divide is an East vs. West thing – or at any rate whether it is that any longer. For example, the Anglo-Catholic, Eric Mascall, cited above, criticizes liturgical practices of Western churches precisely because they attribute to the offertory the kind of symbolic importance it has in the Eastern rites described by Schmemann and Dix. The targets of Mascall’s attack are ‘the proponents of the Liturgical Movement with their offertory processions’(p.182) These, he says, give rise to the idea – which, as we have already seen, he rejects – that the bread and wine are something the Church offers to God. Now, the Liturgical Movement is a development originating, not in the Eastern, but the Roman Catholic, church. And the practices in question are attested within mainstream Catholicism.[ii] So it would seem that the issue of the importance of the offertory divides not only East against West, but the West against itself.
Coming, at last, to those Protestants who would deny that the Eucharist to be a sacrifice in a literal sense (a group I know from personal experience), here, I suspect, we would find little recognition that the offertory could ever have an integral role in the celebration of the Eucharist. The liturgies of my own Evangelical Church have never, to my knowledge, included an offertory – let alone an offertory specifically associated with Holy Communion. I would suspect the very idea would be held theologically objectionable, as appearing to sanction ‘works-based righteousness’. This attitude reflects a relatively individualized understanding of sacrifice, according to which our relationship to God through Christ, is assumed to be, first and foremost, the affair of each Christian believer.
Exclusivist vs. inclusivist positions
On the basis of the long-standing nature of these differences of liturgical practice, we might be tempted to conclude that these eucharistic theologies are equally valid. Unfortunately, logic compels us to admit that the theological positions they embody are irreconcilable with each other.
The criterion to be applied in judging between them (as, indeed, we must) can only be faithfulness to Scripture and the church tradition of the early church. We must therefore ask which position – inclusivism or exclusivism – is more consistent with a theology based on Scripture. We might also consider the symbolic and ecclesial practice of the churches that adhere to these traditions, and ask which of them more closely resemble what we know of the practice of the New Testament and the early church.
For me, it was theological concerns that initially pushed me towards an inclusivist position. I did not believe exclusivism to be compatible with an intellectually credible account of the Christian salvation-event. As explained earlier, my position was that God does not need the sufferings of his Son in order to be able to forgive us, but chooses to forgive us in this way because, in so doing, he thereby brings about the redemption of a world distorted by our idolatries. The theological studies that led me to this position develop their understanding of the Christ-event within the frame of a concept of sacrifice broader than the exclusivist one of an act of atonement and no more.(endnote 23) Only at a much later point, did I come upon the work of liturgical theologians from a range of non-Protestant denominational backgrounds all of whom put the case for an understanding of eucharistic theology and practice that presupposes an inclusivist position on the Christian sacrifice.(endnote 24) They do so, not so much on theological grounds, but on the basis of what their researches lead them to believe was the authentic liturgical and ecclesial practice of the early Church. Here, then, was what appeared to be a happy convergence between the evidence of liturgical tradition and a theology that made sense. The early liturgies seemed to offer a perfect ritual expression of an understanding of sacrifice that already recommended itself to me on theological grounds.
For Dix and Schmemann, there is more to the Eucharist than the assurance of forgiveness of sin. As the people of God, we are caught up in the worship of the angels. This is not just the promise of a divine presence one day to be experienced, but the fulfilment of that promise here and now, moulding us individually and collectively through a sacrifice that is Christ’s and becomes 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)
Why would anyone reject this vision, given its theological coherence and the solidity of its basis in an understanding of early Christian liturgy so far more scholarly than anything known to Martin Luther?
There is one enormous reason – a reason of which I am, of all people, particularly aware, having been, at an earlier stage of my life, a convinced exclusivist. And this reason seems, for many like my former self, to go to the heart of the very essence of Christianity. It is the doctrine of divine grace. On the exclusivist view, the only action of sacrifice worthy of God is His sacrifice of Himself in Christ – a sacrifice in which we have no role save as recipients and beneficiaries. We have already seen how the Eucharist can be understood as a rite in which Christ alone gives (his body and blood), and the congregants receive (the bread and wine). Understood in this way, the symbolism is productive of an ecclesial community characterized by the absolute divine monopoly of ritual agency and the elimination of all mediation (by one human for another). Such symbolism invalidates all human pretention to superior status by reducing believers to the uniform and equal status of undeserving recipients.
Not only does the elimination of human mediation appear, on such a view, integral to Christianity; it also distinguishes Christianity – apparently – from all other religions. We hear it endlessly proclaimed in popular preaching and mission sermons: other religions and spiritual teachings claim to show mankind the way to God – or at least to moral betterment – through their own (vain) efforts; only Christianity offers a salvation that we do not earn, achieved for us by God’s sacrificial action in Christ. Here then is the doctrine of grace, with the indispensability of Christ’s sole mediation at its heart. And, we are told, Christianity is so different from other religions with their works-based righteousness that it is doubtful whether it even qualifies to be described as ‘a religion’ at all.
I am inclined to question how much these preachers actually know about those other religions and philosophies. However, their assumption as to the basis of the Christian uniqueness is deeply entrenched in Christian popular belief. So much so, in fact, that to challenge it feels, like attacking the Christian faith itself.
But, is it actually true that the exclusivity of divine sacrificial mediation marks Christianity out from every other ‘religion’? Now, if that is actually the case, then inclusivism can only be a deviation from genuine Christianity, and a back-sliding towards paganism. When I was exclusivist, this was exactly how I remember feeling about certain phraseology in the Catholic eucharistic liturgy which seemed to allude to an understanding of sacrifice somehow more ‘literal’ than Cranmer’s notion of an ‘offering of thanks and praise.
How then to respond to exclusivists like my former self? Concerns respecting sacrificial mediation go to the heart of the exclusivist’s understanding of the Gospel, and what it has to bring the world.
It was the overwhelming importance of these concerns that seemed, for me, an invitation to approach the question of sacrificial mediation on the widest possible front. They led me to investigate the reality of this alleged uniqueness of Christianity in respect to sacrificial mediation, and whether the claims of exclusivists were well-founded. After all, to claim that Christianity is unique in some respect is as much to claim something about other religions as it is to claim something about Christianity. Studies of other religions, then, seemed to obvious place to begin.
As I began to investigate, the true distinctiveness of Christianity quickly emerged. It turned out to have everything to do with sacrificial mediation, but was not, as we shall see, quite as exclusivists like to imagine it.
Mediation and sacrificial agency in archaic religions: excursus I
Our question, then. Is ‘salvation’ ever sacrificially mediated in other religions as it is in Christianity?
I have placed salvation in inverted commas. Advisedly – because, when it comes to the kind of religions that largely predominated in the world in which Christianity first emerged, salvation was less to do with goals we would nowadays regard as ‘spiritual’ than with healing and wholeness, security and prosperity in the here-and-now. This relatively worldly salvation is, for all that, very much sacrificially mediated. Certainly not the kind of thing one obtains for oneself.
The basic pattern is as follows.
The gods to whom sacrifice is addressed 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. This is where sacrificial mediation emerges. 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 these lineages are invoked by their descendants. But those on behalf of whom that ancestral favour and protection are invoked extend well beyond the descendants of the dominant group. They include a wider community in respect to whom the dominant ancestors exercise a tutelary role, and their descendants a religious service.
The best-known instances of this pattern are large-scale politico-religious structures (now largely passed from the world), such as – to name just a few known to me – the pre-revolutionary Chinese empire, African kingdoms like the Ashanti or the Zulu, or the Polynesian chiefdoms.[iii] In all these cases, the ancestors of the royal clan are the divine protectors of whole nations, and are approached as such by their royal devotees. However, 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 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.[iv] 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.[v] 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 pattern. Christianity brings something different. It removes all these layers of mediation, leaving individual believers, liberated from the worldly hierarchy, to commune independently, along with their fellow-believers, with the deity and each other. I am reminded of a passage, towards the end of an ethnographic account of a north Papuan people by the anthropologist Kenelm Burridge in which he describes the social impact of Christian eucharistic practice in one still largely pagan society. In relatively less hierarchically differentiated societies such as the one he describes (‘big-man’, as opposed to ‘great man’ societies), pooling and redistribution do not disappear, but become highly devolved, resulting, often, in extreme competitivity. By comparison the distinctive symbolic ritual of Christianity stands out through its exclusion of competitive expressions of social mediation:[vi]
It is the only community occasion on which there is no food laid out, no need to worry about the return feast, no covert glances to see who has produced how much, or whether the meat is bad, or the tubers indifferently cooked. Those present are relaxed, and even the pagans enjoy themselves.
From all such ‘archaic’ cultures, Christianity stands out, as much on the socio-symbolic and institutional as on the theological level, by its removal of sacrificial mediation from the kind of socio-political expressions that differentiate humans from each other, and by its exclusive investment of sacrificial mediation in the dead and risen Christ.
2. Mediation in confessional religions: excursus II
This overall schema does not offer the whole picture, however. If the foregoing account of pagan sacrificial mediation seems very remote from anything you may have encountered in descriptions of other religions, this may be because it does not altogether apply – or at least only in part – to the pattern of socio-religious relationships that have largely 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). Such religions exemplify important modifications to the basic structure.
These modifications are largely the result of 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 – with what is called ‘good kamma’ (Pali term for the Buddhist equivalent of Hindu karma).[vii] Good kammatic states 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.[viii] Foregrounded 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.[ix] 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. But 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 sacrificial 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.
The need to account for sacrificial mediation in these confessional religions complicates our schema somewhat, and enlarges the background against which we are seeking to characterize the practice of Christianity. As always when we change the background to something, we obtain a fresh perspective. How does Christianity ‘look’, when considered by comparison with other confessional religions?
On the one hand, as Christians, we can recognize in our own faith the same emphasis on the intention of the worshipper as in Buddhism and Islam, and the same resistance to a certain kind of sacrificial mediation. To this extent, Christianity appears closer, where sacrificial mediation is concerned, to the confessional faiths we have just been describing than to archaic religions. On the other, Islam and Buddhism present a stark contrast with Christianity when it comes to the way they associate these anti-mediatory tendencies with individualization. Their resistance to sacrificial mediation goes along with a species of individual moral self-sufficiency that is the diametrical opposite of the Christian dependence on the righteousness of the Saviour.
This prompts us to ask what happens to sacrificial agency in Christianity if it isn’t exercised by some on behalf of others (as in archaic religions), and doesn’t devolve to the individual (as in Buddhism and Islam). Does it simply disappear? And if so, how is that disappearance reflected on the ideational and institutional level?
Where does Christianity stand on mediation?
The obvious answer to such a question is that sacrificial agency is monopolized by God in Christ. But what does this mean in practice for the religious activity of Christ’s human followers?
It could imply an evacuation from human life of all specifically religious and socio-symbolic content, leaving ‘secular’ life as the only proper field for an active human response to a sacrifice that is entirely God’s. We could even go so far as to imagine a Christianity without Church, where that sacrifice was reduced to a historical reality made known through God’s Word (i.e. Scripture) without necessity of any ecclesial intervention. Maybe, this – or something like it – is what people mean when they claim that Christianity is ‘not a religion’. Contemporary secularism is no doubt itself a legatee of this doctrine of the exclusivity of God’s sacrificial mediation.
However, there is an alternative understanding. According to this, Christ’s sacrificial mediation is not just monopolized by Christ (in such a way as to imply our exclusion), but monopolized in order, then, to be shared by the whole Church where the latter acts in the Holy Spirit as the body of Christ (as it must do – or cease genuinely to be ‘Church’). Participation through Christ in God’s agency invests the Church as a whole with the priestly and kingly role of sacrifice and religious mediation assigned initially to Christ alone. Christian sacrificial mediation, so understood, resembles the pagan mediation of the kings and priests of archaic religion – to the extent that the Church, like them, plays a mediatory role in channelling divine blessing to humankind. On such a view, sacrificial mediation does not simply disappear from the human sphere with Christianity, but is shared by the totality of those disciples who constitute Christ’s ‘body’. There is, in other words, a collective divinization of all who share Christ’s agency. Needless to say, such status belongs only to those incorporated into Christ, who 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.
How far would this alternative understanding of Christian mediation safeguard the uniqueness of the Christian Gospel?
The issue of the exclusivity of divine sacrificial mediation in Christianity is not, as should now be clear, quite as straightforward as some exclusivists suppose. Our comparative treatment of the issue has prompted us to refine on our initial analysis. There turn out to be different ways in which ‘exclusivity’ of divine mediation can be understood. We can understand it as an elimination of sacrificial agency from the human sphere – an understanding that certainly sets Christianity in the sharpest opposition to the other religions we have considered, though arguably also blurring its distinction from contemporary secularism. On the other hand, we can understand it as a generalization of mediation to the whole of ‘the body of Christ’. The latter understanding distances Christianity from Islam, and brings it closer to archaic religions – in that Christianity does not, like Islam, altogether forbid sacrificial mediation. After all, Christ is the sacrificial mediator par excellence, and the institution of the Church is the socio-symbolic expression of this mediatory role. But the mediation so enabled is not of a kind to encourage the sacred hierarchies of archaic religion targeted by Islam. This mediation is not exercised by a current, mortal bearer of a religious agency passed down through the ancestral line, but by the dead and resurrected Christ. Most crucially for Christian uniqueness, the generalization of Christ’s mediatory role through the Church safeguards that sense of our dependency on ‘a righteousness not our own’ so opposed to the notion of moral self-sufficiency to be found in the confessional religions. In sum, there is, on this second understanding of exclusivity, some concession to the notion of Christianity as ‘a religion’; but by the same token the preservation of a sharp distinction between Christianity and contemporary secularism.
Elimination vs. generalization of sacrificial agency
It should be evident 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 exclusivist and inclusivist positions on eucharistic sacrifice.
Which of these two positions on mediation is the more authentically Christian one? The ultimate criterion is, of course, the authority of Scripture and the practice of the early Church. As regards the latter, for the most part, I refer the reader to the liturgical studies on which I have based my own inclusivist understanding of the eucharistic sacrifice. But there is one overwhelming consideration that I shall now mention.
In both New and Old Testaments the relationship between God and man is fixed in covenants. In the OT, you will remember, these covenants (and there are several of them) always bind the deity, not primarily to an individual, but to a people – albeit, in the case of the patriarchs, to a people still, as it were, within the loins of its ancestor. Things are no different in the New Testament. The sacrifice of Christ is described as winning for Him a people, and the new covenant that results, is, like the old, between God in Christ and a new Israel. In neither case is there question of any proper relationship to God outside the collectivity so constituted. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus (no salvation outside the church). This marks a fundamental difference between the Jewish and Christian traditions, on the one hand, and religions like Islam or Theravada Buddhism that devolve agency on the individual.
As regards specific statements in Scripture, which would seem to lend greater warrant to the inclusivist position, there are two groups of texts.
The first group comprises 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 taking on 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 gives every 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.
Mascall vs Daly
Exclusivist views of the Eucharist unite Protestants and those Catholics who think like Mascall. Of these, the latter hold a position on the Eucharist that is sufficiently close in every other respect to the one advocated in the last chapter that the comparison of their views with those of inclusivists allows us to pinpoint the difference regarding sacrificial agency with some precision. So let us conclude by returning to the formulation of the issue to be found 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 acting in the role of 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. In the words of Robert Daly: ‘(the minister) is not conceived as standing there as part of the Church, embedded in the Christ-Church relationship, but as standing between Christ and the Church’.(p.167)
By contrast, the inclusivist understanding of sacrifice advocated by Dix and Schmemann reflects, not the exclusion, or delegation, of sacrificial agency, but its collectivization as the action of the whole body of Christ, acting in the Spirit.
The Church corporately, through the individual offertory by each member for himself or herself personally, offers itself to God at the offertory under the forms of bread and wine, as Christ offered Himself … The Body of Christ, the church, offers itself to become the sacrificed Body of Christ, the sacrament, in order that thereby the Church itself may become within time what in eternal reality it is before God – the ‘fulness’ or ‘fulfilment’ of Christ; and each of the redeemed may ‘become’ what he has been made by baptism and confirmation, a living member of Christ’s Body. As Augustine was never tired of repeating to his African parishioners: “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.”’ (Dix, p.147)
[i] E.L. Mascall, Corpus Christi, Longmans, 1953
[ii] For an account of what the movement for liturgical renewal means for the Christian understanding of sacrifice, see Robert Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, T&T Clarke, 2009, pp.187-201. You will find a full historical account of these developments in Frank Senn, Christian Liturgy, Fortress, 1997, pp.637ff.
[iii] A concise account of these socio-religious structures is give in Leslie Goode, ‘”Creating Descent” after Nancy Jay’, in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 21.4, 2009
[iv] Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, Polity Press, 1999 [1996], p.187
[v] Maurice Bloch, ‘The Royal Bath in Madagascar’, in Rituals of Royalty, ed. David Cannadine & Simon Price, Cambridge U.P., 1987, pp.271-297
[vi] Kenelm Burridge, Mambu, A Melanesian Millenium, Princeton U.P., 1960, p.115
[vii] On the transformation of Hindu karma into Buddhist kamma, see Richard Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism, Routledge, 1988
[viii] For the notion of 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
[ix] You will find an overview of ethicization in Islam in Leslie Goode, Re-evaluating the relationship between Christian salvation-event and ‘history of religions’ sacrifice, PhD Thesis, London University, 2018 https://www.academia.edu/41060884/Christian_salvation_event_and_history_of_religions_sacrifice_Re_evaluating_the_nature_of_their_relationship