This is the second of three pieces in which I will be addressing issues that commonly arise in relation to the meaning of the Eucharist:
-What is the nature of the ‘symbolism’ by which our Eucharist relates to the Christ-event?
-What does we do at the Eucharist: offer sacrifice, or just receive?
– How does the Eucharist reproduce the Church?
The background to these pieces is an attempt to offer an intellectually cogent account of the Christian faith for the benefit of non-believers. The account itself has been published on my website. It is heavily dependent on an understanding of the Eucharist that has been widely accepted by theologians across the range of non-Protestant denominations. Up to now, I have simply assumed its validity. In these pieces, I shall seek to demonstrate it, on the basis of arguments, not only in liturgical theology, but (more unusually) in adjacent academic domains such as social anthropology and religious studies. I set out the advantages of this broad-based approach in my earlier piece.
So these three pieces have a place in my presentation of the Christian faith. Yet they are also intended to stand alone as self-contained treatments of issues which are of general concern to all Christians, though little discussed – still less understood – by non-specialists.
Let us come to the second of our three issues.
-What do we do at the Eucharist: offer sacrifice, or just receive?
Alternative understandings of sacrifice and Eucharist
Our last piece explored how the eucharistic worship of Christians relates to the sacrifice of Christ. Our concern in the present piece is with how Christians – whatever their views on the sacrificial status of the Eucharist – understand their role in the Christian sacrifice as we find that expressed in their Eucharists. Whether, that is, we should see ourselves as beneficiaries of a sacrificial action in which agency belongs exclusively to Christ in his death and Resurrection. Or as active participants in a sacrificial action which we join with Christ in offering. On the latter view, Christ’s sacrifice – and his agency in the sacrifice – becomes ours also.
Theologically speaking, Christians who hold the first view do so because they identify Christian sacrifice exclusively with Christ’s atoning death and its redemptive effects. Only the death of Christ can atone for sin. So to define sacrifice exclusively as atonement, is to confine our own role to one of recipients in the face of an agency that is exclusively God’s in Christ. Those on the other side of the debate favour a broader understanding of Christian sacrifice: not just as an act of atonement (though it is that), but as a gift or return universally owed to God as the author of our being – a ‘gift of praise’, which Christ alone makes worthily and then allows us to share. In the first case, the sacrificial action is a transaction between Father and Son; in the second, it is an ongoing action that begins with the Father and Son, but spirals out to include ourselves.
I will refer to these two positions on sacrificial agency as exclusivist and inclusivist, respectively.
Given the importance of the Eucharist as the means by which Christian sacrifice takes effect in our lives (in the eyes inclusivists, and at least some exclusivists), it is no surprise to find these different understandings of the Christian sacrifice reflected in our respective understandings of the Eucharist. Inclusivists see the offering of the Eucharistic elements as the offering of their own individual and collective lives – an offering thereby united with the one ongoing sacrifice of Christ. In the words of St Augustine:
‘Your mystery is laid on the table of the Lord.
Those exclusivists who do not regard the Eucharist as a sacrifice see the whole idea of sharing in the sacrifice of Christ as the manifestation of an aspiration to a righteousness based on our own ‘works’, and a pretention to offer to God what can only be offered by Christ himself. In Cranmer’s eloquent words:
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.
But there are also exclusivists wholly committed to the notion of Eucharist as a participation in the one sacrifice of Christ, such as the Anglo-catholic, Eric Mascall. Such people reject the idea of there being any element of offering on our own part in the one perfect offering of Christ enacted at the altar:
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)
Alternative liturgies and ecclesial structures
Evidently, important theological questions are at issue here. But it is mistaken to characterize these differences in purely theological terms. For a start, the Eucharist is, of its nature, a collective action – often said to be constitutive of the church. So if the Eucharist really is, for some Christians, the prime means through which the fundamental event of the Christian faith communicates itself to them, but is not – or much less so – for others, this is significant at multiple levels. It indicates a difference in the degree to which the faith is communicated through collective, as opposed to an individual, means. It might also cause us to anticipate a difference in the understanding and practice of church.
In fact, these positions are indeed expressed in differing liturgical practices, and embodied in diverse ecclesial structures.
The Orthodox theologian, Alexander Schmemann, draws our attention to the theological significance in the Eastern church of the proskomide or prothesis. This is where the laity themselves 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 that forms the indispensable first stage of the ritual that continues with the acts and words of the priest at the altar. This goes back to the practice of the early Church, says Schmemann, 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)
Considerations relating to the socio-symbolism of giving take us to the heart of how religious institutions see themselves and their relationship to the world. So, it is no surprise to find that the offertory practice – and no doubt corresponding ideas of sacrificial agency – have tended to divide on an East-West basis. At least according to the Anglo-catholic, Gregory Dix:
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.(pp.120-121)
However, this difference is evidently no longer simply an East:West thing – if it ever was. For we find the Anglo-catholic, Eric Mascall, criticizing liturgical practices in Western churches on precisely the grounds that they give the offertory the kind of symbolic importance that we find attributed to them in the Eastern rites. The targets of Mascall’s attack are ‘the proponents of the Liturgical Movement with their offertory processions’, as well as certain Catholics . Both, as we have seen, are, in Mascall’s exclusivist eyes, at fault for giving the impression that the eucharistic offering is something we joing in giving. Neither of these targets are, so far as I know, specifically ‘Eastern’ in their inspiration. More at issue here, I suspect, may be a division between more conservative and more progressive (post-Vatican 2) brands of Catholicism. I am reminded here of the connection Robert Daly draws between a strongly exclusivist Roman Catholic atonement theology (reliant on penal substitution) and the excessive liturgical focus (as he sees it) on the agency of the priest acting alone as sole representative of Christ. The result, he claims, is a Eucharist that diminishes to practically nothing the distinctive role of the laity as the assembled body of Christ. The reinstitution of a more ‘Eastern’ offertory practice (such as we find with the Liturgical Movement) might be some safeguard against this unfortunate development of pre-Vatican 2 ecclesiology.
Coming, at last, to those Protestant exclusivists who would deny that the Eucharist is a sacrifice in a literal sense (as this is a group I know from personal experience), most would, I suspect, be surprised to learn that the offertory could ever have been considered by anyone to have an integral role in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. In my own Protestant Evangelical Church nothing resembling an ‘offertory’ has ever taken place, nor does the practice of giving (which is generous) ever receive liturgical expression. Specific assocation with the Eucharist would, I imagine, be considered theologically dubious, as appearing to sanction the notion of a works-based righteousness. The socio-political correlate is a relatively weak sense of the Church as an institutional structure, and a relatively personalized understanding of sacrifice, according to which we relate to God through Christ, as individuals. The true Church, as distinct from the assembly of professed believers attending a particular congregation, becomes the ‘invisible Church’ of all true believers, as yet known only to God.
Exclusivist vs. inclusivist positions
So one of the things that makes a Christian believer an exclusivist or an inclusivist is ecclesiological background. But, of course, this does not require us to concede, given the existence of diverse long-standing ecclesial traditions, the one must be as good as the other. Rather it raises the stakes by suggesting that, that since those positions cannot be equally true, the practice of one church must represent the tradition of the Apostles more faithfully than the other.
What then should be our criterion in judging between them? There can, of course, only be one: namely, faithfulness to Scripture and the tradition of the early church. This criterion can, of course, be applied to the theological implications of the exclusivist and inclusivist positions; but also to their socio-religious implications in terms of symbolic practice and ecclesial organization. We can ask which position – inclusivism or exclusivism – is more consistent, with a theology based in Scripture. We can 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 see in the New Testament and the tradition of the early church.
In my own case, it was a theological concern that initially led me to an inclusivist position. I did not find that Penal Substitution, or any ‘satisfaction’ theory of Atonement, offered an intellectually credible or morally tolerable account of the Christian salvation-event. I came to understand that God does not need the sufferings of his Son in order to be able to forgive us, and that He chooses to forgive us through the Cross, because, in so doing, he achieves some further goal: namely, the straightening out of a world distorted by our idolatries. The ‘Atonement studies’ from which I drew this understanding – F.C.N. Hicks; Frances Young; Godfrey Ashby; John Moses; Ian Bradley; Bruce Chilton; John Dunnill – seemed to me united in their insistence on understanding the Christ-event within the frame of a concept of sacrifice far broader than the exclusivist one of an act of atonement. Here then I discovered a theology consistent with the internalist position.
At a much later point, I came upon the work of liturgical theologians from a range of non-Protestant denominational backgrounds – Gregory Dix; Henri de Lubac; Alexander Schmemann; Robert Daly – all of whom put the case for an understanding of eucharistic theology and practice that presupposed an inclusivist position on the Christian sacrifice. They did so, primarily, on the grounds of what their researches had led them to believe was the authentic liturgical and ecclesial practice of the early Church. From my own perspective, however, the Eucharist, when understood in this way, also seemed to offer the perfect ritual expression of the broader concept of sacrifice articulated by the theologians of Atonement mentioned above. In other words, I discovered a happy convergence between an important strand of Atonement theology and liturgical studies of the Eucharist as the superiority of an inclusivist understanding of Christian sacrifice.
For the likes of Dix and Schmemann, the Eucharist is about more than forgiveness of sins. It involves 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, 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)
Why would anyone reject this vision, given its theological coherence and the apparent solidity of its basis in an investigation of early Christian liturgy so much 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. 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 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 rite where 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.
This elimination of human mediation not only appears integral to Christianity; it also distinguishes it from all other religions – or so it is endlessly claimed in popular preaching and mission sermons, as well as by popular authors such as Philip Yancey and Miroslav Volf. 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 – one already achieved for us by God’s sacrificial action in Christ. This is the doctrine of Grace, with the indispensability of Christ’s sole mediation at its heart. And, so we are told, so far does it stand apart from the works-based righteousness of other religions that it is doubtful whether Christianity is even properly be categorized as a ‘religion’.
One may doubt whether the preachers in question are experts in all the religions and philosophies from which they claim to distinguish Christianity. But their assumption as to the basis of the Christian uniqueness seems so firmly entrenched that to challenge it feels, for a former exclusivist such as myself, like laying an axe to the root of the Christian faith.
So, is the exclusivity of divine sacrificial mediation really the thing that distinguishes Christian faith from every other religion or philosophy, and the Christian symbolic and institutional structures from every other form of human sociality? If so, then inclusivism would seem to be deviation from the proper Christian paradigm, and a kind of back-sliding towards paganism. As an exclusivist, this was indeed how I remember feeling about the eucharistic liturgy, and ecclesial structure of important strands of the Christian faith – for example, references to sacrifice in the Roman Catholic eucharistic liturgies that seemed to imply something more inclusivist than Cranmer’s familiar ‘sacrifice of thanks and praise’.
How are we to respond? Such concerns respecting sacrificial mediation involve the entirety of the exclusivist’s understanding of what the Gospel is, and what the Gospel has to bring the world that it doesn’t, in its religions and societies, already have.
In fact, the very universality of these concerns is an invitation to approach the issue of sacrificial mediation on the widest front, and to investigate, with the support of theologically-adjacent disciplines like social anthropology and religious studies, the real differences between Christianity and other religions respecting the notion and practice of sacrificial mediation in order to determine whether the exclusivists are correct.
This I now to propose to do. What will emerge from our comparisons is that, yes, an essential difference on the part of Christianity does indeed exist, and that it is very much to do with its notion and practice of sacrificial mediation. However, that difference is not quite where exclusivists usually place it.
Mediation and sacrificial agency in archaic religions: excursus I
So let us now look at whether, and how, ‘salvation’ is sacrificially mediated in other religions.
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 arrived, salvation (if that is what it is) has less to do with goals we would nowadays regard as ‘spiritual’, than with healing and wholeness, security and prosperity in the here-and-now. But this – as we would see it, rather ‘worldly’ – salvation is, for all that, very much sacrificially mediated.
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.(4) 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. (5) 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. Seen from our perspective, it certainly reinforces the idea, that, in respect to sacrificial mediation, Christianity brings something different. In the latter case all these layers of mediation are effectively removed, and individual believers, liberated from this worldly hierarchy, are left, along with their fellow-believers, free to commune independently 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 a still quite pagan society:
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.
Thus far, then, our evidence seems to support the exclusivist position.
2. Mediation in confessional religions: excursus II
My ‘fundamental schema’ is far from the total picture, however. If my account of pagan sacrificial mediation, thus far, seems very remote from anything you may have encountered in other sources, this is no doubt 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). 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 (Buddhist version of karma) (6) 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. (7) 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. (8) 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.
The case of sacrificial mediation in these confessional religions modifies our understanding of ‘pagan’ sacrificial mediation somewhat, as also our picture of Christianity’s relation to it. 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 kind of sacrificial mediation. To this extent, Christianity does not appear to stand so far apart from these confessional faiths as it did from archaic religions. On the other, Islam and Buddhism seem to present a stark contrast in respect to their association of these anti-mediatory tendencies with individualization. The resistance to sacrificial mediation here seems to go along with a kind 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 – a sacrifice of which we are made personally aware, without necessity of any ecclesial intervention, through our individual study of ‘God’s Word’ (i.e. Scripture). There are certainly forms of Protestant Christianity that tend in this direction, with little place for ‘religion’ or ‘church’. Maybe these forms give some solid ground for the claim that Christianity ‘is not a religion’. Beyond the bounds of Christianity (in any but a purely cultural sense), contemporary secularism may also be a legatee of this doctrine of the exclusivity of God’s sacrificial mediation.
There is, however, an alternative understanding. On this view, Christ’s mediation – his sacrificial agency – is not segregated from humankind, but universally shared by the Church as a whole where it acts (as it must do – or cease to genuinely be ‘Church’) in the Holy Spirit. Participation in God’s agency through Christ invests the whole Church with the priestly and kingly role of sacrifice and religious mediation assigned to Christ. Christian sacrificial mediation, so understood, is not so utterly dissimilar from the pagan mediation of the kings and priests of archaic religion who act as a channel of divine blessing to their communities. Such mediation does not disappear in Christianity. Rather, it is monopolized by the risen Christ himself, who then shares it with all those disciples who constitute his ‘body’. The result is a kind of 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 offer?
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. To understand it as implying an elimination of human sacrificial agency certainly sets Christianity in the sharpest opposition to the other religions we have considered – though arguably it blurrs its distinction from contemporary secularism. On the other hand, to understand that exclusivity in terms of a generalization of mediation to ‘the body of Christ’ distances Christianity from Islam, and brings it closer to archaic religions – in that Christianity does not, like Islam, altogether forbid sacrificial mediation. Christ is the sacrificial mediator par excellence, and the institution of the Church the socio-religious expression of his mediatory role. But the kind of mediation this permits is of a nature to exclude the sacred hierarchies characteristic of archaic religion that are the target of Muslim attack. The mediation in question is not 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. 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’ that is 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 a sharp distinction from contemporary secularism is preserved.
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 internalist 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 that would seem, in my view, to lend greater warrant to the internalist position, there are two groups of texts.
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.
Mascall vs Daly
Externalist views of the Eucharist unite Protestants and Catholics who think like Mascall. Of these, the latter hold a postion on the Eucharist that is sufficiently close in every other respect to the one advocated in these pieces that the comparison of their views with those of internalists 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 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. (9) In the words of Robert Daly: ‘(the minster) 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’.
By contrast, the internalist 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)
(1) Citation from Corpus Christi, Longmans, Green and co. (1953)
(2) Citations from The Eucharist, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press (1987)
(3) Citation from John Colwell, Promise and Presence, Wipf & Stock (2005)
(4) 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)
(5) Maurice Bloch, ‘The Royal Bath in Madagascar’, in Rituals of Royalty, ed. David Cannadine & Simon Price (1987), pp.271-297
(6) For ethicization in Theravada Buddhism, see Richard Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism (1988)
(7) 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
(8) 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)
(9) This is essentially Robert Daly’s main argument in Sacrifice Unveiled (2009)
*****
To summarize – 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?
clearly attributed, in both the New and the Old Testaments like sacrificial mediation, is monopolized by God in Christ. In this respect, Christianity follows on the path of Judaism before it.
Christianity demonstrates an internalization of sacrifice such as I have already described for other religions (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.
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 inter-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.
At the most fundamental level, we are concerned here with different attitudes to mediation: or, in other words, to the intervention between God and the believer of collective (i.e. social and institutional) structures. Is the Christian encounter with God one that is mediated through social and institutional life – or is solely a matter of the individual experience?
So, given the framing of this objection to inclusivism in terms of a challenge to the basis of Christian uniqueness, I propose to respond
But, in my view, it was inadequately supported by empirical evidence from other faiths. After all, the assertion that x or y constitutes an essential difference between Christianity and other religions involves a claim about other religions, as much as one about Christianity. I always believed that the necessary evidence of other faiths would easily be found. But I rather suspected that these preachers and theologians lacked the background in religious studies or social anthropology to back up their claims.
Much depends, I would suggest, on how we understand the nature and function of sacrificial mediation. Since
I propose, therefore, to begin by examining the phenomenon of sacrificial mediation itself as we find it exemplified across the range of world religions. In taking such an approach, I shall be adopting the same strategy that I adopted in our earlier exploration of the symbol. This involves taking a step back from the theological discussion in order to contextualize the Christian phenomenon against the broader background of (non-Judaeo-Christian) practice.
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. All Christians, even those who would deny the Eucharist to be a sacrifice in the proper sense, admit a secondary, ‘metaphorical’ sense, in which sacrifice applies to the non-ritual offering believers are called upon to make of their whole lives in response to the sacrifice of Christ – and even to the Eucharist itself as, in the words of the prayerbook, ‘a sacrifice of thanks and praise’. But, in these latter cases, the term sacrifice is being used metaphorically. The primary sense of sacrifice is strongly dissociated from the eucharistic ritual and refers uniquely and exclusively to the Cross of Christ. What we find in receptionists like Mascall is much the same suspicion respecting sacrificial agency, though, in their case, a catholic commitment to symbolic participation safeguards the status of the Eucharist as sacrifice. The result is a strong sense of symbolic participation in a sacrificial action whose function is exclusively atonement.
c For this reason Mascall resists the tendency in the pre-1970 Roman Catholic Canon and the Liturgical Movement to give ‘extreme prominence’ to the offertory procession. 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 constitute a part of the rite itself.o
Here, as with Mascall, this is expressed through references to liturgical practice.
Schmemann strongly rejects the charge that such practices arise from a blasphemous presumption to offer directly, and of ourselves, what can be offered only once and for all by the cross of Christ. Rather, he argues that the gifts of the laity lying on the offering plate 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 (offering plate), 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)
Protestant Evangelical positions
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 inclusivist 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 (3) 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 of 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 exclusivist 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?
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, 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)
By contrast, proponents of the receptionist position, even sacramentally-inclined 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. All Christians, even those who would deny the Eucharist to be a sacrifice in the proper sense, admit a secondary, ‘metaphorical’ sense, in which sacrifice applies to the non-ritual offering believers are called upon to make of their whole lives in response to the sacrifice of Christ – and even to the Eucharist itself as, in the words of the prayerbook, ‘a sacrifice of thanks and praise’. But, in these latter cases, the term sacrifice is being used metaphorically. The primary sense of sacrifice is strongly dissociated from the eucharistic ritual and refers uniquely and exclusively to the Cross of Christ. What we find in receptionists like Mascall is much the same suspicion respecting sacrificial agency, though, in their case, a catholic commitment to symbolic participation safeguards the status of the Eucharist as sacrifice. The result is a strong sense of symbolic participation in a sacrificial action whose function is exclusively atonement.
I shall return to the crucial question of sacrificial mediation in just a moment.
‘An over-realized eschatology?’
First, however, I shall say a few words about another, more practical and ecclesial, concern that I know to be raised, for Protestant Evangelicals, by the view of Christian sacrifice we have attributed to Schmemann and Dix.
I am referring to the danger of they see as 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 the words ‘over-realized eschatology’, loom, no doubt, time-honoured 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 such as ‘fencing the altar’ – necessitated by the same overweening ambition to embody the glorious reality to which, properly, the Church should only point.
Are these concerns justified?
I would argue that there is a distinction that needs to be drawn here between the divine ‘blueprint’ of the Eucharist 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 community. It goes without saying that, in the here-and-now, neither our individual behaviour nor that of our church communities will altogether show forth the glory of the eschaton. Yet, if there is one place where the Church can participate pre-emptively in the world to come, it is in the liturgy that constitutes that blueprint. After all, the blueprint itself originates with God, not with ourselves.
Implied by my use of the term blueprint is the kind of understanding of the religious symbolism proposed in my last post, where the present ritual event participates in the reality of the Christ-event. This kind of understanding is no doubt unavailable to Protestant Evangelicals – as it is, of course, to contemporary secular culture. It is therefore replaced by an understanding which reduces the symbol to the status of a sign or index of a reality exterior to the symbol itself – a reality which the ‘symbol’ points to without participating in. This is why the claim made for the Christian religious symbol – that it brings the conditions of eschaton into the here-and-now – is treated as a claim made for the the ecclesial reality to which the symbol refers. Hence, the fear of an over-realized eschatology. My next post will examine in detail the relationship between symbol and institution. To forestall my conclusions there, let us simply say that, just because that ‘the Eucharist gives the Church, and the Church gives the Eucharist’, not everything claimed for the symbol can also be claimed for the institution.
more collectivist suggests a far more collective and for othersthe difference regarding its centrality to Christian life, is likely over the place of the Eucharist affects the understanding of the Church and its relation to wider society. Most obviously, the inclusivist understanding of Eucharist presupposes as the fundamental means by which Christian sacrifice takes effect in us a collective action. This inevitably accords a central importance to church in an institutional sense; whereas, where the means of this ‘taking effect’ are understood more individualistically, church becomes more ancilliary
If, as I have suggested, the inclusivist position does not require us to deny either the indispensability of the sacrificial death, or tphe necessity of atonement, it would seem to bring a theological gain, without a compensating loss: an expansion on – not a replacement of – the exclusivist understanding. So why, we might ask, is it so contentious?
The answer, I believe, is that this possibility of shared sacrificial agency, in the eyes of exclusivists, comes perilously close to undermining our sense of the necessity of Christ’s mediation. It appears to invite the possibility of a direct sacrificial approach to God – the kind of thing we often associate with pagan religion. Christianity is unique, so we have been taught, 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 view encapsulated in Cranmer’s famous post-communion prayer:
; not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offences, through Jesus Christ our Lord …
Both views of sacrifice will be reflected in our understanding of the Eucharist
There are, of course, Christians who do not believe the Eucharist to be a sacrifice. This may partly be a failure to understand the nature of the religious symbol, and how it how it unites our eucharistic worship with the sacrifice of Christ (understandable in the present intellectual climate) . This is the issue I treated in my earlier piece.
However, whatever their beliefs about the sacrificial status of sacrifice Our point of departure here is that the Eucharist IS a sacrifice. Theologians who are united in this belief are divided on the issue of our role in the sacrifice. Is the Christian sacrifice exclusively the sacrifice of Christ, or do we, as worshippers, join with Christ in offering up ourselves in the bread and wine? In the first case, agency is entirely Christ’s, and the worshippers’ role in the sacrifice is limited to receiving the benefit Christ has procured; in the second, worshippers exercise a kind of sacrificial agency. Do we simply receive, or do we also give?
Those who deny the Eucharist to be a sacrifice will naturally hold an exclusivist position on sacrificial agency (i.e. that the sacrifice is uniquely Christ’s). Conversely, theologians who believe that the Eucharist is a sacrifice, such as those whose views I am advocating both in this and my earlier piece (Dix, Bouyer, de Lubac, Kilmartin, Schmemann) hold to an inclusivist position (i.e. that sacrificial agency is something we share). However, there are also, as we shall see, theologians holding the Eucharist to be a sacrifice who take an exclusivist position, like the Anglo-catholic, Eric Mascall (see below). We should therefore conclude that there are two separate issues here: the sacrificial status of the Eucharist and the inclusivity/exclusivity of sacrificial agency. This is sometimes obscured by the use of the term participation both with reference to the ontological relation of Eucharist and Christ-event, and to the sharing of sacrificial agency.
There is a clear relationship between the position theologians take on agency, and the nature of their underlying theology of sacrifice. The exclusivist position is, by and large, favoued by those who identify Christian sacrifice uniquely with the atoning death. Evidently, only the death of Christ can atone for sin. So to define sacrifice exclusively as atonement, is to confine our own role to one of recipients in the face of an agency that is exclusively God’s in Christ. Those, on the other hand, who take an inclusivist view will favour a broader understanding of Christian sacrifice as, not just an offering of atonement, but a gift or return to God in acknowledgement of His gifts to us. To define sacrifice more inclusively does not necessarily contradict the belief that sacrifice is something pre-emptively achieved by Christ in the Cross and Resurrection. For, on the inclusivist view (as represented by Dix et al.), the gift we see ourselves as offering to God is still one we make in participation with Christ in his Passion, not one we offer on our own.
Still, the inclusivist position presupposes a markedly broader understanding of sacrifice than the exclusivist one. Just to sum up. For the latter: 1. the only sacrifice is the historical death of Christ on the cross; 2. the function of that sacrifice is entirely one of atonement for sin; 3. it occurs as a one-off transaction between the Father and the Son. On the inclusivist view, Christian sacrifice involves: 1. not only a death, but an act of self-offering in life and death; 2. not only an atonement,but an ongoing action of worship and praise; 3. not only a transaction between Fatherand Son, but a movement of love and giving within the Trinity. In all these respects, the sacrifice, initiated by Christ, spirals outward in order to include ourselves. To the extent, then, that the eucharistic ritual and Christ-event are conceived of as a sacrifice in this broader sense, the Eucharist is seen as a divine action whose agency we share.
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.
Sacrificial agency and the offertory