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 positions on Christian sacrifice
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 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’, that 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, at least in the eyes inclusivists, and some exclusivists, as the means by which Christian sacrifice takes effect in our lives (for reasons discussed in my previous piece), these different understandings of the Christian sacrifice, are inevitably 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 as united with the one ongoing sacrifice of Christ. In the words of St Augustine:
‘Your mystery is laid on the table of the Lord, your mystery you receive.
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. These reject the idea of there being any element of offering on our own part in that 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)
Evidently, important theological questions 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, as we have claimed, the Eucharist really is, for some Christians, the prime means through which the fundamental event of the Christian faith communicates itself to them, but 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 should also cause us to anticipate a difference in the understanding and practice of church.
As we might expect, then, these positions are expressed in liturgical differences, and embodied in diverse ecclesial traditions.
Dix
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.
Sacrificial agency and the offertory
On the level of liturgical practice, a church’s position on sacrificial agency tends to reveal itself in the role within the Eucharist it assigns to the offertory. Where the theology centres exclusively on atonement, the offertory is seen as a mere preface to the sacrifice proper, not a part of the sacrifice itself. Thus Eric Mascall (1), one of those theologians mentioned above who combine a strong belief in symbolic participation with an exclusivist understanding of sacrifice:
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.
We find the opposite position argued by the Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann (2):
In the consciousness, in the experience and in the practice of the early Church, the eucharistic sacrifice was offered not only on behalf of all and for all, but by all, and therefore the real offering by each of his own gift, his own sacrifice, was a basic condition of it.’ (Eucharist, p.107)
Here, as with Mascall, this is expressed through references to liturgical practice. Schmemann draws our attention, in his case, 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, according to Schmemann, 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.
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)
On both sides of the question we see the theological significance attributed to the question of the role of the offertory. Indeed, for Gregory Dix, this seemingly arcane issue encapsulates the decisive difference between Eastern and Western strands of Christianity:
The difference between these two ways of receiving the people’s offerings may seem a mere question of convenience, something quite trifling; and so in itself it is. But if any young liturgical student seeking a useful subject for research should undertake to trace the actual process of development of structural differences between the Eastern and Western rites … he will find that they all hinge upon this different development of the offertory in the two halves of Christendom.(pp.120-121)
The theological significance of this difference of liturgical practice is clear. We might question its characterization, at least nowadays, in terms of East vs. West. After all, Dix himself is a ‘western’ Anglo-catholic; also ‘western’, presumably, are those proponents of the Liturgical Movement berated by Mascall for their offertory processions, as well as the pre-1972 Catholics. Rather, there seem to be two widely-held theological positions on the question of sacrificial agency.
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.
On mediation and sacrificial agency: a short ethnographic excursus
Now let us return to the key theological issue: the role of mediation and sacrificial agency.
So important is this question theologically, that one cannot raise it without appearing to challenge the basis of what, in popular preaching and evangelism, has often been presented as the basis of the uniqueness of the Christian faith. Other religions, so we are told, have claimed to be able to show humankind the way to ascend to God, through their own (vain) efforts; only Christianity offers a ‘salvation’ that we do not earn, one that is already achieved for us by God’s sacrificial action in Christ. Here is the doctrine of ‘grace’: at its heart, apparently, the notion of the indispensibility of Christ’s sacrificial mediation.
This raises a number of questions. Does this doctrine of grace contradict with the inclusivist notion of the eucharistic sacrifice – more specifically the idea that our sacrifice constitutes a gift or return that we join in making to God? And does the uniqueness of Christianity actually lie in an exclusivist understanding of mediation?
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.
1. Mediation in archaic religions
The basic pattern of mediation – in complex and hierarchical societies – is as follows.
Generally, the gods to whom sacrifice is made are ancestral spirits, and are worshipped by their descendants. But – and here is the critical point – not all ancestors, and not all descendants of those ancestors, have the same religious status, or, for that matter, any status at all. There tend to exist dominant lineages with known ancestors who perform, in religion, a mediatory role in respect to other members of the community. The ancestors of dominant lineages are invoked by their descendants. But those on behalf of whom that ancestral favour and protection are invoked can extend well beyond the descendants of the dominant group to include a wider community in respect to which the dominant ancestors exercise a tutelary role, and their descendants a religious service.
The most well-known instances of this are large-scale politico-religious structures (now largely defunct), such as – to name just a few that happen to be known to me – the pre-revolutionary Chinese empire, African kingdoms like the Ashanti or the Zulu, or the Polynesian chiefdoms.(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.
2. Mediation in confessional religions
If what I have said sounds unfamiliar, this may be because it does not altogether apply – or applies only in part – to the pattern of socio-religious relationships that have prevailed over the last two thousand years in cultures and societies founded on – for want of a better term – confessional religions (i.e. Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and others). These show important modifications to this basic structure of sacrificial mediation.
These modifications are mainly owed to a new emphasis on intention – what the Bible calls the heart. There continues to be religious giving, but the motivation of the gift comes to matter more than its material content or its conformity to ritual protocol. Thus, in the case of Buddhism, for example, pious giving matters, because it manifests, on the part of the donor, an intentional disposition associated with the overcoming of attachment to the world – in effect, with good kamma (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.
Where does Christianity stand on mediation?
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.
The relationship between God and humankind manifested in the covenants recounted in the Old Testament is always one that binds the deity to a people – albeit, in the case of the patriarchs, with a people still, as it were, within the loins of its ancestor. Things are no different in the New Testament. The sacrifice whereby Christ wins a people places him in the role of their ultimate religious mediator – a role expressed by Scripture in terms both of kingship and priesthood. In fact, there is no question of any proper relationship to God outside the collectivity constituted by such mediation. This strikes me as a fundamental difference between the tradition of the Old and New Testaments and confessional religions that devolve agency on the individual.
On the other hand, by comparison with archaic societies, there is, with Christianity, a very distinctive form of mediation, and this distinctiveness has important implications for social and political structures. For the mediation, in this case, is no longer that of a current, mortal bearer of a religious agency passed down through the ancestral line; it is that of the dead and resurrected Christ. On the social and political level this precludes – or should preclude – the kind of priestly mediation condemned by the Qur’an whereby a differential status is secured through the role of religious representation. The kind of ‘sacral’ kingship characteristic of archaic hierarchical societies is hardly a possibility where ultimate religious agency is monopolized in this way.
Yet, does this monopolization of religious agency by God in Christ necessarily involve the elimination of mediation from the field of 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.
Elimination vs. generalization of sacrificial agency
Let us return to the initial formulation of the issue that we find in Mascall:
I would not describe it (the Offertory) as an offering of bread and wine, in the strict sense of an offering made to God. If we go back to the last Supper and consider the four actions of our Lord – he took, he blessed, he broke, he gave – we see that the first of these which corresponds to the Offertory of the liturgy, was not an act of offering, but of reception: he took.
Frankly, I believe Mascall is wrong here. Seen against the background of our discussion of non-Christian forms of sacrifice, Mascall’s two-stage break-down of the sacrificial offering (i.e. bread and wine simply brought to the altar, then offered to God as Christ’s body and blood) resembles rather too closely the archaic ritual pattern: resources are first pooled in an initial act of giving in order subsequently to be sacrificed on the community’s behalf. The danger here lies in the quasi-mediatory role this assigns to the priest enacting Christus solus (Christ alone) in relation to the laity, and the way it obscures the sense of a collective sacrifice of the whole Church acting in the Spirit. (9) If the distinguishing feature of Christian sacrifice is not, as we have just seen, the delegation – still less the exclusion – of sacrificial agency, but the collective form of that agency as the action of the whole Church in the Spirit, then let us, by all means, have more prominence given to offertory processions. Personally, I love the moment, preceding the Eucharist proper, when the minister gives thanks as he raises up the collection plate in full view of the congregation; it makes what follows our sacrifice. Which, of course, is by no means to deny that this sacrifice takes the divinely instituted form according to which our bread and wine, the offering up of our daily lives, participates in the one and only sacrifice acceptable to God which is that of Christ’s body and blood.
(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?