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?
-Eucharist ‘sacrifice’? Do we offer it, or just receive its benefits?
– 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.
-Eucharistic ‘sacrifice’? Do we offer it, or just receive its benefits?
Diverse 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 whether we ourselves have sacrificial agency in the Christian sacrifice expressed in our Eucharists. In other words, are we just recipients and beneficiaries of a sacrifice which Christ offers alone? Or do we offer sacrifice at the Eucharist along with Him? Put another way, what takes place at the Eucharist – Christ’s offering? or ours as well?
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 in it to one of recipients in the face of an agency that is exclusively God’s in Christ. Proponents of the second view 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. Humans can no more offer such a gift worthily than they can atone for themselves. So, Christ makes the gift on our behalf, then allows us to share in His offering. In the first of these definitions of sacrifice (as pure act of atonement), there is a transaction between God the Father and God the Son from which we humans benefit. In the second, there 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, for all inclusivists and some exclusivists, as the means by which Christian sacrifice takes effect in our lives, it is no surprise to find these different theologies 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 sacrifice alongside – and as part of – Christ’s offering of Himself. Exclusivists fall into two categories. There are those (i.e. Protestants) who would not see the Eucharist as a sacrifice at all; others who would see it as a sacrifice, but a sacrifice in which Christ alone is offered. In the words of the Anglo-Catholic, Eric Mascall:(1)
I would not describe (the Eucharist) as an offering of bread and wine, in the strict sense of an offering made to God’. (pp.182-183)
Diverse liturgies and ecclesial structures
Evidently, these differences have an important theological aspect. But it is a mistake to characterize them in exclusively theological terms. For a start, the Eucharist is, of its nature, a collective action – often said to be constitutive of the church. It follows that in assigning the Eucharist a relatively more central, or peripheral, role, Christians display differences in their understanding of the means through which the fundamental event of the Christian faith is communicated to them – specifically, over whether, and how far, that event is communicated through collective – as opposed to individual – means. This, in turn, would lead us to anticipate differences between Christians in their understanding of church and its role in Christian life.
This view is certainly borne out by what we see on the ground.
For example, the Orthodox theologian, Alexander Schmemann, draws our attention to a liturgical expression of theological inclusivism in the shape of the practice of the proskomide and prothesis in the Eastern churches.(2) 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, and forms an indispensable first stage of the ritual action culminating in the acts and words of the priest at the altar. This practice goes back to 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. (p.107)
Social anthropology has shown how considerations relating to the socio-symbolism of giving take us to the heart of how religious institutions envisage themselves and their relationship to the world. So, it is no surprise to find that, in Christianity, diverse offertory practices – conveying diverse notions of sacrificial agency – are associated with different ecclesial traditions. As the Anglo-Catholic, Gregory Dix, puts it:(3)
The difference between these two ways of receiving the people’s offerings (i.e. the presence of these practices in the East and their absence in the West) may seem a mere question of convenience, something quite trifling; and so in itself it is. But if any young liturgical student seeking a useful subject for research should undertake to trace the actual process of development of structural differences between the Eastern and Western rites … he will find that they all hinge upon this different development of the offertory in the two halves of Christendom.(pp.120-121)
Actually, the ecclesial impact of this theological and liturgical divergence is no longer, pace Dix, restricted to an opposition of East and West – if it ever was. For we find the Anglo-Catholic, Eric Mascall, cited above, criticizing liturgical practices of Western churches on precisely the grounds that they give the offertory the kind of symbolic importance attributed to them in the Eastern rites mentioned by Schmemann and Dix. The targets of his attack are ‘the proponents of the Liturgical Movement with their offertory processions’, as well as certain Catholics. In Mascall’s exclusivist eyes, these are at fault for giving the impression that the bread and wine are something we offer to God. The practices in question are not, so far as I know, specifically ‘Eastern’ in their inspiration. More at issue, I suspect, may be differences between more conservative and more progressive (post-Vatican 2) strands of Catholicism. I am reminded 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.(4) The result, according to Daly, is a Eucharist that reduces to practically nothing the distinctive role of the laity as the assembled body of Christ.
Coming, at last, to those Protestant exclusivists who would deny that the Eucharist is a sacrifice in a literal sense (a group I know from personal experience), here, I suspect, we would find little recognition that the offertory could ever have an integral role in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. My own Protestant Evangelical Church has always been very generous in its giving. However, I am not aware of that generosity ever receiving liturgical expression (in the shape of an offertory, for example) – let alone being associated in a specific way with the ‘Lord’s Supper’. The latter would, I imagine, be considered theologically highly dubious, in appearing to sanction the notion of a works-based righteousness. The inevitable socio-political corollary of this strongly Protestant stance is a sense of Church that is only weakly institutional, and a relatively individualized understanding of sacrifice, whereby we relate to God through Christ, primarily as individuals. The true Church, on this view, is confined to the ‘invisible Church’ of all true believers, as yet known only to God.
Exclusivist vs. inclusivist positions
One huge factor, therefore, in determining whether a Christian believer (or theologian) is an inclusivist or exclusivist, is no doubt their ecclesiological background. The long-standing existence of ecclesial traditions reflecting different liturgical practices might tempt us to conclude that the one must be as good as the other; it would somehow be raising the stakes too high were we to suggest that the practice of one church represented the tradition of the Apostles more faithfully than the other. The fact remains, however, that the theological positions embodied in these diverse liturgical and ecclesial traditions are not compatible with each 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 the kind of atonement doctrine implied by most exclusivists (i.e. Penal Substitution) offered an intellectually credible or morally tolerable account of the Christian salvation-event. I came eventually to understand that God does not need the sufferings of his Son just in order to be able to forgive us, but chooses to forgive us in this way because, in so doing, he achieves a 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 –(5) were 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 –(6) 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 on 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 a rite in which Christ alone gives (his body and blood), and the congregants receive (the bread and wine). Understood in this way, the symbolism is productive of an ecclesial community characterized by the absolute divine monopoly of ritual agency and the elimination of all mediation (by one human for another). Such symbolism invalidates all human pretention to superior status by reducing believers to the uniform and equal status of undeserving recipients.
Not only does the elimination of human mediation appear, on such a view, integral to Christianity; it also distinguishes Christianity 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, we are told, Christianity stands so far apart from the works-based righteousness of other religions that it is doubtful whether it is even properly categorized as ‘a religion’ at all.
One might doubt whether the preachers in question are experts in all the religions and philosophies from which Christianity is here being distinguished. But their assumption as to the basis of the Christian uniqueness is deeply entrenched. So much so, in fact, that to challenge it feels, for a former exclusivist such as myself, like laying an axe to the root of the Christian faith itself.
Should we then accept the view that it is the exclusivity of divine sacrificial mediation that marks out the Christian faith from every other religion – hence, presumably also, the Christian Church from every other form of human social structure? If so, then inclusivism would have to be considered a deviation from the true Christian paradigm, a back-sliding towards paganism. As an exclusivist, this was indeed how I remember feeling about the eucharistic liturgy – and ecclesial organization – of important strands of the Christian faith. I would jib, for example, at references to sacrifice in the Roman Catholic eucharistic liturgy which seemed to imply anything more literal than Cranmer’s ‘sacrifice’ of thanks and praise.
How then to respond to exclusivists like my former self? How did I lay my own concerns to rest? Concerns respecting sacrificial mediation go to the heart of exclusivist’s understanding of what the Gospel properly is, and what it has to offer the world that the world does not already possess.
Ultimately, the universality of these concerns has been, for me, an invitation to approach the issue of sacrificial mediation on the widest front: 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 – with a view to determining whether the exclusivists are well-founded in their estimation of the uniqueness of Christianity.
I now propose to give you the benefit of this investigation.
Through comparison with other religions, the true distinctiveness of Christianity quickly emerges. It is a distinctiveness that has everything to do with its notion and practice of sacrificial mediation, but is not, as we shall see, quite as exclusivists understand it.
Mediation and sacrificial agency in archaic religions: excursus I
We will begin by looking 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 was less to do with goals we would nowadays regard as ‘spiritual’, than with healing and wholeness, security and prosperity in the here-and-now. This relatively ‘worldly’ salvation is, for all that, very much sacrificially mediated.
The fundamental schema is as follows.
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. This is where sacrificial mediation emerges. There tend to exist dominant lineages with known ancestors who perform, in religion, a mediatory role in respect to other members of the community. The ancestors of these lineages are invoked by their descendants. But those on behalf of whom that ancestral favour and protection are invoked extend well beyond the descendants of the dominant group. They include a wider community in respect to whom the dominant ancestors exercise a tutelary role, and their descendants a religious service.
The best-known instances of this schema are large-scale politico-religious structures (now largely defunct), such as – to name just a few known to me – the pre-revolutionary Chinese empire, African kingdoms like the Ashanti or the Zulu, or the Polynesian chiefdoms.(7) In all these cases, the ancestors of the royal clan are the divine protectors of whole nations, and are approached as such by their royal devotees. However, in such strongly hierarchical states, this pattern of religious (or politico-religious) representation extends downwards to multiple subordinate levels.
So, for example, the mediatory function of the Zulu king in relation to those throughout the kingdom who are not members of the royal clan is (ethnographic present) mirrored at a microcosmic level in the role of the local dominant lineage head (umnumzane). The latter invokes his dead grand-father or great-grandfather on behalf of those not of his lineage who inhabit the lineage territory. Among the Ashanti, this replication of politico-religious mediation takes place at no less than four subordinate levels: division; sub-division and village. At each level, a dominant lineage head exercises a sacrificially-instituted authority over a territorial unit based on the tutelary role of his ancestral gods with respect to the local community that person represents.
The religious status of the mediator role generally goes along with socio-political, and economic, perquisites. Indeed, the case has 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.(8) 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. Christianity brings something different. It removes all these layers of mediation, leaving individual believers, liberated from this worldly hierarchy, to commune independently, along with their fellow-believers, with the deity and each other. I am reminded of a passage, towards the end of an ethnographic account of a north Papuan people by the anthropologist Kenelm Burridge in which he describes the social impact of Christian eucharistic practice in one still largely pagan society. In relatively less hierarchically differentiated societies such as the one he describes (‘big-man’, as opposed to ‘great man’ societies), pooling and redistribution do not disappear, but become highly devolved, resulting, often, in extreme competitivity. By comparison the distinctive symbolic ritual of Christianity stands out through its exclusion of competitive expressions of social mediation:(9)
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.(p.115)
From all such ‘archaic’ cultures, Christianity stands out, as much on the socio-symbolic and institutional as on the theological level, by its removal of sacrificial mediation from the kind of socio-political expressions that differentiate humans from each other, and by its exclusive investment of sacrificial mediation in the dead and risen Christ.
2. Mediation in confessional religions: excursus II
My fundamental schema does not offer the whole picture, however. If the foregoing account of pagan sacrificial mediation seems very remote from anything you may have encountered in other sources, this may be because it does not altogether apply – or at least only in part – to the pattern of socio-religious relationships that have largely prevailed over the last two thousand years in cultures and societies founded on – for want of a better term – confessional religions (i.e. Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and others). Such religions exemplify important modifications to the basic structure.
These modifications are largely the result of a new emphasis on intention – what the Bible calls ‘the heart’. There continues to be religious giving, but the motivation of the gift comes to matter more than its material content or its conformity to ritual protocol. Thus, in the case of Buddhism, for example, pious giving matters, because it manifests, on the part of the donor, an intentional disposition associated with the overcoming of attachment to the world – with what is called ‘good kamma’ (Pali term for the Buddhist transform of karma).(10) Good kammatic states engender good kammatic states in the future, drawing the giver into a virtuous circle of personal spiritual progress. In Buddhism, this comes to matter more than the effect of the gift on the external world – for example, the alleviation of poverty or the propitiation of the gods.
What we see here has been described as an internalization or ethicization of the gift. It involves a sharp demarcation between the gift’s spiritual and its worldly value – and, corresponding to this, a demarcation of its spiritual and worldly beneficiaries.(11) Foregrounded is generally the spiritual value of the gift, which consists in the spiritual progress of which the donor is the primary, though by no means exclusive, beneficiary. Of course, there is also a material level at which the gift benefits those to whom it is given, such as ‘virtuous recluses’ (i.e. monks) and other needy recipients. But the strict separation of these two levels divorces the gift from any expectation of reciprocity and material return on the part of the religious giver. To confuse spiritual and material levels by seeking a material return from a spiritual gift nullifies the spiritual value of the gift.
There are also certain hugely important social and political corollaries of this ideational revolution – above all, an individualization of religious agency. Essentially, if it’s the dispositional intention of the religious giver that matters, wealth in absolute terms comes to matter less. One no longer needs to be wealthy in order to participate in religious giving. Sacrifice now lies within the capacities of every individual, and pooling is no longer required.
Islam offers us a particularly good example of this.(12) The most important sacrificial offerings of Muslims, it is said, are those of prayer and charitable giving (sadaka). In these, each and every believer takes religious action on their own behalf – albeit around a common spiritual axis, materialized in prayer by the orientation towards Mecca (qiblah). Animal sacrifice also takes place – every year at Eid, both in Mecca and in Muslim households. But here too, a distinctively Muslim pattern of individualization prevails, with sacrificial animals associated with named donors, and adhering to a fixed, and relatively uniform, prescription. Systematically excluded by all Muslim religious practices is the possibility of the agency of one person on behalf of another. Indeed, the whole idea of sacrificial mediation, associated as it generally is with the divinization of the giver, implies, for the Muslim, a violation of the principle of God’s unity (shirk). Devotion belongs to God; the material content of the offering goes, as a rule, to the poor and needy.
The need to account for sacrificial mediation in these confessional religions complicates our schema somewhat, and enlarges the background against which we are seeking to characterize the practice of Christianity. As always when we change the background to something, we obtain a fresh perspective. How does Christianity ‘look’, when considered by comparison with other confessional religions?
On the one hand, as Christians, we can recognize in our own faith the same emphasis on the intention of the worshipper as in Buddhism and Islam, and the same resistance to a certain kind of sacrificial mediation. To this extent, Christianity appears closer, where sacrificial mediation is concerned, to the confessional faiths we have just been describing than to archaic religions. On the other, Islam and Buddhism present a stark contrast when it comes to the way they associate these anti-mediatory tendencies with individualization. Their resistance to sacrificial mediation goes 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. One could even argue that it is 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, this, or something like it, is what people mean when they claim that Christianity is ‘not a religion’. Beyond the bounds of Christianity (in any but a purely cultural sense), contemporary secularism is no doubt a legatee of this doctrine of the exclusivity of God’s sacrificial mediation.
However, there is an alternative understanding. According to this, Christ’s sacrificial mediation is not just monopolized by Christ (in such a way as to imply our exclusion), but monopolized in order, then, to be shared by the whole Church where the latter acts in the Holy Spirit as the body of Christ (as it must do – or cease genuinely to be ‘Church’). Participation through Christ in God’s agency invests the Church as a whole with the priestly and kingly role of sacrifice and religious mediation assigned initially to Christ. Christian sacrificial mediation, so understood, resembles the pagan mediation of the kings and priests of archaic religion – to the extent that the Church, like them, plays a mediatory role in channelling divine blessing to humankind. On such a view, sacrificial mediation does not simply disappear from the human sphere, but is shared by the totality of those disciples who constitute Christ’s ‘body’. We could describe this as a collective divinization of all who share Christ’s agency. Needless to say, such status belongs only to those incorporated into Christ, who act in the Holy Spirit. And, of course, it is not an agency that would enhance the status of certain members of the body through its differential exercise by some on behalf of others.
How far would this alternative understanding of Christian mediation safeguard the uniqueness of the Christian 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. We can understand it as an elimination of sacrificial agency from the human sphere – an understanding that certainly sets Christianity in the sharpest opposition to the other religions we have considered, though arguably also blurring its distinction from contemporary secularism. On the other hand, we can understand it as a generalization of mediation to ‘the body of Christ’. The latter understanding distances Christianity from Islam, and brings it closer to archaic religions – in that Christianity does not, like Islam, altogether forbid sacrificial mediation. After all, Christ is the sacrificial mediator par excellence, and the institution of the Church is the socio-symbolic expression of this mediatory role. But the mediation so enabled is not of a kind to encourage the sacred hierarchies of archaic religion targeted by Islam. This mediation is not exercised by a current, mortal bearer of a religious agency passed down through the ancestral line, but by the dead and resurrected Christ. Most crucially for Christian uniqueness, the generalization of Christ’s mediatory role through the Church safeguards that sense of our dependency on ‘a righteousness not our own’ so opposed to the notion of moral self-sufficiency to be found in the confessional religions. In sum, there is, on this second understanding of exclusivity, some concession to the notion of Christianity as ‘a religion’; but by the same token the preservation of a sharp distinction between Christianity and contemporary secularism.
Elimination vs. generalization of sacrificial agency
It should be evident by now that these two understandings of mediation in Christianity – its restriction to the God-man, on the one hand; its sharing by the whole body of the Church in the Holy Spirit, on the other – correspond to the two understandings of the Gospel-event to be found, respectively, in the exclusivist and inclusivist positions on eucharistic sacrifice.
Which of these two positions on mediation is the more authentically Christian one? The ultimate criterion is, of course, the authority of Scripture and the practice of the early Church. As regards the latter, for the most part, I refer the reader to the liturgical studies on which I have based my own 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, which would seem 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, it is exceptional.
Mascall vs Daly
Externalist views of the Eucharist unite Protestants and those Catholics who think like Mascall. Of these, the latter hold a position on the Eucharist that is sufficiently close in every other respect to the one advocated in 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. In the words of Robert Daly: ‘(the minister) is not conceived as standing there as part of the Church, embedded in the Christ-Church relationship, but as standing between Christ and the Church’.(p.167)
By contrast, the 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)
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(1) Eric Mascall, Corpus Christi (1953)
(2) Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist (1987)
(3) Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Eucharist (1945), p.247
(4) Robert Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled (2009)
(5) F.C.N. Hicks, The Fullness of Sacrifice (1930); Frances Young, Sacrifice and the Death of Christ (1975); Godfrey Ashby, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Purpose (1988); John Moses, The Sacrifice of God (1992); Ian Bradley, The Power of Sacrifice (1995); Bruce Chilton, The Temple of Jesus (1992); John Dunnill, Sacrifice and the Body (2013)
(6) Dix, Schmemann, Daly, op.cit.; Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum (2006)
(7) 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)
(8) Maurice Bloch, ‘The Royal Bath in Madagascar’, in Rituals of Royalty, ed. David Cannadine & Simon Price (1987), pp.271-297
(9) Kenelm Burridge, Mambu: A Melanesian Millenium (1960)
(10) For ethicization in Theravada Buddhism, see Richard Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism (1988)
(11) 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
(12) 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)