How can participation in a two thousand year old event be ‘real’?There have broadly been two approaches taken to answering this question.

The eucharistic sign/symbol as traditionally understood

The first is the one adopted by the majority of theologians both Protestant and Catholic. They tell us that that sign/symbol (in the theological sense) does NOT mean what in other contexts we might expect it to mean.  The symbol in question is a ‘sacramental’ symbol – and, as such, something so mysterious as to exceed our intellectual capacity to grasp.

As to what can be said of it in positive terms, there is not much it would seem – other than the mysterious property sometimes attributed to it of ‘bringing about what it signifies’.

Further, these theologians candidly admit that the eucharistic symbol/sign is indeed unique – and in every respect.  Constant recourse to the term sacramental is testimony to this.  This is, without doubt, the most abused word in the theological dictionary, being so rarely employed outside the context of liturgiological discussions of Christian rituals that it conveys no positive content beyond the attribution of an exceptionality that Christian rituals are assumed to possess by virtue of being Christian. Hence formulations such as the following:

The sacramental world is a new world created by God, entirely different from the world of nature and even from the world of spirits … Sacraments are a new creation with entirely new laws. …. To speak of this sacramental presence is to say something entirely distinctive, something entirely other than any general spatial presence: Christ’s presence here is unique; he is present here in a manner in which he is present nowhere else; he is present ‘sacramentally’(18)

If this is the best theology can do on the eucharistic symbol, then we should just forget about a eucharistic soteriology, and return to a non-sacrificial theology on the lines N.T. Wright (with or without penal substitution).

But, actually, there IS an alternative ….

A better understanding

You will find it in well-known studies of which the most influential for me have been: Gregory Dix (The Shape of the Liturgy); F.C.N. Hicks (The Fulness of Sacrifice); Alexander Schmemann (Eucharist); Edward Kilmartin (History of the Eucharist in the Latin West); Louis Bouyer (Eucharist); Henri de Lubac (Corpus Mysticum).  It claims to go back to an earlier, pre-Reformation, understanding of the eucharistic symbol, and seems to have been arrived at by progressive-orientated theologians from across the denominational spectrum (Anglican, Roman Catholic, Orthodox).

This and subsequent chapters will make out a case for what these authors claim about the eucharistic symbol. But they will do so in a novel way, making use of the relevant evidence from non-theological disciplines.

Why?

Theological writers, including those mentioned above, fail to make any distinction between characteristics of the religious symbol common to every case of religious symbolism and those specific to Christianity. As a result, we end up with a concept of symbol that is constructed on the basis of how the theologian understands the Christian Eucharist, re-applied – would you believe? – to the Christian Eucharist.

I hope, in following posts, to do something better than that. I shall begin by drawing on non-theological sources for an account of the religious symbol that has more general application. Then, I shall re-examine theological accounts of the eucharistic symbol in the light of this material with a view to distinguishing aspects of symbolism that are common to every religion, and those that are unique to Christianity.

I foresee major gains from adopting this approach. For a start, the accounts of the religious symbol to be found in adjacent (non-theological) disciplines lend considerable non-theological support to the accounts of the eucharistic symbol of our theologians.

Second, the perspective of comparative religion and anthropology challenges the universality of the presuppositions of Christianity’s interlocutors, according to which the strangely non-symbolic world of contemporary secularism constitutes the human norm, when it is, in reality, a cultural outlier.  This challenge, I believe, can serve the interests of Christian apologetic; but it requires us to stress what Christianity has in common with other religious belief-systems, rather than trying to make out that our faith is exceptional in every respect.

 

Entering the forest of symbols

Religious symbol vs. metaphor

What then, in the context of religion, do we mean by the ‘symbol’?

In answering this question, we face a problem not widely recognized either by theologians or by the general public.  I mean the dominance in our modern Western culture of a competing mode of semiotic relationship that is not, properly speaking, symbolic. For various complex reasons the symbol has been progressively upstaged in our culture by the metaphor, with the latter increasingly tending to frame our conceptualization of the entire field of semiotic relationships. This development has reached the point that even language which would more correctly be characterized as symbolic (such as religious language) comes to be re-classified by us as metaphorical. It is not just a matter of the symbol ceasing to be widely used or understood; it is one of metaphor acquiring cultural prestige: it has become ‘cool’ – and, as such, a source of temptation hard for the theologians to resist.

For all that, there exist studies of religious language (and not just theological ones) that combine an appreciation of the salience and prestige of metaphor in contemporary Western culture with an awareness that this privileging of metaphor has not been a feature of every time and place, and may not offer the most appropriate framework of interpretation in certain non-contemporary, and non-Western contexts.

A good case is the study of the role of metaphor in religious language by the feminist theologian, Sally Macfague.(19) Like many advocates of metaphor, she locates the distinctiveness of metaphor in the way it brings into relation terms – or rather, referents of terms (i.e. the realities to which those terms refer) – that are seemingly unrelated.  Let us take, for example, the metaphor contained in Shakespeare’s famous line from Macbeth: ‘Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave (stet) of care’. The distinctively metaphorical nature of the expression resides in the fact that the referents of the terms ‘sleave’ and ‘care’, brought by Shakespeare into such felicitous union, are ontologically so distinct. On the one hand, we have a piece of material; on the other, a mental state. Their fusion by Shakespeare into a single image is a subversive act of the human imagination which produces a temporary shock. Such metaphorical statements involve an equivocation – or as Macfague puts it – they ‘whisper’ that such a thing both is and is not so.

We should note, however, that it is the distinctiveness of metaphorthat Macfague defines in this way, and not metaphor itself.  Macfague knows, of course, that, in everyday language, the term metaphor can refer to figurative language that doesn’t involve equivocation. Consider, for example, the case of the conventionalized ‘dead’ metaphors that pepper our everyday discourse: e.g. ‘the leg of a table’, ‘the head of an organization’, ‘the heart of a problem’, etc.. Everyday speech would be impossible without the faculty exemplified by these expressions to stretch literal language to cover a range of objects and situations. Yet, they are, for all intents and purposes, uni-vocal, not equi-vocal, since they constitute the only way to name the things to which they refer.  What Macfague is actually doing, therefore, through her own use of the term metaphor is to privilege equivocal over univocal metaphor.  As, indeed, we all do when we refer to properly univocal metaphorical language as ‘dead’ – as if such expressions were once innovative juxtapositions, and had since become jaded.  Actually, there is nothing self-evident about this priority attributed to equivocal over univocal. It goes along with the cultural prestige of metaphor, mentioned earlier, and points to an underlying cultural bias (actually quite specific to the contemporary West) that places a high value in certain contexts on the mode of semiotic relationship manifested in equivocal, or live, metaphor.

So far, so uncontroversial.

Less familiar, and more interesting, is a passage towards the beginning of Macfague’s study where, in outlining the scope of the phenomenon she wants to analyse (i.e. metaphor), she makes a sharp distinction between the ‘creative tension’ of the metaphorical relation, and the symbolic relation, characterized as one of ‘ontological participation’. That is to say, with symbol, we have to do, not so much with of a thing being like another as about a thing, in some degree, actually being another.

What is this alternative mode of semiotic relation?

Essentially, semiotic relations of ontological participation are relationships inherent in things themselves, not relationships merely attributed to things by the human imagination. In other words, with ontological participation, we are speaking of an inter-connectivity between things that is humanly significant. An example of this familiar to many English speakers, is the analogy of humours and planetary influence so prevalent in the poetry of William Shakespeare. Poetically speaking, this language can function like metaphor. Yet, for those who shared Shakespeare’s worldview, the influence of planets on the human temperament constituted a natural phenomenon deriving from the interconnectivity of things in the world. Such relations can be the basis for human intervention in the world – for healing people, for example – not just for poetry.

At stake, then, with the possibility of symbolic, as opposed to metaphorical, relations is an entire worldview. With the former, we have a world where things outside us, like humours and planetary influences, can relate to each other in ways that implicate us. This Macfague describes, rather beautifully, as ‘a silent ontological web which reverberates with similarity within dissimilarity out to its furthest reaches’.  With the latter, the worldview presupposed by the contemporary dominance of metaphorical relations is one in which the interconnectivity between things is evacuated of all human significance, leaving, on the one hand, just things in themselves, on the other, the possibility of a kind of human significance imputed to those things by the imagination of a human subject.

The case of religious language

So much then for Macfague’s distinction of metaphor and the symbol. We now have to determine on which side of the metaphor:symbol distinction religious language belongs – i.e. language such as: ‘This is my body’. There is, as we have said, a fashionable tendency to revel in the ‘poetry’ (= metaphoricity) of such language. Others, more mindful of historical context, including the theologians mentioned above, insist on the essentially univocal character of the religious symbol.  

In this situation, there is much to be said, in my view, for turning to social anthropology, religious studies, and the discussions of religious language influenced by those disciplines in order to see how they characterize the symbolic language of religion. Admittedly, the religious language under discussion is often not that of Christianity.  Yet, I would argue, the clear parallels between the use of religious language we find there and the use of language in Christian ritual confer an obvious relevance on the discussions of religious language that we find in those disciplines.

We have seen how the language of planetary influence to be found in Shakespeare’s poetry might, in some contexts, form the basis of practical interventions in the world, such as attempts at healing people.  We find this corroborated by the studies of social anthropologists.  When Victor Turner famously analyses the symbolism of red, white and black, for example, it is in the context of ritual procedures designed to bring about a humanly significant transformation of the world.(20) These interventions are not purely verbal (unlike metaphor) but involve a fusion of word and act. And the effect they seek to bring about generally involves a transformation in human social and political realities. The example discussed by Turner revolves around the initiation of girls into the role of adult members of the clan – a process that brings about a collective transformation on the level of the clan as well as a personal transformation for the initiate.

The parallels with Christian sacramental symbolism here are evident. The symbolism of the Eucharist is no more ‘purely verbal’ than the language of the Ndembu ceremonies, but involves just such a fusion of word and act. Furthermore, the Eucharist, like the Ndembu initiation rite, effects a transformation of socio-religious realities, producing and reproducing in the assembled worshippers the mystical body of Christ which is the Church.  

How religious symbolism works

Yet these intuitions are confirmed when we turn to the fuller analysis of the symbolic relation offered by the religious studies scholar Catherine Bell, in her book Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice.(21)

Bell’s is an entirely secular analysis – one which, as I explain below, no believer could accept as it stands.  As an account of the structure of the symbolic relationship, however, it is entirely convincing, and based on the evidence of social anthropologist and specialists in comparative religion. If we want to approach Christian eucharistic symbolism from a more general comparative anthropological perspective, it offers an excellent point of departure.

She argues that symbolic relationships are characterized by their circular nature.  Ritual actions, including verbal actions (e.g. ‘this is my body’), project ‘organizing schemes’ on the ‘space-time environment’, and then re-absorb those schemes as the nature of reality itself.  The two poles of ritual act and environment – symbol and symbolized – become ‘homologized spheres’, which are ‘orchestrated’ (or ‘confused’ and ‘collapsed’) so as to produce ‘an experience of their basic identity or coherence’. 

Let us see how this works in the case of the Eucharist 

The ‘physical and verbal act’ of offering and consecrating the bread projects onto the ‘space-time environment’ of the assembly of a representative crowd of believers the ‘organizing scheme’ of Christ’s offering up of his own life to the Father.  The naturalization of that ‘organizing scheme’ comes about with the ‘homologizing’ of the two spheres: the offering of the bread at the Eucharist becomes the self-offering of Christ.  That we really have ‘homologizing’ here, rather than the ‘tension in union’ characteristic of metaphor, is reflected in the conviction participants have that the body Christ is ‘really present’ in the bread, and thus capable of being shared among the communicants.  There is no sense of the tensive opposition of metaphor between vehicle and tenor such as might make us re-conceptualize the one thing (bread) in terms of the other (body of Christ). Indeed, the focus is precisely not on the properties of the referents of the words bread and body of Christ, but on the transformation through those things of the assembled worshippers.

Two points stand out in relation to our discussion. 

The first is the extent to which Bell’s understanding of the symbol, based on ethnographical analyses, corroborates Macfague’s definition of it as a relation of ontological participation.  For both authors, symbolism is about one thing being or becoming another, not about the two things resembling each other. 

The second point is the way in which the structure of the symbolic relation described by Bell inverts the relational structure that Macfague attributes to metaphor.  With metaphor, we have a ‘tensive’ relationship which maintains the distinction of the two terms of the relationship, accompanying the assertion that something ‘is’ with the whisper that it ‘is not’; with symbol, we have ‘collapse’, ‘confusion’ or ‘homologizing’ of the poles with a view to producing an experience of ‘basic identity’ or ‘coherence’.

These considerations clinch our general argument that specifically religious language – such as that of the Eucharist – belongs in the category of symbol, not metaphor.  The concept of symbol pre-dominates in discussions of religious language by social anthropologists.  Bell mentions some who explicitly eschew the term metaphor, on the grounds that it is inappropriate to the uses of language that constitute the object of their study.  Her analysis of the phenomenon enables us to see why.

They also cast a helpful light on the phenomenon that confronts us in the Christian sacrament, allowing us to appreciate the very particular difficulties it poses for a contemporary world, governed, as we have argued, by the very different philosophical presuppositions involved in the culturally dominant concept and practice of metaphor.

The ‘reality’ of Christian symbolism

We stated earlier that, for all its usefulness, Bell’s understanding of symbol is not one a Christian can accept as it stands.  Its deficiency, from a Christian perspective, has to do with the religious stance of Bell rather than any shortcoming in her analysis.  All her talk of ‘projection’ and ‘organizing schemes’ tends to give the impression that what the religious participant sees cannot really be there.  Beyond the cultural ‘projections’ lies a world of things in themselves without humanly significant interconnectivity – the same world that confronts humans of any culture prior to their socially and culturally orchestrated attempts to make sense of it. 

Here, I think, we are up against a fundamental prejudice common to any comparatively-orientated discipline. Anthropologists are professionally committed to taking equally seriously all the diverse ‘realities’ they encounter when studying human cultures, while effectively bracketing out considerations of relative ‘truth’. This habit of thought is inevitably conducive to the notion of a religiously and culturally neutral object of experience beyond the lived realities of religion and culture – even if it doesn’t logically impose it. After all, it is hard to imagine how the ‘truth’ of our space-time environment could correspond to all the diverse ‘realities’ of human religions and cultures.  Yet, to privilege some over others runs counter to the anthropological instinct to take all of them equally seriously.  

Contrary to Bell, therefore, we need to insist that symbolism – at least in its Christian manifestation – does not operate on an exclusively subjective level.  From a Christian perspective, we are speaking of a fundamental real-life interconnectedness of things which is genuinely ‘there’.  It is not a question, then, of ‘organizing schemes’ in our collective imaginations projected onto reality and re-absorbed as though they were the nature of that reality.  For Christians, those projected and reabsorbed projections actually are the nature of reality.  In other words, the ‘organizing schemes’ are principles already active in the space-time environment prior to our recognition of them; our ‘projections’ are the human discernment of those principles; our ‘reabsorption’ of them is an appropriation of them as the reality of our individual and collective life. 

In the case of the Eucharist, there is something about ‘offering up the work of human hands’, though an instinct common to all humanity, that anticipates the redemptive self-offering of Christ; and there is something about food and drink itself that points to the body and blood of Christ. After all, God so ordered the world in creation that it should be capable, when the time came, of reflecting his purpose of redemption.  The same God who gives us the redemptive offering of Christ gives us the offering of the work of human hands through which it may be symbolized; and the same God who gives us Christ gives us food and drink.  There is consequently a real-life ontological connectedness between actions & experiences common to humanity and the redemptive action of Christ. 

Other religions would no doubt claim as much for their own symbolism, of course. But that does not disqualify the claims of Christianity – or oblige Christians to limit their claims, as Christians, to what comparative anthropologists would feel able to assert in their capacity of comparative anthropologists.

How Judaeo-Christian symbolism is different

There is, however, one aspect of Christian symbolism that is more specific to Christianity – if not perhaps unique to it. This is an aspect to which we refer when we describe some Christian symbolism as typological.

Typological symbolism involves ontological participation, like all religious symbolism. But the ontological participation is, in this case, a participation of phenomena over time, not just space. There is typological symbolism wherever we speak of earlier moments as ‘prefiguring’ or ‘anticipating’ later ones, or later moments as ‘fulfilling’ earlier ones. The sacrifice of Isaac and the sacrifice of Christ, for example, are often claimed to stand in this relation to each other, with the former ‘prefiguring’ or ‘anticipating’ the latter, and the latter ‘fulfilling’ the former.  The symbolizer in this kind of relation (i.e. Abraham’s sacrifice on Moriah) is termed the type, and the symbolized (i.e. Christ’s sacrifice at Golgotha) the antitype.

Typological symbolism is commonly assumed to be a peculiarly Christian phenomenon. Yet, I would argue that, at least in the broad sense we have attributed to the concept, it was already an established mode of Jewish thought and practice before Christianity.  I even believe there are instances we could point to outside the context of the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition. But that is not a widely accepted view, and demonstrating it would take us well beyond the intended scope of this essay.

Like other forms of symbolism, typological symbolism often occurs in the context of interventions designed to bring about a transformation of social reality.  A case that is well-known to me (from studies of the early development of the Eucharist) is the the symbolism associated with the Jewish concept of the memorial (Hebrew = zikkaron), such as we find exemplified in the act of blessing a ceremonial cup that concluded the Jewish meal (berakah), or the Passover meal itself.(22) 

The effect of such interventions, according to the liturgiologist, Louis Bouyer, is to make past events present.  The past events are the faithful acts whereby God had ratified his covenant promises to his chosen people – their deliverance from the Egyptians or their entry into the promised land.  The making present of these past events was – and is – done with a view to bringing about the future event of the ultimate, once-and-for-all, realization of those covenant promises through the coming of a messianic kingdom at the end of the age (eschaton).  Behind the ritual intervention is the idea that the God who had sealed his promise to make Israel a people for His own possession by opening the waters of the Red Sea could, on the basis of that miraculous act, be trustingly supplicated to accomplish that promise in full, and one day make Israel everything He had intended her to be.

What do we mean here by ‘to make present’? Clearly, not just ‘to evoke’ or ‘to prayerfully remind oneself’ – or ‘to remind God’, for that matter.  For, by making this kind of memorial the prayers of the suppliant Israel are aligned with the promises of her God.  As Bouyer puts it: ‘The people here is itself consecrated to the accomplishment of the divine plan’. To make present the promise of past event in this way is to forestall the future, through an alignment with the purposes of God that reproduces the community (i.e. ‘the people’) for whom, and through whom, the original promises are to be fulfilled. Thus, it could be said that the past moment of deliverance (of Israel out of Egypt) forestalls the moment of memorial (through which that past moment is integrated into the present reality of the Jewish community). This past-made-present moment of community anticipates, in its turn, a future moment at which God will at last bring to fulfilment what the past-made-present moment currently promises. This is an example of symbolic participation.  It is a relationship that is as ontological & participative as we find in cases of non-typological symbolism, yet one that links over time: past, present and future.

The relevance to Christianity of this Jewish instance of typological symbolism is obvious.  Indeed, the liturgiological studies from which I have drawn it see the Jewish memorial (both berakah itself and Passover) as a direct antecedent of the Christian Eucharist.  But let us briefly summarize the structural parallels between berakah/Passsover and Eucharist. The past moment that occupies the place of the redemption out of Egypt is, of course, the sacrificial self-offering of Christ – from incarnation, through resurrection, to ascension and Pentecost. No less than the deliverance out of Egypt, this constitutes a faithful act of God, calling a people to Himself. The present moment that occupies the place of berakah/Passover is, of course, the Eucharist. This ‘makes present’ the self-offering of Christ, and, through an alignment with the purposes of God, reproduces the community for whom and through whom the promises of the messianic Kingdom are fulfilled. Finally, the past-made-present moment of the Eucharist also has an eschatological dimension, and in this respect, recalls the Jewish hope of a restored community – though, as we shall see in the next chapter, the eschatological moment is no longer, strictly speaking, a future one.

The typological relationship and eschatology

Characteristic of typological symbolism wherever it occurs is a potential for eschatology.  By this I mean the understanding of time as progressing towards a putative moment of fulfilment (eschaton).  In this respect, Judaeo-Christian culture differs from cultures in which religious symbolism takes a non-typological form.  To summarize very briefly what it would require a whole chapter to explain at all adequately – the understanding of time in those other cultures is one, not of historical progress, but of cycles that invariably take society back to a primordial first moment of inception and renewal.  A good example would be the way ancient Egyptian culture saw the ritually maintained procession of each day, and each year, as a constant renewal of that primordial struggle of light over darkness that we see reflected in the origin myth of the triumph of Osiris and Horus over the powers of chaos.(23) 

The very different, eschatological, understanding of time implicit in typological symbolism is set out by, among others, the liturgiologist Gregory Dix.  Dix makes the point that the event which, in both cases, past and present events foreshadow – the event, in other words, which they symbolize typologically (i.e. the eschaton) – is not just an earthly event standing at the close of a historical sequence.  Of course, the moment of fulfilment in the coming of the messianic Kingdom is indeed that; yet it is also a moment that transcends history, marking the advent of ‘God’s time’, which is eternal, and, to that extent, outside time and history altogether.  The relevant passage is worth citing in its entirety:

The completion of history, ‘the End’ which manifests the ‘kingdom’ of God throughout history in all its parts, does not interrupt history or destroy it; it fulfils it.  All the divine values implicit and fragmentary in history are gathered up and revealed in the eschaton, which is ‘the End’ to which history moves. …. ‘The End’ is at once within history and beyond it, the consummation of time and its transmutation into what is beyond time, the ‘Age to come’.  Thus, the prophets both foresee the eschaton as a definite event, and yet are forced to describe it in the fantastic language of myth, for no merely temporal conceptions framed from the events of time can describe it.(p.258)(24)

Dix’s analysis enables us to see how the idea of a ‘completion of history’ goes along with the typological nature of Judaeo-Christian symbolism, as its inevitable corollary. 

It is because of the existence of an ultimate moment that is both in history and beyond it, located both in our time and God’s – and because of the extra-temporal dimension introduced by the possibility of such a moment – that we can say that one moment participates ontologically in another.  Why? Because the eschatological moment is eternal. Being eternal, it contains other moments, and, correlatively, those other moments are contained in the eschatological moment. It is in this sense that Passover/Eucharist participates in the eschaton. And because the eschatological moment is also a moment in history, the participation of the Passover/Eucharist in the eschaton is logically also its participation in another historical moment. One moment in time can therefore be said, as we stated earlier, to symbolize another.

(22) My discussion of zikkaron here is indebted to: Louis Bouyer, Eucharist (1966)

(23) For an excellent account of the cyclic view of time in Pharaonic Egypt, see: Francoise Dunand & Christiane Zivie-Coche, Gods and Men in Egypt (2004), pp.66ff.

(24) Citations from Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy [1945], Dacre Press, Westminster (second ed. 1945)

 

When Heaven meets earth

We have now reached the final stage of our exploration of the symbol.  We have discussed both symbolism and typological (or eschatological) symbolism.  It finally remains to consider the distinctiveness of the form of typological symbolism that characterizes Christianity. 

Christian typological symbolism

In the area of symbolism, as in other matters, I am wary of Christian particularism.  The distinctiveness of a Christian form of something – symbolism or sacrifice, for example – is not a conclusion to which I would want to leap prematurely.  In fact, the method I have pursued (and will continue to pursue) has been the very opposite: to avoid introducing the idea of Christian particularity for as long as it is practical to do so.  Yet, at the end of the day, the Christian form of typological symbolism is, I believe, distinctive.  Once again it is Dix who best explains how.

Broadly, things can be summed up as follows. 

For Jews (and, possibly, Buddhists and others), ‘the End’, or eschaton, comes – as might be expected – at the end of history.  Christian eschatology, on the other hand, achieves the curious feat of moving it to the middle. The moment that, for Christians, corresponds to the Jewish eschaton – the moment that sits both within, and yet beyond, historical time – is the moment of Christ’s ascent into glory.  This marks the culmination of a sequence of events securely anchored in history – incarnation, Cross, Resurrection – but itself transcends the frame of historical time.  It is within history, in the sense that the Ascension and Pentecost, were witnessed by human beings (the Apostles) who could presumably have reported the day and the hour of their occurrence.  Beyond history, in the sense that the sacrifice in the heavenly tabernacle inaugurated by Christ’s ascent into glory (as described in the Letter to the Hebrews) is eternal, and, as such, beyond our time and space. 

There is an important contrast to be drawn with Judaism here.  For Jews, the Last Day may be historical, but in the somewhat putative sense of an event that is yet to happen – and is destined, while history lasts, always to remain so. For Christians, the Last Day is an event that, for all its transcendent and eternal dimension, has already fully happened, and was witnessed to have happened on a given day of human history. 

More bizarrely still, it follows that the Eucharist, which enables us – as Christ’s followers – to participate in that moment, thereby brings us fully into union with something that is properly outside time itself.  For Christians, God’s time – ‘Heaven’ – is already united with the human history; it has come to earth.  The eschatological moment is no longer divided, as in Judaism, between a present ritual moment which points forward and a future realization to which the ritual points; it is fully expressed in the ritual present of our Eucharist.  The implications of this are mind blowing.  As Dix remarks somewhat staidly: 

The eucharist is the contact of time with the eternal fact of the Kingdom of God through Jesus.  In it the church within time continually, as it were, enters into its own eternal being in that Kingdom, ‘in Him’, as Body of Christ …(p.265)

The staggering reality of this is brought home altogether more arrestingly by Schmemann, who speaks of the Eucharist as the church’s ascension into Heaven to join the worship of the angels of Heaven:

The early Christians realized that in order to become the temple of the Holy Spirit they must ascend to heaven where Christ has ascended …(For the Life of the World, p.28)

It is this ascension, he claims, that the early Christians knew they were accomplishing in the Eucharist – and which Christians, whether or not they know it, still accomplish today. 

It is not ‘grace’ that comes down; it is the Church that enters into ‘grace,’ and grace means the new being, the Kingdom, the world to come.  And as the celebrant approaches the altar, the Church intones, the hymn which the angels eternally sing at the throne of God – ‘Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal’ …(p.31)

Dix and Schmemann – from the Anglican and Orthodox wings of the Christian Church, respectively – bring out the implications of Christian eschatology most clearly.  But a very similar understanding seems to underly the conclusions of the Roman Catholics, Edward Kilmartin and Robert Daly.  All of these theologians express the view that the Eucharist does not so much ‘re-present’ Christ’s sacrifice to the Christians assembled in an earthly temple as it does ‘re-present’ the sacrifice of the Christian assembly in the heavenly tabernacle. 

They (the early Christians) realized also that this ascension was the very condition of their mission in the world, of their ministry to the world.  For there – in heaven – they were immersed in the new life of the Kingdom; and when, after this ‘liturgy of ascension’, they returned into the world, their faces reflected the light, the ‘joy and peace’ of that Kingdom and they were truly its witnesses.(p.28)