6.1 Difficult issues – Question 1: How is our Eucharistic sacrifice united with the sacrifice of Christ?
3. WHAT’S WRONG WITH PENAL SUBSTITUTION
4. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: THE ‘MULTI-MODELS’ APPROACH
5. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: TOM WRIGHT
In the next three sections I shall consider the following issues in more depth:
1. How is our Eucharistic sacrifice united with the sacrifice of Christ?
2: What is it for the Eucharist to be a sacrifice? Do we give, or merely receive?
3: What has religious worship to do with the production of human community?
QUESTION 1: How is our Eucharistic sacrifice united with the sacrifice of Christ?
Most theologians tell us that the Eucharist is a sign or symbol of the Christ-event. This statement is, I believe, formally correct. Yet it is also highly misleading, given the meaning that most people are likely to attach to the words sign and symbol. So, the question we need to address in the following section concerns the proper understanding of these terms when applied to the Eucharist, and how this differs from the meaning normally attributed to them.
But before launching into this question, I want, briefly, to consider the alternatives to this idea of the Eucharist as a sign or symbol.
Alternatives to the notion of Eucharist as sign/symbol
There are two. The first, and more familiar, of these need not detain us for more than a moment. This is the view that the Eucharist and the Christ-event are both called sacrifices by virtue of the fact that they accomplish the same thing: in other words, that what the Christ-event did once the Eucharist now repeats. The view has often been attributed by Protestant reformers since the Reformation to the Roman Catholic understanding of the Eucharist. Hence the objection by Protestants that, for Roman Catholics, Christ is ‘re-crucified’ at every Eucharist. Let us call this the ‘repetition’ hypothesis. Leave aside the question of how far this was ever a fair representation of the Roman Catholic views; it is not, to my knowledge, an understanding of the Eucharist entertained by any theologian today, Protestant or Roman Catholic.
However, a second alternative – what I shall call the ‘completion’ hypothesis – has, in my view, much to recommend it. This is the view that the Eucharist constitutes a final and necessary stage in the sacrifice that God initiates with the incarnation of the Son and his earthly ministry. In other words, that Christ’s self-offering in life and death only becomes sacrifice, properly so-called, when it is taken up in the Eucharistic response that the Church makes to that self-offering in the Holy Spirit. Of course, this understanding of the term sacrifice does not accord with the normal Christian usage according to which both the Christ-event event itself and the Eucharist are referred to as sacrifice. But that is only a matter of terminology. It should not lead us to ignore the occasional theological accounts of the Christian salvation-event that seem to represent the relationship of Eucharist and Christ-event in this way.
The example I have chiefly in mind is the account given by F.C.N. Hick’s (1930) study The Fulness of Sacrifice. Hicks views sacrifice as a universal practice expressing a common human aspiration; the Christ-event/Eucharist is the instantiation of that practice in Christianity. Sacrifices, he contends, tend to incorporate a number of relatively fixed elements: the offering of something (e.g. the consecration and slaying of an animal); the transformation of its substance into something sacred (e.g. its blood or flesh); the sharing of that substance by the worshippers at a special meal. The Christian sacrifice is typical in this respect. What distinguishes Christianity from other religions, he argues, is not any divergence from this common sacrificial template, but the nature of its divine addressee as the unattainably ‘Holy’ God of the whole earth. This results in a heightened emphasis on the ethical conditions of sacrifice such as we find in the prophets (‘the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit’). In practice, it raises to an impossibly high level the bar for adequate sacrificial performance. To render proper sacrifice to such a God requires Him to initiate that sacrifice for us. This He does through the Son’s sacrificial offering of his own life and death.
The relevance of all this for our understanding of the relationship of the Christ-event to the Eucharist is spelled out in the following passage. Hicks pursues here the idea of the sacrificial life and death of Christ as both a sacrifice in the normal sense, and one that uniquely meets the conditions for a fitting offering to the Holy God of the whole earth. All the stages in accomplishment of a typical sacrifice find their correspondence in the self-offering of the Son.[1]
The laying on of hands (is recalled) in the incarnation; the slaying of the Victim, in the Cross; the use of the blood, in that heavenly pleading and ‘sprinkling’ of which the Epistle to the Hebrews …. draws out the meaning; the transforming (of what is offered) …. in the Resurrection and Ascension; …. and, finally, the indwelling of God in man, and of man in God, and the fellowship of man with man, in the meal ….
On the face of it, these stages seem to follow an obvious chronological sequence: first, incarnation; then, the cross; third, the resurrection, and so on. As the ‘stages’ progress, however, we see that this ceases to be the case. Yes, incarnation, cross and resurrection are events that can be assigned to consecutive moments of time. But what about ‘the heavenly pleading’ in the Epistle to the Hebrews, or ‘the fellowship’ of man with man in the (presumably Eucharistic) meal? Hicks’ perspective – the perspective of sacrifice as he defines it – brings together into a single arc of sacrifice, on the one hand, things that are apparently time-bound, and, on the other, things that are properly timeless (‘the heavenly pleading’) or take place over and over again (the Eucharistic meal).
And there is another thing that should give us pause for thought. The final stage in the sequence – ‘the fellowship of man with man, in the meal’ – would seem to depend upon the participation of the Christian community. In this, it differs from earlier stages that require the agency of Christ alone. Of course, the work of God underlies the whole sacrificial trajectory; but, with the final stage, the role of the historical Jesus appears to give way to the operation of the Holy Spirit acting through the Church in response to Jesus’s self-offering.
The schema of sacrifice that Hicks adopts (as something culminating in a meal) places the Eucharist at the ‘end’ of the sequence. This is what would suggest that the Eucharist ‘completes’ the sacrifice. But, given that the preceding stage – the ‘heavenly pleading’ of the Epistle to the Hebrews – is already, properly speaking, beyond time itself, is there any reason other than Hick’s schema of sacrifice, why we could not see the Christian sacrifice as culminating in the ‘heavenly pleading’ rather than the Eucharistic meal? This would at least resolve the difficulty (for certain theologians) of seeming to make the culminating stage of the sacrifice fall beyond the scope of Christ’s sole agency. But this is turn raises the question how, in that case, we would understand the notion of the sacrifice of the heavenly tabernacle in isolation from the earthly celebration of the Eucharist. What, in short, is the relationship of the ascent of Christ into the heavenly places, on the one hand, with the descent of the Holy Spirit and the Eucharist of the earthly Church, on the other? In the narrative of the Acts of the Apostles the two moments (the ascent of Christ and the descent of the Spirit) are separated by a short space of time. Yet there are plenty of New Testament texts that would the suggest their quasi-simultaneity.
Foremost among these is Luke’s account of the meal at Emmaus. Christ himself, it will be remembered, has just revealed to his friends the meaning of the events concerning him. But the recognition of Christ in the breaking of bread at the climax of that revelation coincides with the eclipse of his bodily manifestation. When he was at table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight.
This simultaneous appearance and disappearance seems to mark a necessary passage from the ministry of the historical Jesus to that of the Church he left behind, from Son to Spirit. As Jesus himself had said: If I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you. It is as though the ascent of the one and the descent of the other were two opposed aspects of the one thing. As it were, the back and front views of a three-dimensional object that cannot be apprehended all at once from a single angle – at least not by creatures located in three-dimensional space and time.
So, could we have had the ascent of Christ without the descent of the Spirit, the ‘heavenly pleading’ without earthly Eucharists? Or does the one thing connote the other? It’s a speculative question. Rather like the question of what it would mean to characterize the Godhead as Trinitarian without the incarnation of the Son. But – speculative as it may be – the question helps define what Hicks means here by ‘completion’. To the extent that we feel the ascent of Christ and descent of the Spirit, the ‘heavenly pleading’ and our earthly Eucharist, to be complementary aspects of a single sacred reality, then we are forced to concede that the Eucharist ‘completes’ the sacrifice initiated by God’s work in Christ: the arc of sacrifice remains unclosed without the intervention of the Holy Spirit in the Church. If, on the other hand, we think of the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost and the institution of the Church as just an ecclesial supplement to a completed act of salvation that is wholly God’s in Christ, then, obviously, there can be no question of any Eucharistic ‘completion’.
I leave the matter there.
The Eucharist as sign/symbol in the traditional sense
Let us now return to the more widely-held hypothesis that the Eucharist is a sign/symbol and the problem of what precisely it does – and does not – mean to describe the Eucharist in this way.
There are broadly two available theological approaches – neither of them particularly attractive at first glance.
The first is that of the majority of traditional theologians both Protestant and Catholic. The problem here is that there is wide consensus around what sign/symbol does not mean when applied to the Eucharist. All are agreed, for example, that we are not using the term in the familiar contemporary sense of an image or likeness. Still less is the sign/symbol something that merely points to its referent, like a street-sign. But when it comes to offering any explanation of what the sign/symbol positively is – let alone an explanation that would allow us to get an imaginative grasp of a specific concept – the conclusions of these writers invariably disappoint. We are frequently told that the ‘sacramental symbol’ is mysterious and somehow exceeds our intellectual capacity to grasp. The one positive characteristic commonly emerges in such discussions is that of ‘bringing about what it signifies’. The symbol/sign of the Eucharist, in other words, is alleged to be a sign/symbol in virtue of a characteristic that appears to distinguish it from every other sign/symbol. What manner of sign/symbol is it, after all, that ‘brings about what it signifies’?
What is worse, the traditional theologians sometimes candidly admit that the Eucharistic symbol/sign is indeed unique – seemingly in every respect. And as if in testimony to this we find constant recourse to the term ‘sacramental’. This must surely be the most irritating of all words in the theological dictionary, being so rarely employed outside the context of liturgiological discussions of Christian rituals that it seems to convey no positive content beyond the attribution of an exceptionality that Christian rituals are assumed to possess by virtue of being Christian. This gives rise to formulations such as the following:[2]
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’.
Such definitions may demonstrate a kind of theological consistency. But their logical circularity means they do little to assist us in understanding what is being described. So much then for traditional explanations. And what I have said will no doubt explain my own initial dissatisfaction with the ‘sign/symbol’ hypothesis, and my preference for the explanations of F.C.N. Hicks.
What, then, is the alternative?
An alternative understanding of the Eucharistic sign/symbol
Well – there is also what I propose to call a revisionist position taken up by a number of theologians who claim to have retrieved a correct understanding of the Eucharistic symbol from the writers of the early Church. These include: 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). The understanding of the Eucharistic symbol characteristic of this position displays an impressive degree of consistency despite having been arrived at by progressively-orientated theologians from across the denominational spectrum (Anglican, Roman Catholic, Orthodox). It also converges to a remarkable degree with the understanding of the religious symbol to be found in ethnographic accounts of other religions by social anthropologists.
I do not, however, intend to begin in the obvious place by citing the definitions of the religious symbol offered by these writers. There is, in my view, a fundamental problem with these definitions – namely, the failure even by these theologians adequately to distinguish characteristics of the religious symbol that are common to every instance of the symbolic relationship from characteristics that are specific to the Christianity. We end up with a concept of symbol that has been constructed on the basis of how the theologian understands the Christian Eucharist.
I hope, in the following section, to do something a good deal better than this. I shall begin by drawing on some non-theological literature (especially social anthropology) in order to give an account of the religious symbol that is true for all instances. I shall then reconsider theological accounts of the Eucharistic symbol in the light of this non-theological material with a view to isolating those characteristics of Christian symbolism that are peculiar to it.
There are major gains from adopting such an approach. First, my reader will come to appreciate the remarkable extent of that convergence I mentioned earlier between accounts of the religious symbol to be found in other (non-theological) contexts and accounts of the Eucharistic symbol we find in progressive theology. This strikes me as particularly important given the risk of progressive theological definitions of the Eucharistic symbol appearing weird and arcane – an object of antiquarian curiosity, rather than contemporary relevance. The scholarly nature of much liturgiological discussion does little to mitigate this impression. The perspective of comparative religion and anthropology, on the other hand, allows us to appreciate the ubiquity across the cultures of the religious symbol as understood by these theologians, and casts the curiously non-symbolic world of contemporary secularism in the role of the cultural outlier. It should be a priority for Christian apologists to encourage non-believers to reflect on the presuppositions of their own secularism. That cause is better served by stressing what Christianity has in common with other religious belief-systems, than by trying to make out that it is exceptional in every respect.
Religious symbol vs. metaphor
Let us begin, then, by considering the religious symbol in general. What do we mean by it, if not simply the image or likeness of something?
In responding to this question, we face a very specific problem not widely recognized either by theologians or by the general public. That is the dominance in our modern Western culture of a rival mode of semiotic relationship. (By a semiotic relationship I mean a relationship of meaning). For various complex reasons the symbol has been almost entirely displaced 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 got to 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 also one of metaphor acquiring cultural prestige – becoming ‘cool’. This is a temptation that it has been hard for the theological advocates of religious language to resist.
Nevertheless, there are some reflections on religious language (not necessarily 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: even that there exist social and linguistic contexts (for example, non-Western and non-contemporary ones) for which metaphor may not offer the most appropriate framework of interpretation – at least, if our aim is faithfully to understand what is being communicated in the original context.
A good instance of such reflection, perhaps familiar to some readers, is a study of the place of metaphor in religious language by the feminist theologian, Sally McFague. Like many advocates of metaphor, she locates its distinctiveness as a mode of semiotic relationship in the way it presupposes a pre-existing separation between the terms that the metaphor brings into relation – or rather, between the referents of those terms (i.e. the realities to which those terms refer). 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 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 thus produces a kind of temporary shock. As McFague famously puts it – every metaphorical relationship ‘contains the whisper: “it is and it is not”.
In other words, what McFague prizes in metaphor (and most of us, I think) is its equivocal nature – the fact that, in metaphor, the one-to-one relation of words and things is somehow blurred. This is an important point, because the term metaphor is also familiarly used in relation to figurative language that is univocal rather than equivocal. 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’, ‘he heart of a problem’, etc.. It has been argued that everyday speech would be impossible without the faculty exemplified by these expressions to stretch literal language to cover an ever-widening range of objects and situations. But, though we may imagine that these expressions may once, at the time of their first use, have been innovative juxtapositions, they are now, for all intents and purposes, univocal, because they represent the only way to speak of the things to which they refer.
All this is widely accepted. What is less usual and more interesting is the passage towards the beginning of McFague’s study where, in defining the scope of the phenomenon she is to analyse (i.e. metaphor), she makes a sharp distinction between the metaphorical relationship, as one of ‘creative tension’, and the symbolic relationship, as one of ‘ontological participation’. In other words, with symbol, it is not a question of one thing ‘being like’ another, but of one thing, at least in some degree, actually being another. Significantly, McFague introduces Eucharistic language at this point to illustrate her point: the formulation ‘this (bread) is my body’ constitutes, she claims, the ‘most extreme example’ of symbolic language.
What is meant here by ‘ontological participation’?
Fundamentally, it’s about whether the semiotic relationships in question are inherent in things themselves, rather than merely attributed to things by the human imagination. In other words, it’s about a humanly significant inter-connectivity between things. 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. For those who shared Shakespeare’s worldview, however, the influence of planets on the human temperament represented a natural phenomenon deriving from the interconnectivity of things in the world. Symbolic connections like these can be the basis for human intervention in the world – for healing people, for example – as well as for poetry.
Symbolic relations therefore presuppose an entire worldview in which things relate to each other in a way that may concern us – what McFague describes, rather beautifully, as ‘a silent ontological web which reverberates with similarity within dissimilarity out to its furthest reaches’. As the French poet, Baudelaire, puts it:
Nature is a temple where living pillars
Let escape sometimes confused words;
Man traverses it through forests of symbols
That observe him with familiar glances.
Conversely, the worldview presupposed by the contemporary dominance of metaphorical relations is one in which the interconnectivity between things is evacuated of 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.
So much then for McFague’s distinction of the metaphorical and the symbolic relationship. The really important question, however, for us as for everyone else, is on which side of the metaphor/symbol divide to place religious language like: ‘This is my body’. Many contemporary theologians, like McFague, are desperately anxious to consider such language metaphorical. However, others, including the revisionist theology, of which I have spoken, would insist on the essentially univocal character of religious language. This position is strongly supported, so it turns out, by the kind of treatments of religious language we find in social anthropology. More usually, this is religious language in non-Christian settings, but also it also includes religious language in Christian ones, including, as we shall see, that of the Eucharist.
I want to rest my case here on the obvious relevance of the anthropological parallels. We have already mentioned (regarding the language of planetary influence) the fact that symbolic relationships often form the basis of practical interventions in the world, such as attempts at healing people. When the anthropologist, 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 some humanly significant transformation of the world. Such interventions are not purely verbal (another characteristic some attribute to metaphor) but involve a fusion of word and act. And the effect they seek to bring about generally turns out to involve a transformation in human social and political realities, though reasons for undertaking them may include personal distress as well as life-cycle events. The example discussed by Turner revolves around the initiation of girls into the role of adult members of the clan – a process that involves a collective transformation on the level of the clan as well as a personal transformation for the initiate.
The analogies here with Christian sacramental symbolism are obvious – so obvious, indeed, that it is hard to imagine how it could make sense to understand Eucharist language without reference to such parallels. Few would disagree, I think, that the Eucharist produces and reproduces the Church as the ‘body of Christ’, through incorporating individuals within it. Without going further than this, we can already point to the practical and performative aspect of the Eucharistic symbolism, as well as the socially productive and reproductive character of its aim.
In her survey of approaches by social anthropologists to ritual, Catherine Bell helpfully explores this kind of symbolic relationship. Like many of the social anthropologists whose views she summarizes, Bell’s outlook is rigorously secular, as we shall shortly see. So, I do not wholly accept her understanding of symbol. Nevertheless, she gives a very useful account of the structure of symbolic relationship based on the social anthropological work that she surveys. Moreover, it is an account that contrasts illuminatingly with the account of the structure of the metaphorical relationship we find in studies of religious language such as McFague’s.
According to Bell, symbolic relationships have an essentially circular character. 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’. So, for example, 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 schema of Christ’s offering up of his own life to the Father. The naturalization of that schema comes about with the homologization of the two spheres: the offering of the bread at the Eucharist actually becomes the self-offering of Christ. That we have homologization here, rather than the kind of ‘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 seems to be no real metaphorical tension here between the referents of the two terms: the offering of bread by the Church, and the offering of his own life by Christ. Where the referents of the juxtaposed terms are too semantically close – as for example where they are things of a similar kind (i.e. two kinds of offering), the possibility of metaphorical tension is all but eliminated. To describe an animal’s den as its ‘house’, for example, might make us reflect on what animals share in the experience of human beings or vice versa; but such expressions have negligeable literary potential!
There are two points to make here in relation to our discussion. The first is the extent to which Bell’s understanding of the symbol, based on anthropological analyses, corroborates McFague’s definition of it as a relation involving ontological participation. For both, symbolism is about one thing actually being another in some degree, rather than just resembling it. The second is the way in which the structure of the symbolic relation as described by Bell appears actually to invert the relational structure that McFague describes for 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 ‘homologization’ of the poles with a view to producing an experience of ‘basic identity’ or ‘coherence’.
In the light of this, it is no surprise that, in discussions of religious language by social anthropologists, it is the symbol that has pride of place, while metaphor has had little role – or certainly not as a consistent theme. In fact, Bell mentions not a few who conscientiously eschew the term metaphor, as being inappropriate to the uses of language that constitute the object of their study. To my mind, this raises serious questions about its appropriateness in relation to our discussion of the Eucharist. At all events, it casts a very helpful light on the kind of phenomenon that confronts us in the shape of the Eucharistic symbol, as well as accounting for the problems posed by its intelligibility in a contemporary world governed, as we have argued, by the very different philosophical presuppositions involved in the culturally dominant concept and practice of metaphor.
For all its usefulness, however, Bell’s understanding of symbol, is not one any theologian could accept as it stands. Its deficiency, so far as Christians are concerned (one shared by much social anthropology), is plain enough, and 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; that beyond such cultural ‘projections’ lies the world of things in themselves without humanly significant interconnectivity; that the same world confronts all of us prior to socially and culturally orchestrated attempts to make sense of it. This is, of course, a tendency that it is hard for any comparatively-orientated social anthropology to escape. How, after all, could the ‘space-time environment’ truly correspond to all the diverse ‘organizing schemes’ that our cultures project onto it? But to accept the validity of the idea of a religiously and cultural neutral object of experience beyond the lived realities of religion and culture, is already to adopt the worldview presupposed the contemporary apologists of metaphor.
I am aware of perhaps being a little unfair to Bell here. Her reference to ‘projections’ does not, I suppose, necessarily imply that the space-time environment is entirely strange to the ordering schemas that we impose upon it. It might be, for example, that the space-time environment already ‘tends’, of itself, towards the order that our schemas project, just as a child’s mind may be naturally disposed towards the learning of language while still requiring human contact in order to fulfil its linguistic potential.
But we can be clear, at least, that, where the Christian theological understanding of the symbol is concerned, symbolism does not operate on a purely subjective level. With symbolic relationships, we are speaking of the fundamental real-life interconnectedness of one thing with another. So, it is not a question of ‘organizing schemes’ in our collective imaginations that are projected onto a neutral natural environment and re-absorbed as though they were the nature of reality itself. Those projected and reabsorbed projections actually are the nature of reality – or, at least, of reality as it should be. The ‘organizing schemes’, in other words, reflect principles already to some extent operative in the space-time environment. ‘Projection’, on this view, is the discernment of those operative schemata, and ‘reabsorption’ is the recognition of those schemata for what they are.
Thus, for example, in the case of the Eucharist, the offering of the work of human hands is already a symbol of Christ’s redemptive self-offering, and bread is already a symbol of Christ’s body – because God so ordered the world in creation that it should be capable, when the time came, of reflecting his purpose in redemption. The same God who gave us the redemptive offering also gave us the offering of the work of human hands, and the same God who gave us Christ also gave us bread. And there is consequently a real-life interconnectedness between human offerings and the redemptive act of Christ, and between bread and the body of Christ. The same would hold, presumably, for the symbolism of any other religion or belief system, when seen, as it were, from an indigenous perspective – though the particular humanly significant interconnections will obviously be different in each case. It is in the eyes of the comparative anthropologist that the distinct worlds of different cultures become so many ways of interpreting a shared world that is deemed to be the same for everyone and to pre-exist all such cultural interpretations.
We have now completed the first stage in our discussion of the religious symbol. We have dealt with the elements of Eucharistic language that are common to symbolic language in all instances.
Typological symbolism and eschatological thinking
In the case of Christianity, however, and, more particularly, in the case of the Eucharist, we are chiefly concerned with a very specific variety of symbolism, which I shall call typological symbolism. This involves the ontological participation of events over the time rather than things in space. It will be familiar to most believers from the way we speak of Old Testament events as fore-shadowing those of the New, and events of the New Testament as fulfilling those of the Old. The technical terms commonly applied to the symbol and the symbolized in this kind of symbolism (from the Patristic era onwards) are type and antitype.
To judge from the definitions of symbol by theologians (even revisionist ones), we might be tempted to believe that all symbolism was typological. This, of course, is not the case. The typological symbol (as I have described it) is a particular kind of symbol. But even the typological symbol is not exclusive to Christianity. This should be evident to readers of the Bible. For, it is clear even from a reading of the Old Testament prophetic literature, that a tendency to seek prefigurative meaning in ancient Jewish events was an established mode of interpretation long before Christianity began to adapt that typology for its own purposes. We might reasonably conclude that typological symbolism is a way of thinking Christianity shares at least with its Jewish older sibling. My own ethnographic reading would suggest it is also shared by certain non-Judaeo Christian worldviews (though, of course, not all), including Theravada Buddhism and strands of Greek culture. To demonstrate that, however, would take us far beyond the scope of our present discussion.
Like other kinds 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 (from some more recent studies of the early development of the Eucharist, as it happens) is that of the symbolism associated with the Jewish concept of the ‘memorial’ (Hebrew = zikkaron)[3] – for example, the act of blessing a ceremonial cup that concluded the Jewish meal (berakah), or the Passover meal itself. The effect of such interventions was to make present past events – namely, the faithful acts whereby God had ratified his covenant promises to his chosen people (e.g. their deliverance from the Egyptians or their entry into the promised land). But this is done with a view to making present the future event of the coming of the Messianic kingdom at the end of the age (eschaton), that is to say, the ultimate, once-and-for-all, realization of His covenant promises. Behind all this 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.
But what do we mean here by ‘to make present’? Something more than simply to ‘evoke’, claim our revisionist theologians. Something more even than prayerfully to ‘remind’ themselves – or God, for that matter. Because to partake of present event ritually (as in the case of the Passover) is to forestall the future one, to give oneself a foretaste of it, even to make it a present reality – because, in making a ‘memorial’ in this sense, the prayers of the suppliant Israel are aligned with the promises of her God. As the liturgiologist Louis Bouyer puts it, ‘The people here is itself consecrated to the accomplishment of the divine plan’.[4] In short, I would argue that, in this ‘making present’, we have an instance of symbolic participation. A participative and ontological relationship of events no less than in cases of non-typological symbolism, but one that links past and present, and both past and present with an ultimate future.
The relevance to Christianity of this Jewish instance of typological symbolism is evident. It would be surprising if it were not – since 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 me briefly summarize the parallels with the Christian ‘memorial’ of the Eucharist. The entire sacrificial self-offering of Christ – from incarnation, through resurrection, to ascension and Pentecost – is a faithful act of God even greater than that of those commemorated by the Passover. One that ratifies in advance a new covenant promise with the future people of Jesus on the basis of which they can trust God for their present sanctification and ultimate renewal as the one-day-to-be-perfected people of the new Jerusalem. The Eucharist is the pledge of that promise of sanctification and renewal which Jesus tells his present and future disciples to offer to God ‘until he (Jesus) comes’.
Characteristic of typological symbolism wherever it occurs is a potential for eschatology. This concerns a certain understanding of time as progressing towards some putative moment of fulfilment, or eschaton. In this, 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 in which the 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 we see reflected in the origin myth of the triumph of Osiris and Horus over the powers of chaos. The very different, ‘eschatological’, understanding of time to be found in the case of typological symbolism is brilliantly set out by Dix. The point he makes is that the event which, in both cases, past and present events foreshadow – the event, in other words, which they symbolize typologically (the eschaton) – is not just an earthly event standing at the close of a historical sequence. Yes, the fulfilment of the coming of the messianic Kingdom is seen as a moment in history. But 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 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.
Here, we can begin to see the nature of the relationship between typological symbolism and eschatology. It is because of the existence of an ultimate moment that is both in history and beyond it, our time and God’s – and because of the dimension constituted by the advent of such a moment in history – that one moment can be said to participate ontologically in another. The eschatological moment is eternal, and contains all other moments. Thus, any moment, to the extent that it participates in God-time, can participate in that eschatological moment. At the same time, because the eschatological moment is also a moment in history, we have the possibility of one historical moment symbolizing another: the Passover can be a foretaste, of the eschaton.
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) in this chapter has been the very opposite: to avoid introducing the idea of Christian distinctiveness 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. Yet Christian eschatology achieves the curious feat of moving it to the middle! How come? Well, the Christian eschatological moment corresponding to that of the dawn of the Jewish messianic age – that of the culmination of Christ’s sacrificial self-offering – is surely the moment of His ascent into glory. Thus, a sequence of events that begins in historical time (namely, the incarnation, the life, the death on a cross, the resurrection) culminates in an event which, like the Jewish eschaton, constitutes a moment both within, and yet beyond, historical time. It is within history, in the sense that the events of Ascension and Pentecost were witnessed by human beings (the Apostles, for example) 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 time and space.
There is an important contrast to be drawn with Judaism here. The Jewish ‘Last Day’ may be historical, but in the somewhat putative sense of what has yet to happen, and will always remain so as long as history lasts. The Christian ‘Last Day’ has already fully happened and was witnessed to have happened on a certain day and at a certain hour of human history. Yet this ‘fully happened’, fully historical, moment is simultaneously transcendent and eternal; Christ’s ascent into glory marks the accomplishment of the sacrifice of the heavenly tabernacle. It follows that the Eucharist which enables us to participate in that moment brings us fully into union with something that is properly outside time itself. That is to say, for Christians, God’s time – ‘Heaven’, if you like – is already united with the human time of history; it has come to earth. The eschatological moment is no longer divided, as in Judaism, between a present ritual moment and the future realization to which it 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 …
The staggering reality of this is brought home altogether more graphically 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 …
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’ …
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. They summarize the view, entertained by a more progressive strand of Catholicism, 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.
[1] Hicks, p. 272
[2] Mascall, p. 95, citing Vonier; Colwell, p. 168
[3] Bouyer, p.85
[4] p. 86
[5] Pp. 178-185: ‘The Eucharist and the order of creation’
[6] P.106
[7] P.107
[8] P.121
[9] Colewell, p. 121
3. WHAT’S WRONG WITH PENAL SUBSTITUTION
4. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: THE ‘MULTI-MODELS’ APPROACH