How is the Eucharist a sacrifice? Part One: Examining the RC position through Lawrence Feingold, The Eucharist

HOW IS THE EUCHARIST A SACRIFICE? PART TWO: WHAT IS THE ROLE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT?

School textbooks – especially history ones – can provide a remarkably telling insight into another culture.  For me, as a non-Catholic keen to discover mainstream (not scholarly or revisionist) Catholic thinking on the matter of the Eucharist, this book struck me as having all the virtues of the school textbook.  I approached it wanting, not radical ideas, but a sense of the general consensus of Roman Catholic theology.

How the Eucharist holds the answer to our soteriological questions

Why my interest in the Eucharist?

Strangely, enough, because of my concern, as an Anglican Evangelical, to give an account to people around me of the propositional basis of my faith. I have always been utterly unpersuaded by the penal substitution doctrine that figures in the classic presentation we Evangelicals have been taught to use.  Was there some other way I could give an intellectually and morally compelling explanation of the Gospel-event and how it works for us today?

Strangely enough it was a re-reading of the work of theologians in my own Anglican tradition which gave my first intuition of another, more cogent, way of understanding things, and putting them across. (This is, of course, the ‘alternative account’ you will find set out on pages of this website.)  Thanks to my reading, I began to appreciate how everything fell theologically into place, when – and only when – we allowed a proper (non-substitutionary) understanding of sacrifice to take the place of penal substitution at the heart of our practice and testimony.  Strangely – or perhaps not so strangely – the source of this understanding of sacrifice I was discovering in classic studies of the Eucharist.

Where does Roman Catholicism stand on the Eucharist?

The main sources for this new understanding were encouragingly diverse from a denominational perspective.  I was reassured by the degree to which the insights of my two theological loadstars – the Anglican, Gregory Dix, and the Orthodox Alexander Schmemann, seemed to converge.  How far, I wanted to know, was their sacrificial and Eucharistic understanding of the Gospel event also shared by the mainstream Roman Catholic tradition?

I have to admit to being somewhat discouraged by my first foray into mainstream Catholic Eucharistic theology (Cardinal Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy), recorded in my previous blog. But now something else came my way, by way of the twittersphere.  This seemed, for the reasons given above, to hold out every promise of resolving the question one way or another!

What I take from Dix and Schmemann

So, let me begin with the key points of my Dix/Schmemann-inspired ‘alternative account’ for which I was so desperately hoping to find some support in mainstream Roman Catholic thinking:                

1. that the Eucharist is essentially a ‘sacrifice’.  By this I mean it is an act by which we give back to God out of what he has given us.  In respect to its sacrificial nature, the Christian Eucharist resembles the ritual symbolic actions performed by other religions.  The difference is that what mankind has always aspired to do – i.e. to offer back to God worthily – the Eucharist actually accomplishes successfully.

2.that Christ didn’t just accomplish a worthy sacrifice on our behalf.  Through the Eucharist he allows us actually to join in his sacrifice:  not just in the sense of being its beneficiaries, but in the sense of making his sacrificial action our own – of sharing his sacrificial agency.  Thus, in the Eucharist our role as Christian laity is not just to receive from God, but to give to Him alongside Christ.  In other words, Christian sacrifice is reciprocal not unilateral.

3. (closely related to 2.) that what we offer back to God is our own sacrifice as well as Christ’s.  It’s not just a matter of the Church sharing the offering that the historical Jesus made in his earthly Passion (though, of course, we do that).  In the Eucharist, we as Church, individually – but above all collectively – offer up ourselves, as the body of Christ, when we offer up Christ.  So, the Eucharist, sincerely undertaken, becomes our sacrifice, and the Church’s sacrifice, as well as Christ’s.  ‘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’.

Read the pages of this website and you will understand how these points are fundamental to the ‘better alternative’ it develops.

How far are these points corroborated by Feingold?

I am pleased to say entirely.  Let us take the above points in order:

1.‘The fundamental purpose of all sacrifice offered to God is to sensibly return something to God to express the spiritual ordering of our souls to Him so as to enter into fellowship with Him’. (p.325)  ‘Even Catholics who attend Mass are generally unaware that they are participating in an infinite offering to God or that that is the principal reason why there is a Sunday mass obligation ….’ (p.329)’

2.’Christ did not want His Church to be merely the beneficiary of His sacrifice, but also a co-offeror.  He wanted her to be able to enter into the glorification of His Father accomplished by His sacrifice, for, as we have seen, the offering of sacrifice to God is both a duty and an inner need of man, a law written on our hearts.  It was not enough for Christ to sacrifice Himself for His Bride.  He wanted his Bride to be able to offer to the Father, together with Him, the perfect sacrifice.  And since His Bride was to remain on earth until His Second Coming, He wanted her to be able to offer the perfect sacrifice in every place until His return.’ (p.335)

3.’The faithful can think of putting their personal sacrifices on the paten that holds the Body of Christ and of ‘offering them up’ to the Father on the Altar of Christ’s own Body.  Benedict spoke about the practice of ‘offering up’ the daily sacrifices of life ….  The best way of inserting the sacrifices of the Christian life into Christ’s great ‘com-passion’ is to offer them during the Eucharistic sacrifice as our interior oblation that is represented by Christ’s sacrifice ….  A natural opportunity for the faithful to spiritually unite the sacrifice of their lives with the Mass is during the Offertory, in which the material gifts of the faithful are presented.  The Offertory thus symbolically represents the contribution of the faithful and of creation to the sacrifice.’ (p.421)

HOW IS THE EUCHARIST A SACRIFICE? PART TWO: WHAT IS THE ROLE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT?