PART ONE: WHAT WE NEED TO RETRIEVE
In this blog, I’m interested in using a confrontation of Roman Catholic texts on Eucharist theology (de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum; Feingold, The Eucharist; Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy) to discern elements of the Catholic tradition that can and should be appropriated by Evangelicals seeking a coherent understanding of their Christian faith.
My fundamental assumptions here are the following. First, that the proper understanding of the Eucharist is absolutely fundamental to the content of our faith, and will be a key plank in any attempt at offering a plausible account of it to the secular world. Second, that, if we Evangelicals want a proper understanding of the Eucharist, there is much we will need to learn from non-Protestant denominations.
This accepted, I am not proposing that Evangelicals abandon their denominational roots and BECOME Roman Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox. So, the question that concerns me here is what aspects of that non-Protestant Eucharistic understandings of the Gospel-event we need to retrieve for ourselves.
In the present blog, I limit the enquiry to Roman Catholicism. I have read profound treatments of the question by Anglo-Catholic and Orthodox theologians, and I am intrigued to know if something of the same understanding is shared by Catholics.
Why then pursue this aim through a confrontation of these particular texts?
Which Roman Catholic Eucharistic theology?
The matter of Eucharistic theology is highly contested even WITHIN Catholicism. In fact, my encounter with Catholic Eucharistic theology has largely been via theologies offering a profound critique of mainstream Catholic views – notably, Henri de Lubac, Edward Kilmartin, and Robert Daly. We Evangelicals are naturally not bound to any inherited allegiance to Roman Catholicism, and can therefore coldly assess its theological legacy for the purposes of selective appropriation. So, for us, an insightful critique on the part of an authoritative Catholic scholar, like de Lubac, can, I think, blaze a trail for our own efforts to distinguish what in Catholic Eucharistic doctrine is most truly representative of the beliefs and practices of the Church in the era before it became divided.
It is in this process of discernment that – with the aid of de Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum – I shall largely be engaged in this blog. But a prerequisite for making such a critical assessment was, I began to feel, a familiarization with the larger picture of mainstream Eucharistic theology of which de Lubac et al. constituted an at least potentially dissident strand. This need has been amply supplied, as indicated in my previous blog by Lawrence Feingold’s recent textbook study, The Eucharist.
What I appreciated above all in Feingold’s book was his classification of the issues surrounding the Eucharist in three broad categories. These are: first, how Christ and his sacrifice is ‘present’ to worshippers in the Eucharist – an issue that boils down to our understanding of the meaning of the Eucharistic ‘symbol’ or ‘sign’; second, whether, and in what way, Jesus’s historical self-offering, and our Eucharistic worship, constitute a ‘sacrifice’; third, what precisely our Eucharistic worship has to do with the institution of the Church. This three-fold classification of the issues may be self-evident; certainly, it had been the basis of my own classification. However, for the purposes of my project of selective retrieval from Catholicism, it was obviously reassuring to find a categorization of the key issues that made sense to mainstream Catholics.
The second valued feature of Feingold’s treatment was the way it represented the development of mainstream Catholic Eucharistic doctrine as I had always imagined Catholics would represent it: as a steady, upward progress, an evolution of theological understanding in response to the philosophical challenge of each successive generation – rather as all Christians seem to imagine the development of Trinitarian theology. In each of the doctrinal areas mentioned above, Feingold’s broadly chronological analysis culminates in the late mediaeval synthesis with supplementary clarification from recent Popes, followed by a section devoted to answering more recent objections (from the Reformation onwards).
This reassuringly linear picture struck me as far removed from the story I remembered from Corpus Mysticum. However, it was possible I had misinterpreted de Lubac. Feingold hardly mentions this study. But I was intrigued by what I had recently read about it in Joseph Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy. This gave me to understand that my impression of a fundamental incompatibility between the two narratives was mistaken. According to Ratzinger, de Lubac was right to argue that later mediaeval developments had tended to obscure certain aspects of the way the Eucharist was initially – and should still be – understood. But this loss was only a temporary corollary of more important theological gains. ‘We can agree that something of … the corporate character (the sense of ‘we’) of the eucharistic faith was lost, or, at least, diminished. …. People did not exactly forget this truth, but they were not so clearly aware of it as before. There were, therefore, losses in Christian awareness, and in our time we must try to make up for them, but still there were gains overall.’ In other words, de Lubac’s narrative can be integrated into the grand Catholic narrative of theological advance.
I was very curious to discover whether Ratzinger was right about this, and whether I had been wrong to see any fundamental incompatibility between the two narratives, and had somehow failed to pick up on these compensating ‘gains’ which the flowering of late mediaeval theology had brought to the Church’s understanding of the Eucharist. With this in mind, I was keen to return to Corpus Mysticum, and reconsider its implications in the light of a more thorough reading of that text.
Lesson 1: The Eucharist is a sacrificial action in which we share Christ’s sacrificial agency
I return now to the chief question to be addressed in this blog: that of what we non-Catholics should retrieve from Roman Catholic understandings of the Eucharist. In what follows, I shall, as indicated, be adopting Feingold’s classification of the principal issues.
To begin with what is most important, I remain convinced that, from the perspective of Evangelicals, it is the second of Feingold’s issues – that of the sacrificial status of the Eucharist – that is overwhelmingly the most important. What we need, above all, to recover is the understanding of the Eucharist as an active participation in the sacrifice of Christ, in which, we, the Church, are allowed to share in His sacrificial agency. In other words, we become His fellow offerors, not just the recipients of the fruits of His once-and-for-all offering.
This is the aspect of Eucharistic theology, in which Protestants diverge most sharply from the Catholic and Orthodox mainstream. It is also the aspect where that divergence has the most serious implications for our understanding and presentation of the Christian faith. ‘Catholics who attend Mass’ may, Feingold suggests, be ‘unaware that they are participating in an infinite offering to God’ and that ‘this is the principal reason why there is a Sunday Mass obligation’. Protestant Evangelicals are almost certainly ignorant of the fact. I am not sure whether they would dissent absolutely from this proposition that they are ‘participating in an offering to God’; but they would certainly hedge it with qualifications. And the assertion that we are ‘Christ’s co-offerors’ would be probably be met with outright denial. Ultimately, this question of shared agency is the nub of the theological issue, and – where polite ecumenical reflections are concerned (as John Colewell or Christopher Cocksworth) – the elephant in the room that is always ignored.
It is, at the same, time the one issue in respect to which Evangelical Eucharistic theology must shift if it is to make any sense at all. And the consequences of it not doing so, as I have already pointed out, is the failure to have any intellectually and morally coherent account of our Christian faith that we can offer to intelligent secular enquirers. The movement here, I am afraid to say, will need to be all on the Protestant Evangelical side. Protestant Evangelicalism is simply WRONG when it denies the properly sacrificial nature of the Eucharist, as a reciprocal (as opposed to a unilateral) ritual operation.
Lesson 2: The Eucharist constitutes and is constituted by the Church
The second most important issue, for our purposes, is the Feingold’s third. Here the situation is rather different. Many Christians – even Evangelicals – might not dissent from the proposition that (in some sense) the Eucharist constitutes the Church and is constituted by it. BUT, 1., the Church often slips to the rank of a second-order consideration where the Gospel is seen as primarily about the relationship of individual souls to God. AND, 2., the role of Eucharistic ritual in relation to the Church, so conceived, frequently dwindles to that of a convenient ‘symbol’ – in the thin sense in which that term has traditionally been employed in Evangelical discourse. Both tendencies could be seen as representing a drift from orthodox Christian doctrine. Certainly, Augustine did not limit the importance of the Church to that of a largely instrumentalist human organization serving the aim of advancing individual souls on their path to salvation. Yet it is perfectly possible to have drifted a considerable way in these directions and still be able to affirm, in a spirit of ecumenical generosity towards non-Protestant churches, that Church and Eucharist are somehow inter-dependent – especially if the question of the precise nature of that relationship remains little understood by any of the parties to the discussion, even those seeking to assert its importance.
The most significant gain to be derived from the findings of de Lubac’s study, it seemed to me, was an explanation of the interdependency of Eucharist and Church which appeared to flow quite naturally out of the very heart of the early Christianity’s understanding of its own core beliefs and practices. While Feingold seemed to wholeheartedly to endorse this understanding, for him it seemed a kind of additional dimension, no doubt necessitated by a recent well-grounded theological determination to re-conceptualize the Catholic faith in less individualistic terms.
Was there something in the mainstream approach (as represented by Feingold) that stood in the way of our fuller recuperation of the earlier Christian understanding (as represented by de Lubac)? That, it seemed to me, would be some grounds for us non-Catholics rejecting elements of the mainstream picture. Or could the two be made to dovetail without any loss to understanding on one side or the other (as suggested by Ratzinger)? This was the question at the forefront of my mind as I determined to make a more through re-reading of Corpus Mysticum.
WHAT CAN EVANGELICAL PROTESTANTS TAKE FROM RC EUCHARISTIC THEOLOGY? PART THREE: CONCLUSIONS
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References:
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