•Sacramental-blog•

Monday, December 29, 2003

Physical Eating in the Eucharist 3

In my two previous posts I have sought to step back from the particular act of the Lord’s Supper and draw our attention to the wider context in which it is found. Within this post I hope to use this context to help us to better understand something of what occurs within the Eucharist itself.

I started this brief study by emphasizing the importance of the physical act of eating within the Lord’s Supper, something which is generally downplayed by Reformed and evangelical Christians. I implied that the significance of the act of eating within the Eucharist should be allowed to inform the whole of our theology. If our practice of the Eucharist and our theology fail to confirm each other then we are in trouble.

Bread and Wine

In the Eucharist we participate in the body and blood of Christ through eating bread and drinking wine. So much attention has been devoted to the manner in which the bread and wine are (or are not, as the case may be) the body and blood of Christ, that it is easy to lose sight of many of the facts that I have already stated. It is so easy to forget the importance of physical eating when our attention turns to ‘eating with the mouth of faith’ and other things like this. I fear that we have often failed to recognize the ‘movement’ that occurs within the celebration of the Eucharist.

The very idea of a ‘movement’ within the Eucharist seems strange to many. Many people have abstracted the elements from the context of the Eucharistic action and have consequently lost sight of much of their significance. If we are to understand the meaning of the bread and the wine, we must understand them within the context of the Eucharistic ritual as a whole. When they are taken out of this context we can easily fall into all sorts of error on the subject.

We should not immediately think of the bread and the wine as the body and blood of Christ. It is important that we take the time to recognize that, at the beginning of the ritual of the Eucharist, this is not what they represent. What do they represent at this stage? This is a sorely neglected question.

In the Eucharist we have bread and wine. As Peter Leithart has observed, bread does not occur naturally. Bread is something produced by man’s action upon creation. Bread-making requires a considerable degree of knowledge, skill and interaction between men. Bread-making presupposes a developed social and economic structure. No animal makes bread. Bread serves as a symbol of creation transformed by man and serves as a symbol of man’s place within creation. Man is the bread-maker. In the Eucharist the bread serves to represent creation and creation transformed by man.

Wine does not occur naturally either. Our Lord could have ordained some more natural drink. He could have given us water or grape juice. However, He ordained wine. Wine again serves as a symbol of creation transformed by man and of man’s place within creation. However, wine is a drink of celebration. Wine serves to identify man’s place within the creation more clearly than the bread by itself would do. The bread shows us that God has given man the task of transforming the creation. Wine is what we drink when the bread-making is complete. The wine shows us that God wishes man to enjoy the transformed creation.

The word ‘Eucharist’ comes from the Greek word for ‘gratitude’. The Reformed tradition has recognized that, in the Lord’s Supper, whilst no propitiatory sacrifice occurs, a sacrifice of thanksgiving and praise does. The bread and wine symbolize our offering. The bread and wine symbolize our offering to God of every aspect of our lives and labours, of our own selves and of the world we live in. This is the Eucharist sacrifice. In the Eucharist we fulfil man’s true purpose. Man’s ultimate purpose is to truly worship God and to offer himself and the world to God, to give all the glory to God.

The offering of the Eucharist is only possible in Christ. In the Eucharist we offer ourselves and the world to God, but we only do so in Christ, in that one offering that has taken place, once for all. It is Christ who offers and it is Christ who is offered. In the Eucharist we are led ‘into the all-embracing Eucharist of Christ’ as Schmemann expresses it. We are offered, and the whole creation is offered, to God in Christ (Colossians 1:19-22). In the Church we are part of the eucharistic life of Christ. Every week when we celebrate the Eucharist we re-embody this reality.

New Creation!

Creation is not of itself communion with God. Creation can only become fellowship with God as it is offered to Him and received back as communion. In Christ humanity and creation has been offered to God as a pleasing sacrifice. In the Eucharist we participate in this sacrifice. When Christ offered Himself to God He received resurrection life back in return. Christ laid down His life so that He might take it up again. In offering the Eucharistic sacrifice we do exactly the same thing. We offer our lives and our world to God and receive true life in communion with Him in return.

As Christ is the offering of the Eucharist, so Christ is the one who is received in the Eucharist. Having offered ourselves and our world to God in the bread and the wine, we now receive the bread and the wine to eat and drink. However, the bread and wine are no longer mere biological fuel. They have become communion. In partaking of the bread and wine we partake of the body and the blood of Christ. In partaking of the symbols of ourselves, our world and our labours we now partake of the true life of the world — Christ. Now our deepest hunger can be satisfied in the eating of physical food. If we downplay the act of physical eating we will miss the deep significance of what takes place in the Eucharist. The sacraments are more than merely a God-ordained ‘flannel-graph’, they bring about the embodiment of the new creation.

Christ by His incarnation, death and resurrection, has brought this dead world back into living sacramental communion with heaven. As we offer the bread and the wine as the symbols of ourselves, our world and our labours, our whole lives should become Eucharistic. The whole system of our world is offered to God and received back as communion. We cannot be Gnostics. We must learn to engage in our everyday labours in communion with God. In the Eucharist the whole fabric of our lives is drawn up into the new creation.

James Torrance has observed:—

The patristic phrase ‘one in being (homoousios) with the Father’, betokens here that communion with Jesus Christ is communion with God. Therefore to participate by the Spirit in the incarnate Christ’s communion with the Father, is to participate in the eternal Son’s communion — a relationship which is both internal to the Godhead and externally extended to us by grace, established between God and humanity in the incarnation. The prime purpose of the incarnation, in the love of God, is to lift us up into a life of communion, of participation in the very triune life of God.

Trinitarian life is all about giving and receiving. In the church we do not merely image this Trinitarian giving and receiving; in Christ we participate in it. In Christ the church enters into the Trinitarian life.

Conclusion

This study has been brief and there are many areas I would have loved to have given more attention to. However, I might do this on some other occasion. Suffice it to say that the fact of physical eating in the Eucharistic celebration is by no means unimportant. It should also be apparent to the reader that, in most Reformed churches, the importance of physical eating has been ignored.

Theology and practice cannot be separated. Eucharistic practice, in many churches, has been moulded by a dangerous theology and the practice that results serves to further this dangerous theology. If we practice the Eucharist properly we will gradually be forced to abandon false theology. As I mentioned in my first post on this subject, practices can serve as bulwarks against ideas. Re-establishing a biblical manner of celebrating the Eucharist cannot be seen as a marginal concern in the Reformation of the church. It is of prime importance.

I fear that, by losing sight of the importance of the physical food that we eat at the Lord’s Supper, we have gradually become more and more Gnostic. The celebration of the Lord’s Supper has focused on aspects other than the eating of bread and the drinking of wine. Our lives have become increasingly secularized as we have lost sight of the sacramental principle through poor Eucharistic practice. We have lost sight of the goodness of creation and have sought to deny the fact that we are rooted in it.

Our holding back of our children from the Eucharistic feast is a powerful declaration of our denial of the scope of the new creation, a new creation that takes up the whole of our lives into it. In the Eucharist every part of man’s nature is offered up to God, not just his intellect. We want our children, by participating in the Eucharist, to learn to live Eucharistic lives. If you want to raise children who can use language, speak to them; if you want to raise children who live Eucharistic lives, bring them to the table. Teach them to offer themselves, their world and their labours to God each week.

The Eucharist, among many things, instils good habits into us. Ritual teaches us patterns of behaviour by continual repetition. Is there any pattern of behaviour that you want to instil in yourself and your children more than the Eucharistic pattern of behaviour? Only those who practice the Eucharistic pattern of behaviour can truly know life. By God’s grace may we be men and women who have such life.

# posted by Alastair : 12/29/2003 12:47:43 AM Antiphony [ comments.]

Tuesday, December 23, 2003

I have just finished listening to Jeffrey Meyers talk, Theodore Beza and the Development of the Reformed Doctrine of Infant Baptism. It is well worth listening to.

# posted by Alastair : 12/23/2003 03:40:22 PM Antiphony [ comments.]

Physical Eating in the Eucharist 2

Man, The Hungry Soul

Man is a hungry being and by eating he seeks to satisfy his hunger. Man eats in order to live and to enjoy fullness of life. We would do well not to draw too sharp a distinction between man as a physical being and man as a soul, for man is an embodied soul and man’s body is not alone in its hunger. Indeed, the hunger of the body should never be separated from the hunger of the soul.

Man is a hungry soul. At the root of all of man’s hunger lies a deeper and far more powerful hunger. This is man’s hunger for the living God. All of man’s hunger is ultimately a hunger for God, the only One who can truly satisfy the hungry person.

We are all too often inclined to separate man’s spiritual hunger from his biological hunger. Our mindset is used to place everything in its hermetically sealed category. Man has a spiritual hunger and man has a natural hunger and ne’er shall the twain meet. However, the Bible beautifully muddles these things together. Physical meals and foods are imbued with great spiritual significance. We can think, for example, of the Passover and all the food laws. Our salvation is frequently described in terms of food. We will one day sit at the King’s Table, we will share in the Wedding Feast and we will eat of the Tree of Life. One day we will never hunger or thirst again. This does not refer to a removal of man’s appetite, but to a satisfaction of man’s appetite.

In creation God gave man all the trees of the Garden as his food, except for one. Man was to enjoy communion with God as he ate of these. He was to express his commitment to God’s authority by what he ate. The fruit of the Garden given to man was, as Alexander Schmemann put it ‘divine love made food.’ The whole creation was God’s gift of blessing to man. The creation was to be the place in which man knew fellowship with God. Creation was given to man, not merely as a bare sign of communion with God, but as communion with God. Creation was created in order to be exhaustively sacramental. Within creation man was to know fellowship with the true God. The whole of creation was the means of God’s presence, blessing and revelation.

Man’s hunger and man’s eating are signs of his dependency upon the Creator and upon His blessed gift of creation. Man’s hunger is far more than merely a hunger for biological fuel. As Schmemann recognized, man is unique in the creation by being alone able to ‘bless God for the food and the life he receives from Him.’ Man is alone is knowing the ‘meaning of the thirst and hunger that constitutes his life.’ Schmemann expresses man’s primary function beautifully:—

The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God—and by filling the world with this eucharist, he transforms his life, the one that he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion with Him. The world was created as the “matter,” the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and man was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament.

The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature

Man’s physical eating is far from merely utilitarian. Deep down we all realize that at the heart of our meals lies far more than merely eating and drinking for the purpose of refuelling our bodies and maintaining their functions. At the meal table (as Leon Kass has observed) we hungry souls seek to meet our appetite for beauty and order, art and action, sociability and friendship, insight and friendship, insight and understanding, song and worship. Man always humanizes his eating. If man eats in the same way as the animals we believe that he is denying something essential to what we are as human beings.

Man hungers to be alive. This hunger for life is far more than merely a desire for biological continuance. Man’s physical eating is done with this end in view, that is, man eats to be alive. This may seem to be an empty truism, but when we contemplate what being alive means we cannot but be struck by the deep significance of physical eating. Fullness of life can only be known in communion with God. The life man hungers and thirsts for is life in communion with God. Man’s physical eating cannot be separated from his desire to enjoy fellowship with God. The meal table, the place where man’s dependence upon the Creator and His blessed gift of creation is expressed, cannot be secularized.

The Fall

The act of man’s Fall was an act of eating. We often express the ‘spiritual’ significance of the act in such a way as to downplay the fact that it was a physical act. However, the sin that led to the Curse upon mankind was the act of physically chewing upon and digesting forbidden food. The significance of this act is by no means lessened by drawing attention to this aspect.

In eating of the forbidden fruit man sought to fill his appetite for life by participating in something that had not been given to him by God. Man sought life outside of communion with God. The world became an end in itself and man abandoned his role as the priest of creation. No longer would creation be transformed into communion with God. Man has chosen the appearance of life in the gift, rather than the fullness of life in communion with the Giver. Seeking to satisfy his hunger for life purely by depending upon the world, man failed to receive much more than biological fuel from it. The world is dead apart from communion with God, the Source of life. Physical food was no longer sacramental, it no longer was the bearer of the gift of life in communion with God.

By the Fall man doomed himself to unsatisfied hunger. He could only have communion with a dead and cursed world and no longer communion with the Giver of life. The fallen creation was cursed by being separated from God. Man was cursed in his eating. The world became an anti-sacrament for man, a communion with death, rather than a communion with life. Man was no longer the true priest of the world; he was now enslaved to it.

Having examined certain of the effects of the Fall it should be clear that if redemption is to occur, a new creation must take place. Only in a new creation can physical eating once again become a means of communion with God. We all too easily think of the new creation merely in terms of what happens in individual human hearts. However, if I was right in my previous statement that creation was given as communion with God, full salvation can only take place within the context of a renewed creation. Redemption must raise the fallen creation back into a sacramental communion with heaven. The created order must be released from bondage, cease to be a closed system and become the means of communion with God once more. Where food was once cursed, it must now be blessed.

# posted by Alastair : 12/23/2003 12:01:35 AM Antiphony [ comments.]

Saturday, December 20, 2003

Physical Eating in the Eucharist 1

Doctrine and Praxis

Many people have the mistaken impression that a person’s ‘worldview’ can be explained purely in terms of a set of doctrines that they subscribe to. People talk about a ‘Christian worldview’ in a manner that practically excludes reference to the practices of the Christian community, except insofar as they serve as ‘implications’ of a dogmatic system. At its fundamental level the Christian faith is conceived of as a rather abstract philosophical system that is only made practical in the further step of application.

In such a framework the sacraments are not essential elements of the Christian worldview; at best they serve as visible sermons. In opposition to this approach, however, it is my conviction that a ‘worldview’ is far more than a bare theory. As N.T. Wright observes

…the real shape of someone’s worldview can often be seen in the sort of actions they perform, particularly if the actions are so instinctive or habitual as to be taken for granted.

No one can fully articulate their worldview. Few elements in our worldviews are consciously adopted. Few of us step back and think: I use a watch, how does this affect my perspective on reality? Or: How has my worldview been affected by the ‘copy and paste’ function? If we did this, we would be dead before we actually got around to doing anything.

When something is common or habitual, it is often difficult to step back and to recognize its significance and its effect upon the way that we ‘lean into’ life. It is easily taken for granted and becomes part of the furniture of our lives, the original reasons that gave rise to it being obscured and forgotten. We risk becoming ignorant of the effect that certain habitual actions, common technologies and objects can exert have upon our perspective of the world. Such things combine to form the ‘environment’ in which our lives are lived out.

The danger is that we can be blinded to the ideas embodied in technologies, practices and objects through familiarity. There are a number of areas in which this is dangerous. One key danger is that by failing to realize how these things affect us we can end up being unwittingly moulded by them in unhelpful directions. Another particular danger is that important practices can be subverted by beliefs that we hold that are hostile to their existence. Practices can serve as bulwarks against ideas. If we fail to recognize the degree to which practices embody certain ideas and protect us against others, we will be too ready to allow them to be replaced or compromised.

I would like to study what the practice of the Eucharist tells us about the Christian view of creation and redemption.

Eating as a Sign of the Kingdom

When you step back and think about it, the fact that the Christian sacrament of the Kingdom is bread eaten and wine drunk seems profoundly strange. Eating and drinking, arguably above all other actions, root man in creation. Were the average evangelical to think up a sacrament of the Kingdom it would probably not involve the acts of eating and drinking. Such a sign would sit uncomfortably with their conception of salvation. The actions of eating and drinking are far too ‘physical’ to be of any great ‘spiritual’ import.

I believe that one of the reasons why we struggle with the idea of a meal being the sign of the Kingdom is that we struggle to affirm a good creation. Many of us see the created world as something that is unredeemable in some way, something that we have to be saved from. Salvation is something that belongs to the heart. Salvation is all about being rescued from the evil creation and going to be with God in heaven when we die.

As they have struggled to reconcile the practice of the Lord’s Supper with their soteriology, many evangelicals have sought to shift the focus of the sacrament. There has been a tendency to place the ‘meaning’ of the Supper somewhere other than in our eating and drinking. We fail to see how a meal could be the sign of the Kingdom and the memorial of Jesus Christ. As a result the meaning of the Lord’s Supper has gradually been lost.

For some the elements have become mere icons and the eating largely superfluous. However, if the essential purpose of the Lord’s Supper is to draw a picture to help us think about the death of Jesus, then why do we need to eat the bread and the wine? Why not just look at them? The simple fact of the matter is: if the bread and the wine are supposed to be pictures of the body and blood of Christ, they are not very good ones. Far better ones could be suggested. Nor does baptism look at all like someone being buried (no matter how far Baptists might go in following this reasoning). The sacraments are not intended to be icons or pictures; they are intended to be rituals. We ‘do’ the sacraments, rather than looking at them. The Lord’s Supper is a ceremony with great meaning, like a wedding or a funeral. The meaning is in the doing.

When Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper He gave us a simple command — ‘do this in remembrance of Me’. We should pay careful attention to this. Jesus did not say: ‘meditate on this’, ‘think about this’ or ‘preach about this’. We do all of these things, and we are right to do so. However, these should not be confused with what lies at the heart of our celebration of the Lord’s Supper. At the heart of the Lord’s Supper is an action of eating and drinking.

For most evangelicals meditation is a far more ‘spiritual’ act than eating and drinking. Consequently, many have tried to focus the celebration of the Lord’s Supper upon meditation rather than eating. The celebration of the Lord’s Supper is focused upon the period after the receiving of the elements when individuals meditate on the death of Christ with their eyes closed.

I believe that the manner in which the Lord’s Supper is celebrated in many churches today provides a window onto some of the deep errors that plague the church today. The fact that most churches practice the Lord’s Supper wrong should be seen as a theological problem of huge importance. Reforming our practice of the Lord’s Supper is one of the ways in which we can attack some of the deep-rooted errors in our views of salvation.

# posted by Alastair : 12/20/2003 10:42:01 PM Antiphony [ comments.]

Thursday, December 18, 2003

I just received this book this morning. I can't wait to get my teeth into it. Schmemann is one of my favourite authors on this subject. Whether or not you agree with him, you will certainly find him insightful and thought-provoking. It is such a shame that many Protestants will never hear about his works.

# posted by Alastair : 12/18/2003 10:37:04 AM Antiphony [ comments.]

Tuesday, December 09, 2003

From N.T. Wright’s New Tasks for a Renewed Church:—

Let us, then, reject the rationalism that is suspicious of any sacramental action that cannot be analysed in a test-tube. Let us, too, reject the dualistic romanticism that believes that the only true religion has to do with what happens ‘inwardly’ rather than with outward or physical actions. The Eucharist is more than a bare memorial of Jesus’ death. It is more than simply a ‘visible word’ (unless one is prepared to balance this by speaking of preaching as an ‘audible sacrament’!). It is one of the moments in the life of God’s people when all the lines of truth, faith, hope, love and service converge. At the Lord’s table we become for a few moments what we truly are. We are in touch with reality, and are that much less likely to be deceived by man-made substitutes. Faced with a greedy and drunken world, we are called to celebrate in bread and wine the God who displaces any mere corn-king or Bacchus.

# posted by Alastair : 12/9/2003 12:20:07 AM Antiphony [ comments.]

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