Chapter 15 - The Sacrament and the Social Body of the Church

Summary

This chapter explains how the centrality of the sacrament and the reorientation of worship towards the altar were used to give external shape and expression to crucial divisions within the social body of the church. The sacerdotal authority of the clergy was embodied through their role in dispensing the sacraments, and given physical expression in their sole access to the holy of holies beyond the rails. There they administered the sacrament to the laity kneeling at the rails. Division between different sorts of Christian were also expressed in terms of their distance from and access to the sacrament. Here some Laudians espoused an attachment to physical forms of differentiation, expressed through the structure of the church to which, in practice, the church of England did not aspire, but which arguably expressed how Laudians thought about the Christian community and its relation to the church, the clergy and the sacrament.