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What Happens in the Eucharist?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

David F. Ford
David F. Ford
Affiliation:
Faculty of Divinity Cambridge CB2 1TW
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Extract

The eucharist or holy communion or mass or Lord's supper is probably the ritual most participated in and most discussed in human history. It is the principal act of worship of the majority of the billion and a half or so Christians in the world today and has some importance for most of the minority. Simply as an inquiry about what happens around the world at present my title would clearly be an impossible question to answer with anything approaching thoroughness. But that might seem an odd way to take it. In theology the question usually leads in to discussing real presence, eucharistic sacrifice, valid ministry and so on. Those are of course important, but I am reluctant to forget about inquiry into actual practice. I will not be able to contribute much on the subject, but it is a significant part of the imaginative context of this paper. So I will start by trying to begin to do justice to it. That will be the springboard for an attempt in Part 2 to redescribe the Eucharist in relation to some New Testament statements, without pretending that the intervening thousands of years that have generated all that diversity have not occurred. The main concerns there will be imperatives, especially the imperative of death, and Jesus as an agent of incorporation, a critical concept being that of non-identical repetition. Part 3 will take up some of the suggestions of Part 2 in order to develop one aspect of the Eucharist and transformation: what might some characteristics of a ‘eucharistic self’ be? The conclusion will then try to summarise the answer that has emerged to the title question.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , August 1995 , pp. 359 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1995

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References

1 I am especially grateful to Catherine Pickstock for the use of the notion of nonidentical repetition in relation to the eucharist.

2 Jenkins, Timothy, ‘Fieldwork and the Perception of Everyday Life’ in Man (N.S.) Vol 29 no.2, June 1994, p.444.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 See Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1977) p.214 note 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Ibid. pp.72ff.

5 Ibid. p.8.

6 Ibid. p.78.

7 Ibid. p.70.

8 Jenkins, op.cit. p.444.

9 Bourdieu, op. cit. pp.37f.: ‘The logical relationships constructed by the anthropologist are opposed to ‘practical’ relationships - practical because continuously practised, kept up, and cultivated – in the same way as the geometrical space of a map, an imaginary representation of all theoretically possible roads and routes, is opposed to the network of beaten tracks, of paths made ever more practicable by constant use.’ Cf. p.105: ‘Just as genealogy substitutes a space of unequivocal, homogeneous relationships, established once and for all, for a spatially and temporally discontinuous set of islands of kinship, ranked and organized to suit the needs of the moment and brought into a practical existence gradually and intermittently, and just as a map replaces the discontinuous, patchy space of practical roads by the homogeneous, continuous space of geometry, so a calendar substitutes a linear, homogeneous, continuous time for practical time, which is made up of incommensurable islands of duration, each with its own rhythm, the time that flies by or drags, depending on what one is doing, i.e. on the functions conferred on it by the activity in progress.’

10 Jenkins op.cit. p.445.

11 Ibid, p.444.

12 Ibid. p.447.

13 Bourdieu, op. cit. p. 124.

14 Jenkins op. cit. p.446.

15 The Paul-Luke tradition is especially strong on the eschatological dimension.

16 The fourth Gospel, as has often been noted, can be seen as distributing the message of the transfiguration throughout its story, and this is certainly true about the identification of person and message, most clearly seen in the Prologue and in the ‘I am’ sayings. Where the Synoptics have the Last Supper, John has another way of relating person and message in the footwashing and farewell discourses.

17 London: DLT 1991.

18 Ibid. p.93.

19 Ibid. p.38.

20 Jenson, Robert in Unbaptized God. The Basic Flaw in Ecumenical Theology (Fortress: Minneapolis 1992)Google Scholar summarises some of the results of ecumenical discussions as follows:

Jesus' sacrificial act on the cross is his giving of himself to the Father for us and inseparably his giving of himself to us in obedience to the Father. What he gives is therefore communion: our communion with him, and just so our communion with the Father and with one another. Just so again, the content of this encompassing communion is our sharing in Jesus' ‘own life and fate’, which is to say, in his self-giving, his sacrifice. Precisely in that Jesus sacramentally gives himself to us in the bread and cup of the Eucharist, all these dialectics belong also to the event of the eucharistic meal, of his giving the bread and cup and our receiving them. The sacrament of his selfgiving to us incorporates us as a communion, as the church, precisely into the communion of his sacrifice of himself and of us to the Father, (p.40).

21 For some rich (though often quite contentious) reflection on this in relation to still life see Bryson, Norman, Looking at the Overlooked. Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Harvard University Press: Harvard 1990).Google Scholar

22 Stacey, David, ‘The Lord's Supper as Prophetic Drama’ in Epworth Review 21.1 January 1994, p.68.Google Scholar

23 Ibid.

24 A friend back from India contrasted two views of the future: his diary with blank pages and his host's astrological chart filled with significant times. Eucharistic time is neither of those, yet has some similarities with both. It can be agnostic about the future, not presuming to know anything in particular except that the ultimate future is eucharistic. Yet it can confidently expect that the eucharistic habitus will give rise to an endless variety of improvisations.

25 Cf. Milbank, John, ‘Can a Gift be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic’ in Modern Theology Vol.11 No.1 January 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar especially p.152: ‘Nonidentical repetition. Perpetual Eucharist.’

26 Kierkegaard, Soren, Repetition. An Essay in Experimental Psychology (Harper: New York 1964) p.33.Google Scholar

27 Ibid. p.33.

28 Cf. Ibid. Walter Lowrie's Introduction; and, for a perceptive comparative study of what Kierkegaard means by his concept of repetition (Danish Gjentagelse, literally ‘taking again’), with special reference to temporality, similarity and difference, see Melberg, Arne, Theories of Mimesis (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Repetition op.cit. p.117.

30 Ibid. p. 118.

31 Ibid, pp.90, 126.

32 Cf. Williams, Rowan on music in Open to judgement (DLT. London 1994) pp.247ff.Google Scholar

33 Calvin would seem to be right in interpreting the Eucharist from the ascension. There was a danger that the Lutheran affirmation of the ubiquity of Christ would compromise the continuing particularity of his humanity. It also threatens the eschatological tension of presence and absence in the eucharist. Luke's image of separation from face to face encounter until seeing him ‘come in the same way as you saw him go’ (Acts 1.11) clearly affirms both the particularity and a mode of absence. Cf. for a most illuminating discussion of this Douglas Farrow's unpublished King's College London doctoral thesis on the ascension.

On the huge amount of ecumenical discussion of the eucharist and related matters, a provocative summary and theological interpretation of the issues is given by Robert Jenson, Unbaptized God (op. cit.). He is particularly illuminating on the need for the concept of real presence to be thought through in a way that allows notions of time, event and person to coinhere and to relate to the trinitarian God.

34 Gerrish's, Brian fine discussion, Grace and Gratitude. The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (T.& T. Clark: Edinburgh 1993)Google Scholar, is superb on Calvin's appreciation of the eucharist as a celbration of the abundant goodness of God.

35 See Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, The Cost of Disapleship (SCM: London 1959) Part One.Google Scholar

36 Farley, Edward, Good and Evil. Interpreling a Human Condition (Fortress: Minneapolis 1990) especially chapters 1, 13, 16.Google Scholar

37 For the priority of blessing in 2 Cor. see 1.3ff., where there is a powerful statement of substitutionary love in the face to face community; and 9.8ff., which is the culmination of an extended appeal to God's economy of abundance. Cf. Young, Frances and Ford, David F.. Meaning and Truth in 2 Corinthians (SPCK: London 1987) Chapter 6.Google Scholar