The Evangelical need for a participationist Eucharistic theology
I have long been looking for a book. And with Eugene Schlesinger’s recent title I thought I might have found what I was looking for. It instantly signalled itself to my attention, first, by its title, ‘Sacrificing the Church’, second by its relative shortness. To those in the know, ‘Sacrificing the Church’ at once suggests an ‘Augustinian’ view of sacrifice. It was Augustine who famously spoke of the ecclesial body of Christ (i.e. the Church) as offering itself when it lays the bread upon the altar. This is an understanding of Christian sacrifice that I have encountered in various Roman Catholic and Orthodox contexts, and it excites me greatly as a Protestant Evangelical concerned to offer an adequate account to the world of the propositional basics of my Christian faith.
What distinguishes it from anything familiar to my formerly Protestant Evangelical notions is the idea that Christ doesn’t just sacrifice himself for our sake, but allows us as his followers to share in that sacrifice. That is, in offering the body of Christ as bread and wine, we also offer ourselves – not only, as Augustine’s sermon implies, in our Eucharistic worship, but in the ‘living’ sacrifice of our lives and bodies that we dedicate as a church when we place the bread and wine on the altar.
When seen in this way – as a sacrifice inviting our human participation – our account of ‘the cross’ begins to make sense. Viewed simply as the means to our forgiveness (as in so many evangelical tracts and sermons), the inner logic of the cross remains grossly under-determined. Why, after all, could God not forgive us anyway – as he had already forgiven his people so many times before? Viewed as His establishment, through Christ and the Holy Spirit, both of proper sacrificial worship, and of His Kingdom community as the socio-religious corollary of that worship, it makes perfect sense. Here, at last, we find an intellectually cogent and morally sustainable account of the fundamentals of our faith. In other words, an account that evangelically-minded Christians could, without embarrassment, offer the world!
Hence also a second reason I gave earlier for my attraction to this book – its brevity.
I spoke earlier of the considerable consensus I had discovered in Catholic, Anglo-Catholic, even Orthodox contexts on what I shall term a participative view of the Christian sacrifice. As an Anglican Evangelical, I have not personally spent time in Roman Catholic, or even Anglo-Catholic congregations; so I can’t say anything about whatever equivalent they might have to the standard evangelistic presentation of the faith we Evangelicals use to missionize non-believers. My acquaintance with a faith based on participative sacrifice has not been through sermons – let alone evangelistic literature. It has been as a student, via studies aimed at an academic, or at least highly educated, readership. This may explain why, in my own experience, the fundamental Christian message identified above always comes encumbered by lengthy historical and theological discussion. The most straightforward such presentation I have so far encountered is in Robert Daly’s Sacrifice Unveiled. Even here, it has to be disengaged from a mass of esoteric material relating to the origin and history of the mass. If only one could excerpt twenty pages of this admirable text, and publish in the SPCK ‘Little Book of Guidance’ series. What an aid to evangelism! Hence, in my eyes, the promise of Schlesinger’s volume with its one hundred and twenty or so pages.
Finally, while on the subject of what attracted me to this book, I also have to mention a couple of additional features, both suggested in the sub-title and chapter headings of the book. These bring the topic of ‘the mass’ into somewhat surprising juxtaposition with ‘mission’ and ‘ecumenism’. ‘Ecumenism’ in this context surprises me, because, in my experience, the participative view of sacrifice has largely been defended in contexts that presuppose a resolutely Roman Catholic theological horizon. The introduction of ecumenism into the heart of a discussion of participative sacrifice dangles before my eyes the intriguing possibility of a non-Roman Catholic interest in what – to this Evangelical – has always, regrettably, seemed a traditionally Catholic view of faith. Could there perhaps be another non-Catholic out there who shared my interest in what a participative Eucharist theology could bring to the wider, less denominational, understanding of the Christian faith?
This hope was further fuelled by reference to ‘mission’. The term, broadly understood, at once indicated the context of our evangelical presentation of the Gospel, which was where I personally saw a participative understanding of sacrifice as making its greatest contribution. An interest specifically in mission had also been piqued in me by a recent reading of the Evangelical Christ Wright’s Mission of God. Wright’s Scriptural approach, with its rooting of the great commission in a broad notion of the mission of God (Missio Dei) developed in the OT, pointed to what seemed like a parallel interface between Catholic and Protestant Evangelical concerns along the axes of mission and ecumenism, rooting both in a strongly Trinitarian understanding of the Godhead. I was interested to discover whether and how far an approach to mission originating in a Catholic participative understanding of sacrifice (which I firmly believe to be the correct one) would result in corroborating the view of mission that had so impressed me in the work of Chris Wright.
So much for the mixture of motives that drew me to Schlesinger’s book. Did it meet my expectations? Or were those expectations just plain unrealistic?
Does Schlesinger meet the need?
What I find in Sacrificing the Church is a lucid account of the participative understanding of sacrifice, and an account which was helpfully foregrounded as the propositional basis of the Christian faith. And this account, unlike Daly’s, is not encumbered with historical detail. So, from the point of view of positive content, this book ought to meet my needs.
Of course, while relatively short by theological standards, this is hardly a ‘Chick Tract’. Let’s face it, at sixty pounds a copy, it was hardly going to be. No one will be handing this out at railway stations and college foyers!
But neither, unfortunately, does it altogether address the task of transforming the theological mindset of educated but misguided evangelicals. This would have required the author to be much more forthright about offering his participative understanding of sacrifice as a corrective to current post-Reformation distortions (like Penal Substitution). The careless reader could be forgiven for failing to grasp fully that he/she is being offered, in the shape of participative sacrifice, the resolution to all those soteriological difficulties that have recently dogged evangelical Christians, and a more robust basis for their evangelism to the world. As a means to changing educated theological minds, Daly’s Sacrifice Unveiled is far more hard-hitting, though burdened with scholarly detail, and sometimes side-tracked by mistaken Girardian preoccupations.
In fact, it is a curious and recurrent feature of Schlesinger’s book that it takes every opportunity to gloss over historic and liturgical differences – even where a participative & fully Trinitarian understanding of sacrifice is precisely what is at issue. For example, instead of treating Cranmer’s famous prayer after communion for what it is – namely as probably the single most potent influence in Anglicanism towards a receptive and non-participative notion of sacrifice – Schlesinger comments irenically that in its Episcopal positioning (before communion) it is ‘not irreconcilable’ with the participative view. The fact that such ‘reconciliation’ is achieved by overlooking the theology that it has manifestly sustained for generations is something Schlesinger seems to ignore.
There is another respect in which I found the book ill-adapted to the kind of educated evangelism that I had in mind. The chapters, in addition to their theological focus, are each angled to the work of a particular theologian – rather in the manner of some PhD theses. So, in explicating a Trinitarian soteriology in his first chapter, Schlesinger follows Balthasar; in the next, devoted to the participative character of the Christian sacrifice, he focuses on Augustine. The third chapter on sacrifice in liturgy contains a longish excursus on the spiritual exegesis of de Lubac. The fifth, on ecumenism, develops the ideas of Ephraim Radner.
Actually, as someone who has not read much Balthasar (and, given his remarkable prolixity, probably never will), and whose reading of Augustine has hitherto been limited to the Confessions and the City of God, I greatly benefitted from Schlesinger’s very competent and reader-friendly distillations of these great authors. But this is not the way to convince my evangelical friends that the participative understanding of sacrifice is the true orthodoxy of the Church. And the claim of the author to be engaging in the activity of ‘speculative theology’ as opposed to ecclesial doctrine would probably be the nail in the coffin for any attempt to engage their serious attention!
I am being very unreasonable, of course, in evaluating Schlesinger’s book from the perspective of an application of its arguments that Schlesinger himself may never have foreseen. A well-written introductory chapter makes pretty clear what the objectives of the author are – and persuading the Evangelical wing of Anglicanism of the role of participative sacrifice as a basis of the presentation of the Christian faith to the world does not figure among those objectives!
Perhaps, however, I am not being altogether unreasonable. Schlesinger may be writing primarily as an Episcopal for Episcopal Anglicans and Roman Catholics, seeking to draw attention to the power of the concept of sacrifice as a theological resource in a range of theological contexts. But he is not especially anxious to set limits for the applications of his conclusions, and seems ecumenical enough to see the particular application foreseen here as legitimate – though perhaps an application that over-reaches any ambitions explicitly entertained by the book he has actually written! At the same time, I would feel, as a fellow Anglican, entitled to ask the author of such a book – granted it is not the book I seek – where my book is currently to be found. And, if (as I suspect) it does not currently exist, why the author would have prioritized the writing of his book over that of the book I am seeking! He is, after all, an Anglican, and we evangelical Anglicans are his brother Anglicans! What else are we non-writers to do in the face of a theological silence respecting our deepest spiritual needs? Take the pen ourselves? That is easier said than done in the present publishing climate! So, why should we not critique our theological writers in such a manner as to point them in the direction of an application of their talents that would better support our ecclesial need?
I come now to the latter chapters of the book devoted to mission and ecumenism.
Why theologians can’t do without an account of religious symbolism!
The three-fold manifestation of Augustinian sacrifice as ‘mass’, ‘mission’ and ‘ecumenism’ has a satisfyingly Trinitarian plausibility. But, in my view, this rather glosses over a deeper issue regarding sacrifice that Schlesinger fails ultimately to resolve.
The topic of ‘mission’ is clearly introduced in answer to the problem of how to characterize the relationship between sacrifice in a purely ritual/symbolic sense (i.e. ‘the mass’) and sacrifice in the broader enveloping sense of our Christian lives offered up to God as, in St Paul’s words, ‘a living sacrifice holy and acceptable … which is your spiritual worship’. The question Schlesinger is actually addressing, in his juxtaposition of mass and mission, concerns the specific role of the symbolic in relation to the non-symbolic. We get back ultimately to the hoary question of the ‘sacramental’ sign and what kind of relationship it has with the signified. The function of Schlesinger’s concept of ‘mission’ – which is broad enough to encompass everything signified by the ‘mission of God’ (Missio Dei) – is to specify that broader sense of sacrifice that goes beyond the ritual/symbolic. Though it includes the mass, it privileges the wider non-symbolic aspect. The relationship of mass and mission is then described in terms of a ‘two-fold radical interiority’.
the church’s mission is itself intrinsic to the liturgy: neither an unrelated addendum, nor a ‘result’ in such a way as to subordinate the liturgy to it but rather an inherent aspect of the liturgy’s meaning
Conversely, liturgy is ‘intrinsic to’ mission – a relationship that the author more frequently specifies in terms of liturgy ‘setting the agenda for’ mission. This gives a ‘complex reciprocity’ in which neither aspect is subordinated to the other, and, as already stated, is most often specified in terms of the one aspect being ‘interior to’, ‘intrinsic to’, ‘inherent in’ the other
I do not find this satisfying as an account of the relationship of Eucharist and the sacrifice of the Christian life offered up. The latter can indeed be equated with mission in a broad sense. But the real question confronting Schlesinger when he tries to grasp the relationship of mission to Eucharist is how the religious symbol relates to what it symbolizes. In short, how religious symbolism works. Please note, I didn’t say Christian religious symbolism – but religious symbolism itself. What role, in other words, do symbolic and ritual thought and practice play in human moral and social behaviour? I would suggest this is the kind of questions for which theologians should defer – at least initially – to semiologists and anthropologists. Only on the basis of what has already been proved to be true of the fundamentals of religious symbolism in general, can we begin to undertake the analysis that properly interests the theologian – i.e. the analysis of what constitutes the particularity of ‘sacrament’ (i.e. Christian symbolism) as opposed to the symbolism of other religions.
In saying this, I am perfectly aware of going against the grain of theological thinking. That tends to adopt a strongly exceptionalist line in regard to what is termed ‘sacramental’ meaning. The religious symbolism of Eucharist is habitually treated as something totally ‘other’ – something that belongs uniquely to the province of theology. But this strikes me as unreasonable. We do not treat the study of the grammatical structures of Hebrew and patristic Greek as belonging outside the sphere of academic linguistics because these languages have been used to express the thoughts of God. In the same way, I see no reason why the religious symbolism of Christianity should necessarily be assumed to differ in kind from the other religious symbolism, just because we hold that the Christian faith is uniquely true.
This brings me finally to the third point in Schlesinger’s trinity: ecumenism.
Is ‘ecumenism’ such a big deal, nowadays?
A discussion of the topic seems altogether appropriate in this context of a recuperation of participationist Eucharistic theology by an author who is not a Roman Catholic. Participationist theology has recently been developed almost exclusively within the Roman Catholic sphere; moreover, the rejection of such Eucharistic theology has been a hallmark – if not the hallmark – of Protestantism and Protestant Anglicanism in the past. So, its espousal in this volume by an Anglican strikes me as a gesture of potentially considerable ecumenical significance.
That said, the elevation of ‘ecumenism’ to be the third term with ‘mass’ and ‘mission’ seems misplaced. After all, ‘mission’ already contains both the notion of reaching out into the world, and the notion of bringing into union. Theologically speaking, then ‘ecumenism’ seems to add little to ‘mission’ – its presence, alongside mass and mission a reflection, as much as anything, of that preference so frequently evidenced amongst ecclesiastical people for things that come in threes. The problem, though, is that Schlesinger thereby runs the risk of attaching unwarranted theological significance to ecumenism.
His main argument is that merely bringing the denominational parties to agree on doctrine will not suffice to return them to union: ultimately, doctrine is not the main source of disunion, but rather the habit of not being united! That seems very reasonable to me; but raises the issue: how disunited IS the church? And what is it for the Church to be disunited? Here I cite the instance of my native town in the UK, where there is probably greater unity, I would argue, between the local Baptist, the evangelical Anglican, and the non-aligned churches than there is between the evangelical and the non-evangelical Anglican churches. By this I mean that lay members would be more likely to move from one to another, as they might between different congregations at the same church. Yet, the Anglican churches, evangelical and non-evangelical are all linked within the same ecclesiastical structure. So, I repeat, what is it for the Church to be disunited? Certainly, there is nothing like acrimony, and all the churches I have mentioned would broadly feel themselves to be united in a common Christian mission. And, of course, they all communicate with each other. The only important denomination to stand apart is the Roman Catholic, though Roman Catholics are of course welcome at the communion tables of the other mainstream denominations. Not surprisingly, therefore, ecumenism doesn’t figure among the priority issues here – and I doubt if my town is all that untypical. So how big an issue is church disunity, really?
Whatever the answer to that question, I find myself so strongly in agreement with Schlesinger’s practical recommendation for achieving unity that I will cite it at length:
All one need do is recognize other Christians as members of the same body, and bind oneself and one’s fate to them and their flourishing. The proximate locus for this commitment is the communion in which one already finds herself, marking an end to church shopping, and a settled resolution to stay put.
This does not sound like an encouragement to leave one’s own denomination for one in which the teaching is more in line with the Eucharistic theology proposed by the author himself. Still less, an altar-call for the Roman Catholic church. Schlesinger’s advice to lay people such as myself would appear to be: ‘Stay put and argue your case’. Regarding evangelistic outreach: ‘Be prepared to plough your own furrow!’ That’s tough; but I guess it was the counsel I was already giving myself.
One day, if I ever meet Eugene Schlesinger (which is highly unlikely), I’ll ask him if that is what he would really advise someone like me!
Great content! Keep up the good work!