A History of Eucharistic Re-mythologization

Given on August 11, 1997 at the Grace Institute for Religious Learning. Click here to see the flyer.

How it all got started

It began with an act of re-mythologization. Meeting on the eve of the Passover to celebrate God's faithfulness to them with the bounty of the earth, their Rabbi began the meal in the traditional manner. Taking bread in his hands, he blessed the Creator, Sovereign of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth. He broke the bread and passed it to his friends. Then, in a moment of inspiration, he added something that was not in the liturgy. Looking at the broken crust of bread in his hands, he suprised them all by saying, "This is my body."

His friends were stunned. Their teacher had been acting very strange of late, dwelling on his impending death and possessed of a tired melancholy. Peter's hand had frozen half way to his mouth at his teacher's cryptic utterance. What did he mean by that? Peter's mind reeled with the possible implications of the words. He felt a stab of fear in his gut. Passover would never be the same.

The Eucharist
In this way begins the Eucharistic rite, which has held its place at the center of Christian worship through nearly two millennia. With very few exceptions, this ritual of blessing and sharing bread and wine has been celebrated by all Christians in every time and place, from Baptists to Russian Orthodox, Pentecostals to Plymouth Brethren, Calvinists to Roman Catholics, Mennonites to Lutherans. In fact, chances are, if you are a Christian, and unless you are a Quaker or a soldier in the Salvation Army, then you, too, feast at the Eucharistic table.

The word "Eucharist" comes from the Greek eucaristeo, which means "I give thanks." Thus, gratefulness and thanksgiving were originally the purpose of the rite, just as they were the purpose of the Jewish Sabbath Supper on which it is fashioned. The Episcopal Book of Common Prayer calls the Eucharist "The Great Thanksgiving" for this very reason. Known to Roman Catholics as the "Mass," this name derives from the conclusion of the service in Latin: "Ite, missa est" ("Go, it is over"). To many Protestants, the "Lord's Supper" is the title of choice, while the Orthodox call it the "Divine Liturgy."

Now that's a lot of different names, and as might be expected, each one signifies a different outlook on the meal. For centuries, Christians have argued, fought wars and issued proclamations of damnation upon each other over questions such as "exactly how is Christ present in the Eucharist?" The history of these arguments is replete with complementary and conflicting opinions co-existing, often within the same faith community. For although the actions of this rite - the taking, blessing and distribution of bread and wine - have been retained, the meaning ascribed to these actions has never stopped evolving in the imaginations of its participants.

Threads of meaning
Even at the beginning of the Christian movement, before the testimony of the biblical record, there was no clear consensus on the meaning of the rite. What happened during these first few centuries of the church's life was the emergence of various theological "threads," independent traditions concerning the Eucharist, which throughout the next two millennia can be found weaving in and out of the church's life. Though most "threads" began as singular understandings, before long, Eucharistic practice often saw two or more "threads" woven through a prayer, culminating in the more complex prayers we are familiar with today.

Many of these threads are complementary. Some others might be seen as contradictory, while some are built on differing assumptions of what the crucifixion and resurrection actually mean. But all of the threads we shall discuss - whether they have been subsumed by other threads, evolved beyond recognition, or been forgotten altogether - have at one time or another in the church's history been regarded as orthodox (or as the "correct teaching").

The theologies which define these threads usually arose in response to various crises encountered by the church. Generations of Christians, faced with new political and spiritual challenges, shaped their understanding of their ritual meal in order to help them meet their challenges, creating new threads of tradition, and reinterpreting old ones, giving them new life, new hue, and new meaning. Let's take a look at some of these "threads" and the "crises" that precipitated them.

The Thanksgiving & Community Thread
The earliest Christians were, of course, Jews, for whom the observance of a sacred meal was infused with great symbolic meaning and was an important aspect of religious life. Belief in Jesus as the Messiah did not impair the practice of their native faith until much later when Paul began to challenge the inherent "Jewishness" of Christianity. The book of Acts, St. Luke's record of the early church, records that the apostles and their followers continued to worship in the synagogue.

Now, following the liturgy of the word at the synagogue, the Jews would come home and assembling at the table, thanked God over the bread: "Blessed be God, Sovereign of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth."
After the meal the diners shared a cup of wine which was first blessed by the father of the family, who called upon the group to stand: "Lift up your hearts," and asked their permission to give thanks in their name: "Let us give thanks to the Lord our God." God was then blessed as creator, sustainer, and redeemer, and prayer was offered. The wine was blessed by blessing God.

The recitation of the prayer of blessing, over the bread (and on more festive occasions the wine) would have been the normative act of celebration for Jesus and his followers. For the Jews this practice of table-fellowship carried deep symbolic significance, of which Jesus made profound and extensive use during his ministry. To sit at table with someone was to testify to one's acceptance of them, one's unity with them. To eat a meal with someone (especially a sacred meal such as the Sabbath or Passover) was to recognize that your fellow diners were in good standing with God and the community, and also to communicate to them the blessing pronounced in the prayers. Jesus frequently scandalized his religious contemporaries by making a habit of sharing meals with "outcasts and sinners." For Jesus there were none who were excluded from God's love and the benefits of religious community. Those whom the religious leaders of the time scorned, were in fact, in Jesus' eyes, those most in need of friendship and support.

Jesus asked his followers to act "as if" the coming Community of God were already come, to participate in it by choice, by sharing a meal together to which none would be unwelcome, no matter how scandalous their behavior or reputation. Jesus sought to teach them to see each other as God sees them: as equals, as equally flawed and equally loved human beings.

Thankfully, this Thanksgiving and Community thread did not die out with Jesus. Early Christians, especially of the second century, although embarking on threads of their own, continued to be influenced by this, Jesus' own thread, using the bread and wine to celebrate God's goodness in creation, God's faithfulness and the Community God has made of them, adding special thanksgivings for the gift of Christ Jesus.

The earliest recorded Eucharistic liturgy emphasizes this theme of Thanksgiving. It's found in The Didache, , an early second century "church handbook." The Didache's Eucharistic prayer is a fascinating document, for it reveals just how closely early Christian worship continued to be modeled on Jewish practice. The prayer contained in it is simply a series of Thanksgivings for Jesus. It contains no institutional narrative, where Jesus says "this is my body," nor does it (surprisingly!) contain any sacrificial emphasis. It is, in fact, most representative of Jesus' own tradition of table-fellowship in the context of a common meal, and echoes Jesus' own concerns for unity, especially a the beautiful passage that speaks of "these grains that were scattered upon the mountains" being brought together to form one loaf.

We see this thread in our own liturgy in the introductory thanksgiving before the proper preface (in the middle of page four of your handout): "it is very meet, right, and our bounden duty, that we should at all times and in all places give thanks unto thee, O Lord," and especially in the closing prayer of thanksgiving (at the bottom of page six): "Father of all, we give thee thanks and praise, that when we were still far off thou met us in thy Son and brought us home."

It is important to point out that in the period of the early church we are discussing here, Christians still understood Christ's words of institution figuratively, as pertaining not to the offerings of the bread and wine which were used to give thanks, but to the communicants themselves as a gathered body of believers. They saw themselves as Jesus' body and blood.

The earliest of Christians also tolerated a great deal of diversity in their understanding of the Eucharist. It had not yet come to be understood as a "sacrament" but was a carryover of the Jewish mealtime prayers using bread and wine to give thanks. Jesus was understood to be among them wherever and whenever two or more followers were gathered. Thus the early church carried on Jesus' own mealtime ministry to an extent, eschewing differences between themselves and striving to be a community of liberation and support as Jesus had taught them. But soon, scandals, persecutions - and, surprisingly, the greatest difficulty of all: acceptance - would rock the early church and change forever its attitudes and celebrations.

Persecution and the Eschatological Thread
As the Christian movement began to grow, it invariably met with a great deal of opposition. In the first few centuries, Christians met with ghastly persecution, and under such extreme duress, the Christian community drew upon Jesus' promise that the end of the world was imminent and that the eschatological Kingdom would dawn within the apostle's own lifetimes. The persecuted church began to look forward with renewed vigor towards a time when their suffering would end, and their cause be vindicated. Therefore, while the early church continued to focus on the realized eschatology of Christ in their midst in the Eucharist, they also renewed their committment to the coming feast of the Community of God that Jesus had taught. For them, the Eucharist became both a proclamation of the reality of Christ in their midst, and a foretaste of the messianic feast when all that they pray for comes to pass.

In proclaiming the coming "Kingdom" as pre-figured in their own community, the early Christians strove to live with each other in the same spirit of unity, harmony and love that would be shared by all the redeemed in the "Kingdom" of God. The church became the "little Kingdom" that would eventually overcome the world. Sadly, this optimism which was born of external pressure of persecution was to be thwarted by the church's own internal struggles.

This thread survives in our current liturgy, again in the words of our closing prayer (at the top of page seven): "Keep us steadfast in this hope, so that we and all thy people shall be free, and the whole earth live to praise thy name."

Gnostics and the Incarnationalist Thread
Even while the Christians were suffering terrible persecution, this threat did not prevent the appropriation of its rich mythic elements by other religious groups. The kaleidoscope of sects which fall under the umbrella of Gnosticism found in the story of Christ a useful metaphor for their philosophies, causing a great deal of panic and confusion among the Christian ranks.

One teaching that the many varieties of Gnostics held in common was the belief in a radical dualistic split between matter and spirit. Deriving this part of their philosophy from Persian sources, Gnostics held that the flesh, and all things material were the creation of a wicked demiurge, Ialdoboth, or Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews.

Matter is therefore evil, and yet humanity contains a divine spark that longs to break free from its fleshly prison to enjoy divine union. There were many Gnostic sects around at the time of Christ, and they lost no time in appropriating the Christian mythos to illustrate their beliefs; even during the apostles' lifetime, Gnostic interpretations of the Jesus story was felt to be a threat. Gnosticism "denied the creation, the incarnation, the atonement, the resurrection of Christ and the redemption of the body."

Since there was very little developed theology in the Christian church in the first couple of centuries, anything that sounded plausible was a candidate for interpretation. Thus it was that the Apostles felt so strongly about the Gnostic threat. It relegated their God to the status of "pretender to the throne" of heaven, and made Jesus out to be an apparition bent on celestial espionage. This was so contrary to their experience that John, Peter, and Paul all forcefully attacked the heresy. Those who came after them would do the same, for nearly four hundred years.

What made the Gnostics' version so threatening is that they had developed a powerful and detailed Christology: an understanding of who Jesus was and what his mission was about. The church only had the stories of Jesus and the lives of their communities. No systematic theologies had been developed. There was no authoritative teaching regarding the nature of Christ or the meaning of his mission. Even the testimonies of the epistle-writers seemed to be at odds as to what salvation meant and how it was achieved.

Naturally, the elders of the church also began to shape its worship in an effort to reinforce the teachings they considered essential to "true" Christianity. One of the primary issues was of course the incarnation which affirmed the Jewish belief in the goodness of Creation and the holiness of the body. Thus an "incarnational" thread began to wind its way through the history of the Eucharist.

The incarnational thread drew upon the Last Supper traditions where Jesus identifies the bread and wine as his body and blood. Christians began to see the Eucharist as an enacted "parable," wherein the mystery of the Incarnation is re-enacted in the sharing of the meal.

Since "the Word was made flesh and lived among us" in history, then the Word is made flesh again in the sacred meal. It was Irenaeus (130-200 CE) who is credited with first formulating this thread, making it clear to the people that if Jesus unites with these creatures of flesh, this bread and this wine on a daily basis before our very eyes, then of course he could have incarnated in the person of Jesus Christ. The incarnation was thus through the use of the Eucharist reinforced for the early church, and orthodox teaching about the goodness of Creation and the reality of incarnation was safeguarded. Unfortunately, this was done at a cost that could not have been forseen at the time: for it began the shift in the locus of the "Body of Christ" from the community to the elements.

Formerly, the Body of Christ was understood to be present in the community meeting to pray with a holy meal, but now, slowly, it is the everyday elements of bread and wine which are beginning to be seen as the vehicle (or the "host") of Christ's presence. While the early Christians could now say, "Not only is the Eucharist...a means of thanking God for creating the world with all things that are in it...it is also a vivid reminder of the reality of the incarnation," they had at the same time crossed a symbolic threshold from which the church has never returned.

This thread is, of course, evident in our worship since it requires the institutional narrative (at the top of page five), where Jesus says, "Take, eat, this is my body, given for you." This part is missing from earlier liturgies, and from many middle-period Eastern liturgies as well.

The Metabolist Thread
Now that the rite had become in many places a re-enactment of the "mystery of the incarnation" for the benefit of those potentially swayed by Gnostic teachings, Christians began to speak of a "change" happening in the elements during the recitation of the Eucharistic prayer. By the fourth century this notion of "change" (metabolé) taking place in the elements was part of commonplace theological writing.

Precisely when this change in the bread and wine occurs, however, has long been a subject of some debate. According to Ambrose, it is the recitation of the words of Jesus at the Last Supper that affects the bread and wine; when the presider says "This is my body," it is by the power of the Word (through the Holy Spirit) that the bread in fact becomes possessed of its divine character. Likewise with the wine. It is this view (that the "change" occurs at the exact point of the recitation of the Institutional narrative) that has since gained prominence in the West.

At the same time Ambrose was writing in Milan, Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem, testifies to a different tradition, continued by the Eastern churches, which asserts that it is the epiclesis, the prayer which invokes the Holy Spirit upon the elements (and often upon the gathered assembly as well) which affects the change.

The epiclesis developed from a feature of the eschatological thread; specifically from the prayer that God would "gather the church from the ends of the earth" into a single body. Gradually this prayer asked for the Holy Spirit to act upon the assembled community, to fill them and to make of them the Body of Christ.

From there it is a relatively short leap to invoking the Holy Spirit in the same prayer to likewise transform the elements. Not necessarily tied to the Last Supper traditions, many early Eucharistic prayers emphasize the epiclesis to the total exclusion of the Institutional Narrative. In the Liturgy of St. Mark (4th century) the epiclesis beseeches God to fill the offering with the Holy Spirit but no mention is made of the offering becoming the "body" and "blood" of Christ.

Another ancient prayer of the same period (3rd-4th centuries), contained in the Euchologium of Sarapion of Thmuis, is also unusual in its use of "body and blood" imagery. In this prayer it is asked that "God's Word may come upon the bread and chalice so that they may become the body of the Word and the blood of truth."

What is so striking about these examples is that in the rush of theological development - in which the idea that a change occurs in the elements caught on very quickly - there is a decided lack of consensus on what, precisely, the elements change into. While "the body and blood" of Christ were clearly the preferred identifications, even these took on manifold interpretations, with many ancient writers assigning their own, often surprising correspondences. For Ignatius of Antioch (35-107 CE), the bread became "faith" and the wine "truth."

In this, one of the church's most fertile periods of theological and liturgical innovation, churches were still free to discover what the Body (and blood) of Christ meant for them, and it is quite clear that differing communities found meaning in a variety of ideas, especially in regard to the change of plain bread and wine into sacraments. The discovery of such diversity of interpretation can come to many contemporary Christians as something of a revelation, especially since for the majority of these early churches, celebrating the Eucharist in a way that made sense to them, rarely cast doubts upon a community's orthodoxy, but instead spoke loudly for the vitality of the people's life of faith.

I would like to point out that in the epiclesis of our own liturgy (in the middle of page five) we ask that "we who eat and drink these Holy Mysteries in the presence of thy Divine Majesty, that we may be filled with thy Grace and heavenly benediction." Our attributions, therefore, at least as stated in our epiclesis is that the bread and wine be for us Grace and Blessing. Something to chew on! Literally!

The Divinization Thread
With the advent of the metabolist perspective, Christians were faced with the dilemma of celebrating one thing (bread or wine) which they perceived to be something else entirely (in most cases, the body or blood of Christ). This was not as difficult as it might seem, since people in the ancient world were much less confused about the relationship between the symbol and the signified than we are today. For them, the dominant philosophy of Platonism provided a ready vocabulary to describe what was occurring in the consecration of the elements. Christianity had never been a stranger to Platonism, of course; the writings of both John and Paul are replete with Platonic twists. But from the time of Justin Martyr (100-165 CE) onwards, Christianity was to be radically re-interpreted, and at the same time the Eucharist would once again be radically re-mythologized.

The early Christian Platonists discerned two levels of reality in the sacraments; First the level perceived by the senses, the bread and the wine, which point to and participate in a spiritual reality, that of the divinized, resurrected body of Christ.

As we have seen in our analysis of the Eschatological Thread, the early church navigated its persecutions by looking forward to the messianic feast, pre-figured in the Eucharistic meal. As its persecutions continued, however, and Christ's return was delayed, the church began looking backwards at the story of Christ for its inspiration and encouragement. This it found in the Resurrection.

Later to be termed the "Christus Victor" theory of the atonement, this tradition aided the early church by asserting that "suffering is a prelude to triumph and is in itself an illusion." In this tradition, Jesus is painted as "the conquering hero," recalling the Jews' anticipation of a militant messiah, but transporting the drama of the conflict to a more cosmic scale. Jesus sets himself up as bait for Satan, who "seeks to devour human beings." When Jesus dies and is swallowed by death, he has craftily gained access to Satan's stronghold, the underworld. There, on his home turf, Satan is confronted with the messiah in all "his" glory, and is utterly overwhelmed and his power broken forever.

It is easy to see how such a myth might be attractive to those undergoing extreme persecution. To them such a theology said, "Be patient, something good will come of this. In this tradition, God is the all-powerful determiner of every event in life, and every event is part of a bigger picture - a plan that will end with triumph.

Naturally, this view was to have its effect on the Eucharist. Like the Eschatological Thread the Divinization Thread offers a promise and a foretaste of a future and coming redemption; but it is not the messianic feast as such to which the meal points, but to a universal regeneration, a "general resurrection" of the cosmos.

In the Resurrection, the body of Jesus was transfigured and divinized. For the Christians of the fourth century, Christ's resurrection was a "down payment" on the eventual transfiguration of the entire created order. Christ's mission came to be understood in terms of God, through Christ, "assuming" the fallen created order into Godself, and beginning to heal what was lost. Just as for Paul, we who were enemies of God are now not just God's slaves, but joint-heirs with Christ. The Church saw the fallen Created order joined irrevocably to its Creator in the Incarnation, and that the Resurrection set into motion a process of redemption, of "divinization." This process would eventually transform not only humanity, but the universe itself into the blessed Community of God, where the "Cosmic Christ" reigns in the heart of all things. What was broken by sin is, through the goodness and graciousness of God, not simply being healed, but embraced utterly and transfigured by divinity into something ineffably glorious.

The Eucharist thus became both the celebration and the means of this transfiguration. "The purpose of the liturgy [was] to sanctify, even to deify, humankind, bringing transfigured Christians to the Christ of the Transfiguration. Through the bestowal of grace in the liturgy, humanity [was] raised to the supernatural order and therefore into sharing the divine existence."

In the resulting theology, Christianity took on a more transcendent tone than its parent religion, Judaism, had ever claimed, and championed a cosmology as cosmic and universal as the prevailing philosophies of the day. It was this philosophical sophistication that was to win for the church such able theologians as Justin and Origen, and which can arguably be said to be responsible for Christianity's growing intellectual credibility in the second through fourth centuries.

This thread is absent from later Western liturgies, since the West was founded on a sacrificial theory of the atonement. A good example of the Divinization thread can be found, however, in any Orthodox church even today, but we won't find any hint of it in our own, or any other Catholic or Anglican, or other Western liturgies.

The Mystery Thread
The latter half of the fourth century brought about rapid changes that would have made the Christian church virtually unrecognizable to believers of just a hundred years previous, for with the advent of the emperor Constantine (d. 337 CE), Christianity was to suffer the greatest threat to its survival since the great persecutions: acceptance. Although Constantine did not make Christianity the official state religion as commonly believed, he did consider himself to be a convert, and raised the bishops of the church to a grand status within the Roman Empire. He erected the enormous basilicas of Sts. Peter and Paul, and rewarded conversion with political favor. The resulting swelling of ranks in Christendom changed the face of the church considerably, replacing small communities of deeply committed and faithful people with the imperial spectacle encouraged by the swarms of nominal converts, who sought to find in Christianity the lost splendor of the old Roman religion as well as the social vogue attached to the new cult.

In this period Jesus came to be seen as the militant "Emperor of the World," "trampling down death by death" in his triumphant resurrection, reflecting Constantine's military and political victories and embodying Plato's "Philosopher King." Accordingly, the church became "Christianity on parade, with vast congregations meeting in large churches not only recognized by, but approved by the society surrounding it."

During the fourth century the churches became financially viable institutions, and clergy became increasingly full-time and professional in their approach to their vocations. The Eucharist took on the spectacle of imperial pageantry, and became more of an event at which large groups of worshippers were merely "spectators," rather than full participants in the liturgy.

Thus, instead of being performed at home with small groups of believers, celebrated in street clothes, with whatever plates and cups were handy, the Eucharist moved to huge government buildings called "basilicas." This is where we get our rich vestments and the high drama of the mass as we celebrate it today.

Now, this shift in venue was accompanied by a shift in the attitude of the more sincere believers that the church had been "sold out," and that the very precious gift that God had given them in their communities was being destroyed by the Church's cancerous acceleration and its assimilation of the popular pagan culture. Accordingly, there was a knee-jerk effort by the faithful to preserve the holiness of their faith, manifesting in a desire to protect and maintain the mystery they had previously felt in connection with the Eucharist. Fortunately, such a reaction synchronized nicely with the needs of the new "converts." The many new adherents also brought into the church much that they held to be valuable in their pagan practices.

As a result, many of the actions associated with rituals in the Greek "mystery religions," began to crop up in the Eucharistic liturgy, incorporating the "appearances and disappearances of the celebrant, veiling and unveiling of the elements, opening and closing of the doors, and various gestures connected with the sacrament." The Eucharist became like "an elaborate, complicated mystery play."

The shift towards a "mystification" of the Eucharist was a far cry from the common meals shared by Jesus with the disciples. In its favor it must be said that in the complicated and dramatic rite there is found "the whole mystery of salvation, the Incarnation, the death and resurrection of the Logos, his glorification, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and its climax in the descent, the appearance, and the divine presence of the resurrected Christ, who enters the congregation as "King of the universe borne invisibly over their spears by the angelic hosts."

What for the earliest Christians was a meal that emphasized God's immanence and proximity was transformed into a pageant which emphasized God's transcendance and imperial splendor, evoking fear and trembling instead of the ecstacy of freedom previously enjoyed by Christians. Accordingly, the clergy began preaching sermons which emphasied fear and awe towards the Eucharist. This impulse towards hoarding the mystery of the rite eventually banned the uninitiated from not just participating in the Eucharist, but from even observing it.

The rite became divided in two parts, the "Mass of the Catechumens" came first, and consisted of the Readings, the sermon and the prayers, and is analogous to the Jewish Synagogue service and to the Liturgy of the Word as we know it in the West. Anyone was welcome to attend this portion of the service, and attendance was required for those who were preparing for baptism (the catechumens).

At the close of this part of the service, the priest cries, "The doors, the doors." Having excluded everyone but the initiates, those "privy to the mysteries," the service continues with the "Mass of the Faithful, or the Eucharist.

The liturgies in use by the Orthodox churches today retain this terminology, although the unbaptized are no longer "shoo-ed out" of the church. They are denied communion, but unlike their counterparts of the fourth century, they are at least welcome to witness the liturgy. The "mystery tradition" is strong in all of the liturgies from this period and those that developed in the Byzantine empire.

The Orthodox liturgies currently in use, the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and the Liturgy of St. James, have retained much from this thread, and come down to us with only minor accretions, being one of the oldest continuous threads of tradition extant today. They are testament to the power of humanity's urge towards transcendance and the necessity of mystical religion.

The West and the Sacrifice Thread
While the Divinization Thread would come to dominate the Eucharistic theology of the Eastern churches, the West took a very different turn. As the idea of the bread and wine actually "becoming" the body and blood of Christ (the Metabolist Thread) gained ground, it was a short leap to the Eucharist becoming a sacerdotal, sacrificial ritual, where these "spotless and bloodless victims" are offered to appease God. Once the clericalism and the distancing took effect after Christianity's acceptance into the mainstream of religious life, it is not suprising that the general populace's familiar ideas of sacrificial worship - the norm in pagan society as much as in Judaic - began to surface in the church's understanding of its own offering.

Sacrificial language had already been long associated with the rite. In the very early Eucharistic liturgy of Hippolytus, the oblation of the first fruits is mentioned. "Bread and wine are offered, but also milk and honey, water, oil, olives, fruit and flowers." This usage is not connected to sin offerings, but to the ancient Judaic thank offerings.

After several centuries, however, Christians began to speak of the Eucharist as a different kind of sacrifice. It was in the writings of Sts. Cyril and Ambrose this "sacrifice" language first begins to appear explicitly. Cyril, writing in the late third century, described the Eucharist as "that sacrifice of propitiation, for the common peace of the churches, for the stability of the world, for emperors, for armies and auxiliaries, for those in sickness, for the oppressed." Even more to the point, Ambrose set down a Eucharistic prayer which reads "Remembering his most glorious passion and resurrection from the dead, and ascension into heaven, we offer you this spotless victim, reasonable victim, bloodless victim, this holy bread and this cup of eternal life."

Here the locus of the offering is unmistakably narrowed from the whole assembly to the "bloodless, spotless and reasonable victim" in the form of bread and wine. This sacrificial thread began to see the Eucharist as a re-presentation of Christ's death as a propitiatory sin-offering to the Creator "in the tradition of the sacrifices of the Old Covenant with the people of Israel.

The theology of this sacrificial thread presupposes a different soteriology from that of the Divinization thread. In the West the Christus Victor theory of the atonement (which still is the predominant view of the Eastern churches) was supplanted by the "Satisfaction" theory, which was most definitively articulated in the eleventh century by St. Anselm. Anselm writes that "everyone who sins ought to pay back the honor of which he has robbed God and this is the satisfaction which every sinner owes to God."

But humankind is tainted and cannot pay the debt. Anselm said that,

"Only by the death of God's own Son could God receive satisfaction... God's demand that sin be punished is fulfilled by the suffering of the innocent Jesus... God is portrayed as the one who cannot reconcile "himself" to the world becaues "he" has been royally offended by sin, so offended that no human being can do anything to overcome "his" sense of offense. Like [King] Lear, God remains estranged from the children God loves because God's honor must be preserved... It is to free God that the Son submits to death, sacrificing himself...out of overwhelming love for the two alienated parties: God and the human family.

Sometimes known as the "penal" theory of atonement, this view emphasizes the crucifixion and Christ's death as the crucial event in salvation history, rather than the resurrection. Far less abstract than the divinization theory, this theology would have been much more easily grasped and assimilated by pagan converts in the "barbaric" West for whom animal sacrifice was a more familiar context to understand the Eucharist than neo-Platonism.

We see this thread clearly in our own liturgy when we pray (on the bottom of page four), "Of thy tender mercy, thou didst give thine only Son Jesus Christ to take our nature upon him, and to suffer death upon the cross for our redemption; who made there a full and final sacrifice for the whole world."

In the middle ages there arose some confusion about precisely in what way the Eucharist is a sacrifice: is it merely a commemoration of Christ's one and only sacrifice upon Calvary, or is Christ in some way sacrificed again in the ritual? The official teaching of the Western church is clear: the Eucharist is merely a re-presentation of a once and for all sacrifice accomplished by Christ on the cross, and as such, "if Jesus was offering his life to God, then his self-offering can be regarded as in some sense continuing, and the idea can be developed that in the Eucharist, Christ, through his body which is the church, is somehow re-presenting the sacrifice of his life to the Father."

This is clearly stated in our own liturgy as well, as we say (on the bottom of page four) that Jesus "did institute, and in his holy gospel command us to continue a perpetual memory of that his precious death until his coming again."

However fast the church's teachers were to hold to this position, it was not enough to satisfy the popular imagination. This in turn, could not help but to influence the church's practice. As with other sacrifices, this one came to be thought of by the people as efficacious in a special way each and every time the ritual was performed.

The people began to see the Mass as

...a new Calvary...as a sacrifice somehow added to the Cross. This also became linked in the later Middle Ages with a theology of the "fruits" of the Mass. This is related to a kind of quantitative thinking that attributes a limited "worth" to each Mass. In this case, two masses are better than one. This led to a dramatic increase in the number of masses celebrated and "private" masses were offered for all kinds of individual needs.

Indeed, in the late Middle Ages, there were

...votive Masses of the twenty-four patriarchs or elders; of the fourteen, fifteen, and more "holy helpers"; of the seven joys and sorrows of Mary; votive Masses against sicknesses, including one against pestilence, one of Holy Job against syphilis, of St. Christopher against sudden death, one each of Saint Roch and Saint Sebastian against pestilence, one of Saint Sigismund against fever; votive Masses for special requests: in honor of the Archangel Raphael or of the Three Magi for a safe journey.

. . . and so on.

Many of these concepts were present in some form from the church's beginning, yet it was always balanced with other imagery. Only gradually - and only in the West - did the Sacrifice Thread come to dominate the church. It is still the primary orientation of Western Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant. From a "sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving," to a virtual re-playing of events on Golgotha, the sacrifice thread has a long and complex history.

As the West continued to celebrate the Eucharist as a presentation of Christ's sacrifice on the Cross (whether as a memorial or, later, as being re-sacrificed in each and every celebration), the ecclesial aspect of the rite, the idea that the church is the body of Christ, was largely forgotten. Whereas for Paul and the Eastern Church, it is the entire liturgy which mediates grace, and by partaking of the holy elements the assembled believers themselves become the "Body" of Christ, in the West the focus is squarely upon the elements.

With the locus of Christ's presence thus pinpointed in the bread and the wine, late medieval Christianity would become obsessed with the question of precisely how Christ was present in the elements. As we have stated, the relationship between symbol and signified was not a concern to the patristic writers. Whereas in the Classical world, the symbol and the signified were co-inherent, with the symbol participating in and mediating the reality signified, the Middle Ages saw the dissolution of such a presumption. The effect of this loss (of the assumed participation of the symbol in the reality it signifies) was an insecurity regarding the "reality" of Christ's presence in the Eucharistic elements.

The West was to deal with this intellectual crisis by dividing into three broad threads of tradition. The first is the Realist Thread, in which Christ is felt to be "actually, physically," present in the bread and the wine, which was championed by the Roman Catholic Church, and given the name "transubstantiation." In reaction to this arose two other threads: The "Real Presence" Thread, claimed by Lutherans, Anglicans and Congregationalists, maintained that while Christ is not physically present in the elements, "he" is nonetheless "mystically" present. Finally, proponents of the Spiritualist Thread, which includes Calvinists and Zwinglians, saw a return of the ecclesial aspect of the rite, holding that Christ is present only in the gathered community, the elements being void of any but "merely symbolic" significance.

Memorial & Communitarian Threads
In an effort to retain the practice of the Lord's Supper because Jesus had commanded it, many Christians decided that nothing more was meant by the observance than a simple remembrance. The bread and wine (or, more likely in evangelical churches, grape juice) were simply mnemonic devices, "object lessons," to help us remember Jesus. As Victorian Baptist preacher Dr. Alexander MacLaren of Manchester proclaimed in 1884, "All our theories about the meaning and value of this Communion Service must be found within the four corners of that word...a memorial rite, and as far as I know, nothing more whatsoever."

As one Baptist notes, "the content of the rite suggests a very simplistic but perennially popular version of the Memorialist view of the Eucharist: we do just this, because our Lord told us to; and as we do it, we think of him." Consequently, and unfortunately, many evangelicals are very unclear as to why they celebrate the Lord's Supper. For many of them it is done merely because Jesus said for them to. The command seems odd, and often remains unexplained, but it is followed, albeit in some churches exceedingly infrequently.

Fortunately, not all evangelical observances are so anemic. When genuinely and devotionally practiced, the memorial view can evoke a deep reverence, and a true "communion" with Christ in the experience of many evangelical Christians. There is good reason for this. In some ways, the Memorial Thread is a return to the most primitive of Eucharistic threads, where Thanksgiving was given for God's salvific acts. Likewise, in the Lord's Supper, Reformed believers celebrate Jesus's life and death.

There are, however, striking differences between the two threads which distinguish them. In the Thanksgiving thread, the emphasis is on praise and thanks, while in the Memorialist celebrations, self-examination and grave reverence are encouraged. Also, in the Thanksgiving thread, blessing is a communal act; participants kept their heads held high, and shared in a feeling of the joy that comes with being a community of faith. The Memorialist celebrations tend more towards the deeply interior experience. As popular Baptist writer William Barcley writes, "We remember to realize again what our blessed Lord has done and suffered for us" that we may reappropriate its many benefits, and we are remembering "someone who is gloriously alive. And therefore we remember Jesus Christ in the sacrament in order to encounter Jesus Christ."

While communion is being served, each believer is "alone with the Lord," and is encouraged to meditate upon Christ's great sacrifice, and that "Christ would still have suffered on the cross if it was only for you alone."

The first to articulate the Memorialist thread was the pre-Reformation leader Peter Waldo. After his sudden conversion around 1175, this French merchant gave himself over to a life of poverty and ministry. Waldo not only translated the Bible into the vernacular (people have been burned for far less), but he taught his followers to receive communion in both kinds, bread and wine (only the bread was taken in the Roman church at the time), and furthermore, that the rite was "merely a remembrance of the Lord's body given for them, and at the same time...[gave] a strong exhortation to yield themselves to be broken and poured out for [Christ's] sake."

Though not very popular in Waldo's day, the Memorialist Thread was to dominate the more radical Reformed Churches, coming to America by way of the Anabaptists and English Baptists. These together with a Zwinglian Spiritualism, constitutes the basic Eucharistic theology of the majority of Baptist, Pentecostal, and other evangelical denominations.

The Moravians, who are the Czechoslovakian descendants of the Hussites, have for over 250 years been celebrating a very interesting communion service that attempts to resurrect the early church's Agape Meal in terms of its simplicity and its communitarian character. What makes this service so novel is that it takes place only once a year during the Christmas season and is celebrated with coffee and cakes! Some Unitarian Universalist churches have borrowed the rite, which has proved to be enormously popular in those congregations that celebrate it.

Speaking of UU's, Universalists and Unitarians have always felt a profound ambivalence towards the Eucharist, their celebrations ranging from the weekly and highly liturgical services of King's Chapel in Boston, to the curious but popular "flower communions," to no communion at all.

The Liturgical Movement & Ecumenism
By the end of the nineteenth century, each of the myriad denominations were firmly entrenched in their own peculiar theologies and practices. As John Owen pointed out, "if liturgy was designed to promote unity, it had done exactly the opposite; if it is designed to preserve the true faith, it is odd that it has to be so often altered; and if it comes from God himself, it is puzzling to see men before our eyes devising it and haggling over it as they go along;"

As chaos theory has taught us, systems usually reach a state of ultimate dissolution only to see order begin to reassert itself. This can certainly be said of the Eucharistic celebration. Order began its "reassertion" in the twentieth century with what has come to be called "The Liturgical Movement." This movement, unprecedented in the long history of the church's bitter struggles, unselfconsciously took on a life of its own and has succeeded more than any could have hoped, in the ecumenical convergence of Eucharistic celebration.

This convergence was possible because of two independent but complementary occurances: the ecumenical impulse and the development of textual criticism. With the recent discovery of many previously unknown documents from the first centuries of the early church, and the application of literary critical methods, Christians the world over began to explore the Eucharist as the early church had celebrated it.

The Thanksgiving thread was rediscovered, and provides the basis for the modern anamnesis, the blessing of God for the good gifts of Creation and Redemption. The Divinization thread influenced the rediscovery of the epiclesis, the invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the celebration, as well as the Eschatalogical Thread which often re-emerges in many modern epiclesis and Post-Communion prayers, including our own.

The Liturgical Movement - a true grass-roots, diffuse "growing together" of scholarly consensus across denominational boundaries rather than any sort of organized "movement" - thus uncovered the vast multifaceted traditions of Christianity's most central rite. Amazingly, this scholarship has brought theologians as diverse as Roman Catholics and American Baptists to construct Eucharistic Prayers which are nearly identical in form if not in content.

Protestants began to forget exactly why they were separated from each other, and began to welcome one another to the Lord's table indiscriminately. Even the churches of the Anglican communion open their communions to "all baptised Christians." Some Christians would go even further, saying that Jesus would not turn away anyone from his table, regardless of their lifestyle or beliefs.

As Colin Buchanan has said,

It is as if the Holy Spirit has been preparing the Churches, though the work of their liturgists, for just such a celebration...what matters is what God works by the power of the Holy Spirit through the sacramental signs, not our attempts to define what we should do or say when we celebrate the Lord's Supper... What we have to obey is the prompting of the Holy Spirit and the orderliness which he reveals...That is why the epiclesis has been rediscovered by Christians of different Churches in such a vital way. It cuts across our denominational barriers as a sword-like word from God, and it reflects profoundly our increasing faith, that the Spirit God really is fulfilling his promises.