What Does It Mean to “Do This”?: Supper, Mass, Eucharist

By Cascade Books

Jesus' best-known mandate--after perhaps the mandate to love God and neighbor--was given at the Last Supper just before his death: "Do this in memory of me." Indeed, a case can be made that to "do this" is the source and summit of the way Christians carry out Jesus' love-mandate. Of course, Christians have debated what it means to "do this," and these debates have all too often led to divisions within and between them--debates over leavened and unleavened bread, reception of the cup, real presence and sacrifice, "open" or "closed" communion, this Supper and the hunger of the world. These divisions seem to fly in the face of Jesus' mandate, causing some to wonder whether this is "really" the Lord's Supper we celebrate (compare 1 Corinthians 11). Everything turns on just what it means to "do this." The purpose of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology's 2012 conference was to address at least some of the many aspects of this question--to address them together, as Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox pastors and theologians, and all participants in the Supper.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Nov 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781630876647

Book preview

What Does It Mean to Do This?

Supper, Mass, Eucharist

edited by

Michael Root &

James J. Buckley

12776.png

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO DO THIS?

Supper, Mass, Eucharist

Pro Ecclesia Series 4

Copyright © 2014 Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

isbn 13: 978–1-62564–416-9

eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-664-7

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

What does it mean to do this? : supper, mass, Eucharist / edited by Michael Root and James J. Buckley.

x + 144 pp. ; cm. —Includes bibliographical references.

Pro Ecclesia Series 4

isbn 13: 978–1-62564–416-9

1. Lord’s Supper. 2. Lord’s Supper—History of doctrines. I. Root, Michael, 1951–. II. Buckley, James Joseph, 1947–. III. Title. IV. Series.

BV825.3 .W48 2014

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Contributors

Peter Bouteneff is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. He is author of Sweeter than Honey: Orthodox Thinking on Dogma and Truth (2006) and Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives (2008). From 1995 to 2000 he was Executive Secretary of Faith and Order at the World Council of Churches.

James J. Buckley is Professor of Theology at Loyola University Maryland. He is a member of the North American Lutheran Catholic dialogue and an associate director of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology. He contributed to and edited The Blackwell Companion to Catholicism (2007).

George Hunsinger is the McCord Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. He serves as a delegate to the official Reformed/Roman Catholic International Dialogue (2011–2017). Long known for his work on Karl Barth, he was the 2010 recipient of the Karl Barth Prize, awarded by the Union of Evangelical Churches in Germany. Among his recent books is The Eucharist and Ecumenism: Let Us Keep the Feast (2008).

Bruce D. Marshall is Lehman Professor of Christian Doctrine at the Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. He is the author of Trinity and Truth (2000), Christology in Conflict: The Identity of a Saviour in Rahner and Barth (1987), and several papers on Trinity, Christology, sacramental theology, and the theology of Thomas Aquinas. He is a member, and past President, of the Academy of Catholic Theology.

Martha Moore-Keish is Associate Professor of Theology at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. Her publications include Do This in Remembrance of Me: A Ritual Approach to Reformed Eucharistic Theology (2008) and Christian Prayer for Today (2009). She currently serves as Reformed co-chair for the ecumenical dialogue between the World Communion of Reformed Churches and the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

Francesca Aran Murphy is Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Notre Dame du Lac. She was formerly Professor of Christian Philosophy in the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, where she taught from 1995 to 2010. Her major interests are theological aesthetics and ecclesiology. She is the author of Christ, the Form of Beauty (1995), The Comedy of Revelation (2000), Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson (2004), and God Is Not a Story: Realism Revisited (2007). She has also edited several volumes, including The Providence of God: Deus Habet Consilium (2009). Professor Murphy has translated three books. She is currently editing a book series with Bloomsbury Academic titled Illuminating Modernity.

Michael Root is Professor of Systematic Theology at The Catholic University of America and Executive Director of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology. He was formerly the Director of the Institute for Ecumenical Research, Strasbourg, France.

Frank C. Senn, STS, is a retired pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and Senior of the Society of the Holy Trinity. He is past president of the North American Academy of Liturgy and The National Liturgical Conference. He is author or editor of ten books, including Christian Liturgy: Catholic and Evangelical (1997), A Stewardship of the Mysteries (1999), New Creation: A Liturgical Worldview (2000), The People’s Work: A Social History of the Liturgy (2006), and An Introduction to Christian Liturgy (2012). He has been a visiting professor at several seminaries and universities, including Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and Nashotah House.

Telford Work is Professor of Theology at Westmont College and Chairman of its Religious Studies department. He is the author of The Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible: Deuteronomy (2009), Ain’t Too Proud to Beg: Living through the Lord’s Prayer (2007), and Living and Active: Scripture in the Economy of Salvation (2002), and a contributor and signatory of In One Body through the Cross: The Princeton Proposal for Christian Unity (2003).

Preface

Michael Root and James J. Buckley

Jesus’ most well-known mandate—after perhaps the mandate to love God and neighbor—was given at the Last Supper just before his death: Do this in memory of me. Indeed, a case can be made that to do this is the source and summit of the way Christians carry out Jesus’ love-mandate. Of course, Christians have debated what it means to do this, and these debates have all too often led to divisions within and between them. These divisions seem to fly in the face of Jesus’ mandate, causing some to wonder whether this is really the Lord’s Supper we celebrate (compare 1 Corinthians 11). All turns on just what it means to do this. The purpose of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology’s 2012 conference was to address at least some of the many aspects of this question—to address them together, as Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox.

The Lutheran liturgical theologian and pastor Frank Senn provides a helpful overview of the history of Eucharist practice throughout the ages. George Hunsinger critically analyzes the Reformed theologian Karl Barth on three crucial topics in Eucharistic theology: the relations of Word and Sacrament, Real Presence, and Sacrifice. Bruce Marshall articulates a Catholic theology of presence through transubstantiation by focusing on this is my body as an identity statement. Peter Bouteneff not only surveys the positions of different Christian churches on whether Christians can receive communion at each other’s Eucharists but also provides theological reasons for the distinctly Orthodox (and largely Roman Catholic) position on why Christians are not yet ready for (to use the odd term Bouteneff does not, thankfully, use) intercommunion. Martha Moore-Keish, on another hand, makes a biblical and distinctively Reformed case for a more open Eucharistic table. Francesca Aran Murphy provides a profound Catholic theology of Eucharistic communion as sacrifice, while Telford Work brings in a Pentecostal perspective that challenges Orthodox and Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed alike. Discussions at the conference on the ordination of women were embedded in these other controversies.

There are surely other ways of ordering the essays: perhaps the first should be last and the last or the middle first. Readers can, of course, read one or other essay. But this book invites readers to compare the seven, seeking similarities and differences that relate to while transcending traditional disputes. Can Hunsinger’s crucial exposition of Barth on the Eucharist or Murphy on Eucharistic sacrifice find a way between Bouteneff and Moore-Keish (and Senn) on communion? Can Marshall’s explication of transubstantiation as arising from taking seriously this is my body as a simple identity statement, rather than a technical or philosophical term, move Catholics and Hunsinger’s Barth closer to one another? Or does Work’s Pentecostal practice call other Christians to a new way of hearing our different languages as voices of the same Spirit of communion? The Eucharist, George Lindbeck once wrote, tastes bitter in the divided church.¹ But we hope these essays do not promote the bitterness, except as a recognition of our Eucharistic sins. A truly Catholic and Evangelical theology and practice of the Supper can only arise from a careful listening and speaking with one another. We hunger together to do this—theologians and pastors and more ordinary folks.

1. The Eucharist Tastes Bitter in the Divided Church, Spectrum (Yale Divinity School)

19

(

1999

)

1

,

4

–

5

.

1

Do This: Eucharist and the Assembly’s Liturgy

Frank C. Senn

What does it mean to do this? Before it means anything else, it means that we are to do what has been commanded. Many meanings cluster around the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, the Mass, also known as Holy Communion and the Sacrament of the Altar, and these meanings are associated with the benefits offered. But there would be no benefits to receive if we didn’t do this in the first place.

Touto poieite—Do this. This is the command attached to the institution narrative cited by St. Paul as a tradition (paradosis). It is what he has received from the Lord and handed over to his congregation in Corinth. The command accompanies the words of Jesus over both the bread and the cup (1 Cor 11:24, 25).

The command to do this also appears in the institution narrative in St. Luke’s Gospel (22:19). There is the textual problem of the two cups in the Lucan passion narrative (short text versus long text). No matter how one resolves the issue of one cup versus two cups, Luke certainly witnesses to the fact that Jewish meals did begin with a blessing over the cup as well as over the bread. The command to do this in remembrance of me after the words over the bread may also include the thanksgiving over the initial cup, even though the words identifying the poured out cup as the new covenant in my blood are connected to the second cup after the supper (meta to deipnesai) in the long text. In the Didache, chapters 9–10, there is an order similar to Luke’s: blessing of the cup, blessing of the broken loaf, and thanksgiving at the end of the meal over the final cup.¹ The command to do this does not appear in the Matthean or Markan Gospels.

1. The Text

Exegetes and theologians have focused primarily on why we are to do this. It is, as Paul’s text says, "for my anamnesis." The whole idea of the eucharistic memorial is pretty central to the concerns of liturgical and sacramental theology, and a theology of eucharistic memorial has developed in relation to the eucharistic sacrifice.² But for the purpose of this presentation I will give anamnesis a simpler understanding.

When we come together as the church—the ekklesia, the assembly called out of the world—we are to celebrate the meal that Jesus instituted. In fact, the meetings of the early church were primarily for meals, as was the case with other associations in the Greco-Roman world.³ Part of the meaning of the anamnesis, therefore, is simply to do the supper Jesus had with his disciples on the night in which he was handed over—not in the mimetic sense of dramatic reenactment, but in the expectation of Jesus’ promise to be present in and to the celebration, specifically in the signs of bread and wine. This is my body. This is me.

The translation of the phrase on the night he was handed over is a bit problematic. In the Gospel narratives the word paradidonai can be correctly translated betrayed because in the story of the upper room Judas is intent on betraying Jesus, and Jesus tells him to get on with his sordid business. But Judas is not mentioned in the text received and quoted by Paul. Moreover, in Romans 8:32 Paul presents his view that God handed over (paradidonai) Jesus to death for all of us. So the term used in 1 Corinthians 11:23 could be understood by Paul to mean "the night in which God handed over Jesus." Within the Jewish reckoning of time, since the day begins the evening before, the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples did take place on the day he died. Paul sees the death of Jesus, not his betrayal, proclaimed in the supper, by God’s intention.

Moreover, the words of Jesus are all present tense, not past tense. Paul’s text is not evoking a historical remembrance but a present reality—the presence of the crucified Lord who will come again as judge in the proclamation that occurs not just by words but by doing the supper. The judgment of the coming Lord is actually a present reality that is being experienced in the Corinthian community that has violated the ritual conditions in which the meal is to be celebrated by fracturing the body of the church at the table. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died, wrote Paul (1 Cor 11:30).

So what is it that we are supposed to do to obey this command of Jesus? It was Gregory Dix’s thesis that the institution narrative provides a set of rubrics that implies a liturgical order.⁴ Dix’s further thesis was that the sevenfold actions spelled out in the institution narrative developed into the fourfold shape of the eucharistic liturgy when the sacramental meal was separated from the actual meal—resulting in Offertory, Consecration, Fraction, Administration. This thesis is generally regarded now as too facile. But just to rehearse the actions in the narrative related by Paul and probably followed in Corinth: they were to take a loaf of bread, give thanks over it, break it, and distribute it. Then, after supper (I’ll explain this in a moment), they were to take the cup, give thanks over it, and drink from it. Furthermore, this is to be done in such a way that it demonstrates the oneness of the assembly at the table, not schism.

All of this seems straightforward enough. But we’ve been doing this supper for some two thousand years now, and over this span of time a lot of rubrical violations have occurred in various assemblies. Some haven’t taken a loaf of bread; they’ve settled for the convenience of individual wafers. Some haven’t offered up thanksgiving; they’ve recited the rubrics. Some have even fought over the breaking of bread (which, were a real loaf used, would need to be broken for distribution anyway). Some have not passed around or drunk from a cup; they’ve used individual straws, spoons, glasses, or received no wine/blood of Christ at all. In fact, the cup has been withheld from communicants at one time or another in most of our traditions. And some have not eaten the bread and drunk from the cup discerning the unity of body, the church; they have excluded baptized members of the assembly from the meal for non-disciplinary reasons. The threat of judgment that Paul says hangs over this meal suggests that the eucharistic assembly had better get its liturgical act together. So let me go through the things we are mandated to do to see how we might do them, beginning with the social context in which the Christian assembly in Corinth celebrated the Lord’s Supper.

2. The Social Context

The social context of the celebration of the Lord’s Supper was a gathering of the church in the house of a member, or in an inn rented for the occasion as other supper clubs did in the Greco-Roman world, to have a banquet. The form of the banquet was most likely a symposium. A symposium was a meal (which sometimes degenerated into a drinking party) in which the guests engaged in philosophic discussion. There were a number of literary symposia from ancient Greece and Rome, of which the most famous is probably Plato’s.

Scholars like Blake Layerle⁵ and Dennis E. Smith,⁶ who have studied the meal customs of the ancient Greco-Roman world, see the symposium as the form of the banquet that lies behind the Jewish Passover Seder as well as the Christian Eucharist. Typically a symposium begins with a thanksgiving to the god of the feast, the sharing of food and wine, entertainment of sorts in the form of a dance, a poem, a drama, or even a philosophic proposition, followed by discussion of what has been presented, accompanied by additional cups of wine (with copious drinking!). The long night of discussion ended in Plato’s Symposium with only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon left, drinking out of a large cup that they passed around, and Socrates’ two companions not being able to follow his argument because they were drowsy. The symposium broke up at daybreak; Socrates saw his companions home and went to the baths.⁷

The canonical Gospels also present a symposium on the night Jesus was betrayed that left the disciples drowsy and not able to watch with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane while he prayed to the Father that the next cup would pass from him. The symposium structure can best be seen in John 13–17. In the context of a meal, which is mentioned but not described, Jesus performs the dramatic action of washing his disciples’ feet. This serves as the basis for discussion of the new commandment Jesus lays on his disciples (now called friends), that they love one another as he has loved them. Because this is a last supper, there is also much discussion about Jesus’ impending departure from his disciples. The symposium ends with Jesus’ high priestly prayer to his Father on behalf of his disciples.

The symposium structure can also be seen in the Jewish Passover Seder in which, after the berakoth or blessings that mark the beginning of the meal, discussion ensues in connection with the strange food being eaten that night. Multiple cups of wine accompany the meal and discussion. The Seder ends with a prayer of thanksgiving for the meal (birkat ha-mazon).

There is no reason not to think that the Lord’s Supper in the Corinthian church also followed the format of a meal (deipnon) with a symposium (symposion). The cup with its thanksgiving in Paul’s text is after supper. Is it possible that the words of Jesus over the cup cited by Paul—Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me—refer to the multiple cups of the symposium, and not to the frequency of the gatherings to share the meal since a comparable specification "as often as you eat this does not accompany the command do this" in connection with the bread? In other words, this banquet as a