The Bible's Baptismal Liturgy

It can be found in Leviticus, chapter 8, where the rites appropriate to enrollment in the royal priesthood of the redeemed are set forth, partly in literal form and partly in types:

Introit
And Moses said to the congregation, "This is the thing that the LORD has commanded to be done."

The Act of Baptism
And Moses brought Aaron and his sons and washed them with water.

The Dressing in Baptismal Robes
And he put the coat on him and tied the sash around his waist and clothed him with the robe and put the ephod on him and tied the skillfully woven band of the ephod around him, binding it to him with the band. And he placed the breastpiece on him, and in the breastpiece he put the Urim and the Thummim. And he set the turban on his head, and on the turban, in front, he set the golden plate, the holy crown, as the LORD commanded Moses.

Chrismation (also called Confirmation in the Latin tradition)
Then Moses took the anointing oil and anointed the tabernacle and all that was in it, and consecrated them. And he sprinkled some of it on the altar seven times, and anointed the altar and all its utensils and the basin and its stand, to consecrate them. And he poured some of the anointing oil on Aaron's head and anointed him to consecrate him. And Moses brought Aaron's sons and clothed them with coats and tied sashes around their waists and bound caps on them, as the LORD commanded Moses.

Sermon, that is, Explanation of the Need for Atonement and our identification by faith with the one being sacrificed for our sin, and the Prayer of the Church
Then he brought the bull of the sin offering, and Aaron and his sons laid their hands on the head of the bull of the sin offering. And he killed it, and Moses took the blood, and with his finger put it on the horns of the altar around it and purified the altar and poured out the blood at the base of the altar and consecrated it to make atonement for it. And he took all the fat that was on the entrails and the long lobe of the liver and the two kidneys with their fat, and Moses burned them on the altar. But the bull and its skin and its flesh and its dung he burned up with fire outside the camp, as the LORD commanded Moses. Then he presented the ram of the burnt offering, and Aaron and his sons laid their hands on the head of the ram. And he killed it, and Moses threw the blood against the sides of the altar. He cut the ram into pieces, and Moses burned the head and the pieces and the fat. He washed the entrails and the legs with water, and Moses burned the whole ram on the altar. It was a burnt offering with a pleasing aroma, a food offering for the LORD, as the LORD commanded Moses. Then he presented the other ram, the ram of ordination, and Aaron and his sons laid their hands on the head of the ram. And he killed it, and Moses took some of its blood and put it on the lobe of Aaron's right ear and on the thumb of his right hand and on the big toe of his right foot. Then he presented Aaron's sons, and Moses put some of the blood on the lobes of their right ears and on the thumbs of their right hands and on the big toes of their right feet. And Moses threw the blood against the sides of the altar.

The Offertory
Then he took the fat and the fat tail and all the fat that was on the entrails and the long lobe of the liver and the two kidneys with their fat and the right thigh, and out of the basket of unleavened bread that was before the LORD he took one unleavened loaf and one loaf of bread with oil and one wafer and placed them on the pieces of fat and on the right thigh. And he put all these in the hands of Aaron and in the hands of his sons and waved them as a wave offering before the LORD. Then Moses took them from their hands and burned them on the altar with the burnt offering. This was an ordination offering with a pleasing aroma, a food offering to the LORD. And Moses took the breast and waved it for a wave offering before the LORD. It was Moses' portion of the ram of ordination, as the LORD commanded Moses.

Holy Communion (bread, blood, sacrificial meat)
Then Moses took some of the anointing oil and of the blood that was on the altar and sprinkled it on Aaron and his garments, and also on his sons and his sons' garments. So he consecrated Aaron and his garments, and his sons and his sons' garments with him. And Moses said to Aaron and his sons, "Boil the flesh at the entrance of the tent of meeting, and there eat it and the bread that is in the basket of ordination offerings, as I commanded, saying, 'Aaron and his sons shall eat it.'

Provision for Reverent Handling of the Unconsumed Elements
And what remains of the flesh and the bread you shall burn up with fire.

Dismissal
And you shall not go outside the entrance of the tent of meeting for seven days, until the days of your ordination are completed, for it will take seven days to ordain you. As has been done today, the LORD has commanded to be done to make atonement for you. At the entrance of the tent of meeting you shall remain day and night for seven days, performing what the LORD has charged, so that you do not die, for so I have been commanded." And Aaron and his sons did all the things that the LORD commanded by Moses.

More on Sacrifice

Well, my previous post on Dix and the "sacrifice of the mass" (abominable or not) generated not a whole lot of comments (thanks, Eric, for yours!), so I am giving the ungrateful blogosphere a second chance.

What's going to follow is a brief restatement of the issue and some comments raised by the conclusions I've reached so far.

The Issue
In the ante-Nicene church, sacrificial language is routinely applied to the Eucharist. The question is, can this language of sacrifice be squared with the Lutheran Evangelical doctrine of justification by faith alone, and the understanding of the sacrament as a gift or promise of God which needs only faith to be received.

Dix said, No it can't, and that's why justification by faith alone is inconsistent with the apostolic Christian faith. Dix then went on to advocate the idea that through the offertory+eucharist the church as a whole participates in the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, thus through her actions propitiating God.

My answer is yes it can, but only under the fairly stringent conditions:
1) the material of the sacrifice be understood as the gifts of the offertory, which are then used (in part) as the elements of the Eucharist, and not the Body and Blood of Christ. That understanding, that the priest re-presents Christ's passion as a propitiatory sacrifice cannot be found before Cyprian (c. AD 255) although it soon swept the boards.
(Here it must be remembered that in the ante-Nicene church, the actual bread and wine used in each Sunday's Eucharist were brought that day by the congregation and put on the altar during the offertory by the congregation. The switch to special communion wafers and wine laid by in the church has broken this visual-liturgical link of the offertory with the Eucharist proper.)
2) the nature of the sacrifice be understood as a thanksgiving sacrifice, not a propitiatory sacrifice. While the ante-Nicene fathers are pretty vague on this whole distinction, the preponderance of early evidence shows that thanksgiving is indeed the strongly dominant note.
3) The thanksgiving sacrifice of the offertory be kept conceptually and theologically separate from the benefit of receiving the Body and Blood of Christ -- forgiveness of sins, peace, and immortality. And indeed, the major ante-Nicene authors who write on the Eucharist, Ignatius, Irenaeus, and Justin, show no sign of connecting these elements.

Let us note another point: both the Lutheran and Tridentine understanding of propitiation have benefitted from the immensely greater theological precision and the higher view of sin introduced into the Christian churches in the Middle Ages. Neither Evangelicals nor Catholics can go back to the cloudy, perfectionist ideas of St. Irenaeus or Justin Martyr and both have adopted dogmatic formulas that no one before Cyprian, let alone St. Anselm, would recognize.

William Tighe has very generously sent me a copy of an article by Oliver K. Olson, in the Lutheran Quarterly 19 (2005), pp. 199-207, in which he argues against any sacrificial understanding of the Eucharist on the grounds that it would be a betrayal of the Lutheran confessions. His occasion of disagreement is principle 43 in ELCA's new "Principles for Worship":
The biblical words of institution declare God's action and invitation. They are set within the context of the Great Thanksgiving [note: eucharist is simply "thanksgiving" in Greek]. This ecuharistic prayer proclaims and celebrates the gracious work of God in creation, redemption, and sanctification.

Olson makes a lot of good and blessed Evangelical points. He rightly points out that "participation in the redeeming deed of Christ" is downright blasphemous. Agreed -- I said the same at the conclusion of my previous post. He adds that such "participation" implies that the crucifixion is still going on, but "that the atonement is finished is clearly reflected in Luther's doctrine of the mass as testament. At communion, the believer does not participate at Calvary. Instead, the believer is granted the results from Calvary." I agree wholeheartedly, adding only that the results of the world's one truly propitiatory sacrifice are given in precisely the form that they are given in the general sacrificial practice of humanity, a share of the meat and contact with the blood of the sacrifice. I would not support principle 43 as it stands. Practically speaking, our offertory hymn gets it just about right:

Let the vineyards be fruitful, Lord, and fill to the brim our cup of blessing.
Gather a harvest from the seeds that were sown, that we may be fed with the bread of life.
Gather the hopes and dreams of all; unite them with the prayers we offer.
Grace our table with your presence, and give us a foretaste of the feast to come.

I find the third line a bit treacly in phrasing, but theologically this stands firmly on the common ground shared by Martin Luther and Irenaeus.

What this illustrates is that the distinction between communion which is purely a testament, a gift, a promise, in which we give nothing but purely receive from God by faith, and the service of the sacrament as a whole, from the offertory to the dismissal, which also has an aspect of a thanksgiving to God in which we do something (i.e. we offer to God our tithes and offerings, including the bread and wine used in communion). No language of sacrifice of any nature can be allowed to infect our understanding of the former. Holy Communion is not something we do. But we do need to be aware of the sacrificial aspect of the latter, because not just the ante-Nicene fathers, but the apostles themselves treat the offertory as a spiritual sacrifice.

As it says in Romans 12, when Paul moves from expounding the accomplished nature of our salvation to our response, he says:

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.

What is the content of that "living sacrifice"? Well he enumerates it, beginning with the renewing of our minds, and including

Distributing to the necessity of saints

which distribution comes from the offertory. When he receives such a gift from the offertory of the Philippians, sent by Epahroditus to him in prison in Rome, he writes

But I have all, and abound: I am full, having received of Epaphroditus the things which were sent from you, an odour of a sweet smell, a sacrifice acceptable, well-pleasing to God.

Likewise in Hebrews 13:16, after exhorting us that we have an altar which the Jews who offer sacrifice in the Temple cannot approach, the apostle asks us:

By him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name. But to do good and to communicate forget not: for with such sacrifices God is well pleased.

And Peter likewise speaks of the church as a spiritual priesthood offering spiritual sacrifices:

Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.

The generosity of our offering is miserably inadequate to be acceptable to God in itself, but when we have faith in the propitiatory sacrifice of Jesus Christ (Romans 3:25, 1 John 2:2 and 4:10) then even our thank offerings are a sweet savor to God.

It is common in anti-"Gnostic" polemic to emphasize the earthy, practical, ritual nature of Christianity. But we must also remember that the early Christians inherited and largely agreed with a long-standing Greco-Roman critique of Jewish ritual practice. This critique focused on Jewish rituals, arguing that they were unworthy of the highest religious ideals, by being ethnocentric (limited to a particular people, like the Sabbath) and also simply irrational (such as the idea that a sinner offering the blood of a bull can propitiate God). This latter critique had a long history in the prophets of Israel (e.g. Psalm 50, Is. 1:11, Hosea 6:6, Jer. 7:21-22) and many Jews, such as Philo, in the intertestamental period had set about reinterpreting the food and calendar laws, as well as the sacrifices, as fundamentally ethical, teaching institutions, expressing spiritual ideas and gratitude to God, not ritual actions possessing inherent efficacy.

It is common today for anti-"Gnostic" Christians to ridicule such "spiritualizing" interpretations, but this is in fact the background from which, for example, the writer of Hebrews is coming, when he points out the uselessness of the Jewish sacrifices. Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho relies fundamentally on this skepticism about ritual propitiation of God. The Evangelical categorical rejection of the idea that anything a sinner does, week after week, no matter how divinely commanded, can propitiate a holy God is so fully in line with this long-standing critique, one which the apostles so clearly accepted, that the burden of proof lies with those wishing to claim that in fact the apostles would have accepted any propitiatory action in the Eucharist.

Now this skepticism about ritual propitiation can go in two directions: 1) toward ethical propitiation (we turn aside God's anger by doing right), and 2) substitutionary penal atonement -- the CROSS of CHRIST. Philo and the philosophical critique of Mosaic ritualism went toward the first, and regrettably early Christian apologists such as Irenaeus and Justin followed. But in the apostolic writings, no one can deny that it is the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross only, accomplished once for all time, which is treated as the propitiation, the turning away of the wrath of God. In the wake of this once-for-all atonement, we have only two ways of response: 1) to return to it, repenting of dead works -- this is receiving communion; and 2) to follow God's commands by diligently attending to prayer and thanksgivings, both verbal and material. This is our worship, the thanksgiving sacrifice, the offertory, and our songs. But as always, the once for all atonement is the sole basis for our acceptance by God.

Sacrifice? Could You Unpack That Please?

(Continued from here)

Well, where were we? Oh yes, I'm in the middle of a series examining the theological underpinings of Dom Gregory Dix's Shape of the Liturgy. To review:

I first noted that Dix sees the fundamental meaning of the Eucharist as something we do, as a sacrifice. Without that sacrificial underpinning, any acknowledgement of the Real Presence is ultimately meaningless.

I then took a brief tour around the world and concluded with a spiritual law: To receive the benefits of a blood sacrifice and membership in the community formed by the blood sacrifice, one ordinarily consumes the flesh of the sacrificial victim. Bloody offerings, unbloody offerings, and prayer and proper attitude are part of the human sacrificial system from the beginning with Cain and Abel, and to be part of it, the offerings have to be consumed. So yes, the Eucharist should have some link to sacrifice in it, since by we receive the benefits of Christ's sacrifice on the cross.

But before we go any further, we need to sort out what exactly kind of sacrifice we are talking about. And fortunately, this is an issue along which fairly clear lines have been drawn. The Catholic Encyclopedia has an excellent presentation (if really long) of the Catholic position, emphasizing the following points: the Eucharist has two separate functions: sacrament and sacrifice, which must be kept separate. The sacrament is received by the communicant with the intention of the sanctification of his soul, while the sacrifice is recieved by God (especially in His person as Father) with the intention of glorifying Him by adoration, thanksgiving, prayer, and expiation/propitiation. Note that last item. The sacrifice involved is propitiatory, that is expiates our sins and turns aside God's wrath from us as sinners.

The article then goes on to point a number of ways of understanding sacrifice that are inadequate, from the Roman Catholic viewpoint. Two points stand out. The sacrificial aspect must not be understood as

1) a "figurative or unreal" sacrifice, on the level with "prayers of praise and thanksgiving, alms, mortification, obedience, and works of penance."
2) or as taken place in the Offertory, that as the created gifts of bread and wine are offered to God by the church.

No, the sacrifice to be a truly expiatory sacrifice must be the bodily offering of Christ Himself. (The reason is fairly obvious, as on even the lowest view of sin, the mere offering of prayers of praise and thanksgiving, or of bread and wine to God could hardly be enough to expiate sins.)

From the Evangelical side, Philip Melanchthon's distinctions in his chapter on the Mass in the Apology to the Augsburg Confession used these same distinctions. (In fact, of course, most of the extremely subtle language in the Catholic Encyclopedia is Tridentine and post-Reformation.) The Mass as a sacrament (received by man for the good of his soul) is accepted, as a sacrifice (received by God for the expiation of sins) it is rejected. (Note that eventually Evangelicals began to use "Mass" for the Eucharist understood as an expiatory sacrifice; that is why the Smalcald articles denounce the "mass" while the Augsburg Confession accepts it--the understanding of the term is different.)

Melanchthon likewise distinguishes sacrament and sacrifice:
1) Sacrament: a ceremony or work in which God presents to us that which the promise annexed to the ceremony offers
2) Sacrifice: a ceremony or work which we render God in order to afford Him honor.

He then distinguishes between two types of sacrifice:
1) Propitiatory: one makes satisfaction for guilt and punishment, i.e., one that reconciles God, or appeases God's wrath, or which merits the remission of sins for others.
2) Eucharistic (i.e. thanksgiving): one rendered by those who have been reconciled, in order that we may give thanks or return gratitude for the remission of sins that has been received, or for other benefits received. It does not merit the remission of sins or reconciliation, but is the thanksgiving for the fruit thereof.

Melanchthon then defines the Evangelical position as follows:

1) The only true propitiatory sacrifice in the whole world has been that of Christ on the cross.
2) The Mass/Eucharist is rightly understood as a sacrifice only in the eucharistic sense, on the same level as "praise, . . . preaching of the Gospel, faith, prayer, thanksgiving, confession, [bearing] afflictions," etc.
3) This sense of the Eucharist as a thanksgiving is in addition to its efficacy as a sacrament, i.e. as God's promise forgiveness, the reception of which needs only faith.

While the idea of the offertory as a sacrifice is not mentioned by Melanchthon (the historic link of the offertory with the Eucharist had been heavily obscured by centuries of liturgical evolution by then), there is no reason why it could not be accepted as long as it is understood as a eucharistic sacrifice, not a propitiatory one. [UPDATE: Actually the idea of the offertory as the Eucharistic sacrifice is explicitly found in Martin Luther's Babylonian Captivity of the Church, as cited here. Undoubtedly Melanchthon was aware of this passage, even if he chose not to refer explicitly to it.]

Finally it is worth reemphasizing that Melanchthon and Luther both agree wholeheartedly with Dix that justification by faith alone and the evangelical understanding of the Gospel are flatly contradictory to any understanding of the eucharist as a propitiatory sacrifice whose merit can be applied to the living or the dead. They are, however, compatible with the understanding of the Eucharist as a eucharistic sacrifice, i.e. as an act of worship offered in thanksgiving. This eucharistic aspect is not so explicitly emphasized as the sacramental aspect, but it is well ensconced in the Augsburg Evangelical confessions, as well as in the current offertory hymns of our churches.

So one question is now, what the New Testament and early patristic evidence on this is: is the eucharist a propitiatory or eucharistic sacrifice? And can the understanding of the eucharist as a sacrament be coordinated in any sense with the sacrificial eating that seems demanded by the typology of the Old Testament, not to mention the expectations of humanity?

Why Do We Need to Eat Christ's Body?

Continued from here.

A common Reformed/revivalist response to the Augsburg Evangelical (Lutheran) understanding of the Real Presence is to ask "Why isn't a symbolic understanding of Jesus's statement 'This is My Body' sufficient?" To which the usual Evangelical answer is: "Because that's not what Jesus meant!" Fine enough; I agree. But despite that agreement, I think more is needed. As when people ask about women's ordination, a simple "God said so, so shut up!" answer is not enough. You've got to give a reason (I've made this point before.)

Which brings us back to Dix. As I said in my previous post, he says the Real Presence plays no role in Luther's Evangelical theology. Why? Because, he claims, justification by faith alone deprived it of any role, by removing the idea of a sacrificial meaning to the Mass/Eucharist. In other words the real presence is a meaningless theological doodad unless there it is part of a sacrificial action.

Although I think this is wrong, there is indeed an element of truth here. Why indeed do we need to eat Jesus's real Body and drink His real Blood, the same one that died and was shed for us on the cross? Human consensus supplies an answer: because one receives the benefit of a bloody sacrifice only when one eats the meat of the sacrificial victim.

Look at the rules for sacrifice given in Chu Hsi's Family Rituals, pp. 153-177. An essential part of all the meals is the consumption by the family of the foods offered to the ancestor. The food of the sacrifice is distributed to the congregants with these words:

The ancestors instruct me, the liturgist, to pass on abundant good luck to you filial descendants and calls you, filial descendants, to approach and receive riches from Heaven, have good harvest from the fields, and live a long life forever, without interruption (p. 164).

And in Mongolian, the word keshig which in other contexts means "the unmerited favor shown by a superior to an inferior," especially the favor of the emperor, the reception of which sends the loyal servant into transports of delight, means in other contexts the share of meat in a sacrifice, the reception of which confirms one's receipt of the benefits of the sacrifice and the membership in the congregation worshiping the deity or spirit concerned. As in a famous passage from the Secret History of the Mongols, when Genghis Khan's widowed mother is excluded from the sacrifice on the pretext that she arrived late (but really because rival queens wish to seize rule for their branch of the ruling family), she complains

How dare you leave me out from the grace/sacrificial meat (keshig) of the ancestors, from the reserved meat (bile'ür) and the sacrificial liquor (sarqud), thinking only that Yisugei Ba'atur [her late husband] has died and my sons have not yet grown big?

Today, among the Buddhist Mongols, blood sacrifices have fallen out of favor, but they are still practiced in the ancient cult of Genghis Khan. Owen Lattimore described Mongols rushing forward to receive their share of the sacrificial meat being distributed at one of the four annual sacrifices.

So if we assume this as a general principle of sacrifice, then we have a perfectly good answer to the Reformed question, "Why do we have to eat the Body and drink the Blood of Jesus?" The answer is "Because He is our sacrificial victim and in line with the universal human knowledge about sacrificial victims, one must eat of it to receive the unmerited grace of the sacrifice."

Now at this point, the Zwinglians are certainly shaking their heads at the grossness with which I make clear the pagan origin of the teaching of the Real Presence. And even to my mind comes the stern warning of Moses:

When the LORD thy God shall cut off the nations from before thee . . . Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them . . . and that thou enquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? even so will I do likewise. Thou shalt not do so unto the LORD thy God: for every abomination to the LORD, which he hateth, have they done unto their gods . . . .

But Scripture makes it just as clear that the Lord Himself ordained necessity of the application of the sacrificial victim to the body of the congregant who would worship. First of all we see that bloody sacrifice is the part of the common heritage of mankind (Genesis 4:4, 8:20-22). And in His own ordained cult, the consumption of the meat was intended to make atonement for Israel as was clear when, for an emergency, the meat was not consumed:

And Moses diligently sought the goat of the sin offering, and, behold, it was burnt: and he was angry with Eleazar and Ithamar, the sons of Aaron which were left alive, saying, "Wherefore have ye not eaten the sin offering in the holy place, seeing it is most holy, and God hath given it you to bear the iniquity of the congregation, to make atonement for them before the LORD? Behold, the blood of it was not brought in within the holy place: ye should indeed have eaten it in the holy place, as I commanded."

Likewise with the meat of the Passover and the smearing of things with blood; as Hebrews summarizes (9:22),

And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission.

Left unspoken, but implied, is the necessity physical application of the purifying sacrificial substance, in the old law the blood by sprinkling and the meat by consumption.

Most relevant is Paul's admonition in 1 Corinthians 10:

The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread. Behold Israel after the flesh: are not they which eat of the sacrifices partakers of the altar? What say I then? that the idol is any thing, or that which is offered in sacrifice to idols is any thing? But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils. Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's table, and of the table of devils.

What I want to note here is that Paul assumes an identity of procedure between the Christian church, the temple cult in Israel, and the pagan cults of Greece: consumption of the sacrificial offering results in receiving the benefits appropriate to the offering: communion with the living God, communion with superseded shadows of God, and communion with devils, respectively. The procedure (consumption of the victim) is the same, the result (communion/commensalism with the God to whom the sacrifice is offered) is generically the same, but differs specifically according to the differing nature of the God worshiped.

So we can make it a general spiritual law: To receive the benefits of a blood sacrifice and membership in the community formed by the blood sacrifice, one should consume the flesh of the sacrificial victim. Whether that is to your spiritual life or death depends not on the sacrificial procedure, but on the nature of the spiritual being whose favor is being won by the sacrifice.

UPDATE: As Eric Rasmusen points in the comment box on the post above, not all individual sacrifices will have the meat shared out. The Mosaic system is composed of several types of sacrifices, some (the burnt offering, and the sin and guilt offerings) of which are wholly destroyed, but others of which (the fellowship/peace offerings and the consecration offering) are consumed (cf. Lev. 1-8). The key point is, though, the system mandates the consumption of the sacrificial meat at specified points.

Another account of sacrifice can be found in the Iliad in Book 1, where the Achaeans make an offering to Apollo to avert the plague sent on account of the priest Chryses whose daughter they had raped. After restoring her, they pray:

And when all had made prayer and flung down the scattering barley
First they drew back the victims' head and slaughtered them and skinned them,
And cut away the meat from the thighs and wrapped them in fat,
Making a double fold, and laid shreds of flesh upon them.
The old man [the priest Chryses] burned these on a cleft stick and poured the gleaming
Wine over, while the young men with forks in their hand stood about him.
But when they had burned the thigh pieces and tasted the vitals,
They cut up all the remainder into pieces and spitted them
And roasted all carefully and took off the pieces.
Then after they had finished the work and got the feast ready
They feasted, nor was any man's hunger denied a fair portion (vv. 458ff.)

In addition it should also be noted that in all these cultures, blood offerings are not the only form of sacrifice. Sacrifice of vegetable food (barley sprinklings in Greece, rice in China, the grain offering -- flour and oil -- and shewbread of Leviticus 2) and of liquor are found in all. In all of these cases, a portion or first fruits is presented to the spirit being worshiped, and the rest is then eaten. In Israel, the shewbread was regularly eaten by the priests -- see Mark 2:25ff. All of these things: blood offerings, unbloody offerings, and of course prayer and the proper attitude are part of the human sacrificial system from the beginning with Cain and Abel.

(Continued here)

The Sacrifice of the Mass

Despite the vast size of Dom Gregory Dix's The Shape of the Liturgy (for previous posts on which see here, here, here, and here), the key point can be summed up this way: the most essential word in the Words of Institution is not is but do, not this is my body, but do this in anamnesis/remembrance of me.

His story can be summarized rather simply: the original ante-Nicene liturgy focused with admirable economy on the action of the Eucharist, doing the meal as Jesus had commanded. In the post-Nicene period from AD 325 to 800, this simple action was elaborated. Much was gained in this period: theology of sacrifice was developed more explicitly, the Eucharist was adapted to sanctify all Christian times and circumstances, while still maintaining its essential nature, both 'puritan' (about which Dix is surprisingly positive) and ceremonial aesthetics received due recognition. But some valuable things were lost: the eschatological element (the idea that the Eucharist is the in-breaking of the age to come) was replaced by an over-emphasis on the remembrance of the historical facts of Christ's Passion. The theology of the Eucharistic sacrificial action sometimes degenerated a crude viewpoint of the Eucharist as a repetition of the Passion. The tight connection of the offertory to the Eucharist which gave an explicit role for the laity to do something, not just communicate, was likewise lost. The excess of devotional language to some degree obscured the central action, although the Roman church stood like a bulwark against this.

After about AD 400, a much more dangerous distortion (according to Dix) developed. As lay communion declined, as the presbyters/elders became priests and the bishops/overseers became feudal lords, the mass was transformed from something that the church does together to something that the officiant (almost always now a presbyter, often serving alone) does and the church observes. For the laity the focus was now not doing the Eucharist, but watching the priest as he did it, meditating on the Passion that occurred in Israel a thousand years ago and worshiping the result: the Body and Blood of Christ made present. Devotion began to focus on the adoration of the consecrated host, not on communicating, and still less on the church as a whole joining in the Eucharist. The is had replaced the do, and seeing replaced participating.

When the Reformation and Counter-Reformation came, neither understood the issue. Both continued to focus on the is rather than the do. The Zwinglians (the only coherent Reformers in Dix's view) made the Eucharist an optional occasion for meditating on the Passion, explicitly reducing the laity's role to merely reverent attention (the triumph of the puritan aesthetic) and incoporating the suggested late medieval devotional literature into the very words of the liturgy itself, thus wounding fatally the true focus of the Eucharist: the church together doing this in anamnesis/remembrance. Eventually the Eucharist virtually disappears from devotional life and the Protestants revert to a kind of 'catechumen' spirituality. The catholics (a word he consistently leaves uncapitalized, along with christian, jewish, etc.; how clever an evasion is that!) continued the late medieval emphasis on remembering the Passion and worshiping the "is my body." But the retention of the liturgy and the theology of the Eucharist as sacrifice left the Shape of the Liturgy intact as the unspoken framework of Christian life, ready for more conscious recovery as scholarship illuminates the ante-Nicene theology (i.e. as people read and assimilate Dix's book.)

Where do Luther and the Lutherans fit into this picture? Surely we are an is people, not do people, yet presumably the Eucharist is important to us as well? Well, actually not; being an anomaly in his theory, Dix magisterially banishes us into the realm of historical mistakes. Putting aside his comments on the Luther = Hitler argument (a tad oversimplified, but at points remarkably insightful, he concludes on p. 636), Lutherans will be puzzled by statements like this: "Faith for Luther is always not in Christ as redeemer, but faith in my redemption by Him . . . The whole process [of partaking in Communion] is self regarding and self-generated as Luther presents it" (p. 635). How exactly Luther morphed into Jonathan Edwards is a puzzle here. Here is -- complete and unabridged -- his summary of Lutheran eucharistic theology since 1546:

It is perhaps not surprising that Luther's doctrine of the objective reality of our reception of our Lord's Body and Blood in the eucharist slowly declined in precision within the Lutheran churches. It is based simply on the literal understanding of the words of institution and logically unrelated and unnecessary to the Lutheran doctrine as a whole. (!!!) It kept its place in the Lutheran doctrinal confessions, but it received and could receive no adequate expression in the Lutheran liturgies. When the bulk of the German Lutherans were united with the German Calvinists in the Prussian State Church in the early nineteenth century it was in the result the Calvinist eucharistic doctrine which prevailed, though the question was formally left open for every communicant to decide for himself.

That it! That's all! Lutheran theology is just a evanescent wave in Luther's deluded brain! Move along, folks, move along, nothing to see here.

I think there's more to say about the matter. Future posts will address the natural theology of sacrifice, in what respect the Eucharist is or is not a sacrifice, the do and the anamnesis, and the place of the Sacrament of the Altar within the Lutheran theology and the Letter to the Hebrews.

UPDATE: Continued here.