Talking about Eucharist

C.S. Lewis, in his book, Mere Christianity, begs us to imagine that we are living (for the sake of argument) in a post apocalyptic world in the future.  Pick your favorite conspiracy, and imagine that WWIII has happened.  Now, 2 hundred years later, humanity is trying to survive on a largely ruined planet.  This imaginary culture doesn’t have access to the technological expertise that we possess.  They are what we would refer to as “hunter-gatherers” – the destruction of the world as we know it was so total that all their time is taken up in mere survival. Yet, for whatever reason, they recognize that in our culture, technology was highly valued.  So they use words like internet, computer, database, texting, cell phone, Facebook, and Tablet, but don’t actually understand how these words fit together.  These words have no context in their culture at all.

Lewis brings us on this exercise to make the argument that one can draw an analogy between this future culture and our culture – instead of technology though it is the moral virtues that don’t have traction for us.  We use words like justice, temperance, courage, humility, etc but we don’t have the cultural context anymore for how these words fit together. 

I would like to take this analogy and apply it in a different direction.  We use words every Sunday to refer to the Eucharist – sacrifice, oblation, sacrament, ritual, Priest, rites, etc – yet we are almost entirely lacking the cultural context for how these words fit together.  Despite this reality, we recognize (like the imaginary society from the future) that these words once contained great importance and meaning for the society that gave us these words.  In fact, we also remember (through our Scriptural texts) that Christ himself asked us to do this in memory of Him – so we do this – and try as often as we do to remember Him at least in our hearts.

Yet, the situation is slightly more complicated than I have just let on.  For, not only do we remember that these words mean something quite possibly very important, we remember that whatever the trauma was that caused our culture(s) to be so utterly different from the culture(s) in which these words made sense was linked in some important way to precisely a fight over these words!  So the words are not only somewhat nonsensical to most of us, but also very loaded.  They carry with them all the embattled tension of a theological battle with massive social and cultural upheaval that was fought now over 400 years ago. 

We may not be able to tell what these words mean anymore, but we can tell what side of the old battle we are on.  So if someone uses some combination of the words in a way that doesn’t sound similar to how we are used to hearing them, we can know that they are not “one of us.”  All I need to do to illustrate my point is to articulate a few different combinations of these terms.  Someone who says, “The Eucharist is the Sacrifice of the Mass” is clearly referring to something different then someone who says, “The Eucharist is a remembering of the oblation of Christ” or again, “the Eucharist is primarily a communal experience in which our eating a meal together reminds us of Christ.”

As soon as you heard any of those statements I’m guessing you either felt more at ease, or more alarm – yet were unable to say exactly what the phrases meant!  Proof of Lewis’s point, I guess.  That we live in a world that is so dynamically different from the world in which either these words had currency or these phrases were coined is relatively beyond the need for proof.  What we do about that is quite a different story. 

That brings me to the crux of the article – what do we do with the Eucharist now that we are living in a different world?  I am trained as a church historian.  That’s what I do.  I study the way it was.  I find my work fascinating for many reasons – none the least of which is the sometimes utter incongruity between how (as best we can tell, anyway) things were viewed during a particular age, and how we use those concepts today.  Religion and the development of religious rites is perhaps the most shocking of all in precisely this regard. 

Most things change quite dramatically given enough years.  It is very rare to have, say, the same political organization in the same geographical space for more than about 600 years.  It is also very rare to have the same language spoken in the same geographical location for more than about 600 years.  There are exceptions, of course.  But generally, the norm is change. 

Religious rites, by contrast (here I’m using the phrase, “religious rites” to refer to a particular practice done in one particular way by a particular religion) change even slower than political forms of government or language even language.  Since I’m not a historian of Islamic or Eastern religious practices I won’t attempt to draw examples there.  However, one can show that (as an  example) the particular way in which someone was baptized in, say, 3^rd century Ravenna is surprisingly similar to how someone was baptized in 14^th century Ravenna… even though (to use our examples) the language they spoke changed, and the political structures changed.  This general rule applies all across the board – the more sacred a particular practice is believed to be, the less it will change even though everything else around it changes with some regular frequency.

So where are we?  Well, we are in a culture that doesn’t understand the phrases and terminology used to describe what was perhaps the single most important religious rite of the culture that preceded it.  We are 400-500 years away from whatever it was that caused this tremendous cultural upheaval.

I think there are two things we must keep in mind.  

1.)  We will absolutely never be able to rewind the clock and either understand these terms as they were understood by these people or describe them in a necessarily similar format.  I think we have to come to terms with the finality of that loss.  Any attempt to go back (say, to the Medieval or even the Patristic or late Classical period) and resurrect these particular thought worlds regarding the Eucharist is finally a failed attempt.  

2.) The value though that they placed in the Eucharist we can appreciate.  We should not ignore this.  In fact, we must not ignore this.  Simply because 1 is true, doesn’t mean that we can therefore ignore the central importance of the Eucharist in our own religious practices. 

So what?  Why is it important to say everything we’ve just said?  Well, for starters, it helps to remember that the Eucharist is perhaps centrally important to the faith.  It also helps to remember that the battles that were fought over what the Eucharist means lie at the heart of much of what it means today to either be Baptist, or Assembly of God, or Presbyterian, or Anglican, or Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox.  In other words, our current divisions resulted in a large part out of the massive social and cultural upheaval that caused the loss in translation that Lewis’ analogy helps us understand.

But there is more than that, isn’t there?  Much of what we take away from this article depends on how we reconcile points 1 and 2 above.  Can we (without collapsing 1) actually justify 2?  That is the crux of the matter.  How do we appropriate the centrality – both in how we think about God and in how we structure our time together in worship on Sunday – of the Eucharist in the 21^st century?  How can we learn from the past in a way that doesn’t re-enter into those old battles which are fought with terms that no longer fit into a cohesive whole?