I profer these Gospel verses to anyone who refutes the assertion that the message of the Gospel, the message of Christ, is love.

Proceeding upon the grounds that one believes in the Real Presence, be that through transubstantiation, transignification, consubstantion, of simply through an acceptance of divine mystery, then when we receive holy communion, we are sharing in the bodily sacrifice of Christ on the cross, a sacrifice made for the satisfaction of the sins of all humanity. Yes, we are engaged in an act of thanksgiving and memorial, but in so far as we are sharing in the act of Christ’s sacrifice, we are engaged in a propitiatory act.

Now, I am not suggesting that consuming the consecrated gifts propitiates God. That statement would deny efficacy of Christ’s own sacrifice, by suggesting that further satisfaction must be made on the part of the believer. However, the act of Christ’s passion was itself propitiatory. Christ died on the cross to make satisfaction for the sinfulness of humanity (whether one views sin in a legalistic sense or one of spiritual health or of relationship to God is another issue), so that all who believe in Christ should have restitution made for their sins on their account, an act of which no human being, in our present sinful state, is capable without God’s help. This was sacrifice after the model of those making the sacrifice eating of the sacrificial animals to partake of the sacrifice’s real efficacy. When Christ offered His body and His blood at the last supper, He was giving us the ability to share in His sacrifice, to receive the real effect which His death has wrought in this world. The Temple sacrifices which were offered by the Israelites to God have been superseded by the final sacrifice which God Incarnate made for us on the cross, and all believers in that ultimate sacrifice can share in it through the consecrated bread and wine which are Christ body and His blood made present for us.

But people today totally lose sight of this all-important element of the Eucharistic celebration. Reformed memorialism formally did away with propitiation, making the Eucharist into nothing more than an act of memorial of the Christ who is not present. Today propitiation is socially inconvenient. Secular thinkers (Sam Harris spring immediately to mind) compare the propitiatory sacrifice of Christ on the cross with blood sacrifice of animals to appease pagan gods, an entirely fair statement, but one which they consider critical and so many Christians consider derogatory. So we conveniently lose sight of propitiation, in favour of thanksgiving and memorial, even when some of us enforce the doctrine of the Real Presence which is frankly little more than ritual cannibalism without the doctrine of Propitiation.

Aside from us forgetting our fundamental theology and over-emphasising what remains of the Eucharist, what does this mean for the community of believers? We’re now desperately seeking a meaning for the Real Presence. I always marvel at the enthusiasm with which my young Roman Catholic schoolmates regard the Cult of the Eucharist. The Real Presence is now only an object of adoration, as if Christ would ever want us to adore His physical body. The Lamb is not for beholding, He did not sacrifice Himself on the cross so we could venerate bread. The Real Presence was not shared with us for veneration, but for sharing in the ultimate act of love that was the passion.

Though it may like an unnecessary trapping of backward theology, the propitiatory nature of the Eucharist is fundamental to the meaning of holy communion. Without it, we have a whole not only in our sacramentology, but in our entire systematic theology.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Emil Frankl

Creative Disobedience by Dorothee Soelle (previously titled in English “Beyond Mere Obedience”)

Or was it nembutsu?

                White’s posited Christian alternative to what he perceives to be the dominant, and ecologically detrimental, Western Christian attitude toward nature, St Francis of Assisi, does not represent the hope for a modern environmentally-conscious Christianity that White supposes. While Francis’ life is remarkable in the history of Western Christianity for his loving all creation equally, the environmentalism of St Francis (if indeed that term can be applied, since our modern concern for ecological balance and species survival was not present in Francis’ thought) is far from sufficient to address the concerns of the world today. The sentiment that creation, from the lowliest animal to the very Sun, exists in a fraternity of the love of God, and that all God’s creations are symbols of Him, such as is evident in St Francis’ Canticle of the Creatures, while suitable as a vehicle for spiritual development, does not translate into positive action. St Francis’ attitude more closely resembles that of White’s preferred model of sainthood: the contemplative Eastern[1] Christian Saint.[2]

                However, the problems facing the world today cannot be stopped by the pleasant inaction of the contemplative Saint. Though it is possible that had the larger Western Christian tradition adopted St Francis’ attitude toward the natural world, we would not be in the ecological crisis in which we find ourselves.[3] However, the damage, regardless of its cause, is done, and an attitude of action,[4] framed within a new paradigm for Christian thought, is necessary if we are to hope to un-do that damage.

It would be a mistake to assert that the dualism which White argues is the very source of the problem is present in all Western Christian thought. In fact, attempting to reconcile Christian theology with the revered categories of ancient Greek philosophy, the greatest minds of the Western Middle Ages posited a decidedly monistic relation of God to creation.[1] Drawing principally upon the categories of neo-Platonic metaphysics, and thus also on the assumptions of Plato’s monistic naturalism, such figures as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Nicholas of Cusa posited an ontology in which creation is spun out of the very stuff of God.[2]

Augustine soliloquizes to God in the Confessions: “[t]herefore, Thou spakest, and they [heaven, earth, the air, and the waters] were made, and in Thy Word[3] Thou madest them.”[4] To Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, “[a]ll things derive in hierarchical order from the Supre-Divine Godhead.”[5] Thus all of creation descends from the highest and most exalted height of God to the lowest material things, but never vitiating in substance. Thomas Aquinas, though attempting to operate within an Aristotelian framework, was Platonic in his interpretations. Thomas rationalizes cause as the First Cause, and thus the solution to the problem of causality that without an external cause the causal chain of creation would necessarily ad infinitum.[6] For Nicolas of Cusa, God contained within Himself all the “multiplicity of creation.”[7] Thus God both contains and transcends His creation.[8] This consubstantiality of God and creation is the very dialectical opposite of the dualism of God and creation that White argues was promulgated by medieval Christianity, even more so than a “nature as sacred” belief system, which is assumed to be the system of belief that White feels Christianity supplanted.[9]