Made present

What passes for sacramentology these days drives me insane sometimes. I get into the occasional friendly debate on the topic, being a believer in only two sacraments (baptism and holy communion) at a school populated mostly by Roman Catholics, and being an advocate of the propitatory aspect of the Eucharist. Why? Because the Eucharist is propitiatory!

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 The Temple sacrifices which were offered by the Israelites to God have been superseded by the final sacrifice which God Incarnate made for us on the cross, and all believers in that ultimate sacrifice can share in it through the consecrated bread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.

The back of my mind

So i’m pretty inclined toward Predestination, as far as doctrines of salvation go, but a question is bugging me, always in the back of my mind. How does a doctrine of predestination that assumes that not all are saved, jive with the belief in an all-loving God?

Values

I just wrote a short paper on the values of the New Testament world, and why readers of the New Testament would benefit from a better understanding of those values. Though i’m talking about something pretty specific, I think that it holds true for any number of other situations, entirely unrelated to Theology.

                Understanding the key values of the world in which Christ lived and taught, and in which His Apostles and the people through whom His life and ministry have been transmitted to us would grant a greater understanding of the books of the New Testament because it would allow the reader to place him or herself more firmly in the place of the intended audience of the New Testament. The books of the New Testament were written by people living a particular culture with its own value system, for other members of that same culture. The values and unspoken assumptions of the authors of the New Testament books form the underpinning of the message they were intending to communicate when they wrote about Christ. To look at the New Testament through the lens of our modern, technologically advanced, individualistic, consumptionist culture, or through the religious lens of the modern Christian community is to read the New Testament outside its proper context.

                For instance, the need for Christ to assert His own honour before teaching is a nuance of the Gospel narratives that would elude the modern reader. Because Christ stood outside of the natural groupings of the people to whom he was speaking, his honour was necessarily suspect in their eyes. When Christ says “Verily, I say to you…” before his teachings in the Gospel narratives, he is not making an assertion of the truthfulness of His teachings or the validity of His wisdom and promises of salvation, he was communicating to his audience that He was treating as persons of honour, worthy of the truth, and they should treat Him as though he posses and deserves the truth. The modern reader may only understand that Christ is assuring His audience of His truthfulness, the all-important underpinning of honour, a pivotal value of Christ’s listeners, may be totally lost. And thus the implications, that Christ felt that He would not regarded as honourable in the eyes of others, that He had to demand of them a grant of honour before he could teach, and just how alien that demand must have been, would not be understood.

                Because Jesus was speaking to a collectivistic society, his message relates largely to the dyadic mindset of that society. Rather than speaking directly to individuals, Christ was addressing natural and optional groups, people rather than persons. Our modern individualistic society means that we are not at all inclined to hear Jesus’ message the same way as the people to whom it was originally addressed. Christ was addressing a group to whom the expression of individuality was highly undesirable, and group conformity was the ideal, since people defined their individual identity entirely in relation to others. Today this dyadic paradigm is completely alien; it is contrary to the values and the structure of our modern society. When we, as persons shaped by an individualistic outlook read Christ’s message, and those of the other New Testament writers, we are reading them from outside a fundamental part of the frame of reference in which they are written. We must consciously remember to whom what we are reading was originally addressed, and try to consider the message from within the dyadic, collectivist paradigm.

The universal and communal message that Jesus taught was even more at odds with the society in which He preached than it is with our own. Though our modern Western culture and paradigms has been informed by that message, though they do not always follow that message, there was no such frame of reference in Jesus’ world nor in the world that surrounded the writers and compilers of the New Testament. When we read the Gospels today we are unconsciously informed by their message to begin with. Christ’s ideals shape, in large part, those of our society, and thus their revolutionary nature is not necessarily apparent. In so far as we assume, even before reading, that Christ’s teaching on loving one’s neighbour is the proper thing to do, we will not feel its impact on a society in which one’s neighbour is, at best, a potential challenge to one’s honour, and at worst one’s enemy simply because that neighbour is not of your own natural grouping.

                Though both our own society and that of the New Testament hold (held) envy to be a negative, to what degree it is thought to be a negative differs. Whereas today envy can be positive if it leads to drive and ambition, inspiring one to achieve what one sees others having, to the people of the New Testament to act upon envy was to dishonourably achieve success at the expense of another’s possession of the limited good. Envy, since it was directed only to persons of equal status, violated the rule of honour which maintained the cohesion of the all-important group. And even if envy is non-productive, in our society it is entirely inward – those around the envious individual are not involved. However in the world of the New Testament, envy sullied the entire group, as the shame it brought about was as communal as every other aspect of self and identity. This shared shame would make envy totally unacceptable. Because this is never stated explicitly in the books of the New Testament, the modern reader would be completely unaware of the extreme nature of the cultural perception of envy of the people they are reading about. The extreme and fundamental nature of envy makes it a pivotal, but alien value which colours the New Testament writings as much as honour and collectivism.

                The values of the world of the New Testament, and the groups that populated it, form the unspoken underpinning of the entire New Testament. While one can certainly read the books of the New Testament today and derive meaning and understanding from, with an understanding of those values, one can develop a deeper understanding of the meaning, and be the wiser for it.