By Father Arthur H. Couratin, 1951, sometime Principal of Saint Stephen's House, Oxford...
It is very difficult for an Anglican to explain to a non-Anglican the Anglican situation in connection with the Eucharist. The Church of England, so far as the present writer understands the matter, has never claimed to bear witness to any particular aspect of the Gospel, nor does it stand by any particular confession. It possesses a liturgy and a set of Articles; but the Articles are only Articles of Agreement, and the liturgy was only imposed to secure peace and quietness. It claims rather to teach the Apostolic Faith, and to minister the sacraments of the Gospel and other traditional rites of the Church, by means of a ministry inherited from the Apostles, to the people of England. It denies that either it or any other Chnrch is or can be infallible. If it were to make any claim for itself, it would declare that it endeavoured to present undifferentiated Christianity, and had always tried to avoid the systems of Rome on the one hand and of Geneva on the other, on the ground that systematisation is normally effected only at the expense of part of the truth. No such thing as an Anglicanism, comparable to Lutheranism or Calvinism, is therefore desirable or even possible; and any attempt to establish as Anglicanism anyone of the theological traditions within the Church of England has always been strenuously resisted. Insofar as a Court of Appeal in matters of doctrine is required, it is generally thought to be found in the Scriptures as interpreted by the Catholic Fathers and right reason; and the various theological traditions in the Church of England stress the various ingredients differently, as might be expected. To the outsider such a position seems intolerable; but to the born Anglican it seems preferable to any of the present alternatives.
The various eucharistic traditions in the Church of England depend inevitably upon its history during the four hundred years of its separation from the rest of Western Christendom, Catholic and Protestant. Inevitably, then, they must be looked at historically.
The Church of England was never satisfied with a Zwinglian doctrine of the Presence and a nuda commemoratio view of the Sacrifice. Within a generation of Cranmer's death, teachers like Jewel and Hooker were reasserting some notion of Consecration, and their successors a generation later were playing with a fuller doctrine of Sacrifice. When, therefore, the Revisers were producing the present edition of the liturgy in 1661, a number of changes were made or proposed which mark a heightening of eucharistic doctrine. In the matter of the Presence, Cranmer's prayer for the communicants before reception is labelled the Prayer of Consecration; the elements must now be reverently disposed of and not treated as common food, and if more bread or wine is needed for communion, a second consecration is demanded. But the attempt to introduce a higher doctrine of Sacrifice failed. The phrases proposed, however- 'by the merits and death of thy Son Jesus Christ, now represented unto thee, and through faith in his blood, who maketh intercession for us at thy right hand' - show the lines on which the Revisers of the seventeenth century were thinking. It was the reading of the Fathers which led to this reinterpretation of the Anglican eucharistic tradition. But, as Professor Ratcliff writes, 'for all their patristic interest the Anglican divines of the seventeenth century never abandoned a reformed position with regard to the effects of consecration. Their eucharistic doctrine was mostly Calvinist'. Their sacrificial doctrine was correspondingly limited. They regarded the representation of the Lord's death effected through the Eucharist as symbolical in the modern sense of the word; and they restricted any objective offering in the Eucharist to the Church's material gifts of bread and wine.
With the Tractarian Revival of the nineteenth century a further development took place in the Anglican eucharistic thinking. Again, the appeal was made to the Fathers of the Church, and on their authority those who came under the influence of the Tractarians claimed to teach still higher doctrines of Presence and Sacrifice. The notion of Consecration, reintroduced by theologians like Jewel and finally expressed in the rubrics of the Prayer Book of 1661, was now expanded under cover of these rubrics into a doctrine of an Objective Real Presence, which barely stopped short of Conversion; and this was expressed in a ceremonial which departed wholly from the reformed tradition. The seventeenth-century notion of Representative Sacrifice was similarly expanded into a doctrine of Real Sacrifice, which bore a striking resemblance to that of the Council of Trent. But since Cranmer had specially designed the Anglican liturgy to exclude any doctrine of eucharistic Sacrifice in the traditional sense of that term, and since the seventeenth-century Revisers had failed in their attempt to readjust the liturgy to their doctrine of Representative Sacrifice, it proved impossible for the Tractarians and their Anglo-Catholic successors to express a still higher sacrificial doctrine through that 1661 English liturgy. Many therefore have taken the law into their own hands and attempted to turn the Prayer of Consecration into a sacrificial prayer, by attaching to it the Prayer of Oblation on the lines of the rejected proposal of 1661.
Such action received a certain justification from the statements on Anglican eucharistic doctrine made to the Pope by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in 1897, and repeated to the Patriarchs of Eastern Christendom by the Lambeth Conference in 1930, which form the nearest approach to an official exposition of modern Anglican teaching on the subject.
It was here maintained that we do not believe the Eucharist to be a nude commemoration of the Sacrifice of the Cross; but that in the Prayer Book liturgy, besides offering the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, and the sacrifice of ourselves, our souls and bodies, we also offer a material oblation of bread and wine, and Sacrificium Crucis Patri proponimus et repraesentamus. A minimising interpretation of this phrase seems to require at least a doctrine of Representative Sacrifice; a maximising interpretation seems to allow of a doctrine of Real Sacrifice.
Taking into consideration the history of the Church of England, one is not surprised to find three main traditions of eucharistic teaching.
(1) The first stands by the sixteenth-century Reformers and teaches a Presence of Christ in the ordinance as a whole, but denies any particular Presence in connection with the act of Consecration or the act of Communion, and any Sacrifice other than the self-oblation of the communicants.
(2) The second stands by the seventeenth-century Revisers and teaches a Real Presence of Christ in the act of Communion, but denies any objcctive doctrine of Consecration and therefore any possibility of the worship of Christ in the consecrated Sacrament. In the matter of Sacrifice this second tradition is a little less eager to follow the lead of the seventeenth-century theologians; and there is little emphasis upon the material oblation of the elements or upon the Representative Sacrifice among the followers of this tradition.
(3) The third stands by the nineteenth-century Revivalists and teaches an Objective Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament and a Real Sacrifice propitiatory for the living and the dead.
Since the Church of England makes her appeal to the Scriptures as interpreted by the Fathers and right reason, it may be that the Anglican contribution to modern eucharistic thinking is to withdraw from the post-mediaeval disputes of the Catholic and Protestant theologians, to refuse to be conditioned by her own post-mediaeval formularies, and to make some attempt to understand what the patristic theologians really thought about the Eucharist. This is the method suggested by such teachers as Professor Ratcliff, Dom Gregory Dix and Fr. Hebert; and it is the method which will be followed in the remainder of this paper.
A convenient starting-point will be found in the versicle which immediately precedes the eucharistic Preface in the Prayer Book Communion Service - 'Let us give thanks unto the Lord our God (= our Lord God). The eucharistic action is primarily a thanksgiving; it is a thanksgiving offered to the God of the Bible (Lord=Kyrios=Adonai= Jehovah); and He is declared to be our God, because as members of the Church we are His peculiar people, the new Israel of God.
This eucharistic thanksgiving is the Anamnesis, the Memorial, of the Lord Christ. It is not merely a memorial of His death, or of His death and resurrection; it is a memorial of all that He has done and suffered for us. That is why the eucharistic thanksgiving must thank God for the creation of the world and of men through the Son-Word; for the Incarnation of the same Son-Word by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary; for the overthrow of the powers of evil and the deliverance of men by His passion and resurrection; and for His acquiring of the People of God for His own possession, as the true worshippers of His Father.
But the People of God must not come before the Lord empty-handed. God, of course, does not stand in need of anything from us; and indeed we can only give Him of His own. But to come before Him empty-handed would be to show ourselves unthankful. Besides, the People of God is a royal priesthood, and a priest must have somewhat to offer. We therefore offer not only our praises and thanksgivings, but also bread and wine, as an expression of our thankfulness, in fact as a thankoffering.
This thankoffering is not something which we have thought out for ourselves, nor something to which we have been led by the Spirit of God in the life of the Church. It is something which Jesus Christ, the night before He suffered, commanded us to offer. When He took bread and wine and gave thanks and said 'This is my Body', 'This is my Blood', He was teaching the new oblation of the New Covenant. The sacrifices of the Old Covenant have been rejected by God; and only the pure offering, which is offered in every place among the Gentiles, is now accepted. For it alone is offered by the People of the New Covenant; and they alone have been constituted the Priests of the most High God.
What is the purpose of this dominically appointed thank-offering? It is to enable the People of God to gain admittance to the heavenly worship. It is the new and living way into the heavenly places, where we have a High Priest who ever lives to make intercession for us. It is through the veil which is His Flesh, and it is consecrated in His Blood. By means of it we come boldly to the throne of grace, primarily, no doubt, to give thanks and to worship, but also to obtain mercy and to find grace in time of need. So we fulfil the end for which we were made at the creation, the end to which we have been restored by the redemption. For we enter into heaven itself, we stand before the face of God with angels and archangels, and we minister to Him by offering with them the sacrifice of praise and confessing to the adorable Name of Jehovah Sabaoth.
We are now in a position to appreciate the other versicle which precedes the eucharistic Preface, 'Lift up your hearts'. Originally peculiar to the Eucharist, it proclaims the fact that the scene of eucharistic worship is laid in heaven. Christians have an altar; but that altar is in the heavens; and it is thither that our prayers and oblations are directed. For our Great High Priest has passed into the heavens, and is at once the Priest and Sacrifice of the Heavenly Altar. But He is also the High Priest of our offerings, the Angel of the New Covenant, by whose hands our oblations are carried up to the Altar on high. As He offers our sacrifice, so we are enabled to offer His; and the Passion is the Lord's Sacrifice which we offer in the heavenly places, where it abides for ever in the glory of the divine acceptance.
The Holy Thing which we receive when we partake of the Sacrifice is the glorified humanity of Jesus. Our earthly bread and wine becomes His heavenly Body and Blood, so that there is in the consecrated gifts an earthly thing and a heavenly. This consecration is effected when the Holy People constitute the thankoffering by uttering as the Lord's Anamnesis the thanksgiving over the gifts. He said: 'Do this as my Anamnesis'. Therefore the Church offers the gifts with thanksgiving. He said: 'This is my Body', 'This is my Blood'. Therefore the Church believes that the gifts so offered become what He has promised. If a moment of consecration is looked for, it is naturally found in the recitation of the institution narrative. For this at once rehearses the divine command and the divine promise before God, and identifies the Church's Eucharist with the Lord's. But we are here in a different and perhaps more spacious world as compared with the disputes of the Reformation period over Presence and Sacrifice. For we and our gifts are taken out of this present age into the heavenlies; and so we taste of the powers of the world to come.
How, then, is the eucharistic action accomplished by the People of God? Everyone must make the Eucharist to God in his own order. The laity must produce their individual gifts or sacrifices of bread and wine, as the outward sign of their own self oblation. The deacons must carry the gifts of the people up to the altar. The bishop and presbyters must then offer the gifts, by uttering the thanksgiving which constitutes them as the thankoffering, the new oblation of the New Covenant. The presbyters and deacons must then take the gifts and distribute them to the whole People of God, whether they are present in church or not. For all are members of the royal priesthood, and all must therefore partake of the Covenant Sacrifice. There is no question here of a priest offering sacrifice instead of the people or instead of Christ. It is rather that Christ, embodied in people, deacon, presbyter and bishop alike, performs the various actions of the eucharistic rite.
This is the way in which the Catholic Fathers and the Ancient Bishops, Cyprian and Tertullian, Hippolytus and Irenaeus and Justin, Ignatius and Clement, and the authors of Apocalypse and Hebrews, thought about the Eucharist and carried it out. Perhaps the Church of England can best serve Christendom by setting her own eucharistic house in order in accordance with the standard to which she professes to appeal.
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