The Eucharist: ceremony, doctrine, and the real presence

Following up on my previous reflection on finding Christ in the church—which is to say, in the Eucharist—I want to ask four questions in this post:

1. Is every attempt at celebrating the Eucharist valid—that is, just in virtue of making the attempt?

2. If not, then what constitutes eucharistic validity?

3. What is the relationship between the ritual ceremonial features of eucharistic celebration and a given tradition’s eucharistic doctrine?

4. Is it in any way wrong—offensive, unkind, or uncharitable—to suggest that those traditions and churches that deny the real presence in their celebrations of the Eucharist are in fact correct about their own celebrations, if not about others’?

The first question is easily answered: No. That is, merely the desire to celebrate the Eucharist is not and could never be sufficient as a criterion for valid celebration. I am not aware of any Christian tradition that says so; it is ecumenical and perhaps unanimous in church history that more is required than the sheer intention to do it right. You’ve also got to, you know, do it right.

How to do it right, though? This second question raises a whole host of further questions. I like to put these questions to my ministry majors, most of whom come from non-denominational Evangelical backgrounds. They include but are not limited to:

• Who can celebrate, that is, preside at the Supper?

• Is ordination a condition of celebrating? Is baptism? Is belief in Christ?

• What elements must be used?

• What prayers, if any, must be prayed?

• What Scriptures, if any, must be read?

• What petitions, if any, must be made?

• What invocations, if any, must be uttered?

I have students who, on first blush, are willing to say that anyone may preside, any elements may be used, and no prayers or Scriptures or other ritual prescriptions are either necessary or sufficient for the meal to be validly celebrated. I know adult Christians and pastors who agree. (Above I said I knew of no Christian traditions that claimed such a thing; I know plenty of individuals who do!) Let’s say that such a position is one pole on the continuum.

The other pole is high catholic ecclesial traditions. For these, a valid Eucharist must be celebrated by a validly ordained priest—ordained, that is, by a bishop in succession from the apostles—using only precise elements (fermented wine and either leavened or unleavened bread) and following specific liturgical ritual rubrics, which require certain Scriptures, prayers, and invocations to be performed as components of a larger ritual complex, wherein symbolic deeds are just as important as the words spoken.

Naturally, a number of approaches to eucharistic celebration lie along the spectrum between these poles. You will notice, on a moment’s reflection, that the “higher” a tradition’s doctrine of what occurs in the Eucharist, the “higher” its ritual celebration of the meal. That is, the closer you are to affirming the real presence or transubstantiation, the more likely you are to seeing ordination, liturgical rubrics, and carefully orchestrated rituals as the most fitting (and, indeed, necessary) manner of celebrating the Supper. And vice versa: the further you are from affirming the real presence, the less ceremony attending your celebration of the ritual—as well as, in literal terms, the frequency with which you celebrate it, and the amount of time you set aside in public worship in order to do so.

To my third question, then, consider the following image:

This is my rough-and-ready plot graph meant to illustrate the trend I have in mind, namely, that eucharistic doctrine and ceremony are yoked together: the more of one, the more of the other; the less of one, the less of the other.

Notice that I’ve created four quadrants, and that two of them are empty. There simply aren’t large-scale Christian denominations or ecclesial traditions marked by (#1) high eucharistic ceremony wedded to low eucharistic doctrine or (#3) high eucharistic doctrine wedded to low eucharistic ceremony. It’s easy to understand why. If you believe that in this sacramental meal the living Christ, risen from the dead and reigning from heaven, is bodily present under the sign of bread and wine, then as a matter of course you will restrict its celebration to certain people (and not others), under certain conditions (and not others), by means of certain specified rituals (and not others).

On the other hand, if you believe that nothing happens to the elements—indeed, if you believe that the meal, while instituted by Jesus and important to observe, neither communicates grace to participants nor, in terms of divine action or presence, serves as the site of anything unique by comparison to other Christian practices like prayer, singing, and reading Scripture—then you will be less anxious to prescribe the who, the what, and the how of the meal’s celebration. At the outer limits, a populist form of public worship underwritten by a democratized priesthood of all believers will ultimately result in no rituals, conditions, or criteria whatsoever for the celebration of the Supper. Not only can anyone do it; they can do it whenever and wherever and however they please.

As I wrote in my first post, this is neither caricature nor slander. I’ve known people and churches that use cupcakes and soda or Cheez-its and apple juice. As I noted in the spring of 2020, the great question facing “low” churches—not all churches, mind you, for the majority of churches require at least an ordained pastor and a gathering of believers in person—was whether to encourage or discourage believers from self-administering Communion under lockdown. Alas, nearly all such congregations not only encouraged self-administration and “private celebration” (sine populo!) but presupposed without question that to do so was both possible and salutary.

For this reason, among others, my students (including the future ministers among them) take for granted that I, a layperson alone at home, streaming Sunday worship from my couch or bed, may and ought to rummage around in my pantry for plausibly suitable elements to administer to myself while the people on my laptop screen celebrate the Supper. Perhaps this strikes you as a beautiful adaptation of God’s people to the digital age, whether in extremis (under conditions of a global pandemic) or in ordinary circumstances. Either way, that is not how it strikes me, nor how it would have struck any premodern Christian, including Protestants.

Be that as it may, the point here is that “low” eucharistic doctrine underlies this “low” approach to celebration. And that doctrine teaches: nothing happens. That is, there is no eucharistic miracle, there is no consecration, there is no real presence, there is no transubstantiation. These are symbols; not less, but also not more. God instituted these symbols and therefore they are important in the life of the church. But they are not sacramental in the superstitious sense; they are not (eyes roll, hands wave) the body and blood of Christ; they are not changed. They are food and drink and remain so. Hence the relaxed approach to their observance.

We come, then, to the last of my four questions. Is it unbecoming to agree with churches that deny the real presence that their celebrations of the Lord’s Supper are merely symbolic? I do not see how it is. It is an odd sort of imposition to inform Christian traditions that explicitly reject the doctrine of eucharistic change that God, in spite of their states belief and practice, changes the elements anyway. They don’t ask him to, and they don’t believe he does it. Even if God were willing to grant their petition, surely they have to ask?

I hope my tone doesn’t sound facetious. It’s anything but. When I talk about the theology of the Eucharist with low-church folks a few things tend to occur, usually in conjunction:

1. General reaffirmed agreement about the propriety of “low” eucharistic ceremony, i.e., approval of few or no restrictions on who can celebrate or how.

2. General openness toward a “higher” view of eucharistic doctrine, up to and including a full-bore Lutheran or Orthodox or Catholic view of the real presence. (John 6 all by itself does a lot of work here.)

3. A wary sense of unease or offense at the notion that #1 and #2 don’t or can’t go together, especially the implication (logically entailed) that churches whose teaching and practice overtly repudiate the real presence do not enjoy the real presence in their eucharistic celebrations.

4. A vague and sometimes debilitating anxiety that a believer in quadrant #4 who wants the real presence may need to join a tradition in quadrant #2 to find it.

To be clear, the first two of these come joined at the hip, and then the next two become options at a kind of ecclesial-spiritual-doctrinal fork in the road. Because the fourth option is so existentially threatening, the third is more common; but then, most people, being honest with themselves, can admit the discrepancy that lies at its heart. Which leaves them stuck if number four is a nonstarter.

The upshot of all this, for my purposes in this post, is fourfold.

First, not everyone believes in the real presence. It is therefore not an unkindness, either from a “low” or from a “high” perspective, to suggest that (at a minimum) certain attempts at celebrating the Lord’s Supper do not enjoy or realize the real presence. Once, years ago, I was attending a church in which the Supper was being celebrated. Something was said about the body and blood of Christ. A child near me (not mine) asked a minister near him whether the bread and cup really were Jesus’s body and blood. She laughed and told him, “No, it’s just crackers and grape juice.”

(Old Flannery is turning over in her grave.)

Second, doctrine and practice go together. Both theologically and practically, “high” doctrine (=real presence) requires “high” ceremony (=ordination, rubrics, prayers, etc.). Likewise “low” doctrine always and everywhere involves “low” ceremony. This is a matter of description and prescription alike: the one because the other. Christian division makes the connection here crystal clear; no one is in disagreement about the meta-point, only about which quadrant is the right one.

Third, low-church traditions cannot bootstrap themselves into “high” eucharistic doctrine. It can’t be done. To move from memorialism to real presence necessitates massive doctrinal, liturgical, pastoral, and ecclesiological transformation: in effect, a comprehensive reversal of the many Christian revolutions initiated in the sixteenth century. To do so would mean moving wholesale from quadrant #4 to quadrant #2. But that would be to “revert” from low to high, from biblicist to confessional, from congregationalist to episcopal, from evangelical to catholic. It would be to change traditions. Traditions don’t change in that way, though. Either they die or they (their members) join some other, preexisting tradition. There’s no third way here.

Fourth, subjective desire alone cannot change the elements. I’ve known more than a few folks, whether friends or students, who accept what I’ve laid out here yet who remain dissatisfied—stuck in the third “option” I outlined above. What they resolve to do is cut the Gordian knot through sheer force of will. That is, they choose to believe, in spite of their church’s teaching and practice, that the elements of the Supper in which they partake are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Even though no rituals are observed, even though relevant prayers are not offered, even though anyone at all might be presiding, even though the person presiding might say out loud that these are nothing more than symbols—nevertheless, the individual in question chooses to believe that, at least for him or her, the elements have been consecrated; that they communicate grace; that in them Christ himself is really and truly present: body, blood, soul, divinity.

There is a grave irony in this posture, understandable though it may be at the emotional level. It is a kind of private magic. It turns the old Protestant accusation against the Mass (“hocus pocus,” hoc est corpus meum) on its head. I alone, in the confines of my own skull, have the power, through nothing but mental intention, to make (an attempt at observing) the Lord’s Supper into a valid celebration of the blessed sacrament of Christ’s real presence—at least for me, the individual communicant.

Surely I am not alone in wanting to avoid this posture at all costs. No such power exists. Either God in Christ instituted the Eucharist to be the perpetual sacrament of his real presence, his body and blood, or he did not. Either the meal rightly celebrated makes Christ available in that way or it does not. Either we celebrate it accordingly or we do not.

Regardless of one’s answer (or the answer), as the illustration earlier showed, there really isn’t a middle ground. The church is the locus of this marriage of doctrine and practice, not the individual. Which is why, in my original post, I framed the whole matter with a single question phrased in two ways: Where can I find Jesus? Where can I receive the Eucharist? Each of which turns out to be synonymous and therefore convertible with a third question that, for so many pilgrims of faith, governs both: Where can I find the church, the body and bride of Christ?

As I insisted there, so I repeat now: It’s a worthwhile question, one of the most important you can ever ask in this life. Even in the confusions of ecclesial division and brokenness, it’s worth pursuing with the utmost seriousness.

Tony Judt on the New Left in the '60s

It was a curiosity of the age that the generational split transcended class as well as national experience. The rhetorical expression of youthful revolt was, of course, confined to a tiny minority: even in the US in those days, most young people did not attend university and college protests did not necessarily represent youth at large. But the broader symptoms of generational dissidence—music, clothing, language—were unusually widespread thanks to television, transistor radios and the internationalization of popular culture. By the late ’60s, the culture gap separating young people from their parents was perhaps greater than at any point since the early 19th century.

This breach in continuity echoed another tectonic shift. For an older generation of left-leaning politicians and voters, the relationship between ‘workers’ and socialism—between ‘the poor’ and the welfare state—had been self-evident. The ‘Left’ had long been associated with—and largely dependent upon— the urban industrial proletariat. Whatever their pragmatic attraction to the middle classes, the reforms of the New Deal, the Scandinavian social democracies and Britain’s welfare state had rested upon the presumptive support of a mass of blue collar workers and their rural allies.

But in the course of the 1950s, this blue collar proletariat was fragmenting and shrinking. Hard graft in traditional factories, mines and transport industries was giving way to automation, the rise of service industries and an increasingly feminized labor force. Even in Sweden, the social democrats could no longer hope to win elections simply by securing a majority of the traditional labor vote. The old Left, with its roots in working class communities and union organizations, could count on the instinctive collectivism and communal discipline (and subservience) of a corralled industrial work force. But that was a shrinking percentage of the population.

The new Left, as it began to call itself in those years, was something very different. To a younger generation, ‘change’ was not to be brought about by disciplined mass action defined and led by authorized spokesmen. Change itself appeared to have moved on from the industrial West into the developing or ‘third’ world. Communism and capitalism alike were charged with stagnation and ‘repression’. The initiative for radical innovation and action now lay either with distant peasants or else with a new set of revolutionary constituents. In place of the male proletariat there were now posited the candidacies of ‘blacks’, ‘students’, ‘women’ and, a little later, homosexuals.

Since none of these constituents, at home or abroad, was separately represented in the institutions of welfare societies, the new Left presented itself quite consciously as opposing not merely the injustices of the capitalist order but above all the ‘repressive tolerance’ of its most advanced forms: precisely those benevolent overseers responsible for liberalizing old constraints or providing for the betterment of all.

Above all, the new Left—and its overwhelmingly youthful constituency—rejected the inherited collectivism of its predecessor. To an earlier generation of reformers from Washington to Stockholm, it had been self-evident that ‘justice’, ‘equal opportunity’ or ‘economic security’ were shared objectives that could only be attained by common action. Whatever the shortcomings of over-intrusive top-down regulation and control, these were the price of social justice—and a price well worth paying.

A younger cohort saw things very differently. Social justice no longer preoccupied radicals. What united the ’60s generation was not the interest of all, but the needs and rights of each. ‘Individualism’—the assertion of every person’s claim to maximized private freedom and the unrestrained liberty to express autonomous desires and have them respected and institutionalized by society at large—became the left-wing watchword of the hour. Doing ‘your own thing’, ‘letting it all hang out’, ‘making love, not war’: these are not inherently unappealing goals, but they are of their essence private objectives, not public goods. Unsurprisingly, they led to the widespread assertion that ‘the personal is political’.

The politics of the ’60s thus devolved into an aggregation of individual claims upon society and the state. ‘Identity’ began to colonize public discourse: private identity, sexual identity, cultural identity. From here it was but a short step to the fragmentation of radical politics, its metamorphosis into multiculturalism. Curiously, the new Left remained exquisitely sensitive to the collective attributes of humans in distant lands, where they could be gathered up into anonymous social categories like ‘peasant’, ‘post-colonial’, ‘subaltern’ and the like. But back home, the individual reigned supreme.

However legitimate the claims of individuals and the importance of their rights, emphasizing these carries an unavoidable cost: the decline of a shared sense of purpose. Once upon a time one looked to society—or class, or community—for one’s normative vocabulary: what was good for everyone was by definition good for anyone. But the converse does not hold. What is good for one person may or may not be of value or interest to another. Conservative philosophers of an earlier age understood this well, which was why they resorted to religious language and imagery to justify traditional authority and its claims upon each individual.

But the individualism of the new Left respected neither collective purpose nor traditional authority: it was, after all, both new and left. What remained to it was the subjectivism of private—and privately-measured—interest and desire. This, in turn, invited a resort to aesthetic and moral relativism: if something is good for me it is not incumbent upon me to ascertain whether it is good for someone else—much less to impose it upon them (“do your own thing”).

True, many radicals of the ’60s were quite enthusiastic supporters of imposed choices, but only when these affected distant peoples of whom they knew little. Looking back, it is striking to note how many in western Europe and the United States expressed enthusiasm for Mao Tse-tung’s dictatorially uniform ‘cultural revolution’ while defining cultural reform at home as the maximizing of private initiative and autonomy.

In distant retrospect it may appear odd that so many young people in the ’60s identified with ‘Marxism’ and radical projects of all sorts, while simultaneously disassociating themselves from conformist norms and authoritarian purposes. But Marxism was the rhetorical awning under which very different dissenting styles could be gathered together—not least because it offered an illusory continuity with an earlier radical generation. But under that awning, and served by that illusion, the Left fragmented and lost all sense of shared purpose.

On the contrary, ‘Left’ took on a rather selfish air. To be on the Left, to be a radical in those years, was to be self-regarding, self-promoting and curiously parochial in one’s concerns. Left-wing student movements were more preoccupied with college gate hours than with factory working practices; the university-attending sons of the Italian upper-middle-class beat up underpaid policemen in the name of revolutionary justice; light-hearted ironic slogans demanding sexual freedom displaced angry proletarian objections to capitalist exploiters. This is not to say that a new generation of radicals was insensitive to injustice or political malfeasance: the Vietnam protests and the race riots of the ’60s were not insignificant. But they were divorced from any sense of collective purpose, being rather understood as extensions of individual self-expression and anger.

 These paradoxes of meritocracy—the ’60s generation was above all the successful byproduct of the very welfare states on which it poured such youthful scorn—reflected a failure of nerve. The old patrician classes had given way to a generation of well-intentioned social engineers, but neither was prepared for the radical disaffection of their children. The implicit consensus of the postwar decades was now broken, and a new, decidedly unnatural consensus was beginning to emerge around the primacy of private interest. The young radicals would never have described their purposes in such a way, but it was the distinction between praiseworthy private freedoms and irritating public constraints which most exercised their emotions. And this very distinction, ironically, described the newly emerging Right as well.

—Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (2010), pp. 85-91