Catholicity of Prayer III

It is in the liturgies it provides for the sacraments that the Prayer Book’s claim to be fully reformed and fully catholic – without being puritan or papist – is most contested. Naturally, the chief focus is on the service known variously as the Mass, the Lord’s Supper, the Holy Communion, or the Eucharist – all of them terms with ancient origins, and varied patterns of use among catholics and protestants. The matter chiefly contested is the nature of Christ’s presence in the sacrament, and its relation to the physical elements of bread and wine.

The most common view of the eucharist among many protestants today is memorialist and symbolic. The eucharist is a merely symbolic action, whereby Christians are reminded of Christ’s saving death on the cross – and nothing more. It’s all subjective, a testimony to the faith of the receiver. One might ask, then, if Christ is just a projection of your own convictions, a figment of your imagination. When a literary hostess in Manhattan discoursed enthusiastically to Flannery O’Connor about the “rich symbolism of the eucharist”, the writer responded “if it’s just symbolism, I say to hell with it”. If Christ is not truly present, if we have no access to Christ by means of the eucharist, then it is of no value to receivers. Merely symbolic reminders of Jesus are not Jesus. They are souvenirs, tokens of absence.

Over against such subjective memoralism, among the catholicminded, the presence of Christ in the elements themselves in realistic terms that are vaguely (“mystical”) quasi-physical or material. It’s all objective, so objective, that the faith of the receiver may seem irrelevant. The “magic mouthful” is all that is needed, a merely formal participation in a ceremony, a sign of group solidarity or institutional membership. The presence of Jesus is so completely identified with the material elements and ceremony of the community as to be indistinguishable.

These are of course one-sided sketches to the point of caricature, but they bring out the limitations of common accounts of the sacraments. The eucharist is indeed a memorial of Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice on the cross (“do this in remembrance of me”), but it is also the church’s daily sacrifice (“let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually” Heb 13:15 cf. Rom 12:1); it is a symbol of Christ’s body and blood given for us, but also a means of real participation in them (“The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?” cf 1 Cor 10:16). If, following a conventional “via media” model of Anglicanism, you tried to blend symbolic memorialism with mystical realism, you end up with an incoherent mystical muddle. In the classical Anglicanism of the Prayer Book we find something much better: an account of the sacraments that integrates without muddling objective and subjective, symbol and reality, Christ’s once for all sacrifice for us and the Church’s continual sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving; one that does justice both to reformed and catholic imperatives. The humanity of the ascended Christ is at the Father’s right hand in heaven, but according to his promise his presence is truly manifested in the world by means of his Spirit, working in the hearts and minds of men by means of the Word and Sacraments. His presence in the sacraments is “true and spiritual”, not fictive or material; and it is given to faith alone; Christ once dead dieth no more; he does not fall again in the hands of wicked men.

The earliest generation of reformers shied away from calling this a “real presence” – to them the word “real” meant “carnal” or “material”; yet Hooker speaks of “real participation” in Christ, and Andrewes of “real presence”. But there can be no doubt that a real presence “after an heavenly and spiritual manner” was held by the English reformers. As Cranmer said in his trial, “In my book I have written in more than an hundred places, that we receive the self-same body of Christ that was born of the Virgin Mary, that was crucified and buried, that rose again, ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, and the contention is only in the manner and form how we receive it. For I say (as all the old holy fathers and martyrs used to say), that we receive Christ spiritually by faith with our minds, eating his flesh and drinking his blood: so that we receive Christ’s own very natural body, but not naturally nor corporally”.