Worthy Reception

In a contribution to Cultural Reformations, David Aers and Sarah Beckwith explain that “One of the chief reasons why Cranmer and other reformers thought the rejection of transubstantiation was so essential was that it negated the act of repentance and reception. If the body of Christ was ex opere operato produced by a confecting priesthood then all could receive worthily at his hands” (161). Yet this rejection of transubstantiation tended to produce its own set of tensions. They summarize a “Homily of the Worthy Receiving and Reverent Esteeming of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ,” included in a book of homilies, to illustrate.

The homily focuses on 1 Corinthians 11:29. According to to the homilist, Paul’s point is that “it is impossible to worthily receive the body, to participate in the feast if some go hungry, if some are humiliated. This is ‘not discerning the body’. So the homilist begins with an understanding of Eucharist as memory and participation against private eating and sacrifice” (161).

As the homily progresses, Aers and Beckwith detect “emergent signs that the participation so enjoined is undercut by the very techniques encouraged to reach it. They are subtle, unwitting, yet retrospectively, in the contexts of later developments, invidious.” The first problem is the homily’s treatment of Paul’s warning about the discernment of the body: “One of the claims made in the homily is that ‘the ignorant cannot without fruit and profit, exercise himself in the Lord’s sacraments.’ This seems unproblematic. But the author then claims that the Corinthian problem was ignorance: ‘St Paul, blaming the Corinthians for the profaning of the Lord’s Supper, concludeth that ignorance, both of the thing itself, and the signification thereof, was the cause of their abuse; for they came irreverently, not discerning the Lord’s body.’” Paul’s point, though was to correct “the greed and individualism that made a mockery of the body of Christ.” The homily turns this into an epistemological problem with “an epistemological cure.” The problem is ignorance of the nature of Christ’s presence, a claim that, in the authors’ view, “constitutes a bewilderingly optimistic assessment of the situation; as if knowledge and right doctrine might dispel malice, hatred, vainglory, and contempt” (162).

The second problem is an “atomization” of the body of Christ that receives the Eucharistic body: “in trying to insist that there will be no surrogation in worship, no sacrificing of the priesthood on behalf of others (‘no dumb massing’) the homilist comes to insist that ‘every one of us ought to celebrate the same, at his table, in our own persons.’ So the notion of ‘in our own persons’ becomes stressed to such an extent that the Pauline interdependencies of the body of Christ are underdeveloped, even unwittingly undermined, at least in the first part of the homily. The effect is to atomize the body even against the explicit desire and aim, as well as the theology of the supper: ‘make Christ thine own, apply his merits to thyself. Herein thou needest no other man’s help, no other sacrifice or oblation, or sacrificing priest, no mass, no means established by man’s invention’” (162).

The third problem is that the homily turns the participants’ attention from common participation in the meal to an introspection: “the homilist stresses how important it is ‘to prove, and try ourselves unfeignedly, without flattering ourselves, whether we be plants of that fruitful olive, living branches of the true vine.’ Thus our feeding, our sustenance becomes dependent not so much on the participation in the supper and our enaction of the body of Christ together but on a process of introspection whereby we could check our own worthiness. It is just this eradication of a receiving community in the very act of self-knowledge and self-recognition that becomes so exceedingly problematical in this homily and where its confident tones of dispelling the darkness of ignorance only intensify and undermine its most heartfelt aims” (162-3).

Even in rejecting transubstantiation and ex opere operato, this homily is haunted by the questions that transubstantiation is designed to answer. And that leads to distortions of the Eucharist both theological and practical.