The Eucharist and Salvation

I few weeks ago I wrote that salvation in the Christian sense of the word is to become free from those forces that threaten our identity, exploit our fears and rob our lives of meaning. I also noted that these forces are that same that are currently destroying our planet, in other words, very real political and economical institutions and powers.

Salvation is something that is properly attained only in the next life, but in faith we are able to receive some of this freedom already in this life. This is indeed the purpose of the Church: to make some of the future freedom present in this world.

In what way does the ritual of the Eucharist proclaim this freedom? In several ways.

When participating in the Eucharist we are strengthened in our identity, because we see ourselves as individuals interacting with others, in a communion not based on what we do or who we are, but on God's grace. If we learn to look at other people in this way, we can also learn to look at ourselves in this way. We also learn something about being human, that is, to be human is to receive rather than to act.

When participating in the Eucharist we are able to find relief from our fear of death, because we see how Christ's death and resurrection is connected to my death and resurrection. Again, it is my bread that is used in the celebration.

When participating in the Eucharist we are shown how our lives are meaningful, by highlighting how we are called to give what we receive to others. During the epiklesis the Spirit descends upon my bread and turns it into the Body of Christ. In the same way my life is transformed and becomes meaningful when I find my relation to God and to other people.

The Sacrament of the Eucharist, then, can help us to cope with our existential situation on many different levels. These are only examples of course, and serve to connect my ideas about the sacraments to the theological ideas of sin and salvation.

Next, I will attempt a discussion on Ecclesiology. I feel this is the most difficult part of the Christian doctrine, because it seems that all models we know have outlived their usefulness. How should we think the Church in a declining culture?

The Body of Christ

It helps to understand that the bread and wine used in the Eucharist is my bread and wine. As I already mentioned, in the early church it was customary that everybody brought a piece of bread to the Service.

It is my bread and wine that is turned into the body and blood of Christ. It is not something that I am a only a witness to, it is something that involves me directly. This is why I feel it is helpful to speak of a transformation in the Eucharist. The point really is that something changes.

A friend of mine taught me this (if anyone know where he got it from I'd be happy, although I may have modified the original idea): The bread and the wine represents, respectively, my work and my play, my seriousness and my joy. When I bring my bread and my wine to the altar, and break the bread, the Spirit descends on it and turns it into the Body and Blood of Christ. The Spirit changes its meaning. In the Eucharist my whole life (not just the serious part, but also all that stuff I do for joy only) into something meaningful. It is as if God takes my life looks at it, smiles and gives it back to me with approval.

Of course, when my work and my play is turned into the Body of Christ it also becomes the Church. I realize that my work and play becomes meaningful only when I recognize how it relates to other people. By itself it lacks spirit.

The Church, then, is the community of persons that want to see their lives connected to other persons. The Eucharist is there to help us recognize that our lives really are holy, to help us overcome sin by recognizing who we really are.

The Eucharist as an Exercise for the Next World

The celebration of the Eucharist is a type of the life in the next world. Theodore of Mopsuestia, one who perhaps more deeply than any of the Fathers understood the typological character of the Church emphasized this. The sacraments were given for to be able to learn to live after the manner of "Citizens of the Kingdom of God".

In other words, when we celebrate the Eucharist we are learning something about how life in the next world will be. I think one aspect of the Eucharist is the very special sense of communion we experience in it. As I wrote in my last post, it is not a communion with people we are similar to, with people we like or get along with. Rather, it is a communion with people we in this world find it difficult to love.

We we go to the altar to receive bread and wine, we are, within the borders of this ritual, allowed to let all those things we normally base our appreciation of other people go. When we gather around the table things like class, race, gender, political affiliation, manners, personality - all such things are of no importance because the communion is not based on human love but on divine giving. Within the ritual we carry out a kind of pre-practice of how we should relate to other people in real life. Because we have the safe framework of the ritual we can experience this kind of "heavenly" communion here in life, and then slowly learn to take this experience into our daily life and let it transform our relationships to those we meet.

Communion and Community

This is the first post in a series on the Sacrament of the Eucharist, the heart of the Church. It is part of the main theme of this blog, theology in a culture in decline.

What kind of community is expressed when we celebrate the Eucharist? First of all, I think it is important to be clear about the fact that it is not in fact a community with the people we celebrate the Eucharist with, that is the people in the same room. Indeed these persons are mere symbols of a much wider community, the worldwide community reaching through the ages. This is of great importance, because we can easily be lead to believe that we are somehow ordered to be very close friends we the people we go to church with. I think that notion is built upon a flawed ecclesiology.

This kind of community is often expressed through liturgical symbols. For example, in Finland at least, the congregation gathers around the alter in a half-circle, expressing that the rest of the circle is made up by those not present: the dead, the sick, the ones far away. These people too are part of the celebration.

The idea that the community we express is primarily one of community with those not present was also expressed in the early church by the fact that only a small part of the bread was consecrated and used during the mass. The congregation brought bread with them to Church. The part not used was to be distributed among the poor.

When we celebrate the Eucharist then, we are celebrating a ritual where we teach ourselves to be aware of our community with the poor and oppressed of the world. It is into this kind of community that God enters.

This means the Eucharist becomes a political act. When the church celebrates the Eucharist it expresses its belief that God always stands on the side of the poor. This is through even if the church in other areas have forgotten this, the Eucharist can act as a protest within a Church that fails its true calling by joining with the rich and the powerful.

Baptism as New Beginning

What kind of ritual is Baptism? It is something that one goes through only once. It is a ritual that constitutes the beginning of life in the Church.

Baptism, according to Romans 6, is about entering into communion with the death of Christ. By participation in this ritual, "our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin— because anyone who has died has been freed from sin." As I have argued in my earlier posts, I understand this talk about the body of sin, as that which hinders us from being who we really are, that which keeps us soul from being free, as it were.

Paul urges the Romans to "count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus." It seems that Baptism is about how we look at ourselves. When we go through this ritual we symbolically enter a mode of life that will be full reality only in the coming life. But by going through this ritual - essentially a symbolical death and resurrection - we communicate to ourselves that we want to live as if that life was present already here. The person that lets himself or herself be baptized signals that he or she no longer wants to be part of the "system" as I have called it, those forces that manipulates us to not be ourselves.

Now, to believe that baptism itself would free us from the influences of these forces would be to have a magic understanding of the sacraments (regardless if we say that it is God's grace this change or not). But by going through this ritual we incorporate this belief, this choice to try to separate from the system, into our personality in a way that would not be possible were we just to decide to do so intellectually.

We can thus say that baptism frees the baptized from original sin, but this is not something that is experienced directly, it something that only becomes a full reality in the coming existence. It is also something that the new believer can start to make a reality in this life because of the re-evaluation of motives that the choice to be baptized is (metanoia). When we say that the baptized person receives the gift of the Holy Spirit we say that life for that persons now carry a new meaning that were not there before. Again, by communicating this through a ritual we reach a deeper layer in the personlity.

A couple of notes. 1. This is said of baptizing adults. Although I do not see it as wrong to baptize children, this symbolism is certainly lost to the person being baptized. That is a very unfortunate loss. I understand that a person can "live in one's baptism", that is, infuse a meaning into an act one does not remember, even if one is baptized as a child, it is also clear that the way paeodo-baptism generally is performed this kind of symbolism is rarely present. In fact, it seems that the persons undergoing the ritual of paedo-baptism is not so much the child as the parents. Again, this is ok, and it is certainly an apt time for a ritual, but it is a ritual with a different meaning from that which Paul describes in Romans 6.

2. When I say that baptism removes original sin, I realize that this is a historical sommersault, since at least Augustine argued the other way around: since the Church performes paedo-baptism it has to mean that the original sin (or rather its reatus) is removed in baptism. Now, the concept of a guilt connected to original sin is something I can't find any sense in, and it is very difficult what kind of "body of sin" the newborn can carry around. For the adult, however, this is a easy understandble symbol of al those past choices, one's own and those of other people, that affect future choices.

Sacraments and Ritual

Traditionally, theologians have disliked the idea of calling the sacraments rituals, at least in the sense that the sacraments have something important in common with rituals in other religions. Since the seventies, however, rituals have become a subject much studied, and because of the increased understanding of what rituals are, it is today nothing radical about calling the Christian sacraments rituals.

One must always be careful when talking about the sacraments, for they are mysteries, and to explain them would be to profane them. What systematic theology can do, beside exploring the historical background and formation of the sacraments, is to offer ways to approach them, what Rahner called "mystagogy", ways to open up the mystery. It is naive to believe that the truth contained in the sacraments is easy or immediate, just because it is not founded on language. Further, systematic theology has to have an understanding of the connection between the sacraments and the Christian doctrine.

I think that an understanding of what a ritual is can be very helpful in a discussion on the sacraments of the Christian Church. A ritual is a formal act that communicates something significant, that is not easily said in words, to the community and to the individual participating in the ritual. A ritual derives its power from repetition, tradition and from esthetic considerations, although to overemphasis the esthetics aspect may also threaten the meaningfulness of the ritual.

In the Christian rituals of Baptism and Eucharist, primarily, as well as other rituals, something very central is communicated to the Church and to the Believer. In a way one could say that these rituals aims at internalizing the Christian faith, to make the faith of the church a part of the personality of the believer. Because rituals always involve the body, they affect very deep parts of our selves, parts that is not reached by reflection or discussion.

This means, however, that there is not really a theology about the sacraments, rather theology as a whole is about reflection on the mystery communicated in the sacraments. It is incorrect to try to establish a praxis of practicing the sacraments based on the intellectual understanding of the dogma, rather, the relationship is primarily the opposite, i.e. the intellectual understanding of the dogma is based on the practice of the sacraments.