Lift in the City

I believe in one God

If the first rule in thinking about God is that He cannot be thought, the other first rule is to affirm that He is one.

Christians, together with Jews and Muslims (and some others), affirm first and foremost and above everything else that God is one.  The most severe anathemas should fall on those who deny it! It is an idea which has given birth to many martyrs.  Jews, Muslims and Christians have died in common cause, to defend this simple truth. Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. (Deuteronomy 6:4-5).

Martyrs throughout the ages have borne witness to the fact that the God who is infinite possibility will tolerate no rival: not Ceaser; not the King; not Robert Mugabe. No earthly or heavenly power is greater than the God of Israel. And Jewish, Islamic and Christian laws and morals have been based on the very simple understanding that there is no other authority. If we are to call no man on earth “Father” or “Teacher” it is because there is one God to whom all men and women owe allegiance. In our own society it is the whole basis of the notion of the Rule of Law: the king is subject to a higher authority. For me, the only guarantee of political freedom is the possibility of a supreme authority who we are all subject to – even our would-be oppressor s.  Since that supreme authority is “infinite possibility” it is an authority which liberates and does not oppress.

The understanding that there is one God emerged in a political context as Israel discovered that she owed allegiance to her Lord God even abroad; that he was Lord not only of their history but of the whole of history. God was not just the Saviour of Israel; he was Lord of the nations and the future was in his hands.  That God was God of Persia, of Babylon and of Egypt; that he was in control of the events of history: these are the exciting discoveries of the Hebrew people as the one God revealed himself through Moses and the Prophets. Everything else in the Hebrew Scriptures is secondary to this key revelation.

This one big idea of Judaism, discovered in the ups and downs of a turbulent history eventually came to be expressed in philosophical language, so that by the time the Fathers of the Church are writing in the second, third and fourth centuries, certain philosophical propositions are just plain obvious to them: that God is all-powerful – there is no competing power; all-knowing – He is God of the future as well as the past; that he is “impassible”  (un-changing and incapable of suffering) - there is no variation in his goodness; that there is no division in his Godhead and so on. These philosophical ideas simply strengthen the one central claim that he is one.  

Crowning all these ideas is the claim that God created everything ex-nihilo – out of nothing. That is to say that everything that exists comes to exist by God’s act of creation alone. Again, this simply underscores the crucial claim of Judaism and Christianity – there is no other power or authority “competing” with God. Even Satan is God’s creation. And, as we shall see in my next post, all creation came into being through God’s act of love.

 

 

© Peter Bolton

Thinking about God

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water that is under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God. Exodus 5:8-9a

Readers of my blog may be surprised that I have not posted for a while. Well, here is the reason: I have known for several weeks that my next posting would have to be about the very nature of God. You can see, then, why I have been putting it off! It hasn’t helped that my laptop died. But that's another story!

I have been helped enormously by an article which appeared in the March 2011 edition of the Anchor, the magazine of the parish of All Saints with St Saviour, Weston-super-Mare. The piece is by Humphrey Reader. Here is his penultimate paragraph:

For mathematicians, infinity goes beyond crude ‘bigness’ to a concept with a completely different agenda, something which took centuries to work out and which is still a work in progress. I would suggest a parallel with our understanding of God. At the time of the Decalogue He presents as a possessive and jealous super-tribal-leader. Yet the very emphasis on avoiding idolatry is perhaps a hint (in terms understandable by people of that time) of the importance of reserving absolute loyalty for the indefinite and completely Other rather than man-made representations.

Elsewhere in his article Humphrey quotes Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The infinite is understood rightly when it is understood, not as a quantity, but as an “infinite possibility”’ He insists that infinity cannot be conceptualised for the moment you conceptualise infinity you make it finite. 

This mathematical analogy helps us grasp that God is not “a thing or an object among many things”. Just as infinity is not a number so God is not an object.  We must always understand that any talk of God which implies that He is something “out there” is to use language allegorically or analogously.  The very name of God as represented as by the letters in our alphabet: YHWH, suggests a dynamic becoming: not simply, as in the NRSV “I AM WHO I AM” but, rather, “I am becoming”.  (From the Hebrew verb “hayah” meaning “to be”). Wittgenstein’s “Infinite possibility” captures something of the idea.

Mr Reader’s article emphasises the first rule when thinking about God: He cannot be thought. And if you think that you have got an idea of Him, I regret to tell you, you have actually got an idol. God cannot be contained or thought anymore than infinity can be contained or thought. And it is vital in any discussion of God to hold on to this truth.   

You may have noticed that those who think that they have got God sewn up tend to be the most  dangerous of human beings.

© Peter Polton

My love is like a red, red rose.

I suppose the one thing that unites all religious believers is a view of the world that understands human beings to be more than just “flesh and blood”; that there are more things in heaven and on earth than the mere mechanistic cause and effect of scientific explanation.

A scientist could go a long way to explain how all the instruments in the orchestra make the sounds that they do. Another scientist could explain what is happening in the human body and mind when we listen to music. But no one can explain or define the experience completely because the total music experience is more than the sum of its parts. This is, I suppose, similar too – if not part of – that which we call “religious”.

But the “religious” dimension is more than mere emotions. Religion is some sort of explanation for the whole experience we call life; an explanation coupled with prescriptions for making life meaningful, purposeful and, in some sense, “successful”.  Religious explanations are in so many ways totally different from scientific explanations and yet people – particularly in our modern world – are mixing them up.  Amazingly frequently people talk about religious explanations as if they were scientific explanations and then reject them because they fail as scientific explanations. This has led, in our own society, to a tragic loss of the religious sensibility, and in the States and elsewhere a terrifying fundamentalism.

Fundamentalism, very simply, assumes that the religious and the scientific explanation are the same type of explanation and are therefore competing with each other. The obvious example is the stories of Creation in Genesis (yes there are two creation stories).  Seen as scientific explanations they directly compete with theories of Evolution though there is absolutely no scientific evidence that they are true as science  Irrational religion: terrifying!

But worse, the person who sees these stories as mere science misses the profound and important truths which they do contain. As “religious” stories they convey such truths as: that we are dependent upon God; that the relationship between man and woman reflects something within the Godhead; that men and women need the Sabbath rest and (even more important) that the six day world of striving and work only finds its fulfilment when it comes to rest in God. And I could go on. Those creation stories are bursting with meaning as “religious” stories that the “scientific” explanation is incapable of conveying.

I passionately believe that, as human beings, we need these religious explanations to make proper sense of who and what we are. A religious explanation often presents itself to us in the form of a story or a picture. The ultimate religious picture, I would suggest, is the picture of something we call heaven. (It is really worth reading Tom Wright’s book “Surprised by Hope” to help us see that our popular “folk religion” view of heaven is nothing like the Biblical promise of Resurrection). In the New Testament we have the very beautiful and simple story of Jesus’ Ascension. It is a story we know so well that we often forget to ask what on earth it means.

Our mind’s eye picture of the Ascension – reinforced by pop religion and religious art – is of Jesus taking off like Elton John’s Rocket Man to find his new home somewhere “up there”. Of course our mind’s eye picture is not faithful to the picture painted by St Luke in the Acts of the Apostles: “and a cloud took him out of their sight”. We ought to know our scriptures well enough to know that the cloud here represents the presence of God: (The Pillar of Cloud in the Wilderness, the Cloud on Sinai and on the Mount of Transfiguration etc). 

In other words, our mind's eye wants to paint a literal picture. But the truth which is conveyed is NOT a scientific truth. This is NOT a story of Jesus growing wings but, rather, a story about his life reaching its fulfilment in God’s presence. (This hope is held out to us all). If we say that he is “up there” without explaining that we are using language in a different way from the way in which a scientist uses language, then the end result will be that people will simply conclude that religion is not true. They will have shut themselves off from so much of what life is really all about.

Nobody would dream of interrogating the poet to ask him exactly how his love is like that red rose! We need to get ourselves out of the habit of assuming that religious and scientific explanation is the same. Religion is dealing with exactly the same world as the scientist, but it is offering an entirely different type of explanation.

© Peter Bolton

Mary IV

Assumed Body and Soul into Heaven:


This is the heart of the matter! What happened to that flesh which the Eternal Son of the Father took from Mary? What happened to that crucified humanity? What is the fate of the street children feeding from the waste tips of the wealthy; to the body wracked by the pain of addiction; to the woman whose body has been violated by rape and to the boy who has been abused? What will happen to the victims of torture and terror; the slaughtered of the killing fields and the bodies lost in the mud of Passchendaele?  Is the woman condemned to a life time of beatings doomed to die a miserable, lonely death? Is the hero who fought to save his comrades gone for nothing? Is the life of that wonderful mother who fought so hard in her battle against cancer utterly pointless? What will happen to the child who died the agonising death of starvation?

This is the heart of the matter and the Dogma of the Assumption boldly asserts that third class citizens, those who are excluded, the inferior and the lowly, are to be lifted high. On the Feast of the Assumption we sing Psalm 113: “He raiseth up the poor out of the dust; from the dung-hill he lifteth up the needy” and we echo Mary’s Magnificat: “He casts the mighty from their thrones and raises the lowly poor.”

The Assumption answers the question about what happened to the crucified Jesus: to the flesh and blood, body and soul he took from Mary. But it answers too the question about our own destiny, the fate of the poor: what are we destined for? Dust or glory? And this is why I am a Catholic Christian which is a religion not of “spirituality” but a religion of flesh and blood and reality. Catholic Christianity is not about cosy feelings and personal fulfilment but about the fate of those children scrambling over the scrap-heaps in desperate search of sustenance. Catholic Christianity is the religion of the God who feeds the poor by giving nothing less than himself.

© Peter Bolton

Mary III

Conceived without the guilt of Original Sin:

We must not confuse the Church’s teaching that Mary was conceived without the stain of sin (immaculate conception) with the church’s teaching that Jesus was conceived in the womb of a virgin (Virgin birth or Virginal conception).

The dogma (for so it was defined by Pius IX in 1854) depends on our understanding of Original Sin. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that original sin is a deprivation of original holiness and justice. (§ 405) It is really important to note that before Original Sin the really original condition of men and women is Holy and Just. The same paragraph describes human nature as “wounded” and of us having an “inclination towards evil”. (Baptism is the restoration of this original state of holiness though we are left with the need to struggle against the tendency to sin).

Our Original Sin, then, is humanity shutting out God. We have closed ourselves to the possibility of God. This “loss of Holiness” is a loss of connectedness with him. This is the tragedy of the human condition: we have lost God, the source of life and goodness and therefore we know death as well as life; we know evil as well as good. Life becomes the unfulfilled longing for God ending in death. We are no longer singing the song we were supposed to sing; we are out of tune with God. And no matter how hard we try we cannot re-connect; we cannot hear the tune; we live in darkness.

If the church claims that Mary was conceived without the stain of original sin then she is saying that God restored her (at the very beginning of her life) to the original state of holiness which was proper to the whole of humanity before the fall. In this sense her holiness is not unique to her but is, rather the “natural state” of all men and women. In other words, were it not for original sin, we would all be like Mary. So she is conceived without this obstacle which so impedes us: she is reconnected to God by God. God opens her heart so that she is open to him in a way we cannot be without his grace. Mary is given the possibility of God; she sings his song.

So what does this say about God? The dogma affirms that God will not be trapped by our sinful condition. We are trapped: we cannot fulfil what is God’s purpose for us but God is not so bound. God is not prevented from acting in the events of human history because we have separated ourselves from him. We see this beautifully illustrated in the story of the Patriarchs: no matter how much  human beings make a mess of things, God still fulfils the promise he makes to us.  Esau sells his birthright and Jacob tricks his father, Laban tricks Jacob and Joseph’s brothers all but do away with him whilst Joseph gets himself thrown into prison and yet, despite all this and more, God’s purpose is fulfilled. God acts in human history and gives his holiness to his people despite them.

And so God gives his holiness to Mary. It is not because of something she has done. This is God’s action so that his purpose for humanity might be fulfilled. And if God has done this for Mary it is because he intends it for us all: what is given to Mary at the beginning of her life is given to all of us when we are re-born in the waters of Baptism. This holiness meant that Mary was capable of receiving God into her heart as she received Jesus in her womb. So too, at our Baptism we are cleansed of our sins and made holy so that we too are able to receive the Word of God and allow it to grow in our hearts. God is not trapped by our sinfulness but even more importantly, nor are we. By the grace of Baptism, we too can sing our Magnificat; we can say “Yes” to God.

© Peter Bolton

Mary II

Mother of God:

In the early Christian centuries there were fierce arguments about who exactly Jesus is.  The argument mattered to people because they were anxious not to blaspheme God or to underestimate the significance of the Salvation event. It mattered that Jesus was fully God and fully human because affirming that affirmed that human beings mattered to God. What is not assumed, the dictum went, is not healed. The title “Theotokos” or “God bearer”, affirmed at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, guaranteed that when we speak about her son we are affirming that he is Divine (because she is Mother of God) and that he is human (because she is the Mother of God). We are affirming the most intimate union between God and man: that He took our humanity in order that we might be partakers of his Divine nature.

So, of course, the title God Bearer or Mother of God is about us too. If the son of Mary was not God, what use would he have been in bringing us to God? If he were not man, what on earth had he to do with us? This title above all the titles of Mary is about the destiny of humanity. It is THE title which affirms all that the Church wants to say about the person of Jesus who is God made man and therefore it is THE theological statement which affirms our destiny as human become divine. The title adds not one little jot to our knowledge of Mary but it tells us all you ever needed to know about Jesus and about the dignity of humanity. Eastern Christians still speak of the Deification of human persons as our ultimate end: union with God.

It is also a title about our Vocation as individual Christians who, like Mary, are called to bear God to a world which is hungry for his love and his truth.

© Peter Bolton

Mary I

Mary and Dogma and Us:

Most dogma is about Jesus. Even dogmatic statements about Mary are really statements about Jesus. But all dogma is also really a statement about humanity. A dogma says we MUST say this because to deny it would be to say something untrue about Jesus and untrue about humanity. In the next four posts I intend to test this in relation to the key things that we say about Mary: that they are really statements about Jesus and the whole of humanity. I will examine four dogmatic claims: that Mary is a Virgin; that she is the Mother of God, that she was conceived without the guilt of original sin and that she has been assumed body and soul into heaven. In each case I will ask what the statement says about the person of Jesus and or the nature of God on the one hand and what each statement says about the nature and destiny of human persons on the other.

Mary ever Virgin:

Recall that image of the feet disappearing into the clouds. It was a bad picture of the Ascension because it was not informed by proper doctrine. It was a bad picture because it was bad theology. We must be careful that our minds don’t paint a similarly naïve picture of the virginal conception of Jesus.

Jenkins’ mocking, “God doesn’t do that sort of thing” is blatantly untrue when we look at the virgin birth in the light of Holy Scripture. Firstly, God is always intervening all over the place in the events of human history and most especially in the history of His people. Secondly, and much more importantly, the Virgin birth is entirely consistent with the Biblical claim that God is creator. The Virgin Birth must be seen in the light of the Genesis story: as Eve was taken from Man so now the Son of Man is taken from the woman. Here is a new creation.

So the doctrine of the Virgin birth in the first place is about God as Creator. This, (with apologies to David Jenkins) is exactly the sort of thing God does. And here, in the conception of Jesus, man is being re-created. The creation of Jesus in the womb of Mary is no mere continuation of the old created order subject to decay; here, by God’s direct intervention, that old creation of sin and death is being made new. Yes, Jesus is the child of Mary and therefore as fully human as you or I. But, Jesus is the child of God: unique amongst men. The story of the Virgin Birth turns out not to be about the absence of a human father but about the presence of God.

The doctrine of the Virgin birth is about God as creator; it tells us that in Jesus, God has brought about a new creation. It is, therefore a statement about us and the possibilities for the rest of humanity. Jesus is the beginning of a new creation not a one-off event in history.   In the ARCIC Agreed Statement “Mary Grace and Hope in Christ” the Commission says of the virginal conception that it “points to the new birth of every Christian as an adopted child of God”.  If Jesus is a new creation then we who belong to him also have the possibility being made new, of being re-created in his image. “Therefore if any man [be] in Christ, [he is] a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new”. (II Corinthians 5: 17)

We are not trapped in the vicious cycle of birth and death which characterises the old creation. As Christians we have been “born again from above” (John 3: 3-5) and so the “miracle” of the new birth of Jesus turns out not to be a unique event at all: we are all born again into the new creation as our Baptismal regeneration places us firmly in the new paradise.  The Church speaks of Mary as “Ever Virgin” because, just as with the Grace of Baptism, that new Creation can never be undone. This new thing is not subject to decay.

So, just as when we look at the disappearing feet of Jesus we are totally distorting the doctrine of the Ascension, so too, if our understanding of the virginal conception is nothing more than the absence of Joseph we are totally missing the point!

© Peter Bolton

Dogma and Religious Language

I did promise something on the Blessed Virgin Mary – and that piece will be forthcoming – but as I was struggling to write it I realised that there was still a bit more to be said about Dogma. The very word will send a shiver down the spine of the intellectual liberal (even though she has one overriding dogma she adheres to) and it usually appears in the form of an adjective describing one who is less than open minded. Though, as I have already suggested, the whole point of Christian Dogma is to insist on a sort of open-mindedness; to preserve the Catholic “and”.

Today, Christians are in love with poetry and imagery, art and iconography but far les comfortable with Dogma. I want to suggest that they are two sides of the same coin and that the Dogma preserves the iconography and imagery and purifies it. (At the same time, the art and image prevent the Dogma from becoming merely dry, empty intellectualism).

You can, perhaps, already see how I might be thinking about Mary here but I am going to put her on one side for now and look briefly at another idea in Christianity which presents itself to us as a Creedal statement and very frequently in art, iconography, music and poetry and so on. As I write I am looking at an icon representing the Ascension of Jesus into heaven. In the top half of the picture Jesus is seated in the heavens (blue circle) which are held up by an angel on either side. The bottom half depicts Mary and the Eleven. Mary too is accompanied by two angels and whilst she looks directly at us whilst pointing upwards to her Son, the eleven are looking all over the place, still in utter confusion before they receive the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Mary and Jesus have halos the Eleven do not. Mary is dressed in the blue of heaven and the red of martyrdom.

It is a powerful picture but it is not my favourite depiction of the Ascension. My favourite representation is that over the Altar of the Mystery of the Ascension in the Shrine Church of Our Lady in Walsingham. There, the feet of Jesus are seen simply disappearing into the clouds. Perhaps slightly less theologically informed – and I have to say that it is my favourite because it makes me laugh not because it is a good art or good theology!

But the truth is the second image could be hugely misleading. It is too literal, certainly, but in its literalism it depicts the Absence of Jesus and not his presence. In the first picture, the icon, there is no doubt about Jesus presence in the picture. He dominates the picture. And although the Eleven cannot see him there is a serenity in the posture of Mary who seeks to assure us who also cannot see that her Son is indeed present always.

I want to suggest that the first picture is of more use to us precisely because it is faithful to the Church’s understanding of the meaning of the Mystery. The icon needs the dogma. Without sound teaching our religious representations (like the disappearing feet of Jesus) become nothing more than misleading cartoons.

So,what are the Dogmas that inform the image? Well, obviously the statement in the Creed: “And Ascended into heaven.” But who ascended?  And it is the dogmatic answer to this question which is crucial. It is He whom the creed has already affirmed as the Eternal Son of the Father and who had taken human flesh and was crucified. The Jesus sat in the blue circle is the eternal Son of God who had assumed human flesh. The picture depicts the destiny of humanity. This picture is precisely about the destiny of those confused men who are looking all over the place in the icon. Mary’s steady gaze reminds us that although we, like the Eleven, cannot see Him we must trust. Look, she says, he is only there!

The Dogmas that the picture draws on are Dogmas concerning the Incarnation and the Church. The picture is about the destiny of human flesh; it is about the fate of the poor; and here the Eleven - that is us - can be reassured that where he has gone we shall surely follow.   We are reminded of what the Eastern Churches know so well, that the heart of this picture is heaven where all women and men can call home.

So something odd happens in the promulgation of Dogma. If we were asked we would probably say that Christian Dogma is about God. But actually there is not much dogma which is directly about God. Most dogma is about Jesus but even then the dogma is really about the human beings at the bottom of the picture. Why do we want to insist that Jesus, true God and true man ascended body and soul into heaven? Why does it matter? It matters because the Eleven – us – matter.  Dogma says we MUST say THIS about Jesus because to deny it would be to say something untrue about human beings. To deny that Jesus has ascended body and soul into heaven is to deny the destiny of humanity.

Interestingly, when we come to talk about dogmas concerning the Blessed Virgin Mary, we are usually doubly under-scoring, for dogmas about Mary are usually affirming a truth about the rest of humanity (we say it about Mary because it is true of all Christians) but we are usually also affirming something about the person of Jesus. Dogma about Mary has, in this sense become a double check: if we say this, what are we saying about the rest of humanity and what are we saying about Jesus? (And if we are saying this about Jesus, what are we saying about humanity?)

So, when we say what we shall say about Mary it will matter. It will matter because really it is about us and about the fact that we matter.

© Peter Polton

Real Presence

This is the first of a few short essays in which I try to grapple with controversial Catholic Teaching. Here I am going to examine the doctrine of Transubstantiation but I want to begin by exploring the idea of Revelation and that God communicates Himself to us.

I want to suggest that the church has always understood scripture as being (in some way) God's self disclosure; that somehow, through human history God made himself known to his people. The pages of the Old Testament witness not just to human grasping after truth but also to the fact that, through certain people at specific times, God made himself known. He communicated Himself to us.

The fullness of that self-disclosure is found in the person of Jesus Christ. The important thing about Jesus is not that he is good or that he taught wise teaching (though he was and he did). The important thing is who he is. Jesus is God's self-communication. He is God-moving-toward-us. So, for example, when we see him dying on the cross we are not (just) seeing a good man die, we are seeing God's ultimate self-disclosure. If you want to see what God is you have to look at a man dying on the cross. This is not only ultimate revelation; it is also unique revelation. (No other religion has grasped this truth about God and we couldn't have guessed it from our experience of creation.

So, on the night before he died Jesus acted out a little drama to help his disciples understand and claim for themselves this self-givingness of God in Jesus. (I know that that word has only just come into existence - but it’s a useful one).

“This is my body”, he said. “This is my blood, given for you. This is who I am: the self-giving one, the one whose blood is poured out, whose body is broken, whose life is given away. This is not only what I am doing tomorrow, this is who I have been for you from the moment of my conception through death and beyond: I am the God who gives Himself away”.

Then he says, “Do this in remembrance of me”. Where I think we get hung up is our English word has lost its meaning but originally remembrance is the opposite of dis-member. Remembrance is putting the members back together again. As a word it captures something of what is going on at the Passover meal when a good Jew is not just celebrating something that happened to his ancestors but is celebrating something that happened to him or herself. "This is the night God brought US out of Egypt". The deliverance is not a past event but a present reality for the Jew who thanks her God that she is no longer living in slavery.

The Exodus event commemorated at Passover includes, of course, that other significant moment of God's self-disclosure when he gave the Law to Moses on Sinai. The Exodus is an event in which God is revealing Himself and revealing Himself as Saviour.

“So”, says Jesus, “(from now on) do this in remembrance of me. Once upon a time, when you gathered together, you gathered to remember God's self-disclosure and saving activity in the Exodus event. From now on you are to remember God's self-disclosure and saving activity in my self-giving death on the cross. As Jews you claimed the Exodus event as your own; as my disciples you will claim this self-giving as your own. As when you celebrated Passover you were partaking in the Exodus event, so at the Eucharist you are participating in the event of my self-giving”.

Long before Thomas Aquinas invented the word "Transubstantiation" you can find countless accounts in the writings of the Fathers witnessing to the universal belief in the early church that to participate in the Eucharist was to receive this self-givingness of Jesus. So Justin Martyr (who was born in about AD 110), "We do not receive these as common bread and common drink; but as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the word of God, had flesh and blood for our  salvation, so likewise have we learned that the food over which we gave thanks ..... is the Flesh and Blood of the same incarnate Jesus".

Note that St Justin leans heavily on the notion of Incarnation to back up his teaching that the bread and wine have changed. It is the same movement of self-communication which made Jesus God-toward-us that makes the bread and wine God-toward-us: the very presence of Jesus.

I promise I could go on finding other very primitive sources in the Fathers for an equally physical understanding of the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. This was so much the case that one of the charges that the Roman authorities brought against Christians was cannibalism

But was this just a primitive notion that we who are more sophisticated should give up? I want to suggest that this belief is absolutely fundamental to Christianity.

I don't want to dwell on Aquinas because I don't think he is that important. That is to say, I think he is merely one more witness to the church’s universal belief in the Real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. I think he was expressing in his doctrine of Transubstatiation something which the church had always believed. What is different in the teaching of Thomas Aquinas is his (very revolutionary) use of the language of Aristotle to communicate the Christian Gospel. Lesser men that Aquinas had been condemned as heretics for trying to marry Aristotelian philosophy with Christianity and Aquinas was tried for heresy. (This was the time when the really interesting thinking was being done by Islamic scholars and Christianity was struggling to keep up. It was a fascinating era in philosophy and theology). But I digress. The point is that Aquinas wanted to hold onto this key Christian belief: that the self-communicating God, the God who became incarnate (flesh and blood) really does communicate Himself, becomes REAL in the Eucharist. The incarnate, crucified, risen and ascended Lord makes himself present to us, he does what he does best: He gives Himself. So what is there on the Altar? It looks like (form) bread and wine; but the inner-reality has become nothing less than the very presence of the crucified, risen and ascended Jesus. The substance (reality) has changed
even though the outward form remains that of bread and wine.

Now the Reformers (especially Calvin and Zwingli) wanted to deny what I think the church had ALWAYS believed up to that point. They wanted to say that the bread and wine merely symbolised the presence of Jesus or even that the bread and wine "remind" us that Jesus once (a long long time ago) gave himself. They did say that if we received "worthily" we would receive Jesus spiritually. The emphasis shifts from the Consecration to the eating and drinking.

My problem with this is that this idea of "spiritual" giving is not faithful to the scriptures. The scriptures witness to a God who does NOT communicate spiritually - even in the Old Testament. Our God is a God who communicates very much through the messy flesh and blood events in human history. Our religion is NOT a "spiritual" religion it is a very physical one. Jesus didn't give spiritual healing he gave physical healing, he didn't spiritually give himself away he physically suffered and died. I would very much want to add that he didn't "spiritually" rise from the dead but he actually physically rose again (though in a very different dimension to our own flat world). No. Christianity is not a "spiritual religion" and God's self-giving at the Eucharist is NOT spiritual but physical. At the Eucharist God does what he does best. He gives Himself to us and he is physically present as Word made flesh.

(I'm glad to say, by the way, that Mrs Wesley's two boys are on my side. So in Charles Wesley's hymn, Victim Divine, we end by singing:

We need not now go up to heaven
To bring the long-sort Saviour down;
Thou art to all already given,
Thou dost e'en now thy banquet crown:
To every faithful soul appear,
And show thy real presence here.

© Peter Bolton