“This is my body, do this in remembrance of me”
The liturgical implications of alternative Celebrations of the Eucharist during the COVID-19 pandemic in comparison to Melito of Sardis’s On Pascha and Martin Luther’s reformation theology.
Disclaimer: This paper was written as part of an undergraduate program and therefore does not meet formal academic standards. Although great care has been taken in the writing of this paper, errors might occur. The lecturing professor has reviewed this paper and scored it 100/100, corresponding to “Distinguished. Assignment is of sufficient substance and style to be submitted to a refereed journal for publication based on the critical thinking evidenced.” Reference to this paper in an academic context should be done with caution.
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a dramatic impact on the liturgical practices of the Church. To prevent the further spreading of the virus, the celebration of the Eucharist has been stripped of most – if not all – communal aspects. As time progressed, alternative manifestations of the Eucharist began to appear, such as the ‘drive-through-Eucharist’ and the ‘take-home-Eucharist’. The controversy surrounding these initiatives has reignited debates on the profound question of what the celebration of the Eucharist actually is. By comparing the function and meaning of the Eucharist in an ancient worldview to the function and meaning of the Eucharist in our modern worldview, I hope to provide some insight into the origin of the various understandings of the Eucharist. I plan to do this in a fourfold manner. First, by introducing the concepts and terminology surrounding the Eucharist. Second, by investigating the biblical origins of the Eucharist. Third, by showing the meaning and function of the Eucharist in Melito of Sardis’s second-century work On Pascha. Fourth, by introducing the discussion regarding the Eucharist between the Lutherans and the Zwinglians in the first century. I will conclude by considering the implications of the different understandings of the Eucharist on alternative celebrations of the Eucharist during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prolegomena
Teleology and ontology
The answer to the question of ‘what the eucharist actually is’ can be given from a teleological and an ontological perspective. The history of the philosophical disciplines of teleology and ontology is both rich and complex, and I am aware that much could be said, especially regarding their historical relationship to theology. I have chosen not to do so, however, for it would take us too far outside the scope of this paper. My use of the terms ‘teleological’ and ‘ontological’ in relation to the Eucharist must therefore not be seen as attempts to reflect upon the Eucharist from the viewpoint of these philosophical disciplines as such, but rather as a means to convey the general principle these viewpoints embody. The term ‘teleological’ is derived from the Greek ‘telos’, meaning: the goal toward which something is being directed; its ‘end’, ‘goal’, or ‘outcome’.1 Thus, the teleological perspective will approach the Eucharist in terms of its meaning, or ‘purpose’, with questions like “Why does it exist?” and “What is it used for?”. The term ‘ontological’ is derived from the Greek ‘onto’, a participle of the Greek equivalent of the verb ‘to be’, meaning: ‘being’ or ‘that which is’.2 Thus, the ontological perspective will approach the Eucharist in terms of its being with questions like “What is it made of?” and “How does it work?”.
Dualistic versus non-dualistic
Depending on whether one is accustomed to viewing the world in a dualistic or non-dualistic way, this distinction between teleology and ontology may seem somewhat artificial. Indeed, in answering one of these questions, you are probably required to answer one or more of the others in the process. Drawing a line between form (ontology) and function (teleology) is characteristic of a dualistic worldview. Philosophers rejected the non-dualistic Christian paradigm during the Enlightenment and replaced it with derivatives of dualistic Graeco-Roman philosophies like Platonism. Consequently, a schism appeared between ‘matter’ and ‘mind’, ‘material and ‘immaterial’, ‘form’ and ‘function’ that is foreign to the Biblical paradigm; God created the heavens (immaterial) and the earth (material) together, and they are not separated thereafter.3 Only as a consequence of the fall of mankind does one encounter one repeating instance of separation between heaven and earth which occurs at death as “the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” (Ec. 12:1-7)
From a Christian perspective, it can therefore hardly come as a surprise that the adoption of a paradigm that presupposes this separation led to a problem that is generally known as ‘the binding problem’ or ‘the mind-body problem’. It refers to the question as to how these domains of ‘matter’ and ‘mind’ are able to interact with each other and has hitherto not received a sufficient answer. Nevertheless, the dualistic worldview prevailed in the West, and generations upon generations of Christians were born into a cultural paradigm that mismatched the Biblical paradigm of the Church, causing alienation and eventually Reformation as the theological discourse adapted to these new circumstances. It is prudent, therefore, that the question as to what the Eucharist ‘is’ will be addressed not only from the non-dualistic Biblical perspective of the East, but also from the dualistic philosophical perspective of the West; only in this way can we fully appreciate why a ‘take-home-Eucharist’ is a problem to some, and a blessing to others.
The Eucharist in the Bible
The first step in answering the question as to what the Eucharist actually is is to look at its biblical origins. This can be done most effectively through the teleological perspective because it asks questions like: “Why does it exist?” and “What is it used for?”. The Eucharist exists first and foremost because Jesus instituted it during the Last Supper, as one can read in the New Testament. The table below shows an overview of the relevant passages. (Matt. 26:26-28; Mark 14:22-24; Luke 22:19-20; 1 Cor. 11:23-26)
It is apparent that the synoptic Gospels tell a very similar story of how Jesus took a loaf of bread and broke it, saying “this is my body”, and then took a cup, saying “this is my blood of the covenant”. The bread and cup are also either blessed or given thanks for, or both, and Mark adds that the blood is poured out for the forgiveness of sins.” Notably, it is only Saint Paul in 1 Cor. 11:23-26 who mentions that the act of the Last Supper must be carried out again and again by Christians for the purpose of remembrance. Although Luke also mentions the command of remembrance in his Gospel, this is likely because he based his account on that of Paul’s, as the two were good friends (cf. Book of Acts (written by Luke); Col. 4:14; 2 Tim. 4:11), and he likely possessed a copy of Paul’s letter, which was written prior to the Gospels. Furthermore, Paul adds the notion of proclamation to the Eucharist. The notions of receiving life and remaining in Christ may be added to that based on Jesus’s sayings in John 6:53-57: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life” and “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them”. Thus, one may conclude from these Biblical passages concerning the Last Supper that the purpose of the Eucharist is to remember, to give thanks, to identify who Christ is, to receive life from him, to proclaim his name, and to remain in him.
The Eucharist in the Early Liturgical Tradition: Melito of Sardis’s On Pascha
One of the earliest Christian liturgies currently available to us is Melito of Sardis’s On Pascha. Properly speaking, On Pascha is not a liturgy, because it does not describe any liturgical elements that would accompany the text. Thus, when the translation of Melito of Sardis’s On Pascha was first published in 1940, the work was identified as a homily.4 However, further scholarship revealed that the text should be divided into two parts, the first part being a homily on Exodus 12 (stanza 1-46) and the second being a Haggadah, the Jewish ritual observance of remembering the Passover, for the Passover table rite itself (47-105).5 Finally, enough elements that are characteristic of Haggadah were identified in the text to conclude that On Pascha is a Christian Haggadah in its entirety.6
On Pascha begins with a preface in which the mystery of Pascha is described in terms of oppositions between old and new, eternal and perishable, etc. (Stanzas 1-10) This is followed by a dramatic retelling of the Paschal narrative; a collective act of remembering crucial to the Haggadah that is best understood as “the present participation in an event which has no relationship to time, but which is eternally formative.”7 In other words, through the act of remembering the Lord’s redemptive work becomes a present and ongoing action in the believer’s life. This narration ends with the proclamation that the angel of death spared the Israelites because it could see the mystery of the Lord in the slain lamb. (Stanzas 11-34) The meaning of this mystery is explained by showing that the slaying of the lamb was a (proto-)type of Christ’s death and resurrection. Even though a prototype usually becomes worthless after the real thing has been built, the Scriptures in which Christ’s type is shown are quite the opposite: Christ can only be recognized through reading about his type in the Scriptures. (Stanzas 35-45) By referring back to Genesis it is then pointed out that all humanity was under sin and death through Adam, and that therefore the Paschal mystery is completed in the body of the Lord for all humanity, not just Israel. (Stanzas 46-65) At this point, Christ is identified as the Messiah by calling him “the one who comes (ἀφικόμενος) from heaven onto the earth for the suffering one”. (66-71) One should pause for a moment and ponder the significance of this.
In the brief summary above one can see the elements of remembrance and identification at work which were previously extrapolated from the biblical passages concerning the Last Supper. What this reveals about the Eucharist, is first that the aspect of remembrance carries Christ’s redemptive work into the present-day life of the believer, and second that the aspect of identification links Christ’s redemptive work to the Jewish Paschal narrative. This becomes even more apparent as one considers that during the Passover celebration, the Haggadah is preceded by the Passover meal (the Seder), in which a piece of bread called ‘the afikomen’ is broken off and hidden. Even though scholars have tried to come up with increasingly far-fetched etymologies for ‘afikomen’, the simplest, most logical explanation is that it is derived from the Greek afikomenos (ἀφικόμενος), which means ‘the coming one’.8 What is striking about this, is that this Passover rite preceded the birth of Jesus. As Jewish scholar David Daube notes:
“[...] the most decisive evidence for this […] comes from the New Testament itself. If no such rite had existed prior to the New Testament [...], the disciples could not possibly have understood what Jesus meant at the Last Supper. [...] The new thing in what Jesus did was the identification and realization of the messiahship.”9
Thus, at the moment the bread is broken during the Eucharist one is expected to be reminded that the piece of bread called ‘the coming one’ is no longer hidden, but identified by Christ as himself when he said “this is my body” (Matt. 26:26-28; Mark 14:22-24; Luke 22:19-20; 1 Cor. 11:23-26).
In On Pascha this is immediately followed by an intense prophetic harangue, as the sinfulness of the congregation is pointed out, culminating in the pronouncement that they are all dead. (Stanzas 72-99) At this point, the perspective impressively shifts from third-person to first-person as Christ begins to declare that he is their life and their salvation and that all peoples should come to him to receive forgiveness for their sins. The image that is painted here implies that you have to die in order to receive life from Christ. (Stanzas 101-103) The text then shifts back to the third-person perspective and concludes with a doxology and a final amen. (Stanzas 103-105)
In this final part, one encounters the Eucharistic elements of receiving life from Christ and the proclamation of his name (doxology). Furthermore, the element of ‘forgiveness of sins’, stated in Matt. 26:28, is present. Considered as a whole, On Pascha is revealed to be a journey that takes the believer from the creation of man in Geneses through the Paschal narrative in Exodus to the identification of Christ as Messiah, the long-expected ‘coming one’. What this implies for the ‘drive-through-Eucharist’ will be evaluated in the final conclusion.
The Eucharist in the Late Medieval Liturgical Tradition of the West: Luther vs. Zwingli
Whereas the liturgical tradition of the East preserved Eucharistic elements from Melito’s On Pascha in, for example, John Chrysostom’s Paschal Homily (late fourth century) and the Antiphon of the Matins for Holy Saturday (ca. eighth-ninth century), the liturgical tradition of the West was ‘Latinized’ from early on and has consequently grown distant from its Greek roots. The 4th century Saint Augustine of Hippo, who is perhaps the most influential Church Father of the Western tradition, was well known for his disdain of the Greek language, which would later prove to have profound consequences for the understanding of the purpose of theology in the West; which in turn would have a dramatic influence on the way in which Western theologians approached the Eucharist.
Whereas the Greek theologians of the East have viewed theology primarily as a means towards reaching the ultimate goal of deification (unity with God as described in 1 Cor. 15:28 and Eph. 1:23), the Latin West has regarded explanation to be the primary task of theology, aiming at putting the essence of the Christian faith into words so that it can be applied to a concrete, practical situation; be it an ethical dilemma, apologetics, or something else.10 Consequently, the East traditionally favored an apophatic approach to theology—stemming from the conviction that the ultimately unknowable God was represented most truthfully by a theology that does not affirm who he is, but denies whom he is not—whereas the West has traditionally found a cataphatic approach to theology, which focuses primarily on what is known of God through his self-revelation, more suitable for their explanatory purposes.11 In the East, the Eucharistic elements of remembrance, thanksgiving, identification, and proclamation have thus from early on been harmonized and preserved in the Divine Liturgy. In the West, however, different emphases have been made regarding these aspects, usually depending on what suited the explanation of the Eucharist best in defense of the dominant heresy of the time. This is where the ontological questions of “What is it made of?” and “How does it work?” as mentioned in the prolegomena come into play.
A recurring topic of discussion concerns the aspect of ‘identification’ during the Eucharist. When the bread is identified as Christ’s body and the wine as Christ’s blood, the question has often been posed as to whether or not the bread and wine physically change in flesh and blood, or whether they remain bread and wine ‘physically’, but acquire the ‘meaning’ or ‘spirit’ of flesh and blood during the process. This is an ontological question because it concerns ‘the being’ or the ‘composition’ of the Eucharist, and it may seem somewhat out of place considering the information gathered thus far via the teleological questions regarding the purpose of the Eucharist. However, the question finds its biblical origins in John 6:53-56: “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.” and must therefore not be dismissed outright.
However, one must first note the nature of this question betrays that it can only arise from and be answered within the dualistic paradigm that was mentioned in the prolegomena because it presupposes a distinction between ‘matter’ (‘real’ i.e. physical bread) and ‘mind’ (‘meaning’ i.e. the immaterial concept of flesh). In its desire to provide an explanation for the Christian doctrine, the Latin West was forced to adapt its theology to the dualistic worldview based on Greek philosophies, whereas it lacked a proper understanding of the Greek terminology, culminating at times in strange excesses like stercoranism (holding the belief that the bread and wine do not change in ‘spirit’ or ‘meaning’, thereby equating them with regular food and drink that ‘belongs to dung’ = Latin stercoriarius) and the belief in eucharistic miracles involving a physical transformation of bread and wine in human flesh and blood, which are subsequently consumed. It is excesses like these that moved radical reformer Ulrich Zwingli to break with the traditional Roman Catholic understanding of the Eucharist and adopt the view that the ‘real’ presence of Christ in the bread and wine is both absurd and unnecessary.12
This view caused Zwingli to stand in absolute opposition to his contemporary and fellow-reformer Martin Luther. Although many vehemently tried to unite them in hopes of forming a strong opposition to the status quo of the Roman Catholic Church, the attempts proved futile due to the doctrinal differences on the Eucharist. Luther vehemently believed in the real, bodily presence of the Lord in the Eucharist, as is illustrated by a short anecdote, wherein Luther, fatigued after a long journey, accidentally spilled a few drops of wine while administering the Eucharist:
“Luther placed the chalice on the altar, fell on his knees and licked up the wine so as to avoid stepping on it. At this, the whole congregation erupted into loud sobs and tears.”13
Zwingli, on the other hand, believed that the bread and wine only ‘signify’ the body and blood of Christ, meaning that they are only reminiscent of Christ’s suffering and death, as opposed to the Lord himself being incarnate in them.14 Thus, where Luther emphasized that Christ says “this is my body”, Zwingli emphasized that Christ says “do this in remembrance of me” – a schism that proved irreconcilable.
Post-Reformation theologians have often considered Luther’s opinion on the Eucharist a theolegoumenon, by which they mean that it is a strange, one-time occurrence within Lutheran doctrine that is otherwise based on being saved ‘by grace alone’.15 However, this is a fundamental misconception of Luther’s theology due to an ignorance of the dualistic and the non-dualistic worldview. It starts with the misconception of the antithesis of ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ as it is found in the biblical narrative. This is not, as Zwingli believed, the dualistic antithesis between ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ that is found in Platonic philosophy (which was abundant in his time due to the Enlightenment, cf. Prolegomena), but a non-dual antithesis between the ‘old’ human being as a sinful descendant of Adam ‘according to the flesh’ and the ‘reborn’ human being as an adopted child ‘according to the promise’.16
Zwingli interpreted the Bible in such a way that whenever it speaks of ‘spirit’, it refers to ‘the realm of the immaterial’, and whenever it speaks of the ‘flesh’, it refers to ‘the realm of the material’. This led him to the believe that all material things were ‘profane’, a notion that becomes very problematic very quickly when it comes to the incarnation of Christ, as evidenced by the Gnostics in the past, and demonstrated by his reluctance to accept the incarnational nature of the Eucharist. For Luther, however there was no issue concerning the indwelling of the ‘spiritual’ divine nature within the ‘material’ bread and wine, because the ‘material’ does not imply ‘profanity’. In fact, because the divine indwells the bread and the wine, he describes it as a “treasure, in and through which we receive the forgiveness of sins” and a “sheer salutary medicine, which aids you and gives you life in both body and soul”.17
Luther based his theology on the same idea that we find in Melito of Sardis’s On Pascha of the Old Testament sacrificial lamb as a (proto-)type which is fulfilled in the New Testament antitype of Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection. This gives us a clear insight into just how revolutionary Luther was in his thinking. It is reminiscent of Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous parable of the madman, in which a madman cries out on a market place that God is dead, killed by human beings in the Copernican revolution, a deed so great that human beings would have to become like Gods themselves to own up to it, only to conclude that no-one understands him, because he came too early.18 It would take approximately five-hundred more years for the West to realize that matter and mind do not stand in opposition, but are intimately joined together as one. Regarding the Eucharist, Luther called this ‘consubstantiation’, by which he meant that the ‘spirit of the bread’ and the ‘spirit of Christ’ are equally present in the material bread, echoing the Chalcedonian description of Christ’s human and divine nature as “unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, and inseparably” united.19
Although later Protestant theologians leaned more towards the midway view of John Calvin—who positioned himself doctrinally between Luther and Zwingli—the dualistic emphasis on remembrance as ‘signifying’ and the rejection of the incarnational nature of the Eucharist remains predominant in the West to this day. What this implies for the ‘drive-through-Eucharist’ will now be evaluated in the final conclusion.
Recapitulation
In the introduction, I discussed the controversy that erupted around the ‘drive-through-Eucharist’ and the ‘take-home-Eucharist’ as alternative Eucharistic celebrations during the COVID-19 pandemic. I have subsequently pointed out that this controversy arose because of different understandings as to what the Eucharist actually ‘is’. The emphasis in this understanding can be primarily ‘teleological’, or primarily ‘ontological’, and it can stem from a ‘dualistic’ and a ‘non-dualistic’ worldview.
The Eucharist is modeled after the biblical Last Supper as described in the synoptic Gospels, which is itself a depiction of an even more ancient rite commemorating the Jewish Passover. During this rite, a piece of bread called ‘the coming one’ was broken off and hidden, which referred to the identity of the Messiah that was not yet known. By breaking the bread and saying “this is my body” Christ identified himself as the Messiah. By saying “do this in remembrance of me” Christ decreed a continuation of the rite—though now as the celebration of the actualization of the type that was shown in the Old Testament Paschal narrative. Through Melito of Sardis’s On Pascha one is able to get a remarkable insight into what this transformed celebration looked like for the Early Church: as a journey that takes the believer from the creation of man in Geneses through the Paschal narrative in Exodus to the identification of Christ as Messiah, the long-expected ‘coming one’; an all-encompassing rite containing the biblical elements of remembrance, identification, receiving life and forgiveness from Christ, and the proclamation of his name as seen in the Last Supper.
Whereas the liturgical tradition of the East preserved Eucharistic elements from Melito’s On Pascha in its liturgies, the West quickly became ‘Latinized’ and grew distant from its Greek roots. Due to a difference in the understanding of the purpose of theology, the West emphasized the explanatory task of theology, whereas the East saw theology as a means towards reaching union with God. Consequently, the East would prove to be preservative in its theology and its liturgy, whereas the West in its defense against misconceptions of Christian doctrine had to adopt its theological discourse to a dualistic worldview stemming from Greek philosophies of which it had long since lost a proper understanding due to the estrangement from the underlying Greek terminology. This resulted in ontological confusion over the composition of the Eucharist, eventually culminating in the Reformation, wherein Martin Luther proves to be somewhat of a surprise in his remarkable recovery of the non-dualistic biblical worldview – which unfortunately simultaneously made him incomprehensible to his contemporaries, as well as to many Protestant theologians that followed thereafter. Thus, the dualistic worldview remained predominant in the West, proving, again and again, to be fertile soil for doctrinal disputes over the ontological and teleological aspects of the Eucharist, most recently surrounding the ‘drive-through-Eucharist’ and ‘take-home-Eucharist’ as alternative Eucharistic celebrations during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Final Conclusion
The esteemed twentieth-century Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky claims that throughout history all the dogmatic battles within the Church are dominated by the safeguarding for all Christians of the possibility of deification.20 The controversy surrounding the ‘drive-through-Eucharist’ and ‘take-home-Eucharist’ as alternative Eucharistic celebrations during the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as a manifestation of this pattern. If the Eucharist is supposed to be a means towards reaching unity with God, one may have to stray from the non-dualistic perspective of the Bible and seek refuge in the dualistic worldview of the philosophers to make a theological case for the ‘take-home-Eucharist’. Knowledge of God is inextricably tied to the experience of God in the non-dualistic worldview, as is evidenced by Jesus’s actions during the Last Supper, and subsequently by Melito of Sardis’s transformed Passover Celebration—even by Martin Luther’s sinking to the ground to prevent a spilled drop of wine from going to waste.
This experiential aspect was diminished during the Enlightenment, as ‘matter’ was separated from ‘mind’, and the rationality of the ‘mind’ was deemed to be superior to the physical experience of the body. Recently, however, this belief has increasingly been proven to be unfounded, for example by George Lakoff and Mark Johnsen in their revolutionary and renowned book The Metaphors We Live By, in which they prove how subjectivist’s need for coherence and objectivist’s need for understanding are both met and joined together in experience.21 Furthermore, Erik Goodwyn states that:
“placebo study and biogenetic structuralism have shown empirically that meaning, mental image, dance, embodied ritual action, belief, social role, sacred symbol, physical touch, eye-gaze, and empathic human connection can all combine to affect our various biological systems, including not only the brain but the immune system, the gastrointestinal system, the skin, the heart, and the lungs”.22
The separation of the bread and wine from the all-encompassing experience of the Divine Liturgy can be seen as a move away from the non-dualistic perspective of the Bible to the dualistic perspective of the philosophers, as celebrating the Eucharist at home presupposes that the rational mind is sufficient in acquiring knowledge of God. Therefore, it is only to be expected that questions will arise on the validity of the Eucharist.
However, a pandemic is an exceptional situation. To adjust the celebration to these special circumstances is not wrong, for it still provides an experience of Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection—albeit diminished. Furthermore, the notion that the dualistic worldview is insufficient in coming to deifying knowledge of God implies that hundreds of thousands of faithful and devoted Christians have fallen victim to false teachers and the eschatological consequences thereof. I strongly believe this goes too far; nowhere in the Bible does it say that God is the God of the non-dualists only. I do not believe that the power of the Holy Spirit to reveal Christ to a believer is limited by a certain worldview. Through adapting the Biblical worldview to the dualistic perspective, the faith remained accessible to people who were otherwise unable to understand its foreign notions. Similar efforts have been made throughout Church history (cf. for example (pseudo-)Dionysius the Areopagite, who engaged with the Neoplatonic philosophy thriving in his time), and may even be found within in the Bible itself (cf. for example Nehemiah 8:8).23 Here, I must humble myself, and withhold from judging the effectiveness of God’s transformative grace. I am therefore of the opinion that the believing Christian can celebrate the Eucharist in an alternative way, even though the holistic experience of the Divine Liturgy is—on the whole—to be preferred.
William Arndt et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 998.
Ibid., 282.
Cf. Gen. 1:1-18; God separates light from darkness (1:4); water above from water below (1:6); dry land from water (1:9); day from night (1:18); but not heaven from earth (1:1).
John Hainsworth, “The Force of the Mystery: Anamnesis and Exegesis in Melito’s Peri Pascha” in St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 46:2 (2002), 109.
Ibid., 113-114.
Most significantly: the fixed themes (i.e. the lamb, deliverance from Egypt, bitter herbs, unleavened bread); the description of Christ as the afikomen (a piece of bread cut out from the loaf at the beginning of the table rite); and the adherence to the prescribed shape of the Haggadah (according to the Mishnah Pesachim, it must “begin with the disgrace and end with the glory”). Ibid., 116-117.
Ibid., 121.
“In the course of the Jewish Passover eve service, then, whether at the conclusion of the supper (the practice which has carried the day) or at its commencement (as according to some Talmudic practice at least), a piece of unleavened bread is taken as the Messiah by the company. The traditional designation of this fragment is Aphiqoman. The word is neither Hebrew nor Aramaic. Medieval Jewish commentators give fanciful etymologies. Modern scholars realize that the word is Greek, yet for once their etymologies are even more whimsical than those of the Rabbis. They do not even disdain made-up formulations for which there is no evidence whatever in the whole of Greek literature. Lietzmann, in his article putting down Eisler, improving upon an idea of Jastrow’s, claims that the word stands for epi komon, in German auf den Bummel!, ‘off to a crawl!’. Eisler, however, was right: Aphiqoman is the Greek aphikomenos or ephikomenos, ‘The Coming One’, ‘He That Cometh’, Hebrew Habba’, Aramaic ‘athe. But for the theological and historical consequences that follow, it is hard to believe that this obvious, philologically easiest, näheliegendste derivation would have been overlookedin favour of the most far-fetched, tortuous ones” —David Daube, He That Cometh (London: Diocese of London, 1966), 8.
David Daube, Law and Wisdom in the Bible, David Daube’s Gifford Lectures, Volume 2, ed. Calum Carmichael (West Conshohocken: Templeton Press, 2010), 179-180.
Gijs van den Brink and C. van der Kooi, Christelijke dogmatiek: een inleiding (Zoetermeer: Uitgeverij Boekencentrum, 2012), 40. ----- Vladimir Lossky, The mystical theology of the Eastern Church, (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press 2002), 9; 67.
Lossky, mystical theology, 11-14.
John Raymond Stephenson, “Martin Luther and the Eucharist,” Scottish Journal of Theology 36 (4), 1983, 451.
Ibid., 448.
Ibid., 451.
Ibid., 450.
Ibid., 459.
Ibid., 460.
“"Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? […] Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? […] Do we not feel the breath of empty space? How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? […] who will wipe this blood off us? […] Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? […]" Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. […] "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet."” From: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887), edited by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 181-182 (paragraph 125).
Stephenson, “Martin Luther and the Eucharist,” 447.
Lossky, Mystical Theology, 9.
Lakoff and Johnsen describe how two myths see man as separate from his environment: firstly, the myth of objectivism, which reflects the human need to understand the external world in order to be able to function successfully in it, which is overcome by the belief that knowledge is power and science provides control over nature; and secondly the myth of subjectivism, which is focused on internal aspects of understanding, i.e. what is meaningful and makes his life worth living, in which alienation is overcome by attempting to gain union with nature through a passive appreciation of it. As opposed to these two myths, Lakoff and Johnson propose the experientialist myth, which sees man as part of his environment: objectivity and subjectivity are not opposed, but both are met in experience. Truth depends on understanding, which emerges from functioning in the world, which is how the objectivist's need for an account of truth is met. Structuring experience (liturgy) provides coherence, which is how the subjectivist's need for personal meaning and significance is met. From: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, The Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)
Erik Goodwyn, “Rediscovering the ritual technology of the placebo effect in analytical psychology,” Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 62 (2017), Issue 3, 395-414.
“They read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people understood what was being read.” The Torah had to be made understandable to the Israelites after their return from the Babylonian Exile.