Do this in Remembrance of Me

Bryan D. Spinks

Description

Bryan Spinks is one of the world’s leading scholars in the field of liturgy and to have a comprehensive work by him on the Eucharist is a major catch for SCM. Like the author’s previous work on Baptism, this will become a standard work about the Eucharist and Eucharistic theology worldwide. The book, a study of the history and theology of the Eucharist, is the fifth volume in the SCM Studies in Worship and Liturgy series and will help to establish the series as a place for landmark books of liturgical scholarship.

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 10 février 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334052029
• Langue: English

Extrait

Do This in Remembrance of Me
Also in the SCM Studies in Worship and Liturgy series

The Collect in the Churches of the Reformation
Edited by Bridget Nichols

Rethinking the Origins of the Eucharist
Martin Stringer

Liturgy and Interpretation
Kenneth Stevenson

Comfortable Words: Polity, Piety and the Book of Common Prayer
Edited by Stephen Platten and Christopher Woods
scm studies in worship and liturgy
Do This in Remembrance of Me
The Eucharist from the Early Church to the ­Present Day
Bryan D. Spinks
© Bryan D. Spinks 2013

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library



978-0-334-04376-8



Typeset by Manila Typesetting Company
Printed in Great Britain by
Ashford Colour Press, Gosport, Hampshire
Contents
Foreword by Teresa Berger
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction: In Search of the Meals behind the Last Supper: Cultural Background and Eucharistic Origins

1 Some Early Eucharistic Practices and Beliefs from Ignatius to Origen
2 The Shaping of Early Eucharistic Prayers: ‘Paleoanaphoras’
3 Eucharistic Theologies in the Fourth- and Fifth-Century Homilies and the Emergence of the Classical Anaphora
4 The Egyptian Anaphoral Traditions and the Divine Liturgy of the Coptic Orthodox Church
5 The Eucharist and Anaphoras of the Byzantine Synthesis
6 The Syriac Liturgical Traditions
7 The Ethio-Eritrean (‘Ge’ez’) and Armenian Traditions
8 The Classical Western Rites
9 From the Romano-Western Synthesis to the Tridentine Reforms: Liturgy, Commentaries and Eucharistic Theologies
10 Luther and Lutheran Eucharistic Liturgies
11 The Reformed Tradition: From Ulrich Zwingli to Eugène Bersier
12 The Anglican Tradition: From Thomas Cranmer to the Tractarian Disputes
13 The Radical Reformation and Some New Churches of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
14 The Twentieth-Century Liturgical and Ecumenical Movements: From Vatican II to ‘Lima’ 1982
15 Some Trends in a Postmodern Era
Afterword: Some Crumbs from Beneath the Table
Appendix 1: The Classical Anaphoral Families
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
teresa berger
With this book on the Eucharist from the early Church to the present day, Bryan Spinks offers us the fruits of his 40 years of indefatigable, passionate commitment to scholarly inquiry into the history of Christian liturgy. Having displayed his skills in this field in numerous prior publications, he here focuses his attention on what surely constitutes the key challenge for any historian of Christian liturgy, namely how to map the development of eucharistic celebrations from the threshold of the Upper Room all the way to cyberspace. To my knowledge, Bryan Spinks is the first scholar who maps the terrain in precisely this sweeping arch – even the most recent books to date on eucharistic development have stopped short of the digital world, although eucharistic practices have by now migrated online (whether scholars of liturgy approve or not).
The diachronic breadth of the present book is matched by a splendid synchronic or, more appropriately, ecclesial breadth. From the Eastern Churches in all their diversity – both Orthodox and Oriental – through Roman Catholic and Protestant communities to modern and contemporary ecclesial formations, Spinks surveys the history of the Eucharist with an amazingly wide lens. I doubt that there is another book on eucharistic history available that displays not only the standard Eastern and Western narratives but also describes, for example, the eucharistic practices of the ancient Church of the East as well as those of the small yet intriguing nineteenth-century English Catholic Apostolic Church or the much larger (Mormon) Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Bryan Spinks attends to all of these traditions and more, and he does so with many years of scholarly research into a richly diverse array of liturgical traditions at his fingertips. Here too, Spinks’s book is unmatched in its breadth. This history of the Eucharist is marked by a deep passion for the subject matter as a whole, not only for customary high points.
That said, Do This in Remembrance of Me appears at a complicated time in liturgical historiography as a scholarly discipline. Vital challenges have been raised for the traditional ways of writing liturgy’s past. These challenges are related to major shifts in historiography broadly conceived (e.g., the turns to social history, history ‘from below’, gender history and micro-history, to name but a few). The probing questions about the way historians construct the object of their inquiry put pressure also on the work of historians of liturgy as they struggle with how to study and narrate liturgy’s past. Bryan Spinks is aware of these pressures, yet refuses to be either immobilized by them or lured into an endless theorizing of all the pressures that disables one from ever daring to write anything approaching an actual historiographic narrative again. Instead, Spinks presents a clear choice of what he considers essential for a history of the Eucharist (within the harsh constraints of a one-volume, single-authored book). Essential for him are the textual witnesses to the rite, and their renowned interpreters. It is no secret that I have argued for privileging other sites for the writing of liturgical history. It is equally clear that what Bryan Spinks has chosen to focus on will always remain one key building block for any history of the Eucharist, no matter how many other angles one explores. There is, after all, no unmediated access ever to the past; and for the more distant past, written texts especially remain of primary importance. Moreover, a fresh look at these sources is particularly important in liturgical history-writing at this point in time, since some of our key sources have come to be read and interpreted very differently today from how they were read even 50 years ago. Last but not least, privileging a eucharistic history rooted in key textual witnesses clearly does not mean that other ways of narrating this history – for example with a focus on the gathered assembly, or on the importance of gender differences in shaping eucharistic celebrations – are not also important. The beautiful cover of the present book says as much: it shows a detail from a communion service of a group of Moravians at Fetters Lane in London in 1753. Not only is the gathered congregation the central focus of this image, but men and women are separated by gender in this eucharistic assembly – as, indeed, they were for most of liturgical history.
There remains of course the basic question of what – in the face of greatly diversified scholarly methods in historiography – a book on eucharistic history must include. The answers will vary depending on each scholar’s historiographic lenses. That diversity in and of itself can be seen as a good: it witnesses to the fact that no narrative of eucharistic development can tell the whole story (not least because there is an ‘inner side’ to this history that cannot be mapped with historical tools). Such a witness is important especially at a point in time when the grand, linear, evolutionary narratives of earlier scholarship have lost credibility. This scholarship downplayed, among other things, the fragmentariness of the extant sources and the diversity of the evidence, which defies harmonization.
With this background of changes in liturgical historiography, Do This in Remembrance of Me opts for and displays, as no other book I know, a diachronic and synchronic breadth of eucharistic texts and interpretations. This breadth, moreover, is presented by a pre-eminent historian of liturgy who reads ferociously in the field. As Bryan Spinks’s colleague at Yale – our offices are across the hall from each other – I stand as an eyewitness to the phenomenal workload that lies behind this book. I have seen and can testify to the never-ending boxes of new books that piled up outside Bryan’s office; while inside the piles grew higher and higher on his desk, until the man himself was hard to see behind the piles. And then there were the periodic email updates about individual book chapters he was working on, such as one message that announced, with obvious relief: ‘I am finally out of Egypt!’
As Bryan Spinks’s colleague at Yale, I have also had the privilege of worshipping with him. Given Bryan’s vast knowledge of different eucharistic practices and his openness to contemporary pastoral necessities and cultural sensibilities, no eucharistic service at which Bryan presides is ever sim