The Eucharistic Faith

Ralph Mcmichael

Description

In The Eucharistic Faith, the first of a significant new systematic theology of the Eucharist, Ralph N. McMichael weaves liturgy and theology together to understand the ways in which theology and Christian faith are, at heart, about the receiving of the gift of Jesus’ life in Communion.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Practice
• Christian Rituals
• Philosophie et théologie
• Liturgy
• Worship

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 30 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334056614
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contents
Title
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction

Part 1 Theology
1 The Eucharistic Origin of Theology
2 The Eucharistic Nature of Theology

Part 2 Seeking
3 Tradition
4 Scripture

Part 3 Understanding
5 Knowledge
6 Language
7 Truth

Part 4 Faith
8 The Eucharistic Faith

Epilogue: Going Where We Are Already
Appendix: The Holy Eucharist: The Paradigm That Does Not Shift
Index of Bible References
Index of Names and Subjects
Copyright
For Louis
Teacher, Mentor and Friend
Acknowledgements
Theology in its proper existence is the thinking and reflecting that takes place within the Body of Christ. I am one member of the Body of Christ, and we know and confess that each member needs all the other members of this Body in order to become who they really are as that unique member. Individualism is a theological sin, the posture of inescapable error. Thus, I wish to acknowledge some members of the Body of Christ who have assisted my formation as a theologian as well as in the particular work of theology that you have before you. I am thankful first to David Shervington and the editorial staff of SCM Press for taking this project on, and especially for David’s patience during multiple delays of receiving this manuscript and for his enthusiastic response once he did get to read this work. Likewise, I am grateful for those who read specific chapters and offered their reflections: Marshall Crossnoe, Andrew McGowan, Stephen Fowl, David Fagerberg and Nathan Jennings. It is a blessing to offer my gratitude to Allyne Smith for reading the whole manuscript with his keen editorial skill since we first met over 40 years ago at our first day of orientation for incoming seminarians. We have shared many theological conversations as well as a great deal of other talks and experiences that have nothing to do with theology. Thank you to Stanley Hauerwas for writing the foreword, which in his inimitable style tells the reader to do what any author would want, that is, actually read and focus on what is in this book.
Theology also takes place somewhere. While the abiding argument of this book is that the Eucharist is where and whereby theology truly and really takes place, I would like to offer my gratitude to a couple of priests who provided me with a particular place to pray, read, think and write. I speak of that Oxbridge looking office I have on the third floor of the ‘old part’ of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Webster Groves, Missouri. The two priests who have allowed me to come to this office and to remain there are Doris Westfall and Jenny Hulen. While the concept of this book reaches back a couple of decades, its planning and initial writing occurred while I was priest-in-charge of St Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Edwardsville, Illinois. For four years and four months I was blessed to serve this parish as priest, pastor and teacher. We shared the Eucharistic faith and life; we shared the kind of friendship and love that animates the Body of Christ. Thank you, my fellow members at St Andrew’s for our life and time together.
Life within the Body of Christ is not an escape from ‘real’ life; it is the transformation and celebration of our human life. God’s providence in my life led me to a somewhat eccentric Anglo-Catholic parish where I met someone whom I would marry and with whom we would have three children. For this gift of life and love I am grateful to God, and I thank Jan for sharing this life with me for 33 years and for our wonderful children Nelson, Anne Marie and Breck. And then there is our grandson Anthony Khai who blesses us in so many ways.
Forty-one years ago at the age of 22, I showed up on the campus of a seminary to begin my theological formation. On the day I arrived I entered a simple wooden chapel to attend an afternoon celebration of the Eucharist. There were a few people present and the professor of liturgy was the presider. Wearing an unadorned conical chasuble, standing at an austere wooden altar, he presided and prayed with the simplicity and sincerity that I came to learn was required if we were to take the Eucharist seriously as God’s work and not ours. The Eucharistic faith is faith in the Father who gives the Son and pours out the Holy Spirit; it is faith bestowed and received. The Eucharist is not a display of personal piety, whether genuine or manufactured, and it is certainly not an arena for partisan posturing. We strive for Eucharistic competence; ‘we rehearse because it is not important’. Those lessons, that example, is the witness and embodiment of the Eucharistic faith and of the priesthood that serves the Body of Christ that is Louis Weil. I dedicate this first volume of my Eucharistic systematic theology to Louis: Teacher, Mentor and Friend.
Foreword
Keep reading. I begin with that admonition because I worry that some readers of this extraordinary book may take what McMichael has done for granted in the same way the Eucharist is taken for granted. After all, is it not the case that for many Christians the Eucharist is celebrated every Sunday? Accordingly, some may wonder what is so special about McMichael’s claim that Christians are constituted by Eucharist and that Christians make the Eucharist what it is.
Keep reading. What McMichael has done is not theology as usual. This is not just another academic theologian trying to gain notice by emphasizing one or another aspect of the Christian faith – for example eschatology – to try to convince their readers how such an emphasis helps us better understand every aspect of the Christian faith. By rethinking everything from the reality of the Eucharistic faith, McMichael recovers the Christological centre of our faith in a manner that helps us see the radical character of the everyday. Gratitude turns out to be not only a central virtue but a strong claim, indeed even a metaphysical claim, about the way things are.
Keep reading. But read slowly. This is a book that has been long in the making. His project is one that could only be undertaken by someone whose theological judgements have been honed by fundamental reconsiderations of the work of theology. That is but a way to say that McMichael’s book is the work of a mature theological mind that should make the reader stop often to read and reread sentences that should change the way we live and think.
Keep reading. McMichael wants his readers to think with him. For example, McMichael begins his book by asking ‘What is the essence of the Christian faith?’ Yet he soon questions whether that is an appropriate way to begin because that question can tempt the theologian to a reductive theological method. Put polemically, McMichael worries that attempts to try to find an essence of the Christian faith is to fall into the hands of Protestant liberalism.
McMichael is anything but a theological liberal, but that is why you must keep reading. You must keep reading because, like Barth, every theological claim demands being read in relation to other theological claims. Much later in the book, McMichael will say that ‘the Eucharist is the essence of the Christian faith’, which means he must be saying something quite exact given his earlier worries about ‘essence’. Some may think it useful to label McMichael as a ‘postmodernist’, but such labels fail to do justice to the theological substance that has shaped this book.
Keep reading. McMichael is obviously well versed in the ancient as well as more recent theological works, but he does not develop his account of the Eucharistic faith by entering into conversation with other theologians. I have no doubt he thought long and hard about whether or who he might discuss in an effort to make his position more recognizable. But as I have suggested he is not just making another theological proposal. He is trying to help us see what it means to live in a universe created and sustained by a Eucharistic God. It does not get more serious than that.
Keep reading. Let me give one example, though McMichael’s book is one long example, of how a sustained reading of The Eucharistic Faith changes how we think about ourselves and the world. In his wonderful chapter on truth, he makes the obvious but seldom acknowledged observation that ‘Truth is timeless, but we are not.’ What a wonderful sentence. It is a sentence, moreover, that hopefully he will develop further in the volumes he plans to write after this book. That truth is timeless is but a way to remind us, as McMichael does throughout this book, that this is a book about a very particular truth because God is a very particular God, that is, God is a Eucharistic God.
I have tried to do no more than to entice the reader of McMichael’s book to keep reading. But why me? Why should anyone think I am someone that has a standing to make that suggestion? After all I am not even a proper theologian. I am an ethicist. It would be counter-productive for me to try to respond to that worry. What I can say, however, is McMichael’s observation that theology should change a theologian I take to be true. It is also true that reading a theologian as serious as McMichael will also invite changes but then that is the way it should be. Keep reading.

Stanley Hauerwas
Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law at Duke University
Introduction
What is the essence of the Christian faith? This has been an abiding question for Christian theology from at least the eighteenth century, and it has received a variety of positive answers as well as an array of objections and rejections. It would be fair to refer to this question as a characteristically modern one. It is only with the emergence of our critical capacities, expressly in the realms of history and reason, that we would pursue the question of essence. That is, applying our now honed critical perspectives and skills, we can begin to question the Christian faith from outside the confines of church and its authori