agination, and that analogy is a critical means whereby to generate the second immediacy which makes a faith both

critical and reverent. It means finally that the intersection of cultic ritual and cultural ritual is an area for continual inquiry.

Theodore Runyon

The World as the Original Sacrament

The Eucharist brings together and relates three basic forms of reality: the divine, the material world, and humankind. In the sacrament a part of the material world becomes a sign, a means to act out, express and participate in the divine-human relationship. Thus the material world has always been implicated in the sacramental event; it has always been there as a concomitant part of this relation. Unless one stops to reflect on it, however, the world is scarcely noticed; it is there as a taken-for-granted factor. Seldom has it been the focus of interest. Even when attention has been directed toward it as a sacramental sign as in the debates over the nature of the real presence the preoccupation has been with ways and means of insuring the divine presence, or the presence of proper human faith and disposition. The presence of the world seemed obvious by contrast and one does not discuss the obvious. Hence the world has been obscured or even, in Heidegger's sense, "forgotten," the neglected member of the trinity of God, humankind and the world. One reason for this neglect is because the paradigms for explaining and understanding the Eucharist have been borrowed primarily from christology and have been shaped, therefore, by the christological formulas and their concern to conjoin properly the human and the divine. In these formulas perhaps the world has been silently subsumed under the human as fellow creature, but seldom
Dr. Runyon is professor of systematic theology, Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, and during the 1979-1980 academic year was a fellow at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, Saint John's University, Collegeville, Minnesota.

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has it been addressed explicitly, with the result that the world Jesus came to reconcile has been understood as restricted to the anthropocentric world of human sin and corruption, while the cosmic themes of Johannine and Pauline literature have languished or have been touched on only insofar as they could be treated under the christological model. Consequently, in an age in which the world we inhabit can no longer be taken for granted, the Church finds itself ill-prepared to speak a theologically grounded word; nor does worship, with the notable exception of some of the psalms, celebrate the structures of humanity's relationship to the world. How can we raise to consciousness, both for our theologizing and for our worship, this neglected relationship? In order to clarify the issues involved, I propose that we begin by raising the question, "What is the original sacrament?" What is the most fundamental sacramental phenomenon in which all of the particular sacraments are rooted? Henri de Lubac was perhaps the first modern theologian to raise the question in this form when in the mid-i930s he suggested, "All sacraments are essentially sacraments of the Church." 1 By this he meant that the individual sacraments participate in and are mediated by the sacramental reality which the Church is in its concrete visible and social nature. In its materiality the Church is chosen by God to mediate his spiritual gifts. It serves therefore as that underlying sacramental event in which the individual sacraments it celebrates are grounded. Otto Semmelroth provided what was perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of this theme and in the title of his book lent it its classic motto: "the Church as the original sacrament [UrSakrament]."2 Karl Rahner picked up the theme and made some strategic and helpful terminological distinctions. Because the reality of the Church cannot be understood apart from Christ, the Lord of the Church, its sacramentality can be properly grounded only in his prior sacramentality. He is the more original, the primal, sacrament which the Church in turn mediates through its corporeality in the world. Thus Rahner reserves the term Ursakrament for Christ, while he calls the Church the Grundsakrament, the foundational sacrament which through the means of grace it administers continues to transmit
1 2

Catholicism (London: Burns, Oates & Washburn 1950) 35. Die Kirche als Ursakrament (Frankfort: Josef Knecht 1955).

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Christ's life.3 By pushing the question of the original sacrament back one step from where Semmelroth had left it, Rahner achieves more than just a clarification in terminology. He places the Church in proper relativity to its Lord. The way was then prepared for Edward Schillebeeckx's classic statement, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, which employs the insights of phenomenology and the model of sacrament to understand the impact that Jesus made upon those who came in contact with him during his earthly ministry, and the impact he continues to make through his sacramentality as mediated by the Church. Christ is "the one and only saving primordial sacrament. . . the one and only 'Sacrament of God.'" 4 I do not wish to deny the legitimacy and importance of any of these interpretations. All of them found their continuing expression in Vatican II's repeated references to the "servant Church" as the sacramentum mundi, placed in the world with a mission of reconciliation to all peoples in continuity with the universality of Christ's own mission.5 I believe we do justice to the concept of the original sacrament, however, only if we push it back one further step by asking, "What is the horizon, the context, within which Christ's own ministry and mission were set?" According to the general consensus of biblical scholars this question has only one answer. In all the variety of interpretations and speculations concerning messianic consciousness and Jesus' own self-understanding, one thing comes through clearly. Jesus saw himself as an agent of God's kingdom whose task it was to proclaim the radicality of God's rule over all aspects of existence in accord with the intention of creation. "In the basileia, creation and redemption are completed. . . . The only significance of the whole of Jesus' activity is to gather the eschatological people of God." 6 From his baptism to his Last Supper, the kingdom is the constant theme of his ministry, the point of reference of all his teaching. He is baptized in response to John the Baptist's call to prepare for the kingdom. He begins his own ministry with the same message, "The kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe the
The Church and the Sacraments (New York: Herder and Herder 1963) 18. New York: Sheed and Ward 1963, 40. 5 The Constitution Lumen gentium on the Church, no. 48. See also Jan Groot, "The Church as Sacrament of the World/' Concilium 3/: ed. Edward Schillebeeckx (New York: Paulist Press 1968) 51-66. 6 Joachim Jeremas, New Testament Theology (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons
4 3

1971) 249, 170.

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good news." The metanoia, the repentance or turning, for which he calls is a turning away from the world as it is now constituted and a turning toward that power which constitutes the new age that is to come when the Father's "will [is] done on earth as it is in heaven." His healings, his exorcisms, his commands, his parables, all have reference to the quality of the kingdom as it is even now beginning to break in wherever his word is truly heard, forgiveness is received, reconciliation takes place, and the order of God is reestablished. The kingdom he envisages is clearly a transformation of this world in accordance with God's original intention and will for it. True, in the Johannine account, in answer to Pilate's question, Jesus says, "My kingdom is not of this world." But the world to which he refers in that instance is the present age presided over by the likes of Pilate, Herod and Caiaphas, which will be superseded by the age to come presided over by God's own agent of justice, the Son of man. The new age to come will be a radical transformation, therefore, but in neither Old nor New Testament is it envisioned as a volatilization of this material world into a realm of pure spirit. This world is the object of God's redeeming and transforming activity; and christology, Church, and sacraments, must all be seen within the context of this overarching purpose. Indeed, material signs and actions become the clearest indication of participation (or non-participation) in the power of the kingdom food, drink, clothing, housing, visitation (Mt 25:31-46). The notion of sacrament has as it ultimate context this notion of renewal, as Yves Congar writes: "The incarnation of his Son inserted the principle into history . . . of that renewal of the world on which God had irrevocably decided. . . . Seen in this light, the notion of sacrament assumes dynamic value; it is related to the world and its history. It becomes the concrete historical expression of God's design for salvation in this world, the sign and instrument through which God works out his decision to intervene with his grace in mankind and in creation in order to make them achieve the end for which he had destined them from the beginning." 7 As Jesus assembles his disciples for a final meal together, therefore, he enacts a parable which states in summary fashion and dramatizes his own life as a servant of the kingdom, a kingdom whose first signs are the forgiveness of sins and God's love poured out for the reconciliation of those who are open to the good news of
'The Notion of 'Major' or 'Principal' Sacraments," The Sacraments in General (note 5 above)28.
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divine mercy. As they begin the meal he says to them, "I have earnestly desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer; for I tell you I shall not eat it again until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God" (Lk 22:15, J 6). And as he passes the cup he says, "From now on I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes" (v. 18). With these actions he transforms the paschal meal that celebrates the faithfulness of God in the past into an eschatological feast, the first fruits of the age to come. What is this kingdom for which Jesus risks everything? And how can bread and wine serve as appropriate signs of its coming and at the same time be identified with Jesus' own life and mission? The kingdom is the rule of God that will establish an order that promises not just the reconciliation of humankind but fulfillment for all that God has created. As the prophet envisions this messianic age, it is a transformation in which both the human and the natural world share: With righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; . . . Righteousness shall be the girdle of his waist, and faithfulness the girdle of his loins. The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. . . . They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Is 11:4-6, 9). No sharp demarcation is drawn between humanity and the rest of the created order, for their futures intertwine. As St. Paul later was to describe it, the creation itself will benefit from the redemption of humankind through Christ, just as it now suffers from human corruption. "For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God . . . because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God" (Rom 8:19, 21). In the hands of Jesus the bread and wine, signs of the old order and the previous covenant, become signs of the new covenant of grace that is the hallmark of his kingdom. To receive them is to receive the very substance of his life given for the kingdom. To parWorld as Original Sacrament 499

ticipate in that life is to receive eschatological food and drink, the new creation in its promissory form, the earnest (arrabn) of that which is to come. As the presence of Christ, the real presence is the presence of the power of the kingdom which was the driving force in his existence as he embodied and lived out the intention of God. You cannot eat his body (i.e., partake in who he was in his very being) and drink his blood (i.e., partake in that for which he poured out his life's blood)) and not eat and drink the kingdom of God. This is why, according to Paul, to participate in the sacramental power of the new age and yet to operate habitually in terms of selfishness, injustice and insensitivity, is to partake unworthily and to invite judgment and dire consequences (cf. Cor 11:20-32). Once we have grasped the eschatological quality of the sacrament as revealed in Christ, we are in a position to look back from the eschaton to the proton, from the kingdom to creation, and to look at the creation with new eyes. Turning to the first chapter of Genesis, we find that the ancient Hebrew story opens up the character of our relationship to the world afresh. In the hands of its Creator the world was itself the first sacrament, the first use of the material to communicate and facilitate the divine-human relation. Thus the world is the "original sacrament." To be sure, Christ remains the sacramental means to reconcile a fallen humanity. But Christ's giving of freedom through bread and wine to humankind is prefigured in the Creator's bestowal of freedom to his creatures as in Genesis 1 he entrusts to male and female the care and protection of the world he has made. He calls upon them to use it in consistency with his intention. The very term "image of God" may have been used by the priestly au thors of Genesis 1 (which was written during the exile in Babylon) in conscious analogy to the custom of the Babylonian emperor who, when he had conquered a new territory, set up an image of himself in the capital city of the province and appointed a governor who ruled by virtue of the authority vested in the image. The governor was granted a considerable degree of independence to rely on his own judgment in most matters as long as he kept the province loyal to the emperor. If this combination of image and governor was in deed in the minds of those who in Genesis 1 recorded the Hebrew perception of human life, it stood in stark contrast to the official Babylonian view as contained in the Enuma elish epic of creation. In that story humankind was created as slaves to do the work of the gods so that the gods might be at rest. But the Hebrew consciousTheodore Runyon
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ness had originated precisely in the revolt against slavery. Their God called them not into slavery but into a suzerainty covenant, into coresponsibility for the world. 8 "And God blessed them, and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.' And God said, 'Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. . . . And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good'" (Gen 1:28-30). The original sacrament is not the Church, therefore, and not even Christ, important as the sacramental nature of Christ and of the Church are for Christian faith and practice. But the original, visible sign of God's grace is the world he entrusts to our care. Moreover, in giving us this gift God gives us not just something. In, with, and through it he gives us himself as our Father. He endows us with the possibility of receiving him as Creator/Father by giving us the inheritance that makes possible our freedom and independence as mature sons and daughters. Referring to the renewal of creation, Paul says, "You did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship. . . . We are the children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ." And the inheritance given us both in creation and recreation is the proper relationship to the world. "For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God" (Rom 8:15, 17, 19). The term "Father" is an appropriate way of speaking of God, therefore, not just because of the love which a mother or father has toward a child but because to parent is to create a life related to oneself yet free, an independent center of will and action. In giving us the world God both undergirds us with a Father's love and affirms us in our maturity and responsibility to care for that which he has entrusted to us. The implications of this for a theology of ecology and an ethic of responsibility are evident. But just as evident is the fact that we are far gone from the original divine intention. We have separated the gift from the giver, the inheritance from the testator, and acted as if it were our own with no answerability to anyone. The ironic result of this willful absconding with our inheritance has been not increased freedom but fateful bondage; the world is becoming an ever
8

Cf. Walther Eichrodt, Man in the Old Testament (London: SCM Press 1959).

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more intolerable burden, an ominous fate and threat, our own white whale from which, like Captain Ahab, try as we will we cannot disentangle ourselves though it carry us with it to our destruction. Consequently, contemporary human beings simply cannot see the world in its original sacramental form. They cannot envision it as the continuing "gift of the Father's unfailing grace." And the Church has been little help in this regard because it has fostered a timid, truncated sacramentalism. The Church has been content to settle for a small piece of the world, a religious preserve it can control, a sacred corner where the Church keeps the sacramental keys to heavenbut has somehow lost the keys of the kingdom. Loisy' s words have not lost their poignant accuracy: "Jesus preached the coming of the kingdom of God but the Church came instead." In Protestantism as well as Catholicism the words of Augustine, "Christ dies that the Church might be born," 9 continue to be misconstrued. There is a legitimate way to interpret these words, as Vatican II did in its more inspired moments. Christ, through his suffering death and victorious resurrection, calls a community into existence to continue his mission for the kingdom, which is the transformation of the whole world according to God's original intention. Too often, however, Augustine's words are taken to mean that Christ died in order to endow an institution with a sacrificial system powerful enough to appease and placate God and insure that everything will stay in its proper place. Sacrament then becomes rites geared to meet what is vaguely termed "the religious needs of man," which seem to be roughly equivalent to aesthetic needs reinforced by compulsive behavior. If that is all Christianity is, in what respect does it differ from paganism, which also has its altars and sacrifices that assuage guilt for being human and finite, and occasionally stepping out of line? In paganism, both ancient and modern, religion functions to legitimize the status quo by viewing the present order of things as the will of the gods, declaring any offense against this order a sin. The conservative effect of this kind of religion is clear. And who can deny that Christianity too often in the past has functioned in this way, and was therefore prized and rewarded by oppressive regimes. Although it may have consistently maintained the distinction between "this world" and the kingdom, the Church in effect removed the critical and transforming power of
Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (New York: Sheed and Ward 1963) 47.
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the kingdom by equating it with an etherealized, neo-platonic heaven. This metaphysical version of the kingdom could exist as an alternative to this world without having any impact on the structures of this world. Hence the kingdom lost its Jewishness and its critical leverage on the present, and was trivialized. Given the new awareness of the eschatological character of Jesus' ministry and the recovery of the Jewishness of the kingdom after centuries of hellenistic and neoplatonic distortions, we are without excuse if in our time we continue to etherealize or trivialize the kingdom and prevent it from exercising its revolutionary power. This is all very well, you may say, but if we did want to change, how would we move from here to there? Theologians are very good at telling us where we ought to be, but notoriously poor in concrete suggestions about how to get there. A remarkable beginning has already been made in the Second Vatican Council. Seldom in the history of the Church has there been such a demonstration of the presence of Christ and the working of the Spirit. Two hundred years of biblical, historical and liturgical scholarship have been appropriated in less than two decades, not just as thought but as praxis, with liturgical and doctrinal reforms that have had profound effects on the Church's life and selfunderstanding. Never mind the occasional indigestion. Let any Protestant inclined to take offense at the remaining vestiges in the documents of medievalism and triumphalism look to his own church to see what changes have taken place there in so short a time. While Protestant scholars are noted for their pyrotechnic displays in the realm of thought, these usually fizzle out before they produce institutional reforms. One of the recurrent themes of Vatican II was, as I have already noted, the Church as the sacramentum mundi, the sacrament given to the world to serve the world. This was a salutary interpretation because it recognized that the Church does not exist for its own sake and is fulfilling its mission only as it resists the temptation to be fascinated and preoccupied by its own institutional life. This reorientation, and the concomitant willingness to risk institutional security for the sake of the world and the gospel, can only be applauded. What I am attempting to do is to extend this horizon forward and backward, to kingdom and to creation, so that the world itself becomes God's sacrament which the Church then interprets through the Word given it in Christ. When the sacrament is underWorld as Original Sacrament
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stood in these terms, the redeeming work of Christ can also be seen in a new light. If the world as we experience it is unrecognizable as the creation of a loving God; if it has become more a threat than a promise, a tragic destiny in which we are embroiled but over which we feel we have little control; if it is the domain of principalities and powers rather than the creature of God, how can the sacrament represent both the world and Christ? Are they not antithetical? Yet, precisely here the redemptive work of Christ is made evident in the sacrament. In the hands of Christ the sacrament is presented to us as the world in its original and eschatological form. He takes the bread and wine, which are products of our ordinary world and therefore related to the complexities of international grain cartels, embargoes, starvation, alcoholism, and all the other ways in which God's good gifts have gone awry and turns them into signs of his kingdom of justice and love. He does this by identifying them with himself and his mission, just as he did the paschal bread and wine at the Last Supper. Having joined them with his life for the kingdom, he hands the bread and wine back to us to make us participants in that kingdom by sharing its first fruits which nourish us along the way. Because these are signs of the resurrected Christ, they bring with them the unquenchable assurance that he cannot finally be defeated. Therefore, as overwhelming as the task of stewardship of the world may seem, it is not meaningless and without ultimate purpose because it joins us to Christ's own redemptive work of bringing order out of chaos. In the end he will prevail. Because these are also signs of the crucified Christ, we are reminded that responsibility always involves suffering. There are no guarantees of progress, no promises of easy victories. Yet these signs enable us to receive that profound and persistent love that sustains us even when we are faced with defeat, assuring us that "neither death, nor life . . . nor principalities, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom 8:38). Two traditional questions still remain to be considered if this notion of the Eucharist is to contribute to the ecumenical discussion, namely, "real presence" and "sacrifice/' How does this reinterpretation relate to the issue of the real presence of Christ. Does it open up new possibilities for dialogue? What I have sketched here attempts to take into account the conTheodore Runyon
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tributions of Piet Schoonenberg and Edward Schillebeeckx in their theories of transfinalization and transsignification. Though obviously not received uncritically, 10 their proposals and others akin to them are seen in both Catholic and Protestant circles as significant steps toward meeting previous objections and giving creative, contemporary expression to the traditional doctrine of transubstantiation. The affinities between my position and these new interpretations are evident. As in transfinalization, the purpose or final end of the bread and wine is transformed from ordinary nourishment in this age that is passing away into eschatological food and drink, enabling us to participate in that which is lasting and of eternal significance. As in transsignification, the "interiority" of Christ, which was made visible through his historical ministry, assumes "bodiliness" through his sacramental presence by which he incorporates us into that cause for which he gave his life. As his historical body was the means of encounter then, his sacramental body is the means of encounter now. 11 Although it may seem surprising for a Protestant to make this point, there is one element within the doctrine of transubstantiation that is well worth retaining, the emphasis upon transformation and change. Traditionally Protestants have not looked kindly upon this aspect of the doctrine. Not even F. J. Leenhardt, whose attempt to rethink transubstantiation along Calvinist lines proved seminal for Catholic as well as Protestant sacramental thought, could develop a notion of change that could satisfy his critics.12 Leenhardt argued that the ontological reality of anything is what God calls it to be. When Christ calls the bread his body, therefore, that is what it is ontologically.13 From a Catholic standpoint this proves to be insufficient, however, because the change required by the doctrine of transubstantiation is an intrinsic rather than an extrinsic or forensic change of the type familiar to Calvinists and Lutherans from the doctrines of election and justification. Consecration is a sanctifying, not just declaratory, action. This Catholic objection has legitimacy if on a biblical basis one understands the Eucharist to be in a real
Cf. the encyclical of Paul VI, Mysterium fidei, 3 September 1965 (Washington: National Catholic Welfare Conference 1965) pp. 3, 7, 13, 14. 11 E. Schillebeeckx, The Eucharist (New York: Sheed and Ward 1968) 99-101. 12 Ibid. 78. 13 Cf. Oscar Cullmann and F. J. Leenhardt, Essays on the Lord's Supper (Atlanta: John Knox Press 1958) 44-55.
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sense a koinnia in Christ's body and therefore in his ministry and the firstfruits of the kingdom in him. Where the kingdom breaks through, even provisionally, it brings change in this world. Thus a sacrament that mediates the power of the new age in Christ must be affected at its very core by the kingdom-reality of which it is a part. When at the Last Supper Jesus identifies bread and wine with himself, his mission, and the new covenant, he raises them to a new power, he transforms them into their original and eschatological destiny. When he identifies himself with bread and wine he enables these material elements to communicate who he is at the center of his being and to incorporate his disciples into that same reality. This kind of change is consistent with the intent of the Giver of the feast as indicated, for instance, in his attitude toward miracles. He steadfastly refuses to perform signs where they would be misunderstood as displays of wonder-working ability rather than as signs of the kingdom come nigh to transform nature as well as human relations. The wonders associated with his ministry are never ends in themselves but parables of the kingdom. The focus is not upon change for its own sake but for the kingdom's sake. This change is at one and the same time the transformation of the world and the empowering of the sanctified world to be the bearer of Christ to as many as will receive him; it is the proleptic renewal of the order of creation and the reconciliation of humankind through his body. In another important respect, however, the traditional doctrine of transubstantiation proves to be inadequate. If the Supper is to be a true eschatological sign, it must signify the restoration of the created world as well as the reconciliation of the human world. If the Lord of the new age restores the world to its intended relation to the Creator, it is important that the bread and wine remain genuine creaturesbread and wine in the full creaturely sense. In its historical development the doctrine of transubstantiation has tended to undermine this creaturehood. To explain this it will be necessary to examine briefly this development. The Council of Constance in 1415, in order to counter what was felt to be Wycliffe's evacuation of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, sought to guarantee that presence by a formulation which to our eyes today appears to have the docetic effect of evacuating the real presence of the world, leaving only a "veil" of seeming materiality behind. "After the consecration by the priest there is in the sacrament of the altar under the veil of bread and wine not Theodore Runyon 506

material bread and material wine but wholly Christ who suffered on the Cross and sits at the right hand of the Father." 1 4 To raise the specter of docetism in this regard may seem odd because the intention of the Council was just the opposite. Docetic gnosticism, with its abhorrence of the material world, denies that the divine could join itself to human flesh. The docetists argued that although Christ appeared to have a h u m a n body, this appearance was only a veil which hid his true, divine being. In contrast to any such view the Council insisted that Christ was indeed present in the world, inextricably linked with the physical elements of bread and wine. Yet to express this they chose the language of transubstantiation, which may guarantee the divine but does so at the expense of the creature. It is interesting to note that St. Thomas shows sensitivity to this issue of the integrity of the material creature. He opposed the then popular notion of the "annihilation" of the substance of the bread and wine, quoting Augustine as saying, "God is not the cause that anything should tend towards non-existence." Therefore the annihilation theory cannot be true. 1 5 Nevertheless Thomas finds it impossible to suggest an alternative that does not make the presence of the divine dependent upon the translation of the substance of the creaturely into the substance of the divine. Moreover, he adds a distinction between this and other sacraments which implies that real presence requires precisely this kind of transmutation, a notion which persists in Mysterium fidei. "In the other sacraments we have not got Christ himself really, as we have in this sacrament. Hence in the others the substance of the material element remains, but not in this one." 1 6 It was Luther who likened this interpretation to an aberration in christology. "What is true in regard to Christ is also true in regard to the sacrament. In order for the divine nature to dwell in him bodily (Col 2:9), it is not necessary for the human nature to be transubstantiated and the divine nature contained under the accidents of the human nature. Both natures are simply there in their entirety." 1 7
Josef Neuner, The Teaching of the Catholic Church as Contained in her Documents, ed Karl Rahner (Staten Island Alba House 1967) 283 (Denzmger-Schonmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum 1256) 15 Summa theologiae III, 75, 3 16 Ibid III 75, 2, ad 2 17 ' T h e Babylonian Captivity of the Church," Three Treatises (Philadelphia Fortress Press i960) 151
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To put Luther's point somewhat more sharply, if the*theory applied to the sacrament were applied to Christ, the result would be docetism. But this inconsistency between christological and sacramental theory does not seem to have been taken into account by the Council of Trent. In any case, that Council in 1551 reiterated and reinforced the position of Constance by employing instead of "material" the more precise Aristotelian term "substance," as interpreted by Thomas, which allowed the "accidents" or "species" or "appearances" to be separated and remain behind after the metaphysical substance has been changed. "If anyone shall say that in the sacred and holy sacrament of the Eucharist the substance of the bread and wine remains conjointly with the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and deny that wonderful and singular change of the whole substance of the bread into the body and the whole substance of the wine into the blood, the appearances only of bread and wine remaining, which change the Catholic Church most aptly calls transubstantiationanathema sit." 18 Roman Catholic commentators have rightly observed that Trent did not bind the Church to the term "transubstantiation" as such, but only referred to it as "most aptly" applied to the change involved. It is this change that is insisted upon, not the word. "Consubstantiation" is specifically rejected because it implies joint presence but no change.19 We can safely assume that it was not the intention of the Council that this change be docetic in its effect. Its purpose was to give expression to the presence of Christ in his saving and transforming power. This being the case, one might legitimately argue that a reinterpretation such as I have proposed, that does not ignore Trent's concern for change but sees that change as a proleptic participation in the eschaton, preserves the integrity of the creature while exhibiting the power of the kingdom. Thus it does justice to the intent of the doctrine of transubstantiation, as called for by Trent and Mysterium fidei in more genuinely biblical terms. When Christ associates the bread and wine with himself and his kingdom mission, bread and wine are raised to their eschatological destiny. No more fundamental change is imaginable. Nor could the
Neuner, 290 (Denzinger-Schnmetzer 1653). Thus E. Gutwenger is correct when he argues (against Schillebeeckx) that the Council's intent was not simply to emphasize real presence. 'The Council went beyond the real presence to envisage the eucharistie change as such and to affirm it directly" (in Sacramentum Mundi, Vol. 6, 293).
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presence of Christ be more faithfully portrayed than as his presence in the power of the in-breaking kingdom which restores the world to its creaturely integrity. Thus the Eucharist enables us to participate in the very recreation of the cosmos that is being effected in Christ Jesus.20 Another advantage that accrues from viewing the world as God's original sacrament is that it allows us to avoid some of the medievalisms associated with Eucharist as "sacrifice" and to reinterpret sacrifice in a more biblical perspective. The notions of propitiation and satisfaction, for example, are more at home in a pagan context where the gods must be placated or restitution made by a blood offering because an impersonal code has been offended against. True, the language of sacrifice appears in the New Testament whenever early Christians are groping for ways to understand and express the significance of the death of Christ in the context of their inherited religions. The Epistle to the Hebrews, for example, draws
20 Those familiar with the thought of Teilhard de Chardin will note a similar concern to bring the world into the sphere of redemption. The underlying ontology is quite different, however. Teilhard interprets incarnation as the presence of a divine spiritual power within all material things, a "radial energy" which through the process of //christogenesis,, gradually transforms matter into spirit as the whole universe is attracted back to the divine source from whence it originally came. When "the whole divinissable substance of matter" has passed over into spirit, the world will have reached its omega, and all will be in Christ, and Christ in God (cf. The Divine Milieu [London: Collins i960] n o , 116). This interpretation represents a marked departure, however, from the Hebraic and Pauline picture of the consummation. According to that picture there is no need for matter to become spirit in order to reach its goal. The telos of the creatures is not to be transmuted into divine substance but to be transformed from a life of alienation into true creaturehood, into those healthy and just relations to God and the rest of creation for which they were created. The kingdom is envisioned as a social order, therefore, that does not dissolve creation but restores it, and reconciles nature and humanity. It was the gnostics who transformed the picture of the kingdom into a divine cosmic soul. Yet Teilhard claims to be carrying out the implications of the doctrine of transubstantiation. "When Christ, extending the process of his incarnation, descends into the bread in order to replace it, his action is not limited to the material morsel which his presence will, for a brief moment volatilize: this transubstantiation is aureoled with.a real though attenuated divinizing of the entire universe" (Hymn of the Universe [New York: Harper & Row 1965] 14). The similarities between Teilhard's notion of divinization and gnosticism and pantheism have troubled his Catholic critics. He tries to assure them that transmutation of the material order need not result in pantheism or monism (cf. The Divine Milieu 116). If Teilhard's position is judged ambiguous, however, is it not possible that the ambiguity is shared by his model, transubstantiation, which lends itself to an interpretation of fulfillment that replaces the creaturely with the divine?

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analogies from the Jewish sacrificial system but only in order to show how that system has been superseded. In the Gospels Jesus cuts through the sacrificial system, just as he cuts through the legal system, by forgiving sins directly, thus bypassing the system. In fact, this was one of his main offenses. To read the significance of his death primarily in terms of providing a means of cultic sacrifice, therefore, would be fundamentally to misconstrue it. This is said not in order to eliminate the motif of sacrifice from eucharistie worship but to clear the decks to emphasize it in its proper role. There is no way to exclude the theme of sacrifice from the death of the Savior. But God is not providing his own blood offering to himself, or punishing his innocent Son to meet the requirements of an impersonal law of retribution. The cause of justice is not served by further injustice. The one sacrifice that is decisive for the gospel is not humanity's sacrifice to God, but God's sacrifice for humanity. This is the self-offering that is already written into creation as the Creator gives himself to humanity through the giving of the world, granting therewith a life in relation and independence. God sacrifices control in order to gain freedom for his creatures. This is the self-offering present again in the Son who acts out the self-giving love of the Father in the world, the love that Jesus announces as the life-principle of the kingdom, the love that persists at the end when all else passes away. This love is sacrifice, and it calls forth sacrifice for the kingdom's sake. All else can be abandoned, all else given up, all else put in second place by Jesus' disciples for the sake of the one goal that finally counts. Thus sacrifice is demanded in the struggle with the forces that would defeat the Father's intention for the fulfillment of creation in the age to come. But this sacrifice is an inevitable part of the battle with the powers of evil and injustice. Cultic sacrifice on an altar cannot serve as a substitute for it, nor can ritualized obedience replace the ethical obedience the kingdom requires. What then are the benefits that reasonably might be expected from a reinterpretation of eucharistie celebration along the lines I have proposed? The problem with most traditional eucharistie theologies, Protestant and Catholic, is that their horizons do not extend far enough. They stretch neither to the eschaton nor to creation. As a result they have not provided that cosmic context within which the Eucharist could illumine and give meaning to our life today. And they have encouraged what I would call incomplete or Theodore Runyon
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truncated versions of eucharistie interpretation and practice. They interrupt the divine intention short of its ultimate goal. The Protestant truncation typically has reduced the sacrament to an occasion for repentance and the receiving of divine forgiveness, not recognizing that in the ministry of Jesus forgiveness is given as a sign of the kingdom, and its purpose is to prepare those who receive it to fight in the warfare against the forces that oppose the kingdom. The Catholic truncation has been to see the purpose of Christ's coming as the founding of an institution to provide the means of grace and a safe passage to the other shore. Redemption took place in and under the auspices of the Church. Only with Vatican II do we see clearly the world itself as the object of redemption. But even in some of the best Catholic htought, such as the earlier work of Schillebeeckx, the understanding of the significance of the Eucharist seems to begin and end with the personal and interpersonal and miss its final purpose. The alternative I am suggesting seeks to follow the arrow of God's intention through to its ultimate goal as Jesus enunciated it, that kingdom where God's will is done as it was intended to be in creation. When the Eucharist is rethought in terms such as these it can speak more directly to our contemporaries who are at a loss to know how worship illumines the larger world in which they live, and who seek for their own lives a more ultimate context within which to understand and practice the responsibility for the world which they feel. Interpreted eschatologically, the Eucharist communicates to us the assurance of the ultimate victory of the new creation, releasing us from the immobilizing anxiety of carrying the burden of the world alone. And it assures us that this world within which our stewardship is exercised is the gift of the loving Creator/Father revealed in Jesus Christ.

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