Rethinking the Origins of the Eucharist. Martin D. Stringer
Rethinking the Origins of the Eucharist
Also in the SCM Studies in Worship and Liturgy series
The Collect in the Churches of the Reformation
Edited by Bridget Nichols
Do this in Remembrance of Me:
The Eucharist from the Early Church to the Present Day
Bryan D. Spinks
SCM STUDIES IN WORSHIP AND LITURGY
Rethinking the Origins of the Eucharist
Martin D. Stringer
© Martin Stringer 2011
Published in 2011 by SCM Press
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Contents
1 Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians
Index of Biblical and Primary Sources
Acknowledgements
When I sat down to write my book on the Sociological History of Christian Worship (Stringer 2005), I fully expected the first chapter, on the first 300 years of Christian worship, to be the easiest to write. Many other scholars had explored this field, the texts were clear and well known, there was I thought a general consensus on what the text meant and therefore the writing should have been easy. I ended up, however, spending months, if not years, on the first 150 years and probably had to give less time to the following 1850 years than I would have liked. The more I looked at the texts, at what other scholars had written and at the possible interpretations of the material, the more convinced I became that our understanding of this period is severely limited and that much more work still needed to be done. I knew at that time that if I was ever to do it justice I needed to produce a whole book on this material not just 20 pages. Whether I do manage to achieve that within this text is, however, for others to decide.
Having recognized that much more work needed to be done I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to present elements of the main argument of this book as papers for the Oxford Liturgy Group, the Society for Liturgical Study and the Instituut Voor Liturgische en Rituele at Utrecht University. The discussions and arguments that followed these presentations proved very formative for the final text. I am also very grateful to many colleagues with whom I shared elements of the work and whose questions and critiques proved invaluable. In particular, I would like to thank Juliette Day, Charlotte Hempel, David Parker, David Taylor, Phillip Tovey and Markus Vinzent. I also want to thank Natalie Watson and all her colleagues at SCM Press who have been extremely helpful in the production of this text. Finally, I have to thank David whose gentle pressure and prodding has ensured that the text did eventually get written despite so many other calls on my time.
Introduction
‘The Lord Jesus, on the night that he was betrayed, took bread and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said . . .’ (1 Cor. 11.24). And so, for almost two thousand years the Church has followed the instruction of Jesus at his Last Supper and has taken bread, blessed it and broken it saying . . . That, at least, is what many of those sitting in our churches Sunday by Sunday, and often day by day, of whatever theological position, still believe to be the case. Whether Catholic or Evangelical, Orthodox or Pentecostal, what Christians do when they come together to share bread and wine (and whatever theological position they take on the significance of that bread and wine) the overwhelming understanding is that this is something that Jesus did, this is something that Jesus commanded his disciples to continue doing, this is something that the followers of Jesus began to do immediately following the resurrection and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost, and this is something that Christians have continued to do for two thousand years. We only need to look at the hymn to eucharistic practice as presented by Gregory Dix in his classic book, Shape of the Liturgy, to get a feel for the scope and spread of this practice throughout the Church (1945, p. 744), and yet many churchgoers sitting in the pews Sunday by Sunday still believe it all started in that upper room on the night before Jesus was betrayed.
Perhaps it was. The reality is that we do not know, and for just over a hundred years scholars from different churches, different disciplines and different theological persuasions have been arguing among themselves about a wide range of different possibilities. The fact that they have never reached a consensus on what they believed did happen, and probably never will, does not mean that scholars should ignore the question. If historians are going to write a history of Christian worship, then one of the first questions that will inevitably confront them is what happened at that Last Supper, and how does what may, or may not, have occurred at that moment relate to the central act of Christian worship for much of the following two thousand years?
There is no question that historical scholarship informed the liturgical revisions that occurred in practically all the churches in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is also clear, however, that the historical period that was most influential at that time was focused on the third and fourth centuries. This period preceded many of the debates that have caused subsequent divisions