The Eucharistic Liturgies: Their Evolution and Interpretation.
THE EUCHARISTIC LITURGIES: THEIR EVOLUTION AND INTERPRETATION. By Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2012. Pp. xvi + 368. $39.95.Bradshaw (Anglican) and Johnson (Lutheran) have provided an utterly reliable historical survey of eucharistic theory and practice that, in an original way, meets needs in graduate education and wider theological scholarship that have been wanting such a study for several decades now. The climax of the Liturgical Movement included such magisterial works as Josef Jungmann's The Mass of the Roman Rite (German orig., 1952) and Louis Boyer's Eucharist (French orig., 1966), but their reliance on historical sources and information that rather quickly became dated relegated those works to the historical trajectories of bibliographies for doctoral exams. Meanwhile, Hans Bernhard Meyer's massive Eucharistie: Geschicte, Theologie, Pastorale (1989) was never translated into English, even as new evidence and arguments for dating such documents as the Didache and Apostolic Tradition have necessitated revisions in the theological-practical judgments to be gleaned from early Christianity.
In a fashion characteristic of their lives' work, B. and J. state at the outset their laudable methodological intention not to homogenize the historical details and differences in eucharistic texts and practices so as to produce a (modem) prescriptive, comprehensive theology of the eucharistic liturgy--hence the plural substantive in the book's title. Still, the intractable, wonderful messiness of history does not allow quite as clean a process from description to analysis, from "historical information" to "historical and theological judgments" as this pair of "liturgical historians" strive to offer their readers (xiv). By no means is that a weakness in the book; rather, the clarity of prose and transparency of arguments with which they marshal such a mass of data continuously invites readers to raise their own questions, at times, about the authors' theological priorities in covering a certain period. Such scrutiny makes it incumbent upon readers to articulate their own biases, concerns, and theses with regard to this most powerful of Christian ritual symbols.
That the first four of the eight chapters of the book cover only the first five centuries of Christianity makes the work methodologically representative of the wide span of contemporary historical and theological resources they cite, namely, liturgical studies as a return to the sources. A salient, if not neuralgic, point threading through their treatment of Eucharist in the early church is what came to be called the Institution Narrative. Concluding their first chapter ("Origins"), a survey of the range of meal practices (presence or absence of wine, association or not of bread with Christ's body, indistinguishableness of the Eucharist from other communal meals), B. and J. assert: "The association of Christian meals with the Last Supper and the sacrificial interpretation arising from that ... was not one that was taken up until the New Testament books began to be recognized as Scripture in the third century" (24). That summary statement is less representative of the preliminary chapter's content than it is an introduction of the analytical concern carrying the authors forward. Lengthy citation and analysis of early anaphoral, homiletic, and catechetical texts, in conjunction with some treatment of socioecclesial contexts, leads by the end of chapter 4 to brief theological discussions of sacrifice, real presence, and communion.
The ensuing large, highly valuable chapter 5, "The Christian East," reaches its climax with the authors marveling at the "mind-boggling" implications "on several levels" of the Vatican's 2001 recognition of the ancient anaphora of Addai and Mari, lacking explicit words of institution, as "a valid prayer of eucharistic consecration," assuring Chaldean Catholics assisting at liturgies of the Assyrian Church of the East that "they are indeed receiving the body and blood of Christ" (170). Such is the stuff that exhilarates liturgical historians, who for decades have been arguing that no narrowly identified part of the great prayer (e.g., Institution Narrative for Roman Catholics, epiclesis for many Orthodox) "consecrates" the Eucharist; rather, the Eucharist comes about through the entire action.
Generous ecumenical passion, then, manifestly drives the authors' navigation of the Eucharist's history in the West--in the final three chapters--from the unprecedented medieval developments, through the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, finally to modernity. In the course of these chapters, B. and J. give better attention to the full ritual contexts of eucharistic practices in their periods and places than they do in their more text-focused work in the preceding chapters. Indeed, only in the chapter on the medieval period do they address more fully the fact that already in the fourth century lay participation in communion waned, the great eucharistic prayer was largely inaudible, clerical spectacle buried meal-sense, etc. Balancing text and context in a broad treatment of such a complex phenomenon as the Eucharist is difficult indeed. Professors who adopt this excellent survey as a textbook might want to complement the topics B. and J. have addressed with consideration of such further challenges to eucharistic unity-in-diversity as ecclesial-hierarchical power, popular-conventional piety, and other factors that shape religious imaginations and, thus, practical theologies of the Eucharist.
BRUCE T. MORRILL, S.J.
Vanderbilt University
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| Author: | Morrill, Bruce T. |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Theological Studies |
| Article Type: | Book review |
| Date: | Sep 1, 2013 |
| Words: | 838 |
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