Eucharist and the Ethics of Sacrifice and Self-Giving Offertory Exemplified

chapter 6 Eucharist and the Ethics of Sacrifice and Self-Giving Offertory Exemplified

Bernd Wannenwetsch

The offering of the gifts of the faithful at the altar was widespread in all major traditions of the Western and Eastern church as a liturgical act in its own right, a station of the Early Church’s Eucharistic worship. What knowledge we have of the ancient offertory rite we owe to studies of figures like the Jesuit liturgist Josef Andreas Jungmann1 and the Anglican Benedictine Gregory Dix.2 Their archaeological work in the field of early liturgy was undertaken in a reforming spirit: to help the churches of their day reconnect with the rich ritual traditions that they had lost touch with and regain a sense of what Dix called the “shape” of the Eucharistic liturgy.

1 Josef A. Jungmann, Vom Sinn der Messe als Opfer der Gemeinschaft (Einsiedeln: Johannes Ver- lag, 1955); Missarum Sollemnia: Eine genetische Erklärung der römischen Messe, vol. 1 and 2, 5th ed. (Wien: Herder, 1962). 2 Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: A&C Black, 1945). Dix’s seminal study provoked controversy from the beginning. While some of his claims (such as about the original position of the celebrant at the altar or about Cranmer’s alleged Zwinglianism) have been superseded by more recent historical scholarship, the controversies about Dix’s account of the offertory rite and its central significance were based less on historical than on theological grounds. Protestant critics such as Colin Buchanan (The End of the Offertory, (Cambridge: Grove 1978)) rejected his account with its strong focus on the activity of the faithful within the Eucharistic celebration as potentially semi-pelagian. But such criticism could only arise when overlooking what I understand to be the crux of Dix’s account, which stresses the shape of the Eucharistic liturgy as being charac- terized through a fine-tuned relating of two distinct moments of identification, human and divine, in which the latter fully encompasses the former at any point in time. For a recent appraisal of Dix’s book and its reception, see: William J. Tighe, “The Shape of the Liturgy: Dom Gregory Dix’s Imperfect Work Remains an Edifying Modern Classic,” Touch- stone Nov. 2008 http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=21-09-022 -f#ixzz41jWysywv.

Withering Rituals and Shrinking Conceptual Frameworks

By the time these key figures of the liturgical renewal movement began their work in the first half of the twentieth century, the offertory rite had practical- ly vanished from the worship of all major traditions, or at best had been re- duced to a shadowy existence as “offerings” in terms of a monetary collection.3 In this essay, I would like to offer reflections on the early offertory rite with a special focus on the moral dimension inherent in its structure, movements, gestures and prayers, as well as in the Eucharistic theologies that accompanied its practice. The examples and insights drawn from those ancient liturgies will demonstrate, once again, how “pregnant” the Christian liturgy is for the moral formation and transformation of believers, individually and corporately. But being reminded of ancient offertory rites also means having our attention directed to an issue that strikes me as relevant for the hermeneutics of the ‘Lit- urgy and Ethics’ discourse as a whole. If the liturgy is to be assumed instructive for our conceptualizing of core ethical concepts such as ‘gift,’ ‘sacrifice,’ ‘transformation,’ any withering of ritual knowledge such as it happened in the case of the offertory puts an uncomfortable question before us: Could it be that, along with the withering of a key ritual and the wisdom it represents, there also comes a shrinking of the conceptual frameworks that we operate with? And could it be that the heated Eucharistic debates in the era of the Reformation were al- ready indicative of such a shrunken conceptual framework? A framework that left them operating with narrowed alternatives (say, with regard to the concept of sacrifice as either exclusively confined to Christ or encompassing the priestly function of the celebrant), which could have arisen only once the richer theological horizon had disappeared that the offertory rite carried with it? It is true, though, that since the inspiring studies of scholars like Jungmann and Dix were first published, the offertory rite has enjoyed a revival in a num- ber of church traditions, Roman Catholic and High Anglican, in particular.4 Many who worship in these liturgical traditions have since borne witness that the inclusion of the offertory makes a crucial difference for how ‘complete’ and ‘sound’ a Eucharistic celebration appears. After all, it is this very rite that places ‘us,’ as it were, on the altar along with Christ so that we can be identified with and benefit from his salvific self-sacrifice. This is true regardless of the fact that, in comparison to the full extent of the ancient rite, modes of adopting

3 For the historical development, see: Kenneth W. Stevenson, Eucharist and Offering (New York: Pueblo Press, 1986). 4 Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England, Vol. V: The Ecumenical Century 1900–1965 (Princeton, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).