{"id":11945,"date":"2017-02-22T21:17:18","date_gmt":"2017-02-23T05:17:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dminlgp.com\/?p=11945"},"modified":"2017-02-22T21:17:18","modified_gmt":"2017-02-23T05:17:18","slug":"torture-eucharist-being-consumed-a-5-course-meal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/torture-eucharist-being-consumed-a-5-course-meal\/","title":{"rendered":"Torture & Eucharist Being Consumed: A 5 Course Meal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Appetizers<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>This weekend, I visited the Museum of Man in San Diego<\/a>, and explored the Cannibal exhibit. Occasionally, cannibalism occurs in dire survival situations; more often though, cannibalism is ritually or medicinally practiced in order for the partaker to consume the power of the partaken. English royalty drank skull powder for health, and Richard the Lionhearted ate the flesh of his enemies, the Saracens. As I devoured the exhibit, I couldn\u2019t help but connect to William Cavanaugh\u2019s texts, Torture and Eucharist<\/em> and Being Consumed<\/em>. In Torture and Eucharist<\/em>, Cavanaugh makes the claim that, under the Pinochet military junta of Chile, citizens were tortured and disappeared. The state\u2019s torturing of victims was seen by Cavanaugh as\u00a0an upside-down liturgy of the Church\u2019s Eucharist. While we are not (currently) under the rule of a right-wing pseudo-religious military government in America, nor are we Catholic, I found myself absorbed into Cavanaugh\u2019s conviction that the Church needs to unlearn our ecclesiology in order to understand our identity as the Body of Christ.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Unlearning: Mystical vs. Corporeal<\/strong><\/p>\n

As the coup took place, the Catholic Church in Chile initially saw its primary goal as maintaining unity within the country. The church leaders\u2019 biggest fear was that, if they became involved in \u201cpolitics\u201d, it would further divide the country.[2]<\/a> While they didn\u2019t support the regime, they held \u201cthe conviction that more lives could be saved by cooperation and quiet diplomacy.\u201d[3]<\/a> The Church had succumbed to the false imagination of the state, that their role was to serve as the soul of Chile, \u201ca mystical<\/em> body, which unites all Christians above the rough and tumble of the temporal.\u201d[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

The problem with this perspective, however, is that \u201cthe designation of the church as \u2018mystical\u2019 rather than \u2018true\u2019 body of Christ has often served the imagination of a disincarnate<\/em> church.\u201d[5]<\/a> Unfortunately, as I read the story of the Chilean church, I felt uncomfortably as if it was the story of the evangelical church in America, which seeks to save souls for heaven, challenges young believers to \u201cask Jesus into your heart,\u201d and spiritualizes worship services into ethereal disembodied moments and the Lord\u2019s Supper into an individualized obligatory remembrance. Rather than understanding our identity to be the literal, physical Body of Christ, the church sees our self as Christ\u2019s body only figuratively or mystically. Like the Catholic Church of Chile, I hunger to see our churches reimagine our ecclesiology in light of a realized eschatology of the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God into our temporal and spatial place.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What time is it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cavanaugh asserts that the Church resides in a different temporal sphere than the world.[7]<\/a> In my research last semester, I was introduced to William Robinson (1886-1963), a British theologian from my church movement (the Restoration Movement). Robinson operated from the perspective of the Lord\u2019s Supper as \u201crealized eschatology;\u201d[8]<\/a> that is, it is in the action[9]<\/strong><\/a><\/em> of the presider, servers, and participants that the \u201cwhole drama of God\u2019s redemptive work\u201d is made a reality in our present time and place.[10]<\/sup><\/a> Robinson believed God\u2019s time (God eternal, outside of time) and earthly time (created) met together in the action of the church in the Lord\u2019s Supper. He held that Jesus, giving \u201cHis Body and Blood to the disciples before<\/em> they had been offered on Calvary, in the same way He can actually give the same Body and Blood after <\/em>they have been offered\u201d to us, because His connection to the time process is eschatological.[11]<\/a> Although he wrote decades before the Chilean dictatorship or Cavanaugh\u2019s dissertation, like Cavanaugh, \u201cRobinson held that the Lord\u2019s Supper was an ethical act of unity, and because of the divine presence of the Lord in the action<\/em> of the ritual, a place where we meet Christ and salvation begins on earth.[12]<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Consuming Eucharist, Eucharist Consuming<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Kingdom of God is an upside down Kingdom; it doesn\u2019t follow the rules or expectations of the world. Unlike the dismembering of a body tortured by the state, the Kingdom of God re-members the Body of Christ through participation in the Eucharist.[13]<\/a> This occurs because Christ fully poured himself out for us (kenosis<\/em>), giving \u201cover his very identity to the community of his followers, who thereby become in history His true body, which in turn takes the form of a servant.\u201d[14]<\/a> This is powerful. Cavanaugh continues this theme in Being Consumed<\/em>: \u201cthe consumer of the Eucharist is taken up into a larger body, the body of Christ. The individual consumer of the Eucharist does not simply take Christ into herself, but is taken up into Christ.\u201d[15]<\/a> He continues, \u201cin the consumption of the Eucharist, we cease to be merely \u2018the other\u2019 to each other. In the Eucharist, Christ is gift, giver, and recipient; we are simultaneously fed and become food for others.\u201d[16]<\/a> When I marinate on the essence of cannibalism, it seems as if the tables are turned in participation in the Eucharist. While we do receive \u201cpower\u201d from the communion elements we ingest (we are filled with the Holy Spirit), it is because the elements are consuming us<\/em>, digesting us into the Body of Christ, the literal, visible Body of Christ in the world.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dessert<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Church is meant to be Christ\u2019s \u201cdisruption of history,\u201d His Body physically visible in the present. If we are to \u201cresist disappearance\u201d, we cannot allow the Body of Christ to be \u201csecreted away in the souls of believers or relegated to the distant historical past or future.\u201d[17]<\/a> There is always risk in being incarnate into a particular time and place. It means fierce reconciliation of relationship, seeking the welfare of the city, planting and producing, paying the true cost for commodities, and refusing to allow the political state to dictate our identity as embodied members of the literal and physical Body of Christ. \u201cTo participate in the Eucharist is to live inside God\u2019s imagination. It is to be caught up into what is really real, the body of Christ.\u201d[18]<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist<\/em>, (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 16. cf. 73, 202.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Ibid., 80, 84.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Ibid. 89.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Ibid., 79. cf 85.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Ibid., 207. Italics mine<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> One significant challenge in standing up to state authority is the difference between the hegemony of the hierarchal institutional international Catholic Church, and the cacophony of voices from the multitude of Protestant churches.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Ibid., 222-229<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> cf. Ibid., 223.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> cf. Ibid., 230.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> William Robinson, The Administration of the Lord\u2019s Supper<\/em>, (Birmingham: Berean, 1947), 20, 23. cf. Cavanaugh 225.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> William Robinson, \u201cThe Meaning of Anamn\u0113sis<\/em>\u201d, Shane Quarterly<\/em>, No 14 (Jan, 1953), p20-24.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> Can I quote myself here?? Katy Lines, \u201cA study of the historical practices and interpretations of the Lord\u2019s Supper in the Restoration Movement (Christian Churches)\u201d (unpublished), December 12, 2016, p7.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> Cavanaugh, 229.<\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> Ibid., 230.<\/p>\n

[15]<\/a> Cavanaugh, Being Consumed<\/em>, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 54.<\/p>\n

[16]<\/a> Ibid., 56.<\/p>\n

[17]<\/a> Cavanaugh, Tortured Eucharist<\/em>, 234.<\/p>\n

[18]<\/a> Ibid., 279.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Appetizers This weekend, I visited the Museum of Man in San Diego, and explored the Cannibal exhibit. Occasionally, cannibalism occurs in dire survival situations; more often though, cannibalism is ritually or medicinally practiced in order for the partaker to consume the power of the partaken. English royalty drank skull powder for health, and Richard the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":85,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[839,64,840,841,842],"class_list":["post-11945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-cannibals","tag-cavanaugh","tag-consumed","tag-eucharist","tag-william-robinson","cohort-lgp7"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/85"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11945\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}