{"id":12025,"date":"2017-02-23T23:51:03","date_gmt":"2017-02-24T07:51:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dminlgp.com\/?p=12025"},"modified":"2017-02-23T23:51:03","modified_gmt":"2017-02-24T07:51:03","slug":"did-evangelicals-lose-communion-when-we-reformed-the-eucharist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/did-evangelicals-lose-communion-when-we-reformed-the-eucharist\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Evangelicals Lose Communion When We Reformed the Eucharist?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A long, long time ago (about 500 years to be exact), in a couple of places far, far away (namely Germany and Switzerland), a group of reformers looked at the church in charge and, distressed by excesses and abuses, sought to make a BIG change. Some of them thought they could maybe make the change from within the church, while others thought it best to toss it all and start over. To put it a bit (okay, very)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>simplistically, Evangelicals mostly hail from the line that did the tossing and starting over.<\/p>\n

Now that I have that history refresher out of the way, I can try to connect what all that has to do with consumerism, the Eucharist, and torture.<\/p>\n

William T. Cavanaugh is the author of two challenging books, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire<\/em>, and Torture and the Eucharist<\/em>. Both are rich with theology that calls Christians to be mindful of the nature of God in our lives and in our neighbors. Both also place the Eucharist at the center of tough discussions that need to be had in our American churches. At first I wasn\u2019t sure what Cavanaugh\u2019s view of the Eucharist as a Catholic would bring that would help me navigate these discussions in an Evangelical community.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I was secretly sure this would be a purely academic review post.<\/p>\n

My thoughts center mostly on Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire<\/em> because I think that small book initiates the discussion in a way that leads to Cavanaugh\u2019s other book. In Being Consumed<\/em>, Cavanaugh walks down familiar territory of Augustinian theology on desire, and Miller\u2019s discussion of detachment and attachment. Having read Miller last week, I figured Cavanaugh\u2019s view of the Eucharist would take me to much the same place as Miller\u2019s did. Cavanaugh\u2019s writing, however, led me to ask the question I asked in my title: Did Evangelicals lose communion when we reformed the Eucharist?<\/p>\n

In the Eucharist (and in Protestant communion) the church holds up the body of Christ (however that looks theologically to the community) and the blood of Christ for consumption by the body. As Cavanaugh states, \u201cIn the Eucharist, Jesus offers his body and blood to be consumed.\u201d[1]<\/a> But it doesn\u2019t \"\"<\/a>stop there. By consuming the body and blood of Christ, we are also consumed by it. In this act, we abide in Christ and Christ abides in us.[2]<\/a> According to Cavanaugh, this practice resists the individualistic consumerism that we are tempted to embrace as, in the Eucharist, we are joined with the entire body of Christ who is also consuming and consumed.[3]<\/a> As the cycle follows, we become the essence of the consumed and consuming Christ for others. By taking Matthew 25:34-36 seriously, we offer the body and blood of Christ to those with whom Christ identifies \u2013 the poor, the suffering, and those in need.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

So back to my question. By asking if we lost communion when we reformed the Eucharist, I make a pretty broad assumption that all Evangelicals celebrate the Table symbolically rather than with a belief that the bread and wine are transubstantiated into the actual body and blood of Christ. I think this is a safe assumption, but I definitely allow room for the possibility that I am wrong. It has also been my experience that most Evangelical traditions celebrate Communion much, much less often than our Catholic (and certain mainline Protestant) siblings. In my home church, it is possible to only miss a few Sundays each year and never celebrate Communion. I have heard many explanations for this, including we don\u2019t want Communion to become too routine, but the reality is that Evangelicalism removed the \"\"<\/a>Table from the center of worship, and moved the Word (especially preached) to that place.<\/p>\n

Reading Cavanaugh\u2019s work, I began to wonder if this reformation of worship has been at the center of Evangelicalism\u2019s inability to come together as the body of Christ. In our churches, we can easily slip in and out of worship without once thinking about the way we are connected to the greater body. We may participate in ecumenical associations, but our people rarely come face to face with the reality that we \"\"<\/a>are consuming, consumed, and feeding if we are truly united with the Body. Does this removal of the Table from constant focus fracture us away from our siblings in Christ, making it easier for us to become gatekeepers who exclude those who do not look, sound, worship, and love the same way we do? What would it mean to consume and be consumed every time we meet together? What would it mean to consume and be consumed as we stand next to a person of another race, gender, generation, creed, or orientation? Would it break down the walls?<\/p>\n

Going further, would dedication to the Table bring us, as the Body, to a place where we abhor damage done to any of God\u2019s creations? Would it remind us that the death and resurrection of Christ necessitates that we live as resurrection people? Or in an over simplification of Cavanaugh\u2019s question in Torture and the Eucharist<\/em>, do resurrection people engage in torture (or slavery, or abuse of other human beings)?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>This is where it gets messy. This is where our civil religion claps back at a Christianity that doesn\u2019t demand rights and protections. This is where we realize that being resurrection people requires we participate in the suffering of Christ as well as the suffering of others. For some of us, that\u2019s not what we thought we were signing up for in American Christianity, so maybe we don\u2019t want a regular reminder that we are called to consume only Christ.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [1]. William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire,<\/em> (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 54.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 [2]. John 6:56.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [3]. Cavanaugh, 54.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [4]. Cavanaugh, 55.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A long, long time ago (about 500 years to be exact), in a couple of places far, far away (namely Germany and Switzerland), a group of reformers looked at the church in charge and, distressed by excesses and abuses, sought to make a BIG change. Some of them thought they could maybe make the change […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"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":[64,846,807,841,366,845],"class_list":["post-12025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-cavanaugh","tag-communion","tag-economics","tag-eucharist","tag-evangelicalism","tag-torture","cohort-lgp7"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12025","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\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}