Sweet mercy, this is atrocious and offensive.
(Via Adam Kotsko, who has an interesting theological analysis.)
Category: Theology & Faith
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Shouldn’t the Bread of Life resemble actual bread?
Yesterday on Twitter I mentioned that I like it when we use real bread for communion at church and asked, half in jest, whether there were theological arguments for using tasteless wafers that I was unaware of.
The answers I got, at least some of which were, I think, tongue-in-cheek, included avoiding getting crumbs of Christ’s body on the floor or mangling the body by chewing it and the symbolic value of unleavened bread to connect the Eucharist to the Exodus.
A cursory Google search turned up this article at the Episcopal Cafe, which makes the case for real bread and good wine at communion:
If there had been a deliberate campaign to isolate the Eucharist from everyday life, and seal it off a in a purely ritual context, the results could have hardly been more successful. But of course there hasn’t been. It’s just that the desire for efficiency and an almost superstitious concern with what we suppose to be reverence have created conditions for severing the roots of sacramental practice from our everyday lives. Wafers can be efficiently counted and stored, they don’t make crumbs. They don’t require any effort, simply being delivered by mail. The sickly fortified wines marketed by the ecclesiastical supply houses keeps indefinitely. We have dozens of excuses to justify using these customary products as the elements, and we would prefer not to examine the spiritual losses we incur. At home we can savor wonderful wholesome bread, and appreciate even modest wines day by day as the glorious distillation it is of earth and sunshine. And then we go to church and find unique ecclesiastical stuff being used that has no connection with what we love to eat and drink normally.
I think it’s worth noting, in particular, how the connection between the sacrament and the Kingdom of God is obscured by the way the Eucharist is commonly celebrated in many of our churches. Jesus described the Kingdom as a banquet, a feast. And yet how much does the typical Eucharist resemble a feast, even though it’s supposed to be, among other things, an anticipation of the Kingdom?
At the church I attended when living in Berkeley, we would occasionally have not only real bread and wine at communion, but also olives, and milk mixed with honey! At the time I thought that was just left-coast liberal flakiness, but now I think they might’ve been on to something.
I’m curious what others think about this.
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Low-cost, middle-class transgressions
From an article on worship at the Christian Cenutry‘s website:
Instead of fretting about style, however, perhaps we should be more concerned about scale. Worship by definition should guide us to a larger place, should direct our gaze away from ourselves and toward the most vast, holy and mysterious of all horizons. But for all the over-the-top extravagance of many worship experiences, for all the invocations to an “awesome God,” much worship today seems curiously trivial, inward and downsized. To paraphrase Norma [Desmond], “The vision of worship is still magnificent; it’s the services that got small.”
We can see this downsizing in the sometimes trifling use of language. We Americans are involved in two bloody wars, have a rapacious petroleum habit and are near Depression levels of unemployment, but prayers of confession often bemoan banal, relatively low-cost, middle-class transgressions such as “busyness” or “letting our minds wander from You.” Reportedly, Martin Luther’s confessor became so frustrated when Luther was confessing “puppy sins” that he shouted at Luther, “Go kill your father or something. Then we’ll have a sin to talk about!”
Read the rest here.
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Taking atheism seriously
Most of the responses I’ve seen by Christians to the “new atheism,” whether in print or online, have come in one of two forms: combative defensiveness or smug complacency. The first is exhibited by those (usually self-appointed) defenders of the faith who take to the ramparts to refute the atheists arguments with their own knock-down syllogisms. The second is more commonly found among the somewhat more “sophisticated” believers who hardly consider the new atheism to be worth engaging because of its crude and simplistic depiction of religion or its philosophical missteps.
While there may be something to be said for both of these approaches (and I’ve probably engaged in each from time to time), I think that they represent a missed opportunity. If Christians want to present a credible witness to the world, they need to engage with atheism and the experiences that give rise to it.
One obvious source of fodder for atheism is the experience of great suffering or horror at the vast amount of suffering in the world–experiences that rightly call forth a cry of protest. Christianity has a long history of responding to this kind of experience, although one that has met with mixed success to say the least.
But maybe a more prevalent cause of atheism is that, for many people, God’s existence is simply not obvious. There do seem to be some souls blessed with a persistent awareness of the divine presence, but for many people–including many believers–this is simply not the case. More prosaically, many people live their day-to-day lives perfectly well without feeling any need to invoke God at all. They make sense of the world around them–as well as anyone can–using the language and conceptual framework of the natural and social sciences, or common sense, or folk wisdom, or some pastiche of these. As far as our daily routines go, the empirical world can easily appear as a “closed” system that we can navigate without resorting to the “God hypothesis.”
Now, there may come times–what have sometimes been called “limit-experiences”–where otherwise secular people catch glimpses of something “more.” This might be awe at the beauty and vastness of the natural world, an encounter with one’s mortality or the mortality of others, or the experience of a love that seems to transcend what is naturally possible. But these are not usually overpowering enough to provide an iron-clad refutation of the “practical atheism” of everyday life. Faith is when we take the next step and trust that these experiences tell us something deep and true about reality.
My point here is not to say that atheism is intellectually superior to faith or that it makes better sense of our experience–it’s that our experience is at best ambiguous between faith and unbelief. I think Christians need to be more willing to enter into the experience of unbelief sympathetically. (Tomáš Halík’s Patience with God, which I read recently, is one Christian response to atheism that is exemplary in this regard.) As long as Christians’ response to atheism is defensiveness or dismissal, they are failing to engage with a form of experience–the experience of God’s absence as Halík puts it–that is very common in our world. (Indeed, Christ himself, we’re given to believe, experienced the absence of God on the cross.)
A better model of response is one analogous to the model of engaging appropriately with other religions: dialogue and sympathetically trying to understand the other’s perspective from within. Given that most Christians in our society probably find themselves experiencing God’s absence at least some of the time (I’d say this is an understatement in my own case), this should in principle be less difficult than sympathetically entering into another’s religious experience.
Of course, there will always be some atheists who have no desire to enter into any such dialogue. For people like the “four horsemen” (Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett) the goal is the extinction of religion, not mutual understanding and possible transformation. But there’s no reason to think that this must be the attitude of all or even most atheists. And for Christians, such a project seems like a much better way of putting the command to love our neighbor–including our atheist neighbors–into practice.
A Thinking Reed 