Asian Mission Initiative 2021

Contributed this 1,000-word (requirement) paper to the Asian Missiology Forum 2021 on 6th March, 2021 with its theme on contextualisation and the Bible:

Contextualisation & the Early Development of the Eucharistic Meal

    The Eucharist1 and its liturgical development is an important example of contextualisation in the Bible and throughout history: There is no monolithic way of approaching the Eucharistic meal, as the ritual has always been in constant negotiation between the participants and their early cultural practices of the meal traditions since the biblical times. Liturgical history informs us that to be able to meaningfully carry out methods of contextualisation (in this case, that of rituals), understanding the historical development of the ritual(s) in question is essential.

    In scholarship on the Eucharist, a linear development of the Eucharist has been largely assumed, frequently seeking out a “centralised model of ecclesiastical authority.”2 The common consensus among these scholars about the Eucharist’s origins was that the earliest Christian communities “celebrated their sacramental meal in direct imitation of the Last Supper of Jesus, and thus with token use of bread and wine, a universal order or structure, and recitation of the ‘institution narrative’ as the central prayer text. Sacrament and communal banquet were quickly separated—by the later first century—into Eucharist, a morning sacramental ritual, and Agape, a prosaic communal supper.”3 This theory was supported by the likes of Gregory Dix and other scholars who formed a theory of development of eucharistic liturgy as having derived from a “seven-action” shape into a “four-action” shape (taking bread, blessing it, breaking it, and sharing it).4 However, recent scholarship by contemporary liturgical scholars such as McGowan, Bradshaw, Tucker and Wainwright etc. calls this an “eisegetical” attempt to trace a single line of literary evolution in the early anaphoras of the Eucharist, and demonstrate that such a method is anachronistic and exchanges the diversity of the early church context for a non-existent liturgical uniformity.5

    The issues surrounding the Scriptural records of the institution narratives and its context must also be taken into consideration regarding efforts of contextualisation by the early Christians. The juxtaposition of the words of the institution narratives in the Synoptic Gospels and Paul’s comments on the ritual in 1 Corinthians 11:23–26 raises questions of redaction-criticism, and that various layers of meaning and interpretations already existed among early Christians.6 Different early Jewish liturgical traditions could have been applied in the New Testament narratives of the Lord’s Supper;7 furthermore, one must take into consideration the fact that institution narratives were not known to have been formally ritualized into being “liturgical texts” until several centuries later.8

    Within the institution narratives themselves, although there are words, gestures, and other symbolic media present in the biblical texts, they do not immediately reveal their wider social and economic realities—the context in which the Eucharistic meal was being practiced and developed.9 The significance of the discourse of food in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean society that cut across all spheres of life (i.e. social, economic, religious, personal, communal) must also be considered.10 Dana Robinson notes that “foundational work on the Eucharist as a Christian meal has emphasized its creative dependence on classical meal models, its early diversity of form and content, and the social effects of its original location within an “ordinary” meal.”11 While the Eucharist in the institution narratives may reflect the order of the typical Greco-Roman banquet or ancient symposium, where “the meal proper was followed by ceremonial drinking,”12 one must bear in mind that even such “classical meal models” were diverse—and were prepared, performed, and participated in differently. For example, Andrew McGowan considers the Eucharistic meal in the Didache more comparable to the Qumran meal rather than the Greco-Roman meal, arguing that the blessing of the drink and meal elements at the beginning of the meal may be to “de-emphasize the place of wine so elevated in the classical symposium.”14 Early Christians were therefore constantly negotiating (thus contextualising) their identities as Christ followers, cultic practitioners, and the symbolic significance of their rituals within the Greco-Roman world.

    As liturgical historian Gary Macy saliently writes, the history of Christianity is “the ongoing attempt to live out the Christian message in differing social contexts,” attempting to continually “mediate between the lived Christian message and the cultural matrix in which it exists.”15 This short article has set out to highlight problems in the liturgical scholarship of the Eucharist and take a brief tour of its early liturgical history so as to demonstrate that God’s people were continually involved in efforts of contextualisation of the ritual. Theologies and practices were neither developed in a vacuum nor practiced monolithically— social, political, cultural, and religious issues are always in dialectic, and their forces are continually being negotiated by human beings in ritual practices.16 Last but not least, in biblical hermeneutics, there is clear consensus that understanding the text in light of its historical and logical context is crucial.17 Just as biblical studies endeavours to recognise the importance of history in a biblical world—a very different religion and culture—we ought to place the same importance on religion and cultures that we wish to engage Christianity with. Therefore, in methods of contextualisation, liturgical history highlights an equal necessity for the distillation of key discourses and the religious and cultural trends behind them in the ritual practices of the host culture, engaging that of the early Christians’, and also examining them in light of key developments in Church history.18 

Footnotes

    1 I will use “Eucharistic meal” in areas where I refer to the Eucharist in its pre-formalised ritual form.
    2 Paul F. Bradshaw, Eucharistic Origins, Reprint Edition (Wipf and Stock, 2012), viii.
    3 Andrew McGowan, “Rethinking Eucharistic Origins,” Pacifica: Australasian Theological Studies 23, no. 2 (June 2010): 173.
    4 The linear development theory is that the Eucharistic ritual first began in a primitive form using the words of the Jewish Birkat ha-mazon, to Jesus adapting them the Last Supper as recorded the Gospels, then in a chronological movement through the prayers in Didache 9 and 10, the Syrian anaphora Addai and Mari, the ordination anaphora in the Apostolic Tradition, the Egyptian anaphoric fragments such as the Strasbourg Papyrus, and then to the fourth-century and later classic anaphoras of both East and West. In Maxwell E. Johnson, “The Apostolic Tradition,” in Geoffrey Wainwright and Karen B. Westerfield Tucker, eds., The Oxford History of Christian Worship (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 45. 
    5 For further reading, see Bradshaw’s Eucharistic Origins, where he argues that the diversity of what early Christians did cannot be narrowed down to the theory of a “single root” or the hypothesis of a “twofold origin”. Rather, he counter proposes that the early Christians had varying ritual patterns, elements used, and meanings assigned to the rite, which led to a significant variety in their early Christian ritual meals. Bradshaw also aims to show that the separation of the Eucharist from the meal context and the understanding of the bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ is likely to be much later than current scholarship proposals. Last but not least, he challenges current scholarly assumptions that the classic patterns of eucharistic prayers, theology, and practice in the fourth century are directly adapted from the Birkat ha-mazon. He concludes, albeit briefly, that by the fourth century, Eucharist had undergone various changes. It had become less of a personal, full meal than a distant, symbolic rite; the prayers over the bread and cup had increased in complexity.
    6 Bradshaw, Eucharistic Origins, 3–4. See Appendix A for a side-by-side comparison chart of the institution narratives.
    7 Bradshaw, Eucharistic Origins, 9–10.
    8 Bradshaw, Eucharistic Origins, 11.
    9 McGowan, Rethinking, 178.
    10 Dana Robinson, Food, Virtue, and the Shaping of Early Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 3–4.
    11 Robinson, Food, 5.
    12 McGowan, Rethinking, 185. 
    13 The Didache, or “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles” is the oldest in the genre of literature known as “church order,” covering aspects of church life such “initiation, worship, discipline, polity, charitable organization” etc. It contains prayers related to the Eucharist, and is also currently the earliest document that has been discovered which provides instructions on baptism and the Eucharist. Frank Senn would consider the prayers in the Didache the earliest “eucharistic formularies”, whilst the oldest “eucharistic prayer text” is that of Hippolytus of Rome in the Apostolic Tradition, c. 215. See also Frank C. Senn, Christian Liturgy: Catholic and Evangelical (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997), 62, 77.
    14 Andrew B. McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective (Grand Rapids, United States: Baker Academic, 2014), 36.
    15 Gary Macy, Treasures from the Storeroom: Medieval Religion and the Eucharist (Collegeville, Minn: Liturgical Press, 1999), 12.
    16 Lévi-Strauss states that ritual ultimately seeks the resolution of the inherent conflict of culture and nature. In Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2009), 35. Whilst various ritual theorists may argue on the nature of the “conflict,” most will accede to the description that the act of ritual mediates and engages the individual and the society.
    17 Grant R. Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Downers Grove, United States: InterVarsity Press, 2010), 37.
    18 For example, in the 4th and 5th century, Christian leaders wanted to distinguish between Christians and others, and judge within themselves—meal practices played a role in this boundary maintenance. In Robinson, 5. Attempts to contextualise the Eucharist may need to include the question on whether the host culture and/or religion assigns meanings and boundaries to meal practices and rituals in similar ways.

References & Bibliography

Bradshaw, Paul F. Eucharistic Origins. Reprint Edition. Wipf and Stock, 2012.

 Macy, Gary. Treasures from the Storeroom: Medieval Religion and the Eucharist. Collegeville, Minn: Liturgical Press, 1999.

McGowan, Andrew. “Rethinking Eucharistic Origins.” Pacifica: Australasian Theological Studies 23, no. 2 (June 2010): 173–91.

________. Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective. Grand Rapids, United States: Baker Academic, 2014.

Osborne, Grant R. The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation. Downers Grove, United States: InterVarsity Press, 2010.

Robinson, Dana. Food, Virtue, and the Shaping of Early Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Senn, Frank C. Christian Liturgy: Catholic and Evangelical. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997.

Wainwright, Geoffrey, and Karen B. Westerfield Tucker, eds., The Oxford History of Christian Worship. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.