Re Envisioning The Pentecostal Understanding Of The Eucharist An Ecumenical Proposal

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Pentecostal Theology, Volume 28, No. 2, Fall 2006

Re-envisioning the Pentecostal Understanding of

the Eucharist: An Ecumenical Proposal

Wesley Scott Biddy

Introduction

When we come to consider the idea of a distinctively Pentecostal sacra- mentology, it would be legitimate to begin by asking, “Is there any such thing?” My own initial answer is yes: it is still largely undeveloped, but the resources latent in Pentecostal spirituality hold much potential for developing a conscious theological appreciation of the sacramental char- acter of worship in general, and of those ecclesial rituals that have his- torically been explicitly recognized as “sacraments” in particular. My goal in this essay is to investigate that potential so as to demonstrate how, if shaped in a certain way, this area of Pentecostal theology can aid doctri- nal rapprochement between Pentecostals and other groups of Christians in the face of some existing divisions. I intend to direct my focus to the Eucharist, but ﬁrst I must clear a space for talking about sacraments gen- erally from a Pentecostal perspective. That will consume the ﬁrst part of the essay, and in the second part I will proceed to engage some theolo- gians of other traditions to determine where Pentecostalism might be able to appropriate some of their ideas.

Pentecostalism and the Idea of a Sacrament

The Council of Trent deﬁned a sacrament as “a symbol of something sacred, a visible form of invisible grace, having the power of sanctify- ing.” Despite the fact that the sacramental teaching—particularly regard- ing the Eucharist—articulated by the Council was clearly shaped by polemical concerns, I presume that most Protestant Christians could inter- pret this deﬁnition in a way that would render it acceptable to them (the proper meaning of the phrase “having the power of sanctifying” would probably be the most disputed point). At any rate, I ﬁnd it valuable as a place to start, if nothing else. I also value Paul Tillich’s way of differen- tiating between a sign and a symbol, both of which are important terms in any discussion of sacraments. According to Tillich, a sign “bears no necessary relation to that to which it points,” while a symbol

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participates in the reality of that for which it stands. The sign can be changed arbitrarily according to the demands of expediency, but the symbol grows and dies according to the correlation between that which is symbolized and the persons who receive it as a symbol. Therefore, the religious symbol, the symbol which points to the divine, can be a true symbol only if it par- ticipates in the power of the divine to which it points.1

Although the terms will often appear interchangeably in this paper, an example will illustrate how this distinction can be useful.

It seems fair to suppose that Pentecostals, generally speaking, tend to think of practices like baptism, celebrating the Lord’s Supper, and foot washing more as signs than as symbols of grace, usually treating them as an outward response to an inward grace that has already been received. It is understood that we undertake these particular actions simply because they are ordinances of dominical institution: Jesus instructed us to carry them out, and so we do, but our obedience in that regard does not create the occasion for a dispensation of grace; the grace—which, in a usage not uncommon to post-Reformation thought, refers almost strictly to the forgiveness of sins—has already come to us before our responsive action, and does not come thereafter or therein.

However, Frank D. Macchia, a Pentecostal, has argued that the com- mon Pentecostal understanding of glossolalia shares much with the ways in which older, “mainstream” denominations conceive of how God works among us in the sacraments.2 In both cases, alongside the symbolic human action, there is an outward sign of something that God is doing for a person or group that humans cannot genuinely do for themselves, though the genuineness of its occurring is known only by faith.3 Likewise, whe- ther in a Pentecostal “altar service” or at a communion table, those who encounter the living Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit leave believing that they have been granted a blessing that will sustain them as they re-enter the world on the pilgrimage of Christian life. The example demonstrates that Pentecostals have theological resources for exploring two key ideas in sacramentology: (1) that divine-human encounters take

Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology: Reason and Revelation , vol. 1 of Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 239.

Frank D. Macchia, “Tongues as a Sign: Towards a Sacramental Understanding of Pentecostal Experience,” Pentecostal Theology 15, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 61–76; see also his “Sighs Too Deep for Words: Towards a Theology of Glossolalia,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 1 (October 1992): 47–73.

After all, there is no way to prove that one who speaks in tongues is not simply bab- bling nonsense on his or her own impetus, or, say, that the bread and wine undergo a change by Christ’s becoming present in the Eucharist.

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place in, with, and under signs, and (2) that these encounters may rightly be regarded as moments in which God dispenses grace, at least as long as this word is not restricted to refer only to the forgiveness of sins, which Pentecostals generally do not believe comes through the sacraments.

Certainly there is nothing inherently resistant in Pentecostalism to the idea that God grants the Church blessings beyond that of forgiveness of sins. On the contrary, when early Pentecostals claimed a “third blessing” of baptism in the Holy Spirit as evidenced by speaking in tongues, they assumed it to be over and above the “second blessing” of sanctiﬁcation that Wesleyan-Holiness revivalists preached could enhance the “basic” Christian state of justiﬁcation.4 Indeed, it seems central to Pentecostalism, also, to believe that God employs particular signs to declare and mani- fest God’s presence in and intentions for the world. The “full gospel” it proclaims is usually taken to involve ﬁve theological motifs: (1) justiﬁcation by faith, (2) sanctiﬁcation, (3) baptism in the Holy Spirit, or Spirit bap- tism, as evidenced by speaking in tongues, (4) provision of divine heal- ing for all under the Atonement, and (5) the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which is usually regarded as an imminent event.5 The third and fourth of these explicitly involve signs of God’s work in the believer, and both are regarded as pointing to the ﬁfth—they are eschatological signs. Insofar as Pentecostals hold that God’s gracious blessings are often bestowed precisely under speciﬁc signs, they do profess a sacramental understand- ing of the divine economy.

Yet, many Pentecostals are uncomfortable with the word sacrament because they associate it with a “High Church” liturgical worship format that they consider frozen by an excessive formality that restricts God’s freedom to encounter and bless the faithful, or because they think it bespeaks a ritual that people of other traditions superstitiously hold to be imbued with quasi-magical power. Even when this kind of misunder- standing of the theology behind “High Church” liturgy is not present, there is often still a sense among Pentecostals that the word sacrament is

Some early Pentecostals—such as the American evangelist Phoebe Palmer (see Diana Chapman, “The Rise and Demise of Women’s Ministry in the Origins and Early Years of Pentecostalism in Britain,” in Journal of Pentecostal Theology 12, no. 2 [April 2004]: 217–19)—referred to Spirit baptism as the “second blessing,” at once borrowing the Wesleyan terminology and displacing its original content. This became a common prac- tice during the twentieth century and remains so today (see Norbert Baumert, “‘Charism’ and ‘Spirit-Baptism’: Presentation of an Analysis,” in Journal of Pentecostal Theology 12, no. 2 [April 2004]: 147–80).

Because of these particular motifs, the “full gospel” is also called the “ﬁvefold gospel.” Of course, none of them belong exclusively to Pentecostals, but historically the ﬁve taken together have been used by Pentecostals as a self-identifying credo.

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burdened with too much baggage to be very useful in ecclesial commu- nities that stand under the shadow of Zwingli’s denunciation of Roman Catholic sacramentalism.

I, for one, think otherwise. In my view, the term sacrament can be useful even for Protestants who reject the majority of Roman Catholic teaching about the seven sacraments and their nature and proper use, if two things are borne in mind. First, as Edward Schillebeeckx observes, theologians of the post-World War II era have widely recognized that “the sacraments are ﬁrst and foremost symbolic acts or activity as signs.”6 This recognition allows us to talk about the Eucharist, for example, as a sacrament, using different categories than the Aristotelian terms of sub- stance and accident. The latter have deeply informed past sacramentology and have become bound up with theological disputes over what occurs in the consecrated elements. Of course, that is certainly an issue worthy of the most serious consideration, and the Aristotelian categories are still useful for framing the discussion. But it is not the only issue to be con- sidered, and the older terms, which have to do with ontology, aid us lit- tle in describing and analyzing sacramental symbolic activity. Thus, we can leave them aside for at least this task, which we may now take up separately from ontological questions about the sacramental elements. I ﬁnd this especially beneﬁcial from the perspective of Pentecostal theol- ogy, because I believe that a Pentecostal sacramentology will have to begin with an account of sacraments as events of a divine-human encounter that take place through symbols. I will try to sketch out what such an account might look like in what follows. Once that is accepted, I think, it will be easier for Pentecostals to engage the other (older) issues in a proﬁtable dialogue with Christians of other traditions.

The second thing to be borne in mind is that the original sense of “sacrament” offers us a fruitful way to contemplate what occurs in these events in which we encounter God in a special way. Stanley Grenz notes that in the Roman world, the Latin word sacramentum indicated “the oath of ﬁdelity and obedience to one’s commander sworn by a Roman soldier upon enlistment in the army.”7 It was common for the soldier then to be

Edward Schillebeeckx, The Eucharist, trans. N. D. Smith (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968), 97.

Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000), 513. It is often pointed out that the Latin Vulgate uses sacramentum to translate the Greek mysterion, but I see little relevance in that for a discussion of the rituals most commonly referred to as “sacraments” because the New Testament never uses the word mysterion/sacramentum to refer to rituals. Rather, it uses the term in the same

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branded with a mark that identiﬁed him as such—the visible sign of his new identity, which carried distinctive responsibilities and privileges. Sacramentum could also refer to the sum of money that was put in escrow— often in a temple, as it was thought of as being in the care of the gods— while a court case awaited settlement.8 The word pledge seems a good candidate for encapsulating these two meanings of sacramentum. I sug- gest that each of them might be seen to be, in certain respects, congru- ent to both a divine and a human dimension of what takes place in a sacramental event.

What occurs in the human dimension of the ﬁrst meaning of sacra- mentum, theologically interpreted here as “pledge,” is captured by Grenz’s characterization of sacraments as “acts of commitment.” When we per- form these actions, we pledge to God the commitment to obedience that properly belongs to the whole of a Christian life. And as the Roman sol- diers allowed themselves to be branded as a physical symbol of their con- signing themselves over to the army, so when we make our pledge we employ designated visible signs—the sacramental elements—in a particular concrete act of obedience, namely, obeying Jesus’ instruction that we should engage in these speciﬁc practices (the dominical ordinances).

Grenz, a Baptist theologian, remains faithful to the Zwinglian heritage of sacramentology in afﬁrming that these acts of commitment are pri- marily human acts performed as an outward, symbolic response to God’s gift of salviﬁc grace to believers. Yet he does not deny a place to divine operation in these moments. Grenz writes:

Through these acts, we confess our faith in a special manner. They are enacted pictures or symbols of God’s grace given in Christ… [so that] acts of commitment become visual sermons, the Word of God symbolically proclaimed. Through our participation we not only declare the truth of the gospel, however, we also bear witness to our reception of the grace sym- bolized. Hence, through these rites, we “act out” our faith. The acts of com- mitment become enactments of our appropriation of God’s action in Christ. As we afﬁrm our faith in this vivid symbolic manner, the Holy Spirit uses these rites to facilitate our participation in the reality of the acts symbolized.9

It seems safe to say that, in Grenz’s view, even if the initial liturgical move of the sacred drama belongs to us, the ﬁnal (and surely more impor- tant) aspect of what occurs therein is a work of the Holy Spirit.

sense in which it is used in the Septuagint, i.e., to refer to the secrets or hidden plans of God, commonly with the understanding that these have now been revealed.

Ibid., 513.

Ibid., 516.

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Still, to say this is not yet the equivalent of afﬁrming a personal pres- ence of Christ at, for example, the Eucharist, which is afﬁrmed in almost all the churches that did not fall under Zwingli’s sway. Those who aver some version of the doctrine of the Real Presence often appeal to Christ’s promise to be with us “wherever two or more are gathered” (Matt. 18:20; see 28:21). This notion speaks to the divine dimension of “pledge” that I have mentioned: as all the promises of God in Christ are Yea and Amen (2 Cor 1:20), we should believe that the presence of the cruciﬁed and risen Son of God with us at the Eucharist is a promise of which we have the greatest assurance.

I am sympathetic to the reasoning here. It might be objected—perhaps in the name of “biblical purism”—that while Christ promised to be with us, he did not say that he would do so in any special way at the Eucharist. That is, one might contend that the belief in a special eucharistic pres- ence is a development of the post-New Testament era, and therefore it has less warrant than ﬁrst-order truths drawn directly from Holy Scripture. On such a supposition, Christ’s injunction to the disciples in the Upper Room to hold the Lord’s Supper “in remembrance of me” was understood by the earliest Christians to refer to a mere memorial. But that is quite simply inaccurate.

Sharing a fellowship meal with someone had great signiﬁcance in the ancient world, especially in religious contexts, where the participants assumed the presence of, or their communion with, a particular deity or dead ancestors during the meal. This is precisely why Paul forbids the Corinthians to participate in such rituals with pagans (1 Cor. 10:18–21): the idols at pagan feasts do not represent gods who truly exist, but demons participate in the scene and become the actual objects of worship just because it is idolatrous; to eat this kind of meal with their worshippers would be an expression of solidarity with them in that worship. Paul con- trasts the pagans’ partaking of the table of demons and being partners with them (vv. 20–21) with the Christian Eucharist, wherein the cup that is drunk and the bread that is broken are a koin¨nia, a sharing in or par- ticipation in the blood and body of Christ (v. 16). One cannot do both, because what one does in such acts is an expression of a reality in which the person participates—if a person participates in the expression, he or she necessarily thereby becomes a participant in the reality, for the reality is both enabled by supernatural means (whether the agent be God or demons) and concretely effected by the sign: “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (v. 17).

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In fact, the apostle claims that in the church he addresses, some have gotten sick or died because they have not honored the nature of the eucharistic celebration (1 Cor. 11:29–30). Here we have a sin that brings about different consequences than do other sins that the people should avoid, which clearly suggests that something unique pertains to the situ- ation in which this sin is committed. The Corinthians have not just been rude or insincere or forgetful in their meetings. Simply to act without “good worship-table etiquette” would be no different from the unchecked use of glossolalia in the congregation; to conduct a mere memorial cele- bration improperly would be like forgetting other elements of what Paul has passed on to them. The Corinthians have been immoderate and for- getful, but those sins have not been diagnosed as the cause of illness and death, as the sin regarding the Eucharist has. Paul certainly believes that in the Lord’s Supper more than a mere memorial or casual Sunday din- ner is taking place. This is perhaps most clearly evidenced by his com- parison of the eucharistic koin¨nia with Temple sacriﬁce, wherein he asks rhetorically, “Are not those who eat the sacriﬁces partners in the altar?” (10:18). God was understood to reside in a special way in the Temple, such that sacriﬁces made and eaten at the altar were quite literally made and eaten in God’s presence. The logic of Paul’s analogy works to indi- cate that Christ is likewise present among the believers in their eucharis- tic eating and drinking.

Furthermore, we must take account of what Jesus’ instruction about the Lord’s Supper, “Do this in remembrance of me,” implied for the early Church. In Hebraic thought, Scott McCormick, Jr. explains, this ritualis- tic kind of remembrance, or anamnesis, was not chieﬂy a human under- taking, nor was it merely a memorial in the sense of “calling to mind again,” for the action actually provided a means of “bringing up into the present the effects of something done in the past:”

True, functions of human memory might be involved in this powerful link- ing of past and present: for example, a memorial or cultic recounting of an event such as the exodus, wherein the past event was “actualized” or made a contemporary, redemptive reality for the worshipers. But just as it was a really redemptive link, God’s own action was basic and necessary for the human or cultic remembering to be thus effective. To cause the effects of some past deed to appear freshly in the present, whether redemptively or with negative force—this presupposes sovereignty, a moral control of his- tory, a control that is God’s alone.10

Scott McCormick, Jr., The Lord’s Supper: A Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966), 78–79. McCormick (79, n. 10) cites the observation of Brevard Childs

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McCormick proceeds to argue that

[w]hen it is said that the church celebrates the Sacrament unto the remem- brance of Jesus, it means emphatically that God thereby ushers into the present the effects of Jesus’ past and completed sacriﬁce. The effects of his obedience unto death are made a present reality. That is to say, salvation in Christ is made a present reality. This is precisely what was given to the disciples in the upper room: salvation in Christ as a gift received in faith. In this interpretation of anamnesis, the continuity between the Last Supper and the Lord’s Supper is therefore maintained and stressed…. What the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper holds for us is God’s salvation coming to us repeatedly: his re-creating, life-giving gift being repeatedly offered and repeatedly received.11

Here, “salvation in Christ” does not refer to something accomplished as a strictly past event, nor does this notion of making a past action’s con- sequences effective for the present involve a repetition of the past action itself, nor is it implied that salvation in Christ cannot be maintained over time unless the anamnesis is carried out regularly (as if the ceremony were a magical rite that must be performed at certain times in order to keep a person safe). Instead, “salvation in Christ” names the state in which we carry out our lives, so that our identity is to be the people who accept salvation by our continual reliance upon God in faith. We concretely and repeatedly accept that identity, proclaiming it to each other and to the world (1 Cor. 11:26), by celebrating the Eucharist. And because our sal- vation comes from a living Christ who is a life-giving spirit (1 Cor. 15:45), it comes from a Christ who is present to us and among us.

that “the dynamic connection via tradition (i.e., via Israel’s memory) between present time and historically ﬁxed events of the past must be understood in the sense that history, by God’s own action, is made to be redemptive history: his redemptive action in past and unrepeatable events is not static but rather continues.” See Brevard Childs, Memory and Tradition in Israel, Studies in Biblical Theology 37 (London: SCM Press, 1962), 66–70, 74–80, 83–89.

McCormick, The Lord’s Supper, 81–82. This conception of the link between the Last Supper and the Lord’s Supper accords with the Jewish understanding of the link between the Passover Seder and the original Passover on the night that the exodus began. As A. J. B. Higgins explains, “The precept to tell the children the meaning of the festival (Exod 12.26f; 13.8) is the basis of the Passover Haggadah, by which the memory of the event is to be kept fresh, and each individual in every generation is to feel that he shares in the deliverance from Egypt” (The Lord’s Supper in the New Testament, Studies in Biblical Theology 6 [London: SCM Press, 1952], 36). He notes that this approach to the Seder was current in Mishnaic times, making reference to the stipulation in the Mishnah Pesachim 10.5 that at the meal “[e]veryone must regard himself as if he had come out of Egypt” (46). The fact that Jesus was likely familiar with the Mishnaic Seder practices allows Higgins to construct an interesting comparison between them and the Synoptic depictions of the Last Supper (45–47).

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This presence is effected and made effectual for believers by the Holy Spirit, who is also a gift from the Father and with whom the Son is always united in work. In worship, when we encounter Christ through the Spirit, we experience his presence as real, and it necessarily effects change in us because we encounter him as active Lord and Savior—if the experi- ence is real, then it cannot fail to affect us profoundly. As I have said, we leave that encounter, whether it takes place at the Communion table or in an “altar service,” knowing that we have been granted a blessing that will sustain us as we re-enter the world. Of course, the common Christian name for this blessing is “grace.”

According to the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, “Grace is God’s favor towards us, unearned and undeserved; by grace God forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills,” and sacraments are “given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.”12 Frankly, I do not see anything in those state- ments with which a Pentecostal ought to disagree. Granted, they suggest that forgiveness of sins can come through the sacraments, an idea that may initially bother some believers of Zwinglian stripe, but why should anyone suppose that God would not encounter a person while he or she is participating in the sacraments, dealing with the person’s heart and for- giving his or her sins? If Pentecostals prize the belief that God freely operates among us whenever and in whatever ways it pleases God to do, then there should be no problem with afﬁrming that God may grant us forgiveness or any other blessings in a sacramental context. It is by all means appropriate to believe that when we “communicate”13 with God in worship, we are granted spiritual sustenance in the encounter. When this happens in sacramental events—in which we encounter the Holy Spirit in a special way, as Pentecostals believe it happens in other forms of wor- ship (such as glossolalia)—the moment is a kind of crystallization of the life in the Spirit that constitutes our everyday graced existence. The pro- vision of grace remains with us as we leave the altar, and it must be added here that it does so not merely to edify us in a personal spiritual way, but to equip us to carry out the work of God in the world. This is the mean- ing of referring to the eucharistic celebration as the Mass (missa in Latin,

The Book of Common Prayer (New York: The Church Hymnal Corp., 1979), 858, 857.

I am consciously punning on the word “communicate” here: I intend the special liturgical sense of the word, “to participate in Holy Communion,” to be available as well as the more general meaning, “to be in communication.”

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which has the same root as missio, “mission”14). To celebrate the Mass is to assent to and rejoice in the economy of salvation—the Trinity’s mis- sion to us—and to accept a commission for our own lives.

A post-communion prayer from the Book of Common Prayer that con- tains an acceptance of this commission reads,

Almighty and ever living God,

we thank you for feeding us with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood

of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ;

and for assuring us in these holy mysteries that we are living members of the Body of your Son, and heirs of your eternal kingdom.

And now, Father, send us out

to do the work you have given us to do,

to love and serve you

as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.

To him, to you, and to the Holy Spirit,

be honor and glory, now and forever. Amen.15

The ﬁrst four lines of this prayer acknowledge that God has in fact fulﬁlled God’s pledge to be with us in Christ here and now. Lines 5–7 also point to the divine dimension of the second meaning of “pledge” from sacramentum that I am seeking to use, the deposit put in escrow while a legal suit was in progress. Obviously, the legal setting of this deposit prevents its serving as a very precise metaphor, since we are still talking about a matter of grace rather than legalistic obligation, but here is what I mean. In the sacramental event, God gives us an assurance of who we are, children whom our heavenly Father loves and whom he will one day draw into perfect, eternal communion with him; we get a taste of that communion now as a deposit, a pledge of our future status before God. We return our own deposit/pledge by giving “honor and glory” to the triune God, understanding that in this life we cannot (and usually do not try hard enough to) offer praise as God deserves from us, but in antic- ipation of that eschatological communion in the eternal future in which we will adore, enjoy, and glorify God more perfectly, as we were created to do.

I have given some attention to Stanley Grenz’s description of the sacra- ments as human acts of commitment wherein the Holy Spirit also oper- ates, a description approaching the understanding of sacraments as events

Catechism of the Catholic Church (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1994), §1332. 15

The Book of Common Prayer, 366.

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of a divine-human encounter that take place through symbols, which I have claimed will be important to articulating a Pentecostal perspective on sacraments. Indeed, some Pentecostal scholars have recently made sim- ilar claims in promulgating the notion that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are means of grace.16 When it comes to sacramentology in ecclesial groups that have traditionally followed the Radical Reformers, I think that Grenz and these Pentecostals are among those whose ideas afford a good oppor- tunity for dialogue with other, older traditions because they somewhat counteract the Zwinglian tendency to strip down God’s role in the fol- lowing of dominical ordinances. It has become clear, I am sure, that I agree with much of what they have to say, though I favor an understanding of the Eucharist that may be yet one step farther from the extreme strain of Zwinglianism, and thus a step closer to some of the older churches’ views, than theirs is. However, I hope to show in the next section that taking that step need not be difﬁcult for Pentecostals and would, in fact, be beneﬁcial in several respects, not least because it ought to be of some value in efforts at ecumenism. Ecumenical work generally proceeds most smoothly and fruitfully when points of convergence between the dialogue partners are recognized and teased out theologically. With that in mind, I now take up the task of adopting some partners whose ideas about sacra- ments in general, and the Eucharist in particular, strike me as widely amenable to a Pentecostal theology.

Given that so many Pentecostal groups have their historical roots in the Wesleyan Holiness movement and that Pentecostalism in general remains Wesleyan in much of its theology, John Wesley makes a good partner with whom Pentecostals might begin in an ecumenical conversa- tion about the Eucharist. He served as an Anglican minister throughout his life and considered his own theology to be thoroughly consistent with

Most of these, to my knowledge, put foot washing in the same category. See, e.g., John Christopher Thomas, Footwashing in John 13 and the Johannine Community (Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement 61 [Shefﬁeld, UK: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1991]), and Frank D. Macchia, “Is Footwashing the Neglected Sacrament? A Theological Response to John Christopher Thomas,” in Pentecostal Theology 19, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 239–49. Additionally, Kenneth J. Archer, “Nourishment for Our Journey: The Pentecostal Via Salutis and Sacramental Ordinances,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 13, no. 1 (October 2004): 79–96, has explicitly called Spirit baptism “a sacramental ordinance of Pentecostal churches” (88). This perhaps goes further than the claim I have been making, namely, that the Pentecostal understanding of glossolalia as experienced in Spirit baptism is in many ways analogous to a more tradi- tional understanding of what occurs in the sacraments. To call Spirit baptism (at least where this is understood to be deﬁnitively signiﬁed by speaking in tongues, as it widely is in Pentecostal circles) “a sacramental ordinance” alongside baptism and the Eucharist intro- duces connotations of normativity with which I am not quite comfortable.

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Anglican principles, a fact that should remind Pentecostals of how close their branch is to that of the Anglican Church on the historical family tree of Christian denominations and movements. In the context of discussing Wesley’s views on the Lord’s Supper, wherein I believe there is much from which Pentecostals can proﬁt, I will examine the speciﬁcally Anglican elements of his thought as a way of engaging that tradition, particularly as represented by Thomas Cranmer and Richard Hooker.

Beginning the Ecumenical Conversation

With reference to John Wesley’s views on the Eucharist, perhaps the ﬁrst thing to recognize here is that he regards it as a means of grace. He deﬁnes means of grace as “outward signs, words or actions, ordained of God, and appointed for this end, to be the ordinary channels whereby He might convey to men, preventing, justifying, or sanctifying grace.”17 Wesley numbers baptism, prayer, the reading of Scripture, and preaching among such means, but he holds the Eucharist to be the foremost, “the grand channel” of grace:

Is not the eating of that bread, and the drinking of that cup, the outward, visible means whereby God conveys into our souls all that spiritual grace, that righteousness and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost; which were pur- chased by the body of Christ once broken, and the blood of Christ once shed for us?18

He eschews an ex opere operato (meaning “by the performance of the work itself”) understanding of sacramental efﬁcacy, stressing that the rites accomplish nothing for the participant who lacks faith. Of course, for Wesley, this faith is not what causes the efﬁcacious dispensing of grace (ex opere operantis, meaning “by the disposition of the person perform- ing the work”), any more than the mere performance of the rite is. Grace, being what it is, comes strictly and directly from God. Yet, the commu- nicant believes “that whatever God hath promised, he is faithful also to perform,”19 and thus that grace will surely be given. In light of this, John R. Parris judges that “it is trust in God that is at the heart of Wesley’s positive evaluation of the Lord’s Supper.”20

John Wesley, “The Means of Grace,” Standard Sermons of John Wesley, ed. Edward H. Sugden, 2 vols. (London: Epworth, 1921), I: 242.

Ibid., 253.

Ibid., 254.

John R. Parris, John Wesley’s Doctrine of the Sacraments (London: Epworth, 1963), 67.

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How, then, is grace imparted through the Eucharist? What role do the elements of bread and wine play, and what does it mean to call them the body and blood of Christ? Wesley consistently denies the doctrines of transubstantiation and consubstantiation. By rejecting these, Wesley makes it clear that the gift and reception of grace through the Eucharist do not depend on the presence of the whole Christ in the elements. In fact, he disavows that Christ’s human nature is present in the sacrament at all because, he explains, “we cannot allow Christ’s human nature to be pre- sent in it, without allowing either con- or transubstantiation,”21 ideas that Wesley cannot accept because they ascribe a kind of ubiquity to Christ’s human nature, whereas he follows the school of thought common to Calvin, Hooker, and Peter Martyr Vermigli that Christ’s human nature is physi- cally located only in heaven.22 However, Wesley does afﬁrm that Christ is personally present in his divine nature.

On this point, it is instructive to take note of a passage of a letter from Susanna Wesley to her son, to which Wesley replied that he substantially agreed with her opinion

that the divine nature of Christ is then eminently present to impart, by the operation of His Holy Spirit, the beneﬁts of His death to worthy receivers. Surely the Divine presence of our Lord, thus applying the virtue and mer- its of the great Atonement to each true believer, makes the consecrated bread more than a sign of Christ’s body; since, by His doing so, we receive not only the sign but with it the thing signiﬁed—all the beneﬁts of His Incarnation and Passion….23

To my mind, these remarks are as theologically rich as anything Wesley himself writes on the subject, and the sophisticated ideas they convey are central to his view, as will become clear in the discussion below. Now, Wesley suggests that Christ’s presence and activity are effected through or in the Holy Spirit, as we see in a prayer of epiclesis from the Hymns on the Lord’s Supper:

Come, Holy Ghost, thine inﬂuence shed, And realize the sign;

Thy life infuse into the bread, Thy power into the wine.

John Wesley, The Letters of John Wesley, Standard Ed, ed. John Telford, 8 vols. (London: Epworth, 1931), I: 118.

See John Wesley, The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., 3d ed., ed. Thomas Jackson, 14 vols. (London: John Mason, 1829–31), X: 121.

Quoted in Luke Tyerman, The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., 3 vols. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1878), I: 82.

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Effectual let the tokens prove, And made, by heavenly art, Fit channels to convey thy love To every faithful heart.24

This epiclesis indicates not only the Holy Spirit’s role in transmitting the divine gifts of the Eucharist to communicants, but also two other ele- ments of Wesley’s understanding of how those graces are conferred, both of which he inherited from the Anglican tradition. The ideas go under the names “virtualism” and “instrumentalism,” and they are tied together in the tradition by a third, “receptionism.”

Virtualism lies behind the prayer for divine “life” and “power” to imbue the elements. The doctrine “denie[s] that any change in the elements [takes] place, but maintains that the faithful [receive] the power or the virtue of the body and blood of Christ.”25 In the words of the Non-Juror Robert Nelson, whose views seem to have inﬂuenced Wesley, what the faithful receive is not “the gross . . . substance, but . . . the spiritual energy and virtue of his holy ﬂesh and blood, communicated to the blessed Elements by the power and operation of the Holy Ghost descending upon them.”26 This view of the Eucharist, which is probably the most ﬁtting one to ascribe to Calvin, too, is amply attested in Anglican theology. It was especially important for Cranmer, who explicitly identiﬁes the Real Presence as “Christ and his holy Spirit be[ing] truly and indeed present by their mighty and sanctifying power, virtue, and grace in all them that worthily receive.”27 Among Anglicans after Cranmer, one sees the same thought at work in Hooker’s eucharistic theology,28 as well as in that of John Johnston and Thomas Brett, two clergymen who profoundly inﬂuenced

“Hymn 72” in J. Ernest Rattenbury, The Eucharistic Hymns of John and Charles Wesley, 2nd American edn., ed. Timothy J. Crouch, O.S.L. (Cleveland, OH: Order of Saint Luke Publications, 1990), 217.

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F. L. Cross (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 409.

Robert Nelson, A Companion for the Fasts and Festivals of the Church of England with Collects and Prayers for each Solemnity, 23rd ed. (London: F. C. & J. Rivington, 1773), 511. Parris notes that “Wesley’s fondness for the epiclesis dates from his contact with those Non-Jurors who insisted on the primitive character of this ‘usage,’ as they termed it, as an essential part of the eucharistic liturgy” (87).

Thomas Cranmer, “An Answer Unto a Crafty and Sophistical Cavillation Devised by Stephen Gardiner Against the True and Godly Doctrine of the Most Holy Sacrament of the Body and Blood of our Savior, Jesus Christ,” in Writings and Disputations of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1884), 3; see also “Disputations at Oxford” in the same volume.

See Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity(hereafter LEP), in The Works

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the Anglican Communion Service of 1718 and who stressed the “power” and “effect” of the body and blood of Christ conveyed to the elements by the Holy Spirit.29

Cranmer’s phrase “in all them that worthily receive,” and Wesley’s assertion that Christ in his divinity “is so united to us then, as He never is but to worthy receivers,” illustrate the role played by “receptionism” in their understanding of what occurs at the Communion table: recep- tionism holds that “while the bread and wine continue to exist unchanged after consecration, the faithful communicant receives together with them the true body and blood of Christ,”30 which is to say that the Real Presence of Christ, in Hooker’s words, “is not therefore to be sought for in the sacrament, but in the worthy receiver of the sacrament”31 as he or she eats and drinks in faith. Now, this statement of Hooker’s should not be taken completely at face value because, like Cranmer before and Wesley after him, he does want to allow for an objective, personal presence of Christ at the Eucharist. Cranmer, for example, believes that at baptism “Christ himself cometh down upon the child and appareleth him with his own self” and at the Eucharist personally feeds the communicant with spiritual sustenance. He, Hooker, and Wesley insist that the faithful not only receive the graces won by Christ, which virtualism emphasizes, but they are also united to Christ’s person through their sacramental “partic- ipation in his body and blood.”32 A belief in Christ’s objectively real pres- ence enables Wesley to posit that the Lord’s Supper can be a faith-granting ordinance. Christ is not only present subjectively—that is, encountering those who seek to have their faith bolstered by “meeting him” at the altar. He is truly there in the Spirit, and thus is able to (and sometimes does) cause a person of meager faith to grasp the fact that he is present and at work, thereby granting the person an increase of faith. But, for Wesley, Christ’s presence is not restricted to the elements, and it does not proﬁt

of that Learned and Judicious Divine Mr. Richard Hooker, ed. R. W. Church and F. Paget, 7th ed., Vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1888).

Nicolas Joseph Reina, The Development of the Teaching on Real Presence and on the Notion of the “Sacrament of the Sacriﬁce” in the Eucharistic Theology of the Anglican, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic Churches and its Implication for an Ecumenical Eucharistic Service among These Three Churches, Ph.D. diss., Graduate Theological Union, 1983, pp. 57–61.

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 409.

Hooker, LEP Book V.lxvii (p. 352).

Reina points out that “the key tenet in Cranmer’s system was the indwelling of Christ in us and our indwelling in Christ through the reception of Holy Communion” (22). For the same in Hooker’s thought, see LEP V.lxvii (esp. 349, 352).

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those who totally lack faith and thus are in no way disposed to receive him.

Wesley seeks to retain a link between Christ’s presence and the ele- ments without admitting a substantial change in them—hence he joins Calvin, Cranmer, and Hooker in subscribing to the theory of instrumen- talism, which takes the bread and wine to be “instruments and organs by which the Lord gives us His Body and Blood,”33 though they themselves are not that body and blood. Here it is the symbolic act of Christ’s feed- ing and of our eating and drinking that makes the sacrament. Or, to focus on the elements themselves, they are symbols (in the Tillichian sense) of grace because they are made to participate in the spiritual reality of the gift of grace to us, which we accept (again, symbolically) precisely in the act of eating that bread and drinking that wine, since we thereby physi- cally enact our spiritual acceptance of grace. This idea is suggested by the lines of the epiclesis quoted above that contain a prayer for the ele- ments to be made “effectual tokens” and “ﬁt channels” to convey grace to those who receive them. Parris identiﬁes receptionism and instrumen- talism as links between Hooker and Calvin, and both notions, alongside virtualism, link the two thinkers both to Cranmer and to Wesley.34

If Pentecostals could adopt this general understanding of Christ’s pres- ence and action in the eucharistic event, it would strengthen their ties to the Wesleyan theology from which most Pentecostal thought ﬁrst devel- oped, and in so doing it would also establish a point of theological con- vergence with the Anglican tradition that might open the way for further dialogue between Pentecostals and Anglicans, despite the menacing gulf that appears in many ways to separate Christians from “Low-” and “High- Church” traditions such as these. In fact, it would also link a Pentecostal view of the Eucharist to the Reformed view at the point of virtualism, to which Calvin adhered, as has been noted. I submit that Pentecostal the- ology can appropriate the view of the Eucharist described above whole- sale if a few easy moves are made beforehand. Indeed, I recommend that it do so, for two key reasons: (1) I believe that here we have a biblically and theologically sound description of what occurs at the Eucharist as a

Wilhelm Niesel, The Theology of Calvin, trans. Harold Knight (London: Lutterworth, 1956), 218; this is Niesel’s description of how Calvin understands the presence.

Parris, John Wesley’s Doctrine of the Sacraments, 7–10. Hooker insists that the con- secrated bread and wine “contain in themselves no ﬁnal force or efﬁcacy, they are not phys- ical but moral instruments of salvation” (LEP V.lvii [257]); they are “causes instrumental upon the receipt whereof the participation of his body and blood ensueth” (LEP V.lxvii [352]). These two statements rather sum up the overall picture that virtualism, instrumentalism, and receptionism combine to give of the role the bread and wine play in this sacrament.

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sacramental event, and (2) if the Eucharist is the most important symbol of Christian unity, then it is crucial to make every effort to reach as much agreement as possible about the meaning of this symbol.

To my mind, the following steps would do much to pave the way for a Pentecostal appropriation of the Wesleyan-Anglican view. First, Pentecostal theology must openly afﬁrm a dynamic conception of grace and acknowl- edge that God desires to, and in fact does, bestow it upon us whenever we encounter God in worship—indeed, this occurs sacramentally because worship and the bestowal of grace are accomplished by the use of exter- nal signs. The Charismatic nature of much of what characterizes Pentecostal worship—the uplifting of hands in praise and self-surrender to God, speak- ing in tongues, dancing, laughter, and so forth—provides rich material for a hermeneutic of worship, and of the giving of divine blessings, through signs. By a “dynamic” conception of grace, I mean one that does not restrict the deﬁnition of grace to the forgiveness of sins. To add to what I have already said about this, I submit Bernhard Häring’s assertion that

[g]race (charis) means the graciousness of God in turning his countenance to man. It is a sign of God’s nearness, a word of love which arouses in us the answer of love. Grace means gentleness, the attractive energy of true love; it means alliance, a reciprocal relationship which, however, remains wholly the gift of God. On man’s part it is received with the awareness that it is an undeserved gift and this awareness energises us, teaches us, disci- plines us, gives us orientation to our whole life.35

Pentecostals certainly hold to this idea of how we relate to God, and there is nothing strange about giving it the name “grace.”

Second, Pentecostal theology should recognize the special sacramen- tal character of certain rites in which Christians have always believed God to operate each and every time they are faithfully performed by the gath- ered community, baptism and the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper being the foremost among these. Paul is abundantly clear that these practices unite believers to Christ and to one another in unique ways, and we must never diminish their proper signiﬁcance out of zeal to correct fellow Christians who may have assigned them too exclusive a signiﬁcance, or assigned too much importance to the role of ministers in carrying them out, or erred in some other way regarding them. Pentecostals who neglect the real value of these practices—a value vividly and consistently assigned to them in the New Testament—ought to acknowledge that by doing so,

Bernhard Häring, The Sacraments in a Secular Age(Slough, UK: St. Paul Publications, 1976), 98.

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they cheat themselves every bit as much as some Christians cheat them- selves by denying that the charismata are available to the Church today.

Third, the Real Presence of Christ, at the Eucharist, for example, should be understood by Pentecostals—if in no other way than this—in terms of Christ’s personal involvement in bestowing grace on the faithful when- ever we encounter God in the special moment of worship. The paradig- matic biblical episode to uphold here is the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples gathered at Pentecost. Peter testiﬁed to those who witnessed that event that Jesus himself, “being… exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit,… has poured out this that you both see and hear” (Acts 2:33). When we speak of the Holy Spirit’s work among us in any capacity, it is surely right to attribute it to the personal agency of the risen and gloriﬁed Christ into whose hands the Father has placed all things (for example, Matt. 11:27). Seen in this light, the Real Presence of Christ, he who works in and among us in all things, is not a strange doctrine to posit in a eucharis- tic context; rather, it is a doctrine that should be posited in every Christian context. As for a special kind of Presence becoming realized during the Eucharist, I must again point to the biblical meaning of anamnesis (“remem- brance”): if Jesus instructed us to observe the Lord’s Supper and referred to it as an anamnesis of him in a way that nothing else is so called in the New Testament, who are we to dispute with him about its unique character?

I have said that these steps would pave the way toward embracing the Wesleyan-Anglican view of the Eucharist discussed above. I see no rea- son why Pentecostals in general should have difﬁculty taking any or all of them, and Kenneth J. Archer has recently written about the sacraments in broad scope from a Pentecostal perspective in a way that would seem- ingly provide support for all three. He describes the Pentecostal “way of life” in narrative terms as a journey along which people continually receive grace in the form of spiritual nourishment and progressive conformity to the image of Christ, especially by means of periodic encounters with his Spirit during worship that Archer calls “signiﬁcant crisis experiences.”36 Archer accurately characterizes the Pentecostal conception of the via salutis (“way of salvation”) as “a dynamic pneumatic soteriology”:37 it recognizes that the Holy Spirit is present in and with believers always, but it particularly celebrates those episodic eruptions ofthe Spirit’s im- manent presence in the worshipping community that have a markedly

Archer, “Nourishment for Our Journey,” 85. 37

Ibid., 82.

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redemptive character. Archer argues that these experiences “aid us in our salviﬁc journey because they give the Holy Spirit necessary opportuni- ties to keep the community on the right path,” and that Pentecostals ought to see the “sacramental ordinances”—those “acts of commitment” that are directly connected to Christ and his promises in Scripture—as con- texts in which one may expect such experiences to occur.38

Archer does not say much directly about Christ’s presence at sacra- mental events, but it seems implicit in his schema that Christ has some personal involvement in all of them. One of the major tasks of his essay is to connect a sacramental sign with each of the ﬁve points of the “full gospel,” and he primarily speaks about the ﬁve points by their connec- tion with the person of Jesus: Jesus is our Savior, Sanctiﬁer, Spirit-Baptizer, Healer, and Coming King, and his work among us in each of these capac- ities is dynamically symbolized and enacted through sacramental ordi- nances, each ordinance being bound up with a particular sign. The sacramental signs correlated with Christ’s operational ofﬁces in the “ﬁvefold gospel” are: (1) Savior—baptism, (2) Sanctiﬁer—foot washing, (3) Spirit Baptizer—glossolalia, (4) Healer—anointing with oil, (5) Coming King— Lord’s Supper.39 Therefore, the sacraments are acts of commitment per- formed in obedience to Christ, but the totality of what occurs therein seems by no means less dependent on his involvement than on ours. The sacraments effectively mediate Christ’s presence and grace “when inspired by the Holy Spirit,”40 and Archer never indicates that he thinks that the faithful should not expect this inspiration to be provided.

I regard most of what Archer has done here as a positive move, both for the sake of a healthy Pentecostal spirituality and for the prospect of Pentecostals widely adopting a sacramentology that might aid ecumeni- cal work with non-Zwinglian traditions.41 However, Archer fails to address with adequate thoroughness the key question of how one should under- stand the relationship between Christ’s presence and the sacramental signs—for example, how is that presence related to the bread and wine in the Eucharist? This particular question has tremendous importance in

Ibid., 85.

Ibid., esp. 82–83 and 90–95. Archer points out that in carrying out this task, he is following and further developing the recommendation made by John Christopher Thomas in his presidential address to the Society for Pentecostal Theology, “Pentecostal Theology in the Twenty-First Century,” Pentecostal Theology 20, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 3–19, 18–19.

Archer, “Nourishment for Our Journey,” 86.

I only say that “most” of what Archer has done here is positive partly because, as I stated above (n. 17), I am not comfortable with calling Spirit baptism a sacramental ordi- nance, as most members of other traditions surely would not be.

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ecumenical discussion about the Lord’s Supper. I have attempted to offer at least a preliminary answer that I believe Pentecostals can accept, argu- ing on behalf of a particular notion of Christ’s eucharistic presence that strikes me as biblically and theologically sound, in addition to being ecu- menically valuable for its retention of the traditional belief that the risen Lord is really present among the faithful at the Supper and that the beneﬁt of that presence is communicated to them through the eucharistic elements.

Of course, not every interpretation of the Real Presence has an equal likelihood of gaining acceptance in Pentecostal circles. The Council of Trent dogmatically bound the doctrine of the Real Presence to the doc- trine of transubstantiation, the traditional understanding of which is, at least at present, completely unacceptable to most Pentecostals. According to Trent, “the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist truly, really and sub- stantially contains the body and blood together with the soul and divin- ity of our Lord Jesus Christ and thus the whole Christ,” and the Council called for the excommunication of anyone who “should say that they [body, blood, etc.] are only [present] as in a sign or ﬁgure or [only] by [their] efﬁcacy” or who “should deny [the] wonderful and unique chang- ing of the whole substance of bread… and of the whole substance of wine” into the whole Christ, “which change the Catholic Church very suitably calls transubstantiation.”42 Here we see the belief that Christ is corporeally present in the consecrated elements, a belief rejected by many of the Anglicans and by Calvin and Wesley, as it is by Pentecostals.

Insofar as the Real Presence is tied in Catholic thought to transub- stantiation, does this mean that Pentecostals cannot ﬁnd any theological points of convergence with Catholics on the Real Presence? I think that it depends on just how one interprets the essential meaning of transub- stantiation. In his book The Eucharist, Schillebeeckx describes a trend in post–World War II Catholic theology that recasts talk about transubstan- tiation into the grammar of “transfunctionalization,” “transﬁnalization,” or “transigniﬁcation,” wherein the substantial change that occurs in the consecrated elements applies not to their underlying physical reality, but to their function, end, and meaning. This is still a genuinely substantial change because the meaning that a thing holds for those who conceive of it is essential to the concept of that thing: “In their being, things have a meaning for someone (God, man), an original meaning which belongs to the reality itself, since, without this ‘having meaning for,’ something

Quoted in Schillebeeckx, The Eucharist, 37–38.

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is not what it is.”43 It would be easy to suppose that since the matter at hand has to do with “meaning,” it is a subjective matter—what some- thing means for me may not be what it means for someone else, and nei- ther of us is objectively correct or incorrect about its “real” meaning, because ultimately there is no such thing. It would be easy, but mistaken. Schillebeeckx explains that within a given sphere, a thing may be essen- tially changed, so that a new thing comes to be from it, when a new mean- ing is authoritatively conferred upon it. For example, when a government designates a colored cloth as a national ﬂag, that cloth “is really and objec- tively no longer the same.” If a person were to come to that country and say, “That is not the national ﬂag; it is just a cloth,” then that person would be really and objectively wrong. In the same way, in the Eucharist, when the Lord declares that the bread is his body, he authoritatively con- fers a new meaning upon the bread that truly remakes its basic reality.44 The meaning is that Christ is present to, in, and among the believers gath- ered to perform the eucharistic anamnesis of him, giving them the gift of himself. This is a real presence, but it is only real (or unreal) for persons at the level of interpersonal encounter, because that is the purpose for which it becomes real at all: the only way that it could be unreal for a person would be for him or her to be uninterested in the personal encounter with Christ that the sacrament occurs precisely to provide, and thus for the person to take himself or herself completely out of the sphere in which this reality actually takes place.

Schillebeeckx explains that

[o]n the basis of these general principles, it is therefore possible to say that eucharistic transubstantiation cannot be viewed in isolation from the sphere of giving meaning in sacramental signs. Because of the paschal context (“Take and eat, this is my body”), it must moreover be situated within the sphere of reality of Christ’s gift of himself that is meaningful and capable of being experienced, a remembrance, both doing and speaking, of Christ’s death and resurrection. The level of physics and the philosophy of nature can therefore be disregarded. Transubstantiation is inseparably a “human” establishment of meaning.45

Ibid., 112–13.

Ibid., 113. J. de Baciocchi, the ﬁrst Catholic theologian to describe this understanding of transubstantiation in detail, maintains that “Christ’s word, without altering these gifts as far as their empirical purport is concerned, entirely changes their social and religious destination”; “because the new function is really exercised, Christ making himself present and truly giving himself, the change of bread cannot be reduced to a subjective fact in the believer” (“Présence eucharistique et transubstantiation,” Irenikon 32 [1959]: 139–61, 150; quoted in Schillebeeckx, The Eucharist, 109).

Schillebeeckx, The Eucharist, 133–34.

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To my mind, these statements help to set aside some of the difﬁculties posed by the need to engage Catholic teaching about transubstantiation; I cannot see a reason why Protestants, including Pentecostals, could not accept this line of thought. Here transubstantiation is situated within the doctrine of the Real Presence and is given a very serious treatment with- out raising the contentious issue of exactly what it means for Christ to be present—indeed, there is not even a strong push for the idea that Christ’s physical body is rendered literally, spatially present in the elements. Of course, I have been quite selective in quoting Schillebeeckx, who goes on to say that while transubstantiation and transigniﬁcation are indissol- ubly linked, they are not identical,46 and he never claims that the former is reducible to the latter—an idea that Pope Paul VI denounced during the Second Vatican Council.47 But I have been selective on purpose, because I want to bring out a description of transubstantiation that might be acceptable to open-minded Pentecostals, using statements from a Roman Catholic that can be interpreted to this end, even if that interpretation does not fully represent the view of the one who made the statements. Not all Catholics approve of explicating transubstantiation in terms of tran- signiﬁcation (to put it lightly), but I doubt that many would deny the tie between them. Therefore, if Pentecostals could accept the latter idea, it would create a platform of common belief with Catholics on which to hold discussions of the notion of a change in the eucharistic elements. One must start an ecumenical conversation somewhere, and I believe that this is as good a place as any.

Conclusion

One of the things that makes Schillebeeckx a good candidate for a thinker with whom Pentecostals might initially engage Catholic sacra- mentology is his acknowledgement that sacraments “are ﬁrst and foremost

Ibid., 149–51.

Even if Schillebeeckx leaned in the direction of this claim, as some interpreters think he did, he could not have explicitly stated it without condemnation after Pope Paul VI had issued the 1965 encyclical Mysterium Fidei (“The Mystery of Faith”). In that doc- ument the pope denies outrightly that transﬁnalization and/or transigniﬁcation exhausts the normative faith-content of the doctrine of transubstantiation, and he insists that the formulas promulgated by the Council of Trent are indispensable to expressing what occurs in the Eucharist (Paul VI, Encyclical Letter Mysterium Fidei[1965], Internet resource available from , accessed 14 October 2005; see especially pars. 11 and 24).

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Pentecostal Theology, Volume 28, No. 2, Fall 2006

symbolic acts or activity as signs”48 and “interpersonal encounters between the believer and Christ.”49 I have proposed that this is the point from which a Pentecostal treatment of the sacraments must embark. To reca- pitulate, Pentecostal theology needs to recognize openly (1) that divine- human encounters take place in, with, and under signs, and (2) that these encounters may rightly be regarded as moments in which God dispenses grace—notions that are latent in Pentecostal spirituality in the ﬁrst place, as we can see from the way glossolalia is believed to function, for exam- ple. If this is done, and if the original biblical meaning of the eucharis- tic anamnesis of Christ is recovered and embraced, it should be easy to move a step closer to the understanding of the Eucharist as sacrament shared by some other Christians.50

Because Pentecostalism is historically rooted in Wesleyan theology, Wesley (and perhaps, through him, contemporary Methodism51) makes for a natural choice as an initial dialogue partner. I also think that the emphasis he places on the role of the Holy Spirit at the Eucharist—which can be seen, for example, in many of the Hymns on the Lord’s Supper that focus on the epiclesis or otherwise employ strong pneumatological themes—would meet with special approval among Pentecostals. Of course, once we look into Wesley’s views on the Eucharist, we immediately see his conformity both with an important aspect of the Reformed view, and especially with a certain school of thought that is perhaps distinctively Anglican. That allows Pentecostals to engage Anglicans at this point in

Schillebeeckx, The Eucharist, 97.

Ibid., 101. He explores this idea at length in his book Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963).

I would be remiss if I did not at least mention the World Council of Churches’ renowned Lima text of 1982, “Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry” (BEM), Faith and Order Paper No. 111 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982), the most far-reaching multi- lateral statement of convergence yet produced by the modern ecumenical movement. As I interpret it, BEM’s account of the meaning of the Eucharist does not in any way conﬂict with the account I have proposed here, though BEM touches upon much that I have not addressed. I might have cited clear agreements with the text at several points in this paper but elected not to do so because, while BEM emerged as the fruit of decades of intercon- fessional dialogues, it does not (nor was it intended to) provide a detailed explanation of how those who belong to various ecclesial bodies or theological traditions could navigate their respective paths to reach an agreement with the statement that the document embod- ies. My purpose, on the other hand, has been precisely to show how Pentecostals can remain true to themselves while afﬁrming much with others; I should think that this would easily be the case with regard to the position on the Eucharist set forth in the Lima text.

This is not to say that contemporary Methodism subscribes to a unitary understanding of the Eucharist that is strictly consonant with Wesley’s views. However, to the extent that trends in Methodist thought continue to take their cue from him, it is useful to turn to Wesley for discussion points.

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Re-envisioning the Pentecostal Understanding of the Eucharist: An Ecumenical Proposal

a theology of worship, which one might not ordinarily expect would be possible for two groups of Christians with such different liturgical prac- tices. All of this, in turn, creates a window of opportunity—however small at ﬁrst—for conversation with at least some Roman Catholics in their approaches to the Eucharist. Certainly, there will be many points of dis- agreement along the way, and probably increasingly so as one progresses in dialogue back toward the trunk of the historical family tree of Christian denominations and movements. However, those of us who take up this task may also discover many more points of agreement than we might have thought we would, and thus may discover both something more of the mystery of unity that God has given to the Church, as well as ways to work and pray for the more complete fulﬁllment of Christ’s prayer to the Father that we “all may be one” (John 17:21).

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Re Envisioning The Pentecostal Understanding Of The Eucharist An Ecumenical Proposal

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