Friday, April 29, 2022

Esther Chung-Kim on Early Christian Eucharistic Theologies

  

Around the third century, Cyprian spoke of “representation” to describe the metaphorical meaning for the Christian eucharistic celebration as the sacrifice of Jesus, not of animals or food. Other ancient Christian writers, such as Origen, pointed out that the reception of the Lord’s body and blood was a purely spiritual affair. At the same time, early Christians were also worried about the growing gnostic groups that valued spiritual things and denounced all material substances. Against the Gnostics who denied the value of the Lord’s Supper. Irenaeus, for example, used strong “realistic” language. Subsequent controversies within the early church prompted other emphases of the Lord’s Supper to arise. Conflicts with the Manichees, Donatists, and Pelagians shaped the teachings of Augustine, who addressed some aspects of the Eucharist in his conflict with the Donatists. For Augustine, the sacraments did not rely on the purity of the priest but were defined as belonging to and given by Christ. In the “Nestorian” controversy in the fifth century, Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria, wished to demonstrate the unity of the divine and human natures of Christ against Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople. In his commentary on the Gospel of John, Cyril insisted that the body of Christ was so inseparably linked to the second person of the Trinity that, through contact with Christ’s body in the Eucharist, believers shared in divine immortality. For Cyril, the sharing of immortality could only happen if there was an insoluble union between the human and divine natures in Jesus Christ. Responding to controversies in their time, the church fathers often discussed the Eucharist to address particular issues concerning Christology (e.g., the humanity and divinity of Christ) and ecclesiology (e.g., the efficacy of the sacraments). (Esther Chung-Kim, Inventing Authority: The use of the Church Fathers in Reformation Debates over the Eucharist [Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2011], 159-60 n. 64)