Does it matter whether the mass is a sacrifice?
On the Lord's Supper, Sacrifice, and the Gospel of Grace
Is the mass (or Lord’s Supper, or Eucharist, or Holy Communion) a sacrifice? From the perspective of many contemporary theologians and liturgists, the amount of ink that was spilled over this question in the sixteenth century was born more of misunderstanding and polemical tempers than genuine theological difference. At best, on this construal, Protestant rejections of any sacrificial account of the mass were an overreaction to Roman Catholic overstatement. Many scholars inspired by the Liturgical Movement argued that the Protestant allergy to talk of sacrifice led to strange and indeed insufficient liturgies, and so liturgical reforms of the late twentieth century tended to emphasize the offertory as a core part of the eucharistic action and included fuller eucharistic prayers, sometimes with language of offering (of oneself, of praise and thanksgiving, of bread and wine). Ecumenical efforts sought to get behind sixteenth century debates and find consensus in a Biblical-patristic model of anamnesis (remembering), which was widely seen as a way to meet Protestant worries that the Roman view amounted to a re-sacrificing of Christ while nonetheless preserving the real contemporary efficacy of Christ’s sacrifice through the mass. Thus, for example, the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission statement on the Eucharist in 1971 or the 1982 Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry statement of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches.
One could read this as a story of responsible scholarship and generous ecumenical understanding triumphing over polemic and confessional bigotry, in which differences have happily been overcome both in theory and in liturgical practice. And to be sure, I think it is a good thing that Protestant polemicists no longer accuse (and are no longer given grounds to accuse) all Roman Catholic theologians of teaching that Christ is re-sacrificed on every altar. I think it is a genuine accomplishment that across Christian divides we are able to recognize a great deal of shared ground in our understanding of the Lord’s Supper.
And yet: I am not so certain that we have grappled sufficiently with the Reformation critique of eucharistic sacrifice, and I worry that in our desire to find an ecumenical shape for our eucharistic worship we have lost some brilliant liturgical articulations of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And so I want to sketch out the logic of one significant Reformation critique of sacrifice, that of Martin Luther in his 1520 On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. And then I want to look at one liturgical enactment of that critique, found in the 1552 Book of Common Prayer (and following). I want to suggest that the stern either/or (what Jonathan Linebaugh calls “antithetical grammar”) of Reformation teachings on eucharistic sacrifice is not the product of misunderstanding or polemical excess. Rather, it follows from the either/or at the heart of Protestant Christianity: the commitment that we are not saved by some combination of human effort and divine gift, some happy concatenation of faith and works, but by divine agency alone, apprehended by faith alone. It is precisely because salvation is God’s action (and not ours) that the Lord’s Supper – even if it takes place sandwiched between sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving – is not our sacrifice but God’s gift.
What Luther argued in this 1520 treatise was that the fundamental problem with the doctrine of the mass as sacrifice is that it confuses the sacrament’s directionality. That is, the Lord’s Supper is not something we do for God but something that God does for us. This, he thinks, is made clear in the words of institution themselves. What we have in them, Luther says, is a promise: my body is given for you; my blood is shed for you for the forgiveness of sins. Indeed, Christ calls it a “new testament”; it is thus a particular sort of promise, a testament or will, which comes into effect at the death of Christ. What happens at the Lord’s Supper is the giving of Christ’s promise of his bequest to his heirs, namely, forgiveness of sins, confirmed with the signs of Christ’s own body and blood.
Luther sums it up this way:
According to its substance, therefore, the mass is nothing but the aforesaid words of Christ: “Take and eat, etc.” as if he were saying: “Behold, O sinful and condemned man, out of the pure and unmerited love with which I love you, and by the will of the Father of mercies, apart from any merit or desire of yours, I promise you in these words the forgiveness of all your sins and life everlasting. And that you may be absolutely certain of this irrevocable promise of mine, I shall give my body and pour out my blood, confirming this promise by my very death, and leaving you my body and blood as a sign and memorial of this same promise. As often as you partake of them, remember me, proclaim and praise my love and bounty toward you, and give thanks.”
And if the mass is thus a promise of the forgiveness of sins by Christ’s death, it is not something we do but something we receive. And the way that we receive it is by faith:
If the mass is a promise, as has been said, then access to it is to be gained, not with any works, or powers, or merits of one's own, but by faith alone. For where there is the Word of the promising God, there must necessarily be the faith of the accepting man. It is plan therefore, that the beginning of our salvation is a faith which clings to the Word of the promising God, who, without any effort on our part, in free and unmerited mercy takes the initiative and offers us the word of his promise.
Given this understanding, then, it is nonsense to call the mass a good work or a sacrifice for Luther. It would be as odd as calling it a good work for someone to claim a promised inheritance. Indeed, what happens when the mass is understood as a sacrifice, Luther thinks, is the nonsensical situation of us receiving a will that names us an heir and then attempting to give that will back to its author as a sacrifice to him.
To be sure, we might say that we offer prayers and even bread and wine to God as part of our worship service. “The prayers which we pour out before God when we are gathered together to partake of the mass are good works or benefits,” Luther writes, and indeed “the bread and wine are offered beforehand for blessing in order that they may be sanctified by the word and by prayer.” In this sense Christian eucharistic worship involves offerings, works, even sacrifice. But the mass itself, Luther is insistent, is not something we offer to God but something God gives freely to us, asking only for faith (which he himself creates) in his promise. Thus when Luther says that the bread and wine are offered to God before the consecration, he goes to add “but after they have been blessed and consecrated they are no longer offered, but received as a gift from God.”
The ways that we respond to God’s gift in prayers and good works, then, are logically (if not always temporally) subsequent to what God does for us. That is, the way that God deals with us in the mass is the exact same way that God deals with us outside of it: the mass just is the Gospel. As Luther says in his earlier A Treatise on the New Testament, that is, the Holy Mass, “If man is to deal with God and receive anything from him, it must happen in this matter, not that man begins and lays the first stone, but that God alone - without any entreaty or desire of man - must first come and give him a promise. This word of God is the beginning, the foundation, the rock, upon which afterward all works, words, and thoughts of man must build.”
Thus, to move back to the Babylonian Captivity, Luther writes that “these two things - mass and prayer, sacrament and work, testament and sacrifice - must not be confused; for the one comes from God to us through the ministration of the priest and demands our faith, the other proceeds from our faith to God through the priest and demands his hearing. The former descends, the latter ascends.”
What would it look like to liturgically enact this view of the Lord’s Supper? Luther himself, of course, provides examples of this in his Latin and German masses. Indeed, he bequeathed a unique feature to the Lutheran liturgical tradition: to ensure that what God gives us and what we offer to God are kept entirely separate in the minds of worshippers, he instead of embedding the Words of Institution within a eucharistic prayer addressed to the Father, rather had ministers proclaim them to the congregation. That is, rather than part of a prayer directed by the minister to God, the Words of Institution were directed to the people as an announcement by the minister on God’s behalf.
But I want to briefly explore another liturgical tradition that I know better: the Anglican one. In some ways, the liturgy is less radical than Luther’s, for the Words of Institution remain within what will eventually (in 1662) be called the Prayer of Consecration. But all the same, Cranmer’s service clearly sets forth the same view of the Supper – and of the Christian life – as God’s free gift to us that then elicits our joyful self-offering in response.
This is perhaps most evident if you look at the changes that Cranmer made from the 1549 BCP to the 1552. Starting already in the seventeenth century, there have been those who saw the 1549 as the high point of Cranmer’s liturgical achievement and the 1552 as an unfortunate declension from it (perhaps spurred by the untoward influence of those pesky Continental divines like Bucer and Vermigli!). But I am convinced that the 1549 was always intended as a transitional liturgy, that the 1552 (or something like it) was always Cranmer’s aim. And on the subject of the sacrificial or oblationary component of the Lord’s Supper, we indeed see Cranmer clarify what was left somewhat ambiguous in the 1549 communion service.
In the 1549 service, the prayer of consecration continues after the Words of Institution; the minister asks the Father “mercifully to accepte this our Sacrifice of praise and thankesgeving,” and then moves into a self-oblation: “And here wee offre and present unto thee (O Lorde) oure selfe, oure soules, and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto thee…” He further asks God to “accepte thys our bounden duetie and service, and commaunde these our prayers and supplicacions, by the Ministery of thy holy Angels, to be brought up into thy holy Tabernacle before the syght of thy dyvine majestie.” After this comes the Lord’s Prayer, confession, absolution, comfortable words, the prayer of humble access, and then the communion. Now, we are already somewhat distant from the late medieval account of the mass as sacrifice (at least as described in Protestant polemic!). The sacrifice is described as one of praise and thanksgiving; the offering is not of Christ but our selves. Nonetheless, this sacrifice and offering is not clearly distinguished from God’s gift of Christ to us in the way that Luther demanded. There is potentially a mixing together of God’s action and ours, that which we receive by faith and that which we perform. This, for Cranmer is a problem for the liturgy just as it is a problem (indeed, the key problem) of Roman Catholic theology. And so, in his 1552 revision, he makes some key changes.
Specifically, now the prayer of consecration stops right after the Words of Institution, and the communication of the people immediately follows. He doesn’t go quite as far as Luther does in the Deutsche Messe, where Luther makes the Words of Institution also words of distribution; Cranmer includes additional words of distribution to be said to the people as they receive the bread and the wine. But all the same, the people hear Christ’s testament to them and immediately thereafter eat and drink the signs of Christ’s promise. And then, after the Lord’s Prayer, comes a revised version of the text that followed the Words of Institution in the 1549 prayer book. It is here, after the communion, that the petition that God accept “this our Sacrifice of prayse and thanksgeving” appears, followed by the self-oblation in which we “offre and presente unto thee, O lord, our selfes, our soules, and bodies” and the plea that God would “accept this our bounden duetie and service.” Most significant here, it seems to me, is the placement of the self-oblation. It is no longer associated with the prayer of consecration but is now a response to hearing Christ’s testament of the forgiveness of our sins and receiving the bread and wine of communion. While Cranmer does continue to give liturgical emphasis to the Lord’s Supper as performed in obedience to Christ’s command (“our bounden duetie and service”) in a way that Luther does not but the Swiss, for example, do, or as '“our Sacrifice of prayse and thanksgeving,” the liturgical flow is decidedly different than the earlier 1549 service. There, Christ’s offering to us and our offering to God were combined. Here, the liturgy itself enacts the way that Christ’s offering to us leads to our self-offering to God: we receive communion and respond to the grace freely given with a life of grateful obedience.
And this is why I am convinced that the Reformation critique of the mass as sacrifice and the liturgies such critique generated remain important today. Protestant criticisms were not only about the idea that an interpretation of the mass as the church’s offering of Christ’s sacrifice to the Father involved re-sacrificing Christ or denied the full efficacy of Christ’s “one oblacion of hymselfe once offered” (although such criticisms were certainly made). Rather, from the Protestant perspective, the fundamental problem with the mass as sacrifice was the same as the problem with late medieval soteriology: both failed to recognize the absolute priority of divine agency, confusing what needs to be clearly distinguished. Just as we are not saved by both our works and God’s grace, so too is the mass not both our offering to God and God’s gift to us. Instead, the mass simply is the liturgical enactment of the Christian life: God freely gives us his promise of forgiveness and new life along with the signs that help us trust his promise; we gratefully receive them by faith and then offer ourselves to God in thanksgiving in response. And so perhaps we cannot so quickly turn the page on these sixteenth century debates, even if it is a very good thing that we have turned the temperature down on them. And the same is true for the Reformation liturgies. In a world in which the proclamation of God’s free gift of grace remains scandalous, the clarity that the Reformation liturgies seek in setting forth this truth seems to me not a sign of liturgical insufficiency but a great strength.
Ben, a superb exposition of the theological clarity the reformers brought to the doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice, especially in distinguishing the two aspects of this sacrifice - the memorial of the sacrifice for sin offered for us by Christ, as the sole cause of the grace we receive - and the sacrifice of praise continually offered by his Church, wherein is manifested the effect of grace received. I think Cranmer's form of delivery in 1552 is significant in this regard. Obviously it echoes the instruction Jesus gave his disciples to "take, eat/drink in remembrance" - but continues with an exhortation "to feed on him in thy heart by faith" and to do so "with thanksgiving" ("and be thankful") - indicates that our self-offering in praise and thanksgiving springs from and is driven by the grace we receive from Christ. Though distinct, these are not separate actions.
I think that viewing the Eucharist through only a Roman/Protestant lense is misleading. The ancient church was not just catholic, it was Eastern orthodox, Oriental orthodox, and even Assyrian in the Church of the East. The fact is, all of these pre-Protestant churches view the Eucharist as a sacrifice. But they do so in different ways. Definitely not all agree with the Roman view and believe Christ's body and blood are being sacrificed each week, but instead it's the oblation, which we in Anglicanism also celebrate. The sacrifice is not Jesus, but the bread and wine that we bring to the table, which the priest then consecrates. This is why it was so very important for the book of common prayer to reflect that the people bring the oblation. I'm not exactly sure where your centered, but this is very clear in the 1979 Episcopal Church Book of Common Prayer.
This is important for a whole bunch of different reasons. For one, the ancient world only considered acts that incorporated sacrifice as worship. So, obviously this creates a problem for Protestants, because if the Eucharist isn't sacrifice, then their worship isn't actually worship. However, this also flies in the face of Protestant claims that veneration of the Saints is worship, since no one is sacrificing to the saints.
We do a grand disservice to our theology, if all we do is look at Peotestantism and Rome, when the ancient early church was much more diverse than this, and had a multitude of understandings. If we want to get back to the beginnings, which is one of the things that I think Anglicanism is interested in doing, we need to look to the original understandings of what worship actually is. And we need to not be worried about offending Protestants with it. If Protestants are offended that their "worship" is not actually worship because there is no sacrifice involved, then maybe they need to adjust.