An Unbloody Sacrifice? Eucharistic Ecclesiology and the Ecumenism of Blood

Call to mind a scene from the third-century Passion of Sts Perpetua and Felicity. The text depicts the scene's space–time as a remembered future: the titular martyrs are at once alive in the narrative and already dead (or is it alive?) in a vision. In the scene, Martyrs Saturus and Perpetua emerge from heaven's gate. Beyond it, two clergymen—the bishop Optatus and the priest Aspasius—yield compunctuously at their feet. Componite inter nos, they plead: “make peace between us.” ¹ Scandalized, the martyrs return: “Are you not our father and our priest? How can you throw yourselves at us?” The martyrs oblige and conduct the clergymen to a garden—perhaps even the Garden. But not before an eavesdropping angel rebukes the bishop for petitioning the martyrs to perform the task God has entrusted to him.

As with most apocalyptic texts, this passage conceals what it most wants to reveal. Among its secrets is a question about the relation between the nature of the church, the importance of the martyrs, and the unity of Christians. Here, I seek more to ask that question than to answer it. And I want to do so by wondering aloud if two deficiencies of the ecumenical use of “eucharistic ecclesiologies”—its failure to win communio in sacris among the churches (part 1) and its relative inattention to the martyrs, ancient and new (part 2)—might be thought together (part 3) precisely to strengthen and defend eucharistic ecclesiology for ecumenical purposes.

1

When he addressed the Faith and Order delegation in 1995, Met. John Zizioulas praised the promise of “eucharistic ecclesiology.” No wound among the churches, he announced, would not benefit from its cure. Thus, he concluded, “the potential of such a concept for the ecumenical movement can be almost inexhaustible.” ²

No doubt the conceit of the Church as eucharist or communion has displaced most others. ³ Doubtless, too, the concept—or family of concepts ⁴ —features everywhere across and among the layered strata of multilateral ecumenical dialogue. There hardly exists an ecumenical joint statement or working document or a communique that does not glow radioactive blue the moment one word-searches PDFs for the term “communion” or “eucharistic.” Even some Protestants now conceive their churches as somehow eucharistic. ⁵ “Almost inexhaustible” potential indeed.

But “inexhaustible potential” for what? Almost 30 years later, the potency of eucharistic ecclesiology seems entirely theoretical. True, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists and Coptic Christians may individually and severally affirm that “the eucharist makes the Church.” But with few exceptions, the Church rethinking itself as eucharist has not issued in the churches actually sharing in eucharist. Ours, then, is a paradoxical season: we all at once inhabit an ecumenical summer of theory and a winter of practice.

In The Unbaptized God, Robert Jenson argues that the ecumenical problem lies not with what divides the churches but rather with what unites them. ⁶ Jenson meant that Catholics and Protestants share a deficient, or “unbaptized,” theology of time. To adapt Jenson, the shared assumption in much communion or eucharistic ecclesiology is that “eucharist” in the “eucharist makes the church” axiom names a bi-valent sacramental relation between a divine sacrifice (whether Golgotha's past or the heavenly altar's future) and a liturgical rite. For most in the West, this means that the eucharist draws the past forward, such that Golgotha's sacrifice becomes self-same with the Mass or Lord's Supper. For some in the East, this means that the eucharist instead makes present a future, such that the eschatological sacrifice (Heb. 9) arrives backward onto our altars. In either case, the superstructure is bi-valent: the eucharistic liturgy is indexed to one other event, whether past or future. ⁷

If that's so, then one reason why so many churches have adopted eucharistic ecclesiology is that it confirms what they already take themselves to be. ⁸ Rather than destabilizing a priori assumptions that support ecclesial divisions, eucharistic ecclesiology may instead underwrite them. On this reading, the point is that the divine sacrifice appears on our altar, during our liturgy, according to our rubrics, under the jurisdiction of our bishop. In a concept as attractive and burnished as eucharistic ecclesiology, it is easy to mistake what is inside the chalice for one's reflection glittering on its surface. ⁹

2

Not all eucharistic ecclesiologies presume this bi-valent relation between divine sacrifice and liturgical rite. Readers of Zizioulas will remember how he recovers the eschatological dimension of the eucharist. ¹⁰ On his telling, the eucharist names an anamnesis of the future, a disclosure of the Church's essence, a glorious rather than funereal event. Few readers, however, notice how Zizioulas extends these features to the Church's martyrs. For Zizioulas, the early Church was at her most biblical “when she attached a eucharistic implication to martyrdom.” ¹¹ Consider the Protomartyr Stephen. What the dying St Stephen glimpses in his vision is not just “Christ,” Zizioulas argues. He sees instead the apocalyptic “Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56), which is to say he sees himself incorporated eucharistically into the eschatological body of Christ.

So too, Zizioulas thinks, with all of the Church's martyrs. And though he mentions only two martyrs, Zizioulas's point is easily dilated to include more. Only remember on this point, and, for example, how St Ignatius of Antioch burns “to be a libation poured out [on] the altar.” Or how he pleads to become “wheat (σῖτός εἰμι θεοῦ), ground fine by the lions’ teeth to be made purest bread (καθαρὸς ἄρτος) for Christ.” ¹² Or how St Polycarp's prays “to share among the number of the martyrs in the cup of our Christ (ἑν τῷ ποτηρίῳ τοῦ Χριστοῦ σου)… as a rich and acceptable sacrifice.” ¹³ Or how his flaming body appears to witnesses as “a loaf baking in the oven” with which they “desire to commune.” ¹⁴ Or how the story of St Pionius obeys a liturgical structure and culminates in an apparent quotation from an ancient anaphora, transforming his body into Christ's own. ¹⁵ Or how from his corpse issues blood and water and dove, the “elements” of the eucharist. Or—well, you get the point.

Otherwise unaware of Zizioulas's claim, scholars across disciplinary lines have converged on challenging the eucharist as a bi-valent relation between divine sacrifice and liturgical rite. Historians argue that in an age in which the eucharistic rite was still private, it was martyrdom that was the Church's most public liturgy. ¹⁶ Liturgists explain the sudden appearance of death-themes in liturgical rites around the fourth century as the sequelae of martyrdom's cessation. ¹⁷ Even biblical scholars now propose that pericopes long assumed to describe eucharistic rites—principally John 6—are more accurately interpreted as references to martyrdom. ¹⁸ Their point is the same: our assumption that “eucharist” names a bi-valent relation between heaven's altar and the parish's proves anachronistic exactly to the extent that the latter sacrament does not flow from and toward martyrdom.

That the eucharist as liturgical rite points either backward to the holy martyrs or forward to one's own martyrdom is a conviction threaded across patristic texts. St Polycarp's disciples, for instance, celebrate the eucharist at his tomb both to commemorate him and to train others to follow. ¹⁹ Cyprian of Carthage reproves Caecilius for using water rather than water and wine. And he does precisely because the former makes visualizing their own spilled blood harder on martyrs-in-training. ²⁰ Which eucharistic ecclesiology can claim, with Cyprian, that the persecuted already “offer a sacrifice equally as precious and glorious and most profitable” ²¹ as the one on the parish altar?

That few come to mind suggests eucharistic ecclesiologies are not nearly as eucharistic—or indeed patristic—as we often imagine. A more patristic position would affirm with Karl Rahner that “if we cannot call martyrdom a sacrament in the usual sense, it is not because it is something less than a sacrament but because it is something more.” ²² It is rather a sort of supra-sakrament, the condition for the possibility of any sacraments at all.

3

A more patristic eucharistic ecclesiology, then, would identify the eucharist as at once the divine and liturgical, and martyrological sacrifice. But isn’t this just more theory? How can it redress the lack of practical unity? To close, allow me to brave a speculative answer in the form of a question.

In 2014, Pope Francis surprised audiences by denying belief “in a definitive ecumenism.” More, Francis repudiates ecumenism that begins by seeking theological consensus. ²³ Francis's point here is not to attack theory as such and so criticize his predecessors’ highly theoretical approach to ecumenism—a performative contradiction, that. No, he is instead offering a specific instance of his more general allergy to “false opposition… between theology [theory] and pastoral ministry [practice].” ²⁴

Still, Francis's worry over theory-first ecumenism is itself an ecumenical contribution. Asked in 2013 whether ecumenism is for him a priority, Francis's answer is paradigmatic:

Yes, for me ecumenism is a priority. Today there is an ecumenism of blood. In some countries they kill Christians for wearing a cross or having a Bible and before they kill them they do not ask them whether they are Anglican, Lutheran, Catholic, or Orthodox. Their blood is mixed… This is what the ecumenism of blood is. It still exists today; you just need to read the newspapers. Those who kill Christians don’t ask for your identity card to see which Church you were baptized in. We need to take these facts into consideration. ²⁵

Francis's attention to the shared suffering of the churches is remarkably consistent. The narratives he includes sometimes vary: at times he tells of the martyrdom of Catholics and Anglicans in Uganda, of the Copts in Libya, of Catholics with a Lutheran pastor by the Nazis—even recently of “martyred Ukraine.” ²⁶ But Francis's comments almost always feature the same points: (1) that the persecutors understand Christian unity better than we Christians do; (2) that the blood of the martyrs “is mixed”; and (3) that differences of doctrine or jurisdiction need not prevent receiving the dead as “our martyrs.”

Whatever its practical import, Francis's ecumenism of blood remains largely untheorized. ²⁷ His exhortations not to “be scandalized” by his teaching have not staved off broadsides. ²⁸ True enough, there linger interesting and difficult questions about venerating martyrs wide of our respective church bounds. How best to think about canonical recognition and liturgical inclusion of these martyrs? How exactly are the martyrs “ours”? And what does it mean to claim that the blood of the martyrs “is mixed”? ²⁹

A theological beginning might be made by attending carefully to recent theorizing about blood. Eugene Rogers has shown that in religious talk, “blood” is socially constructed, for instance. Terry Eagleton has reclaimed sacrifice, even blood sacrifice, for a radical politics of human flourishing. And Andrew Rillera has reminded us that scriptural blood sacrifice sometimes has liberation, and not atonement, as its goal. ³⁰ All of which provides rich theoretical resources for thinking of the blood of the martyrs as somehow making present the eschatological—and unified—Church. But thinking about what Francis is already doing remains a task for the future.

4

Let me end how I began: by thinking again about that passage from the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity. Most important for our purposes are the assumptions of its characters. For martyrs Saturus and Perpetua, the assumption is that the business of Church unity belongs properly to its hierarchy—here represented by Optatus the bishop and Aspasius the priest. For the latter, however, the assumption runs the other direction. As they who have already eucharistically become Christ's body, the martyrs alone bear the credentials requisite for instructing the clergy on uniting the churches.

To dismiss this text's questions as somehow Montanist is to avoid its critical gaze. It is also to ignore the angel's rebuke that the unity of the Church ought to entail the forgiveness of one another before calling upon the martyrs. That we Christians have fought shy of the forgiveness necessary for restoring eucharistic communion is clear. That we have so failed while claiming that our churches just are the eucharistic arrival of the divine sacrifice on our altars is—in light of the martyrs’ presence within the chalice as the body of Christ—very nearly blasphemous. How the Church's collected martyrs, two-thirds of whom died in the last century, can instruct us on uniting the churches is a question eucharistic ecclesiologies need seriously to consider. Not to consider it, I worry, will confirm its critics' worst suspicion of eucharistic ecclesiology as a romantic conceit that veils business as usual. ³¹