Saturday, July 12, 2008

Another from Cavanaugh on the Eucharist


“Each Eucharist performed in the local community makes present not part of Christ but the whole Christ, and the eschatological unity of all in Christ. For this same reasons, however, there can be no mutual exclusion between local Eucharistic communities. From the early centuries this principle was represented by the necessity for two or three bishops from other communities to participate in the ordination of any bishop. The Eucharist made it necessary to see the whole Christ in each local community, which at the same time unite the communities, not through a single external centre or structure superimposed on the local, but through the presence of the whole Christ in each. The one Christ, then, is the centre of each Eucharistic community, yet the centre appears in many different places. Here we might apply Alan of Lille’s comment about absolute Being to the Body of Christ: it is an ‘intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.’”

2 comments:

nick mucci said...

what up scott...appreciated both of the last two posts, Torture and Eucharist, right? I'm readin it right now...keep this stuff comin, good stuff.

Scott Savage said...

Nick, hey what's up man. I had no idea you were in Portland. Hey, just for the sake of connections, a friend of mine, Rodney Bertholet, is pastoring Portland Southeast Church of the Nazarene. I worked with him in Los Angeles.

The quote is actually form Cavanaugh's Theopolitical Imagination. Great book! But, his theology of the Eucharist is probably as similar as in Torture and Eucharist. Later.