Divinity United

An extended quote from Cullmann's, Early Christian Worship , 1953 (originally Urchristentum und Gottesdienst , 1950): "Two main features of the purpose of all early Christian gatherings for worship must still be stressed. First, the Lord's Supper is the natural climax towards which the service thus understood moves and without which it is not thinkable, since here Christ unites himself with his community as crucified and risen and makes it in this way one with himself, actually builds it up as his body (1 Cor. 10.l7). Corresponding to this all the other parts of the service have the risen Lord of the Church as their object. For this reason the day of the Lord's resurrection is the Christian festive day... "The second main Christian feature of the early service is shown to us in the fact that the risen and present Lord of the Church who stands in the centre of the Christian gathering, points at one and the same time backwards to the crucified and risen histo...

I have been reading through Bruce Chilton, A Feast of Meanings: Eucharistic Theologies from Jesus through Johannine Circles (Brill, 1994). The following citation is a significant methodological statement about what he thinks about the eucharistic texts in the New Testament. Chilton states (pp. 6-7): "Each of them [that is, the previous views on the eucharistic texts such as those held by Jeremias and others] presupposes that eucharistic texts are best understood as referring simply to the past: Jesus is held to have said and done such and so, and the only issue of importance is whether that is fact or artifice. Each alternative posits a single hero behind the texts, either a willing martyr or a literary genius, who forges meaning in an instant of creativity. The hero acts, and the texts lie inert. But along with their diversity, among the most striking features of the eucharistic texts--especially in the Synoptics, Paul, and the Didache --is their insistence that they relate t...