rain and the rhinoceros

There is no doubt that the Church cannot abandon or betray or distort the Gospel, and present to society an ethos different from the one emerging from Christ’s life. If this is inapplicable to social life; that simply means that the Church can never coincide with society; she lives in the world but she is not of the world (Jn 15.16). The ethos she preaches cannot take the form of a rationality or practically sustainable ethic. The optimism of a ’social gospel’ which might transform history into the kingdom of God simply cannot be sustained theologically. Society will never become the Church, and history will have to wait for the eschaton to redeem it from its antinomies.   

 Meanwhile the Church, as the sign and image of the eschatological community, continues to portray in history the genuine ethos of otherness, not only in her preaching and teaching, but also and above all in her sacramental life and in her saints. As a sacramental and eucharistic community, the Church is the place where the ‘old man’ of servitude to nature and selfhood dies in Baptism, and where the fear of the Other is replaced in the Eucharist and in the ascetic ethos by the acceptance of the Other qua Other: this is the meaning of catholicity. And in the persons of her saints (martyrs, ascetics, and innumerable anonymous Christian faithful) who in one way or another, though always imperfectly, sacrifice themselves for the sake of the Other, she manifests in history the holiness of the only truly holy one, Jesus Christ. 

John Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 87-88. 

The incarnate Christ is so identical to the ultimate will of God’s love, that the meaning of created being and the purpose of history are simply the incarnate Christ. All things were made with Christ in mind, or rather at heart, and for this reason irrespective of the fall of man, the incarnation would have occured. Christ, the incarnate Christ, is the truth, for He represents the ultimate, unceasing will of the ecstatic love of God, who intends to lead created being into communion with His own life, to know Him and itself within this communion-event.

John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press), 98.

Thus the Church itself is a leitourgia, a ministry, a calling to act in this world after the fashion of Christ, to bear testimony to Him and His kingdom. The eucharistic liturgy, therefore, must not be approached and understood in “liturgical” or “cultic” terms alone. Just as Christianity can-and must-be considered the end of religion, so the Christian liturgy in general, and the Eucharist in particular, are indeed the end of cult, of the “sacred” religious act isolated from, and opposed to, the “profane” life of the community. The first condition for the understanding of liturgy is to forget about any specific “liturgical piety.”

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World(Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 25-26.

The Words of Institution always remain consecratory for every Eucharist celebration regardless of whether they are recited or not. Therefore, even though it does not contain the Words of Institution, the Anaphora of Addai and Mari traditionally used in the Assyrian Church of the East is rightly considered a valid Eucharist celebration by the Roman Catholic Church. In his article “Mass without Consecration?” Robert F. Taft defends the Catholic Church’s recent declaration that this prayer, though absent of the Words of Institution, is still valid. He argues that the Latin West in the Late Middle Ages narrowly understood the Words of Institution as a sort of formula that, at the precise moment when recited by a priest, effected the consecration of the gifts of the Eucharist. The problem with this view is that it isolates the Words of Institution from the rest of the Eucharistic prayer.

Taft defends the Catholic Church’s validation of Addai and Mari on the basis that it is more faithful to the practices of the undivided early Church. Furthermore, there is much evidence to suggest that Addai and Mari is one of most ancient Anaphoras. In fact, some scholars have argued it is likely that Addai and Mari was not the only Anaphora without the Words of Institution in the early Church. All of this, however, does not deny or discount the Catholic insistence that the Words of Institution are both “constitutive” and “indispensable,” for as Taft rightly states, “they are words eternally efficacious in the mouth of Jesus.” Addai and Mari is valid precisely because, in the view of John Chrysostom, consecratory power is to be found not in its priestly recitation but in the historical moment of Jesus’ institution of the prayer.

The transcendence of the ontological necessity and exclusiveness entailed by the biological hypostatis constitutes an experience which is offered by the eucharist. When it is understood in its correct and primitive sense-and not how it has come to be regarded even in Orthodoxy under the influence of Western scholasticism-the eucharist is first of all an assembly (synaxis), a community, a network of relations, in which man “subsists” in a manner different from the biological as a member of a body which transcends every exclusiveness of a biological or social kind. The eucharist is the only historical context of human existence where the terms “father,” “brother,” etc., lose their biological exclusiveness and reveal, as we have seen, relationships of free and universal love.

John D. Zizioulas, Being As Communion (New York: St Vladimir’s Press, 1985), 60.