Introduction
The paradox of Anglicanism is that one of its greatest strengths (the ability to uphold a robust ecclesial unity despite theological difference) is predicated upon one of its greatest weaknesses (the continual in-house arguments over those theological differences). A church that is flexible enough to permit a wide range of catholic and evangelical expressions seemingly guarantees that this diversity will be an ongoing source of tension. Yet, such tensions are often the source of great theological synthesis, a synthesis famously described as ‘a blending of the old traditions with a desire to interpret the faith in terms of contemporary life, a piety in which a love for the Church’s forms mingles with a sturdy sense of personal responsibility, an ability to avoid sectionalism and to touch the life of the English people widely’.Footnote 2
The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how Louis-Marie Chauvet’s fundamental theology both coheres with Anglican sacramentology and has the potential to bridge evangelical and catholic sacramental expressions within Anglicanism today. After giving a brief background to the sacramental controversies inherited by both Chauvet and the early Anglican theologians, the first section of this essay contains a dialogue between unitive Anglican sacramental concepts and key components of Louis-Marie Chauvet’s fundamental theology as outlined in his monograph Symbol and Sacrament. The purpose of this dialogue is to show that, despite vastly different historical eras, and utilizing different philosophical concepts, both are attempting to correct similarly perceived deficiencies in sacramental thought and practice. First, the Anglican notion of the Eucharist as real participation, developed principally by Richard Hooker, shows great coherence with Chauvet’s core concept of the symbolic exchange as medium through which Christ is mediated. Second, Anglicanism’s emphasis on communal participation in the context of the Eucharist, seen most vividly in the language of Holy Communion (instead of Holy Eucharist) coheres with Chauvet’s insistence on the liturgical assembly as the primary locus of God’s mediation to humanity.
After demonstrating that, through these similarities, Chauvet’s theology should be seen as a fruitful conversation partner with Anglican sacramentology, the second section of the essay will focus on two concepts within Symbol and Sacrament that hold the potential to enrich sacramentology within Anglicanism today. Here I will show how Chauvet’s concept of the Eucharist as necessary stumbling block can provide an alternative grounding of the significance of the Eucharist that resists a classic evangelical-catholic divide, and how his notion of ritual as symbolic rupture can address issues of sacramental inculturation.
Common Background: Scholastic Sacramentology and its Respondents
Though separated by centuries, the era in which Chauvet penned Symbol and Sacrament is not too dissimilar than that of the formative years of Anglicanism.Footnote 3 Both can be seen as standing within a major re-evaluation in sacramental theology, and both address the excesses of Scholastic theology and the perceived overextension of its critics.
Chauvet writes in the aftermath of Vatican II catholic sacramental theology, an aftermath which, while not dismantling the Scholastic schema of causality and grace vis-à-vis the Eucharist, nonetheless opened the door for a plurality of new emphases and definitions. A change in emphasis was in part due to a renewed ecclesiology centered upon the Church, and specifically the local congregation, as the people of God. ‘The Church lives through and in its concrete gatherings. They are the fulfillment of its existence.’ It is ‘the assembly in which the whole community comes together or is at least represented, and in which the union with the whole Church is preserved’.Footnote 4 The Church is not defined first by its institutions and its actions, but by the local gathering of the people of God.
Such an understanding of the Church as the local assembly has profound effects on the emphasis of the Eucharist within that assembly. An emphasis on the local assembly of the Church as the people of God necessitated a shift in the locus and purpose of the sacrament, away from the precise moment of consecration by an ordained minister and toward the celebration of the Eucharist within the worshipping congregation. Patrick Pretot summarizes Albert Houssiau’s explanation of this shift:
Houssiau had already traced this perspective, calling to mind the rediscovery of the liturgy through sacramental theology, a phenomenon that he placed ‘between 1951 and 1980’ and that necessitated overcoming three major obstacles (1) rediscovering the profound meaning of the adage lex orandi, lex credendi…(2) isolating less the sacramental moment…to move to a broader perspective, taking into better consideration the temporal unfolding of the celebration, and finally (3) rediscovering history not as confirmatur of a predetermined theological thesis but as ‘original source of knowledge of the an sit and the quid sit, that is, the establishment of a truth and of the interpretation of reality’.Footnote 5
This shift created a plurality of new sacramentologies (such as those labeled ‘transfinalization’, or ‘transignification’), but was not without its critics. The temptation was to utilize the same scholastic instrumentalist view of the sacraments, yet apply it not to the elements, but to the liturgical assembly. Here, the sacraments become a tool of the community to project their collective consciousness onto the elements,Footnote 6 or as instruments of inspiration towards the cause of liberation.Footnote 7
Chauvet writes within this Catholic rediscovery of sacramental theology in the wake of Vatican II, yet he is equally cautious about the types of revisions proposed. As will be discussed further, Chauvet will propose his own approach that attempts to renew the importance of the sacraments through an alternative to traditional metaphysical categories.Footnote 8
Despite vastly different circumstances, sacramental theology as it developed throughout the formative period of Anglicanism (roughly from Thomas Cranmer through the 1662 Prayer Book) represents a similar attempt to plot a way forward in the wake of strenuous sacramental debate. The struggle within the Church of England throughout this period is a struggle over the extent to which the political and theological ramifications of the reformation should be appropriated. What emerged was what Oliver O’Donovan calls a distinctly Anglican notion of ‘moderation’, which is ‘the policy of reserving strong statement and conviction for the few things which really deserve them’.Footnote 9 Such a distinction is often mischaracterized as a via media between Rome and Geneva. This implies a kind of political pragmatism that seeks the least offensive and most inclusive theological pronouncements. Instead, an Anglican view of moderation is a struggle to discern essentials from adiaphora for the sake of the spiritual health of its members.Footnote 10
The development of Eucharistic theology within this formative period is a microcosm of this struggle. Like his continental reformation counterparts, Thomas Cranmer sought to revise liturgical practice in the wake of perceived Eucharistic abuses, such as the overemphasis on the celebrant, the neglect of lay participation, and the repetition of Christ’s sacrifice. Cranmer’s liturgical changes were meant to address these concerns, yet they were seen by his successors as creating too distinct a separation between the physical elements and their spiritual effects.Footnote 11 Over the next century the Church of England underwent a myriad of sacramental reforms that in part mirrored its political upheaval. Such changes were an attempt to navigate a proper response both to the rejection of perceived scholastic abuses and the radical reactions to these abuses. This attempt to plot a course through the Catholic and radical reformations is exemplified vividly in Richard Hooker’s development of the concept of ‘real participation’ in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.
Part I: Points of Coherence: Real Participation and the Symbolic Exchange
Just as Chauvet’s sacramental theology is situated within the backdrop of the Eucharistic reforms of Vatican II, Richard Hooker’s development of an Anglican sacramentology emerged within the backdrop of the Eucharistic reforms of the continental reformation. Both sought to chart a course that avoided the pitfalls on the margins of these controversies. As such, there can be seen striking similarities between the sacramental concepts of both Chauvet and Richard Hooker.
A major point of coherence between Chauvet and Hooker is the development of Eucharistic language that attempted to avoid the incessant controversy due to an overextension of metaphysical concepts. Throughout its first 150 years of development, Anglican theology sought to chart a course that attempted to avoid an objectivist/subjectivist dichotomy that evidenced itself in the continual Eucharistic controversies that dominated the continental reformation. Christopher Cocksworth states that what emerged was a unifying category that asserted that ‘rather than in or with the Eucharistic elements, the Eucharistic gift was communicated through them’.Footnote 12 God had specifically appropriated the physical elements of bread and wine, yet it was given for communion with God. For Richard Hooker, the language of real participation in Christ is used as an attempt to distill the fundamental emphasis of both the Roman Catholic and Reformation understandings, while doing so with language that is general enough to avoid divisive debates of minutiae: ‘I can see on all sides at the length to a general agreement concerning that which alone is material, namely the real participation of Christ and of life in his body and blood by means of this sacrament.’Footnote 13
Hooker is attempting to unite a notion of the real participation with Christ with the insistence that such participation must come through the physical elements. For Hooker, ‘every such receiver doth thereby incorporate or unite himself unto Christ as a mystical member of him’,Footnote 14 it is tied to His ‘glorious power’ to appropriate the bread and the cup. Hooker believes that at their core, both Catholic and Reformation theologians are trying to capture a similar notion of this participation in Christ, yet are stumbling over specific metaphysical categories. Even though Hooker uses instrumental language, he attempts to break from a type of causality that renders the Eucharistic elements to a type of machinery. The sacraments are ‘moral instruments’, not mechanical or physical instruments.Footnote 15 Hooker is employing here what we might today call a ‘personalist’ rather than a naturalist or mechanical model of sacramental causality.Footnote 16
In his own attempt to rescue sacramental theology from persistent metaphysical debates, Chauvet grounded his sacramental theology in a notion of the symbolic exchange that emphasizes the communicative aspect of the Eucharist while maintaining the necessity of its physical mediation.
For Chauvet, individuals are, by nature of their birth, born into a preformed linguistic world, and thus inherit a world of symbols with which they mediate. The symbol is ‘an expression of a social pact based on mutual recognition and, hence, is a mediator of identity’.Footnote 17 Symbols point one beyond the immediate experience – here, Chauvet distinguishes sign from symbol. A piece of cloth can be a sign if it is simply acknowledged by its descriptive characteristics (colors, designs). The very same piece of cloth is a symbol when it is identified as a flag of a nation state, evoking various ideas (patriotism, history, etc.). A symbol retains its value, however, only in its relation to the entire whole. Hence the symbol carries with it the transmission of the whole even while its transmission is always epistemologically incomplete. This is akin to a piece of a broken vase, which carries not only its piece but a symbol of the whole vase now broken. The symbol is thus ‘a mediation for mutual recognition between subjects and for their identification within their world’.Footnote 18
This symbolic world is inherited and navigated through the body. ‘This approach has repeatedly sent us back to the contingent mediation of language, a culture, a history as the very place where the subject comes to truth. Of this reality outside of which the subject can only lose itself in its imagination, the body is the primordial expression.’Footnote 19 To become a Christian, then, is to inhabit the Christian symbolic exchange – it is to inhabit a group of words, gestures, actions that mediate Jesus Christ. To inhabit this world is to acknowledge that God has appropriated these symbols to mediate himself, yet it remains a mediation. Christ still remains absent even in the midst of sacramental presence. One cannot abandon these symbols, nor attempt to claim a mastery of their meaning.
There are many similarities between Hooker and Chauvet’s approach to the Eucharist. Though Chauvet does not use the same philosophical system as Hooker (the Reformers are still viewing the sacraments as instruments of grace), there are parallels between Hooker’s real participation and Chauvet’s symbolic exchange as medium of communication between God and Man.Footnote 20 In Chauvet’s discussion of symbol, we see the same kind of wrestling with language as that exemplified by Richard Hooker, yet played out under a post-metaphysical backdrop. While Hooker emphasized the language of participation as a corrective to Catholic and Reformation Eucharistic excesses, Chauvet posits the abandonment of all instrumental, metaphysical, Eucharistic categories in favor of the symbolic exchange model. Both are attempting to emphasize the necessity of physical mediation through bread and wine while asserting the ultimate unknowability of its inner workings. For Hooker, this is exemplified by what William Crockett calls Hooker’s ‘deliberate agnosticism’.Footnote 21 Hooker intentionally does not adopt a specific doctrine explaining the Eucharistic elements – following a ‘distinction in Anglican theology between those doctrines which were regarded as necessary articles of faith, and those matters which could be left in the realm of theological opinion’.Footnote 22 Similarly, Chauvet adopts the language of paradox – physical mediation is necessary because we necessarily navigate the symbolic world corporally, yet because it is precisely a mediation, it can never fully disclose itself. Hence the bread and the wine are necessary as physically appropriated by God to mediate his presence, yet such mediation can never be fully grasped.
Summary of Hooker and Chauvet’s Departures
After highlighting key aspects of Richard Hooker’s concept of real participation and Louis-Marie Chauvet’s concept of the symbolic exchange, we can now summarize the ways in which their developments cohere.
It is important to note that pointing out these areas of coherence does not mean that no differences remain between Hooker and Chauvet’s sacramentology, the principal difference being that Hooker remains indebted to the metaphysical system of causality that Chauvet rejects. Such a difference is arguably inevitable given Hooker’s historical situation. The large historical gap between Chauvet and Hooker, and the fact that Heidegger stands in the middle of this gap, means that a one-to-one correlation is not possible. Instead, it is helpful to show how their sacramental trajectories cohere. In this way, we find in Hooker departures from Catholic and radical reformation sacramentality that bear striking similarities to the kinds of departures Chauvet makes from ‘onto-theological sacramentality’.
We can summarize this departure as a movement away from certainty to relationality. Hooker’s insistence on the pre-eminence of joy over knowledge in regards to the sacraments points to a sacramentality that is not perceived as goal oriented. Ronald Vince argues that Hooker’s use of participation is not intended as a kind of lowest common denominator between Roman Catholic and Zwinglian opinions, but rather an attempt to dismiss unhelpful speculation: ‘What appears to be an irenic accommodation of varying opinions … is in fact a rhetorical demonstration of the insignificance of the cause of dispute, and of the unreasonableness of imagined answers to meaningless questions.’Footnote 23 For Hooker, there is an intentional movement away from theological assertions that claim a grasp of the mechanics of the sacraments that fall outside what has been disclosed by God in Holy Scripture. This over-speculation obscures the sacrament’s joyful purposes. Instead, for Hooker, the Eucharist is for the nourishment of souls, and the focus is on the joyful (a ‘sea of comfort and joy’), ecstatic experience of its recipients. Hooker’s notion of real participation is, in this way, less transactional and more relational: ‘Participation is concerned with a mutual, dynamic relationship; it is not a fusion or merger of the human and the divine.’Footnote 24
Similarly, Chauvet departs from onto-theological notions of the sacraments that assert their ability to move the recipient from lesser to fuller knowledge of God. For Chauvet, a flaw in sacramental thinking is the belief that the sacraments are a medium through which one moves from lesser to greater certainty, a movement towards further and further intellectual purification of concepts.Footnote 25 Instead, Chauvet emphasizes a notion of the sacraments centered on grace and exemplified in biblical manna. Here, grace is ‘of an entirely different order from that of value or empirical verifiability’.Footnote 26 Manna exemplifies this lack of empirical verifiability – attempts to retain it result in its decay. Instead, the sacraments place the recipient in a continuing gracious relationship with God, the ‘transformation of subjects into believing subjects’.Footnote 27
We thus see in both Hooker and Chauvet attempts to depart from the sacramental thought of their predecessors, departures that are spurred by a desire to critique a false sense of epistemological certainty and re-emphasize the transformative and joyful relationship between God and communicant. To use a mathematical metaphor, Hooker and Chauvet’s sacramentology are akin to similar vectors – sharing a similar degree of magnitude and direction despite having different starting points. This similarity in sacramental trajectory makes Chauvet a helpful dialogue partner with Anglican sacramental theology today.
Part II: Chauvet’s Challenge to Anglicanism Today: The Stumbling Block, the Symbolic Rupture, and Inculturation
After establishing some of the ways Chauvet’s fundamental theology correlates favorably with Richard Hooker’s Anglican sacramentology, it is important to highlight some of the ways Chauvet may challenge current Anglican sacramental expressions. I offer such challenges based upon my own understanding of the multitude of Eucharistic expressions in my own jurisdiction, the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). While this is a small and somewhat anecdotal sampling, I believe that the issues and tensions within the ACNA are manifestations of a type of recurrent tension within segments of Anglicanism throughout its history.
The identification of distinct groups within an overarching ecclesiastical structure has been a recurrent challenge throughout Anglican history. Mark Chapman identifies Evangelicalism and Anglo-Catholicism as the two most distinct ‘parties’ that developed in the Church of England over the 200 years following the Toleration Act of 1689,Footnote 28 with Evangelicalism characterized by an emphasis on the need for personal conversion and the authority of Scripture, and Anglo-Catholicism characterized by an emphasis on the sacraments, priestly ministry, and the authority of the Church.Footnote 29
The differences in emphases between these two parties led to ongoing disputes within the Church of England. While arguments about instrumental causality and sacramental efficacy rarely break out on a Sunday morning, differences in sacramental theology often manifested themselves in debates over the minutiae of liturgical practices and aesthetics. Mark Chapman notes how the tensions between the Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical ‘parties’ of Anglicanism have historically been evidenced by such minutiae: ‘Matters that in themselves were of little significance – such as the placing of flowers on the altar, or the abbreviation of saint to S. rather that St – could provoke vigorous reaction.’Footnote 30
While it does not retain the kind of affiliative formality that Chapman uses to define them, the ACNA retains groupings of individuals, churches, and dioceses that draw their lineage from the Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic movements. The various forms of Eucharistic practice within the Anglican Church in North America attempt to achieve an ecclesial unity amidst a diversity of worship. Anglo-Catholic services approach structurally and ceremonially the current Roman Missal, while Evangelical services emphasize the preaching of the Word, with sermons lasting between 30 and 60 minutes, and the Eucharist celebrated once a month. These differences are often the source of tensions, with Anglo-Catholics criticizing evangelicals for an ecclesiology of convenience, and evangelicals criticizing Anglo-Catholics for being Roman Catholics incognito.
The work of Louis-Marie Chauvet has the potential to address many of these current problems facing Anglican sacramental theology in the present.Footnote 31 Specifically, two major themes in Symbol and Sacrament have the potential to challenge and enrich Anglican sacramentology in the present: Chauvet’s description of the Eucharist as stumbling block and his description of symbolic rupture vis-à-vis ritual.
The Eucharist as Stumbling Block: The Eucharist as a Necessary Difficulty
Chauvet’s use of the symbolic exchange stresses the communicative aspect of the Eucharist while emphasizing the necessity of its physical mediation. Because we navigate in our bodies a symbolic world which communicates to us, and because what is communicated to us is the Other, we are met with the paradox of a simultaneous revelation and withdrawal. In the moment in which the Other is revealed to us as the Other, it is revealed that the Other is not us, and thus not completely knowable. Chauvet is here appropriating a Heideggerian anthropology (the manifestation of Being is simultaneously the withdrawal of Being) for theology: ‘In revealing, God constantly withdraws.’Footnote 32 The reality of this paradox means that one must both acknowledge the need for revelation to come through an experience of the senses, yet at the same time acknowledge the inability to grasp this revelation as knowable. For Christians, this means one must encounter Christ through physical mediation, yet always realizing their inability to fully grasp Christ.
The Eucharist becomes the paradigm for this paradoxical mediation of Christ’s presence and absence within the symbolic exchange. For it is the Eucharist that Christ appropriates as symbol of his very body and blood, yet this symbol is the simple and banal: bread and wine. The Eucharist forces us to acknowledge Christ in this act, yet simultaneously acknowledge our inability to master Him. For Chauvet, the raw physicalness of the simple act of chewing and drinking presses us to the extremes – it is a severely physical act that claims the possibility of mediating Christ’s body and blood. This is a more basic act than even the reading of Scripture, since the intangibility of reading and hearing Scripture holds a greater possibility of internally claiming Christ in one’s mind.
The Eucharist is thus both essential to the Christian life, yet remains a great stumbling block for the Christian life. Each Sunday Christians are presented with the physical mediation of Christ through the humble meal, and are forced to lay aside their own projections of Christ and receive:
This is why the celebration of the sacraments … often appears as a stumbling block, since the celebration beckons people to sacrifice their personal wishes and their unique ‘sensitivities’ to enter into the dynamic of covenant but also into the great game of symbolic exchange, where the order of grace demands the renunciation of all mastery in order to open oneself to receive what we cannot give ourselves.Footnote 33
It is precisely this view of the Eucharist as necessary stumbling block that provides a bolstering of the importance and centrality of the Eucharist while sidestepping metaphysical debates. This has enormous potential to enrich Anglicanism today. As mentioned above, the theological differences between Anglo-Catholic and Evangelicals often manifest themselves on the ground level through disputes over minute liturgical practices. There is a danger of seeing the centrality of the Eucharist as integrally related to the adoption of these practices. The use of vestments, altar crosses, or incense become cues that signal how significant the place of the Eucharist is in Church, as opposed to preaching or musical worship.
While the Anglican Church in North America encourages the assimilation of Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic expressions, there can be a tendency to view the Eucharist in a type of instrumental way which Chauvet cautions against. Here, one is presented with an either/or proposition, whereby one either accepts a ‘high’ view of the Eucharist with its medieval and modern Catholic developments, or accepts a ‘low’ view that de-prioritizes the Eucharist in favor of preaching, musical worship, or evangelism. What is needed is a sacramental theology that views the Eucharist as essential to Christian life that does not fall into a type of false high/low binary.
Chauvet offers a view of the Eucharist as central to Christian worship without necessitating the adoption of many of the metaphysical and scholastic terminology that cause such high/low distinctions. One can adopt portions of Chauvet’s theology as a parallel system to that of metaphysical understandings.Footnote 34 For the Anglican Church in North America, it challenges both evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics to reassess their sacramental theologies. For evangelicals, there is a calling to see the Eucharist not as an inconvenient hurdle to evangelism but as the foundation of Christian worship and discipleship, where one is continually converted away from their internally false projections of Christ. For Anglo-Catholics, it is a calling to accept the paradoxical reception of Christ’s presence and absence in the Eucharistic act, an absence that is not lessened with increased sacramental definitions.
The Symbolic Rupture and Chauvet’s Pastorally Rigorous Ritualism
Just as Eucharistic theology is in danger of falling into a mechanistic instrumentality, where one must choose between its absolute functional importance or rejection, the various other liturgical rituals can fall into a similar schema. In Anglicanism, there is the danger of viewing rituals in purely quantitative terms: if one finds rituals important, the more the merrier. Hence high church Anglicans search for greater ways to incorporate more ancient rituals, vestments, and so on, into public worship. If, on the other hand, one finds ritual unimportant, then one tries to minimize their use. Here, one is constantly redacting, shortening and editing rituals in search of other forms of worship that hold more promise for growing the church.
Chauvet provides a way out of this ‘useful-useless’ distinction through the law of symbolic rupture. A symbolic rupture is an event in which one is taken out of the ordinaries of life and into ‘the threshold of the sacred’.Footnote 35 This rupture creates ‘an empty space with regard to the immediate and utilitarian’.Footnote 36 It is in this space that we enter into a symbolic world with which we cannot fully understand or master. Rituals are the words and actions which help create this symbolic rupture. To consecrate, for example, is to set aside specific things as appropriated for God’s use – the exacting of rigorous specifications for the construction of the tabernacle in Exodus provides a prime example. In the same way, an ordinary cup is consecrated as a chalice for wine, or a decorative cloth is placed over an empty table to denote an altar. In these ways we are confronted with a symbolic order with which we do not master, and an experience with God that prefigures our explanation of it. This, for Chauvet, is where we experience grace:
all this belongs to this ‘silent language’ which speaks, and speaks in an illocutionary way, much more than discourses. That God is the Different, that God’s difference, perceived on the symbolic register as the Other, is Grace – all this is said ‘performatively’ and before a word is spoken through the ritual rupture; all this is said by being done in a symbolic practice where we do not limit ourselves to speaking about God’s grace … but where we open up, through an effective break with the useful, a space of gratuitousness where God can come.Footnote 37
Much like his view of the Eucharist, the ritual rupture is necessary because it forces us to encounter God without being able to master God. The practical question remains though – how does one create this ritual space without attempting to master it? For this, Chauvet asserts that ritual requires a minimum symbolic distance that is negotiated pastorally.Footnote 38 If not negotiated pastorally with a sensitivity to the culture of the congregation, rituals can calcify, with the symbols becoming unrecognizable to Christians. If one rejects symbolic distance – through the adoption of everyday language, through the insistence on the oxymoron of spontaneity on demand, or through the attempt to turn the ritual into a mini-theology course – one will unforeseeably embrace the alternative rituals of moralism or dogmatism.
In order to negotiate the symbolic distance pastorally, one must take into account the specifics of the culture and the event, including the number of participants, the location, the age of the group, and so on: ‘The limits beyond which rites can function properly is not always the same.’Footnote 39 Despite seeming to advocate for a kind of middle way for liturgists, what Chauvet is calling for in fact requires more of those leading worship. Pastors need to know ritual well enough to adapt it without losing the symbolic distance it creates. An analogy can be made here to jazz musicians, who must first master their instrument and the rules of music theory that undergird their tradition, before they can begin to improvise within new circumstances in creative new ways while still embodying and transmitting their tradition. One can see today circumstances of jazz music’s calcification (in the form of big bands that try to rigidly recreate the spontaneity of Duke Ellington) and its devolvement into a ‘spontaneous’ cacophonic chaos (the free jazz movement).
Chauvet’s notion of the symbolic and ritual rupture holds great promise for Anglicanism today. Issues surrounding inculturation are at the heart of current debates surrounding unitive Anglican sacramental theology. The numerical decline in the Church of England, coupled with the remarkable explosion of Anglicanism in the Global South, has led to a vigorous debate as to what constitutes a distinctive Anglican sacramental identity. At the heart of these debates is a discernment of the distinction between liturgical essentials and English adiaphora.Footnote 40 While these issues are played out internationally, they are also challenged within specific Anglican provinces. This is seen in the Anglican Church in North America in its expansion through the planting of new congregations. Here, clashes occur in the types of church planting methods utilized and the traditions they transmit, as well as in the level to which these new church plants take on the cultural resemblances of the specific people groups they are attempting to reach with the gospel. Issues of inculturation often encompass a debate over how much tradition can be modified – essentially, how far is too far in discarding or modifying liturgical practices?
The issue of negotiating symbolic distance is perhaps more complicated and challenging within an Anglican context as compared to a Roman Catholic context, since there is a larger fixed liturgical structure in the latter. Within Anglicanism, there is greater freedom for the local pastor not only in how to apply liturgical rubrics, but also in choosing between several different rubrics. The expansion of liturgical freedom in the Anglican context means also an expansion of responsibility for the local pastor in negotiating an appropriate symbolic distance in public worship.
Chauvet’s view of the symbolic rupture creates a separate axis that can serve as a foundation for inculturation questions. It presents a way of viewing ritual that rejects a useful/useless categorization – the purpose (if such a word could even be applied) of ritual is not how useful it is in either recapturing a perceived golden age of sacramental worship, or in perfectly encapsulating the idiosyncrasies of the cultural zeitgeist, but in its ability to create space within cultural cacophony to enable God to be known in his difference, as wholly Other. Such a purpose, however, must open up ritual to a continual pastoral scrutiny to ensure that its performance not devolve into an attempt to utilize ritual to exert a mastery over God.
Incorporating Chauvet’s view of the symbolic rupture to the ACNA’s church planting initiatives would necessitate a reappraisal of the role of the pastor called to start a new congregation. What is needed are not pastors that are highly skilled liturgical technicians trained with all of the resources of academia. What is needed are not pastors that are highly trained in crafting the structures of the church to meet the perceived needs of their culture to maximize numerical growth. In a sense, what is needed by pastors is that their training exceed both of these seeming dichotomies. The goal is to know both their tradition and their culture so well that the rituals can be creatively interpreted in new ways that remain faithful to the theater of symbolic-exchange created by God himself, while enabling such a space to be created anew in the here and now.
Conclusion
In the concluding remarks of his attempt to describe unifying elements of Anglican Eucharistic theology, Christopher Cocksworth admits that such an attempt has taken place within the backdrop of traditional and scholastic categories, and that such a rooting in these categories may be the reason why such attempts prove difficult: ‘The outcome of the method we have followed has also been inevitably Western and scholastic. It may be justifiably said that this is exactly the strait-jacket from which Eucharistic theology needs to be released.’Footnote 41 A focusing on such scholastic and metaphysical categories employs sacramental language that immediately triggers centuries-old debates along the evangelical-catholic divide. A greater unity in Anglican sacramental theology and practice should be sought along other philosophical and theological categories.
The attempt in this brief essay is to suggest that the fundamental theology of Louis-Marie Chauvet provides just such an arena. Chauvet’s theology coheres well with many of the emphases of the Anglican divines during Anglicanism’s formative era, demonstrating that his theology can be mined for riches without discarding Anglican fundamentals. Core concepts such as the symbolic-exchange manifested in the Eucharist as the foundational stumbling block of Christian faith, and the necessity of the symbolic rupture, provide areas to enrich Anglican sacramentology while sidestepping incessant metaphysical debates. The hope is that such riches may help to spark a renewed discussion on Anglican liturgy and its potential to strengthen the people of God in the upcoming decades.
