A Panpsychist Panentheistic Incarnational Model of the Eucharist

Abstract

According to the guidance of the seven Ecumenical Councils as explications of the Christian Scriptures, Christianity teaches not only that there is a God, but that this God is triune and that one member of this Trinity has become incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ. Traditional explications of this teaching show Christ as being both fully God and fully human, while remaining only one person. That is, whereas most everything else in the cosmos only has one nature, Christ is unique among entities in having two natures—divinity and humanity. Hence, Christ is properly named »Emmanuel,« »God with us.« When one turns to Christian practice to find those instances wherein humanity’s encounter with God is most profound, the Eucharist serves as the pinnacle of Christian worship and—or, perhaps, because of—a direct encounter with God. This is because the majority opinion teaching of the Christian tradition has it that in some fashion Christ—the God-human—becomes so related to the mundane elements of bread and wine, that the predications »This is the body of Christ« or »This is the blood of Christ« become warranted. Hence, the tradition teaches an increasing concretizing of God’s being with humanity: in the cosmos, in Christ, and in the Eucharist. What is not laid out explicitly in the Christian Scriptures or the pronouncements of the Councils, are specific statements regarding the ontology of the cosmos. The Christian theologian, then, is free to pursue fine-grained expositions of ontology that can be said to fall within the more thick-grained determinations of these authoritative sources.1 Hence, well-intentioned Christians have pursued such radically distinct fundamental ontologies as idealism, dualism, and materialism as possible ideologies within which to make sense of the Scriptural and Conciliar material. This essay proposes a route for explicating a model of the Eucharist—and its Christological infrastructure—within a panpsychist panentheistic ontological framework. Hence, the model offered here