An Eaten Church: Celebrating the Eucharist as Fragments of Bread

Abstract

In his Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas describes Sacraments as signs that lead us to believe in the sources of our salvation. The many signs we embody in our liturgical celebrations serve the purpose of deepening our experiential knowledge of God’s love for us. In this essay, I will examine one of the Christian tradition’s most important sacramental signs: bread. More specifically, I will focus on the sacramental significance of broken bread (i.e., klasma). Although an exhaustive study of the way in which broken bread has served Christianity throughout its history is certainly beyond the scope of a single essay, in the present work, I will seek to understand how this particular sacramental sign can be a source for contemporary ecclesiology. By examining the nature of broken bread, insofar as it is used eucharistically as a sign of Christ’s Church, we can come to a deeper understanding of the relationship between the Church and the world for which it exists and from which it exists. The bread that we break during eucharistic celebrations is, to use St. Augustine’s language, a visible word through which God tells us who we are and who we are called to be. The nature of broken bread, especially as it is portrayed in the Gospel accounts of the miraculous feeding of the multitudes, can teach us something about the nature of the Church. By focusing my attention on these Gospel accounts, I will be constructing (1) an ecclesiology of an eaten Church and (2) from that ecclesiology, a theology of ministry. Ultimately, I am concerned with emphasizing the missionary nature of the Church and its presence in a pluralistic world.