While deploring the fetishistic physicalism of some eucharistic theologies, I also deplore the haimophobia that would wipe away all the sacral overtones of blood-sacrifice from the death of Christ and his martyrs and from the Eucharist. To talk of metaphors is all right if one remembers that a metaphor, as Heidegger suggests in Der Satz vom Grund, can be a way of naming being. The reality and power of Christ’s sacrificial language is equally missed by those who obsess about transubstantiation, ripping the Real Presence from its total network of relations, including the temporal play between anamnesis and eschatological expectation, and those who dephysicalize it to the point of making Christian assembly a mere meeting of minds and hearts rather than incorporation into the Body of Christ.

¶ 12:05 PM