A Canonical Theology
There have been some legitimate fruits to the ecumenical turn that was experienced in Christian theology during the 20th century. This includes, at the very least, an increased capacity to engage and appreciate theological reflections stemming from other traditions. Such an example that is especially relevant for apostolic and sacramental Christians (such as Reformed Catholics) would be the Roman Catholic declaration in the Second Vatican Council’s Lumen Gentium[1] that the Eucharist “is the fount and apex of the whole Christian life.” Certainly, all the precious treasures of our faith come together in this symbol to us “whose souls are possessed of this Paschal Lamb” received in bread and cup “hallowed with solemn benediction [which] avails to the endless life and welfare both of soul and body.”[2] I myself have thought on how to frame the significance of the Blessed Sacrament, settling on astrophysics as the metaphorical vehicle: like a star the Mass, full of grace and benediction, is the heavenly banquet and royal procession around which the fullness of Christian life orbits, with all its various parts and moments and seasons (as planetary bodies), and at the heart of the Mass is the roaring fusion of the Eucharist. A Eucharistic spirituality is a liturgical spirituality is a Christian spirituality.
All this certainly begs the question of where exactly the sacramentology of the Christian religion is spelled out in its scriptures, which is parallel to the same questions that may be asked about liturgical theology. The Synoptic narratives of the Last Supper are the obvious examples, but wise students of Scripture have pointed to far more diverse passages as lighting upon said doctrine. One source, however, has garnered some contention, especially in recent years of critical scholarship, which is St. John’s Bread of Life discourse in John 6. Recently enthralled with figuring out an answer to the age-old question “Does John teach a high sacramentology along with his high Christology?” (or, “Is John 6 Eucharistic?”) I have determined to provide a holistic response and engagement with biblical and critical theology. In what follows, while I have paid attention to scholars such as Keener and Brown, a more post-critical approach has allowed me to recontextualize and move beyond the categories they impose on the text. In fine, I will supply an answer to this that I will proleptically explain this way: “John’s presentation of the Bread of Life discourse is canonically sacramental.”
When it comes to any book of the canon that he has written a commentary on it’s my personal conviction that one should always begin with Craig Keener, due to his unparalleled and remarkable comprehensiveness in research. Whether you agree with all his interpretive conclusions or not he is an unmistakable scholarly titan. Moreover, for our purposes, in his two-volume appraisal of St. John’s Gospel[3] his interpretive conclusion is to distance John’s language from its Eucharistic echoes. Keener’s reasoning follows a typically critical logic, which boils down to “Would this really be the author’s purpose?” Based on his (extensive) evaluation of John’s motif of signs and sign-faith, in addition to the emphasis on communicating the identity of Christ,[4] Keener feels that for John to discuss a sacrament in this discourse would be unnatural, and indeed there are some elements in the discourse that would be atypical of Eucharistic imagery.
Which position best represents the logic of the discourse in its Johannine context and Sitz im Leben? It is difficult to miss some eucharistic language in the background; unfortunately, it is more difficult to know what to make of it. Not all the language is distinctly eucharistic. For instance, bread and wine were the basic components of any Jewish meal signified in the standard blessings, with bread standing for all food. Thus even if the text mentioned both bread and wine, eucharistic connotations need not be supposed; and in any case (and perhaps most damaging to the eucharistic argument) wine is nowhere mentioned here (though this is what one might expect of an unanticipated meal in the wilderness).[5]
However, as you can tell, Keener is pushed to make important qualifications of his position, moving it into what we could call “sacramental ambiguity,” over against anti-sacramental (which he relates to James Dunn) or non-sacramental (which he relates to Paul Anderson and D.A. Carson) views. Even then, what Keener says still leaves the Eucharistic view just viable enough.
Consider his point that John’s language isn’t “distinctly eucharistic,” and that while “bread” is mentioned it’s mentioned with “drink,” not “wine.” Food and drink are very generic terms, and “bread” is readily interchangeable for “food” in relevant contextual literature. But, there’s more to say about this. First of all, while πίνω/πόσις does mean generically “[to] drink,” it should be noted that an analysis of the word’s usage throughout Greek literature finds it to be very often collocated with wine, to the point of being metonymic.[6] Second, if John’s Gospel is a Paschal Gospel, as John Behr intimates,[7] then the language of bread and wine should strongly evoke the symbolism of the Paschal seder. Moreover, in the context of the early Christian faith community, what in the world would the terms “bread” and “drink” bring to mind for them? Note also how all the Eucharistic loci classici (Mk. 14; Mt. 26; Lk. 22; 1 Cor. 10, 11) collocate the terms “wine” and “cup” with πίνω/πόσις. The early Christian mind would’ve been primed to associate such terms, and to associate them in a Eucharistic context. Indeed, that is the fundamental logic that the Eucharistic interpretation often comes down to: how could such language as this not be taken as Eucharistic?
Here’s where things get more “meta.” So much of modern critical scholarship is derivative of Enlightenment rationalism, wherein notions such as “objectivity” took hold of our understanding of the world.[8] The truths of the Bible were “out there” just like any other object-ive fact, and floated autonomously in a realm of facts that simply had to be seized on through the scientific analysis of systematic theology, as “logical procedure and scientific method [are the keys to hermeneutics].”[9] However, as the (re)turn to the subject presses on in philosophy schools of thought such as “reception theory” have rejuvenated the importance of the inhabitation of a story in a community and the reciprocation between story-in-life and life-in-story.[10] The Sitz im Leben isn’t a monolith, for that very phenomenon of Leben is an integrated whole.[11] Therefore, there is something that may be authentically learned from the community in which such stories found their meaning in.
As it concerns New Testament theology, it must be coped with that the communities that received the Four Gospels were not isolates but part of the “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4:5) witnessed to from the beginning.[12] While “subcommunities” might have been the audience of the Evangelical corpus,[13] the Community proper at the same time had these works enter into its life, which may be attested to by the liturgical origins of “canonical texts,” i.e., the texts were made authoritative by their use by the Church in their formative acts of worship (liturgy) and became integral parts of the Community’s lifeworld.[14] Therefore, even if there was a “protocanonical stage” in the history of the biblical texts, that clearly implicates a canon, one that is inextricable in the development of the community’s reception history, and a canon which arose out of the dynamic Sitz im Leben of said community.[15]
Therefore, in all we’ve discussed we see the significance of what John Peckham has presented as canonical theology,[16] that the “final canon” is the Sitz im Leben of the Community proper, reciprocally arising out of its life and teaching. What defines the Community’s imaginary[17] is not those objective autonomous facts, but rather the holistic story it tells, and the final canon is that. No text taken in isolation, but each text taken together is what grounds the worldview of the Christian believer. Canonical theology is intimated in the New Testament’s own intertextuality, for while most instances of that might emphasize a particular passage (e.g., Ps. 8 or Ps. 110), or even the same literary-thematic unit (Genesis or Isaiah), there are also instances where distinct literary-thematic units of the Old Testament canon are treated unitedly in developing New Testament doctrine, such as how Romans 3:10-18 weaves together Psalms and Isaiah, or 9:24-29 brings Hosea and Isaiah together, and Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 is a vibrant dialogue of Joel and the Psalter. It’s, moreover, a Christological exegesis that grounds all this, for if Moses and the prophets all speak to Christ (Lk. 24:27, 44) then in truth the Scriptures must be taken as a united work—there can be no other conclusion than “Every scripture is inspired by God and useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16).[18] Therefore, the “local” exegesis of John 6, such as most academic scholarship draws out, can be and is entirely legitimate.
Here we may begin taking lead from John Behr. John is narrating the nature of the Son of Man, who is the Bread that descends from Heaven, and it is as the blood and flesh of the Son of Man that “His human flesh and blood are offered” to the elect, “not to be consumed simply as such.”[19] Moreover, in John’s Gospel this “Son of Man” is deeply intertwined with the Passion/Crucifixion of the Christ (3:13-14; 8:28; 12:23, 34; 13:31), with the Son of Man’s glory and nature seen in His lifting up before the Father on the Cross.[20] Therefore, the apostolic deposit that John leaves to his community is that of “receiving this life-giving flesh and blood not simply as a ‘medicine of immortality’…but as that which is sacrificed, offered, ‘for the life of the world’ (6:51) and as that which brings recipients to share in the life-giving Passion so that they too will be ‘raised up on the last day’ (cf. 6:39, 40, 44, 54), that is, through their death in conformity with Christ.”[21]
Another way to put what I’m saying is that no matter how you cut it (early dating or late dating), the entire Johannine corpus took shape after the formation of the Pauline corpus, meaning that John was entering into his evangelical project when verses such as “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Cor. 5:2) and “And did all eat the same spiritual meat; And did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ” (1 Cor. 10:3-4), in addition to the Synoptic Last Supper narratives, had been informing[22] the imaginary of the early Christians for years. It’s been said that John’s Gospel, by all means the final Gospel, took its shape from the apostle’s desire to write the story of Jesus from a perspective not yet told, and in reflecting on all that had happened over the previous decades, which accounts for the unique literary and structural features that define his Gospel.[23] If that’s so, then a Sitz im Leben already well-informed of the other canonical Eucharistic texts was what John was engaging, not a community disconnected from such. Necessarily, John’s Gospel, and John 6, must be read with those texts in the background, simply for historical reasons if not everything else we’ve discussed. The question no longer is “Does John 6 have any bearing on the Eucharistic texts of the New Testament?” but rather “What would John 6 have meant for a community that had (proto)canonically received the Eucharistic texts already?”
We may summarize what I’ve said in the fashion of a standard syllogism:
(1) In the wider context of the New Testament, the language used in John 6 sounds remarkably Eucharistic.
(2) It is perfectly legitimate for the canonical text to inform our reading of local texts.
(3) Therefore, John 6 may in turn inform our understanding of the Eucharist.
This, of course, begs a final and important question: what is the understanding of the Eucharist begotten by John 6? Well, it arises very simply from the paralleling of John’s discourse with the quintessential Pauline gloss on the subject: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?” (1 Cor. 10:16 ∥ 11:22-25). Cup and bread, blood and body are here explicitly collocated, and the symbolism of one of ancient Christianity’s most enduring and renown rituals is couched in terms of body and blood. Paul will continue to conceptually intersect the sacrificial altar of the Temple with the cup of blessing and the bread, and he earlier links Christ to the Paschal Lamb (1 Cor. 5:7-8), the sacrificial victim of Israel’s most typologically rich holy day, slaughtered on that very altar, and at the very moment Christ Himself was offered up “for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling favour” (Eph. 5:2). It was on top of this tradition that John writes his Paschal Gospel (per Behr), and explains how by verily eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the crucified Son of Man the one who does so will share in the life-giving Passion, just like how the Israelite who joyfully partook in the Paschal feast would live and prosper in the Promised Land and not be cut off from his people (cf. Num. 9:13).[24] As the Israelites ate the flesh of the Paschal Lamb, so the Church eats the flesh of Christ our Passover.
The Church, then, has always taken seriously the apostolic deposit and understood it for what it clearly means, as the received canonical story of the Pentecostal Community of faith.[25] We, then, may graciously and sincerely appreciate St. Ignatius’ words:
I have no delight in corruptible food, nor in the pleasures of this life. I desire the bread of God, the heavenly bread, the bread of life, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who became afterwards of the seed of David and Abraham; and I desire the drink of God, namely His blood, which is incorruptible love and eternal life.[26]
We are joyed to receive “the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of…Christ,” and the assurance that “we are very members incorporate in the mystical Body of Thy Son.”[27] Christ’s statement that “The Spirit is the one who gives life; human nature is of no help! The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life” (Jn. 6:63) troubles this interpretation none, for it affirms the historic-catholic theology: “The body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner.” It is the Spirit of the Christ Who is the Paschal Lamb that communicates Him to us, hence the ancient rite of the epiclesis, Who brings to bear the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ upon the altar of the Cross to all believers.
“Lord, I have received this Sacrament of the Body and Blood my dear Saviour. His mercy hath given it, and my faith received it into my soul. I humbly beseech Thee speak mercy and peace unto my conscience, and enrich me with all those graces which come from that precious Body and Blood, even till I be possessed of eternal life in Christ. Amen.”[28]
[1] Which itself may be taken as a significant exhibit of that ecumenical turn.
[2] Words of Bp. Richard Hooker, taken from Saint Augustine’s Prayer Book, ed. Rev. David Cobb (rev. ed.; Cincinnati: Forward Movement, 2014), 177.
[3] Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003).
[4] See Keener, John, 251-78.
[5] Keener, John, 690.
[6] Gerhard Friedrich, ed., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 10 vols., tr. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968), 6:135-60. After all, wine, and other liquors, were so common in ancient societies so as to compete with the prevalence of water because the requisite processing they went through rendered them more reliably safe to drink.
[7] John Behr, John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
[8] Christopher Hall, Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 1998), 19-42; Stanley Grenz and Roger Olson, 20th-Century Theology (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 1993); James K.A. Smith, The Fall of Interpretation (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 35-62.
[9] Lewis Sperry Chafer, as quoted in Hall, Reading Scripture, 26.
[10] Ben Blackwell, Christosis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 14-24, for a distillation of this and application to Christian dogma (the Resurrection); see also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013); Hans Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); Merold Westphal, Whose Community? Which Interpretation? (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009); Brennan Breed, Nomadic Text (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).
[11] It seems that some modern research into the Sitz im Leben concept is more sensitive to this. See Christopher Tuckett, Reading the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 95-115; Cameron Boyd-Taylor, “In a Mirror Dimly — Reading the Septuagint as a Document of Its Times,” in Septuagint Research, eds. Wolfgang Kraus and R. Glenn Wooden (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006), 15-32. For another take on how our lifeworld is constituted by communal and narratival action see James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 29-100.
[12] The primordial unity of the Church may not be reasonably doubted. See Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017); Francis Watson, Gospel Writing (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013); Andreas Köstenberger and Michael Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010)..
[13] Prototypes of the later “particular churches” of the one Catholic Church.
[14] See Scott Hahn, “Worship in the Word: Toward a Liturgical Hermeneutic,” Letter & Spirit 1 (2005): 101-36, and all scholarship referenced therein. Cf. Stephen Presley, Biblical Theology in the Life of the Early Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2025); Hans Boersma, Scripture as Real Presence (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018); Brandon Smith, Taught By God (Brentwood: B&H Academic, 2024)..
[15] And it can be decisively stated that the ancient Christian Sitz im Leben was profoundly Eucharistic: J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (rev. ed.; San Francisco: HarperOne, 1978), 189-220; Jarislov Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 162-71, 302-13; Daniel Cardo, The Cross and the Eucharist in Early Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Ernst Dassmann, “Eucharist,” in Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity, vol. 1 (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2014), 854-59.
[16] For a summary see John Peckham, “The Rationale for Canonical Theology: An Approach to Systematic Theology After Modernism,” Andrews University Seminary Studies, 55.1 (2017): 83–105.
[17] Charles Taylor Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 23-30.
[18] In contemporary theology this post-critical appreciation for biblical intertextuality has been best forwarded by G.K. Beale (A New Testament Biblical Theology [Ada: Baker Academic, 2011]) and Richard Hays (Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels [Waco: Baylor University Press, 2016]).
[19] Behr, John the Theologian, 152.
[20] Behr, John the Theologian, 218-244.
[21] Behr, John the Theologian, 155-56.
[22] In-forming them, in ways that Smith would be apt to point out are liturgical and communal (Imagining the Kingdom).
[23] This notion is often fleshed out in the introductory sections to the major commentaries. Behr’s is the biggest exception, but I don’t think it needs to strictly be taken as so inimical.
[24] And do take care to note how possessing and living in the Promised Land is clearly typological of the Church and being made heirs in Christ of His eternal kingdom. See Munther Isaac, From Land to Lands, from Eden to the Renewed Earth (Carlisle: Langham Academic, 2015).
[25] I mean here “Pentecostal” in the sense intended by James K.A. Smith (Who’s Afraid of Relativism? [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014], 72; cf. 110-13):
Our revealing Creator is not just incarnational; he is pentecostal. He doesn’t just send us a message; he enfolds us into his body. And that body is the community of practice in which we learn to mean the world—the context in which we learn what the world is for.
Cf. Howard M. Ervin, “Hermeneutics: A Pentecostal Option,” Pneuma 3.1 (1981): 11-25; Smith, The Fall of Interpretation (2nd ed.), 199-221.
[26] Ignatius of Antioch, “The Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans,” in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, eds. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995), 77.
[27] Words of the 1662 Eucharistic liturgy.
[28] William Laud, The Private Devotions of Dr. William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Martyr, ed. Frederic W. Faber (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1838), 153.
