The Impetrative Sacrifice of the Mass

“Christ our passover lamb is sacrificed for us.” At the heart of the Roman Catholic rejection of Anglican holy orders is the claim that Anglicans relinquished an adequate conception of the Eucharist as a sacrifice. While many have responded to this claim at length (including in my own forthcoming book Null and Void: The Catholic Validity of Anglican Holy Orders) and have traced the dynamics of the debate,[1] ecumenical work would be well served if Anglicans could sketch a concept of Eucharistic sacrifice that is both faithful to our Anglican patrimony and adequate to the Eastern and Roman churches. In this article, I want to suggest that the Anglican alternative to Rome’s propitiatory sacrifice of the mass is our concept of an impetrative sacrifice of the mass. This article will proceed as follows. First, I will address what the Anglican divines were rejecting in repudiating the “Romish” notion of a propitiatory sacrifice. Then, I will resource various Anglican divines to uphold an impetrative sacrifice of the mass made via consecrated bread and wine.

1 – The Anglican Critique of the Romish Mass

If these Anglican divines could affirm that the Eucharist applies the benefits of the Passion to the one who receives it in faith, then what precisely was their objection to a “propitiatory” sacrifice? Why did the English church reject “the sacrifices of the masses” per Article XXXI? The same article gives us a clue we have traced above: “in which it was commonly said that the Priest did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt.” We have noted that there are several emblematic practices that seem to come up in the critique of the mass: private masses, sacrifices in which Christ is offered “for the quick and the dead to have remission of pain or guilt,” and the optionality of lay reception of the elements. What conceptual framework ties this together? In my estimation, these practices emblemize the system of merit over and against which the Protestant Reformers asserted justification by faith alone.
In the 16th century (and today, given the ongoing authority of the Council of Trent), it had been taught that there were two sorts of punishments owed to sin. In the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between the eternal and temporal debt of punishment incurred by sin. The former corresponds to the guilt of sin, and merits eternal damnation. The latter incurs temporary punishments or satisfactions. If due satisfaction is not made for the temporal debts accrued by sin, one must suffer punishment for them in purgatory.[2] Per Aquinas, while the turning away from the Eternal Good himself accrues an eternal debt of punishment, the degree of a given turn which doesn’t entail a fixing, as it were, on some finite good, is finite and so merits a debt of temporal punishment.[3]

The Council of Trent adopts the theology of satisfaction that undergirds practices like private masses for the living and the dead, prayers, suffrages, et cetera. Thus, one finds a clear affirmation that the satisfactions imposed on those who have fallen after Baptism are “not only for the preservation of a new life and a medicine of infirmity, but also for the avenging and punishing of past sins.”[4] Anathemas are pronounced in canons 12 and 15 of the same session upon anyone who says that God “remits the whole punishment together with the guilt” or anyone who denies that there remains often a temporal punishment to be discharged after “the eternal punishment has, by virtue of the keys, been removed.” In canon 30 of session VI, the Council condemns anyone who says that justification intrinsically blots out all eternal and temporal debt (which is to be discharged either here or in purgatory). Discussions on venial sins and the need for proportional punishment surely prepared the ground for the dogmatization of purgatory by the Second Council of Lyon.[5]

In the Council, one finds the notions of “punishment” and “satisfaction” made in connection with Purgatory:

If they die truly repentant in charity before they have made satisfaction by worthy fruits of penance for sins committed and omitted, their souls are cleansed after death by purgatorial or purifying punishments…to relieve punishments of this kinds, the offerings of the living faithful are of advantage to these, namely, the sacrifices of Masses, prayers, alms, and other duties of piety, which have customarily been performed by the faithful for the other faithful according to the regulations of the Church.[6]

One finds such affirmations in Catholic writers throughout the centuries. Martin Jugie, an early twentieth-century theologian, argued that the principal reason for purgatory is the temporal punishment due to venial sins, “since neither venial sin nor vicious inclination survives the first instant that follows death. Immediately on its entering purgatory, the soul is perfectly holy, perfectly turned towards God, filled with the purest love.” He notes that official definitions mention purgatory in connection to temporal punishment.[7] John Hornyhold, an English Catholic bishop of the 18th century, even wrote that the fact the reality of “temporal pain” is “the foundation of our faith as to sacramental satisfaction, indulgences, purgatory, and prayer for the dead.”[8] He even distinguishes between the medicinal and penal aspects of satisfaction, arguing that one can make satisfaction for another with respect to the latter but not the former.[9] The Catechism of the Council of Trent makes this similar distinction, arguing that while one Catholic can make satisfaction for another with respect to the punishment do sin, they cannot with respect to its medicinal function.[10] In this context, then, the Mass is a sacrifice that “renders God propitious” in the sense that God, on account of the sacrifice performed, reduces the punishments due the faithful—whether living or dead.[11]

I am not the first to suggest that this doctrine is at the heart of the Anglican critique of the sacrifice of the mass. William Palmer, an early member of the Oxford movement who latter opposed it and a formulary of Branch Theory, wrote On the Errors of Romanism.[12] In a letter to Nicholas Wiseman, the first Archbishop of Westminster when the Catholic hierarchy was formally re-established in England, he argues the following:

I need scarcely point out to your sagacity, that a vast body of your doctrines and practices to which we object, depends altogether on one principle, which is as it were the foundation stone, the very vital essence of the whole. I mean, your doctrine of a debt still remaining due to Divine Justice after the remission of sin-the doctrine of temporal punishments to be endured for sin after its eternal penalty has been remitted. It is the doctrine of your Church, that by the Divine Law, temporal as well as eternal penalties are due to sin ; that while the latter, together with the guilt of sin, are remitted in the Sacrament of Penance, the former still remain due to Divine Justice: and that they may be averted by works of satisfaction, such as prayer, fasting, and alms-deeds, and by the suffrages of the Church, especially by the sacrifice of the holy Eucharist.[13]

Palmer quite explicitly objects to the sacrifice of the mass in this connection—namely, that it has efficacy “in remitting the temporal punishments of the living and the dead.”[14]

The critique of the sacrifice of the mass in this context makes a great deal of sense of the various critiques we find in the divines surveyed above. Latimer and Coverdale, for instance, both object to the notion that the mass “procures the forgiveness of sins” and is propitiatory in that sense. Given that both agree the Eucharist mediates the passion of Christ to all who worthily receive, it is best to understand the objection in terms of the remission of temporal debt due to sin. Further still, this situates the critique of the Mass proffered in Article XXXI: “the sacrifices of the masses, in which it was commonly said, that the Priest did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits.” The critique here fits quite nicely with the Eucharistic doctrine derived above if the critique aimed at the overarching system of merit, in which one could have temporal debt deserving of divine punishment even while being united to Christ.

Understanding the critique of a propitiatory sacrifice in the context of the system of temporal debt makes sense of why the critique of the private mass is so often paired with the critique of sacrificing “for the living and the dead.” Private masses, in this system, were understood to remit temporal debt (and thus temporal pains or punishments) simply by the work performed by the Priest, whether the laity received the elements or not. The denial that masses could be propitiatory in this sense was a denial that, through the performance of the “sacrifice,” God could be so propitiated as to remit punishments he would have otherwise inflicted—even upon his people—as recompense for sin (quite apart from the medicinal function of such punishments).

To my mind, this explanation fares better than attempts to explain the denial of a propitiatory sacrifice in the objection to a “re-sacrificing” of Christ, as it were. The main objections one finds in the divines cited above seem to coalesce around particular practices that don’t intrinsically entail an objection to a re-sacrificing of Christ as such (e.g. the connection between private masses and satisfactions one finds in Cooper). Rather, I argue, the early Anglicans rejected the notion of a mass as a propitiatory sacrifice in the context of what that meant in the polemics of the time: namely, that the mass propitiates God such that God relents of punishments he would have otherwise inflicted owing to temporal debt. For the Anglicans, the mass is not a propitiatory sacrifice in this particular sense.

This also explains why later Anglicans like Cosin or John Johnson[15] can affirm that the Mass is a propitiatory sacrifice in a sense: namely, that it applies the benefits of Christ’s passion to worthy recipient, and thus re-presents the Cross by mediating the true body and blood to all who receive it by faith. They are not repudiating former divines in doctrinal substance—even like Cranmer—but are rather specifying a further sense in which Anglicans have not denied the mass to be a sacrifice. Yet both Cosin and Johnson are insistent that the Eucharist fully applies the benefits of the Passion, and thus effects a further engrafting into Christ, to the one who receives it by faith. The doctrinal space needed to make such an affirmation was already open in the theology of Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, and others, via their affirmation of a sacramental commemoration in which the true body and blood and the true sacrifice were made present by the secret work of the Spirit, applied to the faithful who received consecrated bread and wine. To demonstrate this, we must survey the Reformation conversation over the sacrifice of the mass in England.

To understand the context of the condemnation of the “sacrifice of the mass,” it will be useful to briefly survey Luther and Melancthon’s condemnations, which would impact the English condemnations.[16] In The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther’s condemnation of the sacrifice of the mass is closely connected to his rejection of an ex opere operato notion, whereby merit is won simply by the performance of the mass apart from participation.[17] He writes,

Hence it is a manifest and wicked error to offer or apply the mass for sins, for satisfactions, for the dead, or for any needs whatsoever of one’s own or of others. You will readily see the obvious truth of this if you firmly hold that the mass is a divine promise, which can benefit no one, be applied to no one, intercede for no one, and be communicated to no one, except only to one who believes with a faith of one’s own.[18]

For Luther, the mass is an abomination not merely because it repeats or adds to the sacrifice of Christ, but because it is said to forgive the debt of sin through the performance of the work. Hence, his critique is situated within his wider rejection of the overarching system of merit.[19] Melancthon, developing this critique, affirms that the mass is a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, but argues “that there is no sacrifice or worship in the New Testament which merits for the doer or others the remission of sins ex opere operato.”[20] He laments the fact that

In the church…masses are piled high, because they are [considered] sacrifices which are pleasing to God ex opere operato and merit for the one who performs them and for others the remission of sins. For they taught that through the mass the sacrifice of Christ is applied. But let each person through his own faith apply or appropriate to himself the sacrifice of Christ…[21]

Melancthon identifies this as “the point which some are arguing”—namely the application of the mass for the sake of another unto the remission of sins by the work done.[22] This carries forth his critique in his Loci Communes, in which Melancthon asserts,

Those who perform masses to do some good work, to offer Christ to God for the living and the dead with the thought that the more often it is repeated the better it is done commit a godless error. In my opinion these errors should be blamed on Thomas in large part, since he taught that the mass profited others besides persons who ate of it.[23]

The critique here is clear. Melancthon opposes the notion of a sacrifice in the sense that it can be repetitiously done for the better (which is true in the context of the system of merit), and that it can be offered on behalf of those who do not eat of it. Melancthon does not condemn the notion that the Eucharist sacramentally re-presents the sacrifice of Christ. In fact, in The Larger Catechism in the Book of Concord, the Eucharist is expressly stated to give the true body and blood of Christ and convey the remission of sins.[24]

The Lutheran critique of the Mass featured strongly in England. The English polemics regarding the sacrifice of the mass were thoroughly situated within the broader question of merit: did the mass propitiate God, and thereby alleviate judicial punishments owed to those in purgatory or the living, on account of the temporal debt of sin?[25] For instance, King Henry VIII, in response to The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, centered his defense of the mass on this very proposition. In his words, Luther’s errors are in claiming

That the Mass is no sacrifice; that [the private mass] is only profitable to the Priest, not to the people; that is nothing available either to the dead, or to the Living; that to sing Mass for sins, for any necessity, or for the dead, is an impious error.[26]

For Henry, the issue is the Lutheran denial that the mass can avail to render God propitious towards the sins of the faithful.[27]

Thomas More, who may have helped Henry VIII compose the treatise, connects the sacrifice of the mass similarly to the relief of the pains of those in purgatory. His work, The Supplication of Souls, was written in response to a treatise (The Supplication for the Beggars) decrying the practice of indulgences which, instead of being given to the poor, were given to the relief of the temporal punishments imposed on those in purgatory. One of his key arguments for the existence of purgatory is as follows:

For since that God, of his righteousness, will not leave sin unpunished; nor his goodness will perpetually punish the fault after the man’s conversion: it followeth that the punishment shall be temporal. And, now, since the man often dieth before such punishment had either at God’s hand, by some affliction sent him, or at his own, by due penance done—which the most part of people wantonly doth forsloth—a very child, almost, may see the consequent: that the punishment at the death remaining due and undone is to be endured and sustained after.[28]

More makes it clear, anticipating the Catechism of the Council of Trent cited above, that purgatory is inflicted to recompense the wrongs done in this life for which due satisfaction was not yet made.[29] More locates the role of the mass in the context of relieving temporal punishments via almsgiving, prayers, and other such good works.[30] Masses are an instance of the overarching principle that one can make satisfaction for another.

John Frith, defending the Supplication of Beggars, similarly identified the argument used in defense of purgatory:

The first and chiefest reason that moveth [John Rastell] (yea and all other) to affirm purgatory, is this, which reason made he putteth both in the first chapter of his third dialogue, and also in the last. “Man (saith he) is made to serve and honour God ; now if man be negligent about the commandments of God, and commit some venial sin, for which he ought to be punished by the justice of God, and die suddenly without repentance, and have not made sufficient satisfaction unto God here in the world, his soul ought neither immediately to come into the glorious place of heaven, because it is somewhat defouled with sin, neither ought it to go to hell unto eternal damnation; but by all good order of justice, that soul must be purged in another place to make satisfaction for those offences, that it may afterward be received into the glorious place of heaven. And so, by the justice of God, there must needs be a purgatory.”[31]

Frith insists that since Jesus made full satisfaction to the Father on our behalf, there is no need for additional satisfactory acts to be made. Therefore, since all sins (including their pains, which is just the embodied outworking of guilt) have been covered in Christ, there can be no more to pay in purgatory; for “the nature of mercy is to forgive, but purgatory will have all paid and satisfied.”[32] If God has forgiven sin, then it would be unrighteous to punish someone for that which they are already forgiven.[33] Whatever one makes of this argument, it’s clear that Frith is addressing opponents who are sketching a punitive vision of purgatory which grounds the possibility of vicariously satisfactory alms, works, masses, etcetera. This critique is echoed by Tyndale.[34]

What we see in the Anglican Reformers, who move beyond Tyndale and Frith’s generally Zwinglian view of the Eucharist,[35] is an affirmation of this critique of the mass. We will examine in more detail John Jewel and Thomas Cooper’s arguments, which were popularly read during the English Reformation. In his famous Apology, Jewel writes,

Besides, where they say, and sometimes do persuade fools, that they are able by their masses to distribute and apply unto men’s commodity all the merits of Christ’s death, yea, although many times the parties think nothing of the matter, and understand full little what is done, this is a mockery, a heathenish fancy, and a very toy. For it is our faith that applieth the death and cross of Christ to our benefit, and not the act of the massing priest. “Faith had in the Sacraments,” saith Augustine, “doth justify, and not the Sacraments.” And Origen saith, “Christ is the Priest, the Propitiation, and Sacrifice: which Propitiation cometh to every one by means of faith.” That by this reckoning, we say that the Sacraments of Christ without faith do not once profit those that be alive; a great deal less do they profit those that be dead.[36]

In the very next paragraph, Jewel goes on to critique purgatory. What’s clear from his critique, then, is his concern with the application of the mass in the context of the system of merit. Jewel’s critique also echoes the concern that the mass works to accrue merit and discharge the debt of sin ex opere operato, as he connects the efficacy of mass to faith. He echoes this critique in his exchange with Thomas Harding, writing,

Then ye began to tell the simple that it was sufficient for them to sit by; that your mass was a propitiatory sacrifice for their sins; that it was available unto them ex opere operato, although they understood not what it meant; that you had power to apply it to quick and dead, and to whom ye listed; and that the very hearing thereof of itself was meritorious. Upon this foundation ye erected your chantries, your monasteries, your pardons, your supererogations, and I know not what.[37]

Once again, the system of merit is clearly in view. Jewel critiques the notion that the mass can be applied ex opere operato to the “quick and to the dead.” He then argues that the “foundation” of merit grounds “your chantries, your monasteries, your pardons, your supererogations.” If one keeps the system of merit in mind, then Jewel’s argument becomes clear. If one thinks that they can win merit which covers the temporal debt of punishment through various works, then this winning of merit will provide the motivation for these various works.

Thomas Cooper, similarly, locates his critique of the private mass in the overall system of merit. He defines the private mass as follows:

It is a sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ…by one priest alone offered to God the Father for the sins of quick and dead: which, without any to participate with him, he may apply to the benefit of what persons and things he listeth…that one may offer it for quick and dead, that it is in the priest’s power to apply it, all your sort do not only without resistance easily confess, but without reason stoutly defend.[38]

Once again, the issue here is clearly the application of the mass to remit sins of the living or the dead. This critique, once again, makes sense when one keeps the purgatorial imagination current of the day in mind: the offering of the mass could lighten temporal punishments. Furthermore, this paragraph is useful as a paradigmatic English critique of the mass: the system of merit, in which the mass functioned to release temporal punishments, hung in the backdrop.
My conclusions here seem to vindicate C.W. Dugmore’s conclusions reached in his book The Mass and the English Reformers which, while receiving discussion in the late 50s and early 60s,[39] has since fallen out of contemporary discussion. Dugmore argues that the Reformers, while they would not “countenance the notions concerning the temporal benefits procured by the mass,” nevertheless affirm that the Eucharist is a sacrifice insofar as it commemorates Christ’s passion and makes the benefits available for the full remission of sin.[40] He argues that, in fact, Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, and many others took issue with Zwinglian denials of the spiritual presence of the real body and blood of Christ, and positively affirmed a realist-symbolist Augustinian view of the Eucharist.[41] For instance, Cranmer, in his debate with Stephen Gardner, seems to heartily affirm the notion that we are co-mingled, as it were, with Christ in the Eucharist and are made partakers of the fruits of his passion.[42] Gardner and Cranmer also both critiqued the mass as a sacrifice which gains satisfaction for the remission of sins.[43]

Given the approving use of Peter Lombard’s definition of the Eucharistic sacrifice by the Anglican divines, then, we can sum up the core critique of a propitiatory mass as such. The Anglican divines rejected the notion that the mass could be offered up to win temporal merit which suffices for the remission of temporal debt (and hence, the forgiveness of sins in that sense). This explains why the critique is so often connected to a critique of purgatory as a place of punishment, wherein those punishments could be relieved by suffrages, works, and masses. They did not deny that the mass commemorates, in a realistic way, the Passion, such that the self-offering of Christ is sacramentally present in the bread and wine. Christ, through the bread and wine, makes the faithful sharers of the fruits of his passion and further engrafts them into his deified humanity. The difference between the Roman Catholic and Anglican doctrines of the Eucharist, then, centers on the notion of temporal debt which sustains the notion of the mass as a satisfactory offering for sin is essential to a sacramentally valid conception of the priesthood.

2 – An Impetrative Sacrifice

Anglicans, famously, offer the Eucharist up as a “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.” Hence, one of our post-communion prayers reads:

O Lord and heavenly Father, we, thy humble servants, entirely desire thy fatherly goodness mercifully to accept this, our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving; most humbly beseeching thee to grant that, by the merits and death of thy Son Jesus Christ, and through faith in his blood, we and all thy whole Church may obtain remission of our sins and all other benefits of his passion. And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls, and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching thee that all we who are partakers of this holy Communion may be fulfilled with thy grace and heavenly benediction. And although we be unworthy, through our manifold sins, to offer unto thee any sacrifice, yet we beseech thee to accept this, our bounden duty and service, not weighing our merits but pardoning our offences, through Jesus Christ our Lord; by whom, and with whom, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, all honour and glory be unto thee, O Father Almighty, world without end. Amen.[44]

The grammar of the prayer is fascinating. It is in offering up the Eucharist to the Father that we beseech God to grant us the remission of sins through the merits of Christ. Because the Eucharist sacramentally re-presents the one perfect sacrifice of Christ, the priest prays that the Father would grant forgiveness through the merits of Christ made present in the consecrated bread and wine.

Here, then, we have the foundation for what would be termed an “impetrative” sacrifice. In the Anglican divines of the 17th and 18th centuries, we find a notion emerging that the priest impetrates or entreats God on behalf of the whole church on account of the sacrifice re-presented on the altar. Hence, John Cosin writes,

And in this sense, it is not only a eucharistical but also a propitiatory sacrifice. And to prove it a propitiatory sacrifice, always so acknowledged by the ancient Church, there can be no better argument than that it was offered up not only for the living but also for the dead, for those who were absent, for travelers, for Jews, for heretics, etc., who could have no other benefit from it but as a propitiatory sacrifice. That this was indeed how they offered it—read a whole army of Fathers (apud Mald. De Sacr., p. 342, etc.). Nos autem ita comparati sumus, ut cum tam multis et magnis authoribus errare malimus, quam cum Puritanis verum dicere. Not that it makes any propitiation as the sacrifice of the Cross did, but that it obtains and brings into act that propitiation which was once made by Christ; and in this way, we may speak of prayer, for that is propitiatory too. Why should we then make any controversy about this?[45]

Cosin’s ingenious move here is to advance a notion of a propitiatory sacrifice by way of impetration, thus preserving the Anglican critique while also affirming the applicatory function of offering the passion of Christ to the Father via hallowed bread and wine. This notion makes good use of the post-communion prayer quoted above—found in the 1549, 1552, and 1559 BCPs—to find a way to maintain the Anglican rejection of the Roman system of merit (and the critique of the mass situated within that system) while also preserving a robust notion of Eucharistic sacrifice. John Bramhall, similarly, writes,

The Holy Eucharist is a commemoration, a representation, and an application of the propitiatory Sacrifice of the Cross. If the Sacrifice of the Mass has any other propitiatory power or virtue beyond commemorating, representing, and applying the merit of the Sacrifice of the Cross, let it be plainly stated what it is. Bellarmine knew no more of this Sacrifice than we do: Sacrificium crucis, etc. — “The Sacrifice of the Cross remits all sins past, present, and future, since it acquired a most sufficient price for the sins of the whole world. Therefore, that Sacrifice being finished and sins being remitted, there remains no other Oblation for sin like it—that is, for acquiring a price or value for the remission of sins.” To what purpose, then, does the Sacrifice of the Mass serve? Hear him out: Adhuc sunt, etc. — “There are yet, and will be until the end of the world, those to whom this price of deliverance must be applied.” If this is all, as it clearly is—to apply that price of deliverance which Christ paid for us—then what noise have they raised in the world to no purpose? If so, then our Sacrifice is as good as theirs.[46]

Bramhall, like Cosin, challenges the Roman notion of the sacrifice of the mass while maintaining that the Eucharist sets the Passion of the Son before the eyes of the Father. For Bramhall, this fact is central to an adequate conception of the formal priesthood:

We acknowledge all power necessary for the exercise of the pastoral office. We acknowledge an Eucharistical Sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving; a commemorative Sacrifice, or a memorial of the Sacrifice of the Cross; a representative Sacrifice, or a representation of the Passion of Christ before the eyes of His Heavenly Father; an impetrative Sacrifice, or an impetration of the fruit and benefit of His Passion, by way of real prayer; and, lastly, an applicative Sacrifice, or an application of His merits unto our souls. Let him, that dare, go one step further than we do; and say that it is a suppletory Sacrifice, to supply the defects of the Sacrifice of the Cross. Or else let them hold their peace, and speak no more against us in this point of Sacrifice forever.[47]

The “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” does not merely give thanks to the Father for a sacrifice received, but places the Passion before the Father such that the priest can impetrate the benefits of the Passion for the good of the church.
We can articulate a robust Anglican theology of Eucharist as such. By rendering present the divinized humanity of the Word, the Eucharist renders the sacrifice of Christ truly present in the midst of the people. The offering of the body and blood in bread and wine is an offering of Christ’s sacrifice. For properly speaking, Christ makes atonement in the heavenly tabernacle.[48] Upon bearing the sins of the world in his death, and carrying the wounds of his crucifixion in his resurrection, Jesus presents his crucified and risen body in the tabernacle in heaven and makes sacrifice via offering his sin-bearing-and-glorified body to the Father. The heavenly intercession of Christ, then, consists in his sacrificial self-presentation to the Father, on account of which the Father forgives the sins of those for whom Christ pleads his death. In the Eucharist, one participates in Christ’s crucified and risen body. As Brant Pitre writes,

Jesus not only saw the Eucharist as a participation in his bodily death on the cross. He also saw it as a participation in his bodily resurrection. The reason he would be able to give his body and blood to “many,” and not just to the disciples, is that as the messianic Son of Man, he would not just be killed, but raised, and ascend to where he was before—in heaven. There, from his heavenly throne, he would be able to pour himself out upon the altars of the world, giving his crucified and risen body and blood to all. Then would his promise to the apostles be fulfilled: they would be able to “eat and drink at my table in my kingdom” (Luke 22:30).[49]

Since the Eucharist is a participation in the divinized humanity of Jesus, it offers Christ to the Father. Bishop Joseph Mede writes,

This commemoration is to be made to God, His Father, and is not a bare remembering or merely putting ourselves in mind, as is commonly supposed, but rather a putting of God in mind. For every sacrifice is directed unto God, and the oblation therein, whatsoever it may be, has Him as its object and not man. If, therefore, the Eucharist is Sacrificium Christi commemoratium, as ours grant, then the commemoration therein must be made unto God. And if Christ therein is offered objectively—that is, as the object of the commemoration made, as that learned bishop speaks—if the commemoration of Him is an oblation of Him, to whom is this oblation, that is, commemoration, made but to God?[50]

Bishop George Hickes, similarly, writes,

Hence, as I have shown and shall show again, in the time of the Apostles, the bread and wine in the Holy Eucharist came to be called δώρα and προσφοραί, “gifts” and “offerings,” and the ministers of the Gospel προσεδρεύοντες τῷ θυσιαστηρίῳ, “waiters at the altar,” and προσενέγκοντες τὰ δώρα, “offerers” or “sacrificers.” Their ministration at the Lord’s table was considered the most special and excellent part of their priestly function. By making the bread and wine a holy and acceptable sacrifice to God through solemn oblation and prayers, they thereby made intercession and atonement for their own sins and the sins of the people. This was done as a most solemn rite of supplication, according to the nature and use of sacrifices, by which God is atoned and His mercy and favor procured.[51]

Since the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ are present in the bread and the wine by the Holy Spirit, the Eucharist is a properly impetrative sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. That is, through the setting forth of Christ’s Passion in the Eucharist, the priest makes an embodied entreaty to God for his mercies on account of the merits of Christ.[52] In the Eucharist, one has an impetrative sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving (and propitiatory in that sense), such that the sacrament sacramentally re-presents the one sacrifice of Christ for the priest and people to plead to God. The priest, in offering to the Father, impetrates the Father for his mercies on account of Christ’s merits. The people, receiving the sacrifice, impetrate the Father through receiving a furtherance of their union with Christ. In this way, the sacrifice of the mass is effective for the entire debt of sin, leaving none of it left and renewing one’s Baptism fully, by re-presenting the Passion, pleading it before the Father, and providing it for the people of God to take, eat, and be further swept upward and inward into the life of God in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Notes

  1. Joris Geldhof, “The Role of Liturgy in Apostolicae Curae and Saepius Officio,” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 16, no. 3 (July 2, 2016): 169–81, https://doi.org/10.1080/1474225X.2016.1225941. ↑
  2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1952) Suppl. Append II. Q1.A1. ↑
  3. ST. III.q86.a4 ↑
  4. J. Waterworth, trans., The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Œcumenical Council of Trent: Celebrated Under the Sovereign Pontiffs, Paul III, Julius III and Pius IV (London: C. Dolman, 1848) Session XIV, “On the Most Holy Sacrament of Penance.” ↑
  5. Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1984) 218–25. ↑
  6. Heinrich Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, trans. Roy Joseph Defarrari (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder Book Company, 1957). ↑
  7. Martin Jugie, Purgatory and the Means to Avoid It, trans. Malachy Gerard Carroll (New York, NY: Spiritual Book Associates Inc, 1949) 5. ↑
  8. John Hornyhold, The Real Principles of Catholics (Dublin, Ireland: R. Coyne, 1821) 278. ↑
  9. Ibid., 278 ↑
  10. J. Donovan, trans., The Catechism of the Council of Trent (Dublin, Ireland: Richard Coyne, 1829) 292–93. ↑
  11. Ibid., 249–250 ↑
  12. Peter B. Nockles, “Palmer, William Patrick (1803–1885), Church of England Clergyman and Theologian,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/21225. ↑
  13. William Palmer, Letters to N. Wiseman On the Errors of Romanism in Respect to the Worship of Saints, Satisfactions, Purgatory, Indulgences, and the Worship of Images and Relics, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, MD: Jos. Robinson, 1849) 37. ↑
  14. Ibid., 40 ↑
  15. See John Johnson, The Unbloody Sacrifice and Altar Unveiled and Supported (London: Robert Knaplock, 1724). ↑
  16. John Schofield, Philip Melanchthon and the English Reformation, St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2006); Dewey D. Wallace, “The Anglican Appeal to Lutheran Sources: Philipp Melanchthon’s Reputation in Seventeenth-Century England,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 52, no. 4 (1983): 355–67. ↑
  17. Martin Luther, Church and Sacraments, ed. Paul W. Robinson, Annotated Luther, volume 3 (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 2016), 49. ↑
  18. Ibid., 50-51 ↑
  19. William T. Cavanaugh, “Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Social Imagination in Early Modern Europe.,” Journal of Medieval & Early Modern Studies 31, no. 3 (September 1, 2001): 585, https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-31-3-585. ↑
  20. Philip Melanchthon, The Chief Theological Topics: Loci Praecipui Theologici 1559, trans. Jacob A. O. Preus, 2nd ed (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Pub. House, 2010), 282. ↑
  21. Ibid., 282 ↑
  22. Ibid., 283 ↑
  23. Philip Melanchthon, Commonplaces: Loci Communes 1521, trans. Christian Preus (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2014), 184. ↑
  24. Theodore G. Tappert and Vereinigte Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche Deutschlands, eds., The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 30. [print.] (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2001). ↑
  25. This is thoroughly documented in Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 47–92. ↑
  26. Henry VIII, Defence of the Seven Sacraments (New York, NY: Benzinger Brothers, 1908), 258. ↑
  27. Ibid., 290 ↑
  28. Thomas More, “The Supplication of Souls,” in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More. 7: Letter to Bugenhagen [u.a.] / [Ed. by Frank Manley …], trans. Frank Manley (New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr, 1990), 173. ↑
  29. Ibid., 173–74 ↑
  30. Ibid., 198-200 ↑
  31. John Frith, “A Disputation of Purgatory,” in The Works of the English Reformers William Tyndale and John Frith, ed. Thomas Russell, vol. 3 (London: Samuel Bentley, 1831), 97. ↑
  32. Ibid., 130–39 ↑
  33. Ibid., 140 ↑
  34. William Tyndale, An Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue, The Supper of the Lord, After the True Meaning of John VI. and Cor XI., and WM. Tracy’s Testament Expounded, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1850), 140–41. ↑
  35. See Glen Bowman, “William Tyndale’s Eucharistic Theology: Lollard and Zwinglian Influences,” Anglican and Episcopal History 66, no. 4 (1997): 422–34. ↑
  36. John Jewel, The Apology of the Church of England, trans. Anne Lady Bacon (London: SPCK, 1864), 36. ↑
  37. John Jewel, The Works of John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, ed. John Ayre, vol. 2 (Cambridge: The Parker Society, 1845), 628. ↑
  38. Thomas Cooper, An Answer in Defence of the Truth Against the Apology of the Private Mass (Cambridge: The Parker Society, 1850), 54–58. ↑
  39. See E. H. ECKEL, “The Mass and the English Reformers,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 29, no. 4 (1960): 359–61; Gottfried G. Krodel, “The Mass and the English Reformers,” ed. C. W. Dugmore, The Journal of Religion 40, no. 2 (1960): 147–48; Massey H. Shepherd, “The Mass and the English Reformers,” Church History 29, no. 1 (1960): 106–7, https://doi.org/10.2307/3161636; William R. Trimble, “The Mass and the English Reformation,” ed. C. W. Dugmore, The Review of Politics 23, no. 1 (1961): 119–20; W. A. Van Roo, “The Mass and the English Reformers,” Gregorianum 41, no. 2 (1960): 347–48. ↑
  40. C.W. Dugmore, The Mass and the English Reformers (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1958), 118–30. ↑
  41. Dugmore, 141–75. ↑
  42. Dugmore, 184–85. ↑
  43. Dugmore, 193–94. ↑
  44. Samuel L. Bray and Drew N. Keane, eds., The 1662 Book of Common Prayer, International edition (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021). This is found also in the 1549, 1551, and 1559 editions as well. ↑
  45. John Cosin, The Works of the Right Reverent Father in God, John Cosin, Lord Bishop of Durham, vol. 5 (Oxford: John Henry and James Parker, 1850), 120. ↑
  46. John Bramhall, The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, John Bramhall, vol. 2 (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1852), 8. ↑
  47. Bramhall 2:276 ↑
  48. See David M. Moffitt, Rethinking the Atonement: New Perspectives on Jesus’s Death, Resurrection, and Ascension (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 2022); David M. Moffitt, Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Leiden: Brill, 2013). ↑
  49. Brant James Pitre, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist: Unlocking the Secrets of the Last Supper, 1st ed (New York: Doubleday, 2011), 196. ↑
  50. Joseph Mede, The Works of Joseph Mede (London: John Clark, 1648), 522. ↑
  51. George Hickes, Two Treatises on the Christian Priesthood and on The Dignity of The Episcopal Order, vol. 2 (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1847), 87. ↑
  52. See John Bramhall, The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, John Bramhall, vol. 2 (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1852), 276. ↑
Sean Luke
About

Sean Luke is a graduate of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School with his Masters of Divinity and Masters of Systematic Theology. He has published articles in journals such as The Scottish Journal of Theology, New Blackfriars, Journal of Reformed Theology, among others. He also runs the YouTube channel "Anglican Aesthetics."

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