"A feast upon a sacrifice": Newman and the High Church tradition contra Pusey
The phrase is from a Christmas sermon by John Henry Newman in 1840*. In the words of a Roman Catholic Newman scholar, it was "a sermon at the height of the Oxford Movement when he was discovering the truth of Catholicism".
This is what makes Newman's description here of the institution of the Eucharist particularly interesting. The phrase "a feast upon that sacrifice" was taken from Waterland, his distinctive description of the relationship between the Eucharist and the Lord's atoning sacrifice:
But though the Lord's Supper is neither a proper sacrifice, nor the great, original, or primitive federal rite, strictly speaking; yet being a feast upon a sacrifice ...
It is objected, that Christ's crucified body, and blood shed, are now no more, have no being as such, and therefore there can be no feast upon them; consequently, it is but an airy notion to imagine any such feast or sacrifice. To which we may reply, that though the crucified body, as such, is not, and though the blood shed is not, yet the fruits remain, and ever will remain, as a feast for good men here and hereafter ...
for as the Jews literally feasted upon the typical sacrifices, so Christians spiritually feast upon the body and blood of Christ, the true and grand sacrifice. Therefore Christ's sacrifice is our sacrifice, but in the passive sense, for us to partake of, not to give unto God. Christ once gave himself to God for us, and now gives himself to us, to feast upon, not to sacrifice ...
for though Christ is our sacrifice to commemorate, or to feast upon, he is not our sacrifice to offer up in a proper sacrificial sense.
(From Waterland's A Review of the Doctrine of the Eucharist, as laid down in Scripture and Antiquity, 1737.)
Waterland's phrase was the most influential account in the High Church tradition of the relationship between Sacrament and Sacrifice. It was, however, not the only account available. John Johnson's The Unbloody Sacrifice (1714-18) gave a more 'advanced' account:
That the Eucharistical bread and wine, or body and blood, are to be offered for the acknowledgment of God’s dominion and other attributes, and for procuring divine blessing, especially remission of sins.
Against this, Waterland denied that the elements are to be understood as having a sacrificial quality:
they are not a proper sacrifice, but symbolical, and commemorative, being that they are memorial signs of the sacrifice, not the sacrifice itself.
While Johnson's account was to find favour amongst some Non-jurors, it was not to become characteristic of the High Church tradition: it was Waterland's "feast upon a sacrifice" which was to become the normative High Church account.
Nockles states:
Waterland's view of the eucharist as 'a feast upon a sacrifice' was a more Protestant position than Johnson's.
And yet it was Waterland's phrase which Newman used in late 1840. This suggests something of the vitality of High Church Eucharistic teaching, that, even as Newman and the Tractarians were consciously departing from the High Church tradition, that tradition's understanding of the Eucharist continued to shape and define the Oxford Movement, until Pusey's 1843 sermon The Holy Eucharist, a Comfort to the Penitent. In contrast to Newman's 1840 sermon, Pusey made no use of Waterland's phrase. He did, however, quote Johnson's The Unbloody Sacrifice. The Tractarian rejection of the native High Church tradition's Eucharistic teaching had commenced.
*Although the 'note' to this sermon in Sermons on the Subjects of the Day states that it was an Easter sermon, commentators consistently describe it as Newman's Christmas Day sermon 1840, and the text for the sermon - Ps. 45:3, 4 - is from one of the proper Psalms at Mattins on Christmas Day.
(The illustration is from the Newman Window in the chapel of Oriel College, Oxford, depicting Newman as a traditional Anglican parson.)
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