Overview

The sacrament par excellence, the Eucharist, has been upheld as the foundational sacrament of Christ's Body called church, yet it has confounded Christian thinking and practice throughout history. Its symbolism points to the paradox of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of God in Jesus of Nazareth, which St Paul describes as a stumbling block (skandalon). Yet the scandal of sacramentality, not only illustrated by but enacted in the Eucharist, has not been sufficiently accounted for in the ecclesiologies and sacramental theologies of the Christian tradition. Despite what appears to be an increasingly post-ecclesial world, sacrament remains a persistent theme in contemporary culture, often in places least expected. Drawing upon the biblical image of 'the Word made flesh', this interdisciplinary study examines the scandal of sacramentality along the twofold thematic of the scandal of language (word) and the scandal of the body (flesh). While sacred theology can think through this scandal only at significant risk to its own stability, the fictional discourses of literature and the arts are free to explore this scandal in a manner that simultaneously augments and challenges traditional notions of sacrament and sacramentality, and by extension, what it means to describe the church as a 'eucharistic community'.

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Hancock notes that, although, on the whole, eucharistically centred Churches in the West are in decline, popular culture is often full of Eucharistic allusions. Literary and artistic media, in particular those in the post-modern idiom, are often better at keeping the paradoxes intact, and expressing dimensions of the eucharist which more specifically theological writing tends to airbrush out.--Revd Dr Edward Dowler Church Times (10/01/2015)

""Hancock notes that, although, on the whole, eucharistically centred Churches in the West are in decline, popular culture is often full of Eucharistic allusions. Literary and artistic media, in particular those in the post-modern idiom, are often better at keeping the paradoxes intact, and expressing dimensions of the eucharist...which more specifically theological writing tends to airbrush out."" -Revd Dr Edward Dowler, Church Times, 9 October 2015 ""Anglicans, Catholics, and even Baptists could read this work with interest. Each would find something that accords with and destabilizes their tradition's dogmatic and liturgical norms. Yet that is precisely the author's point: none of us have the sacrament within our grasp."" -Chris Dodson, Reviews in Religion and Theology 23:1, 2016

Author Information

Brannon Hancock is a pastor and theologian in the Church of the Nazarene and an adjunct professor at Trevecca Nazarene University and Wesley Seminary at Indiana Wesleyan University. His work has appeared in Literature and Theology, The Journal of Religion and Film, and Conversations in Religion and Theology.

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