Recent Philosophical Work on the Doctrine of the Eucharist

Abstract

The doctrine of the Eucharist has been one of the more fruitful locales of philosophical reflection within Christian theology. The central philosophical question has been, ‘what is the state of affairs such that it is apt to say of a piece of bread, “This is the body of Christ”?’ In this article, I offer a delineation of various families of answers to this question as they have been proffered in the history of the church. These families are distinguished by how they view the presence of the body of Christ as well as the continued presence of the bread and wine after consecration. I then provide a specific examination of some recent attempts to explicate these views. A number of the recent work has focused on the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, but I also survey consubstantiation, transignification, and a recent revival of impanation as potential means for describing the metaphysical realities of the Eucharist.

Recent developments in analytic Christology

“…One possible problem that humanity faces is original sin that alienates humans from God. Crisp Lastly, Arcadi (2015Arcadi ( , 2016aArcadi ( , 2018 appropriates the three-part, concrete-compositional model of the Incarnation as a means of expositing a view of Christ's presence in the Eucharist. Many theologians of the past have drawn a comparison between the Incarnation and the Eucharist.…”

“…Lastly, Arcadi (, , ) appropriates the three‐part, concrete‐compositional model of the Incarnation as a means of expositing a view of Christ's presence in the Eucharist. Many theologians of the past have drawn a comparison between the Incarnation and the Eucharist.…”

Eucaristía, presencia real y viajes en el tiempo

“…La eucaristía y las cuestiones que le son asociadas han vuelto a ser objeto de discusión en el marco de estos intereses generales (cf. Pruss, 2009Pruss, , 2013Pickup, 2015;Heil, 2015;Arcadi, 2016;desde otra perspectiva, Pickstock, 1998). En este trabajo se va a examinar una cuestión que no ha sido considerada expresamente en esta discusión reciente y que tiene que ver con la conexión existente entre el sacrificio del Calvario y el sacrificio de la Misa.…”

Transubstantiation

“…These accounts range from that of multiple location accounts(Pruss 2009), transfiguration accounts(Baber 2013), Cartesian accounts(Heil 2015) and essentialist accounts (Toner 2011), all the way to time-travel accounts(Pickup 2015). For a helpful introduction to these accounts, and other types of accounts, seeArcadi (2016).5 This metaphysical baggage would be that of one needing to assume, for example, such things as the reality of time-travel in Martin Pickup's account, or multiple location in Alexander Pruss' (2015) account, or the veracity of Cartesian physics and metaphysics in JohnHeil's (2015) account. I take Lowe's account to be one that has less metaphysical baggage, given the (quite) wide acceptance of Neo-Aristotelian metaphysics in the field of contemporary metaphysics.…”