The Feasts of Pentecost & Corpus Christi

The question of what we mean when we speak of God being present, or present to us, is a deeply interesting one which two of our recent feasts give us much cause to ponder, namely Pentecost and Corpus Christi.

As always, what might be called the angle of approach to such questions has much impact on the answers. For example, the doctrine of creation tells us essentially that all that is, which is to say the entire universe and all reality, depends for its existence at all times upon the continuing will of God that it should all continue to be. Thought of in this way, it would seem clear that God is equally present at all points to all of creation. This in turn would seem to make it hard to understand how God could be more present at this or that point in space or time than any other. Yet clearly, the Biblical witness, and much Christian experience, tells us that a more specific sense of presence has been of fundamental importance through the course of salvation history going all the way back to Moses and the burning bush on the one hand and on to the life and person of Jesus Christ on the other, before we even get to the profundities of the Trinity and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the nature of the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist which we celebrate in Corpus Christi.

All of which brings us face to face with a profound, but hard to analyse, reality – which is that Christianity has always held in tension two irreducible claims about God: namely that God is radically other — wholly transcendent, beyond all creaturely categories — and that God is near, intimately present to the world and to us as human beings and his creatures in ways that transform both. 

These twin convictions of transcendence and immanence are not merely abstract metaphysical postulates; they are anchored in the narrative structure of salvation history and come to particular expression in the great mysteries of the Eucharist and Pentecost. 

The God who addressed Moses from the burning bush as I AM WHO I AM — refused thereby to be reduced to a name that human beings might misunderstand and treat as somehow an object within the universe rather than the ground of its existence — yet for Christians that is the same God who, in the fullness of time, took human flesh, and was sacrificed for us and was then resurrected. Moreover, that same Jesus as one part of the Triune Godhead broke bread and then in a further special manifestation poured out the Holy Spirit upon the Church at Pentecost. 

That movement which we have observed liturgically from Sinai to the Upper Room, to the Day of Pentecost and on through time in the Eucharist is a movement of progressive divine self-donation and manifestation which also contains within itself an inescapable sense – somehow – of an intensification of the divine presence.

And as we think further about all this, it may be helpful to keep in mind some of the ways in which theologians have distinguished what we might call the several mutually interlocking modes of that divine presence.

1. Omnipresence (praesentia generalis) is the sense touched on at the outset above whereby we understand God as present to all things as the sustaining ground of their being. 

Thomas Aquinas articulated this by explaining that God is present to every creature by essence, by power, and by knowledge (per essentiam, per potentiam, per praesentiam) — not as one object among others in space, but as the inexhaustible act of being upon which all contingent existence depends. This is not a diminished or impersonal presence; it is the very condition of possibility for any presence at all.

2. Covenantal presence: Scripture narrates a particular presence of God to his chosen people, the people of Israel. Together with the Shekinah glory that fills the Tabernacle, the cloud by day and pillar of fire by night, the Temple as the special place of YHWH in the Holy of Holies — which understanding was not merely metaphorical but involved tokens of a genuine divine condescension, a self-location of the God who is everywhere into particular places and relationships. This covenantal logic reaches its telos in the Incarnation, the irreversible and hypostatic union of divine and human natures in the one person of the eternal Son and flows on very naturally to inform our approach to the Eucharist.

3. Pneumatological presence: With the Resurrection and Ascension of the incarnate Word, a new mode of divine presence becomes possible — and indeed necessary. The departure of the Son in his bodily particularity makes way for the advent of the Spirit, who is not less than God but is God in the mode of interiority, dwelling within believers and the gathered community rather than among them as an external figure. This is the presence inaugurated definitively at Pentecost.

4. Sacramental presence: Christian theology, has consistently further maintained that God is present in a distinctive and efficacious way in the sacraments — and most especially in the Eucharist. The precise metaphysical analysis of this presence has been fiercely contested, but the pastoral and doxological conviction of the central and supreme reality of a special presence with us when the Church gathers to bless bread and wine at the altar in the name of Christ has endured as one of the most profound and central truths and mysteries of our faith. 

And putting the matter thus, indeed brings us to a further very important point which is that these successive modes of understanding the divine presence also make clear that, while we have reason to affirm these central beliefs as truths of our faith, the fulness of what it means for these beliefs to be true is something that we shall only fully have disclosed to us after the general resurrection and the life to come – something that should rightly engender some degree of humility here and now about the specific mechanisms whereby we may seek to understand these mysteries theologically and philosophically here and now. 

Which brings us to the two special instances referenced here, of how we understand both Pentecost and the Eucharist as particular instances of and occasion of the divine presence. 

Pentecost

The account in Acts 2:1–13 — featuring the descent of the Spirit upon the disciples gathered in Jerusalem, manifested as tongues of fire and a rushing wind — marks not merely the founding of the Church but a new ontological reality in the economy of salvation. 

In Jewish tradition, Shavuot (Pentecost) commemorated both the wheat harvest and, in certain streams of Second Temple Judaism, the giving of the Torah at Sinai. 

Luke’s narrative invites us to understand the descent of the Spirit as a new Sinai: where once the law was written on stone tablets as an external covenant, now the Spirit writes the law upon the heart, fulfilling the prophecy of Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 36.

Patristic theology developed this pneumatological theme extensively. 

Basil of Caesarea’s De Spiritu Sancto (375 CE) articulates the Spirit as the perfecting cause of all divine action: the Father is the originating source, the Son the creative agent, the Spirit the one who brings to completion and sanctifies. 

For Basil thus, the Spirit is not an impersonal force but the very breath of God who distributes gifts to the Church, who is present wherever the Eucharist is celebrated, and who, as the Giver of Life, deifies (theōsis) those in whom he dwells. 

Athanasius similarly argued in his Letters to Serapion that the Spirit’s coequal divinity with the Father and Son is precisely demonstrated by the Spirit’s capacity to communicate the divine life — to make creatures sharers in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4).

Eastern Orthodox Theology of the Spirit

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition a foundational distinction was articulated by Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century between the divine essence and divine energies, and this provides the metaphysical framework for Orthodox accounts of how God can be genuinely present to and within creatures without the creature absorbing or compromising divine transcendence. God in his essence remains utterly unknowable and inaccessible; but the divine energies — which are truly God, not secondary emanations — pervade all creation and are supremely communicated in the Church’s sacramental life.

Pentecost, for Orthodoxy, is therefore the feast that makes explicit what the Eucharist enacts week by week. 

The Spirit’s descent does not merely empower the apostles for mission; it constitutes the Church as the Body of Christ animated by the Spirit, extending the Incarnation through time. Vladimir Lossky, perhaps the most systematic Orthodox theologian of divine presence in the twentieth century, spoke of two “hands” of God — the Son and the Spirit — both proceeding from the Father and together accomplishing the economy of salvation. Pentecost is the Spirit’s own mission, coordinate with but distinct from the Son’s, and it creates a new mode of divine immanence: God dwelling not in a temple made with hands but in the living temple of the ecclesial body.

In Roman Catholic theology, we find the same affirmation of the full Palamite insight but in modified forms deploying especially a Thomistic account: God’s presence to creatures by way of grace, which is not merely a created effect of divine power but an uncreated indwelling of the divine Persons themselves (inhabitatio Trinitatis). 

The Council of Trent and subsequent magisterial teaching emphasized that sanctifying grace genuinely communicates the divine life; and Pentecost is understood as the moment when this indwelling, prepared by the Incarnation and made possible by the Paschal mystery, is poured out universally upon the Church. 

Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Dominum et Vivificantem (1986) presented Pentecost as the decisive manifestation of the Spirit as the Paraclete and the Spirit of Truth who continues Christ’s presence in the Church.

Anglican Theology of the Spirit

Anglican theology, shaped as it is by both the Reformation and the Catholic heritage, has tended to hold Pneumatology in close relation to Christology and ecclesiology. 

While it is not possible to do justice to the fulness of his thought here, it can be said that Richard Hooker, whose Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594–1597) remains the most systematic work of classical Anglican theology, understanding the Spirit as the bond of participation between Christ and the believer — the divine medium through which the Eucharist conveys genuine communion with Christ’s person. 

The Spirit, for Hooker, does not replace the ascended Christ but makes the absent (locally) Christ genuinely present spiritually. Such a pneumatological Christology distinguishes Anglican eucharistic theology from both Lutheran consubstantiation (which requires a corporeal omnipresence of Christ’s humanity) and Roman transubstantiation (which requires a metaphysical change of substance in the elements).

All of which brings us then to The Eucharist itself 

and the question of how we understand the true presence within it of Christ. 

The patristic heritage is rich and complex, but on the central claim — that the Eucharist involves a genuine encounter with the risen Christ — remarkably consistent. 

Ignatius of Antioch (d. c. 108 CE) already calls the Eucharist pharmakon athanasias, the “medicine of immortality.” Justin Martyr (First Apology, c. 155 CE) insists that the eucharistic bread and cup are “not common bread and common drink” but “the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.” Cyril of Jerusalem’s Mystagogical Catecheses (c. 350 CE), addressed to the newly baptized, speak with striking directness of the bread becoming the Body and the wine the Blood of Christ through the prayer of invocation (epiclesis). John Chrysostom understands the Eucharist as a participation in the sacrifice of Christ, making present not merely its memorial but its living reality.

But when we come to Augustine of Hippo we find a somewhat distinctive emphasis through his strongly pneumatological and ex opere operantis account of the Eucharist: “Believe, and you have already eaten,” he famously declares. 

For Augustine, the res (the spiritual reality) of the Eucharist — the unity of the Body of Christ — matters more than the sacramentum (the visible sign) but he understands the outward sign as the vehicle of genuine spiritual nourishment. 

Hence Richard Hooker would later find in Augustine a congenial model for his account of  eucharistic receptionism while (and this is very important) firmly emphasizing that both agree: the Body and Blood of Christ are truly received by those who communicate in faith.

Roman Catholic eucharistic theology famously reached its classical formulation at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which formally defined transubstantiation as the term for the change that occurs at consecration, while the Council of Trent (1545–1563) reiterated and defended this dogma against Reformation challenges. 

The doctrine holds that while the accidents (appearances, taste, weight, color) of bread and wine remain, the substance — what the things actually are in their deepest ontological reality — is wholly converted into the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ. 

This transformation is effected by the words of institution spoken by the ordained priest acting in persona Christi capitis.

The Eucharist is, in the language of Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium and Paul VI’s Mysterium Fidei (1965), the “source and summit” (fons et culmen) of the Church’s life. 

The real presence is not merely a presence of Christ’s power or grace, but his full personal presence — body, blood, soul, and divinity —subsisting in the consecrated species so long as the accidents of bread and wine remain. And it is this understanding of  presence that grounded the practices of reservation of the Blessed Sacrament and eucharistic adoration, which in turn connect the Eucharist to a continuing locus of divine immanence extending beyond the liturgical action itself.

Catholic theology also relates Eucharist and Pentecost through the role of the Holy Spirit for the epiclesis in the Roman rite — the invocation of the Spirit upon the gifts — is explicitly placed before the words of institution in the Novus Ordo Mass (1969), while Pentecost is understood as the founding of the Church in which the eucharistic sacrifice perpetually re-presents the Paschal mystery. Pope Benedict XVI’s Sacramentum Caritatis (2007) emphasized that the Spirit is the interior principle of the Eucharist, making present what the words of institution signify.

Eastern Orthodox Theology

Orthodox eucharistic theology shares with Catholicism the conviction that the bread and wine become truly the Body and Blood of Christ, but it characteristically avoids  commitment to the particular the Scholastic formulation of transubstantiation, preferring instead to speak of metabole (transformation) or metousiosis (change of substance) as a mystery that transcends our capacity for  rational analysis. The Orthodox liturgical and theological tradition insists that the Eucharist is not primarily a doctrine to be defined but is rather an experience of communion with the Living God.

Orthodox eucharistic theology is highly Pneumatological. So, the epiclesis — the solemn invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the gifts — is placed after the words of institution in the Byzantine rite, and Orthodox theologians have historically argued that it is the Spirit, invoked through the whole eucharistic prayer as a unified act of anamnesis and epiclesis, who effects the transformation of the gifts. 

As the great eighth-century theologian John of Damascus argued in his De Fide Orthodoxa: just as the Holy Spirit overshadowed the Virgin Mary to bring about the Incarnation, so the same Spirit comes upon the eucharistic gifts to make Christ sacramentally present — same Spirit, same divine action, different mode. This Marian-eucharistic typology is one of the most theologically suggestive contributions of the Eastern tradition.

For Orthodoxy, the Eucharist is also inseparable from Pentecost as the eschatological assembly of the Church. The Divine Liturgy is understood as a participation in the heavenly liturgy, an entry into the eternal present of the Kingdom. The faithful do not merely commemorate the Last Supper; they are caught up into the risen and glorified life of Christ in the Spirit. 

John Zizioulas’s great work Being as Communion (1985) argues that eucharistic theology must be ontologically grounded: and that personhood itself — both divine and human — is relational and communal, and that the Eucharist is the event in which the eschatological community of God constituted by the Spirit becomes concretely present in history.

Anglican Theology

Anglican eucharistic theology has been has striven to hold together both a genuine sacramental realism with a rejection of the more mechanistic or philosophically overdetermined accounts of how that presence is effected. 

The foundational documents of the English Reformation establish the parameters carefully. 

Thomas Cranmer’s 1552 Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563) reject transubstantiation (Article XXVIII), while Article XXIX denies that wicked recipients nonetheless consume the Body and Blood of Christ as would seem to be entailed by the Roman Catholic view.. But Article XXVIII also affirms  firmly that “the bread which we break is a partaking of the Body of Christ” — which is a firm declaration of a eucharistic realism that resists reduction to bare memorialism.

Thus it would be characteristic of much Anglican thoughts here to say that Christ’s Body and Blood are truly given and truly received, but the reception is through faith and by the work of the Holy Spirit, not simply through a change in the physical substance of the elements. 

Arguably this pneumatological account of eucharistic presence receives its fullest articulation in Richard Hooker’s Laws, Book V. Hooker argues that those who ask “what has become of the bread” are asking the wrong question; for the theologically pertinent question is what the faithful communicant receives, and the answer is a genuine participation in Christ’s whole person — his body and blood, human and divine — through the Spirit’s action. For Hooker, the Eucharist is neither is thus a participatio Christi, a real feeding upon the life of the Son through the Spirit.

Such Anglican eucharistic theology clearly affirms the true or real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, even though it is true Anglicanism has spanned a significant internal range of accounts of how all this is to be understood.  Evangelical Anglicans tend to emphasize the pneumatic or spiritual presence, insisting that Christ is truly present to the faithful communicant through faith and the Spirit’s action, while Anglo-Catholic Anglicans affirm a corporeal presence analogous to that maintained by Catholic and Orthodox theology — whilst maintaining that the precise manner of that presence remains ultimately a deep mystery which is a perspective very consonant with that of Eastern Orthodoxy.

Thus as Anglicanism affirmed the fact of Christ’s presence without imposing a specific philosophical account of its mechanism — a deliberately pastoral and ecumenical reticence that has characterized Anglican sacramental theology from Hooker down to the present day.

But there is a side note with making here in the USA in that Anglicanism has also been particularly sensitive to the pneumatological dimension of eucharistic presence, as instanced through the influence of the Scottish Episcopal Church on the American Prayer Book tradition. 

The epiclesis — the explicit invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the gifts and the congregation — entered the Episcopal Church’s 1789 Prayer Book through Scottish Episcopal influence, and the 1979 American BCP and the Church of England’s Common Worship (2000) both contain robust epicleses in the eucharistic prayers. 

This liturgical development signals an Anglican theology increasingly attentive to the Pentecostal dimension of eucharistic worship: the same Spirit who descended upon the disciples at Pentecost descends upon the gathered Church and upon the bread and wine, making them bearers of the risen Christ’s own life.

All of which brings us back to where we began these reflections – with the two recent feasts of Pentecost and Corpus Christi !