Consuming the Word: The New Testament and the Eucharist in the Early Church by Scott Hahn

Abstract

212 Antiphon 18.2 (2014) and taught the Lord’s Prayer on Palm Sunday. The baptizands of Hippo wore white and received anointing before and after baptism as he had in Milan, but there was no foot-washing, since the hereditary guilt of original sin was thought to be cleansed in baptism itself. In a digression, Wills argues that Augustine probably taught the newly baptized about the Eucharist, and in so doing he would have ridiculed the idea—espoused by Ambrose—that the bread and wine were the literal Body and Blood of Christ. It is unfortunate that the tendentious Wills—more clearly seen in works such as Why Priests? A Failed Tradition—inserts itself here. Likewise, Wills sees “sacramental legalism” in Augustine, which would be better understood as a pastoral and theological desire for precision . Like Harnack and the historical Jesus, the Augustine Wills describes at such times is only the reflection of his own face, seen at the bottom of a deep well. In time, Wills concludes, Augustine referred more to Ambrose to credential himself against opponents and adopted Ambrose’s coercive tactics and emphasis on the cult of miracles, both of which he had earlier disdained. Still, in the end, “Ambrose was remembered and celebrated for his forcefulness, and Augustine for his inwardness” (159). Nathaniel Peters Boston College Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts Scott Hahn Consuming the Word: The New Testament and the Eucharist in the Early Church New York: Image, 2013 176 pages. Hardbound. $22.00. In two very different contexts – a homily on Genesis and his massive apologetic against Celsus – Origen speaks of believers “eating the flesh of the Logos.” In one instance he is clearly referring to the hearing of Scripture proclaimed within the liturgy, and in the other to participation in Eucharistic communion. Hahn’s principal contention in this new volume – giving voice to an ancient and deeply Catholic intuition – is that the Word of God is much more than text on page and that the New Testament (read: New Covenant) is more than simply a collection of privileged texts. 213 Book review Hahn devotes the first third of his book to situating the language of diathêkê (and its later Latin equivalent testamentum) within the context of first-century Judaism, demonstrating with numerous texts how the language of covenant cannot be properly understood apart from the notion of sacrifice implicit within it (a connection grasped, he suggests, intuitively by first-century Jews and Christians, but something not native to modern readers). Hahn offers here in popular, accessible terms the fruit of his more dense and scholarly work, Kinship by Covenant (2009); more than mere contract, a covenant establishes a bond of kinship – in this case, between God and his people. In the first and second centuries , this “New Testament” (as often juxtaposed to the “Old”) was understood not in terms of particular texts considered inspired and therefore privileged (whether Jewish or Christian), but as a living relationship rooted in an event, a covenantal relationship established in the saving death of Jesus Christ. Long before the “New Testament” became something literary, it was liturgical: it was a sacrament before it was a document, and the document was and still is, in a very real way, normed by the sacrament (51). The Church, Hahn contends quite rightly, should recover “the convenantal essence of the sacraments – especially baptism and the Eucharist…our sense of the saving power of the Word of God and the response of faith [God] seeks from us in the liturgy” (120). It was from within the liturgical life of the Church that the Scriptures were born, and it is there where believers need to renew their own faith in God’s revelation of himself, most fully in the Word-made-flesh, Jesus Christ. Christian faith is not faith in a text, no matter how privileged, but in a Person, “[t] he Body of Christ that is risen and ascended in glory is the New Covenant; and it radiates out through the Spirit to encompass each one of us – through the liturgy and sacraments” (117; cf. reprise at 145). The pattern of divine humility (as the Fathers would often call it, divine sugkatabasis, God...