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Anamnesis - Remembrance and the Lord's Supper

The argument in short

Memorialism's own proof text does not deliver memorialism. Zwingli wrote Hoc facite in meam commemorationem on the table at Marburg because he believed remembrance implies absence. But anamnesis in its covenantal and Jewish sense is the word whose native use is to abolish distance: at Passover the remembering makes the remembered event present to the participant's identity, so that a later generation says "you saw with your own eyes what I did to the Egyptians." The word Zwingli reached for to prove absence is a word designed to close a gap. If a church has reduced Communion to remembrance, its problem is that it never found out what the word means.

Table of Contents

  1. #The central key of Communion
  2. #The command
  3. #What remembering means in a covenant
  4. #Telescoped into collective biography
  5. #Do this means hold a service
  6. #Why Zwingli's proof text defeats Zwingli
  7. #Guarding the overcorrection
  8. #What this changes on a Sunday
  9. #Sources

The Central Key of Communion

The standard process of the communion debate is that memorialists have remembrance and everyone else has to argue for something extra on top of it. However, remembrance, properly understood, was never a small view. The people who made it the whole view were working with a definition of the word that Scripture does not use.

J. Todd Billings notes that remembrance piety "usually emphasizes a remembrance of Christ's cross as a once-for-all sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins" and "cultivates a congregational perception of the gospel as the forgiveness of sins through the cross" (Billings, 2018). Those are good things.

His objection is about proportion: "when this theme becomes singular rather than integrated with other themes, it provides a myopic vision of both the Supper and the gospel." Drawing on N. T. Wright and Scot McKnight, he argues the reduced view "fails not because of what it includes, but because of what it displaces" (Billings, 2018).

Nothing below takes anything from remembrance. It takes remembrance more seriously than memorialism does.

The Command

Luke 22:19 - ESV

19. And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, "This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me."

The Greek noun is anamnesis (an-AM-nay-sis). It appears in the institution tradition preserved by Luke and Paul (Luke 22:19; 1 Cor 11:24-25) and not in Mark or Matthew, which is one of the two significant differences between the two streams.

English speakers hear "remembrance" as an event that happens inside a mind. A Jewish first-century person did not hear it as that.

What Remembering means in a Covenant

Billings, drawing on Anthony Thiselton, argues that to remember in this sense is "not simply to call to mind" the mighty acts of God, but to "assign them an active role in one's 'world'." Remembering God's works is to "engage in worship, trust, and obedience," a remembering that "transforms attitudes and action" (Thiselton, quoted in Billings, 2018).

Billings extends this with Paul Ricoeur's account of remembrance as inserting oneself into "a meaningful 'plot' of narrative history" in which past, present and future are held together, and then draws the distinction cleanly: "Some 'remembering' is trite, like remembering a shopping list; but other remembering is identity forming, opening up a new world, a new drama to inhabit" (Billings, 2018).

Everyone accepts that distinction the moment it is stated. We just have not been applying it to the one place Jesus put the word.

Telescoped into Collective Biography

The controlling parallel is Passover, and here Billings' use of the Jewish scholar Jon Levenson is strong. Levenson observes how covenant renewal telescopes history into biography. At Shechem the Lord says to a generation that was not there:

Joshua 24:6-7 - ESV

6. Then I brought your fathers out of Egypt, and you came to the sea. The Egyptians pursued your fathers with chariots and horsemen to the Red Sea.
7. And when they cried to the LORD, he put darkness between you and the Egyptians and made the sea come upon them and cover them; and your eyes saw what I did in Egypt.

Levenson's comment on this:

History is telescoped into collective biography. What your ancestors saw is what you saw. God's rescue of them implicates you, obliges you, for you, by hearing this story and responding affirmatively, become Israel, and it was Israel whom he rescued. Telling the story brings it alive.
(Levenson, quoted in Billings, 2018)

He cites the rabbinic Passover liturgy to the same effect: "Each man is obligated to see himself as if he came out of Egypt."

Then Levenson makes the observation that indicts most contemporary Communion practice. Israel at Passover "did not move into private introspection (like many contemporary Christians do in remembrance); instead, they inserted themselves into the public history of YHWH's saving action on behalf of his people." As a covenant people, "they do not determine who they are by looking within, by plumbing the depths of the individual soul… Rather, the direction is the opposite. What is public is made private. History is not only rendered contemporary; it is internalized… One looks out from the self to find out who one is meant to be" (Levenson, quoted in Billings, 2018).

Many churches have taken a word that means step into the story and used it to mean look inside yourself. Those are totally opposite directions.

Do This means Hold a Service

Hughes Oliphant Old reaches the same place from the liturgical side. He argues that "'Do this in remembrance of me' is in effect Jesus' interpretation of the fourth commandment, 'Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy'," and that neither Jesus nor Paul "had in mind a simple mental recollection. They had in mind far more. The text says Do this in remembrance of me. They had in mind holding a religious service" (Old, 2002).

In a covenant meal, remembering God's saving acts "had an essential function. Through these gracious acts of redemption, God laid claim to his people; by remembering those saving acts, one confessed and acknowledged that claim" (Old, 2002).

Remembering, in this sense, is not a mental activity performed toward the past. It is a submission performed in the present.

Why Zwingli's Proof Text Defeats Zwingli

Now put the pieces together, because the memorialist argument has a problem it cannot solve from its own resources.

Zwingli's rebuttal to Luther at the Marburg Colloquy in 1529 was to write Hoc facite in meam commemorationem on the table against Luther's chalked Hoc est corpus meum. The logic of that move depended entirely on remembrance implying absence. Cornelius Hoen, whose letter supplied Zwingli with the whole framework, had argued that the command "clearly points to commemoration of 'a person who is absent (at least, physically absent)'" (McGrath, 2012).

But this is not what the covenantal sense of anamnesis means. In the Passover the remembering makes the remembered event present to the participant's identity. It is the way by which a Jew in the second century BC stands inside the Exodus.

The point

The word Zwingli reached for to prove absence is a word whose native use is to abolish distance. Memorialism ends up defeated by its own text.

Now, this does not, by itself, prove any particular mode of Christ's presence, and it definitely does not get to Transubstantiation. What it establishes is that "do this in remembrance of me" cannot be used as an argument for absence, which is the only work memorialism has ever asked it to do.

Billings concludes: "ultimately we underplay the significance of even 'remembrance' when it is severed from communion and hope" (Billings, 2018).

If a church has reduced Communion to remembrance, the problem is not that they have taken remembrance too seriously. It is that they have not taken it seriously enough to find out what the word actually means.

Guarding the Overcorrection

One caution, because this argument can be overdriven.

Anamnesis being covenantal rather than merely mental does not affirm the Roman use of the same word. Rome argues that because the memorial makes the past event efficaciously present, the Mass "makes present" the sacrifice of Calvary in a real and substantial way. That conflates sacramental participation with sacrificial re-enactment, and it runs straight into Hebrews. The argument is set out in The Mass and the Finality of Calvary.

The distinction to hold is that anamnesis incorporates the participant into the event. It does not re-perform the event. Israel at Passover was brought into the Exodus; nobody suggested the Exodus was happening again in the dining room.

What This Changes on a Sunday

Tell the story out loud. Passover was a meal that came with a required explanation, and Green's observation that "the meal is not self-interpreting" applies just as hard to a Communion table with a two-line prayer over it. If the only words spoken are "let's take a moment," the congregation has been handed the elements without the anamnesis.

Stop making it introspective. The instruction to close your eyes and look inward is the exact inversion of what the word does. Self-examination has its place, and 1 Corinthians 11 defines that place precisely, but it is examination of how I am treating the people in this room, not a private audit of my week. See 1 Corinthians 11v17-34 - Discerning the Body.

Preach it as incorporation, not recollection. The line to give a congregation is not "think about the cross." It is that what happened to Him happened for you, and that by eating this you are standing inside it. What your Saviour did is what you did, because you are in Him and it was those in Him He was rescuing.

That is what Jesus put in their hands on the last night He had, and it has been the church's meal ever since.

See also: Memorialist Communion | Koinonia - Participation in the Body and Blood | Holy Communion

Sources