This Is My Body
Where we are on the timeline
After manna, prayer, and the lost tomorrow-bread reading, Part II reaches the Eucharist. This chapter follows bread as it becomes rite, body, sacrifice, and sacramental matter.
The Lord’s Prayer asks for bread. The Eucharist enacts bread.
That difference changes the scale of the argument. A petition can shape imagination. A rite shapes bodies, calendars, architecture, priesthood, and law.
The textual claim is strong: the Last Supper traditions identify bread with Christ’s body. The historical claim is strong: Christian communities made that bread central to worship very early. The metabolic claim remains limited: Eucharistic doctrine is not nutrition science, but it helps explain why wheat bread became culturally protected.1
Sections
- The Bread He Took
- The Breaking Of Bread
- Bread Of Life
- Not Common Bread
- Doctrine Around The Loaf
- Wheat With Gluten
Cross Links
- Our Daily Bread asks how bread entered the central Christian prayer.
- The Aramaic Reading That Lost shows a path where the petition pointed forward instead.
- Not by Bread Alone keeps the eucharistic claim from becoming bread absolutism.
- The Staff of Bread supplies the older support metaphor that Eucharistic theology inherits and transforms.
Footnotes
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Secondary sources for the chapter’s broad frame include Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, rev. ed. (London: SCM, 1966); Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre, 1945); and Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages, trans. Gemma Simmonds et al. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). ↩