Epicletic Advance? Viewing Eucharistic Fellowship Through the Epiclesis and Critical Realism Benjamin Durheim Benjamin Durheim, PhD is visiting assistant professor of theology at the College of Saint Benedict/Saint John’s University. He has published articles on ecumenism, liturgy, and ethics, and is the author of Christ’s Gift, Our Response (Liturgical Press, 2015). He also teaches philosophy at Saint Cloud Technical and Community College.
Introduction This paper begins from a point of frustration. Or perhaps it is cynicism, or simply melancholy, but in any case, the foundation upon which I’ve constructed following discussion is that of a near-resignation to the irrelevance of solid, creative liturgical and sacramental theology, particularly regarding the Holy Spirit, to the practices and life of the contemporary church. In this I would delight to be deeply mistaken, but it seems to have been a common specter at the table of our discussions these past few years. This Seminar on the Way has on numerous occasions named, lamented, and even chuckled about the disconnects between the relative coherence of careful liturgical or sacramental theology, and the lived experience of churches on any given Sunday.1 It is with this recognition that I center the following discussion on the practice of invoking the Holy Spirit in eucharistic praying, especially through the lens of critical realist social theory, in order to bring into another focus not only the epiclesis within Christian liturgy, but the manner by which we (Christians and theologians) may or may not trust its practice to be communally transformative. As Robert Jensen observed back in 1974, “The most important Spirit-demands on our liturgy are more subtle than any demand for specific Spirit-bits in the order.”2 In attempting to do this piece of liturgical pneumatology, my goal here is not necessarily better epicleses or even theologies thereof; my goal is a clearer theological and social understanding of how they actually function in Christian community and how we trust the Spirit in Christian liturgical communities’ development.
