The conviction that hermeneutics and eucharistic theology are intimately linked finds an important scriptural foundation in Luke 24. In Luke 24, Jesus expounds the Scriptures of the Old Testament so as to reveal to his disciples his presence there; and when he sits down with them over bread and wine he is found by them in the breaking of bread. In the West, the bond between the Old Testament and the Eucharist was secured by Augustine’s conviction that semiotics is the primary tool Christians should employ as they explore the mystery of eucharistic presence. Augustine used the term sacramentum to refer to Old Testament texts because he believed Old Testament words were pregnant with this mystery. Footnote 2 Before Augustine, Tertullian employed the term figura in a similar manner. Tertullian’s critique of Marcion of Sinope’s (85–160) Old Testament hermeneutic and eucharistic theology suggests that he believes a faulty understanding of figure underlies Marcion’s twofold error. For Tertullian, a properly Christian understanding of figure recognizes that what is figured is, as signified, given in the figure. Tertullian’s use of the term figure opens up the intriguing possibility of applying the epithet ‘Marcionite’ not only to Old Testament hermeneutics, but also eucharistic theologies.
This essay considers the viability of a twofold application through the study of the Old Testament hermeneutic and eucharistic theology of the great eighteenth-century philosopher and Anglican divine Samuel Clarke (1675–1729). Clarke was the leading philosopher in England in the years following the death of John Locke (1632–1704). Clarke was also one of the leading divines of the Church of England. As rector of London’s most fashionable parish, St James Piccadilly, he was situated at the center of English religious and cultural life, and he probably would have become the Archbishop of Canterbury had he not been so intent on publicizing his Antitrinitarian views. Footnote 3 Clarke’s subordinationist Christology has been regarded by many as scandalously heretical. It has been easy for interpreters to ignore other important aspects of his theological system given this controversy. Among these is Clarke’s rabid supersessionism, which rears its head in his denigration of the Old Testament. Clarke was one of the first modern theologians to regard the Old Testament as less than Christian Scripture, and attaching the epithet Marcionite to Clarke on this account is straightforward enough. But I am proposing that this application can be extended to a second overlooked loci of Clarke’s system. I am calling Clarke’s eucharistic theology Marcionite. This twofold appellation is possible because Clarke’s Old Testament hermeneutic and his eucharistic theology are both generated by his approach to figuration.
Marcionite Figuration
In contemporary Christian discourse, the epithet Marcionite is applied to Christians who are perceived to have disregarded the Old Testament. In America, pastor Andy Stanley has recently been accused of Marcionism and in Germany, scholar Notger Slenczka has been similarly branded. Footnote 4 In the wake of such accusations, there is a renewed impetus to engage Marcion historically and theologically. One of the perennial challenges of Marcion studies is that everything we know about Marcion comes from the pens of opponents who regarded him as a heretic. Since Harnack, this inconvenience has been regarded as an opportunity to pursue speculative historical reconstruction. Footnote 5 Yet Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Ephrem, and Epiphanius will not willingly be enlisted for this project. Their primary concern is not to resurrect Marcion but to lay him to rest by exposing that which makes him a threat to the Church. From this standpoint it is possible to observe Tertullian employing figura to overcome both Marcion’s approach to the Old Testament and his approach to the Eucharist.
In his important 1938 essay, Figura, the great Jewish literary theorist Erich Auerbach claimed that the Latin term figura was brought into the Christian world in the second century by Tertullian. Tertullian deploys the term a number of times in his longest work, Contra Marcion. In Book III he calls Joshua a figure of Jesus, and for Auerbach, this pairing confirms that ‘figura is something real and historical which announces something else that is also real and historical. The relation between the two events is revealed by an accord or similarity’. Footnote 6 The aim of figural interpretation for Tertullian, according to Auerbach, was to demonstrate that ‘the persons and events of the Old Testament were prefigurations of the New Testament and its history of salvation’. Footnote 7
Auerbach notes that in Contra Marcion Tertullian also employs the term figura in his discussion of the Eucharist. Tertullian does so in order to discredit Marcion’s docetist inclinations. Footnote 8 Tertullian interprets Jesus’ words, ‘This is my body’ to mean ‘This is the figure of my body’. Footnote 9 For Tertullian, eucharistic elements can only be said to be figures of the body of Jesus if Jesus had a human body. Auerbach rightly observes that Tertullian’s eucharistic use of figura functions in the same manner as his Old Testament deployment: it extends signification into the realm of ontology. Figura, for Auerbach, affirms the historical veracity of both figure, the bread and wine, and figured, the body and blood of Jesus Christ. In this figura protects against ontological identification: as figured, the human body of Christ and the eucharistic elements are both real, but they are not identical.
Auerbach does not consider whether Tertullian’s twofold use of figura suggests that the incarnate Christ is somehow ontologically tied by means of scriptural signification to the Old Testament text or the eucharistic elements. Yet there are at least three good reasons to believe that Tertullian marshals the term figura with reference to the Old Testament and the Eucharist not only to confirm the historical veracity of both figure and figured but to signal their ontological participation. First, as Auerbach notes, Tertullian’s use of figura emanates from the classical prosopological understanding of the term. Footnote 10 This understanding was a product of the Platonic framework which took for granted the ontological participation of copies and their generative forms. Second, Tertullian elsewhere describes the Eucharist as the ‘Body and Blood of Our Lord”, which grants Christians participation in his sacrifice. Footnote 11 Such participation could in no way be established by mere bread and wine, but depends upon the presence of Christ at the eucharistic feast. For Tertullian, the participation of the body of Christ with the eucharistic elements depends upon a divine creative act. Christ does not merely say that the bread and wine are his body and blood, he makes them his body and blood through this appellation. Footnote 12 Tertullian is thus able to say that the goal of baptism and chrismation is eucharistic participation: ‘while the flesh feeds on the body and blood of Christ’ at the Eucharist, ‘the soul likewise may fatten on its God’. Footnote 13 Third, there is reason to believe that the term figura implies participation given that Tertullian’s view of the Eucharist is grounded in his figural exegesis of the Old Testament, which is itself deeply participatory in orientation.
Contra Marcion is saturated with figural readings of the Old Testament. Footnote 14 Tertullian tends to speak of the passages from Isaiah and other prophets which he exposits as predictive in orientation, yet the Old Testament does not, for Tertullian, merely refer extrinsically to the Incarnation. Tertullian’s antidote to Marcion’s Old Testament degradation is to insist that Christ is present in the letter of the Old Testament text. He speaks of the twenty-first Psalm (our Psalm 22) as a prediction of the Lord’s cross, but he also insists that it contains ‘the entire passion of Christ’. Footnote 15 Tertullian’s approach is aptly summarized by his gloss upon 1 Cor. 2.6-7. The wisdom of God, now revealed in Christ, ‘once lay hidden in things that were foolish, weak, and lacking in honour; once also was latent under figures, allegories and enigmatical types; but it was afterwards to be revealed in Christ’. Footnote 16 Tertullian boldly declares that, ‘the whole Mosaic system was a figure of Christ’. Footnote 17 As figured, Christ is present, though hidden, within it.
Extending Tertullian’s understanding of figure consistently to the Eucharist entails that Christ is present, though hidden under the appearance of bread and wine. Such an application, however, is more than simply a matter of logical consistency. For Tertullian, it is a matter of following Old Testament precedent. Christ was given license to declare that the eucharistic elements are his body and blood by the Old Testament witness. When Christ declared in the New Testament that the Passover was his feast he was articulating that which had been figured in the Law and the Prophets, for it ‘would have been unworthy of God to desire to partake of what was not His own’. Footnote 18 For Tertullian, Christ is present in the Old Testament figurally as the one who speaks the following words through his prophet Jeremiah: ‘I was like a lamb or an ox that is brought to the slaughter, and I knew not that they devised a device against me, saying, Let us cast the tree upon His bread’ (Jer. 11.19). Tertullian comments that this tree and this bread are ‘of course’ the cross and the body of our Lord. Footnote 19 Christ’s presence, as figured, in Jeremiah as the Passover Lamb establishes his presence, as figured, as the bread of the eucharistic meal. This eucharistic interpretation of Jeremiah is a single instance of Tertullian’s consistently figural approach to the Old Testament. Tertullian’s eucharistic theology is the extension of his figural interpretation of the Old Testament. Tertullian does not articulate a precise doctrine of real presence since his focus is upon scriptural signification. For Tertullian, it is enough to say that the words of Scripture, interpreted figurally, unveil the presence of Christ.
There is reason to believe that Marcion’s eucharistic theology was equally bound to his reading of the Old Testament. Scholars have wondered whether they might distinguish Marcionite from Catholic on the basis of eucharistic practice. Yet Harnack’s claim a hundred years ago that ‘the Marcionite service of worship and sacral actions cannot have been essentially different from those of the great church’ continues to be received today. Footnote 20 McGowan argues that Marcionism pursued an ascetic interpretation of the Eucharist which favored bread and water rather than bread and wine. Footnote 21 This was the practice of some other early Christian groups, and thus would probably not have been, as Ephrem the Syrian suspected, an expression of the Marcionite denigration of creation. Footnote 22 If Marcionites did use water rather than wine, this may have been an attempt to render the Eucharist ‘bloodless’ as the complement of the practice of rejecting meat in favor of fish at eucharistic feasts to distinguish Christian worship from Old Testament sacrifice. Footnote 23 Stewart-Sykes denies Marcion condemned the use of wine, affirms that he rejected meat, and reaches a similar conclusion about Marcion’s approach to the Old Testament. Footnote 24 In distinguishing Marcionite from Catholic eucharistic rites, we can say little with confidence except that he refused to speak of the blood of the new covenant. Footnote 25 The Marcionite cup was the blood of the covenant, since the old covenant, as superseded, was to be excised from Christian faith and practice. This is consistent with Origen’s observation in Peri Archon 2.5.2 that Marcion interpreted the Old Testament literally to discredit it and thus separate the Christian covenant from the covenant of the Jews. While Marcion’s Eucharist must have been ‘figurative’ with reference to Christ, its figurative reach was probably restricted to the New Testament. Tertullian’s emphasis upon Old Testament eucharistic figuration can thus credibly be regarded as part of his larger attempt to expose Marcion’s approach to the Old Testament as less than Christian.
Clarke’s Old Testament Hermeneutic
Marcion of Sinope seems to have had in mind a particular, though restricted, role for the Old Testament which is predicated upon his Antitheses; the antithesis of law and gospel; the antithesis of physical and spiritual; and the antithesis of flesh and spirit. Tertullian maintains that Marcion’s antitheses are aimed at ‘committing the gospel to a variance with the law’. Footnote 26 These antitheses were taken for granted by Samuel Clarke, and directed towards the same end. A number of scholars have noted that the status of the Old Testament as Christian Scripture was increasingly called into question at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and Clarke was at the forefront of this development. Footnote 27
Clarke regularly dismisses the Old Testament as the ‘Jewish law’ or the ‘Jewish dispensation’. In his essay on the rite of Confirmation, Clarke states that Paul’s epistle to the Romans is about God’s supersession of the Jewish dispensation because it had ‘proved insufficient to make Men truly holy’. The setting up of a new religion, Clarke says, necessarily implies the abolishing of the old: ‘it follows that Christianity was not to be added to Judaism, but that Judaism was to be changed into Christianity, i.e. that the Jewish Religion was from thence forward to cease, and the Christian to succeed in its Room’. Footnote 28 Clarke believes that while the Jewish law calls for ‘positive and carnal Ordinances’, the New Testament makes plain the ‘great duties of the moral and eternal law of God’. Footnote 29
The Duties of the Christian Religion are almost wholly moral and Spiritual, respecting the inward Disposition of the Heart and Mind; whereas on the contrary, the Ceremonies of the Jewish Law were for the most part external, and as the Apostle to the Hebrew stiles them, carnal ordinances, respecting chiefly the outward purification of the Body; therefore the Apostle calls the Christian Religion Spirit, and the Jewish Religion Flesh. Footnote 30
Clarke condemns Judaizers as false apostles ‘who in a contentious manner endeavored to oblige all Christians to observe the Ceremonies of the Law of Moses’. Footnote 31 Here Clarke has Roman Catholics in mind. As Christians Protestants rightly appreciate that God requires true, spiritual worship, but as Jews Roman Catholics are held captive by entrenched idolatrous rituals and as Judaizers they ensnare others as well. There is reason to believe that for Clarke the fundamental problem is the Law rather than those who follow and promote it, for the established duty of the Law is the ‘anxious observance of the burdensome ceremonies’ which placed the Jewish people in ‘bondage to the elements of the world’. Footnote 32 Clarke wants to hold on to his inherited belief that God originally spoke through Moses to the people of Israel. Yet his extremely negative valuation of the Law means that the Old Testament can have no constructive formative role for either Jews or Christians.
While Clarke regards the Old Testament as impotent for moral formation, he also regards it as useless for constructive theology. This second impotence is articulated in Clarke’s 1712 work, The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity, which ignited a firestorm of controversy because it denied the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father and proposed an alternative subordinationist Christology.Footnote 33 I note two representative examples of the opposition it provoked. In the preface to The Scripture-Doctrine, Clarke had boasted that he had ‘examined thoroughly’ the nature of the Trinity ‘by a serious study of the Whole Scripture’. Footnote 34 In his Essay towards an impartial account of the Trinity, and the deity of our Saviour, as contained in the Old Testament, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University Edward Wells countered that Clarke had only been able to credibly endorse a subordinationist Christology because he had ignored the Old Testament. Footnote 35 In his response to Wells, Clarke conceded that while the Old Testament contains certain predictive prophecies which were fulfilled in the future coming of the Christian Messiah, it does not contain Trinitarian doctrine. Footnote 36 Indeed, Clarke regards such a testimony as unnecessary since the words of the New Testament settle the matter once and for all.
A second opponent, James Knight, developed Wells’ argument in a work entitled The True Scripture Doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Knight insists that,
The Gospel was contained and published to the Jews, under the Vail of the Law: And the Bulk of that People saw not through the Vail, but rested in the Letter and Ceremonies of the Law; yet, notwithstanding this Blindness, the Gospel was there, and consequently the Fundamental Doctrine of the Gospel Dispensation, the Trinity in Unity. Footnote 37
Clarke, for his part, replied dismissively that while Knight could only muster 40 texts in support of his theology – and Old Testament texts at that – he had over 300 New Testament texts in favor of his. Footnote 38
Clarke maintained that each noun in a given language must be assigned a single referent (or in the case of plural nouns, a single class of referents). The word God, in the New Testament, must therefore refer to either God the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit. Having placed all of the relevant New Testament texts under the microscope, Clarke concludes that almost all of the 1251 specimens in question refer to God the Father. He admits a handful of ambiguous referents that may refer to Jesus Christ, but he insists that they do so, if they do so, in an inferior and derivative sense. For Clarke, textual interpreters have only to identify the referent that corresponds to the sign in question, for each distinct referent, with its set of unique properties, determines the meaning of the sign. Clarke affirms that Jesus Christ is the Jewish Messiah who was sent by God to dispense salvation to the Gentiles. He also suspects that Jesus was an Angel of the Covenant before his earthly sojourn. Footnote 39 Marcion, remarkably, appears to have embraced a similar view. Footnote 40 Such a Christology depends upon the assumption that the text of Scripture does not draw Jesus the Son and God the Father together ontologically through mutual signification.
Clarke sought to demonstrate, through the full force of his enlightened rationality, the exact referent of individual biblical words. Knight attacked this presumption by insisting that Christ was present within the Law and the Prophets. Knight therefore asks his readers to read Ps. 102.25 and following, and then to observe Paul’s citation of this text in Heb. 1.10 and following. Footnote 41 Knight’s point is simple: New Testament authors do not adhere to Clarke’s principle of singular referentiality. They apply terms that have properly been applied to God the Father in the Old Testament to Jesus Christ as God the Son, since the Father and the Son are consubstantial. This leads Knight to the same conclusion that Tertullian had reached in his refutation of Marcion: the Old Testament is to be upheld because it figures Christ not merely by pointing to him, but by signifying him as present within it. As Knight puts it, as signified, Christ ‘rested in the Letter and Ceremonies of the Law’. Footnote 42
Clarke’s Memorialism
In 1735 Benjamin Hoadly (1676–1761) published his influential Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Footnote 43 Hoadly’s Protestant audience gladly affirmed his boisterous rejection of transubstantiation, but his extreme nominalism was an affront to even modest expressions of Anglican receptionism. Hoadly was vigorously opposed by defenders of the Anglican establishment who regarded his account as inconsistent and novel. Yet Hoadly’s work was far from creative. It simply applied the hermeneutical and rhetorical method of The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity to the doctrine of the Eucharist, which was something Clarke had already done in his sermons. Footnote 44 For Hoadly as for Clarke, the true Christian doctrine of the Eucharist can only be determined by isolating the precise referents of Christ’s New Testament eucharistic ordinances. And while these ordinances offer figurative associations – bread and body, blood and wine – these must not be taken as the basis of metaphysical doctrines since they were intended merely to inspire Christians to reflect upon Christ’s sacrifice. Figurative associations must be confined to the New Testament, for the Old Testament Passover is, in Hoadly’s words, ‘another sort of feast’. Footnote 45
Clarke rejects Old Testament religion and eucharistic theologies of real presence because both impose a ‘burdensome system of rites and ordinances’. Footnote 46 Clarke insists in one of several sermons on the phrase ‘Do This in Remembrance of Me’, that the doctrine of Transubstantiation is the extension of the ‘yoke of ceremonious performances’ into the Christian era. Footnote 47 Roman Catholics are obliged to perform the Mass by their Judaic assumption that sacrificial performance is a prerequisite for divine visitation. They fail to note that Christian eucharistic remembrance is performed only to demonstrate and excite the ‘religious affections of our minds’. Footnote 48 For Clarke, the antidote to the Judaizing doctrine of Transubstantiation is to recognize that remembrance is a cognitive devotional act Christians perform for personal edification.
Clarke insists that Christian and Jewish remembrance are not the same. In the Jewish dispensation, Jews were asked to commemorate the Passover. But on the night that he was betrayed, Jesus brought this commemoration to an end. Clarke paraphrases Jesus’ words of institution from Mt. 26.26-29 as follows:
Take and eat this. For as the eating of the Passover, was a perpetual Commemoration of the Deliverance of the Children of Israel out of Egypt; so from henceforward your eating this Sacramental Bread, shall be a Commemoration or Remembrance of my Death, and of my Body being broken for you. 27 & 28. In like manner taking a Cup of Wine in his Hand, he gave thanks, and gave it to his Disciples, saying, Drink ye all of this. For from henceforth your Drinking this Sacramental Wine, shall be a Commemoration of my Blood being shed for the Remission of Their Sins who Believe and obey the Gospel, and a perpetual Confirmation of this new Covenant. 29. And I will have the Jewish Passover Commemoration no longer continued; But the things of which these were Figures, shall now be fulfilled and accomplished in the Kingdom of the Messiah. Footnote 49
For Clarke, those eager to avoid the scourge of Judaism must purge their minds from all thoughts concerning the Jewish dispensation: the Eucharist establishes a new covenant which demands that Christians turn their attention away from the Law and unto Christ.
Clarke’s paraphrase relies upon the same hermeneutic he employed in the Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity. The interpretation of the word ‘remembrance’, like other biblical words such as ‘God’, requires the identification of a single referent. As Clarke would have it, the term ‘remembrance’ in the Jewish dispensation refers to the Passover, and in the Christian dispensation, to the Passion. This distinction depends upon Clarke’s understanding of figuration. For Clarke, figures are linguistic ornaments which correlate distinct entities within a nominalist framework. Footnote 50 They are mental projections which speakers create in order to teach and entertain, but they are problematic from a philosophical standpoint since they draw attention away from the properties of objects in favor of hypostatized conceptualities which these objects supposedly share. Thus, for Clarke, to say that the Passover is a figure of the Eucharist is to say that they can be verbally linked for rhetorical purposes. In his discussion of Christ’s sacrifice, Clarke remarks that ‘the deliverance of the People out of Egypt and their passage through the Red Sea was but a Type and a Figure’ of the true and lasting vindication of God through Christ’s sacrifice, and yet God insisted that ‘this Shadow was to be so solemnly commemorated by the Passover’. This realization spurs Christians to forsake Passover commemoration and celebrate Christ’s sacrifice. ‘How much more,’ Clarke insists, ‘does the Substance itself of this eternal Blessing, deserve to be perpetually kept in mind with the highest veneration.’ Footnote 51
For Clarke, to say that the Passover is a figure of the Passion is to highlight just how little they have in common. The Passover highlights the excellency of the coming dispensation of the Gospel. But even in this capacity it is to be regarded with suspicion. Christians who latch onto figural associations between Passover and Passion are in danger of reverting back to the carnal ordinances of the Law. They must therefore fix their eyes away from the Passover and upon Jesus. It is here that we witness the extent of Clarke’s departure from the Tradition. As Ephraim Radner observes, ‘Christ our passover is sacrificed for us’ is a central Christian figural claim. Footnote 52 For Tertullian and the Tradition, it is precisely in fixing their eyes upon the Passover that Christians fix them upon Jesus. It is thus that Origen can say, ‘The Passover still takes place today … those who sacrifice Christ come up out of Egypt, cross the Red Sea, and will see Pharaoh engulfed.’ Footnote 53
For Tertullian and the Tradition, the Eucharist figures the Passion of the Christ and the deliverance from Egypt. For Clarke, it figures only the Passion. Clarke maintains that the species of bread and wine allow the remembrance of Christ’s Passion to be fixed and imprinted on minds ‘with a more lasting and permanent impression’. The breaking of the bread is the occasion for Christians to ‘declare publickly, and keep up amongst men the memory of his Death, and of the inestimable benefits purchased for us theirby’. Footnote 54 Following the example of Christ, the priest calls the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ to stir his people to a more universal obedience. Footnote 55 But for Clarke, the abiding danger that accompanies eucharistic remembrance is that it opens the door to the ‘Judaizing’ doctrine of Transubstantiation. Those that see the bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ easily fall under the Judaic yoke of ‘ceremonious performances’. Footnote 56 Such Christians fail to appreciate that God only mandated rites for the Jews ‘in condescension to their infirmity, and considering the hardness of their hearts’. Clarke imagines that the Jewish Law was a divine accommodation, ‘adapted by God in great condescension to the weak apprehensions of that people’. Footnote 57 The precepts he gave them ‘Had not in themselves any real or intrinsic worth; but their obligation depended wholly upon their being positively commanded.’ Footnote 58
Clarke’s problem is that Jesus seems to have continued the Judaic dispensation by instituting Baptism and Eucharist. Clarke concedes that these divine commissions, like the carnal ordinances of the Old Testament, were generated by a spirit of divine condescension, God’s awareness that ‘we are confined to these earthly bodies and so our minds are assisted by outward acts of religion’. Footnote 59 Clarke insists that Jesus warned his disciples that the Lord’s Supper should be understood as a figure of the Passover meal only in an ornamental sense. Yet the carnal human tendency to interpret figural relations as ontologically significant suggests that the bread and wine should be put on the shelf so that individuals can focus upon what matters, dedicating themselves anew to a life of obedience. As Clarke puts it, all ‘positive institutions’, including the Eucharist, have ‘the nature only of means to an end, and therefore they are never to be compared with Moral Virtue’. Footnote 60 Christians might find that receiving the Eucharist is helpful. But more likely they will find that it ensnares them in the Judaic trap. It thus comes as no surprise that Clarke’s understudy and defender Ashley Arthur Sykes (1684–1756) insisted, in defending Clarke, that there is nothing in Scripture which suggests that the Lord’s Supper ‘unites us to Christ, or has a life-giving virtue annexed to it, or supplies the defects of moral virtue’. Footnote 61 As Clarke’s great adversary Daniel Waterland (1683–1740) complained, for Clarke, scriptural institutions such as the Eucharist ‘are treated as mere nothings, as things not required at all, compared with moral virtues’. Footnote 62 In the end for Clarke the Eucharist is as dispensable as the Law of Moses. Clarke has successfully liberated Christians from reliance upon all such carnal encumbrances. Footnote 63
Conclusion
Samuel Clarke’s eucharistic theology is generated by his ornamental understanding of Old Testament figuration. For Clarke, the Old Testament figures Christ only in the limited sense that it provides linguistic correspondences between messianic prophecies and the Messiah that subsequently fulfilled them. The lack of Christ’s presence in the Old Testament inclines Clarke to follow Marcion in dismissing it as the superseded Jewish dispensation. The lack of Christ’s presence in the Old Testament, as figured, also fuels Clarke’s belief that Christ is not present at the Eucharist. As memorials, the bread and the wine are subject to a utilitarian calculus. They may or may not inspire communicants to greater obedience and are accordingly dispensable. We know too little about Marcion’s eucharistic theology to hold with confidence that it is replicated by Clarke. But we can say with some confidence that Clarke’s memorialism is Marcionite because it severs the Eucharist from the Old Testament witness. And what is more, we can call Clarke’s memorialism Marcionite in the precise sense that it is derived from a view of Old Testament figuration which they seem to share. According to this view, the shared vocabulary of the testaments is a nuisance that obscures the distinction between Old and New. Clarke is a harbinger of modern Marcionism not merely because his valuation of the Old Testament is the product of his specifically Marcionite impulse to excise Christ from the Old Testament. As he consistently applies this impulse to his eucharistic theology, his memorialism becomes a venue for him to transmit his Marcionism to modernity.
The basis of this proposal is not merely a particular integrative rendering of Clarke’s Old Testament hermeneutic and his eucharistic theology. It is, rather, the scriptural text itself. In the Scriptures, the figural claim ‘Christ our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed’ (1 Cor. 5.7) is the basis of the ecclesial institution of the Eucharist. This claim marries Old Testament hermeneutics and eucharistic theology by including them both within a single figural pairing: to say that Christ is a figure of the Eucharist is to say, at the same time, that he is a figure of the Passover lamb. If Christ, as figured, is somehow present at the celebration of the Eucharist, it can only be because he was already present in the Old Testament as the Passover Lamb of the Jews. If, on the other hand, Christ, as figured, is referred to in the Eucharist only by way of ornamental metaphor, then it follows that he came, at first, to the Gentiles. Thus the basis of my claim that Clarke’s memorialism is Marcionite is the scriptural claim that Christ came first to the Jews, and then to the Gentiles (Rom. 1.16).
