Not By Bread Alone

The Mass is either a sacrifice or it is a memorial meal, and the Reformation turned on which. This book argues the first from Scripture and from the Fathers, and it does so by starting a long way before the Last Supper.

The argument runs through the covenant before it reaches the altar. What a covenant is, how the Old and the New relate, why Scripture keeps reaching for marriage as the analogy, and then sacrifice itself: Abel, Noah and Job; Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; the bread and wine offered by Melchizedek; Jethro the priest of Midian; Moses and the Levites. By the time the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Council of Trent come into view, the question of whether a sacrifice can be offered again has already been framed by everything that came before it.

That ordering is deliberate. The usual argument starts at Hebrews and works backwards, which concedes the ground before the first sentence.