Anamnesis & Oikonomia

A Theme in Robert Taft's "Beyond East and West: Problems in Liturgical Understanding"

In liturgy we remember. This is much more than merely recollecting the past or trying to make it mystically present. For the past that is liturgically remembered is not merely history, but the Saving History of a Divine actor that culminated in the Paschal Mystery wherein Christ overcomes the ultimate temporal limitation of mankind—death. In Christ, history has reached its completion (< Gre. ἔσχατος—eskhatos). Not that the chronological unfolding of the cosmos has ceased, but rather that it has been made full—πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόνου (Gal. 4:4). Salvation History continues, now consisting of the individual histories of men and women who are being redemptively incorporated into Christ (cf. Robert Taft, Beyond East and West: Problems in Liturgical Understanding, 9); ‘enstoried’ as it were into the saving life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Hence the dual meaning of the term ‘Divine Economy (< Gre. Oἰκονομία—Oikonomia)’ by which is meant both the saving drama of the covenant people and that salvation in Christ mediated in the sacramental and liturgical activity of the Church. As Taft explains, “the divine-human mediatorship of the risen Lord…renders actual in the present liturgical event both the past saving work and the future fulfillment” (Beyond East and West, 22). For, “what Israel did prefigured Christ; what he did, the Church re-presents in the daily liturgical theophany of his saving action so that it can touch our lives. But what the Church actualizes in us radically through its sacramental life must be lived out by us in the exodus of our own pilgrimage” (Taft 54).