Consecration

Consecration is the act of setting a person, place or object apart from ordinary use and dedicating it to the sacred, so that what was common becomes holy. The practice rests on the widespread religious distinction between the sacred and the profane, between what belongs to God or the divine and what belongs to ordinary life, and consecration is the rite by which something crosses that boundary. Churches and temples are consecrated before they are used for worship, altars and sacred vessels are set apart for holy purposes, priests and monarchs are consecrated to their offices, and offerings are consecrated in being given to God. Once consecrated, a thing may not lawfully be returned to common use, and to treat it as though it were ordinary is regarded as desecration, a violation of its holiness.

The forms of consecration vary widely. In the biblical tradition places, objects and persons are consecrated by anointing with oil, by sacrifice, by the spoken word of dedication and by the laying on of hands. In Christian worship the term also names the central moment of the Eucharist, in which the bread and wine are consecrated and, in the understanding of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, become the body and blood of Christ. Parallel rites of dedication mark the sacred spaces, objects and personnel of religions across the world. In every case consecration expresses the conviction that holiness is not merely a quality of feeling but a real status that can be conferred, marking off a realm set apart for the divine within the ordinary world.

No consecration is more argued over than the consecration of bread and wine at the eucharist, and the disagreement is not a matter of emphasis but of what churches formally teach happens at that moment. Catholic doctrine, defined precisely at the Council of Trent in response to the Reformation, holds transubstantiation: the entire substance of the bread and wine is converted into the substance of Christ's body and blood, while every appearance, taste and physical property remains that of bread and wine, a philosophical distinction between substance and accident borrowed from Aristotelian categories and given binding doctrinal force. Orthodox churches affirm a comparably real change without committing to that specific philosophical vocabulary, generally preferring to call it a mystery rather than to define its metaphysics as precisely as Trent did.

Lutheran theology teaches a real presence of Christ in, with and under the bread and wine, explicitly rejecting transubstantiation as an unnecessary philosophical addition while still insisting on more than a symbol. Reformed Protestant theology following Calvin holds a spiritual real presence received by faith rather than a physical one, and Zwinglian and much of evangelical Protestantism treats the rite as memorial and symbolic, with no change to the elements at all. These are not differences of style: rejecting or accepting the doctrine of the moment of consecration is precisely the line that has kept these churches from sharing communion with one another for five centuries, which makes this single theological question one of the most practically consequential disputes to survive from the Reformation into the present.