The cultic division between the religious and the profane is potentially abolished in faith in the Christ who was profaned by crucifixion. Thus the Eucharist, like the meals held by Jesus with “sinners and publicans,” must also be celebrated with the unrighteous, those who have no rights and the godless from the “highways and hedges” of society, in all their profanity, and should no longer be limited, as a religious sacrifice, to the inner circle of the devout, to those who are members of the same denomination.
The Christian Church can reintroduce the divisions between the religious and the profane and between those who are within an those are without, only at the price of losing its own identity as the Church of the crucified Christ ….
It is the godless, forced out by the church, who recognized the inner distinction between the reality of the cross on Golgotha and its cultic representation within the church. Thus for the faith which believe believes in and celebrates the representation of the crucified Christ as a reality in the sacrifice of the mass, it is also indispensable to be aware once again of this inner distinction.
--Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, 44-45.
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