When Action Collides with Meaning: Ritual, Biblical Theology, and the New Testament Lord’s Supper

This study highlights the contribution of current scholarship focusing on ritual studies and its impact on biblical studies. Ritual is not just useful to discover activities, patterns, and the interaction of key elements of religious practice and textual worlds (including, among others, time, space, participants, objects, sounds, language, and action), but it also offers a helpful way of understanding the text’s talking about God, or biblical theology. The three-step from ritual to interpretation to integration of the data into the big picture of theology (or ideology) is seldom done consistently and requires a methodological reset. Finally, a brief look at the New Testament Lord’s Supper within this framework is attempted, demonstrating the potential of such an approach.