a memorial: a shared act of remembrance that calls a person or event to mind in worship
This is the word Jesus uses at the Last Supper and Paul repeats in his account of it: do this in remembrance of me. It does not mean a private act of calling something to mind. It names a shared act of the gathered community, patterned on the Passover meal, in which believers remember Christ together.
The background lies in the Old Testament idea of a memorial that stands before God on behalf of his people. In the Hebrew Scriptures, remembering is active: when God remembers his covenant, he acts on it, and when Israel sets up a memorial, it keeps the relationship in living force. The Lord's Supper inherits that weight. Paul's own explanation ties it to announcement: as often as the church eats the bread and drinks the cup, it proclaims the Lord's death until he comes.
Because of that depth, the meal has been read in very different ways, and the disagreements are among the sharpest in the study of Christian worship (see the notes on this meaning and the scholarship summary). The word itself, though, points to a communal, worship-centered remembering of Christ that is richer than a bare mental exercise and is centered on his death.
Disputed
In the eucharistic command "do this in remembrance of me" (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24 to 25), whether the remembering is directed toward God, so that the rite moves God to remember Christ and hasten the end, or is the community's own remembering of Christ.
- majorityThe community's remembrance of Christ: the rite proclaims his death (Paul's gloss, 1 Corinthians 11:26) rather than petitioning God to remember.; Douglas Jones, ' anamnesis in the LXX and the Interpretation of 1 Cor. xi.25,' JTS 6 (1955): 183-191; Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT, rev. ed. (2014), on 11:24-25; Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (2000), 878-882
- minorityA Godward memorial meaning "that God may remember me," repeating the rite so that God remembers the Messiah and hastens the consummation.; Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, tr. Perrin (1966), 237-255; Fritz Chenderlin, Do This as My Memorial, Analecta Biblica 99 (1982)
Whether anamnesis in the eucharistic sayings carries the weight of making the past event of Christ's death present again (an objective re-presentation), or names a communal memorial that proclaims and applies his death without repeating the event itself
- majorityA communal cultic memorial that proclaims Christ's death and stands before God; the "making present" is a later theological development, not the lexical sense of the noun.; Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT, rev. ed. (2014); Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner, The First Letter to the Corinthians, PNTC (2010)
- minorityAn objective making-present (Vergegenwaertigung) of the Christ-event itself in the memorial act.; Odo Casel, Das christliche Kultmysterium (1932)