the transubstantiation and the distribution are connected with each other. Is
the former perhaps an enabling ritual needed so that bread and wine qualify to
be elements of the communion? In fact, in the Catholic Church, deacons and
other liturgists can distribute the host that was previously consecrated by a
priest (Code of Canon Law900.1 and 910.1) From a strictly Calvinist perspec-
tive, neither the minister (Second Helvetic ConfessionXVIII; Presbyterian
Church [U.S.A.], 2014, pp. 115–22, esp. 5.151), nor the elements (Calvin et al.,
2011, pp. 1370–1) are closer to the divine than the members of the congrega-
tion. It is especially difficult to analyze the ritual when the elements are passed
around instead of being distributed by the minister or some designated
member of the congregation. If we asked about the intuition of the partici-
pants (which is the decisive factor according to the theory), most of them
would probably see Christ as present in the bread and wine and interpret the
ritual as special-patient.
Whereas the Ritual Form Theory offers a variety of ways to think about a
particular class of rituals, it does not address many others at all. How shall we
understand prayer, Bible reading, ritual dance, or a Protestant service (without
baptism, the Lord’s Supper, or a healing ritual)? As Biró (2013, pp. 133–41)
pointed out, rabbinical Judaism does not contain any religious rituals at all if
we take the Lawson–McCauley model as a criterion. In terms of our foregoing
discussion of different approaches to rituals, the limited scope of the Ritual
Form Theory should not bother us too much. We have seen that different
approaches mark different (but often overlapping) groups of human behavior
as rituals as well as highlight different aspects of the same ritual behavior.
Arguably, what the Lawson–McCauley theory helps us study is the connection
between people’s perception of superhuman agency, on the one hand, and
their perception of ritual efficacy, on the other hand. (1) Although thefirst of
these two aspects falls outside the scope of this chapter, we can briefly note
that questions of divine transcendence and social hierarchy probably play
significant roles in the formation of proper rituals in terms of the Ritual
Form Theory. A transcendent divine being that does not manifest itself in
either material objects or social hierarchies makes corresponding religious
practices more difficult to analyze in the framework of the Lawson–McCauley
theory. The real question is of course how far such religious traditions
shape participants’intuitions about rituals. This could be an empirically
testable problem.
(2) The second aspect of rituals that the theory addresses isritual efficacy.
The power of rituals to bring about change has been widely discussed and
underlies notions of rituals as tools of social“maintenance”or“transform-
ation.”Jesper Sørensen (2005) identified ritual efficacy as the power of rituals
to change some aspect of the world. In contrast, thesymbolic interpretationof
rituals directs attention to the issue of how ritual actions are connected to
“overarching symbolic and doctrinal systems, that is, to themeaningof the
118 Cognitive Science and the New Testament