It is about the money: Against docetic offertory prayers
Docetism is an ancient Christian heresy—one of the earliest, in fact. Docetism taught that Jesus' physical body was an illusion. That meant that Jesus' crucifixion was illusory as well. Jesus only seemed to have a physical body and only seemed to die on the cross. The docetists taught that Jesus was pure spirit, incorporeal, so he could not have done the kinds of earthly things real people do, the most earthly of all being to die.
The rationale behind docetist thinking was that the material world is too base and grubby for God to have actually entered it. Death, especially death on a cross, is too undignified and messy for God in Christ to have experienced. The realm of the spiritual is pure and holy, whereas the material world is impure and unholy. God belongs to heaven and could have had nothing to do with the crass world in which we live. So Jesus must have been an immaterial spirit that God sent to communicate with us; he could not have been a flesh-and-blood human being like the rest of us.
Docetism is a well-known heresy. Yet sitting in church the other Sunday as I listened to the offertory prayer, it occurred to me that we were praying docetic prayers. Then I thought about all the docetic prayers I have prayed over the years.
