Eating Becomes Theology

By Jim Watkins, Ph.D.

There are few books more surprising than Robert Farrar Capon’s The Supper of Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (Modern Library, 2002). (1) It is not surprising for its plot twists or unexpected ending. Rather, it stands out for being utterly singular. Survey the landscape of human literature. What does one find? A great flock of fantasy over there. A herd of folktales grazing on the hillside. A small swarm of historical fiction buzzing nearby. Capon’s book is all by itself.

The Supper of the Lamb is a theological cookbook; at least, that is the best description I can give. Capon weaves together theology, commentary on eating and making food, and instructions for preparing meals into a beautiful tapestry until the individual threads are lost. It is both theoretical and practical. It raises questions of ultimate significance, and waxes eloquent about matters of little importance. It is a mixture of song, food criticism, poem, advice column, narrative, recipe, memoir, and ingredient list. 

Capon’s book brings together worlds that many of us try hard to separate: namely, the heady, rational, cognitive world of theology and the visceral, fleshy, sensuous world of the body. We might imagine that the task of theology is carried out by a part of our brains fundamentally different from bodily activities, like dancing or making and eating food. Capon’s book, however, envisions a holistic anthropology by engaging an embodied theology, and he graciously invites us to join him.

One of the most common definitions for Christian theology is “faith seeking understanding.” An embodied theology situates the task of faith seeking understanding within the body and recognizes the important role played by our emotions, metaphor, and imagination in this pursuit. As H. A. Williams writes, “The theologian is no different from the poet or dramatist. All of them must write in blood.” (2) If the notion of an “embodied theology” seems counter-intuitive, this is because our awareness of just exactly how our bodies are involved in theology is indirect and limited. (3)

Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb is an example par excellence of embodied theology. Reading it is like standing with Capon in his kitchen as he explains the finer points of cooking while taking on the deep questions of theology and leading us in prayer for our spiritual and physical nourishment. 

Throughout the book, and woven around many enjoyable tangents, is a lesson about how to make Lamb For Eight Persons Four Times. As a reader coming to Capon’s book more for theology than culinary tips, I skipped over this recipe in my first several readings. Those detailed sections of instruction and food commentary seemed to me to be boring. However, I returned to Capon’s book again just before Easter in 2021, and I decided to discover if I had missed something by skimming those parts. I most certainly had.

The meal ⁠— Lamb For Eight Persons Four Times ⁠— is a ferial delight with festal proportions. The ingredients are simple: lamb, some vegetables, noodles, rice, and the usual herbs and oils one often has to hand in a kitchen. But the meal itself is a whole so much greater than its parts. As Capon puts it, “Lamb for Eight Persons Four Times is not simply a recipe. It is a way of life.” (4)

I should preface what comes next with this disclaimer: I am not very good in the kitchen. At best, you may describe me as a novice. At worst, a nuisance. But I was determined to follow Capon’s recipe as closely as I could. So, on Easter Day, I gently laid a leg of lamb on a cutting board and began.

I started, as Capon instructs, by cutting off one third of the meat and chopping it into smaller pieces for a stew. I poked numerous holes in the outside of the other two-thirds of the leg of lamb and then inserted slivers of garlic clove. I placed the punctured leg and a large number of onions in a pot to be browned and braised. After the leg was cooked, I divided the meat and stored it for later meals. The stew meat I used right away.

The first installment of “Lamb for Eight Persons Four Times” is a lamb stew with onions, carrots, mushrooms, and parsley poured over noodles. I decided to make the noodles from scratch, which always takes longer than I expect. The meal provided a lovely Easter dinner for our family of six and, to our delight, leftovers for lunch on the next day.

After the stew, Capon’s recipe calls for a lamb casserole with spinach and cheese, a lamb fried rice, and vegetable soup. Each of these were individual meals and each returned to the table the following day. Altogether, Capon’s recipe fed my family for an entire week.

This series of meals that began on Easter Day became an enacted ritual of generosity. I returned to the same leg of lamb and discovered that there was more than enough. And this is precisely the point that Capon wants us to see. The physical world is filled with a kind of generosity that is excessive, if one takes the time to see it.

Food is the daily sacrament of unnecessary goodness, ordained for a continual remembrance that the world will always be more delicious than it is useful. (5)

Helping others to see food as a sacrament is one of Capon’s major aims in The Supper of the Lamb. And, by sacrament, he means a kind of generosity that goes beyond what is “necessary.” For this reason, Capon abhors abstractions and diagrams to the degree that they deny the goodness of creation. Food is a gift that is so much more than calories or nutritional information. It is a sign of God’s love and goodness, and it is meant to be tasted, savored, and digested.

Can we truly understand the Last Supper without having tasted a supper ourselves? By preparing, serving, and eating Lamb for Eight Persons Four Times, I grasped a theology of atonement in a fresh and embodied way. The self-giving love of God is one thing to say, another to imagine, and something else entirely to eat! The Anglican Eucharistic liturgy ends with a prayer thanking God “for feeding us with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ.” At the heart of Christian devotion is a meal, and it is through the Eucharist that we come to understand that God is love. Food becomes sacrament; eating becomes theology. 

Capon’s book is an embodied theology that invites us into the task of faith seeking understanding along with the bodily tasks of preparing, tasting, serving, and eating food. The world of cuisine is no mere illustration of theology but a vital realm in which he explores theology. As such, eating is an activity of eternal significance. 

Its eternal purpose is to furnish our sensibilities against the day when we shall sit down at the heavenly banquet and see how gracious the Lord is. Nourishment is necessary only for a little while; what we shall need forever is taste. (6)

For Capon, eating is caught up in our attempts to know and love God, and it is a means through which God prepares us for his presence. Faith seeking understanding is not an abstraction but the concrete and embodied pursuit of a God who made this world full of flavor and flesh.

O Lord, refresh our sensibilities. Give us this day our daily taste. Restore us to soups that spoons will not sink in, and sauces which are never the same twice. Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with, and casseroles that put starch and substance in our limp modernity. . . . Above all, give us grace to live as true men ⁠— to fast till we come to a refreshed sense of what we have and then to dine gratefully on all we have. (7)

Dr. Jim Watkins is the Director of Distributed Education / Affiliate Professor of Theological Aesthetics at Nashotah House. Dr. Jim Watkins holds a Ph.D. in theological aesthetics from the University of St Andrews. He and his wife Emily live in nearby Milwaukee with their four boys and dog. Dr. Watkins is always happy to answer your questions about distance education at Nashotah House. You may email him at jwatkins@nashotah.edu.

Footnotes:

1) Robert Farrer Capon, The Supper of the Lamb (New York, NY: The Modern Library, 2002), 23. Originally published in 1967.

2)  H. A. Williams in the foreword to W. H. Vanstone’s, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1977).

3)  Some helpful books to explore the relationship between embodiment, language, and theology include: Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), John Sanders, Theology in the Flesh (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017), Janet Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

4)  Capon, Supper, 23. 

5)  Ibid, 40.

6) Ibid.

7)  Ibid, 27-28.