Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is

Over at the Spectrum blog Ryan Bell recalls a list of spiritual "one-liners" he heard from Jurgen Moltmann. One of the lines confused me:

At the Lord's Table we do not celebrate our theories about his presence, but his presence.

Why did it confuse me? Because I thought the second half of the coordination was leaving out more than it actually was. What?

Most of what we leave out of sentences, we don't think about. The following sentences are examples of ellipsis in coordinated structures—specifically, elliptical forms that are more common than the corresponding spelled-out alternatives:

1a. Are you more likely to eat a peach or an orange?
1b. Are you more likely to eat a peach or are you more likely to eat an orange?

2a. I don't want mushrooms on my pizza, but sausage.
2b. I don't want mushrooms on my pizza, but I want sausage on my pizza.

3a. Don't run across the road; walk.
3b. Don't run across the road; walk across the road.

4a. I want to hit him, but I know I shouldn't.
4b. I want to hit him, but I know I shouldn't hit him.

Tho punctuation and prosody can help disambiguate some structures, there are some structures that just don't lend themselves to a clear understanding. Sentence 3a for instance, would most likely be understood as an imperative telling you to walk across the road. But it could also be understood as two sentences. One telling you to walk. Take a walk. Walk for fun. Just walk. And another sentence telling you not to run across the road.

Consider 2a. Stressing mushrooms and sausage makes the contrast of two toppings most likely. Stress pizza and sausage and it might seem that I want mushrooms on sausage. Odd. A little awkward syntactically. Another possibility: if mushrooms and pizza get similar stress, and sausage gets the primary stress of the entire utterance, it's possible that sausage isn't a topping, but an independent choice.

Imagine a slightly different form. Tho this one makes sausage's independence easier to see, it's still ambiguous:

I don't want mushrooms on my pizza; I want sausage.

Is there there a silent prepositional phrase — on my pizza — following that banger?

Example 4a remains ambiguous. Most likely understood with hit him as the omitted verb phrase, but just as reasonable with want to hit him understood.

I want to hit him, but I know I shouldn't want to hit him.

The one-liner at the top of this post is confusing if we assume the coordinated phrase has omitted more than just the verb phrase we celebrate. As I first understood the sentence it was structured thus:

At the Lord's Table we do not celebrate our theories about his presence, but we celebrate our theories about his presence.

That makes no sense. It contrasts the complement of the preposition with itself. We would expect one complement of a preposition his presence to be replaced with a different complement of the same preposition: say, his kindness. Instead of celebrating theories about his presence they would be celebrating theories about his kindness.

But what Moltmann almost certainly meant is represented by the following structure:
At the Lord's Table we do not celebrate our theories about his presence, but we celebrate his presence.

The important difference here is that no longer is the complement of any preposition contrasted. The prepositional phrase isn't even a part of the omitted phrase. There is ellipsis in this form, but not the ellipsis that my first reading used in interpretation. Instead, a direct object of the verb is coordinated as a contrast to the noun phrase that happens to include it as a prepositional phrase complement. This could be made clear (and very likely was, as this was a spoken line) by stressing the two items being set in opposition: theories and presence.

• We do not celebrate our theories about his presence, but his presence.

That's hard to capture in writing. One strategy would be to specify presence with something that identifies its suggested actuality:

• We do not celebrate our theories about his presence, but his actual presence.

The ambiguity could also be avoided by completely avoiding ellipsis, and writing out a conspicuously—but not awkwardly—overt verb phrase. Actually, I would suggest leaving out the conjunction and using a lovely semicolon:

At the Lord's Table we do not celebrate our theories about his presence; we celebrate his presence.

But I repeat, if spoken, this would probably be clear with the right emphasis on the contrasted segments.