The Presence of Christ in the Eucharist

Before I begin, there is a lot of animosity built up between Roman Catholics and Protestants of all stripes and I think this is supremely unhelpful in nearly every way. In example I no more believe that every Catholic is going to hell anymore than I believe that every pick-your-denominational-flavor believer is going to Heaven. It is God's Heaven and He will save whom He wills to save and none other. As such this is not a diatribe against the Catholics but is rather the outflowing of a meditation on the presence of Christ in the Lord's Table which I have been considering for some time. So please any desirous to play kick the Catholic please go somewhere else, and those who think I am playing kick the Catholic please know this about a disagreement that I personally hold with the Mother Church concerning one doctrine and has nothing whatever to do with my feeling about the Catholic Believers themselves.

In the Catholic Mass the priest says the Prayer of Consecration by which he dedicates the host (the Eucharist or the bread of the Lord's Supper) in so doing he changes the substance of the bread to the body of Christ. As in the actual flesh of Christ. The means of which is that all material things (so says Thomas Aquinas) have two different sets of attributes. 1) their accidents which are the physical visible properties and 2) their substance which is the underlying nature of the thing. For example if I say "ball" you will probably think of something spherical with various other properties which comprise the idea you have of "ball". You don't know exactly what I mean by "ball" but you more or less have an idea. The idea, so says some philosophers, stems from a universal ideal of "ball-ness". Therefore any and all balls would have a general participation in this "ball-ness" that is they possess the substance of "ball". It is the individual accidents which differentiate basketball, football, baseball, and soccer ball.

So?

Well the notion in Catholic Theology is that the host, which the Church prescribes is made of water, flour and salt, has the accidents of bread and the substance of bread, but when the priest, who has received Holy Orders and thus been empowered to do so by Mother Church, says the Prayer of Consecration the Holy Spirit effects what is called the Transubstantiation. That is to say God in response to the prayer of the priest changes the substance of the bread from bread to the Body of Christ while the accidents remain unchanged. So the Host would therefore still look like bread, feel like bread and taste like bread, but would now possess the substance of the Body of Christ.

And....

This doctrine comes from the Gospels when at the Last Supper the Lord breaks the bread and tells the Apostles, "This is my body which is broken for you...." Therefore, Rome maintains, that in order to have received the true Eucharist you must actually eat the Body of Christ, since that is what the Lord said, and the only way to do this is too receive it from the hand of a rightfully ordained Priest.

So what is the problem?

Well there are a lot of them. Among them are questions concerning Church Authority, the Authority of the Pope and by extension the Priesthood, the necessity of repeating the sacrifice etc, but here I want to focus on the one question of, "Can we have the presence of Christ without the Transubstantiation?", and, "Is the Transubstantiation a true and valid religious rite?"

The second question first.

I think the single most forceful argument against the Transubstantiation was offered by John Calvin. He argued that the Transubstantiation was invalid not because of its reliance on Aristotelian Philosophy but because the Doctrine does violence to the Church's own teaching. Namely as it concerns the Council of Chalcedon. For those of you have attended a confessional church in your life you have probably at some point stood with the congregation and said something which included the statement about Jesus that He was "fully man and fully God". The Council of Chalcedon affirmed this belief. The bishops at the council repudiated the idea that Christ had only one nature, that is to say His nature was only that of God. Earlier the Church had repudiated the idea that Christ had somehow become God after having ascended to it (the Arian Heresy which Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses teach to this day) at the Council of Nicea and at Chalcedon they repudiated the monophysite heresy which held that Christ's human nature was less than human in some way.

In so doing the Church affirmed that the two natures of Christ existed fully, without confusion or mixture. That they were distinct and existed in one person. In other words, Christ pertaining to His humanity was a man. He was born in a very normal fashion, grew up, learned things, became a man of wisdom and stature, learned and obeyed the Law, ate slept and even pooped. He bled real blood, suffered real pain and died a real death at Calvary and rose in a real body in which He will come again. Concerning His humanity He has all of the properties of the Deity. He is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent and did not divest Himself of these in any fashion in order to become man. After all to do so would make Him less than God which would mean that He was God and not God in the same way and at the same time.

And here was Calvin's argument. Since Christ had a human and divine nature and holds them both without mixture or confusion, then that means that the properties of one cannot belong to the other. That is the Omnipresent Son when He was walking the streets of Jerusalem in His flesh could not also be walking the streets of Bethlehem; that His divine presence did not and does not negate His human body's physical properties. And here is where Rome tripped on herself concerning this doctrine. Each day 365 days a year the Roman Catholic Church performs the Mass. At the Mass the Transubstantiation takes place. In other words each and every day Rome's doctrine holds that the Body of Christ, that is His flesh, takes the omnipresent nature of God because any Mass held at the same time in two different places would demand that Christ bodily be present in two places at the same time. In other words Rome blends the natures of Christ by this doctrine and in so doing sets aside her own doctrine in favor of her practice. For this and no other reason, though there are many (how can man offer to God the person of Christ, and do so repeatedly which just so happens to offend the text of Scripture... Hebrews) this one argument I think throws the practice out as any legitimate Religious rite.

So where is the rub? Surely the practice being invalid means that the Supper is itself a symbol and naught else.

The problem is the words of Christ. Jesus plainly declares to the Apostles, "Take and eat this is my body do this in remembrance of me." There are those who would like to argue that since the Apostles understood that they were not actually eating the flesh of Christ that we can imply the symbolism of the Supper, but the issue is that if Jesus had wanted to say, "This is like my body" He could have, but He did not. The Gospels and Paul all record that Jesus said the bread is His Body and the wine is His blood, and this is no invention of later years as we know because the Church from her earliest days offended Roman culture because they were accused of being cannibals because they ate someone's flesh and drank their blood.

So if the Supper is no mere symbol and neither do we call down the flesh Christ to be daily broken on the altar then what do we do with this simple declaration, "This is my body."

I think the answer is found in two things. One the Passover and two the other sacraments.

Again we'll start with the latter. St Augustine when he was writing concerning the Donatist Controversy (certain Christians, the followers of Donatus oddly enough, argued that any sacrament administered by a priest who then back slid and renounced the Faith in the face of persecution would be invalid because the Priest or Bishop had invalidated himself) argued that the faithfulness of the priest was not the determinate factor in the efficacy of the Sacrament, but rather the Holy Spirit's attendant mercy is that which validated the sacrament, after all if the validity of baptism or marriage or the Lord's Table depended on the sinlessness of any man priest or not we would all be firmly up the creek.

So Augustine argued that the Sacraments were made real by the Spirit. For example in Baptism we are symbolically buried with Christ. But Christ was in the ground three days, and certainly the Church does not require us to hold our breath for three days so the Sacrament represents the participation in the death and burial of Christ. But if Baptism is merely a symbol then would an atheist also receive the benefits of Baptism? Certainly not. Because baptism is a symbol but not merely one. That is the Baptism is only real if it is administered to a believer in Christ. But any Joe can say he is a Christian and we have very limited means to know whether or not it is so, but God knows. And so in a mysterious way the Holy Spirit attends the Baptism of the saved and effects the reality of the participation in the death and burial of Christ. So in a sense the Baptism is a sign and yet it is a reality. Plainly spoken, a person can attend Church daily, go through all the religious rigmarole and still go to Hell because he does not have the Grace of Salvation. It is only the Grace of the Holy Spirit which makes a man's religion real and it is therefore the work of God which validates the faith and practice of the faithful.

A quick aside. R. C. Sproul very astutely pointed out that orthodox believers have a tendency to think of the Grace of God as though it were something which came in a box with a bow on top. Not so, the Grace of God is the presence of God, therefore those to whom Grace has been given have received from God, God Himself. As such when Grace of God attends a sacrament God is there.

Now onto the Lord's Table and the tricky phrase.

I think the first thing we must do when considering the Lord Table is remember that this is a distinctly Jewish observation. Namely the observation of the Passover. When Jesus instituted the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper He was eating the Passover with the Apostles. So what is the Passover? It was a yearly celebration commemorating the Exodus from Egypt when the Israelites sacrificed a lamb and put its blood on the door posts and ate the lamb and bitter herbs within so that the Angel of Death would not strike their houses as He passed through Egypt. A pretty simple command really, "Do this or I will kill you." So for the first participants in Egypt the Passover was not symbol at all, but a very present reality which promised immediate and total disaster for those who did not obey.

But what about those who kept the Passover, say, in the time of King David? If they did not keep the Feast would the Death Angel strike their households and slay their firstborn? No. It was a symbol kept in remembrance that God had delivered them from Egypt. So those who ate the Lamb were not actually eating the Passover Lamb as their Fathers had in Egypt, but they were participating in the deliverance of their fathers by eating a lamb. So there was a sense of really eating the Lamb at Passover as they remembered what God had done. But were all of those who participated year in year out true adherents to the Faith of God. No. We know because God tells the Prophets (Isaiah and Amos immediately come to mind) that He hates the festivals and new moons in which the people participated because they did so without faith. The clear message is that while perhaps a great many people took part in the Passover those who did so without faith received no benefit from it. That is only the faithful experienced the reality of eating the Passover Lamb when they ate a lamb at the Passover.

So what happened at the Lord's Table? Jesus ate the Passover with the Apostles (although we know for certain that at least Judas received no benefit from it) and as He did so He changed the Liturgy of the ceremony. Instead of eating the Lamb He told the Apostles to take and eat the Bread which was His Body and drink the Cup which was His Blood, and they were to do this in perpetuity until they drank the Cup with Him in Paradise. So did they literally eat the Body of Christ? I think the answer depends on what is meant by "literally". I think the first question to be asked is, "Did all the Apostles receive the same meal?" Again considering Judas I think the answer is clearly no. There were those who received the symbol in faith and received the full grace of the presence of Christ as they ate and others who did not, as such can it really be said that they all literally ate the same meal? Again I think the answer is no.

So from the very beginning of the Table there is a sense in which there is a reality beyond the physical which takes place at the meal. But then we must consider what followed. After Jesus had eaten the meal and changed the liturgy He then went to the Cross and died and became the all sufficient Lamb for the faithful thus paying in full the price of their debt. And now instead of the Death Angel coming and slaying the first born of the faithless Egyptians He instead laid hold of the Firstborn of God Almighty and drove stakes into Him on a Roman gibbet thus fulfilling the future to which the Passover of old had pointed.

But now a new Liturgy of the Passover had been given and now those who would take of it would participate not in the temporal salvation out of slavery from the Egyptians, but from the permanent and once for all salvation out of sin and death which those who are Christ's find in Him. Now instead of eating a Lamb in faith, we eat the Lamb in faith. Not because of a priest, but because we offer ourselves as living sacrifice wholly acceptable to Him and in so doing we partake of His suffering because He attends our taking of the sacrament. It is as though we are receiving the bread from His hand as surely as the Apostles did. When Christ gives us grace to come to His Table He is giving us His presence as we eat the bread remembering, as the Israelites did, the escape from slavery, and looking forward, as the Israelites did, not to the Lamb who is to come but to the Lamb who will return and eat this meal with us in Paradise.

In the same way we now take the Cup. We no longer take the bitter herbs to remind us of the bitterness of Slavery and the price paid for our freedom, but rather we take the cup to remember the Blood of the Lamb poured out at the Altar of the Cross remembering that Jesus drank the bitterness of the Cup of God's wrath to its dregs that we may drink the sweet wine of the River of Life in Paradise with Him. And those who do so in faith take that Cup from the Hand of God who gives it to them in Grace and says "Take and drink and remember what I did for you." Looking back to the bitterness of our slavery and the bitterness of the Cross and looking forward to the sweetness of hearing Him say, "Well done good and faithful servant."

So we have no need to invoke a priestly prayer to change the substance of bread and wine, as if that were possible, to have the presence of Christ at His Table. This is the crudest of understandings of what it means to be with God. It is to say that the only way God can commune with us is by actually placing Himself into our hands as though His presence is not real if I cannot personally physically touch Him.

No. And again no.

Rather the faithful enters into the presence of Christ at the Table not because a Priest has called God down but because Christ has called us up, and at His table we look forward to the Table where we will have the pleasure of His person forever more. And we need no earthly sign to know that having accepted the bread from His hand we have accepted Him. And we need no religious rites to know that having drunk of His cup of suffering we have drunk of Him. So let us find pleasure not in the things we can see touch and taste, but rather in the One who gives them to us and says,"All who are weary come unto me, for my burden is easy and my yoke is light." Let us worship His Name forever and evermore.