Holy Scripture clearly affirms the substantial presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. Yet, throughout the history of the Church, theologians have explained this presence in different ways. In Western Christendom before the Reformation, transubstantiation became the standard doctrine. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 dogmatized transubstantiation as official and infallible Church teaching. The Council of Trent reaffirmed transubstantiation after the Reformation was underway.
Luther On Transubstantiation
Martin Luther took a different approach. In On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther rejected transubstantiation, while still allowing that it could be accepted as a theologoumena. Although he later became more opposed to the doctrine, Luther was never as hostile to transubstantiation as he was to the sacramental teaching of the southern Reformers. This was largely because although transubstantiation is a misguided account of the substantial presence of Christ in the Eucharist, it nevertheless affirms the core biblical teaching that Jesus is present in the elements of the Lord’s Supper.
Aristotle and the Lord’s Supper
Many Roman Catholics claim that transubstantiation merely uses the language and categories of Aristotelianism to explain the mystery of the eucharistic presence. However, in On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther rejected the doctrine because its account of Christ’s substantial presence is not only held captive to the assumptions of Aristotle, but is also theologically inadequate. The subsequent Lutheran tradition agreed with Luther in this regard.
Being pre-Newtonian, Aristotle did not think of space as something into which we put objects. Rather, he argued substances carried space with them. Hence, if one substance was present, it necessarily pushed out another substance. St. Thomas Aquinas and others applied this logic to the Lord’s Supper. Aquinas and other advocates of transubstantiation thus held that affirmation of the substantial presence of Christ’s Body and Blood logically entailed the complete replacement of the bread and wine with the Body and Blood of Christ. Since the substances of the Body and Blood necessarily occupied space, there was no long any space for the substances of the bread and wine, regardless of biblical testimony.
For Aquinas and other Roman Catholics, the priest speaking the words of institution acted in persona Christi to transform the elements into the Body and Blood of Christ. Aristotle defined accidents as external and theoretically separable inessential qualities of a substance. Therefore, Aquinas argued that the accidents of the bread and wine (like size, color, and taste) remained even after consecration. In other words, for Roman Catholics, the appearance of the bread and wine remain the same after the eucharistic miracle.
Difficulties with Transubstantiation
Despite its consistency according to Aristotelian logic, the dogma of transubstantiation has some problems. Exegetically, St. Paul is quite clear that the bread and wine remain as mediums of the Body and Blood of Christ: “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Cor. 10:16). Though “cup of blessing” appears somewhat ambiguous, this is a term for a cup of wine used in the Passover liturgy. It therefore indirectly affirms the continued presence of the wine.
The reference to the “bread that we break” is utterly unambiguous, and therefore a difficult text for Roman Catholic apologists. Robert Bellarmine attempted to argue that Paul had merely spoken of the Body of Christ metaphorically as bread. Ironically, this argument mirrors Zwingli’s procedure of interpreting a text metaphorically when it does not fit his metaphysical scheme.
The other difficulty with transubstantiation is that it entails an odd contradiction. The dogma of transubstantiation begins by assuming God respects the metaphysical laws of reality as discerned by Aristotle. Two substances cannot be present simultaneously. Hence, the Body and Blood of Christ must miraculously replace the substances of the bread and wine.
Nevertheless, as John Wycliffe observed in his critique of transubstantiation, Aristotle also claimed that accidents always adhere in substances. Therefore, the removal or replacement of a substance would change its associated accidents.1 This is true even though accidents are inessential qualities. Transubstantiation claims that God uses his supernatural power to make the accidents remain even if the substance has changed. The doctrine of transubstantiation, then, makes two apparently contradictory claims. First, God respects Aristotle’s metaphysical law that two substances cannot be present simultaneously. Second, God then violates Aristotelian metaphysical law by miraculously allowing the accidents to remain without their original substances.
Consubstantiation?
During the late Middle Age, theologians developed an alternative position to transubstantiation known as “consubstantiation.” Older Roman Catholic and Reformed textbooks of the history of dogma sometimes attributed this position to Luther and Lutheranism. Unfortunately, this error remains present even in some modern scholarship. Yet, the idea that Luther and later Lutherans adhered to consubstantiation is completely inaccurate. Luther never accepted consubstantiation as an explanation of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper. Consubstantiation, like transubstantiation, relies on Aristotelian metaphysics and logic to explain the substantial presence.
In any case, Duns Scotus and later Franciscan theologians, such as William of Ockham and Gabriel Biel, correctly recognized that there was no solid metaphysical or scriptural reason to doubt the persistence of the bread and wine along with the Body and Blood of Christ after consecration. Scotus, and later Ockham and Biel, posited the hypothetical possibility of fusion between the Body and Blood and the bread and wine. According to this late medieval conception, it was possible that the substances of Christ’s Flesh and Blood existed alongside the substances of bread and wine without replacing them. Yet, all authors agreed that this was not a correct position because the Fourth Lateran Council had already authoritatively affirmed and dogmatized transubstantiation.
Luther on the Sacramental Union
Christ’s substantial Body and Blood “in, under, and with” the bread and wine
Again, the problem with consubstantiation is that it still labors under the Aristotelian belief that two substances cannot be present together simultaneously. Therefore, they must exist merely alongside each other. Despite this, the early Luther was a student of the via moderna. As a result, Ockham and Biel’s argument for the theoretical possibility of the simultaneous presence of the Body and Blood along with the bread and wine influenced the young Luther. After having rejected the infallible teaching authority of the Church (evident as early as Luther’s Leipzig debate with Eck), Luther no longer felt constrained by the dogma of transubstantiation.
Following Paul’s assertion in 1 Corinthians 10:16, Luther believed the Body and Blood of Christ became present through a kind of sacramental union with the bread and wine. The Body and Blood of Christ did not exist in union alongside the bread and wine (consubstantiation). Rather, communicants received the Body and Blood in and through the bread and wine. Later Lutherans pioneered the formula “in, under, and with” to explain the mode of reception.
Luther himself not only saw the aforementioned biblical text as evidence for this position, but also saw a parallel to the incarnation. In Christ’s incarnation, His divinity does not replace His humanity (in analogy to transubstantiation). Neither does the divinity merely exist alongside the humanity (as in consubstantiation). Instead, Christ’s divine nature is united with the humanity so as to be present in and through it. Thus, although an imperfect comparison, the hypostatic union parallels the sacramental union between Christ’s Body and Blood and the bread and wine.
The role of the Lord’s Supper as a fulfillment of the Passover also supports Luther’s view. Jesus instituted the sacrament at a Passover meal and very clearly saw his death as the fulfillment of a new exodus. In the Passover, Jews consumed both the unleavened bread and the sacrificed lamb. The flesh of the lamb did not somehow replace the unleavened bread. Likewise, Jews drank wine and painted the blood of the lamb over the lintels of doors. This lamb’s blood did not replace wine, but was genuinely present with it.
Angels in adoration of Christ in the Holy Eucharist
- John Wycliffe, Trialogus, trans. Stephen Lahey (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 209-212. ↩︎
From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).
Cover image from: Kenneth Wieting, “Are You Fanatical about the Lord’s Supper?,” The Lutheran Witness, November 23, 2020, accessed August 7, 2024, https://witness.lcms.org/2020/are-you-fanatical-about-the-lords-supper/; other images from: Ian Huyett, “Fast Food Communion Must be Destroyed,” Staseos, October 1, 2019, accessed August 8, 2024, https://www.staseos.net/post/fast-food-communion-must-be-destroyed; Larry A. Peters, “A Small But Significant Thing. . .,” Pastoral Meanderings, March 9, 2017, accessed August 7, 2024, https://pastoralmeanderings.blogspot.com/2017/03/a-small-but-significant-thing.html; Sacramental Union meme from Liturgy Matters group, Facebook, accessed August 7, 2024, https://www.facebook.com/lutheranmass; and “Angels in Adoration of the Eucharist,” lithograph by J. G. Schreiner after M. Seitz after H. Hess, accessed August 7, 2024, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Angels_in_adoration_of_the_Eucharist,_which_is_presented_on_Wellcome_V0035755.jpg.