“I may ask any ingenuous man whether he ever heard any approved Doctor in our Church teach, that we do, or ought to kneel before the Sacrament; that by it, or in it, we may personally worship Christ, as if He were really present.” — Thomas Morton, Bishop of Durham (1619)^[1]

“What happens to the loaf and the cup?” They are eaten and drunk. The elements are used in a ritual meal. They are not transformed. But what happens to those who eat the bread and drink the wine? That is the question. For this ritual meal, qua social occasion, is a sharing in Christ and in all that has happened to Him: death, resurrection, ascension, and glory. The Biblical sacramentology is just Biblical soteriology applied to the sacrament. We thus affirm that “the communicant receives Jesus himself sacramentally at the Supper.” But we deny that the bread and wine are changed. That was never the intent of Jesus’ institution.

The evidence of late 2nd Temple Judaism precisely contemporary with Jesus and Paul shows that the Passover was understood with the same conception of “participation.” Paul’s teacher Gamaliel is recorded as having taught that “In every generation, everyone” who partakes of the Passover — even those born in Brooklyn or Kiev — “is duty bound to regard himself as if (lir’ôth eth ‘atsmô ke-ilû) he personally had passed out of Egypt.” (m.Pes. 10.5) It is no surprise, then, to find Paul telling us that “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us” and speaking about how his Israelite ancestors were “baptized into Moses” and “drank from the rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.” For those who have been baptized into Christ, the Lord’s Supper is a sharing in his body and blood, which is to say, in the body that experienced death on a Roman cross, and was then raised on the third day. Ritual meals as an efficacious means of participation in saving events that are accomplished in history — in the Exodus, in Jesus’ death and resurrection — this is the Biblical model of how the Passover and the Eucharist work. This view of the Eucharist fits perfectly with the Pauline language of sharing in Christ and with his repeated exhortations to “regard” (οἴδαμεν = Gamaliel’s lir’ôth) everyone who is in Christ as a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:15-16).

This pattern of how the Passover works explains why it is that Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper at the Last Supper, before His death, even as the first Passover was celebrated before the Exodus that all subsequent Passovers reinscribed on every Israelite who partook, even hundreds of years later. The Last Supper was the climax of Jesus’ self-revelation, the moment when he took bread that was already known to his disciples as representing the Messiah, and identified it with himself, thereby disclosing His identity as the Messiah. Indeed, some scholars have suggested that “my body” (guphi) is an idiomatic Aramaic way of saying “me myself.”^[2] That is, the emphasis is not so much on flesh in contrast to blood, but on Jesus’ messianic self-disclosure. It is a method of self-disclosure that fits well with our Lord’s indirectness. It is also surely not a coincidence that He uses another morsel of bread to reveal another unutterable truth: “Is it I who am to betray you, Lord?”

We should thus think of the Jewish Messiah, sitting at table with His disciples to eat a ritual meal that was saturated in Israel’s history and in eschatological expectation. Not for nothing did nearly every false messiah, from Judas of Galilee to Simeon ben Kosiba, choose Passover as the date on which to launch his rebellion. In this context, then, Jesus takes up a piece of bread that represents the Messiah, and in calling it “my body,” thereby reveals that He is that Messiah. He takes up a cup, and by speaking of the wine it contains as “the blood of the covenant,” He indicates that He will offer himself to redeem Israel in much the same way as the original Passover lambs in Egypt. Thus, the Last Supper is a self-disclosure of Jesus’ true messianic identity and his sacrificial vocation at the same time. And all subsequent Eucharists make those who partake to be “sharers” (συγκοινωνοί) in Jesus and in His “affliction and kingdom and perseverance,” even as baptism makes us to be “baptized into His death.”

Here is a Biblical sacramentology that has the virtue of being historically available to the NT writers. It is also starkly realist: the Supper gives us real sharing in Christ; it is not a “mere symbol” that we should, with Flannery O’Connor, say “to hell with it.” At the same time, it is clear both from the Passover background and from the way Paul speaks about the Eucharist, that it was never intended as a replacement for Christ’s personal presence. There is nothing in the Bible or the early fathers about Christians directing adoration or worship toward the Eucharistic elements as though Christ were “present” in the bread and wine as they sat on a table. The sharing in Christ that we have in the Eucharist is vivid and real enough to underwrite the most effusive language of the apostolic fathers. But it has nothing to do with a static local presence, nor with Eucharistic adoration, benediction, reservation, or Corpus Christi processions. It is, like Passover, a ke-ilu (“as if”) participation: the sharing of the covenant people in the saving events of the covenant, in the body that was broken and the blood that was shed to inaugurate that covenant, as though they personally had been crucified with Him and raised again. As N.T. Wright has put it: “the Lord’s Supper must be celebrated narratively.”

That is the problem with ontology of the sort that theologians have long used to explain the working of the Supper: it has nothing to do with the Biblical narrative. Indeed, ontology is often enough a replacement for the narrative. By focusing on the word “is” in the phrase “this is my body,” often with that pseudo-tautology “is means is,” many theologians have then set themselves to answer the question, “How does the bread and wine become metaphysically identical with Jesus’ historical body, “the same,” as Paschasius Radbertus insisted, “that was born of the Virgin Mary”? Never mind that “metaphysical identity” is almost never what anyone means by “is,” or that the very word “is,” as Oecolampadius observed, would not even have been spoken if Jesus said his Eucharistic words in Aramaic. The metaphysical answers have varied, depending on whether the theologians answering it have been Roman Catholic, Anglican, or Lutheran. In probing and parsing the words of institution, theologians have had recourse to Aristotelian substance and accidence language (Thomas Aquinas), Platonistic “participation in heavenly realities” (Boersma), and now, with Jenson, “intention” and “availability.” It is almost as though theologians are afraid to parse the Supper in terms of Israel’s story, despite the fact that it was instituted by a 1st century Jew who was eating a meal, Passover, that was absolutely shot through with Israel’s story. If they had attended to that story, they might have found the words, “It is the Lord’s Passover” (pesach hu’ without any verb “is”), applied to the paschal lamb (Ex. 12:11) — where “the Lord’s Passover” means the literal act of YHWH’s passing over the houses whose doorposts and lintels were daubed with the blood of the lamb. I submit that this verse shows us how to think about the meaning of the word “is” in Jesus’ words “This is my body.” Jesus is not saying that the substance of the bread is metaphysically transformed. He is saying, at a moment before His crucifixion, that this ritual meal is henceforth a sharing in Him and the events that are about to happen to Him, even as later Passover meals were a sharing in the Passover Lamb and the events of the Exodus that were effected by its blood smeared on doorposts and lintels.

James Keating says that the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation is an attempt to express “Christ’s Eucharistic presence” with an adequate “ontological density.” The problem is that metaphysical concepts are culturally relative fictions. Terms like “tree” or “horse” are relatively easy to translate into another language. But when we try to render “substance” or “essence,” we discover that such words are fossilized metaphors, and that different periods and countries do not use the same metaphors for such things. Especially in our day, the Aristotelian language of substance and accidents does not actually give anyone a sense of “ontological density.” For the man in the pew, such metaphysical language does not help to make the Eucharist seem more real or Christ seem more present. Rather, it leads to several very bad things. First, it promotes “the real objective presence,” which is a defective and inadequate way of thinking about how we receive Christ by eating the bread and drinking the wine. Second, it promotes Greek categories, which are a substitute for the Biblical narrative through which the apostle Paul wants us to understand both the Supper and ourselves. Third, metaphysical language almost invariably uses spatial metaphors, which divert the Church into doing things that Jesus did not command us to do with the elements of bread and wine, things which are destructive of the right use of those elements that Jesus did command.

First, “objective presence.” James Keating says that “subjective presence requires and presupposes objective presence.” Etymologically, the term “object” comes from the Latin obiectum, “thrown up against” someone. Etymologically, the word “presence” comes from the Latin prae + esse, “being in front of” someone. It is a characteristic of “objective presence” that it can happen without any narrative context. A truck driving on the road in front of my car “throws up” a stone, which strikes my windshield. A man is walking too quickly around a corner and bumps into another person, causing both to fall down. In such cases of “objective presence,” there is no story, no context, no meaning, no relationship. Such presence is, in fact, how we usually encounter things and persons in everyday life for the first time, but it is very far from the sort of “participation” and “union” that the Apostle Paul teaches that the Supper effects. The goal of the Supper is not that Jesus be on the table in the elements. The goal is rather that His people should be fully united to Him in His death and resurrection. As N.T. Wright puts it, “His fate becomes theirs, his inheritance becomes theirs, his life becomes theirs. To be ‘in the king,’ or now, for Paul, ‘in the anointed one,’ the Messiah, is to be part of the people over which he rules, but also part of the people who are defined by him, by what has happened to him, by what the one God has promised him.” (N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 830)

Indeed, if we attend to the Bible’s stories, we find that “presence” is not even the point. Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples does not culminate in a sacramental “real presence.” The disciples have Jesus present before their eyes as they sit at the table, but they still do not really know who He is or how they ought to relate to Him. They are still deeply insensible of his true Messianic vocation and the fact that it requires Him to die. Yet His Messiahship and death are the very things which He intends for them, not to observe or adore from without, but to share in via the Eucharist. “Can you drink the cup which I am about to drink?” The Last Supper begins with presence, true, but it moves from presence to something higher. By contrast, there is never any suggestion that the Eucharist is intended as a remedy for Jesus’ bodily absence after His ascension.

Again, the disciples on the road to Emmaus “come to know Him in the breaking of bread” (Luke 24:35). They have had the facts of Jesus’ resurrection already reported to them (“some women of our company amazed us,” 24:22), but as Richard Hays points out, they are unable to place this fact in the narrative within which it makes sense, and it is therefore meaningless to them.^[3] They move from “not knowing how to locate” Jesus’ resurrection “within Israel’s story,” to recognizing Jesus, understanding His death and resurrection within the larger story of the Scriptures, and worshipping Him. They move from ignorance to knowledge and from despair to hope, not because of “real presence” but by their “eyes being opened.” While they were on the road to Emmaus, they remained  in a state of confused incomprehension and gloom (σκυθρωποί, 24:17), despite the fact that Jesus was present. No sooner did they recognize Him than he absented Himself from them. This same pattern happens again in 24:52, when Jesus appears bodily to His disciples (presence), and then is “parted from them and carried up into heaven” (absence), whereupon “they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy.” In these stories from the end of Luke, the presence of Christ is not brought about by the eating of the bread (still less by “consecration” of it); indeed, the resurrected Jesus appeared and was bodily present to his disciples on the road to Emmaus only in order to bring about the disciples’ participation in his new life, which is the life of the renewed Israel, the climax and fulfillment of Israel’s story. And they did participate, and were caught up into that new life — despite Jesus being bodily absent. The goal in all these narratives is participation, not presence.

Against the idea of “real objective presence,” we must insist that the Eucharist is not an object, but a ritual. It is a thing which the people of God must do, not deiknumena (“objects to be displayed”) in Jane Harrison’s sense (cf. the Eleusinian mysteries),^[4] or a presence before which they should do obeisance. Thankfully, some Roman Catholic theologians have recognized this fact. Consider Louis-Marie Chauvet:

“Sacramental theology is the theory of a practice. Its object is the church’s celebration itself. It has nothing relevant to say that does not stem from the way the church confers the sacraments. If one had always obeyed this golden rule many deviations would have been avoided. One example of these deviations pertains to the eucharistic presence of the Lord, which has been understood in isolation independently of its purpose as nourishment for its partakers, demonstrated by the gestures, the words, and even the material elements used in the narrative of the institution.”^[5]

Spatial language is conspicuously absent from the Bible’s descriptions of the Eucharist, but that has not stopped theologians from trying to retrofit their metaphysical and spatial explanations with Biblical warrant. For instance, Brant Pitre attempts to find precedent for Eucharistic “real presence” in the Old Testament showbread, lechem panîm, a Hebrew phrase which Pitre attempts to translate as “bread of the presence,” as though God were present in the bread. No such idea is at work in the name of the showbread. It is called lechem panîm because it is placed “before” (le-p’ney) God in the Tabernacle (Ex. 25:30). The showbread is “to the face of” God, but He is not “present in” the showbread.

Alastair Roberts once told me, in response to my objections to ontological explanations of the sacrament, that transubstantiation and other such theories are “second-order language.” This is fair enough: after all, even if one were inclined to an understanding of the sacrament’s working that takes Israel’s story, the identity of Jesus as the Messiah, and the events of his death and resurrection as its starting points, one could still ask metaphysical questions: “If union with Christ in His death and resurrection is the point of the Eucharist, how does that happen, since He is one person and I am another?” Or “how does that happen, since His death is a past event and I am in the present?” I don’t pretend that I have escaped the need to think about metaphysics or to use second-order language. But at least the second-order language should have a chance of being in line with the first-order language of the Bible itself. Does anyone suppose that the Apostle Paul would have struggled to explain how he thought the Eucharist worked without recourse to Greek metaphysics? This is the apostle who thought things were obvious: “The bread which we bread, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” Isn’t it?

Stephen Long points to the reason why the Eucharist has been the object of so much heated debate over the centuries: “Where intractable theological disagreements arise, there often lurk ‘unbaptized’ theological assumptions that need correction.” – Quite so. Or again, Long quotes Jenson: “Our common apprehension of God is only partly Christian, and this generates dialectics in the church’s history that must constantly compel choice between false alternatives.” Among those “only partly Christian” unbaptized assumptions is the Roman Catholic insistence on substance language and ontological change of the elements, which is pitted against the false alternative of a “Zwinglian” understanding of the bread and wine as “edible flashcards.” Either we must accept, with Keating, claims that the elements of bread and wine are imbued with “ontological density” or else we must grant that they are empty signs of the sort that Flannery O’Connor banished to Hades. Can we beg off this false dichotomy?

Greek ontology is expressed in spatial metaphors: substantia is that which “stands under” a thing; accidents “fall to” a thing; hypokeimena “underlie” a thing, and so on. Applying this ontology to a Jewish ritual meal like Passover or the Last Supper is akin to trying to understand a wedding cake using superstring theory or quantum mechanics. Not only is the Aristotelian apparatus inappropriate to the sort of thing that the Supper is, but it also perniciously causes people to think that the operation of the Supper is best grasped using this sort of metaphysical language. Accordingly, we find that spatial imagery plagues “real presence” discussions — whether Calvin’s Spirit-effected “descent” from heaven (an idea not taught in the Bible, which Long rightly rejects as a “stopgap”); or the idea that Christ is “enclosed” in a wafer that is then placed in a monstrance and treated as an object of worship; or the Lutheran formulation that Christ’s body is “in, with, and under” the bread. None of these spatial concepts is taught in the Bible. Worse, they go hand in hand with aberrant ritual practices: Corpus Christi processions; benediction and adoration; sancing bells; Martin Luther licking up spilled wine; Amalarius of Metz spitting out the elements rather than digest them, lest they become excrement; worries about mice eating the host; priests filling the chalice with water three times and drinking it, lest any drop be wasted. All of these practices are bizarre and utterly absent from the New Testament and the early church. I say nothing of the implausible eucharistic miracles that were alleged to prove transubstantiation: “bleeding” hosts, miraculous healings, and persons who did not age while in the presence of the consecrated elements. All these are observable miracles attesting the reality of an oxymoron: history’s only unobservable miracle, in which the body of Christ is confected by a priest, only to remain undetectable, as a sort of challenge to the faithful, who get credit if they can believe it is there against the evidence of their senses.

The consequences of the Fourth Lateran Council’s (1215) approval of “real presence” effected by the consecration of the elements are detailed by Christopher Elwood’s book The Body Broken:

“The focus of the liturgy came to be the moment of transformation and the point at which the host was elevated for the congregation to see, a practice introduced early in the thirteenth century. The eagerness to see the consecrated host was abetted by the church’s policy of encouraging acts of devotion to the sacrament, particularly the adoration of the host. Seeing the host increasingly became far more important for most Christians than actual reception, which had become very infrequent, required by the church only once a year.”^[6]

Yet these aberrant practices and ridiculous legends are — let’s admit it — the logical consequences of the doctrine of “real objective presence.” We may argue using a cascading modus tollens based on the following chain of conditionals:

“The truth is self-evident, that if a true Presence of Christ (Body, Soul, and Divinity) in the Elements be acknowledged, adoration addressed to Christ as so present must be admissible; and if admissible, it must be due; and if due, it ought to be paid.”^[7]

In the New Testament and in the early Church, no such adoration is paid; therefore it is not due; and not admissible; therefore there is no such presence in the elements. The Anglican tradition has been quite good on this point, or at least it was before moderns abandoned the classic Book of Common Prayer and the 39 Articles. Yes, we kneel for Holy Communion,^[8] but it is not because the body and blood of Christ have become present in the elements: “For the Sacramental Bread and Wine remain still in their very natural substances, and therefore may not be adored…and the natural Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ are in Heaven, and not here…” (1662 BCP, the “Declaration on Kneeling”) The promise of union with Christ and sharing in His death and life applies to the participants in the ritual meal. There is no “impanation,” no hypostatic union of Christ with bread. “The Sacraments were not ordained of Christ to be gazed upon, or to be carried about, but that we should duly use them.” (Article XXV) “The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was not by Christ’s ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshiped.” (Article XXVIII)

This brings us to the question which Stephen Long raises of Jenson’s understanding of “Body” as “availability,” and the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist as His “availability” in the bread and wine, and the explanation that this is all so because the gathered Church “intends” the elements as Christ’s body and blood. The problem with this account of “body” — as also with “object” (as in “the real objective presence”) — is that it is ordinarily not dependent on our intention. A body is either there or it is not. In Roman Catholicism, the presence of Christ’s body and blood in the elements depends, not on what the congregation “intends,” but on the intention of the priest who consecrates the bread and wine. If his “hoc est corpus”^[9] has its desired effect, then Jesus is “objectively” there, and then we may intend Him; but if He is not there, then we cannot. Thus, Keating is quite right to respond to Jenson’s and Long’s argument that “subjective presence” (i.e. by which the worshipers “intend” Christ as the elements of the Eucharist) “requires and presupposes objective presence” (i.e. by which Christ is actually there, independent of their intentions).

Speaking only for myself, I have no use for either of these positions. In my judgment, so long as we are talking about “objective presence,” we are not even in the same conceptual universe as the Biblical language about the sacraments, but are under the dominion of the weak and beggarly principles of Greek ontology. Israel’s ritual meals did not work that way. Greek ontology is a substitute for the Biblical narrative through which Jesus and His apostle Paul want us to understand both the Supper and ourselves. “Real presence” is a static, two-dimensional parody of sacramental union with Christ. I am tempted to say that “real presence” is to the narrative-participationist sacramentology of the Bible what “Zoom Church” is to real Church: a feeble and deracinated declension from the Biblical norm, which is only plausible in the absence of the fuller reality of which it is a parody, always propped up by an ontology that is culturally and temporally alien to the Biblical text. As the age of COVID has trained a shrivelled society to suppose that interaction with flickering images on a screen amounts to real relationship, so centuries of Aristotelian talk about substances and “real presence” have trained the Church — Protestant as well as Roman — to think that Jesus is “there” or “available” on the Table, in the elements apart from the ritual meal of the people of God. “For which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred?” (Mt. 23:16) Or, as Peter Leithart has put it:

“What is the Supper? It is not just bread and wine, and not just eating of bread and wine. It is eating bread and wine by members of Christ’s body at Christ’s invitation…The Supper is not a symbol of a meal with Jesus. The bread and wine are symbols of Christ’s body and blood, but because Jesus promised to be with us at the table, this symbolic meal is a meal with Jesus. By eating the symbols, we are partaking the reality.

Symbol or reality? It is a false question.” ^[10]

Let us reject the false dichotomy. Let us instead think about the Eucharist the way a first century Jew would. Let us take the Passover as our pattern for thinking about the Eucharist. Let us not lift the elements up or worship them, but duly use them, so that we may share in Jesus, in His death and resurrection, by eating the meal that He commanded us to eat.

–

Matthew Colvin is a presbyter in the Reformed Episcopal Church. From 2012-2017, he served as a missionary teaching ministerial students in the Philippines and Indonesia. He holds a PhD in ancient Greek literature from Cornell University (2004). He lives on Vancouver Island.

^[1] Cited in Nathaniel Dimock, On Eucharistic Worship in the English Church (London: Haughton and Co., 1876), iv.

^[2] For instance, m.Avot 4.6: “Whoever honors the Torah, his body (= he himself, guphô) will be honored by created beings.” Cf. Gustaf Dalman, Jesus-Jeshua (New York: MacMillan, 1929), 143; Rudolf Meyer, “σάρξ” in TDNT 7.116, Pesch, Das Abendmahl und Jesu Todesverstandnis, 91. Other scholars propose the word gshem for σῶμα, but it too can be used with personal suffixes to mean “oneself.” Cf. the discussion in M. Colvin, The Lost Supper (Lexington, KY: Fortress Academic, 2019), 29-33.

^[3] Richard Hays, Reading Backwards (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014), ch. 1.

^[4] Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

^[5] Louis-Marie Chauvet, The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2001), 48.

^[6] Christopher Elwood, The Body Broken: The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the Symbolization of Power in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 1999), 14.

^[7] Nathaniel Dimock, On Eucharistic Worship in the English Church (London: Haughton and Co., 1876), 28. Dimock wrote during the height of the Tractarian controversy in the Church of England. His erudite exposés of the fallacies and shoddy scholarship of advocates of the “real objective presence” fill several volumes.

^[8] James B. Jordan has critiqued the practice of kneeling for the Lord’s Supper on the grounds that reclining or sitting is the Biblical posture for meals with Jesus, as befitting co-heirs and brothers and sisters of the King. It seems to me that he has a plausible case, but a respect for the wisdom of tradition deters me from agitating for change on this point.

^[9] Literally the origin of “hocus pocus.”

^[10] Peter J. Leithart, Against Christianity (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2003), ch. 3, § 18.