What exactly “happens” when Christians celebrate the Lord’s Supper? More specifically, what happens to the loaf and the cup?[i] For many American Evangelicals—and even for quite a few American Catholics—the only point of the Supper is to stir up and express personal piety: In subjectively “remembering” the sacrificial death of Jesus on one’s behalf, the individual thereby renews his or her personal commitment to the Savior. Other Christians—the Catholics who know the official teaching of their church, as well as the Lutherans and the Reformed who know theirs—have spoken about some sort of “real presence” of Christ. The communicant receives Jesus himself sacramentally at the Supper.
Spelling out what is meant by “sacramentally” in the preceding sentence became a notorious cause of division between Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation—and subsequently between the Protestants themselves (thus the Lutheran position versus the Reformed). But the attempt to state that something objective and real actually “happens” in the Supper is not an otiose project. Consider where we are culturally: During the past eighteen-plus months of Covid-lockdowns, many churches acquiesced—with alacrity—when urged or instructed to stop assembling as the church in worship. This happened on both sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide, albeit with differences commensurate with ecclesial structures. Among Protestants, “Zoom church-ing”—listening to a sermon at home and perhaps singing along with some hymns and praise choruses—put down some tenacious-looking roots. Worse still, many churches instituted Zoom “communion,” in the privacy of one’s own home, without any significant questions being raised as to its theological legitimacy. Were every last vestige of these practices to stop tomorrow, the fact that they happened at all, and that they have gone on for as long as they have, would still be a standing testament to governing assumptions about what happens (or doesn’t!) in the liturgy—especially about what happens in the Supper with which that liturgy ought to culminate. We clearly assume, for instance, that bodies—especially gathered bodies, eating from a common loaf and drinking from a common cup—make no real difference for our being one ecclesial body of Christ. The “virtual” presence of bodies will do because apparently nothing much happens with the cup and loaf that’s constitutive of the ecclesial body that should be gathered around them.
In view of our present cultural moment and the Zoom church-ing characteristic of it, a renewal of active reflection and catechesis concerning the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist is desperately needed.[ii] Though I am working within the Reformed tradition, I will use this occasion to appropriate some arguments of an American Lutheran, Robert Jenson, as a resource for articulating what it means to say that the cup and the loaf are the body of Christ, which we receive in the Eucharist—and that in receiving it we are, just so, one ecclesial body of Christ in that act.
§
To get a running start: Calvin denied Rome’s doctrine of transubstantiation as the proper account of Christ’s presence in the Supper. Even so, Protestant Calvin asserted a view of Christ’s presence that would startle most American Evangelicals: “Those to whom God has given knowledge of his truth,” taught Calvin, “must hold for certain that our Lord gives us in the Supper what he signifies by it, and we thus really receive the body and blood of Jesus Christ.”[iii] Note well: we really receive the body and blood. Again, Calvin insists that we truly partake of the whole person of Christ, as the very embodied divine Son that he is: “We say that Christ descends to us both by the outward symbol and by his Spirit, that he may truly quicken our souls by the substance of his flesh and of his blood.”[iv] The “descends” in that sentence is occasioned by one of Calvin’s fundamental assumptions in his sacramental teaching, concerning the definition of “body.” From the same chapter just quoted: “What is the nature of our flesh? Is it not something that has its own fixed dimension, is contained in a place, is touched, is seen?”[v] More axiomatically: “But it is the true nature of a body to be contained in space, to have its own dimensions and its own shape.”[vi] Christ is embodied in heaven, says Calvin, and so neither is present on the altar via any supposed “ubiquity” (contra the Lutheran position) nor is “enclosed” substantially under the accidents of bread (contra the Catholic position), and so we must be lifted up to him by the agency of his Spirit. But, precisely as those so carried by the Spirit, Calvin insists that we really do “receive in the Supper the body and blood of Jesus Christ, since the Lord there represents to us the communion of both.”[vii] Because what the Lord “represents” must be true—because the sacramental sign is not a “bare figure” but is “joined to its reality and substance”[viii]—so “the internal substance of the sacrament is joined with the visible signs; and as the bread is distributed by hand, so the body of Christ is communicated to us, so that we are made partakers of it.”[ix]
Calvin’s teaching on these points was taken up and formalized in the Reformed confessional documents of the sixteenth century.[x] And despite the fact that, in a curious twist of fate, this Calvinist Reformed confessional position came to be dominated by a Zwinglian (merely “symbolic”) interpretation, the Calvinist Reformed—in their early and confessional period anyway—have wanted to teach a real presence of Christ. Simply recovering an awareness of that would be a considerable gain for a good many American Presbyterians (I’m looking at you, PCA).
A further observation about the mechanics of Calvin’s teaching should be made here, one that moves towards criticism of this Reformer and on to the question of how we should press ahead with thinking a real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Repeated throughout Calvin’s teaching is the “analogy” articulated as follows:
From the physical things set forth in the Sacrament we are led by a sort of analogy to spiritual things. Thus, when bread is given as a symbol of Christ’s body, we must at once grasp this comparison: as bread nourishes, sustains, and keeps the life of our body, so Christ’s body is the only food to invigorate and enliven our soul. When we see wine set forth as a symbol of blood, we must reflect on the benefits which wine imparts to the body, and so realize that the same are spiritually imparted to us by Christ’s blood. These benefits are to nourish, refresh, strengthen, and gladden. For if we sufficiently consider what value we have received from the giving of that most holy body and the shedding of that blood, we shall clearly perceive that those qualities of bread and wine are, according to such an analogy, excellently adapted to express those things when they are communicated to us. (Institutes 4.3)
The heart of Calvin’s Eucharistic teaching, the focal image that (by his own estimate) made it “simple, edifying, and irenic,” is this frequently repeated “sacramental analogy”: “as bread nourishes…our body, so Christ’s body…enlivens our soul.”[xi] But there is a gap here, it seems to me, between what Calvin wants to say and what he actually gives resources for thinking. What I can phenomenologically intend as my action in the Supper is the eating of bread with others—but somehow I need to be feeding on Christ “in soul.” But then precisely that “somehow” is never really accounted for, seems to bear no very clear connection to what I’m phenomenologically doing (again, eating bread with others, drinking wine with them). And so the agency of the Spirit is invoked in the account as (it is hard not to say) a stop-gap to assure me that I really am receiving Christ by faith. But then, since the Holy Spirit also is not usually among the phenomena that I intend in the eating and drinking, I am forced into introspective pondering on the reality of my faith—that is, I am led away from the concreteness of eating and drinking, away from the company of those around me doing the same.[xii]
§
Notoriously, not only did the Lutherans and the Reformed disagree with Rome about how Christ was present in the Eucharist—they also disagreed with one another.[xiii] Given that history, it may seem a contradiction in terms for a Reformed theologian to look to a Lutheran for help with articulating the Eucharistic presence. The Lutherans have insisted on saying “in, with, and under,” which the duly catechized Presbyterian just as insistently refuses to say (see the Westminster Confession of Faith, 29.7). Fortunately Robert Jenson—an American Lutheran who professed to have learned a thing or two from the Reformed tradition (at least as Barth represented it)—says what he has to say without particular reliance on the offending prepositions. Perhaps that’s enough to be going on with.
Jenson understood his theological project as a metaphysically revisionary one. That is, the gospel’s account of the triune God and the particular story of Jesus Christ are determinative of reality: Our notions of what it is to be, or to be a person, or to be personally present are all finally to be determined or revised in light of what happens with Jesus.[xiv] Where intractable theological disagreements arise, there often lurk “unbaptized” theological assumptions that need correction.[xv] In the paragraphs to follow, I want to highlight one of Jenson’s revisions, concerning the nature of a “body.” Adopting it, I would argue, opens a way forward to thinking anew what “happens” in the Supper and to finding our way to the table together.
§
“This is my body.” The “is” here has been variously construed as “(merely) represents,” “is identical in ‘substance’ to (no matter the ‘accidents’),” “joins by the power of the Spirit to,” and so on. The verb “to be” is after all a very irregular verb indeed for Indo-Europeans. The term “body” has occasioned less trouble, except as predicate of that “is,” since we all appear to know what it means. So Calvin, as already cited, teaches that “body” is whatever is spatially circumscribed according to dimension and shape. In this the Reformer merely agrees with long-standing consensus: A true human body, also the risen Christ’s, necessarily has a spatial location and can acquire another location only by leaving its present one.[xvi] So also, to cite another example of the same consensus, Aquinas’ defense of the claim that the substances of bread and wine no longer remain after consecration includes the observation that, “a thing cannot be in any place, where it was not previously, except by change of place, or by the conversion of another thing into itself…Now it is evident that Christ’s body does not begin to be present in this sacrament by local motion. First of all, because it would follow that it would cease to be in heaven: for what is moved locally does not come anew to some place unless it quit the former one.” (Summa theologiae, iii.75.2) Christ is in heaven and does not move to the altar. Rather, his body replaces the substance of bread in an entirely supernatural act effected by the power of God alone (Summa theologiae, iii.75.4). Both Calvin’s and Aquinas’ arguments operate within the same “boundary conditions” concerning the nature of body: Christ is in heaven and so is not “here”in any of the usual ways we are accustomed to conceive the “here-ness” of a human body.
These boundary conditions supposedly definitive of body are not the only, nor even the most suitable, starting point for an account of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. Rather a personal body is the person’s availability to others and thereupon to him or herself.[xvii] If we are to be genuinely available to one another, persons must be not only subjects but also objects to and for one another. That is, you must be able so to “intend” me—and I you—that you can shake my hand or kiss me if I say something sublimely beautiful, or lay hold of me and chuck me out the window if I say something demonically wicked.[xviii] Were I merely a disembodied voice to you—an addressing Subject whom you could not draw nearer to nor successfully get away from—then sublime and maniacal address alike would be my sheer domination of you. But we are persons, and thus subjects and objects to one another. And that object-availability to and for one another is our “body.”
To speak carefully about what happens in the Eucharist, Christian theology has distinguished three inter-related referents of “body”: Christ’s historical body, born of Mary; Christ’s ecclesial body, the church; and Christ’s sacramental body, the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Jenson’s revisionary definition of body as “availability” sheds light on each. I concentrate here on the second and third referents. Concerning Christ’s ecclesial body:
That the church is the body of Christ…means that she is the object in the world as which the risen Christ is an object for the world, an available something as which Christ is there to be addressed and grasped. Where am I to aim my intention, to intend the risen Christ? The first answer must be: to the assembled church, and if I am in the assembly, to the gathering that surrounds me.[xix]
There is a first availability of Christ—where all the baptized are assembled as the church (1 Cor 11:18). But the identifying description of Christ’s body is not yet complete. Though Christ and his church form one body, yet Christ can still be distinguished from his body according to New Testament usage: the church is Christ’s bride, for instance.[xx] So what is the availability of Christ—his body, his objectivity—to the church that simultaneously distinguishes him also from the assembly? It is Christ’s sacramental body:
The object that is the church-assembly is the body of Christ, that is, Christ available to the world and to her members, just in that the church gathers around objects distinct from herself, the bread and cup, which are the availability to her of the same Christ. Within the gathering we can intend Christ as the community we are, without self-deification, because we jointly intend the identical Christ as the sacramental elements in our midst, which are other than us.[xxi]
It is this distinction-within-unity that is the condition of possibility for churchly reform, notes Jenson. In that the church is united to Christ as his body (which he will in no way part with) and yet he addresses her as her head (and so is distinguishable from her), church reform as an act of “asceticism” within Christ’s own life may genuinely happen.
But now the really theological question: How may the things said above be true—how may both the church and the sacrament be “body of Christ”? In one sense, the answer is simple: “for it to be true that the church gathered around her sacraments is Christ’s body, all that is needed is that the risen Christ’s personal self-understanding determine what is real, that is, that he be the Logos of God.”[xxii] Which, according to Christian confession, he is. More fully:
The church with her sacraments is truly Christ’s availability to us just because Christ takes her as his availability to himself. Where does the risen Christ turn to find himself? To the sacramental gathering of believers. To the question ‘Who am I?’ he answers, ‘I am this community’s head. I am the subject whose objectivity is this community. I am the one who died to gather them.’ And again: ‘I am the subject whose objectivity for this community is the bread and cup around which she gathers.’ The church with her sacraments is the object as which we may intend Christ because she is the object as which he intends himself. The relation between Christ as subject and the church with her sacraments is precisely that between transcendental subjectivity and the objective self…the church is the risen Christ’s Ego. And as he is the Word of God by which all things are created to be what they are, no further explanation of his Eucharistic presence is needed or possible.[xxiii]
A bold claim, that. To recap: a personal body is most essentially that person’s availability, the church is the risen Jesus’s availability to the world, and the bread and the wine on the table are the availability of the risen Jesus to the church. This last is true because the loaf and the cup are the objects “as which he intends himself”—that is, in which he recognizes his own intentions, his determination to be “for you [the church]” and to be the new bond of faithful covenant-keeping “for the many [his church].” He acknowledges the past that the bread and the cup make visible as his past and the promises they make visible as his commitments.[xxiv] And because his life is the life of One of the Three whose interrelation is God, and because his role in that life is to be the Logos of God—it constitutes reality, and is true availability also to us. And that is why this sacramental availability of Jesus is neither “virtual reality” symbolism nor an elaborate game of “let’s pretend.” It is how he is the particular incarnate Son he is.
§
There is more, much more, that should be said. For instance: that heaven is the “place” of the future as this is anticipated by God[xxv]; that sacraments are the “embodied presence” to us of what is in heaven[xxvi]; that the risen man Jesus not only transcends space but is constitutive of God’s transcendence of it[xxvii]; and so, finally, that the “being” that is specific to sacramental reality—that is, specific to the ecclesial “sacred signs” in which “the difference is transcended between the earthly location of the sign and the heavenly and then eschatological location of the reality”—is constituted in the logic of the triune God’s conversation with his people.[xxviii] Such things can indeed be said—and can be made “thinkable.”[xxix] But for the present let me draw just two corollaries from Jenson’s revision of “body.”
First, for our confused times. It matters that bodies actually be gathered together around a common table. No Zoom-gathering may substitute for “coming together as the church,” because there is no social body available via Zoom that may be “intended” by embodied persons. “Virtual reality” has its uses. But it does not make the church. And just so a “Zoom-communion” is not a valid communion, has no word of promise to be a true availability of Jesus. Why not? Because again there is no ecclesial “we” gathered around joint objects of intention, which objects of intention are Jesus’ own embodied-ness to himself. So long as Reformed or other Evangelical churches act as though “Zoom-communion” in the privacy of one’s own home is legitimate, we directly contribute to the “purely symbolist” understanding of the Eucharist that early Reformed confessions wanted to reject. We tacitly concede that communion is about my subjective remembering of the sacrifice of Christ (which is all that the bread and wine eaten in privacy sorta does), and we refuse to carry out the mandated rite (“coming together as the church” around bread and wine used as the anamnesis of the Son to the Father) to which the word of divine promise is actually attached (viz. that we would receive Christ and be in fact one ecclesial body).
Second, a corollary for a perennially-occurring problem of Reformed worshippers. I remarked above on the way that Calvin’s sacramental “analogy” leaves something to be desired. Phenomenologically, what I’m doing at communion is eating bread with others and drinking wine with them—but what I need to be doing is somehow “feeding on Christ in my heart by faith” (to borrow a BCP phrase sometimes used in PCA liturgies). Sincere Reformed believers find themselves wondering, Am I doing that? and they turn inward to see if it is so. And though they certainly hope so, such introspection is a notoriously endless (and comfortless!) task. But the liturgy itself—and theological clarity about what happens in that liturgy—can point the way out of the introspective rabbit hole.
The Westminster Confession of Faith’s Longer Catechism (q. 169) instructs that the bread and wine be “set apart” by three things: “by the word of institution, thanksgiving, and prayer.” The WCF doesn’t offer a great deal of fodder for robust liturgical theology—but there’s enough here to be getting on with. These three elements are all part of the “Great Thanksgiving” that has been central to the Christian liturgy.[xxx] So to phrase it prescriptively: First, let the Words of Institution Narrative be spoken clearly and with care (as it is not always done, especially by pulpit supply in the PCA, I have observed). Next, let the recitation of those words flow naturally onwards into a Great Thanksgiving that recites and glorifies and actually gives thanks for the saving actions that the Father has performed in the Son by the Spirit (that is to say: let there actually be an “anamnesis” of the Son to the Father). And finally, let that recitation culminate in prayer—specifically, a prayer of invocation to the Spirit, that he should come and make the cup and loaf the body and blood of the Son, and we who eat and drink of them the Son’s one body. When words of institution, thanksgiving, and prayer are so performed, then this liturgical action is just so determined as the “remembrance” of the Son to the Father in their Spirit. Then my participation in the act, my eating and drinking, isn’t the sign of some more fundamental but hidden faith. Rather it is the act of faithfulness that I am invited to make. Since it is the ecclesial body of the One who is the Logos of God, the risen Jesus, who calls upon the Father in the Spirit to remember this Son, it is what it signifies: the availability and the reception of that same Lord Jesus Christ.
Stephen Long is Assistant Professor of Theology at Providence College.
[i] Others have pointed out—and I agree with them—that “zooming in” on bread and wine to ask only about what happens to them leads to some really terrible Eucharistic theology. (See Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom [Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987], and Peter J. Leithart, “The Way Things Really Ought to Be,” WTJ 59 [1997]: 159-76.) I hope it will be clear from the discussion to follow that I think it makes no sense whatsoever to talk about the “sacramental body” without also talking about the “ecclesial body”—and about the Christ, of whom they are both the body.
[ii] If we don’t do this—and soon—the church will actually just be further aiding and abetting the “biopolitical” turn of modern politics, on which see https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/80127/.
[iii] From Calvin’s “Short Treatise on the Holy Supper of our Lord and only Saviour Jesus Christ” (1540), 162-163.
[iv] Dicimus, Christum tam externo symbolo, quam Spiritu suo ad nos descendere, ut vere substantia carnis suae et sanguinis sui animas nostras vivificet, Institutes 4.24. More characteristically for Calvin, we “ascend” to Christ – thus the point of the “descent” of the Spirit is really to catch us up in his onrushing sweep and so to carry us “up” to where Christ is in heaven. See, pithily, Institutes 4.31. For more on partaking of Christ as the embodied Son, see for example statement like the following: “Moreover, if the reason for communicating with Jesus Christ is in order that we have part and portion in all the gifts which he has procured for us by his death, it is not only a matter of being partakers of his Spirit; it is necessary also to partake of his humanity, in which he rendered complete obedience to God his Father, to satisfy our debts; though rightly speaking, the one cannot be without the other. For when he gives himself to us, it is in order that we possess him entirely.” From Calvin’s “Short Treatise on the Holy Supper,” 146-47.
[v] Qualis est nostra caro? nonne quae certa suo dimensione constat, quae loco continetur, quae tangitur, quae videtur? Institutes 4.24.
[vi] Atqui haec est propria corporis veritas, ut spatio contineatur, ut suis dimensionibus constet, ut suam faciem habeat, Institutes 4.29.
[vii] “Short Treatise on the Holy Supper,” 148.
[viii] “Short Treatise on the Holy Supper,” 147.
[ix] “Short Treatise on the Holy Supper,” 148.
[x] The point, available to American readers since the 19th century, is still there for anyone to read in John Williamson Nevin’s recently reprinted The Mystical Presence and the Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord’s Supper (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2012). See the documentation on pp. 40-91. More succinctly, Herman Bavinck makes a similar judgment about the agreement between Calvin’s main ideas and the Eucharistic teaching of the various reformed confessions: see Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 4: Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 559.
[xi] On this point as Calvin’s central teaching on the Supper, see B. A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 12-13.
[xii] For a somewhat similar line of criticism, see Simon Oliver, “The Eucharist Before Nature and Culture,” Modern Theology 15.3 (1999): 331-353, especially pages 342-344.
[xiii] The history has been told any number of times. A handy summary can be found in Vander Zee, Christ, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper: Recovering the Sacraments for Evangelical Worship, 161-185.
[xiv] To offer two instances of this conviction drawn from the context of interest to me in this essay, first: “The usual metaphysics suppose that what can be and what cannot be are determined by abstractly universal principles and never by a particular; thus the question of how the church with her sacraments can be the actual body of the individual human person Jesus can be settled only by argument that does not itself mention his particular personhood or the specific communion of the church. But this supposition of the Greek pagan thinkers is neither revealed nor an otherwise inevitable position….We have been revising inherited metaphysics on these lines throughout the present work; this discussion of the church’s reality and that of her sacraments merely continues the development.” ST 2.215. (NB: I here and henceforth cite from Jenson’s two-volume Systematic Theology [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997-1999] as ST followed by volume and page number.) Or again: “The effort [sc. to understand the church’s sacramental life] must rather be to interpret the being of a particular person, the risen Jesus, insofar as we truly say of him such things as that he is ‘really present’ as the Eucharistic elements or that he ‘speaks’ when the Scriptures are read in the midst of the people or that he ‘re-presents’ himself by an icon of the Pantokrator. If the interpretation succeeds, it will state a key ontological fact; but here as always when metaphysical questions arise, the direction of thought—what one takes as given and what one may then have to reinterpret—is decisive.” ST 2.250-251.
[xv] So one of the central theses of Jenson’s generally neglected Unbaptized God: The Basic Flaw in Ecumenical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), p. 8: “Within a grasp of reality shaped by the Bible, the concepts by which we interpret reality generally (the basic concepts) are determined by the apprehension of God. I will argue that Christendom cannot now help but be riven by interpretive cross-purposes, because we have together stopped halfway with the faith’s great spiritual-intellectual challenge, the new interpretation of God by the specific Christian message of the gospel. 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. Thus the underlying reason of our compulsions to disagree is that we are together in deficit before a common task. And nothing prevents us from taking this up anew and with each other.”
[xvi] For this and the following, see Jenson, “The Supper” (pages 337-66 in Christian Dogmatics [Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson, eds.; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984]), 356-359.
[xvii] The version of this statement cited here is drawn from ST 2.110. Important treatments of this theme, with slight variation of phrasing, are to be found in ST 1.201-206 and ST 2.212-215. Some of these will be quoted below.
[xviii] Phrasing modified from Jenson’s A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Life? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 38 and 97.
[xix] ST 2.213.
[xx] Jenson himself points to this image from Eph 5:31-32. I doubt he was unaware of it, though he doesn’t note it in this context, but of course bridegroom-and-bride merely continues the “body” image from another angle—since the two are “one flesh,” incorporated together as it were.
[xxi] ST 2.213.
[xxii] ST 2.214.
[xxiii] ST 2.214-215. Emphasis added.
[xxiv] Jenson, “The Supper,” 361.
[xxv] Again, this is Jenson, ST 2.251—but it’s also, for example, Schmemann and John Zizioulas.
[xxvi] ST 2.251.
[xxvii] ST 2.254.
[xxviii] ST 2.259.
[xxix] Thus take up and read Volume 2 of Jenson’s Systematic Theology!
[xxx] This and the following are inspired in part by Schmemann, The Eucharist, 159-245; Jenson, Visible Words: The Interpretation and Practice of Christian Sacraments (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 92-123; and Jenson, ST 2.226-27.
What exactly “happens” when Christians celebrate the Lord’s Supper? More specifically, what happens to the loaf and the cup?[i] For many American Evangelicals—and even for quite a few American Catholics—the only point of the Supper is to stir up and express personal piety: In subjectively “remembering” the sacrificial death of Jesus on one’s behalf, the individual thereby renews his or her personal commitment to the Savior. Other Christians—the Catholics who know the official teaching of their church, as well as the Lutherans and the Reformed who know theirs—have spoken about some sort of “real presence” of Christ. The communicant receives Jesus himself sacramentally at the Supper.
Spelling out what is meant by “sacramentally” in the preceding sentence became a notorious cause of division between Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation—and subsequently between the Protestants themselves (thus the Lutheran position versus the Reformed). But the attempt to state that something objective and real actually “happens” in the Supper is not an otiose project. Consider where we are culturally: During the past eighteen-plus months of Covid-lockdowns, many churches acquiesced—with alacrity—when urged or instructed to stop assembling as the church in worship. This happened on both sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide, albeit with differences commensurate with ecclesial structures. Among Protestants, “Zoom church-ing”—listening to a sermon at home and perhaps singing along with some hymns and praise choruses—put down some tenacious-looking roots. Worse still, many churches instituted Zoom “communion,” in the privacy of one’s own home, without any significant questions being raised as to its theological legitimacy. Were every last vestige of these practices to stop tomorrow, the fact that they happened at all, and that they have gone on for as long as they have, would still be a standing testament to governing assumptions about what happens (or doesn’t!) in the liturgy—especially about what happens in the Supper with which that liturgy ought to culminate. We clearly assume, for instance, that bodies—especially gathered bodies, eating from a common loaf and drinking from a common cup—make no real difference for our being one ecclesial body of Christ. The “virtual” presence of bodies will do because apparently nothing much happens with the cup and loaf that’s constitutive of the ecclesial body that should be gathered around them.
In view of our present cultural moment and the Zoom church-ing characteristic of it, a renewal of active reflection and catechesis concerning the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist is desperately needed.[ii] Though I am working within the Reformed tradition, I will use this occasion to appropriate some arguments of an American Lutheran, Robert Jenson, as a resource for articulating what it means to say that the cup and the loaf are the body of Christ, which we receive in the Eucharist—and that in receiving it we are, just so, one ecclesial body of Christ in that act.
§
To get a running start: Calvin denied Rome’s doctrine of transubstantiation as the proper account of Christ’s presence in the Supper. Even so, Protestant Calvin asserted a view of Christ’s presence that would startle most American Evangelicals: “Those to whom God has given knowledge of his truth,” taught Calvin, “must hold for certain that our Lord gives us in the Supper what he signifies by it, and we thus really receive the body and blood of Jesus Christ.”[iii] Note well: we really receive the body and blood. Again, Calvin insists that we truly partake of the whole person of Christ, as the very embodied divine Son that he is: “We say that Christ descends to us both by the outward symbol and by his Spirit, that he may truly quicken our souls by the substance of his flesh and of his blood.”[iv] The “descends” in that sentence is occasioned by one of Calvin’s fundamental assumptions in his sacramental teaching, concerning the definition of “body.” From the same chapter just quoted: “What is the nature of our flesh? Is it not something that has its own fixed dimension, is contained in a place, is touched, is seen?”[v] More axiomatically: “But it is the true nature of a body to be contained in space, to have its own dimensions and its own shape.”[vi] Christ is embodied in heaven, says Calvin, and so neither is present on the altar via any supposed “ubiquity” (contra the Lutheran position) nor is “enclosed” substantially under the accidents of bread (contra the Catholic position), and so we must be lifted up to him by the agency of his Spirit. But, precisely as those so carried by the Spirit, Calvin insists that we really do “receive in the Supper the body and blood of Jesus Christ, since the Lord there represents to us the communion of both.”[vii] Because what the Lord “represents” must be true—because the sacramental sign is not a “bare figure” but is “joined to its reality and substance”[viii]—so “the internal substance of the sacrament is joined with the visible signs; and as the bread is distributed by hand, so the body of Christ is communicated to us, so that we are made partakers of it.”[ix]
Calvin’s teaching on these points was taken up and formalized in the Reformed confessional documents of the sixteenth century.[x] And despite the fact that, in a curious twist of fate, this Calvinist Reformed confessional position came to be dominated by a Zwinglian (merely “symbolic”) interpretation, the Calvinist Reformed—in their early and confessional period anyway—have wanted to teach a real presence of Christ. Simply recovering an awareness of that would be a considerable gain for a good many American Presbyterians (I’m looking at you, PCA).
A further observation about the mechanics of Calvin’s teaching should be made here, one that moves towards criticism of this Reformer and on to the question of how we should press ahead with thinking a real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Repeated throughout Calvin’s teaching is the “analogy” articulated as follows:
From the physical things set forth in the Sacrament we are led by a sort of analogy to spiritual things. Thus, when bread is given as a symbol of Christ’s body, we must at once grasp this comparison: as bread nourishes, sustains, and keeps the life of our body, so Christ’s body is the only food to invigorate and enliven our soul. When we see wine set forth as a symbol of blood, we must reflect on the benefits which wine imparts to the body, and so realize that the same are spiritually imparted to us by Christ’s blood. These benefits are to nourish, refresh, strengthen, and gladden. For if we sufficiently consider what value we have received from the giving of that most holy body and the shedding of that blood, we shall clearly perceive that those qualities of bread and wine are, according to such an analogy, excellently adapted to express those things when they are communicated to us. (Institutes 4.3)
The heart of Calvin’s Eucharistic teaching, the focal image that (by his own estimate) made it “simple, edifying, and irenic,” is this frequently repeated “sacramental analogy”: “as bread nourishes…our body, so Christ’s body…enlivens our soul.”[xi] But there is a gap here, it seems to me, between what Calvin wants to say and what he actually gives resources for thinking. What I can phenomenologically intend as my action in the Supper is the eating of bread with others—but somehow I need to be feeding on Christ “in soul.” But then precisely that “somehow” is never really accounted for, seems to bear no very clear connection to what I’m phenomenologically doing (again, eating bread with others, drinking wine with them). And so the agency of the Spirit is invoked in the account as (it is hard not to say) a stop-gap to assure me that I really am receiving Christ by faith. But then, since the Holy Spirit also is not usually among the phenomena that I intend in the eating and drinking, I am forced into introspective pondering on the reality of my faith—that is, I am led away from the concreteness of eating and drinking, away from the company of those around me doing the same.[xii]
§
Notoriously, not only did the Lutherans and the Reformed disagree with Rome about how Christ was present in the Eucharist—they also disagreed with one another.[xiii] Given that history, it may seem a contradiction in terms for a Reformed theologian to look to a Lutheran for help with articulating the Eucharistic presence. The Lutherans have insisted on saying “in, with, and under,” which the duly catechized Presbyterian just as insistently refuses to say (see the Westminster Confession of Faith, 29.7). Fortunately Robert Jenson—an American Lutheran who professed to have learned a thing or two from the Reformed tradition (at least as Barth represented it)—says what he has to say without particular reliance on the offending prepositions. Perhaps that’s enough to be going on with.
Jenson understood his theological project as a metaphysically revisionary one. That is, the gospel’s account of the triune God and the particular story of Jesus Christ are determinative of reality: Our notions of what it is to be, or to be a person, or to be personally present are all finally to be determined or revised in light of what happens with Jesus.[xiv] Where intractable theological disagreements arise, there often lurk “unbaptized” theological assumptions that need correction.[xv] In the paragraphs to follow, I want to highlight one of Jenson’s revisions, concerning the nature of a “body.” Adopting it, I would argue, opens a way forward to thinking anew what “happens” in the Supper and to finding our way to the table together.
§
“This is my body.” The “is” here has been variously construed as “(merely) represents,” “is identical in ‘substance’ to (no matter the ‘accidents’),” “joins by the power of the Spirit to,” and so on. The verb “to be” is after all a very irregular verb indeed for Indo-Europeans. The term “body” has occasioned less trouble, except as predicate of that “is,” since we all appear to know what it means. So Calvin, as already cited, teaches that “body” is whatever is spatially circumscribed according to dimension and shape. In this the Reformer merely agrees with long-standing consensus: A true human body, also the risen Christ’s, necessarily has a spatial location and can acquire another location only by leaving its present one.[xvi] So also, to cite another example of the same consensus, Aquinas’ defense of the claim that the substances of bread and wine no longer remain after consecration includes the observation that, “a thing cannot be in any place, where it was not previously, except by change of place, or by the conversion of another thing into itself…Now it is evident that Christ's body does not begin to be present in this sacrament by local motion. First of all, because it would follow that it would cease to be in heaven: for what is moved locally does not come anew to some place unless it quit the former one.” (Summa theologiae, iii.75.2) Christ is in heaven and does not move to the altar. Rather, his body replaces the substance of bread in an entirely supernatural act effected by the power of God alone (Summa theologiae, iii.75.4). Both Calvin’s and Aquinas’ arguments operate within the same “boundary conditions” concerning the nature of body: Christ is in heaven and so is not “here”in any of the usual ways we are accustomed to conceive the “here-ness” of a human body.
These boundary conditions supposedly definitive of body are not the only, nor even the most suitable, starting point for an account of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. Rather a personal body is the person’s availability to others and thereupon to him or herself.[xvii] If we are to be genuinely available to one another, persons must be not only subjects but also objects to and for one another. That is, you must be able so to “intend” me—and I you—that you can shake my hand or kiss me if I say something sublimely beautiful, or lay hold of me and chuck me out the window if I say something demonically wicked.[xviii] Were I merely a disembodied voice to you—an addressing Subject whom you could not draw nearer to nor successfully get away from—then sublime and maniacal address alike would be my sheer domination of you. But we are persons, and thus subjects and objects to one another. And that object-availability to and for one another is our “body.”
To speak carefully about what happens in the Eucharist, Christian theology has distinguished three inter-related referents of “body”: Christ’s historical body, born of Mary; Christ’s ecclesial body, the church; and Christ’s sacramental body, the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Jenson’s revisionary definition of body as “availability” sheds light on each. I concentrate here on the second and third referents. Concerning Christ’s ecclesial body:
That the church is the body of Christ…means that she is the object in the world as which the risen Christ is an object for the world, an available something as which Christ is there to be addressed and grasped. Where am I to aim my intention, to intend the risen Christ? The first answer must be: to the assembled church, and if I am in the assembly, to the gathering that surrounds me.[xix]
There is a first availability of Christ—where all the baptized are assembled as the church (1 Cor 11:18). But the identifying description of Christ’s body is not yet complete. Though Christ and his church form one body, yet Christ can still be distinguished from his body according to New Testament usage: the church is Christ’s bride, for instance.[xx] So what is the availability of Christ—his body, his objectivity—to the church that simultaneously distinguishes him also from the assembly? It is Christ’s sacramental body:
The object that is the church-assembly is the body of Christ, that is, Christ available to the world and to her members, just in that the church gathers around objects distinct from herself, the bread and cup, which are the availability to her of the same Christ. Within the gathering we can intend Christ as the community we are, without self-deification, because we jointly intend the identical Christ as the sacramental elements in our midst, which are other than us.[xxi]
It is this distinction-within-unity that is the condition of possibility for churchly reform, notes Jenson. In that the church is united to Christ as his body (which he will in no way part with) and yet he addresses her as her head (and so is distinguishable from her), church reform as an act of “asceticism” within Christ’s own life may genuinely happen.
But now the really theological question: How may the things said above be true—how may both the church and the sacrament be “body of Christ”? In one sense, the answer is simple: “for it to be true that the church gathered around her sacraments is Christ’s body, all that is needed is that the risen Christ’s personal self-understanding determine what is real, that is, that he be the Logos of God.”[xxii] Which, according to Christian confession, he is. More fully:
The church with her sacraments is truly Christ’s availability to us just because Christ takes her as his availability to himself. Where does the risen Christ turn to find himself? To the sacramental gathering of believers. To the question ‘Who am I?’ he answers, ‘I am this community’s head. I am the subject whose objectivity is this community. I am the one who died to gather them.’ And again: ‘I am the subject whose objectivity for this community is the bread and cup around which she gathers.’ The church with her sacraments is the object as which we may intend Christ because she is the object as which he intends himself. The relation between Christ as subject and the church with her sacraments is precisely that between transcendental subjectivity and the objective self…the church is the risen Christ’s Ego. And as he is the Word of God by which all things are created to be what they are, no further explanation of his Eucharistic presence is needed or possible.[xxiii]
A bold claim, that. To recap: a personal body is most essentially that person’s availability, the church is the risen Jesus’s availability to the world, and the bread and the wine on the table are the availability of the risen Jesus to the church. This last is true because the loaf and the cup are the objects “as which he intends himself”—that is, in which he recognizes his own intentions, his determination to be “for you [the church]” and to be the new bond of faithful covenant-keeping “for the many [his church].” He acknowledges the past that the bread and the cup make visible as his past and the promises they make visible as his commitments.[xxiv] And because his life is the life of One of the Three whose interrelation is God, and because his role in that life is to be the Logos of God—it constitutes reality, and is true availability also to us. And that is why this sacramental availability of Jesus is neither “virtual reality” symbolism nor an elaborate game of “let’s pretend.” It is how he is the particular incarnate Son he is.
§
There is more, much more, that should be said. For instance: that heaven is the “place” of the future as this is anticipated by God[xxv]; that sacraments are the “embodied presence” to us of what is in heaven[xxvi]; that the risen man Jesus not only transcends space but is constitutive of God’s transcendence of it[xxvii]; and so, finally, that the “being” that is specific to sacramental reality—that is, specific to the ecclesial “sacred signs” in which “the difference is transcended between the earthly location of the sign and the heavenly and then eschatological location of the reality”—is constituted in the logic of the triune God’s conversation with his people.[xxviii] Such things can indeed be said—and can be made “thinkable.”[xxix] But for the present let me draw just two corollaries from Jenson’s revision of “body.”
First, for our confused times. It matters that bodies actually be gathered together around a common table. No Zoom-gathering may substitute for “coming together as the church,” because there is no social body available via Zoom that may be “intended” by embodied persons. “Virtual reality” has its uses. But it does not make the church. And just so a “Zoom-communion” is not a valid communion, has no word of promise to be a true availability of Jesus. Why not? Because again there is no ecclesial “we” gathered around joint objects of intention, which objects of intention are Jesus’ own embodied-ness to himself. So long as Reformed or other Evangelical churches act as though “Zoom-communion” in the privacy of one’s own home is legitimate, we directly contribute to the “purely symbolist” understanding of the Eucharist that early Reformed confessions wanted to reject. We tacitly concede that communion is about my subjective remembering of the sacrifice of Christ (which is all that the bread and wine eaten in privacy sorta does), and we refuse to carry out the mandated rite (“coming together as the church” around bread and wine used as the anamnesis of the Son to the Father) to which the word of divine promise is actually attached (viz. that we would receive Christ and be in fact one ecclesial body).
Second, a corollary for a perennially-occurring problem of Reformed worshippers. I remarked above on the way that Calvin’s sacramental “analogy” leaves something to be desired. Phenomenologically, what I’m doing at communion is eating bread with others and drinking wine with them—but what I need to be doing is somehow “feeding on Christ in my heart by faith” (to borrow a BCP phrase sometimes used in PCA liturgies). Sincere Reformed believers find themselves wondering, Am I doing that? and they turn inward to see if it is so. And though they certainly hope so, such introspection is a notoriously endless (and comfortless!) task. But the liturgy itself—and theological clarity about what happens in that liturgy—can point the way out of the introspective rabbit hole.
The Westminster Confession of Faith’s Longer Catechism (q. 169) instructs that the bread and wine be “set apart” by three things: “by the word of institution, thanksgiving, and prayer.” The WCF doesn’t offer a great deal of fodder for robust liturgical theology—but there’s enough here to be getting on with. These three elements are all part of the “Great Thanksgiving” that has been central to the Christian liturgy.[xxx] So to phrase it prescriptively: First, let the Words of Institution Narrative be spoken clearly and with care (as it is not always done, especially by pulpit supply in the PCA, I have observed). Next, let the recitation of those words flow naturally onwards into a Great Thanksgiving that recites and glorifies and actually gives thanks for the saving actions that the Father has performed in the Son by the Spirit (that is to say: let there actually be an “anamnesis” of the Son to the Father). And finally, let that recitation culminate in prayer—specifically, a prayer of invocation to the Spirit, that he should come and make the cup and loaf the body and blood of the Son, and we who eat and drink of them the Son’s one body. When words of institution, thanksgiving, and prayer are so performed, then this liturgical action is just so determined as the “remembrance” of the Son to the Father in their Spirit. Then my participation in the act, my eating and drinking, isn’t the sign of some more fundamental but hidden faith. Rather it is the act of faithfulness that I am invited to make. Since it is the ecclesial body of the One who is the Logos of God, the risen Jesus, who calls upon the Father in the Spirit to remember this Son, it is what it signifies: the availability and the reception of that same Lord Jesus Christ.
Stephen Long is Assistant Professor of Theology at Providence College.
[i] Others have pointed out—and I agree with them—that “zooming in” on bread and wine to ask only about what happens to them leads to some really terrible Eucharistic theology. (See Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom [Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987], and Peter J. Leithart, “The Way Things Really Ought to Be,” WTJ 59 [1997]: 159-76.) I hope it will be clear from the discussion to follow that I think it makes no sense whatsoever to talk about the “sacramental body” without also talking about the “ecclesial body”—and about the Christ, of whom they are both the body.
[ii] If we don’t do this—and soon—the church will actually just be further aiding and abetting the “biopolitical” turn of modern politics, on which see https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/80127/.
[iii] From Calvin’s “Short Treatise on the Holy Supper of our Lord and only Saviour Jesus Christ” (1540), 162-163.
[iv] Dicimus, Christum tam externo symbolo, quam Spiritu suo ad nos descendere, ut vere substantia carnis suae et sanguinis sui animas nostras vivificet, Institutes 4.24. More characteristically for Calvin, we “ascend” to Christ – thus the point of the “descent” of the Spirit is really to catch us up in his onrushing sweep and so to carry us “up” to where Christ is in heaven. See, pithily, Institutes 4.31. For more on partaking of Christ as the embodied Son, see for example statement like the following: “Moreover, if the reason for communicating with Jesus Christ is in order that we have part and portion in all the gifts which he has procured for us by his death, it is not only a matter of being partakers of his Spirit; it is necessary also to partake of his humanity, in which he rendered complete obedience to God his Father, to satisfy our debts; though rightly speaking, the one cannot be without the other. For when he gives himself to us, it is in order that we possess him entirely.” From Calvin’s “Short Treatise on the Holy Supper,” 146-47.
[v] Qualis est nostra caro? nonne quae certa suo dimensione constat, quae loco continetur, quae tangitur, quae videtur? Institutes 4.24.
[vi] Atqui haec est propria corporis veritas, ut spatio contineatur, ut suis dimensionibus constet, ut suam faciem habeat, Institutes 4.29.
[vii] “Short Treatise on the Holy Supper,” 148.
[viii] “Short Treatise on the Holy Supper,” 147.
[ix] “Short Treatise on the Holy Supper,” 148.
[x] The point, available to American readers since the 19th century, is still there for anyone to read in John Williamson Nevin’s recently reprinted The Mystical Presence and the Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord’s Supper (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2012). See the documentation on pp. 40-91. More succinctly, Herman Bavinck makes a similar judgment about the agreement between Calvin’s main ideas and the Eucharistic teaching of the various reformed confessions: see Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 4: Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 559.
[xi] On this point as Calvin’s central teaching on the Supper, see B. A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 12-13.
[xii] For a somewhat similar line of criticism, see Simon Oliver, “The Eucharist Before Nature and Culture,” Modern Theology 15.3 (1999): 331-353, especially pages 342-344.
[xiii] The history has been told any number of times. A handy summary can be found in Vander Zee, Christ, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper: Recovering the Sacraments for Evangelical Worship, 161-185.
[xiv] To offer two instances of this conviction drawn from the context of interest to me in this essay, first: “The usual metaphysics suppose that what can be and what cannot be are determined by abstractly universal principles and never by a particular; thus the question of how the church with her sacraments can be the actual body of the individual human person Jesus can be settled only by argument that does not itself mention his particular personhood or the specific communion of the church. But this supposition of the Greek pagan thinkers is neither revealed nor an otherwise inevitable position….We have been revising inherited metaphysics on these lines throughout the present work; this discussion of the church’s reality and that of her sacraments merely continues the development.” ST 2.215. (NB: I here and henceforth cite from Jenson’s two-volume Systematic Theology [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997-1999] as ST followed by volume and page number.) Or again: “The effort [sc. to understand the church’s sacramental life] must rather be to interpret the being of a particular person, the risen Jesus, insofar as we truly say of him such things as that he is ‘really present’ as the Eucharistic elements or that he ‘speaks’ when the Scriptures are read in the midst of the people or that he ‘re-presents’ himself by an icon of the Pantokrator. If the interpretation succeeds, it will state a key ontological fact; but here as always when metaphysical questions arise, the direction of thought—what one takes as given and what one may then have to reinterpret—is decisive.” ST 2.250-251.
[xv] So one of the central theses of Jenson’s generally neglected Unbaptized God: The Basic Flaw in Ecumenical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), p. 8: “Within a grasp of reality shaped by the Bible, the concepts by which we interpret reality generally (the basic concepts) are determined by the apprehension of God. I will argue that Christendom cannot now help but be riven by interpretive cross-purposes, because we have together stopped halfway with the faith’s great spiritual-intellectual challenge, the new interpretation of God by the specific Christian message of the gospel. 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. Thus the underlying reason of our compulsions to disagree is that we are together in deficit before a common task. And nothing prevents us from taking this up anew and with each other.”
[xvi] For this and the following, see Jenson, “The Supper” (pages 337-66 in Christian Dogmatics [Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson, eds.; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984]), 356-359.
[xvii] The version of this statement cited here is drawn from ST 2.110. Important treatments of this theme, with slight variation of phrasing, are to be found in ST 1.201-206 and ST 2.212-215. Some of these will be quoted below.
[xviii] Phrasing modified from Jenson’s A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Life? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 38 and 97.
[xix] ST 2.213.
[xx] Jenson himself points to this image from Eph 5:31-32. I doubt he was unaware of it, though he doesn’t note it in this context, but of course bridegroom-and-bride merely continues the “body” image from another angle—since the two are “one flesh,” incorporated together as it were.
[xxi] ST 2.213.
[xxii] ST 2.214.
[xxiii] ST 2.214-215. Emphasis added.
[xxiv] Jenson, “The Supper,” 361.
[xxv] Again, this is Jenson, ST 2.251—but it’s also, for example, Schmemann and John Zizioulas.
[xxvi] ST 2.251.
[xxvii] ST 2.254.
[xxviii] ST 2.259.
[xxix] Thus take up and read Volume 2 of Jenson’s Systematic Theology!
[xxx] This and the following are inspired in part by Schmemann, The Eucharist, 159-245; Jenson, Visible Words: The Interpretation and Practice of Christian Sacraments (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 92-123; and Jenson, ST 2.226-27.
-->