Our friendly conversation began with Stephen Long’s defense of Calvin’s deep sacramental theology that asserted the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist without localizing it in the bread and wine on the table. Then, lamenting the advent of Zoom communion, he points to Jenson’s concept of availability as a way of creating a stronger connection of Christ’s body with the ecclesial body. James Keating furthers the conversation by describing how the traditional Roman Catholic concept of transubstantiation is in some trouble at the pew level whether from an overly magical viewpoint or sheer befuddlement as to its philosophical underpinnings.
With Matt Colvin’s challenging contribution our conversation has come to a major turning point. In effect, he challenges the very basis of discussion about Eucharistic presence of Christ by asserting that with that language we have moved from the biblical world and its Hebrew conceptual framework into the philosophical and metaphysical world of Aristotle, or, as it’s often characterized, from Jerusalem to Athens.
Colvin claims that the most salient aspect of the Last Supper is that it was a Passover meal. In the framework of Hebrew thought that means we are talking about a ritual meal and, as such, the question of the presence or ontological status of the body and blood of Christ and the bread and wine is meaningless. Understanding the Last Supper in the context of the ritual meal of the Passover, Colvin writes, “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….”
He concludes, “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.”
The significance that the Lord instituted his sacred meal on the Passover has been widely recognized in more recent studies, and it is certainly significant for how we understand the Holy Supper. The Supper is a ritual meal that recognizes Christ’s death and resurrection as the fulfillment of God’s salvation through his saving engagement with Israel begun in the liberating event of the Exodus. It is a “remembrance” of that crowning event not as something that happened in the distant past that bears significance on our lives today, or to put it in terms of Reformation controversies, a mere memorial. It is a re-membering, a way of understanding ourselves as participants in the event and its transforming consequences. It is that which, I assume, Colvin refers to when he says that the Supper is “Biblical soteriology applied to the sacrament.” It is in this way that we should understand the participatory language often associated with the sacrament; we participate in the death and resurrection of Christ and thereby receive its blessings.
Calvin and the Reformed Confessions often describe what happens at the Lord’s Supper as receiving “Christ and all his blessings.” It seems to me that Colvin’s emphasis on the participatory aspect of the ritual meal tends to diminish the gift of “Christ” in favor of “all his blessings.” While there is a deep and important relationship between Passover and Eucharist, the Eucharist offers us something more than what we grasp though its Paschal associations.
First, I want to expand on Colvin’s discussion of the Paschal dimensions of the Eucharist. While he emphasizes that the ritual meal as a way of participating in the saving event of Christ’s death and resurrection, he fails to mention one important aspect of this participation. The Passover was centered on the sacrifice of the unblemished lamb. Indeed, the gospels tell us that Jesus sent the disciples out to procured one for their meal. When Paul then declares, “Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed for us, therefore lost us keep the feast,” he highlights that Passover association. The whole New Testament echoes the theme of Christ as the Lamb of God. In the early church, one of the words most often used in association with the Eiucharist is oblation. It is deeply important that the Eucharist is understood as a sacrificial meal, a participation in the once and for all sacrifice of Christ.
Of course, this kind of language became anathema in the Reformer’s struggle against what they saw as one of the more egregious abuses of the Roman church at the time, the Mass itself as a sacrifice. Whether that accusation was true or not, the idea of the sacrificial character of of the Supper was muted at best to the great loss of the Reformation churches. Understanding the Eucharist as a ritual meal in line with the Passover at least means that we need to recover the sense in which it is a participation in the sacrifice of Christ on the cross and his victorious resurrection.
Second, I think it’s important that we recall another moment in the Gospel of John’s in which Jesus reached back to Israel’s experience and related it to the Eucharist. In John 6, after feeding five thousand, Jesus reaches back to Israel’s experience of manna in the wilderness to present himself as the “Bread of Life.” He then brings the discourse to a dramatic climax. “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them” (John 6: 53-56)
Almost universally, the Early Church Fathers directly associated these words with the Eucharist, and this association continued right to the time of the Reformation. The Reformers, worried that the crassness of Jesus’ language here could be read to support transsubstantiation denied that he was talking about the Eucharist, relying on verse 63, “the Spirit gives life, the flesh is useless.” Most contemporary biblical scholars have returned to interpreting Jesus words in John 6 as a deliberate reference to the Eucharist.
My point here is that John’s gospel readily picks up Israel’s experience in the wilderness to move beyond the language of rituals meal to inject a graphically realistic understanding of Eucharistic participation. However we may understand Jesus words here John wants to say that the bread and wine of the Eucharist as Eucharistic give us Christ in some very real way. That is, of course, the mystery over which so much ink has been spilled. What does it mean to eat Christ body and drink his blood?
Colvin dismisses the philosophical and ontological language used in this quest by excluding such speculations as unnecessarily harmful in favor of the more biblical and Hebraic ritual meal. The long historical movement into metaphysics and ontology reflects the fundamental truth that theology is fides Quires intelligum, faith seeing understanding. Anyone confronted with Jesus’ words at the Last Supper, or his language in John 6 might well ask, “What does it mean that “this is my body” and that we eat and drink his body and blood?” What is happening here? One angle of grasping this is to look at the context of the Pasover meal and its ritual function. But there is more to it than that, as Jesus words of institution and his discourse on the bread of life indicate. How do we think about what takes place in sacrament by which Christ communicates himself along with all the blessings of his death and resurrection to the church?
In the first few centuries the church did not dig too deeply into the question of the sacramental presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. In the early second century Justin and Irenaeus simply affirmed this truth without seeking to understand its philosophical meaning and implications. Christ is given to us in the sacrament of his body and blood.
But the work of understanding was not far behind. Just as the church had to work through a way to articulate and understand what it means that Jesus is the Son of God and how the Son participate in the trinitarian Godhead, so it was necessary to seek to understand the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood, not least to prevent errors that might lead to false worship. In both cases the church discussed these mysteries by using the philosophical language available to them in the larger context of the Greek and Roman world, the language of the philosophers like Aristotle.
Augustine’s brilliant analysis of sacraments gave us the language of the sign and that which it signifies. As this passed into the medieval church it was further developed into the concept of transubstantiation which received its deepest explanation by Aquinas. But that seemed to lead to the very thing the church seeks to avoid, a false understanding that lead to false worship. Colvin graphically highlights these errors and eschews the philosophical and ontological speculations from which he claims they come. He finds the Reformers no less guilty because they continue to work within an ontological system that obscures the Hebrew context of the ritual meal.
Should we give up on this whole tradition and simply return to the Pasover ritual alone for our understanding of the sacrament? Brett Salkeld’s important new book Transubstantiation: Theology, History, and Christian Unity offers a strong challenge to thinking that the old well of sacramental theology has gone dry. By delving deeply into Aquinas, Salkeld shows that he does not simply validate Aristotle, but in many ways upends Aristotle’s ontology by presenting a clear picture of the relation between the signs of bread and wine and the reality of Christ in them. Salkeld also shows that a proper understanding of Aquinas brings him far closer to Luther and Calvin than previously thought, advocating a new ecumenical movement toward a shared understanding and practice of the Eucharist.
While I obviously cannot reconstruct Salkeld’s argument here, the main thrust is that the concept of transubstantiation rejected by the Reformers had little to do with the teaching of Aquinas or the Council of Trent. Aquinas’ understanding of transubstantiation “carefully distinguishes sign and signified in a way that gives the bread and wine a genuine role without denying the primacy of Christ’s body and blood in the sacrament. It is able to acknowledge the essentially symbolic character of the sacrament without reducing Christ’s presence to something that happens only ion the minds of the community.” (P. 240).
I want to argue that the philosophical and theological tradition relating to the sacraments of the western church is not the fruitless wasteland that Colvin pictures. If our theology is to communicate to the culture in which we live, we need to speak the language of the culture, and that involves, among other things, engaging in its philosophical ideas about the metaphysical structure of reality.
This, of course, is a long way from helping the actual people in our congregations, Catholic or Protestant, from understanding and articulating what happens in the Eucharist. Father Robert Barron is a widely recognized as a premier Roman Catholic teacher and preacher. In this short video https://youtu.be/bJjW3LXuHzo Barron explains to his audience of lay Catholics what the Eucharist is about. Knowingly or not, he is using a complex philosophical argument pioneered by J. L. Austin and applied to the sacrament by Nicholas Woltersdorff, called “speech-action theory,” but explains it in language anyone can grasp.
I do not believe that we must abandon the long, rich history of philosophical and theological reflection on the mystery of the sacrament in order to be true to its original Passover setting. But we do need to do a far better job of communicating that mystery to those who gather around the table/altar each week so that they can be meaningfully blessed by the grace the sacrament provides by his gracious presence in the bread and wine.
Leonard vander Zee is a retired editor and pastor, and is the author of Christ, Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper.
Our friendly conversation began with Stephen Long’s defense of Calvin’s deep sacramental theology that asserted the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist without localizing it in the bread and wine on the table. Then, lamenting the advent of Zoom communion, he points to Jenson’s concept of availability as a way of creating a stronger connection of Christ’s body with the ecclesial body. James Keating furthers the conversation by describing how the traditional Roman Catholic concept of transubstantiation is in some trouble at the pew level whether from an overly magical viewpoint or sheer befuddlement as to its philosophical underpinnings.
With Matt Colvin’s challenging contribution our conversation has come to a major turning point. In effect, he challenges the very basis of discussion about Eucharistic presence of Christ by asserting that with that language we have moved from the biblical world and its Hebrew conceptual framework into the philosophical and metaphysical world of Aristotle, or, as it’s often characterized, from Jerusalem to Athens.
Colvin claims that the most salient aspect of the Last Supper is that it was a Passover meal. In the framework of Hebrew thought that means we are talking about a ritual meal and, as such, the question of the presence or ontological status of the body and blood of Christ and the bread and wine is meaningless. Understanding the Last Supper in the context of the ritual meal of the Passover, Colvin writes, “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….”
He concludes, “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.”
The significance that the Lord instituted his sacred meal on the Passover has been widely recognized in more recent studies, and it is certainly significant for how we understand the Holy Supper. The Supper is a ritual meal that recognizes Christ’s death and resurrection as the fulfillment of God’s salvation through his saving engagement with Israel begun in the liberating event of the Exodus. It is a “remembrance” of that crowning event not as something that happened in the distant past that bears significance on our lives today, or to put it in terms of Reformation controversies, a mere memorial. It is a re-membering, a way of understanding ourselves as participants in the event and its transforming consequences. It is that which, I assume, Colvin refers to when he says that the Supper is “Biblical soteriology applied to the sacrament.” It is in this way that we should understand the participatory language often associated with the sacrament; we participate in the death and resurrection of Christ and thereby receive its blessings.
Calvin and the Reformed Confessions often describe what happens at the Lord’s Supper as receiving “Christ and all his blessings.” It seems to me that Colvin’s emphasis on the participatory aspect of the ritual meal tends to diminish the gift of “Christ” in favor of “all his blessings.” While there is a deep and important relationship between Passover and Eucharist, the Eucharist offers us something more than what we grasp though its Paschal associations.
First, I want to expand on Colvin’s discussion of the Paschal dimensions of the Eucharist. While he emphasizes that the ritual meal as a way of participating in the saving event of Christ’s death and resurrection, he fails to mention one important aspect of this participation. The Passover was centered on the sacrifice of the unblemished lamb. Indeed, the gospels tell us that Jesus sent the disciples out to procured one for their meal. When Paul then declares, “Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed for us, therefore lost us keep the feast,” he highlights that Passover association. The whole New Testament echoes the theme of Christ as the Lamb of God. In the early church, one of the words most often used in association with the Eiucharist is oblation. It is deeply important that the Eucharist is understood as a sacrificial meal, a participation in the once and for all sacrifice of Christ.
Of course, this kind of language became anathema in the Reformer’s struggle against what they saw as one of the more egregious abuses of the Roman church at the time, the Mass itself as a sacrifice. Whether that accusation was true or not, the idea of the sacrificial character of of the Supper was muted at best to the great loss of the Reformation churches. Understanding the Eucharist as a ritual meal in line with the Passover at least means that we need to recover the sense in which it is a participation in the sacrifice of Christ on the cross and his victorious resurrection.
Second, I think it’s important that we recall another moment in the Gospel of John’s in which Jesus reached back to Israel’s experience and related it to the Eucharist. In John 6, after feeding five thousand, Jesus reaches back to Israel’s experience of manna in the wilderness to present himself as the “Bread of Life.” He then brings the discourse to a dramatic climax. “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them” (John 6: 53-56)
Almost universally, the Early Church Fathers directly associated these words with the Eucharist, and this association continued right to the time of the Reformation. The Reformers, worried that the crassness of Jesus’ language here could be read to support transsubstantiation denied that he was talking about the Eucharist, relying on verse 63, “the Spirit gives life, the flesh is useless.” Most contemporary biblical scholars have returned to interpreting Jesus words in John 6 as a deliberate reference to the Eucharist.
My point here is that John’s gospel readily picks up Israel’s experience in the wilderness to move beyond the language of rituals meal to inject a graphically realistic understanding of Eucharistic participation. However we may understand Jesus words here John wants to say that the bread and wine of the Eucharist as Eucharistic give us Christ in some very real way. That is, of course, the mystery over which so much ink has been spilled. What does it mean to eat Christ body and drink his blood?
Colvin dismisses the philosophical and ontological language used in this quest by excluding such speculations as unnecessarily harmful in favor of the more biblical and Hebraic ritual meal. The long historical movement into metaphysics and ontology reflects the fundamental truth that theology is fides Quires intelligum, faith seeing understanding. Anyone confronted with Jesus’ words at the Last Supper, or his language in John 6 might well ask, “What does it mean that “this is my body” and that we eat and drink his body and blood?” What is happening here? One angle of grasping this is to look at the context of the Pasover meal and its ritual function. But there is more to it than that, as Jesus words of institution and his discourse on the bread of life indicate. How do we think about what takes place in sacrament by which Christ communicates himself along with all the blessings of his death and resurrection to the church?
In the first few centuries the church did not dig too deeply into the question of the sacramental presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. In the early second century Justin and Irenaeus simply affirmed this truth without seeking to understand its philosophical meaning and implications. Christ is given to us in the sacrament of his body and blood.
But the work of understanding was not far behind. Just as the church had to work through a way to articulate and understand what it means that Jesus is the Son of God and how the Son participate in the trinitarian Godhead, so it was necessary to seek to understand the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood, not least to prevent errors that might lead to false worship. In both cases the church discussed these mysteries by using the philosophical language available to them in the larger context of the Greek and Roman world, the language of the philosophers like Aristotle.
Augustine’s brilliant analysis of sacraments gave us the language of the sign and that which it signifies. As this passed into the medieval church it was further developed into the concept of transubstantiation which received its deepest explanation by Aquinas. But that seemed to lead to the very thing the church seeks to avoid, a false understanding that lead to false worship. Colvin graphically highlights these errors and eschews the philosophical and ontological speculations from which he claims they come. He finds the Reformers no less guilty because they continue to work within an ontological system that obscures the Hebrew context of the ritual meal.
Should we give up on this whole tradition and simply return to the Pasover ritual alone for our understanding of the sacrament? Brett Salkeld’s important new book Transubstantiation: Theology, History, and Christian Unity offers a strong challenge to thinking that the old well of sacramental theology has gone dry. By delving deeply into Aquinas, Salkeld shows that he does not simply validate Aristotle, but in many ways upends Aristotle’s ontology by presenting a clear picture of the relation between the signs of bread and wine and the reality of Christ in them. Salkeld also shows that a proper understanding of Aquinas brings him far closer to Luther and Calvin than previously thought, advocating a new ecumenical movement toward a shared understanding and practice of the Eucharist.
While I obviously cannot reconstruct Salkeld’s argument here, the main thrust is that the concept of transubstantiation rejected by the Reformers had little to do with the teaching of Aquinas or the Council of Trent. Aquinas’ understanding of transubstantiation “carefully distinguishes sign and signified in a way that gives the bread and wine a genuine role without denying the primacy of Christ’s body and blood in the sacrament. It is able to acknowledge the essentially symbolic character of the sacrament without reducing Christ’s presence to something that happens only ion the minds of the community.” (P. 240).
I want to argue that the philosophical and theological tradition relating to the sacraments of the western church is not the fruitless wasteland that Colvin pictures. If our theology is to communicate to the culture in which we live, we need to speak the language of the culture, and that involves, among other things, engaging in its philosophical ideas about the metaphysical structure of reality.
This, of course, is a long way from helping the actual people in our congregations, Catholic or Protestant, from understanding and articulating what happens in the Eucharist. Father Robert Barron is a widely recognized as a premier Roman Catholic teacher and preacher. In this short video https://youtu.be/bJjW3LXuHzo Barron explains to his audience of lay Catholics what the Eucharist is about. Knowingly or not, he is using a complex philosophical argument pioneered by J. L. Austin and applied to the sacrament by Nicholas Woltersdorff, called “speech-action theory,” but explains it in language anyone can grasp.
I do not believe that we must abandon the long, rich history of philosophical and theological reflection on the mystery of the sacrament in order to be true to its original Passover setting. But we do need to do a far better job of communicating that mystery to those who gather around the table/altar each week so that they can be meaningfully blessed by the grace the sacrament provides by his gracious presence in the bread and wine.
Leonard vander Zee is a retired editor and pastor, and is the author of Christ, Baptism, and the Lord's Supper.
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