On the Reformational Doctrine of the Substantial Presence of Christ in the Eucharist

Does the Church believe in a real substantial or essential Presence of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ under the form of bread and wine in the Eucharist, and if so, does that belief imply or necessitate the scholastic doctrine of transubstantiation, here defined, according to popular perception, as some kind of material change in the elements? Are substantial Presence and transubstantiation the same belief? If one holds to the substantial Presence, does this belief commit one to the specific doctrine of transubstantiation however defined? The following thoughts seek to answer these and other questions.

As concerns linguistics, the word substantial simply means ‘not imaginary or illusory,’ ‘real,’ ‘essential.’ Substance from the Latin substantia means, ‘to stand under’ - ‘essential nature,’ ‘ultimate reality that underlies all outward manifestations and change.’ The Greek word ousia, essence, is synonymous with substance: from the word einai, ‘to be’, it means nature, a thing in and of itself, being, reality, existence.

How would this language apply to the Eucharist? Our Lord is present in the Blessed Sacrament, not only in figure, virtue, power, or sign, but truly in His Body and Blood, as well as His Divinity – we call this mystery Substantial Presence. The total and complete One Person of God the Son made Man, fully human and fully divine, is objectively present under the forms of the Blessed Sacrament as our heavenly sustenance. The Divine Thing signified in the Holy Eucharist is Our Lord Himself, in the fullness of His human nature. So the Eucharist is the true Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. But the Body and Blood present in the Eucharist are present in their glorified and risen state, in the glory of the Resurrection, immortal, immutable, impassible, divinised. Our Lord's Body and Blood are not present in any carnal, gross, materialistic, or mortal state. So, in a true sense, the presence of Our Lord in the Holy Communion is bodily, that is, the Body and Blood of Christ are the risen, ascended, glorified, deified human nature of the Saviour personally present in the Eucharist in a unique sacramental mode - mystically, supernaturally, heavenly. The Substantial Body contained in the Blessed Sacrament is defined by Saint Paul in I Corinthians 15 as a spiritual body, soma pneumatikon, a Body after Resurrection.

PART I: The Anglicans

First, let us observe what Anglicanism has held concerning this matter. All of the below-mentioned Anglican Divines assented to Article of Religion XXVIII, which repudiates the Latin doctrine of transubstantiation. Yet, they are able to teach the Substantial Real Presence in the most vivid terms.

Bishop Guest (Author of Article of Religion XXVIII, 1566): ‘the Body of Christ is given, taken and eaten only after a heavenly and spiritual manner.’ ‘I told him plainly that this word only in the aforesaid article did not exclude the Presence of Christ’s Body from the Sacrament but the grossness and sensibleness in the receiving thereof. For I said unto him though he took Christ’s Body in his hand, received it with his mouth, and that corporally, naturally, really, substantially, and carnally, as the doctors do write, yet did he not for all that see it, feel it, smell it nor taste it.’ ‘The word was put in to this end, to take away all gross and sensible presence; for it is very true that when Christ’s Body is taken and eaten, it is neither seen, felt, smelt, nor tasted to be Christ’s Body, and so it is received and eaten, but after a heavenly and spiritual, and no sensible, manner.’

John Overall (Bishop of Norwich, 1619. One of the authors of the Church Catechism in the Book of Common Prayer): ‘It is confessed by all divines that upon the words of the consecration the Body and Blood of Christ is really and substantially present.’ ‘In the Sacrament of the Eucharist, or the Lord's Supper, the Body and Blood of Christ, and therefore the whole of Christ is verily and indeed present, and is verily partaken by us.’

John Cosin (Bishop of Durham, 1661): ‘Where is the danger, and what doth he fear, as long as all they that believe the Gospel own the true nature and the real and substantial Presence of the Body of Christ in the Sacra­ment?’

Lancelot Andrewes (Bishop of Winchester, 1623): ‘And the gathering or vintage of these two in the Blessed Eucharist is, as I may say, a kind of hypostatical union of the sign and the thing signified, so united together, as are the two Natures of Christ. And even from this Sacramental union do the Fathers borrow their resemblance – I name Theodoret for the Greek, and Gelasius for the Latin Church, that insist upon it both, and press it against Eutyches; that even as in the Eucharist neither part is evacuate or turned into the other, but abide each still in his former nature and substance, no more is either of Christ’s Natures annulled, or one of them converted into the other, as Eutyches held, but each Nature remaineth still full and whole in his own kind. And backwards; as the two Natures in Christ, so the signum and signatum in the Sacrament e converso. And this latter device, of the substance of the bread and wine to be flown away and gone, and in the room of it a remainder of nothing else but accidents to stay behind, was to them not known, and had it been true, had made for Eutyches and against them. And this for the likeness of union in both.’

William Forbes (Bishop of Edinburgh, 1635): ‘The opinion of those Protestants and others seems to be most safe and most right who think, nay, who most firmly believe, that the Body and Blood of Christ are really and actually and substantially present and taken in the Eucharist… In the Supper by the wonderful power of the Holy Ghost we invisibly partake of the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ, of which we are made recipients no otherwise than if we visibly ate and drank His Flesh and Blood.

James Ussher (Archbishop of Armagh, 1620): In the outward part of this mystical action, which reacheth to that which is Sacramentum only, we receive this Body and Blood but Sacramentally; in the inward, that containeth rem, the thing itself in it, we receive them really. And consequently the presence of these in the one is relative and symbolical, in the other real and substantial… and this is that real and substantial presence which we affirmed to be in the inward part of this sacred action. For the better conceiving of which mystery, we are to enquire, first what the thing is which we do here receive, secondly, how and in what manner we are made partakers of it. Touching the first, the truth which must be held is this: that we do not here receive only the benefits that flow from Christ, but the very Body and Blood of Christ, that is, Christ Himself crucified. For as none can be made partaker of the virtue of the Bread and Wine to his bodily sustenance, unless he first do receive the substance of those creatures, so neither can any participate in the benefits arising from Christ to his spiritual relief, except he first have communion with Christ Himself.’

The main difference between Calvinist and Zwinglian views and the historic Anglican is on the matter of Objective Presence: What is offered in the Eucharist is the True Body and Blood of Christ objectively, mystically and supernaturally present under the sacred species of host and chalice. In the Eucharist, an Objective Divine Thing is made present under the sacramental veils, Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, in the totality of His divinity and humanity, not merely present in power, grace or virtue, but made present in His human nature as well as His divine - and wherever that Objective Thing, the Thing Signified, is made present, He is present as Priest and Victim. The Risen Jesus, who now makes intercession for us as Great High Priest, is on our Altars - really, truly and substantially. (The Caroline Divines frequently refer to a 'substantial presence,' which does not require the Latin definition of transubstantiation at all - the Change in the Elements is real but of a metaphysical and not a material kind). Christ is objectively present in the Blessed Sacrament at the Consecration of the Mass, and by virtue of that objective presence is manifest and pleaded to the Father as Sacrifice and Atonement. 

Anglicans do not dogmatically impose the medieval scholastic Aristotelian theory of transubstantiation on the revealed mystery of the Real Objective Presence, although Rome does. We do believe in the Real Substantial Presence of Our Lord under the form of bread and wine in the Eucharist without attempting to explain how the Lord is substantially present – that is, without imposing any more dogmatic teaching on the mystery than that which is required by the Holy Scriptures and the Church of the First Millennium.

Our Lord's proclamation of the truth of the Real Objective Presence in Saint John chapter 6 is certainly not symbolical or metaphorical, and He is not speaking in figurative terms, as the context of the Scripture makes clear. Our Lord's human nature, as well as His Divinity, is present in the form of the sacred species, in an abiding and permanent way after Eucharistic Consecration. We should reject as contrary to Holy Tradition the doctrine of memorialism, which makes the Eucharist a mere mental psychological act of remembrance devoid of presence and grace, and the doctrine of virtualism, which holds that only the believing faithful receive the subjective grace or power of the Body and Blood through the elements, but not the Thing Itself objectively present in the elements.

Since the Reformation, Anglicans have insisted, with the consensus of the early Fathers, Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, Saint Theodore of Mopsuestia and Saint Theophylact especially amongst them, that the materiality of the Bread and Wine remains in its original physical state after Eucharistic Consecration, but that to it is joined by Consecration the supernatural totality of the Incarnate God-Man, by a ‘hypostatic union,’ a Personal Union extending the Incarnation, a sacramental unity of the outward and visible sign with the Divine Thing, Our Lord, Who is signified and contained in the sign. ‘The Bread which is of the earth receiving the invocation of God is no longer common bread but Eucharist, made up of two things, an earthly and a heavenly.’

The Holy Ghost, through the Consecration of the Mass, effects a sacramental change, an ontological change, in the forms of bread and wine on a supernatural metaphysical level, so that the outward forms become the Spirit-filled Body and Blood of Christ in an immaterial but essential manner. The Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist are the Body and Blood of His mighty Resurrection and glorious Ascension, a spiritual Body vivified by the Holy Spirit (I Corinthians 15.44). The afore-described doctrine is plainly laid out in the Prayer Book Catechism, the Prayer Book Offices of Instruction and in the Prayer Book Eucharistic Liturgy, as well as Articles of Religion XXVIII and XXIX. All communicants receive the outward and visible Sign and the Thing Signified; only the faithful receive the Benefit or virtue of the Sacrament, as the wicked receive not benefit but condemnation (I Corinthians 11.27-29). We do indeed need to be careful about Eucharistic language, so as to avoid on one hand a monophysiticism wherein the elements are believed to be destroyed and absorbed into Christ, and a Nestorianism often found in Calvinism and 'reformed' protestantism on the other, wherein the sign is divorced and entirely separated from the Divine Reality.

Again, Saint Irenaeus says, 'in the Eucharist there is an earthly thing and a heavenly thing,' hence, the outward signs of Bread and Wine and the Thing Signified, the Body and Blood of Our Lord. Other Fathers describe the Eucharist as the prolongation of the Incarnation, a Mystery like an iron thrust into the fire - the iron does not lose its own properties or reality, but it takes on the reality and properties of the fire. Both remain complete in themselves and yet are perfectly united, and each takes on the property of the other: True God and True Man in the Incarnation, earthly elements and the Person of Christ in the Eucharist. The consecrated Elements are not destroyed, but elevated, not replaced, but perfected into a new Thing. Grace builds upon nature, and does not destroy, but perfects, nature. Our Lord is ‘incarnated’ in the sacramental species, mystically present.

That there is 1. a supernatural, glorified, metaphysical yet corporeal (of a Body) Presence of Our Lord's Incarnate Person in the Eucharist, the Risen and Exalted Lord, and 2. a Change in the Eucharistic Elements upon Consecration, is beyond doubt for all Catholic Christians; but as Anglicans we believe we cannot attempt dogmatically to define the exact manner of the Presence or the process of how the Presence comes about at Mass - without adding to the Catholic Faith. We cannot rationally explain the inexplicable or define the indefinable. The Real Presence is Mystical - the ultimate Holy Mystery. The Presence is more real than that found in our own material physical plane, but it is not material and physical as understood in the limited field of our empirical experience.

PART II: The Lutherans

Anglicans are not the only heirs of the Reformation to proffer belief in the essential Eucharistic Presence. While the doctrine of the substantial Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is popularly attributed solely to the Latin ecclesiastical tradition and the scholastic movement, it should be noted that the belief in an essential Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament is not only the received tradition of the universal Church of the first millennium, the Anglican Church, the Eastern Churches and the Latin Church, but is, in fact, the original protestant Eucharistic doctrine.

A doctrine of substantial presence is located in the undisputed universal tradition of the Holy Catholic Church for the first 1,500 years of Christian history; it is also what many sixteenth-century magisterial protestants held, the most important representative being Doctor Martin Luther. The original Lutherans would vehemently object to the appellation ‘Lutheran.’ They saw themselves simply as true Western Catholics, the Evangelical Catholics or the Evangelicals - who held to the ancient Faith of the Church renewed. They fiercely perpetuated the consensus fidelium on the matter of the Real Substantial Presence of Our Lord in the Eucharist. 

Anglicans and other orthodox Catholics certainly do not agree with Luther and his followers on all aspects of Eucharistic doctrine, as, for example, on the issue of Eucharistic Sacrifice and Perduring Presence, but the similarities between the traditions regarding belief in an essential Eucharistic Presence are salient.

Basic Eucharistic doctrine as presented by Martin Luther in his Small Catechism includes belief in the real and essential Presence:

Q. What is the Sacrament of the Altar?
A. It is the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ under bread and wine for us Christians to eat and to drink, established by Christ Himself.

Q. What good does this eating and drinking do?
A. These words tell us: ‘Given for you’ and ‘Shed for you to forgive sins.’ Namely, that the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation are given to us through these words in the sacrament. Because, where sins are forgiven, there is life and salvation as well.

Q. How can physical eating and drinking do such great things?
A. Of course, eating and drinking do not do these things. These words, written here, do them: ‘given for you’ and ‘shed for you to forgive sins.’ These words, along with physical eating and drinking are the important part of the sacrament. Anyone who believes these words has what they say and what they record, namely, the forgiveness of sins. 

The same is posited in Luther’s Large Catechism:

Now, what is the Sacrament of the Altar?

Answer: It is the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, in and under the bread and wine, which we Christians are commanded by the Word of Christ to eat and to drink.

Doctor Luther rejected the Latin scholastic doctrine of transubstantiation, that is, that the essence or substance of the bread and wine are annihilated and replaced with the substantial body and blood of Christ. In line with the earliest Fathers of the Church, he saw no need for the Aristotelian doctrine. Rather, he asserted that Christ's Real Presence did not replace the material presence of bread and wine but was united to the consecrated elements. Luther clearly maintained that the Body and Blood of Our Lord are substantially present in and under the consecrated elements of bread and wine. It is common parlance for many to refer to the Lutheran view as consubstantiation, because the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ are held to be present with (con) the substance of the bread and wine.

Lutheran theology, however, does not use the term consubstantiation and instead uses Doctor Luther’s own formulation of ‘sacramental union’ – a union of the Incarnate Person of Our Lord with the Eucharistic species. It is perspicuously manifest that Luther, in all of his writings, insists on Real Substantial Presence of Christ in the elements of the Holy Communion.  He repeatedly cites Our Lord’s ipsissima verba, the Words of institution, ‘This is my Body, This is my Blood,’ to prove the truth of the doctrine, and the best example of his persistence is the famous (or infamous) Marburg Colloquy of 1529, in which an effort to unite various protestant movements failed because of a lack of consensus on Eucharistic doctrine. Huldrich Zwingli refused Luther’s doctrine of the substantial presence; Luther in conscience could not back down. Even in the face of continued protestant division, Luther would not and could not relent and recant: ‘this is my Body’ means ‘this is my Body.’  Doctor Luther would not permit the verb is to be taken in a figurative, symbolic or representative sense. The verb was and is taken literally, so that in the Eucharist Our Lord makes the bread and wine to be what He declares them to be, His True Body and True Blood. In this teaching, Luther is merely being consistent with the affirmations of Holy Scripture and the Great Tradition of the Church throughout the ages.

Doctor Luther uses the previously-mentioned fire-and-iron analogy of the earliest Fathers to defend the substantial presence: ‘Fire and iron, two different substances, are so mingled in red-hot iron that every part of it is both fire and iron. Why may not the glorious Body of Christ much more be in every part of the substance of the bread?’ He uses the Hypostatic Union of the divine and human natures in Christ to explicate the mystery. Our Lord’s Deity, he teaches, is not present under accidents of the human nature in Christ. He submits therefore that one can say, ‘This Man is God, this God is Man,’ in the Chalcedonian tradition of the communcatio idiomatum. So also in the Blessed Sacrament, it is not necessary that transubstantiation (however defined) occur in order for Our Lord become essentially present. After Eucharistic Consecration, the materiality of the bread and wine continue to exist, yet one can say in the person of Christ, ‘This bread is my Body, this wine is my Blood – and vice-versa.’  ‘As this truth is found in Christ, so also in the Sacrament.’ Luther utilises Christology to express the nature of the Real Presence.  He employs Christology and the Hypostatic Union solely by way of analogy, for he does not attempt to define the ‘how’ of the mystery, only that the mystery is objective and real. The Real Substantial Presence only comes about, as Saint Augustine saith, by the power or virtue of the Word, the Word of Christ, the hoc est enim corpus meum, for the divine mystery can never be comprehended or understood.

In 1528, in opposition to Zwingli, Doctor Luther wrote in The Confession of the Supper of Christ. In this work, he evolves an analogy between the Unity of the Three Divine Persons in the Godhead, the Hypostatic Union of the divine and human natures in Christ, and the sacramental union of Our Lord with the elements - the unio sacramentalis.

The Holy Trinity possesses a union of nature, a natural unanimity. In Our Lord, there is a union in One Divine Person of two Natures, a union of person, a personal unanimity.  In the Holy Eucharist, Our Lord forges a union with the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine, a union of sacrament, a sacramental unanimity. According to Luther’s interpretation, the bread and wine are so suffused with the substantial presence of Christ, and Our Lord is so closely joined to the elements after Consecration that the terms ‘flesh-bread’ and ‘blood-wine’ are engaged to describe the mystery of the sacramental union. There is an absolute, indivisible unity between Our Lord and the Eucharistic species. Therefore, the substantial presence is infallibly received with the consecrated elements – the Body and Blood are received with the bread and wine, which serve as the vessel, the conduit, the instrument. The outward and visible sign of material bread and wine (signum sacramenti) are always given with the inward and spiritual Substance of the Body and Blood of Christ (res sacramenti), in Augustinian terms.

Moving on from Luther himself to his followers, we witness below the confident teaching of the Book of Concord on the matter of substantial Presence. No one could dispute that the Augsburg Confession and its Confutation and Apology are protestant formularies, and yet we observe how certainly the doctrine of essential Presence is affirmed.

Article X: Of the Lord's Supper - Confession

Of the Supper of the Lord they teach that the Body and Blood of Christ are truly present, and are distributed to those who eat the Supper of the Lord; and they reject those that teach otherwise.
  

To Article X - Confutation

The tenth article gives no offence in its words, because they confess that in the Eucharist, after the consecration lawfully made, the Body and Blood of Christ are substantially and truly present, if only they believe that the entire Christ is present under each form, so that the Blood of Christ is no less present under the form of bread by concomitance than it is under the form of the wine, and the reverse. Otherwise, in the Eucharist the Body of Christ is dead and bloodless, contrary to Saint Paul, because Christ, being raised from the dead, dieth no more. One matter is added as very necessary to the article of the Confession -  that they believe the Church, rather than some teaching otherwise and incorrectly, that by the almighty Word of God in the consecration of the Eucharist the substance of the bread is changed into the Body of Christ. For thus in a general council it has been determined firmly concerning the exalted Trinity, and the Catholic faith. They are praised therefor, for condemning the Capernaites, who deny the truth of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.

Article X: Of the Holy Supper - Apology

The Tenth Article has been approved, in which we confess that we believe, that in the Lord's Supper the body and blood of Christ are truly and substantially present, and are truly tendered, with those things which are seen, bread and wine, to those who receive the Sacrament. This belief we constantly defend, as the subject has been carefully examined and considered. For since Paul says, that the bread is the communion of the Lord's body, etc., it would follow, if the Lord's body were not truly present, that the bread is not a communion of the body, but only of the spirit of Christ. And we have ascertained that not only the Roman Church affirms the bodily presence of Christ, but the Greek Church also both now believes, and formerly believed, the same. For the canon of the Mass among them testifies to this, in which the priest clearly prays that the bread may be changed and become the very body of Christ. And Vulgarius, who seems to us to be not a silly writer, says distinctly that bread is not a mere figure, but is truly changed into flesh. And there is a long exposition of Cyril on John 15, in which he teaches that Christ is corporeally offered us in the Supper. For he says thus: Nevertheless, we do not deny that we are joined spiritually to Christ by true faith and sincere love. But that we have no mode of connection with Him, according to the flesh, this indeed we entirely deny. And this, we say, is altogether foreign to the divine Scriptures. For who has doubted that Christ is in this manner a vine, and we the branches, deriving thence life for ourselves? Hear Paul saying: We are all one body in Christ; although we are many, we are, nevertheless, one in Him; for we are, all partakers of that one bread. Does he perhaps think that the virtue of the mystical benediction is unknown to us? Since this is in us, does it not also, by the communication of Christ's flesh, cause Christ to dwell in us bodily? And a little after: Whence we must consider that Christ is in us not only according to the habit, which we call love, but also by natural participation, etc. We have cited these testimonies, not to undertake a discussion here concerning this subject, for His Imperial Majesty does not disapprove of this article, but in order that all who may read them may the more clearly perceive that we defend the doctrine received in the entire Church, that in the Lord's Supper the body and blood of Christ are truly and substantially present, and are truly tendered with those things which are seen, bread and wine (quod in coena Domini vere et substantialiter adsint corpus et sanguis Christi et vere exhibeantur  cum his rebus, quae videntur, pane et vino). And we speak of the presence of the living Body of Christ; for we know that death hath no more dominion over Him.

The Augsburg Confession, Article Ten (1530), definitively professes the Real Substantial Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the distribution of the True Body and True Blood of Christ to all communicants under the elements, good and evil alike – the manducatio impiorum; it condemns those who teach otherwise. The doctrine of transubstantiation is never taught or mentioned. The Confutation proclaims that ‘the tenth article is not verbally hurtful, because they acknowledge that in the Eucharist after consecration lawfully made, the body and blood of Christ are substantially and really present.’ But regarding transubstantiation it is affirmed: ‘One very necessary addition to the article of the Confession is that they should believe the Church, rather than any who wrongly teach differently that by the almighty word of God in the consecration of the Eucharist the substance of bread is changed into the body of Christ.’

After the Confutation came the Apology of the Augsburg Confession of 1530. Philip Melanchthon, in addressing Article Ten, replaces for vere et adsint the strongest possible language, vere et substantialiter adsint, in order to teach the Real Substantial Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ. Transubstantiation again is never mentioned.

The Lutheran Reformation is another very crucial example of how even the protestant tradition has historically embraced the ancient and universal tradition of the essential Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Communion. It is not a doctrine alien to the Anglican Church or to other Churches of the Reformation, but a truth of the Gospel, a vital truth, a divine revelation, and a living component of our inheritance from the consensus patricum and the consensus fidelium of the First Millennium Church. The Church’s faith in the Real Presence is not to be confused with the later philosophical development called transubstantiation.