eucharist + protestantism

consubstantiation

• teaches that the bread and wine of the Eucharist do not change into the actual body and blood of Christ when consecrated by a priest.

• They remain bread and wine.

• Nevertheless, Christ is spiritually present ‘with them, in them and under them’.

• The bread ‘co-exists’ with his body and the wine with his blood.

• The prefix con- means ‘with’. So consubstantiation means that the body and blood of Jesus co-exist with the substance of the bread and wine.

• The term is often employed to designate the view of the Eucharist held by Martin Luther (1483– 1546), the Father of the Protestant Reformation, but it was never used by him and is rejected by most Lutheran churches as unbiblical.

• While it is true that Luther asserted the ‘real presence’ of Jesus in the bread and the wine, the term he used was not ‘consubstantiation’ but ‘sacramental union’.

• The doctrine was set out in the Lutheran Augsburg Confession of 1530.

memorialism

• Memorialism is a term used to describe the view of the Eucharist held by Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531).

• Zwingli denied the real presence of Christ in the sacrament and taught that the bread and wine do not communicate him to the recipient.

• They are rather symbolic representations of his body and blood. In Luke 22:19, Jesus commands his followers to ‘Do this in remembrance of me’. The Eucharist is therefore a commemorative ceremony where participan

calvin’s virtualism

• Virtualism is a term used to describe the view of the Eucharist associated with John Calvin (1509–1564).

• Calvin taught the doctrine of predestination, which asserted that God, even before he created the world, had chosen some people, whom Calvin called ‘the elect’, to receive salvation, while the rest were left to continue in their sins and receive eternal damnation.

• Calvin’s view of the Eucharist arose from this belief.

• He taught that Christ’s body cannot be present in the Eucharist, because Christ’s body has ascended into Heaven (Acts 1:9–11).

• He did not, however, deny the presence of Christ’s unique power (Latin virtus) in the bread and wine, but believed that this power is received only by the elect, who have been predestined to receive salvation.

• For this reason, the doctrine of virtualism is also known as ‘receptionism’.

who should take communion

• Christian denominations differ in their thinking as to who should be permitted to share communion.

• Justin Martyr wrote c. 150 CE ‘No one else is permitted to partake of it, except one who believes our teaching to be true’ and for the first several hundred years of church history non-members were forbidden even to be present at the rite.

• Today, the Roman Catholic church and some conservative Protestant churches still exclude non-members from communion except under exceptional circumstances.

• Most Protestant communities, however, practise open communion and many feel that all that is necessary to share communion is faith in Christ, regardless of denomination, although some attempt to limit it to those who are baptised, as far as they can control this.