Are the communion elements literally Jesus?

TRANSUBSTANTIATE træn.(t)səb'stæn.(t)ʃi.eɪt verb. Substantially convert into the literal body and blood of Christ Jesus. Used to describe the elements of bread and wine during the Christian ritual of holy communion or Eucharist.

2. Change something’s form or substance into something wholly different.

[Transubstantiation træn.(t)səb.stæn.(t)ʃi'eɪ.ʃən noun.]

Since I’ve been writing about the living bread in John 6, passages Roman Catholics love to use to back up their doctrine of transubstantiation—particularly Jesus’s bit about eating and drinking him—I figured I’d write about that idea in a little bit more detail.

As you can tell from the vocabulary word I provided up top, transubstantiate, Catholics take John 6 literally and claim the elements of holy communion—the wafers and wine they use—literally become Jesus. They don’t merely represent Jesus, as many Protestants have come to believe. Jesus, Catholics insist, wasn’t being metaphorical, wasn’t using hyperbole, when he said,

John 6.53-58 NABRE

53B“Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. 54Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. 55For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. 56Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. 57Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. 58This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.”

When Jesus says, “My flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink,” he’s not mincing words: We’re literally meant to eat him.

The Galileans he spoke to when he said this, and his students, had no clue at the time exactly what Jesus meant by this. He hadn’t yet taught his followers about holy communion; wouldn’t for a few more years. So it was still a mystery—but one which freaked out the Galileans. In contrast Jesus’s kids had trusted him this far, so they stuck around long enough to watch him ultimately fulfill it, which he did at his last supper. (Nevermind that he didn’t do holy communion at all in the gospel of John. The author was aware of the other gospels, and didn’t feel the need to repeat them.)

So when Jesus did this at his last supper, it triggered the memory of when he talked about the living bread:

Mark 14.22-25 NABRE

22While they were eating, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them, and said, “Take it; this is my body.” 23Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, and they all drank from it. 24He said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many. 25Amen, I say to you, I shall not drink again the fruit of the vine until the day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”

Again, Catholics insist, Jesus wasn’t using metaphor. That was his body. That was his blood.

If it’s not, why did Paul and Sosthenes have to warn the Corinthians against practicing holy communion without acknowledging it’s Jesus’s body?

1 Corinthians 11.27-32 NABRE

27Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord. 28A person should examine himself, and so eat the bread and drink the cup. 29For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself. 30That is why many among you are ill and infirm, and a considerable number are dying. 31If we discerned ourselves, we would not be under judgment; 32but since we are judged by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world.

This is why Catholics won’t let non-Catholics partake of Eucharist. Unlike other Christians, who figure if you’re Christian of course you can worship Jesus along with them, they don’t want people ignorantly eating and drinking judgment upon themselves. After all, those elements aren’t merely wafers and wine: They’re Jesus. It’s why Eucharist is the central part of the Catholic worship service—it’s when Jesus enters the building. It’s a big, big deal.

Transubstantiation has always been around.

The belief the communion elements are literally Jesus, has always been around. The early church fathers—Christianity’s leaders for the first five to seven centuries, before the schism—kept writing things which left no doubt this is what they firmly believed, because they were entirely sure this is what the apostles taught. Literally Jesus, not a metaphor, not a symbol, not a figure of speech. The Holy Spirit does something supernatural during our sacraments, and while those elements used to be nothing more than wheat and grapes and water, now they’re Jesus.

Ignatius Theophorus of Antioch wrote this in around 110 of the Christian era, about people whom he considered heretic. He had other complaints about ’em too, but noted they also avoid certain forms of worship.

They stay away from Eucharist and prayer, because they don’t acknowledge the Eucharist is the body of our savior Jesus Christ, who suffered for our sins, whom the Father in his kindness raised up. Smyrnæans 6.2 (7.1 in the Ante-Nicene Fathers)

Justin Martyr wrote this in his first Apology, around 156.

For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these, but in like manner as Jesus Christ our savior, having been made flesh by the word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation; so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of his word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh. Apology 1.66

Irenæus of Lyon wrote this in Against Heresies, around 180. You can see he clearly figured when, during the ritual, we give thanks (Greek εὐχαριστέω/evharistéo, from which we get the word Eucharist), the “mingled cup” (Greeks liked to water down their wine) and “manufactured bread” become Christ’s actual blood and body.

When, therefore, the mingled cup and the manufactured bread receives the word of God, and the thanksgiving of the blood and the body of Christ is made, from which things the substance of our flesh is increased and supported, how can they affirm that the flesh is incapable of receiving the gift of God, which is life eternal, which flesh is nourished from the body and blood of the Lord, and is a member of him? Against Heresies 5.2.3

These guys went with the idea of the elements literally being Jesus, because… well, why would that be a problem for God? Why can’t God perform a miracle every single time we remember Jesus in this way? God is living and active and almighty, and turning bread and wine into body and blood is nothing to him. Even though it totally looks like bread and wine, they figured it’s a faith thing: Jesus said, “This is my body” and “This is my blood,” and either you trust Jesus or you don’t.

Because these guys wrote these things before there was any Roman Catholic Church, all the ancient churches taught transubstantiation. Orthodox churches too—though since they’re not Roman, they don’t use the Latin word for it. They call it μετουσίωσις/metusíosis, which means “change in being.” But it’s the very same idea. In the 1672 Synod of Jerusalem, Orthodox leaders gathered to state their points of disagreement with Protestants, and among them they said this: “The bread becomes truly, indeed, and essentially the very true body of the Lord, and the wine the very blood of the Lord.” Orthodox churches prefer to not discuss how God does it; they’re fine with it remaining a mystery, which they accept by faith. But they do believe it.

And before that synod, the Catholics held their Council of Trent to refute Protestant beliefs, and declared this on 11 October 1511:

But because Christ our redeemer declared that which he offered under the species of bread to be verily his own body, therefore has it ever been a firm belief in the Church of God, and this holy Synod doth now declare it anew that, by the consecration of the bread and of the wine, a conversion takes place of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. Which conversion is, by the holy Catholic Church, conveniently and properly called Transubstantiation. Decree Touching the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, 6.

Plus they anathematized anyone who said otherwise. So if you don’t believe in transubstantiation, you can’t be, nor remain, Catholic. Sorry.

Since for the most part Catholics believe in science, there are some who naturally struggle with the idea of Jesus’s atoms being swapped out for the wine and wafer’s atoms, and wanna come up with a less physics-based description of what God does in transubstantiation. Catholic theologian Edward Schillebeeckx pitched an idea we now call transignification: No atoms are swapped out, no chemical changes take place, but the communion elements simply take on the significance of Jesus’s body and blood. Catholic theologian Karl Rahner suggested what he called transfinalization: No atoms swapped, no chemical changes, but the elements now have a new function, and their purpose has transformed. Pope Paul 6 didn’t care for either of these ideas, and rebuked them both in his 1965 encyclical Mysterium fidei. Paul understandably didn’t care for any ideas which he felt eliminated the real presence of Jesus in holy communion.

Various Protestant ideas.

Martin Luther, the Wittenburg college professor who started the Protestant movement, critiqued and rethought a lot of Catholic beliefs when he decided to reform Catholicism, and wound up creating the Lutheran church. One of the beliefs was transubstantiation. He felt the elements of communion don’t become Jesus; instead Jesus’s body and blood—Jesus’s person and presence—are present whenever we’re doing the sacrament. “We do not make Christ’s body out of the bread,” he explained, “we say that his body… is present when we say, ‘This is my body.’ ” Lutherans call this a sacramental union, because bread and body are two different things, and wine and blood are two different things, but in communion they somehow become one.

Some folks call that consubstantiation, but that’d be inaccurate. In actual consubstantiation, the bread and wine don’t transform into another substance; instead Jesus’s body and blood join them. As William of Occam put it, "The substance of the bread and the substance of the wine remain there, and the substance of the body of Christ remains in the same place, together with the substance of the bread.” So… you’re eating bread and wine, and you’re eating Jesus’s flesh and blood. Which leads to the inevitable question: Why on earth would God do it that way? Consubstantiationists usually say it has something to do with how Jesus is both God and human—so therefore the communion elements are both bread and body, both wine and blood. This belief is popular among Anglicans, but few others.

Geneva’s bishop Jean Calvin had an idea similar to Luther’s: Jesus’s person and presence are present, but spiritually present, not physically. No physical substance changes, nor gets added, nor swapped. Jesus remains in heaven, at the Father’s right hand, and we are spiritually lifted up to receive spiritual nourishment from him. Most Reform churches run with his idea.

Lastly there’s the really common Protestant idea of memorialism—that Jesus’s presence isn’t involved in holy communion at all. The elements are purely symbolic; they only represent Jesus, and aren’t literally Jesus. Not that Jesus isn’t there, in the midst of the Christians who are worshiping him, who remember his self-sacrifice in holy communion. He definitely is. But, as Anabaptists put it, our communion with Christ comes through being part of the body of Christ, not through the communion elements.

Me. (Not that I get a vote!)

Though baptized Catholic, I grew up Protestant, grew up in memorialist churches, and still go to memorialist churches. So you can kinda see where my beliefs lean.

But honestly, I’m agnostic about how holy communion works. I don’t know that the memorialist view I grew up with is correct. Maybe it is, but I could be wrong. I don’t know that the transubstantiationalist view is correct either. I also don’t know that it’s not correct.

Because I’m Protestant, I don’t see Christian history and Christian tradition as authoritative. The early church fathers might’ve been right… and might’ve been wrong. (You can immediately see this as soon as you read Ignatius. His antisemitism makes it really obvious he’s not infallible.) Maybe they listened to the Holy Spirit; maybe they didn’t and were guessing. Like the writings of every other Christian, I’m free to pick ’n choose, and judge them based on how much I think they jibe with infallible scripture. Same with the Protestant reformers—they’re not infallible either.

At the same time, I’m not gonna be so arrogant as to claim 20 centuries of longstanding Christian tradition are wrong and I’m right. Maybe God does transubstantiate the elements. Feels needlessly complex to me, but what do I know?—God does it however God wants to do it.

My view resembles that of a poem by Elizabeth Tudor (1533–1603), who later became queen of England:

Twas God the Word that spake it,

He took the Bread and brake it:

And what that Word did make it,

That I believe and take it.

Notice she didn’t specify what that belief was, because at that time, with her homicidally anti-Protestant sister Mary on the throne, it was perilous for her to pick a side. Once she became queen herself she could, and did. In her poem A Meditation How to Discern the Lord’s Body in the Blessed Sacrament, she noted, “For if his Body he did then divide, / He must have eat himself before he dy’d.” That and other snide statements in the poem indicate she believed in memorialism; maybe Calvin’s idea, but certainly not consubstantiationism nor transubstantiationism. But I prefer the sentiment of her previous poem. The scriptures don’t say how communion works with perfect, unmistakeable clarity. So we don’t know. And it isn’t wise to come down hard on any side when we don’t know.

The idea of Jesus’s presence in holy communion seems correct to me. Does his presence have to be within the communion elements themselves? Depends on how God chooses to do it. I will say whether the bread and wine (or, in my church, oyster cracker and half-ounce cup of juice) are literally Jesus or merely represent Jesus, either way we oughta show some respect to these elements, and not just fling ’em around or throw ’em away or otherwise display anything but reverence. ’Cause functionally they’re Jesus, and Jesus did a monumentally great thing by dying to save us, and we’re taking holy communion to remember that. Don’t disrespect his sacrifice; don’t disrespect his elements.

And the idea of condemning fellow Christians because they cling to different views about communion, seems profoundly wrong to me. If their views aren’t getting in the way of obeying and following and worshiping Jesus—if in fact they facilitate those things—who am I to judge them? Ro 14.1-4 The only people I’ll judge are the gatekeepers and nitpickers who want to divide Jesus’s church, and drive Christians apart, by demanding everybody conform to their favorite doctrines, and condemning those who doubt or disagree. To paraphrase Paul and Sosthenes, if your fellow Christian is hurt by what you believe about what you eat, you’re no longer walking in love. Don’t destroy someone Christ Jesus died for. God’s kingdom isn’t eating or drinking—even eating or drinking Jesus!—but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. Ro 14.15-16 ’Nuff said.