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Trueman, C, "The Incarnation and the Lord's Supper"

© The Word Became Flesh, David Peterson (ed), (Carlisle, Paternoster Press, 2003)
The Incarnation and the Lord's Supper, Carl Trueman
Published with the permission of Carl Trueman and Paternoster Press.

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I say that although Christ is absent from the earth in respect of the flesh, yet in the Supper we truly feed on his body and blood - that owing to the secret agency of the Spirit we enjoy the presence of both.1

The Lord's Supper: A Neglected Gift

There would seem to be little doubt that neglect of the Lord's Supper or the Eucharist is one of the hallmarks of contemporary evangelicalism. With the exception of the conservative tradition of Highland Presbyterianism, which still maintains its practice of infrequent communion seasons, and evangelical Anglicanism, with its liturgical practices, the Lord's Supper is not a particularly important part of evangelical church life.2 Many attend churches where the sacrament is little more than an addendum attached to the end of the main Sunday service; and a glance at basic theology primers for evangelicals reveals a dramatic neglect of the theology of the Lord's Supper in the litany of what are otherwise considered to be evangelical essentials and distinctives. Thus, for example, in John Stott's recent manifesto for evangelical unity, the Lord's Supper is scarcely touched upon except for a couple of lines in the section on the cross of Christ.3 But such has not always been the case in Protestantism. Indeed, at the Reformation, the Protestant consensus was shattered at precisely this point, when Lutherans and Reformed failed to reach agreement at the Colloquy of Marburg in 1529 and set up a division within the ranks which persists to this day.4 If we equate modern evangelical values and attitudes with those of the Reformers, then such a breach becomes incomprehensible; it is a dispute about trivia. If, however, we return to our roots and see the Lord's Supper in terms of the theological dimensions of the Reformation itself, we can see both why the breach took place and how impoverished we ourselves have become through our contemporary indifference to the practice of communion in the contemporary church. The Lord's Supper is a gift of God; the Reformation's most brilliant sacramental theologians, men such as Calvin and Cranmer, clearly understood it as such; and thus we neglect it only to our own detriment.

How and why this neglect has come about is not easy to discern. Possible reasons include the inherent emphasis upon individual rather than corporate activities as the gauges of spiritual health within the evangelical church. Emphasis upon quiet times, individual Bible reading etc. rather than upon gathering as believers would be one sign that this is the case. Theologically, the frequent failure of evangelicals to have any real doctrine of the church is also almost certainly part of the problem. At another level, the failure of church leadership within evangelicalism to provide a solid rationale for sacramental activity within a theological tradition committed to justification by faith has undoubtedly eroded Eucharistic practices. Then, at the level of sheer pragmatism, the ecumenical difficulties involved in any sacramental discussion by a movement that is, in essence, transdenominational no doubt militate against the kind of sharp drawing of boundaries in which Luther and Zwingli indulged. The reasons are probably manifold and complex; the result is rather simple - in general, evangelicals neglect the Lord's Supper.

My approach in this paper will be twofold: first, I will lay out the incarnational aspects of the Reformation debates surrounding the Lord's Supper between Lutherans and Reformed (and, for the sake of argument, I used 'Reformed' here not in any sense of modern church politics but in terms of that Reformation tradition represented by such as Zwingli and Calvin); and, second, I will explore how and why the Eucharist was significant for the Reformers and how their vision might be renewed today. I must, of course, lay my own cards on the table at the very start. I write not as an Anglican but as a Presbyterian; yet, in honour of my immediate context and as a symbol of the fundamental catholicity of the evangelical faith, I intend to interact closely with the writings of the great Thomas Cranmer, a man for whom neglect 186 'The Word became flesh' of the Lord's Supper within the life of the church would have been inconceivable.

Luther versus Zwingli: The Lord's Supper as Incarnational Problem

Lying behind the sacramental breach between Luther and Zwingli were both differing views of salvation and differing views of incarnation. At the most basic level, Luther regarded the incarnate Christ as the only context in which God could be encountered as gracious; and this required Christ's humanity to be really present in the Eucharistic elements.5 Zwingli, however, felt no such need to find God gracious only at the point where divinity and humanity coincided and thus had no need to find Christ's humanity within the elements. For him, the Lord's Supper was more of a memorial and a ritual of horizontal significance between believers. 6 This is why there could ultimately be no compromise between them. For Luther, mere spiritual presence of Christ, or, even worse, complete absence of Christ, turned the Lord's Supper into law rather than gospel, into a message of judgement rather than of good news and grace.

Underlying these soteriological concerns was a fundamental disagreement over the nature of the incarnation itself and it is important that we grasp this in order to see that Protestant understandings of the Lord's Supper were at their inception intimately related to understandings of incarnation. For Luther, the need to maintain a real presence of the whole Christ, both divine and human, in the Eucharistic elements led him, in the heat of controversy to argue for the general ubiquity of Christ's flesh. His arguments on this issue represent a remodelling of philosophical notions about presence inherited from his Occamist background.7 He is indeed careful to distinguish Christ's corporeal presence from a crude spatial and circumscriptive presence, whilst yet maintaining the reality of that presence in the elements. To do this, he is driven to argue for a direct communication of properties between the two natures in Christ.8 Thus, the human nature becomes infinite through its contact with the divine. One consequence of this is that Christ's human nature becomes ubiquitous. However, it must be stressed that this in no way relativises the sacrament, or Christ's presence therein, since Luther regards as The Incarnation and the Lord's Supper 187 crucial the fact that Christ's presence in the sacramental elements is presence joined to a promise, thus giving a different significance to the presence in the elements than, say, in the ink and paper of this essay.9

Zwingli, however, holds to an understanding of the communication of properties whereby the properties of the two natures are communicated indirectly in the person of the mediator. Thus, while Christ the one person can be described as infinite, this is according to his divine nature, not according to his human nature. There is, therefore, no need to argue for the presence of Christ's humanity wherever one finds the divinity, a position now commonly known by the later Lutheran pejorative term 'the extraCalvinisticum'. This is actually not an innovation, but a position held by such luminaries as Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa and Thomas Aquinas, which became normative for the later Reformed tradition.10 This Christology finds its expression in the linguistic convention of alloiosis where, as Zwingli defines it, 'what applies to one of the natures is predicated of the other.'11 This, in turn, allows him to understand the phrase 'This is my body' in a nonliteral sense as 'This represents my body'. Indeed, he has to do so, for to do otherwise would lead him into what he would regard as a Christological absurdity - a literal, physical identification of Christ's body with something that is patently not so.12

Enough has been said regarding the Eucharistic dispute between Luther and Zwingli, and then between Lutheran and Reformed traditions as a whole, to demonstrate that underlying these disputes were important, irreconcilable differences over the nature of the incarnation. There is not time in this paper to thrash out in detail all the ramifications of the two approaches, but it seems clear to me at least that the Reformed position on the communication of properties is both closest to the mainstream patristic and western medieval tradition of the church and the one which most clearly preserves the balance of natures and personhood which is expressed in the Chalcedonian definition of Christ's incarnation. Perennial Lutheran accusations of Nestorianism aside, the Reformed position would seem to preserve the integrity of the two natures in the one person in a way in which the Lutheran position simply does not. While it must be conceded that the exalted humanity of Christ after the resurrection 188 'The Word became flesh' possesses properties not generally associated with our humanity (such as the ability to pass through solid walls), it is a long way from these references in Scripture to the ubiquity doctrine, even in the refined form in which later Lutheranism held to it.13

The Positive Function of the Lord's Supper in Reformed Theology

Christian assurance

The conflict between Luther and Zwingli is instructive for seeing the historic connection between views of the incarnation and of Christ's presence in the Lord's Supper, but it is somewhat less helpful in constructing a positive Eucharistic doctrine for evangelicals today. This is because, whatever the virtues of Zwingli's Christology, his understanding of the Lord's Supper is highly reductionist, rooting its usefulness almost exclusively in its power to recall to mind the death of Christ and as a corporate pledge binding believers together like some communal oath.14 I suspect that this aspect of Zwinglianism is the default position of many evangelicals, not because evangelicals are at all noted for profound reflection upon the metaphysics of incarnation but for a more prosaic reason: it is so easy to understand relative to the alternatives (Lutheran or Reformed). Indeed, in many evangelical churches, the Lord's Supper becomes an opportunity simply to sit in silence and reflect upon Christ's death in the service, with the sacramental action itself being entirely accidental to what is going on. Some evidence that this is in fact the case is provided by John Stott's book to which I referred earlier. Talking of preaching as calling to mind the cross in the minds of those who hear, Stott parallels this with the function of the Lord's Supper:

This is also what the Lord's Supper or the Eucharist does. The technical word for it is anamnesis, or remembrance, as word and sacrament together dramatize verbally and visually the unique, epochmaking event of the cross.15

The problem with such a view is, of course, that it dramatically relativises the Lord's Supper and begs the obvious question: what do we get here that we cannot get better through better preaching The Incarnation and the Lord's Supper 189 - or, even, any preaching? Furthermore, this memorialism presents a much narrower understanding of the Eucharist than that contained within classic reformation documents. Take, for instance, the Anglican Article 28, which says the following:

The Supper of the Lord is not only a sign of the love that Christians ought to have among themselves one to another; but rather is a Sacrament of our Redemption by Christ's death: insomuch that to such as rightly, worthily, and with faith receive the same, the Bread which we break is a partaking of the Body of Christ; and likewise the Cup of Blessing is a partaking of the Blood of Christ.

Now, this article, which is good, solid Reformation theology, clearly goes beyond the kind of mere memorialism that lies at the heart of Zwinglian, and of later popular evangelical, approaches to the Eucharist. Whatever else the Eucharist is in Anglican theology, it involves more than just the mere remembrance of Christ's death upon the cross.

We need not, however, restrict ourselves simply to official Anglican documents on this issue. A glance at the Westminster Confession of Faith reveals a similar cultural divide between our evangelical forebears and our own church theology and practice. Chapter 19 of the Confession opens with the following paragraph:

Our Lord Jesus, in the night he was betrayed, instituted the Lord's Supper, to be observed in his church, unto the end of the world, for the perpetual remembrance of the sacrifice of himself in his death; the sealing all benefits thereof unto true believers, their spiritual nourishment and growth in him, their further engagement in, and to, all duties which they owe unto him; and to be a bond, and pledge of their communion with him, and with each other, as members of his mystical body.16

Though the emphases are perhaps a little different, once again the importance of the Lord's Supper as more than mere remembrance is brought out clearly. This sacrament seals the benefits of Christ's death to us (i.e. is one part of our assurance of salvation), nourishes 190 'The Word became flesh' us spiritually, and encourages us to, and strengthens us for, greater devotion to Christ. The implications of neglect of the Lord's Supper from a Westminster perspective are thus both obvious and devastating.

The language of the Westminster Confession at this point clearly indicates that the Westminster divines considered the Lord's Supper to have a significant role in the matter of Christian assurance. Indeed, this is a constant theme in the writings of the Reformed at the time of the Reformation, reflecting their interest in asserting the reality of Christian assurance over medieval Catholic denials of the doctrine. This concern regarding the Eucharist is central to Cranmer's masterful exposition of Eucharistic doctrine, his Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ.17 Cranmer's argument regarding this issue is summed up in the following quotation from this work:

[A]lthough, in the truth of his human nature, Christ be in heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father, yet whosoever eateth of that bread in the supper of the Lord, according to Christ's institution and ordinance, is assured of Christ's own promise and testament, that he is a member of his body and receiveth the benefits of his passion which he suffered for us upon the cross.18

This is classic Reformed theology: the emphasis upon the localised presence of Christ's body in heaven, the identification of the right hand of God as a place rather than a metaphor for divine power, and the language of promise and assurance all locate Cranmer on the Reformed wing of the Reformation. More important for us is the clear connection he makes between partaking of the Eucharist and assurance of faith. The Eucharist is not simply a memorial which allows the believer an opportunity in the service to remember Christ's death; it is also an important aspect of a healthy, assured Christian life, a belief Cranmer shared with, among others, John Calvin.19

We might say, therefore, that Reformed Eucharistic theology of the Cranmer variety was profoundly pastoral in its orientation towards Christian assurance. This particular point is made in a firm yet beautiful fashion in the liturgy of Cranmer's Prayer Book. The structure of the service is a masterpiece of pastoral relevance and The Incarnation and the Lord's Supper 191 simplicity. After prayer comes the reading of the law, by which all hearts should be convicted; then shortly thereafter we have the readings from Scripture, the Creed, the sermon, intercessions, exhortations to attend communion worthily, prayer of confession, words of comfort, the prayer of humble access, the consecration and partaking of the elements; and finally an extended opportunity for thanksgiving and prayer. The whole thrust of this service is towards underlining the sinfulness and unworthiness of the communicants and the overwhelming grace and mercy of God in providing his Son, Jesus Christ, for their salvation. The desired result is exactly what Cranmer argued for in his Defence: the assuring of weak consciences.

The question now arises, of course: how does it do this? The basic negative point we can make in this context is that it does not do it by way of being in any sense an offering or a sacrifice to God. The focus in the service is on what God has done for the communicant, not on what the priest is doing for God on behalf of the communicants. Several factors serve to undergird this. First, there is the obvious christological issue. Reformed Christology provides a basic axiom for understanding the nature of the Eucharist in that it stresses that Christ's humanity is now ascended to heaven, sits at the right hand of the Father, and will not return until the Second Coming.20 This means that Christ's humanity cannot be present in the Eucharistic action in a manner which would be required by anything approximating to the medieval Catholic notion of the sacrificial nature of the Mass.21 Thus, from a Reformed perspective, there is nothing on offer to God in the Eucharist. Second, the commitment of Cranmer to the doctrine of justification by grace through faith means that assurance is a reality for the believer only because of the action of God in Christ for humanity, not because the believer has done something for God.22

This is why it is somewhat unfortunate in the latest Anglican liturgy, Common Worship, that a certain ambiguity slips into the language of Holy Communion. In Eucharistic Prayer G, for example, we have the following words:

Father, we plead with confidence his sacrifice made once for all upon the cross; we remember his dying and rising in glory, and we rejoice that he intercedes for us at your right hand. Pour out your Holy Spirit as we bring before you these gifts of your creation; may they be for us the body and blood of your dear Son.23

The prayer starts well, by pointing participants unambiguously towards the sacrifice of Christ as the basis for salvation but then, and quite out of step with the theological flow of the prayer, we have this unfortunate statement about bringing before God these gifts of his creation, in this context clearly the elements of bread and wine. While these words can probably be given a harmless meaning from an evangelical perspective, they are nonetheless unfortunately ambiguous, particularly against the background of the historic debates about the significance of the Eucharist. While the traditional language of the Book of Common Prayer focused exclusively on what God had done for the communicants, here we suddenly have hints that the communicants may themselves be doing something for God. There is no exegetical basis for taking the Lord's Supper as any kind of offering to God with regards to the elements. If anything is being offered, it is Christ's body and blood to us by God, not to God by us; and if we offer anything at all, it is ourselves, our praises, our thanksgiving and our loving response to God's prior grace in Christ as shown forth in the action of the Lord's Supper. The ambiguous language is, therefore, unfortunate. One might also add at this point that to take something which is meant to work for assurance and to turn it into something we offer back to God is pastorally extremely cruel - as cruel as typical evangelical neglect of the sacrament - depriving congregations of the full joy and benefit of God's gift of Holy Communion by turning it into yet another work.

If the understanding of incarnation and of justification restrict the understanding of the Eucharist in a negative sense by telling us how it does not offer us assurance, we can now turn to the positive construction which the Reformed give to the Eucharist, and that focuses on the true (as opposed to real) presence of Christ. Hear what Cranmer has to say in his Defence:

[T]he bread and the wine be not so changed into the flesh and blood of Christ, that they be made one nature, but they remain still The Incarnation and the Lord's Supper 193 distinct in nature, so that the bread in itself is not his flesh, and the wine his blood, but unto them that worthily eat and drink the bread and wine, to them the bread and wine be his flesh and blood; that is to say, by things natural and which they be accustomed unto, they be exalted unto things above nature. For the sacramental bread and wine be not bare naked figures, but so pithy and effectuous, that whosoever worthily eateth them, eateth spiritually Christ's flesh and blood, and hath by them everlasting life.24

Cranmer's language here is quite dramatic, and reflects the systematic underpinnings of the Book of Common Prayer and the Anglican Articles, both of which talk about eating Christ's body and drinking his blood. This language has profound implications. If the worthy are really eating Christ in some sense, then Christ must be really present in some sense. Thus, while Cranmer rejects the real presence as understood in Catholic and Lutheran circles, his language yet carries him beyond a mere memorialism which roots the efficacy of the sacrament in its function as a mere prompt to the remembrance of Christ's death.25 The crucial qualification for Cranmer is provided by faith. Take, for example, the language used when the element of bread is distributed:

The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life. Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving.

This language reflects the theology of the Article 28, which declares that:

The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten in the Lord's Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is faith.

The key words in this context are faith, heavenly and spiritual. These are the things which qualify our understanding of what is taking place in the Eucharist. For those that believe, by faith Christ is truly present and partaken in a heavenly, spiritual manner. Here we get what we might term the subjective and objective dimensions of the 194 'The Word became flesh' Eucharist coming into relation with each other, tying in with the typical Reformation insistence that the sacrament is only a sacrament in the context of the word clearly declared; and only effective in the context of that same word grasped by faith.

The result of all this is that, for all the Reformation stress upon the importance of the recipient's subjective disposition, the sacrament is not reducible in Reformed theology to mere subjectivity. Faith for the Reformers is always faith in something; it always has a specific object and a content. The emphasis upon personal religious experience at the expense of objective theological and ecclesiological factors which one finds in later pietism and evangelicalism - and which may well be another factor feeding into the decline of the sacrament in evangelical life and practice - is absent from their writings. Faith is always faith in Christ; it grasps hold of that which is presented to it in Christ; it is not simply a leap in the dark or a contentless psychological state; and the sacraments are always actions of the whole church, performed in the context of the word preached, and therefore of real benefit to the church community.26 This is where the incarnation becomes not simply negatively significant in setting boundaries for our understanding of how Christ is not present in the sacrament but positively significant in determining how he is present.

Why Christ is present?

At this point, we need to be precise about exactly what sort of questions the Reformed asked about the Lord's Supper. The debate between Luther and Zwingli is focused very much upon the issue of how Christ is present. What is fundamentally wrongheaded about allowing the debate to get channelled in this direction is that the question of how Christ is present is really subordinate to the question of why Christ is present. It is quite clear in Luther, for example, that the necessity of maintaining the presence of Christ's humanity in the Eucharist is predicated upon his understanding of how God reveals himself as gracious to his people. That Zwingli's soteriology has no such need serves to explain both the Eucharistic differences between them and the ferocity of Luther's repudiation of the Zuricher's position. In other words, the metaphysics of presence are in actual fact somewhat subordinate to wider questions about the practical role of the sacraments in The Incarnation and the Lord's Supper 195 salvation and the life of the church. It is when the Reformed tradition moves beyond the impasse of the how question and focuses instead upon the why question that it makes its most significant contribution, and where the work of a man like Cranmer marks a significant improvement on the work of Zwingli.

The refusal to take any of these obvious options (Roman, Lutheran or Zwinglian) on the Lord's Supper is not distinctive to Cranmer but is part of mainstream, nonZwinglian Reformed thought, and finds its finest advocate in John Calvin. It is in Calvin's writings that we can find theological moves which serve to explicate the realist language of eating and drinking in terms of incarnational theology and, more importantly, trinitarian theology. Clues to this are provided in Calvin's 1561 tract against the Lutheran polemicist, Heshusius. Lutherans, of course, objected strongly to the Reformed rejection of the physical presence of Christ's humanity in, with and under the elements of bread and wine, seeing this as leading to a real absence of Christ from the Eucharist. Calvin rejected such an accusation, and in so doing made the following comment which clearly underlines both his rejection of transubstantiation and his repudiation of accusations of straightforward memorialism:

I say that although Christ is absent from the earth in respect of the flesh, yet in the Supper we truly feed on his body and blood - that owing to the secret agency of the Spirit we enjoy the presence of both. I say that distance of place is no obstacle to prevent the flesh, which was once crucified, from being given to us for food. Heshusius supposes, what is far from being the fact, that I imagine a presence of deity only.27

What is so important here is the reference Calvin makes to the role of the Holy Spirit in overcoming the problem which the Christology of the Reformed has created. To put it crudely, the spatial distance between the body of Christ in heaven and the elements of the Lord's Supper is overcome by the action of the Holy Spirit.

There are a number of issues raised by this argument which require further comment. First, we should note the direction of what we might call the spiritual movement. Christ is not brought 196 'The Word became flesh' down from heaven so much as we are raised up to heaven to feed upon him there.28 It is indeed mysterious as to how this happens, but Calvin's thought is clearly no mere memorialism, and comports well with Anglican language of heavenly and spiritual eating. In addition, we might also note the eschatological implications of such eating: the Lord's Supper is a reminder of Christ's death; but the physical absence of Christ's humanity from the elements also serves as a reminder that he is not here in the flesh now. As the mind is lifted by the Spirit to feed upon Christ in heaven, it is also made acutely aware that this is indeed an action of faith and not sight, and that the return of Christ has not yet happened, capturing well the eschatological implications of Paul's comments on the Lord's Supper in 1 Corinthians 11:26. Our doctrine of the incarnation which leads us to emphasise Christ's physical absence from the elements draws us elsewhere to find his flesh and reminds us that he will come again.

This approach to the action of the Spirit, of course, stands in sharp contrast to the typical notion of 'epiclesis' which has found a place in modern liturgical practice.29 There, the movement is not upward but downward, bringing Christ down through the Spirit to the elements. Recently, David Peterson has drawn attention to the epiclesis in Prayer E in Common Worship. The wording on which he comments, and his criticism, are as follows:

Send your Holy Spirit, that broken bread and wine outpoured may be for us the body and blood of your dear Son.

The idea that God should need to 'send' his Spirit upon those who already have the Spirit is unbiblical. Other verbs such as 'fill' or 'renew' make more sense with respect to the people of God.30

Peterson goes on to quote with approval the language of the Westminster Directory for Public Worship, which focuses on the work of the Spirit and the reception by faith of the body and blood of Christ without making the elements the object of the Spirit's action. The criticism of Common Worship at this point seems valid and, indeed, we might elaborate by saying that the kind of theology which the Westminster Directory represents is consistent with precisely the kind of orthodox Christology, soteriology and eschatology that provide The Incarnation and the Lord's Supper 197 the framework for sacramental theology but which are basically undermined by the kind of downward movement of Christ and the Spirit implied by the kind of epiclesis we find in Common Worship at this point.

Secondly, we should note how much of Calvin's language at this point, and of Reformed thought in general on the Lord's Supper, is incarnationally oriented. This is because underlying all of Calvin's theology of the Eucharist is his stress upon the spiritual union with the incarnate Christ which provides the basis for our enjoyment of the benefits which his incarnation and incarnate work have achieved. 31 Criticising the idea that one needs to physically eat Christ's physical body to enjoy such benefits, he says the following:

And there is no need for us to enjoy a participation in it, since the Lord bestows this benefit upon us through his Spirit so that we may be made one in body, spirit, and soul with him. The bond of this connection is therefore the Spirit of Christ, with whom we are joined in unity, and is like a channel through which all that Christ himself is and has is conveyed to us.32

Cranmer expressed a similar thought, but this time with language that speaks more explicitly about the church as a whole:

[A]s the bread and wine which we do eat, be turned into our flesh and blood, and be made our very flesh and very blood, and be so joined and mixed with our flesh and blood that they be made one whole body together, even so be all faithful Christian spiritually turned into the body of Christ, and be so joined unto Christ, and also together among themselves, that they do make but one mystical body of Christ.33

This, of course, brings us to the point where most evangelicals will now raise the crucial question: what do I obtain in the Eucharist that I do not obtain elsewhere? The question is a most powerful and pertinent one because it is faith in God's word which effects union with Christ and there are ultimately no degrees of union with Christ any more than there are degrees of justification. One cannot be a little bit united to Christ any more than one can be a 198 'The Word became flesh' little bit pregnant. One is either united to Christ or one is not. Then, if this is so, one already enjoys all the benefits that flow from this union and thus participation in the Eucharist cannot add to this any more than absence can detract from this. Indeed, this is the kind of argument, I suspect, that lies at the back of much evangelical neglect of the Eucharist: we are justified by faith, so why bother with the Lord's Supper? The typical response in many churches has amounted to a crude form of Zwinglianism: we do it simply to help remind ourselves of Christ's death, even though we may actually think that good preaching is in itself quite sufficient for such memorialist purposes. Given this reality, I wish to spend the rest of this paper mounting a defence of the importance of the Eucharist based upon what I have discussed so far.

Why is the Lord's Supper Necessary?

The first major reason for ascribing the Eucharist a place of importance in church life is, of course, that Christ commanded it. Thus, whether we understand the rationale behind Christ's thinking at this point or not, we have no right to consider the Eucharist as anything but important and central to the Christian life and all evangelical emphasis upon individual piety and downgrading of the doctrine of the church must be critiqued in the light of this fact.

Secondly, we need to make a careful distinction here between types of necessity. On one level, it is indeed true that all we need is faith in Christ for salvation; and on this level, we do not, strictly speaking, need to take the Eucharist in order to be saved. Yet this same kind of necessity applies to almost everything else which we routinely do as Christians. We do not need to pray or to read our Bibles, yet few of us would consider a Christian life where these activities are not part of our daily staple to be particularly good or helpful examples of healthy Christian living. Nor do we need to go to church on a Sunday, yet we do so because that is a basic part of a well-rounded, vibrant Christianity. What we have in the thought of Cranmer, Calvin and other Reformed theologians is a similar approach to the Eucharist. On one level, it is not necessary for salvation; but, we might add, just because something is not necessary for salvation does not mean that it is not necessary for a good, healthy Christian life. To return to my last point: the Lord's Supper The Incarnation and the Lord's Supper 199 is a command of Christ; therefore it is necessary; and, as Christ's command is understood by the Reformers, it is necessary not simply because of a divine whim but because it conduces to our spiritual health.

Why does it do so? The answer lies in the idea that the Lord's Supper serves to assure us of God's favour towards us. There is, of course, a tendency within popular evangelicalism to reduce the means of assurance to the word preached and this does indeed capture something of the Reformation emphasis whereby the word can be preached without the sacrament being administered, but the reverse can never be the case: the sacrament always needs the word for it to be a valid sacrament. Nevertheless, by subordinating sacrament to word in this sense, the Reformed tradition did not regard itself as having made the sacrament dispensable, as we noted above. Instead, when attached to the word of promise, the sacrament itself becomes yet another sign of God's bounteous grace in providing further means of assurance. The great Scottish Presbyterian, Robert Bruce, makes this point with power:

The Sacrament is appointed that we may get a better hold of Christ than we got in the simple Word, that we may possess Christ in our hearts and minds more fully and largely than we did before, by the simple Word. That Christ may have more room in which to reside in our narrow hearts than He could have by the hearing of the simple Word, and that we may possess Him more fully, is a better thing ... The Sacrament assures you of no other truth than that contained within the Word. Nevertheless, because it is a seal annexed to the Word it persuades you better of its truth, for the more the outward senses are awakened, the more is the inward heart and mind persuaded to believe.34

In other words, while the sacrament gives us nothing that the word itself does not give us, it gives us it in a better - or perhaps 'different' - way so that we might have our hearts and minds expanded, the better to appreciate what we have and who we are in Christ.

Now, I must confess to a lack of ease with Reformed language of heavenly and spiritual eating that Calvin does so much to inject into the tradition. It is not exactly clear to me what, if we take it 200 'The Word became flesh' in anything approaching a literal sense, such language imparts. It is better, I believe to take the intention of the Reformers at this point to heart while perhaps leaving behind - or at least exerting some caution towards - the actual language that they use which can, unless carefully handled, create more sound than light. Their intention is, after all, quite clear - to underline the fact that the Lord's Supper is part and parcel of healthy Christian living because it plays a crucial role in assurance, because it is the meal of the New Covenant. Christ himself makes the covenant connection quite explicit in his words of institution at Luke 22:20. And what is the essence of the New Covenant? It is, to summarise Jeremiah 31:31-4 that all shall know God directly, that all will have the law written on their hearts, that there will be no need of mere human priests as mediators.

There, at the very heart of the gospel message, is assurance, a point which the Reformation brought to the very forefront of Christian life and thought; and the Lord's Supper is tied emphatically to that assurance. This is what Reformers such as Cranmer and Calvin saw so clearly. Whether language about ascending to heaven and feeding spiritually upon Christ there is the best way to express this, I am not sure; it may well be something resident in the very physical actions of hearing the promise and eating and drinking the elements which is that which helps to assure us both of the concrete reality of Christ, of his work in the past, and his present absence - an absence which is assuring precisely because it points us to his future return. There is, perhaps, a danger in reifying the language of present eating as Calvin does to the point where the reference to Christ's death in the past and his return in the future is, if you will pardon the pun, swallowed up in too much satisfaction with the present. One might say that the Eucharist's task is to feed us in such a way as to leave us hungry for real food yet confident that one day we shall receive it.

How Christ is present?

When we move from the why to the how question, we are perhaps on more difficult ground. Obviously, the incarnational theology of Chalcedon (which I would argue is probably the closest to a coherent Christology that one can get in terms of its ability to make sense of the biblical account of Christ's person), imposes The Incarnation and the Lord's Supper 201 certain restrictions: we are not assured by a physical eating of Christ. Nor, I would suggest, is a radically Zwinglian approach acceptable: Zwinglians will always struggle to give any rationale for the Lord's Supper at all. Something approximating the Reformed position, which takes seriously Reformed concerns, would seem to be the way forward. Thus, is the sacrament necessary? Well, strictly speaking, no, in the way that prayer and reading the Bible are not strictly necessary. But is the sacrament something which we neglect to our own disadvantage? Yes, for in doing so we cut ourselves off from one of the two basic media by which God makes known to us the reality of our union with Christ. And, just to anticipate the objection that I have here quoted a Scottish Presbyterian, let me turn once again to Cranmer to demonstrate that the thoughts expressed so beautifully by Bruce stand in basic continuity with those of Cranmer, pointing us, incidentally, to the catholicity of the Reformed tradition. Writing in his Defence, Cranmer says the following:

[O]ur Saviour Christ hath not only set forth these things most plainly in his holy word, that we may hear them with our ears; but he hath also ordained one visible sacrament of spiritual regeneration in water, and another visible sacrament of spiritual nourishment in bread and wine, to the intent that, as much as is possible for man, we may see Christ with our eyes, smell him at our nose, taste him with our mouths, grope him with our hands, and perceive him with all our senses. For as the word of God preached putteth Christ into our ears; so likewise these elements of water, bread, and wine, joined to God's word, do after a sacramental manner put Christ into our eyes, mouths, hands, and all our senses.35

Here, Cranmer drives home his belief that the sacraments make Christ more real to us by appealing not simply to our disembodied intellects but to all our senses. Cranmer instinctively grasps that human beings are physical creatures and that the very physical nature of the sacraments thus reinforces faith by bringing Christ to us not simply via the auditing of words but by the smelling and tasting of the elements. In fact, we can probably broaden Cranmer's own approach here and say that the whole sacramental action, including the visual impact of the breaking of the bread, 202 'The Word became flesh' serves this purpose of reinforcing the word in the public worship of the church.

In a recent essay, Melvin Tinker has argued that Calvin's view of the Lord's Supper can be understood using the categories of speechact theory. Picking up on the Reformed tradition's analogy of the sacraments to seals, he argues that, for Calvin, the Lord's Supper does not add to the knowledge we have of Christ given in the gospel but, like the seal or signature at the bottom of a degree diploma, gives a certain force and public validity to the thing to which they are appended.36 This would seem to be consistent with the picture I have drawn above, and as applicable to Cranmer as to Calvin. Understood in this way, the elements back up the word, reinforcing its message. As we eat the bread and drink the wine, our minds are drawn by the Spirit through the transformation of the signifying power of the elements by the word of God to that heavenly feeding upon Christ's body which we do by faith and which is the instrument of our salvation. This is neither the magical hocus-pocus of an ex opere operato understanding of the real presence of Christ, nor is it merely a recollection of Christ's death. It is rather an action performed by the church community which has a much richer and more dynamic role to play in our Christian lives than either of the other two options. It serves to dramatise God's word before us and thereby to strengthen our confidence in its truth; and, as we grasp both word and sacrament by faith, we become more conscious of that heavenly feeding upon Christ which is our very lifeblood.

Conclusion

What, therefore, are the conclusions which can be drawn from these brief observations?

First, our understanding of the Eucharist is inevitably closely related to our understanding of the incarnation. Doing full justice to Christ's humanity would seem to require that we understand his body to be now in heaven and not here on earth, and certainly not in the Eucharistic elements. To place the human Christ there is to do violence to his human nature and to indulge in an over-realised eschatology that actually undermines the purpose of the Lord's Supper as something to be performed, in part, as a reminder that he has not yet returned in his humanity to claim that which is his own.

Secondly, we must not allow mere memorialism to remain the default position for evangelicalism. That it is easy to understand, that it seems to sit so comfortably with justification by faith, and that a word based religion seems to have little space for the Lord's Supper being anything other than a convenient slot in the service to cast our minds back to Calvary, are none of them adequate reasons for taking this option. The theological reflection of the church on this point indicates that mere memorialism is scarcely an adequate basis for maintaining the necessity of the sacrament which Christ's own command imposes upon us. We need to tap once more into the riches of our Eucharistic heritage, and reflect upon the significance of the Lord's Supper as a New Covenant meal, with all of the theological and existential significance that possesses.

The Lord's Supper is not incidental to our lives as Christians - it is something commanded by the Lord and something which has reference to the past, the present and the future. The Eucharistic action as a whole serves to bring home a whole variety of truths to the believer about Christ, about union with him, and about the corporate nature of Christianity. In a day where 'everyone does what is right in his own eyes', these are aspects of Christian life we can scarcely afford to ignore. We may not find the quasimystical language of Calvin and his colleagues to our taste; we may regard their theology as somewhat obscure at this point; but I believe we must acknowledge that, at the very least, the current tendency for mere memorialism in the Eucharist, which takes little account of the Eucharistic action itself, is somewhat inadequate, and a richer understanding of the signifying power of the Eucharist, which takes into account the whole of the Eucharistic action, its context as a New Covenant meal, and its symbolic references both to Christ's death and to our vital union with him, must be part of our sacramental testimony today.

Thirdly, we must ensure that whatever liturgy we use (be it of the formal or informal variety) emphasises that the Lord's Supper is gospel, not law: namely, it is about God doing something for us, not about us doing something for God. Any attempt to make it into an offering to God strikes at the heart of the whole notion of the incarnation as God giving himself for us, and enjoys no biblical support whatsoever, however much certain branches of the Christian tradition might wish to maintain the contrary.

Fourthly, and related to the above, we must emphasise in our sacramental services that the theological 'movement' is not God coming down to us, but us being raised up to God. Calling on the Holy Spirit is right and proper - he is the one through whom we are united to Christ - but we are the objects of his activity, and he raises us to heaven by faith; he does not bring Christ down to the elements.

Finally, let us take seriously once again the role of the sacraments in assurance. We live in an age where traditional Protestantism is often excoriated for being too word oriented and too focused on cerebral matters rather than upon taking seriously the existence of human beings as physical entities. There is a level at which there is nothing we can do in relation to this criticism: words expressing the Word are central to Protestantism and to remove the former leads to the removal of the latter. But there is also a sense in which this criticism should drive us back to our own theological heritage, to see that the Reformers themselves did have a place for drama and for the senses in Christian worship. They called this the Lord's Supper and they considered it to be an integral part of their pastoral practice. In a day when we are increasingly concerned about pastoral care, perhaps it is time to reflect upon the profound pastoral usefulness of the sacraments, especially the Lord's Supper, in our church lives. If the Reformers were right, and the Lord's Supper made the Incarnate Christ more real to those who partook of the Lord's Supper in faith, then for us to neglect the Lord's Supper or to isolate it from a deep incarnational theology and turn it into a mere memorial, is for us unwittingly to deprive our people of a vital element of healthy Chr
stian living. Correct sacramental practice, that is, sacramental practice in the context of a careful theology of incarnation and salvation which is preached and applied to the sacramental action, is crucial to such and may well bear more fruit in our church lives than we could ever imagine that simple obedience to Christ's command could bring forth.

  1. 1. The Clear Explanation of Sound Doctrine Concerning the True Partaking of the Flesh and Blood of Christ in the Holy Supper to dissipate the mists of Tileman Heshusius. Reprinted in John Calvin, Tracts 3 vols The Incarnation and the Lord's Supper 205 (ed. H. Beveridge; Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844-51), vol. 2, p. 502.
  2. 2. For an interesting account of the function of the Lord's Supper in Highland Presbyterianism with special reference to its connection to the rise of American revivalism, see L.E. Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
  3. 3. J. Stott, Evangelical Truth: a personal plea for unity (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1999).
  4. 4. See, for example, the agreement between the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Reformed Church in America, and the United Church of Christ, which finds much common ground between the churches yet still finds their diverse Eucharistic teachings, rooted in the language of the historic confessions, impossible to harmonise. See the statement at www.elca.org/ea/Relationships/formula.html.
  5. 5. See Luther's 1527 treatise, 'That These Words of Christ, "This Is My Body," etc Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics' in Luther's Works (55 vols; ed. J. Pelikan; St Louis: Concordia, 1955-86), 37, esp. pp. 85 ff. On Luther's theology in general, see B. Lohse, The Theology of Martin Luther (Edinburgh: Clark, 2001).
  6. 6. See Zwingli's 1527 treatise,'Friendly Exegesis,' in Huldrych Zwingli, Writings, vol. 2 (trans.H.W. Pipkin;Allison Park: Pickwick, 1984).On Zwingli's theology in general, see W.P. Stephens, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986).
  7. 7. See the comments in Lohse, Theology of Martin Luther, p. 174.
  8. 8. On the different ways in which language of presence can be used, see Luther's Works 37, pp. 214-17; on the communication of properties, see Luther's Works 37, p. 210; and on the elaboration of this idea in later Lutheranism, see J.T. Mueller, Christian Dogmatics (St Louis: Concordia, 1934), pp. 268-86;W. Elert, The Structure of Lutheranism, ET W.A. Hansen (St Louis: Concordia, 1962), pp. 231 ff.
  9. 9. This is clearly the burden of much of his sacramental writing: see, for example, Luther's Works 37, pp. 94 ff. Elert addresses this point explicitly in his work on Luther, and his comments are well worth consulting: see The Structure of Lutheranism, pp. 314-15.
  10. 10. See Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, ch. 17; Gregory of Nyssa, The Great Catechism, ch. 10; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 3a.5.2; for the Reformed understanding, see H. Heppe, Die Dogmatiek der Evangelisch-Reformierten Kirche (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1958), p.354; also E.D.Willis, Calvin's Catholic Christology (Leden: Brill, 1966).
  11. 11. Zwingli, Writings, vol. 2, p. 320. On the communication of properties in classic Reformed theology, see L. Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1958), pp. 323-4.
  12. 12. Zwingli, Writings, vol. 2, pp. 337ff.
  13. 13. On this modification of Luther's position, see Elert, The Structure of Lutheranism, pp. 231-2.
  14. 14. Zwingli is particularly attracted to the semantic range of the Latin word 'sacramentum' which he takes to mean 'pledge' or 'oath': see his Commentary on True and False Religion, (ed.) S.M. Jackson (Durham: Labyrinth, 1981), pp. 179-84; on his Eucharistic theology in general, see Stephens, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli, pp. 218-59.
  15. 15. Stott, Evangelical Truth, p. 98.
  16. 16. Various editions of The Westminster Confession exist. The best is probably The Westminster Confession of Faith (Glasgow: Free Presbyterian, 1994), a volume that also contains, among various relevant ecclesiastical materials, the other official statements produced by the Westminster Assembly
  17. 17. This is reprinted in The Work of Thomas Cranmer (ed. G.E. Duffield; Appleford: Sutton Courtenay, 1964), pp. 45-231.
  18. 18. Cranmer, Defence, p. 63.
  19. 19. See, for example, Calvin's comments in Institutes 4.17.1.
  20. 20. 'And with the selfsame body he forsook the world, and ascended into heaven, (the apostles seeing and beholding his body when it ascended,) and now sitteth at the right hand of his Father, and there shall remain until the last day, when he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.' Cranmer, Defence, p. 123; cf. Calvin, Institutes 4.17.12.
  21. 21. For the official Catholic definition, which links the sacrifice of the Mass to the real presence, see H. Denziger, Enchiridion Symbolorum (Friburg: Herder, 1937), 424.
  22. 22. Thus, one of the prayers after Communion thanks God that in the Supper he assures those who rightly receive, 'of thy favour and goodness towards us; and that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs through hope of thy everlasting kingdom, by the merits of the most precious death and passion of thy dear Son.'
  23. 23. The text is available via www.cofe.anglican.org/common worship/resources/downloads.
  24. 24. Cranmer, Defence, p. 190.
  25. 25. Memorialism is there, of course, as the words of the officiating minister make clear, but this memorialism is carefully juxtaposed to language about eating and drinking. The same theology is reflected in the words of the Book of Common Prayer: '[G]rant us ... (gracious Lord) so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.' The language of eating and drinking, and the emphasis on flesh and blood point both to the importance of the Lord's Supper as an action, and its intimate connection to the incarnation.
  26. 26. On the necessity of the Word accompanying the sacrament, see Martin Luther, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church; Calvin, Institutes 4.17.39.
  27. 27. Calvin, Tracts, vol. 2, p. 502.
  28. 28. Institutes 4.17.12 and 4.17.31.
  29. 29. The Greek word epiklesis is used with reference to the invocation or 'calling (of the Spirit) upon' the elements of bread and wine or upon the participants in the Lord's Supper by the presiding minister.
  30. 30. D. Peterson,'Holy Communion in Common Worship', p. 6. Paper available at www.geocities.com/the_theologian/content/pastoralia/ cw_communion.html.
  31. 31. In the Institutes, Calvin prefaces his discussion of the Eucharistic presence with a section on the incarnation, linked closely to Christ's teaching in John 6: see Institutes 4.17.8-9.
  32. 32. Institutes 4.17.12.
  33. 33. Cranmer, Defence, p. 72.
  34. 34. R. Bruce, The Mystery of the Lord's Supper (ed. T.F. Torrance; Richmond: John Knox, 1957), p. 64.
  35. 35. Cranmer, Defence, p. 70.
  36. 36. M. Tinker, Evangelical Concerns (Fearn: Christian Focus, 2001), pp. 133-4.