I appreciate the comments you've offered on this past Sunday’s message from I Corinthians 11, Worshipping at the Table. In the message I briefly discussed the different views on the presence of Christ during the Lord’s Supper. The three I mentioned were the Roman Catholic position (Transubstantiation); the Lutheran position (Consubstantiation), and the majority Protestant view (the Symbolic and Spiritual Presence of Christ). I didn’t have time in the message to go into much detail on these.
So instead I will post the best brief summary of these positions I’ve found, which is by Wayne Grudem, in his Systematic Theology, An Introduction to Bible Doctrine.
Today we see his discussion of the Roman Catholic View. (Found on pp. 991-993)
The Roman Catholic View: Transubstantiation. According to the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ. This happens at the moment the priest says, “This is my body” during the celebration of the mass. At the same time as the priest says this, the bread is raised up (elevated) and adored. This action of elevating the bread and pronouncing it to be Christ’s body can only be performed by a priest.
When this happens, according to Roman Catholic teaching, grace is imparted to those present ex opere operato that is, “by the work performed,” but the amount of grace dispensed is in proportion to the subjective disposition of the recipient of grace.2 Moreover, every time the mass is celebrated, the sacrifice of Christ is repeated (in some sense), and the Catholic church is careful to affirm that this is a real sacrifice, even though it is not the same as the sacrifice that Christ paid on the cross.
So Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma teaches as follows:
Christ becomes present in the Sacrament of the Altar by the transformation of the whole substance of the bread into His Body and of the whole substance of the wine into His Blood … This transformation is called Transubstantiation. (p. 379)
The power of consecration resides in a validly consecrated priest only. (p. 397)
The Worship of Adoration (Latria) must be given to Christ present in the Eucharist … It follows from the wholeness and permanence of the Real Presence that the absolute worship of adoration (Cultus Latriae) is due to Christ present in the Eucharist. (p. 387)
In Catholic teaching, because the elements of bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ, the church for many centuries did not allow the lay people to drink from the cup of the Lord’s Supper (for fear that the blood of Christ would be spilled) but only to eat the bread. Ott’s textbook tells us,
Communion under two forms is not necessary for any individual member of the Faithful, either by reason of Divine precept or as a means of salvation … The reason is that Christ is whole and entire under each species … The abolition of the reception from the chalice in the Middle Ages (12th and 13th centuries) was enjoined for practical reasons, particularly danger of profanation of the Sacrament. (p. 397)
With respect to the actual sacrifice of Christ in the mass, Ott’s textbook says,
The Holy Mass is a true and proper Sacrifice. (p. 402)
In the Sacrifice of the Mass and in the Sacrifice of the Cross the Sacrificial Gift and the Primary Sacrificing Priest are identical; only the nature and mode of the offering are different … The Sacrificial Gift is the Body and Blood of Christ … The Primary Sacrificing Priest is Jesus Christ, who utilizes the human priest as His servant and representative and fulfills the consecration through him. According to the Thomistic view, in every Mass Christ also performs an actual immediate sacrificial activity which, however, must not be conceived as a totality of many successive acts but as one single uninterrupted sacrificial act of the Transfigured Christ.
The purpose of the Sacrifice is the same in the Sacrifice of the Mass as in the Sacrifice of the Cross; primarily the glorification of God, secondarily atonement, thanksgiving and appeal. (p. 408)
As a propitiatory sacrifice … the Sacrifice of the Mass effects the remission of sins and the punishment for sins; as a sacrifice of appeal … it brings about the conferring of supernatural and natural gifts. The Eucharistic Sacrifice of propitiation can, as the Council of Trent expressly asserted, be offered, not merely for the living, but also for the poor souls in Purgatory. (pp. 412–13)
In response to the Roman Catholic teaching on the Lord’s Supper, it must be said that it first fails to recognize the symbolic character of Jesus’ statements when he declared, “This is my body,” or, “This is my blood.” Jesus spoke in symbolic ways many times when speaking of himself. He said, for example, “I am the true vine” (John 15:1), or “I am the door; if any one enters by me, he will be saved” (John 10:9), or “I am the bread which came down from heaven” (John 6:41). In a similar way, when Jesus says, “This is my body,” he means it in a symbolic way, not in an actual, literal, physical way. In fact, as he was sitting with his disciples holding the bread, the bread was in his hand but it was distinct from his body, and that was, of course, evident to the disciples. None of the disciples present would have thought that the loaf of bread that Jesus held in his hand was actually his physical body, for they could see his body before their eyes. They would have naturally understood Jesus’ statement in a symbolic way. Similarly, when Jesus said, “This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20), he certainly did not mean that the cup was actually the new covenant, but that the cup represented the new covenant.
Moreover, the Roman Catholic view fails to recognize the clear New Testament teaching on the finality and completeness of Christ’s sacrifice once for all time for our sins: the book of Hebrews emphasizes this many times, as when it says, “Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly as the high priest enters the Holy Place yearly with blood not his own; for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself … Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many” (Heb. 9:25–28). To say that Christ’s sacrifice continues or is repeated in the mass has been, since the Reformation, one of the most objectionable Roman Catholic doctrines from the standpoint of Protestants. When we realize that Christ’s sacrifice for our sins is finished and completed (“It is finished,” John 19:30; cf. Heb. 1:3), it gives great assurance to us that our sins are all paid for, and there remains no sacrifice yet to be paid. But the idea of a continuation of Christ’s sacrifice destroys our assurance that the payment has been made by Christ and accepted by God the Father, and that there is “no condemnation” (Rom. 8:1) now remaining for us.
For Protestants the idea that the mass is in any sense a repetition of the death of Christ seems to mark a return to the repeated sacrifices of the old covenant, which were “a reminder of sin year after year” (Heb. 10:3). Instead of the assurance of complete forgiveness of sins through the once for all sacrifice of Christ (Heb. 10:12), the idea that the mass is a repeated sacrifice gives a constant reminder of sins and remaining guilt to be atoned for week after week.
With regard to the teaching that only priests can officiate at the Lord’s Supper, the New Testament gives no instructions at all that place restrictions on the people who can preside at Communion. And since Scripture places no such restrictions on us, it would not seem to be justified to say that only priests can dispense the elements of the Lord’s Supper. Moreover, since the New Testament teaches that all believers are priests and members of a “royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9; cf. Heb. 4:16; 10:19–22), we should not specify a certain class of people who have the rights of priests, as in the old covenant, but we should emphasize that all believers share the great spiritual privilege of coming near to God.
Finally, any continuation of the restriction that will not allow laypersons to drink of the cup of the Lord’s Supper would be arguing from caution and tradition to justify disobedience to Jesus’ direct commands, not only the command to his disciples where he said, “Drink of it, all of you” (Matt. 26:27), but also the direction Paul recorded, in which Jesus said, “Do this, as often as you drink it in remembrance of me” (1 Cor. 11:25).
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