I. Intro. Last week we spoke about Access to the Eucharist, how we have a radically 
open sacrament because of the radically open nature of Baptism, which is the only gate we 
have to the Eucharist.  We also spoke about the Effects of the Eucharist in our lives, how 
we receive from God in the Eucharist the power to live a holy life.  We also spoke about 
the connection of the Eucharist to the Resurrection.  Today we’re talking about the nature 
of the change: How are Christ’s body true food, and his blood true drink?

II. Early Church and Eucharistic Presence
How the Early Church understood this: In the Apostolic age and the early Patristic era, 
Christians took this passage literally and the presence of Christ in the Consecrated 
Elements very seriously, as a defense against Platonic gnostics.  The Gnostics were groups 
of worshippers that wanted to mix Christianity with other religious ideas, some from the 
pagan religions of Rome and Greece, some from the mystery cults that were prevalent in the 
Empire at that time, and some from Greek philosophy.  Although it’s difficult to lump all 
the Gnostics together in a single category of doctrine, we can say that in general, they 
believed that the flesh and the body and all things physical were evil, the creations of 
an evil God; while the spirit and all things spiritual were good and creations of the good 
God whom Christ represented.  Early Christians resisted this dualism, and they pointed to 
Christ’s presence in the elements of the Eucharist as a primary argument: if Christ did 
not hesitate to inhabit the physical substances of bread and wine, then surely physical 
substance itself is good, on some level.  Surely the God of creation is the same God who 
loved the world and sent Jesus to redeem not only our souls but also the physical world.  


III.  Development unto Transubstantiation
	A. As the Church grew and developed, there were several Eucharistic controversies.  Once 
Gnosticism died out, there were new questions to ask about the Eucharist and the 
miraculous change that took place in the elements.  And there were new answers to give, 
and a new vocabulary to use for talking about the Eucharist.  They articulated the 
doctrine of Real Presence, which says that Christ is present in the elements, but not how 
or to what extent.

	B. In the 13th century, a new challenge arose.  The Western world discovered Aristotle, 
and his philosophy caused some to question whether Christ was present in the elements of 
the Eucharist.  Thomas Aquinas gave the definitive answer to these questions in the 
doctrine of Transubstantiation.  It’s important to note that Transubstantiation is NOT 
about physical substance, but about essence, idea, category.  ‘What IS this thing?’, not 
‘What is it made of?’  Given the observable physical fact that the elements remain 
mundane, where do we locate the change from bread and wine to Body and Blood?  The words, 
“This is my body” are to be taken as literally as possible, given the lack of physical 
change.  The bread and wine are ‘annihilated’ – as ideas (NOT as physical substance) they 
no longer exist on the altar; what is there is the Body and Blood of Christ.  

	C. This had implications for worship: practices of Eucharistic reverence such as 
adoration and benediction were created to express the reverence of God’s people for His 
presence in the Eucharist.  The ‘Is’ from ‘This is my body’ was understood to refer to a 
change in existence that is objectively true whether people believe in it or not.  This 
objective change means that the Consecrated Elements must be treated with utmost reverence 
and kept from the hands of the wicked.  This fit well into medieval Roman Catholicism, 
which was a religion of holy things.  Holy water that drove away evil spirits, sacred 
candles that kept your prayers before God even when you finished praying; holy altars upon 
which the miraculous change took place, and which were often set with relics – the holy 
bones of saints or holy pieces of the true cross.  

IV. Reformation Views
	A. Luther’s Consubstantiation: In the 16th century, Martin Luther reacted against some of 
these rituals of reverence and the theology of Transubstantiation that underlay them.  He 
asserted that there is no change in the Eucharist, but rather an addition.  The elements 
become invisibly clothed with the Body and Blood.  “In, with, and under” is Luther’s 
phrase, but not an objective change of essence  Bread remains bread and wine remains wine, 
but each with the additional presence of Christ ‘piggy-backing’ on them.  Why?  A change 
would be objective and efficacious with or without the faith of the receiver.  Luther 
wanted to root the whole thing more firmly in the faith of the receiver.  In his theology, 
the eyes of faith behold the Body and Blood, and receive them; the eyes without faith see 
and receive only bread and wine.  This was useful for him to combat medieval superstition 
that had grown up around Eucharistic reverence (i.e. stealing, use in witchcraft, etc.).
	B. Calvin’s Receptionism: Calvin wanted to combat many of the same abuses in the church 
which Luther worried about, but he goes one step farther: instead of Christ being present 
‘in, with, and under’ the elements, for Calvin He is not present in the elements at all.  
The words, “This is my body” were meant figuratively, meaning “This signifies my body.”  
All the statements of the Early and Patristic church that speak of a miraculous change are 
similarly to be understood figuratively.  The Sacraments are God’s concession to our 
weakness: we can’t simply believe His promises, so he gives the weak-minded among us the 
sacraments, like the rainbow in the story of Noah, to remind us of what He has promised 
and that He is faithful.  The Eucharist, then, primarily exists to help us understand the 
sermon.  Calvin writes, “[the sacraments] avail no farther than accompanied by the Holy 
Spirit to open our minds and hearts, and to make us capable of receiving this testimony 
[of God’s promises].” (Institutes, book IV, chapter 14, para. 7; Beveridge translation 
vol. 2, p. 503).  There is no objective virtue in the elements, such that they may be 
paraded around or worshiped or mis-used in witchcraft.  The presence of Christ is in the 
moment of eating and drinking, when the Spirit opens our hearts to understand Christ’s 
message.  Calvin is moving away from the idea of holy things – holy bread, wine, water, 
vessels, altars, etc. – and toward a religion where holiness exists only in God and in 
people, and where a rational understanding of the Word of God is paramount.  It came to be 
normal among Calvin’s followers for sermons to last for two hours or more, and for the 
people to come back to hear another one that evening.  The Word is the thing: experience 
and action, not so much.
	C. Zwingli’s Memorialism: The last major reformer we need to look at is Ulrich Zwingli, a 
contemporary of Luther who lived and ministered in Switzerland.  His idea, similar to what 
Calvin would say later, was that Christ is not present in any special way in the elements. 
 There is no change; bread remains bread, wine remains wine.  We eat and drink them not 
because there’s any special miracle or sacrifice going on, nor because of any special 
presence of Christ.  We do the Eucharist simply as a memorial of Jesus and His redemptive 
work; as a way to remember what was accomplished once and for all.  Christ is present only 
in our worship generally, through the sharing of prayer and praise and the hearing of the 
Word.  The words, “This is my body” are understood, like Calvin, symbolically: Jesus was 
saying, “This symbolizes my body; this symbolizes my blood.”  The benefit of receiving the 
Eucharist is in taking a moment to focus on Jesus and what He did.  

So we’ve looked at the Early church and their understanding of the presence of Christ in 
the Eucharist; we’ve looked at the idea of Transubstantiation, where the essence, not the 
material, is changed; we’ve looked at three views of the Reformers: Luther’s 
consubstantiation, where the bread and wine carry the presence of Christ but themselves 
are not changed; Calvin’s Receptionism where the Sacraments serve primarily to confirm to 
us God’s promises; and Zwingli’s Memorialism, where there is nothing at all special about 
the elements, but Christ is present in our worship as we remember what He did.  Almost 
every other Christian teaching about the Eucharist consists of some form of these basic 
ideas, with a few adaptations.  

Here at St. Peter’s, there are parishioners who hold almost all of these different 
theologies about the Eucharist.  We don’t force you to hold one belief or another, and you 
are welcome to explore these things further either on your own or with others.  As a 
church, though, we do practice the Episcopal Church’s official teaching on the Eucharist, 
which is the Early Church Real Presence view: Christ is present in the elements themselves 
(though we do not pretend to say how), and we treat them with reverence because of that.  
You can ask your local Altar Guild member if you’d like to know exactly how we treat the 
Sacrament with reverence.  But for those of you who are of more reformist sympathies, we 
do not parade the Sacrament around or display it for worship.  If you’ll pay attention 
during our Eucharistic prayer, you’ll notice that there is some language here of 
Transubstantiation, some of Receptionism, and some of Memorialism: this represents the 
fact that all parts of the theological spectrum were present in the church when Cranmer 
wrote this prayer, and that people with all these views have a place at the Anglican 
table.  

There is much more we could say about the Eucharist.  But in two sermons, we’ve covered a 
lot, and I hope that they have been beneficial for you.  I would like to close with this 
excerpt from a book entitled The Shape of the Liturgy by Dom Gregory Dix, written in 
England during World War II:

“Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every 
continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every 
conceivable human circumstance, for every human need from infancy and before it to extreme 
old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives 
in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for 
kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or 
for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or 
for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a 
sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus 
setting out to discover America; for a famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead 
lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman 
much tempted to return to fetish because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the 
gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son 
for a barren women; for Captain so-and-so, wounded and prisoner of war; while lions roared 
in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the 
thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old 
monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn 
timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonization of Saint 
Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not 
tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a 
hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of 
Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancti Dei—the holy common 
people of God.”