Theopedia

Communion

“And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’”

— Luke 22:19 (ESV)

Definition

Communion, also called the Lord’s Supper, is one of the two ordinances Christ instituted for his church, the other being baptism. Jesus gave it to his disciples the night before his death, commanding them to eat bread and drink wine “in remembrance” of him (1 Cor. 11:24-25) until he comes again. Reformed Baptists, together with the wider Reformed tradition, hold that believers who partake in faith are truly, though spiritually rather than bodily, fed on Christ crucified by the Holy Spirit’s own working, not on the literal substance of his body and blood.

Confessional Witness

The Reformed confessional family states this doctrine with one voice. The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession’s chapter on the Lord’s Supper follows the Westminster Confession (1646) and the Savoy Declaration (1658) closely, sharing the same central formula on Christ’s presence in the ordinance.12 It opens by naming what the ordinance does for those who receive it:

“The supper of the Lord Jesus was instituted by him the same night wherein he was betrayed, to be observed in his churches, unto the end of the world, for the perpetual remembrance, and shewing forth the sacrifice of himself in his death, confirmation of the faith of believers in all the benefits thereof, their spiritual nourishment, and growth in him, their further engagement in, and to all duties which they owe to him; and to be a bond and pledge of their communion with him, and with each other.”3

Against the Roman Catholic sacrifice of the mass, the confession insists the Supper is a memorial, not a repeated offering:

“In this ordinance Christ is not offered up to his Father, nor any real sacrifice made at all for remission of sin of the quick or dead, but only a memorial of that one offering up of himself by himself upon the cross, once for all.”4

Against transubstantiation, it states that the bread and wine “still remain truly and only bread and wine, as they were before,” even though they are “sometimes called by the names of the things they represent.”5 It then gives the chapter’s central claim, its own account of how Christ is present in the ordinance:

“Worthy receivers, outwardly partaking of the visible elements in this ordinance, do then also inwardly by faith, really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually receive, and feed upon Christ crucified… the body and blood of Christ being then not corporally or carnally, but spiritually present to the faith of believers in that ordinance, as the elements themselves are to their outward senses.”6

Finally, the confession restricts the table: “ignorant and ungodly persons… are unworthy of the Lord’s table,” and one who “receive[s] unworthily” eats and drinks “judgment to himself.”7 Who qualifies as a worthy receiver is taken up below.

Biblical Basis

The institution itself is recorded four times in the New Testament (Matt. 26:26-29; Mark 14:22-25; Luke 22:14-23; 1 Cor. 11:23-26), the last of these being Paul’s own received tradition and the earliest written account. Calvin ties the whole ordinance to Christ’s promise in John 6:51 to be “living bread”: God “has given another sacrament to his Church by the hand of his only-begotten Son… a spiritual feast, at which Christ testifies that he himself is living bread, on which our souls feed, for a true and blessed immortality,” fulfilling the institution’s own words, “Take, eat; this is my body, which is broken for you.”8 Paul supplies the ordinance’s other load-bearing text, calling the cup and the bread a κοινωνία, a “participation,” in Christ’s blood and body, and grounding the church’s unity in the single loaf: “we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor. 10:16-17).

Scripture also restricts the table to those who can examine themselves and discern what they are doing (1 Cor. 11:28-29), which is why Reformed Baptist practice, denying that infants hold any prior church membership to presume upon, admits only those who make a credible profession of faith, the same standard applied to baptism itself.9 A believer who doubts his own standing is not thereby excluded: if he “unfeignedly desires to be found in Christ, and to depart from iniquity, he ought to labor to have his doubts resolved, and, so doing, to come to the Lord’s Supper, that he may be further strengthened,” rather than staying away.10

Historical Development

By the second century the Supper was already a fixed part of the church’s worship, and the New Testament’s own μυστήριον (“mystery”) had begun sliding, in Latin translation, toward the broader word sacramentum, a drift Augustine’s own usage only widened.11 The early church knew the ordinance by several names besides “the Lord’s Supper” itself: “Eucharist,” from εὐχαριστία, “to give thanks,” naming it as “the cup of thanksgiving, whereby we celebrate the grace of God”; σύναξις, “a coming together”; and ἀγάπη, from the shared meals at which it was received.12

Across the medieval period a theology of a real, physical change in the elements gradually hardened into dogma. Paschasius Radbert, a ninth- century abbot, first spelled out what would become transubstantiation in explicit form (A.D. 831); Hildebert of Tours coined the term itself around 1134; and the Fourth Lateran Council made it an article of faith in 1215, at the urging of Innocent III.13

The Reformation broke that consensus without immediately replacing it with one of its own. Luther rejected transubstantiation but held that Christ’s body and blood were nonetheless truly present “in, with, and under” the elements; Zwingli held the bread and wine to be memorials only, Christ’s body remaining in heaven. The two positions proved irreconcilable at the Marburg Colloquy of October 1529.14 Calvin, writing after both men, staked out a middle position: with Zwingli, that “this is my body” means “this bread represents my body”; against Zwingli, that believers are truly fed by the Spirit on Christ’s own crucified body and blood, not merely reminded of them.14 To unite the Zurich and Geneva wings of the Reformed movement on this point, Calvin drafted the Consensus Tigurinus in 1549, and the doctrine it set out passed into the Second Helvetic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and eventually the Westminster Confession, whose language the 1689 Baptist confession itself inherited.14

Opposing Views

Roman Catholicism teaches that when a priest pronounces the words of consecration, the entire substance of the bread and wine is changed into the body and blood of Christ, with only the outward “species” (appearance, taste, texture) of bread and wine remaining.13 Because the whole Christ is held to be present in every fragment of either element (concomitantia), the cup has historically been withheld from the laity, who receive only the bread.15 Rome further distinguishes the Eucharist as sacrifice from the Eucharist as sacrament, teaching that the mass re-presents Christ’s own sacrifice as an offering propitiatorium, atoning for the sins of the living and the dead.16 See transubstantiation for the doctrine’s own fuller statement and the Reformed case against it.

Lutheranism rejects transubstantiation but teaches that “the entire person, body and blood of Christ are really and corporeally present in, with, and under the sensible elements,” received by the mouth by believer and unbeliever alike, though only the believer receives them to blessing rather than condemnation.17 This position is often loosely labeled “consubstantiation,” though it is a philosophical rather than a properly Lutheran theological term; see consubstantiation for that distinction.

Zwinglianism, the view named for Huldrych Zwingli and continued by the Socinians and Remonstrants, holds the bread and wine to be “mere signs,” denying that Christ is present in any special sense in the ordinance and treating it as “bare acts of commemoration and badges of profession” rather than a means of grace.18 The Reformed confessions reject this alongside Rome’s and Luther’s views, holding the Supper to be “an efficacious means of grace” whose efficacy belongs “neither to any virtue in it, nor in him that administers it, but solely to the attending operation of the Holy Ghost.”19

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t “This is my body” require a literal, corporeal reading? Scripture regularly uses this kind of figurative predication without implying a literal identity: Joseph tells Pharaoh “the seven good cows are seven years” (Gen. 41:26-27), Daniel is told “the ten horns are ten kings” (Dan. 7:24), and John is told “the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches” (Rev. 1:20).20 Read this way, “this is my body” means what the elements themselves are, a representation and seal of Christ’s body, not the substance of that body.

Doesn’t a merely “spiritual” presence collapse the Reformed position into Zwingli’s bare memorialism? The Reformed confessions answer this by explicitly refusing Zwingli’s own account alongside Rome’s and Luther’s: the Supper is not a physical channel of grace (against Rome), not a literal reception of Christ’s flesh (against Luther), but also not an empty badge with no objective efficacy (against Zwingli). Its power lies “solely” in the Spirit’s own accompanying work, not in any property of the elements, which is a stronger claim than Zwingli’s own memorialism makes, even though it agrees with Zwingli that Christ’s body remains in heaven.19

If the “mode” of Christ’s presence can’t be explained, hasn’t the doctrine simply been left unexplained rather than answered? Calvin does not treat this as evasion but as the honest limit of a genuine mystery: “should any one ask me as to the mode, I will not be ashamed to confess that it is too high a mystery either for my mind to comprehend or my words to express; and to speak more plainly, I rather feel than understand it. The truth of God, therefore, in which I can safely rest, I here embrace without controversy.”21 The confessional statement rules out Rome’s and Luther’s accounts of how Christ is present without itself claiming to resolve everything about how the Spirit unites a believer, on earth, to Christ’s own body in heaven.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 29, “Of the Lord’s Supper.” ↩

  2. The Savoy Declaration (1658), chap. 30, “Of the Lord’s Supper.” ↩

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 30, “Of the Lord’s Supper,” para. 1. ↩

  4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 30, para. 2. ↩

  5. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 30, para. 5. ↩

  6. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 30, para. 7. ↩

  7. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 30, para. 8. ↩

  8. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 17, sec. 1, 557-558. ↩

  9. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 43, “The Lord’s Supper,” Q. 23. ↩

  10. Westminster Larger Catechism (1647), Q. 172, as quoted in Hodge, chap. 43, Q. 22. ↩

  11. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩

  12. Hodge, chap. 43, Q. 3-4. ↩

  13. Hodge, chap. 43, Q. 12. ↩ ↩2

  14. Hodge, chap. 43, Q. 16. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  15. Hodge, chap. 43, Q. 13. ↩

  16. Hodge, chap. 43, Q. 17. ↩

  17. Hodge, chap. 43, Q. 15. ↩

  18. Hodge, chap. 43, Q. 20. ↩

  19. Hodge, chap. 43, Q. 21. ↩ ↩2

  20. Hodge, chap. 43, Q. 14. ↩

  21. Calvin, book 4, chap. 17, sec. 32, 587. ↩