What is consubstantiation?

How fearfully the words of our blessed Lord have been misused, what blasphemous doctrines have been built upon the simple language of the Lord and how this blessed memorial has become the occasion for strife, violence and even bloodshed, we do not care to follow in our exposition. It would take hundreds of pages to record all that. The Roman dogma of the transubstantiation is a downright blasphemy. Hundreds of saints have been tortured and killed for stating thus the lie of transubstantiation, and, if Rome could, she would do the same in the present day. This transubstantiation claims that the bread and wine are changed into the real body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. And then there is the consubstantiation, the doctrine that the body and blood of Christ coexists in and with the bread and wine, although they retain their nature as bread and wine. This is more or less the teaching of the Lutheran church.

As a reformer, Luther gave up the term transubstantiation and adopted, if possible, the still more inexplicable term of consubstantiation. He renounced the papal idea that the bread and wine after consecration remained no longer, but were changed into the material body and blood of Christ. His strange notion was, that the bread and the wine remained just what they were before — real bread and real wine — but that there was also together with the bread and wine, the material substance of Christ's human body. No invention of man, we may freely affirm, ever equalled this popish doctrine in absurdity, inconsistency and irreconcilable contradictions. "The hands of the priest," said the Pontiff Urban, in a great Roman Council, "are raised to an eminence granted to none of the angels, of creating God, the Creator of all things, and of offering Him up for the salvation of the whole world. This prerogative, as it elevates the pope above angels, renders pontifical submission to kings an execration." To all this the sacred synod, with the utmost unanimity, responded, Amen. Surely this is the last test of human credulity, and the consummation of human blasphemy.*

About the period at which we have now arrived, one of the most grievous sources of discouragement to the Reformers, both in Germany and Switzerland, was the dispute which arose about the sacrament of the supper, commonly called the sacramentarian controversy. Luther, it will be remembered, whom God used to raze to the ground almost every part of the Romish system, retained to the end of his days a superstitious reverence for a certain materialism in the supper which he called consubstantiation; that is, "he believed in the presence of the flesh and blood of Christ with, in, or under, the bread and wine." He did not believe like the Romanist, that the Lord's supper was a sacrifice, or that the body of Christ in the elements should be worshipped; but he maintained that the body was there, and received, not merely by faith, but corporeally by the communicant. Zwingle, on the other hand, was extremely simple in his views of the sacred supper. He maintained that its grand design was a memorial or commemoration. "This do in remembrance of Me." At the same time he affirmed that it can only be properly commemorated in faith. We show the Lord's death-His death for us, the blood shed by which our sins are washed away. We thus rest in faith upon His death as the sure ground of our eternal life, and joyfully feed on the rich spoils of accomplished redemption.

The Roman Catholics hold that after the priest has pronounced certain words over the bread and wine, they become changed into the actual body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is called transubstantiation. They also hold that both the body and blood of Christ are present in the bread which alone is given to the recipient, who thus partakes of the body and blood of Christ altogether independently of whether he has faith or not.

Luther did not believe this; for he believed that there must be faith in the receiver, and then along with the bread and wine there was the presence of the actual body and blood of Christ. This was called consubstantiation.*

In the same year that the Anabaptists made their appearance (1524), a long and pernicious controversy arose among those who had withdrawn from the Romish communion, respecting the manner in which the body and blood of Christ are present in the sacred supper. Luther and his adherents, while they renounced the papal error of transubstantiation — that the bread and wine after consecration remained no longer, but were transmuted into the body and blood of Christ — yet did maintain that persons coming to the sacred supper participated truly of the body and blood of Christ, together with the bread and wine. This doctrine gave rise to the term, consubstantiation. Ulric Zwingle, the Swiss Reformer, and his adherents were much more simple, being more fully delivered from the traditions of Rome. They maintained that the body and blood of the Lord are not present in the holy supper, but that the bread and the wine are merely symbols or emblems by which people should be moved to remember the death of Christ, and the blessing flowing therefrom.

If there be any force in the argument founded on history, it would apply equally to the precious institution of the Lord's supper. For how did it fare with that ordinance for over a thousand years? It was stripped of one of its grand elements, wrapped in a dead language, buried in a sepulchre of superstition, and bore this inscription, "A bloodless sacrifice for the sins of the living and the dead." And even when, at the time of the Reformation, the Bible was once more permitted to speak to man's conscience, and pour its living light upon the sepulchre in which the Eucharist lay buried, what was produced? Under what form does the Lord's supper appear before us in the Lutheran church? Under the form of consubstantiation. Luther denied that there was any change of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ; but he maintained, and that, too, in fierce and unbending opposition to the Swiss divines, that there was a mysterious presence of Christ with the bread and wine.

Consubstantiationists believe that with the bread and wine there is present the body and blood of Christ. Such is the error which one man, otherwise greatly used of. God, has brought into the Lutheran Church. Consecrationists believe that before there can be a "real communion" the bread and wine must be "blessed" or "consecrated" by the ordained "priest" who officiates.

In chapter 10 the Lutherans plainly assert that the real body and blood of Christ are truly present in the Eucharist, under the elements of the bread and wine, and distributed and received. In consequence of this plain assertion of the dogma of Consubstantiation, the Reformed, or Zwinglian party refused to subscribe the Augsburg Confession. Hence the imperial cities of Strasburg, Constance, Lindau, and Memmingen, offered a separate confession, called the Confession of the Four Cities — Confessio Tetrapolitana. It agreed substantially with the Augsburg Confession, except in regard to the corporeal presence; but the Emperor would not allow it to be read in public.*

This may seem a hard word, but it is abundantly supported by facts, and history must be candid. The proceedings at the conference at Marburg are a sufficient proof of this. This conference was brought about by Philip, the landgrave of Hesse, and had for its object the settlement of the great sacramentarian controversy, which had long been raging between the German and Swiss reformers.

Luther had never been able to shake himself entirely free from the trammels of popery; and the doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist was a dogma which he held to the last. True, he exchanged the word transubstantiation for that of consubstantiation, and sought to modify the hurtful and blasphemous doctrine; but his modification was a poor shift, and the error was not removed. Rome held — one's pen is slow to write it — that "the hands of the priest are raised to an eminence granted to none of the angels, of creating God, the Creator of all things, and of offering Him up for the salvation of the whole world." In other words, that the bread and wine were actually converted into the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist; a doctrine which they made the corner-stone of their fabric of errors, condemning as infidels all who rejected it. Luther held the more absurd, and quite as erroneous notion, that the elements after consecration remained just what they were before it — true bread and wine, "but that there was also with the bread and wine the material substance of Christ's human body." "As soon as the words of consecration are pronounced over the bread, the body is there, however wicked be the priest who pronounces them!" These are the reformer's own words.

There are others, as we know, much more widely and keenly debated, though one cannot say really more entitled to be heard. The Romanist contention that the bread and wine, after the Lord's blessing, were pronounced by Him to be literally His body and blood, involves a grossness of conception which He has Himself rebuked elsewhere (John 6:60-63). It makes Him while alive in the body, take and break His body in His hands. It multiplies the body of Christ, at the will of man; upon myriads of altars, day by day. It makes God work as constant miracles to conceal those which are in this way taking place; so that to the senses that should still be bread and wine, which has wholly changed its character. It makes the flesh to profit spiritually, while the Lord has Himself denied it. And all this is done to escape a difficulty which never existed, and to make us treat one of the commonest forms of figurative speech, which we are every day using, as if it were a manifest perversion to take it as they themselves are doing without thought of wrong. "The rock was Christ," needed no transubstantiation to make good. Nay, even; "the cup is the new covenant in My blood," cannot be understood by them but as a figure. But "this is My body," must be maintained, in the face of whatever objection from nature, from spirit, from the connection here, from Scripture elsewhere, in the grossest literality!

The doctrine of consubstantiation escapes some of these incongruities, no doubt, but it is as open to some of these charges as is the Romish one itself. It admits that the bread is bread, and the wine wine; but it maintains that the "flesh profiteth" in the way Christ denies; and the actual production; multiplication and eating of the body of Christ.

In opposition to both these is the Calvinistic or "Reformed" view, in which the reception is not by the mouth, but by faith, through the power of the Spirit; and not of the substance of His body and blood, but of the sacrificial virtue or efficacy of His work alone.