Why is the real presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper such a controversial issue?

We may remark at the outset, however, that every true Christian acknowledges the great and blessed privilege granted to us in the institution of the Lord's Supper. What could be more touching than that He, the blessed Saviour, should care and desire that we should remember Him; and that He should have earnestly desired to eat the last Paschal supper with His disciples before He suffered? But the whole question is, not whether we should value the privilege, and desire to respond to His last request to remember Him, but whether the bread and wine are physically changed into the body and blood of Christ so that there is no bread and wine there at all; but that Christ, a whole Christ (and that expressed in a profane way—His bones and nerves), alone is there.

3 Allow me however to say that every Christian acknowledges the great and blessed privilege granted to us in the institution of the Lord's supper — that feeding on Him, though not there only, is the very way of life to the soul. Nor is there anything more touching, than that He, the blessed Saviour, should care that we should remember Him, and should even desire with desire to eat the last Paschal supper with His disciples before He suffered. This is not the question; but whether the bread and wine are physically changed into the body and blood of Christ, so that there is no bread and wine there at all; but that Christ, a whole Christ, and that expressed in a profane way, His bones and nerves, alone is there. They admit that it is called bread after consecration, and seek to account for it, saying it is so called, because it has the appearance of it; as when Abraham saw the three men who really were angels. And that it still retains the quality natural to bread, that of supporting and nourishing the body.

We cannot do better than to take the definition of Transubstantiation given by the Council of Trent; that "This holy Synod now anew declares, that by the consecration of the bread and wine, conversion of the whole substance into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord takes place, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of His blood. Which conversion is conveniently and properly called by the holy Catholic Church, "Transubstantiation." An anathema is pronounced against anyone who denies "that in the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist are contained truly, really, and substantially, the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and consequently a whole Christ." The catechism of the same Council declares that, "Not only the true body of Christ, and whatever belongs to the true body, as bones and nerves, but also a whole Christ," is contained in the sacrament. It is said that the whole substance of the bread is converted into the body, and the whole substance of the wine into the blood; only the forms of bread and wine remaining, and it is to be adored with divine worship.

Accordingly, after the Passover Supper, He instituted the new memorial feast of the Lord's Supper which would remind them, and believers down through the centuries, of what He had done for them at Calvary's cross. The bread was emblematical of the body in which He suffered and completed the work of atonement and the cup would remind us of His blood which was shed on the cross for our sins. It was not, as some erroneously think and teach, that in the Supper the bread becomes literally His body and the contents of the cup become literally His blood, so that we actually eat His body and drink His blood as something which makes us more fit for heaven and gives us' the forgiveness of sins. The Lord was still bodily present with them when He instituted the Supper and surely He did not mean that, though He was bodily present, the bread and the cup He then gave them was also literally His body and His blood. No, He was thinking of the time when He would no longer be bodily present with them; thus He gave them, and believers throughout the Church age, the emblems of the bread and the cup which would recall Himself and His death on the cross vividly to their minds.

When the Lord said, "This is my body," and "this is my blood," he used a figure of speech, as He often did, just as we do in showing a picture of a loved one, saying, "This is my mother," etc. We mean thereby that the picture is a likeness of our loved one, a representation, and no thought of literalness is implied by the words. Yet many have strained at the like expression of our Lord" This is my body"-and insist that the emblems of the Lord's Supper become, at the words of the priest or minister, literally His body and His blood to the participant.

You quote John 6, and you quote, "I am the living bread which came down from heaven," words as plain as "this is my body." Am I to believe that Christ was transubstantiated into living bread? The words are just as plain, just as positive: why not believe them? Are we to eat Him incarnate and alive on earth? Where? Yet "he that eateth of that bread shall live for ever." In the Lord's supper I cannot, for His body is presented broken, not whole; His blood shed, not in His body. But again, the Lord declares that whosoever eats Him, as He describes, is fully and finally saved. They "shall live for ever." They "have everlasting life, and he will raise them up at the last day." "They abide in Christ, and Christ in them." That is, it is the real vital saving possession of Christ by faith in the perfect efficacy of His life and work, in which those who possess will abide, and Christ raise them up, consequently, at the last day. But this is confessedly not true of all who partake of the Eucharist. That is, the passage does not refer to it; it refers to what the Eucharist refers to. Further, the terms of the institution preclude the literal sense; for, whatever image He employed, it could not then be literally Himself; because His body was not yet given, His blood was not yet shed, and this is what it is expressly a sacrament of. The Lord plainly shews what He meant in saying, "This cup is the new testament in my blood," which is clearly a figure; and "I will not drink of this fruit of the vine," Matt. 26. Nothing can be plainer. But the Lord did not really hold in His hand a broken body and shed blood; for His body was not broken and His blood was not shed. Yet that is of the very essence of the truth, for it was shed for the remission of sins, and there was no remission without it. In a word, the testimony is as plain as possibly can be, that the literal sense is untrue and impossible; shed blood there was none. Now Christ is glorified. There is no dead Christ; it cannot be He in reality — He in the letter; for there is no such Christ in reality as broken and His blood shed. He is alive for evermore. 1 Corinthians 10 is the plainest of all in reality; it speaks of the body as broken.

He is thinking simply of the unity which, in fact, makes us one body in any proper sense, this unity of apprehension of that blessed death which Christ has died for us, and which our hearts own as having power over us in this very coming together; but there is really no difficulty here. In the wisdom of God, things are so expressed that we can scarcely make mischief of them if we would. The doctrine of the tenth chapter is in absolute conformity with the doctrine of the eleventh. There is no difference between them. In both alike it is the thing expressed with which we are identified, identified in the apprehension that we have of it and the part which God's grace has given us in the effect. We partake of the bread and the wine, and the bread and the wine would be nothing to us except we saw in them the body and the blood of the Lord. We partake in this way of the body and blood of the Lord, assuredly not in the gross, material sense, but in the joy of the apprehension of what these are to us. It is the same truth as the Lord has Himself given us in the sixth chapter of the gospel of John, and which is, in the minds of so many, itself to be referred to the Lord's supper. The fact is that the Lord's supper and what the Lord states there as to the bread from heaven refer to the same thing. That is all. It has been the triumph of Satan to materialize all this in such a way as to, make it the instrument of a designing priesthood to get glory to itself, and to lord it over the souls and consciences of men. In no way has this been done more cruelly than in the transformation of the Lord's supper into a mass, or something approaching this. We cannot but remember, also, that at the Reformation the martyrdoms of the Lord's saints had largely reference to their refusal of this unholy doctrine, — a doctrine which would make the Lord die innumerable times, make His original death to be proportionately of little effect, and put the whole into the hands of men to make merchandise out of, and to assume to themselves the glory which is due to God.

Beloved friends, do not let Satan get any victory over us in this matter of punctual attendance. The Lord is there at His supper, and the object of this ceremony is His remembrance. We remember the Lord Jesus as the One Who died; He is present with us as the living Lord of glory, and this is the "real presence" in connection with the supper of the Lord about which we hear a great deal sometimes. The phrase is often misunderstood and misconstrued. The "real presence" is the living presence of Christ in this way, as He promised to be in the midst of His own company. He is there as the One Who is glorified at God's right hand; and He is there to lead our hearts back to remember Him when He was betrayed and crucified.

No wonder the apostle declared, "This is not to eat the Lord's supper." Why? Because they had left the Lord out of their thoughts; they had not before their minds the adorable Person of the One Who died. They looked upon the memorials as common bread and common wine, as articles of food. And in a literal sense it was but common bread and common wine. There was no material change in the bread or the wine, yet there was a real presence in their company, the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ. And the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ made those elements, the bread and the wine, significant of the most tremendous event in the world's history — the death of the Lord Jesus Christ, God's own Son.

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.

But the true doctrine, as given in holy Scripture, is plain and simple enough. St. Paul says, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood"; he had no thought of any literal blood. It suffices him to speak of it as the new covenant in Christ's blood, and he calls it bread when thus given and broken; and not only when so broken, but when eaten by the faithful (1 Cor. 11:26); they "eat this bread," and drink the cup, and show forth the Lord's death. Christ is now a glorified Christ above, One who once hung upon the cross for us in love, the one real sacrifice of never ending and unchanging value, always in the presence of God accepted of Him. True faith ever rests on Him while it feeds daily upon Him as the spiritual food for the soul. The Lord's Supper is the special memorial and presentation of Christ in His death: where we truly discern the Lord's body spiritually, and "show the Lord's death till He come."