The Augustan Confession presented by the German electors to Charles V. in the section on the Mass merely protests against the view that “the Lord’s Supper is a work (opus) which being performed by a priest earns remission of sin for the doer and for others, and that in virtue of the work done (ex opere operato), without a good motive on the part of the user. Also that being applied for the dead, it is a satisfaction, that is to say, earns for them remission of the pains of purgatory.”
The Saxon Confession of Wittenberg, June 1551, while protesting against the same errors, equally abstains from trying to define narrowly how Christ is present in the sacrament.
Consubstantiation.—The symbolical books of the Lutheran Church, following the teaching of Luther himself, declare the doctrine of the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the eucharist, together with the bread and wine (consubstantiation), as well as the ubiquity of his body, as the orthodox doctrine of the church. One consequence of this view was that the unbelieving recipients are held to be as really partakers of the body of Christ in, with and under the bread as the faithful, though they receive it to their own hurt. (Hagenbach, Hist. of Doctr. ii. 300.)
Of all the Reformers, the teaching of Zwingli was the farthest removed from that of Luther. At an early period he asserted that the Eucharist was nothing more than food for the soul, and had been instituted by Christ only as an act of commemoration and as a visible sign of his body and blood (Christenliche Ynleitung, 1523, quoted by Hagenbach, Hist. of Doctr. ii. 296, Clark’s translation). But that Zwingli did not reject the higher religious significance of the Eucharist, and was far from degrading the bread and wine into “nuda et inania symbola,” as he was accused of doing, we see from his Fidei ratio ad Carolum Imperatorem (ib. p. 297).
Original Significance of the Eucharist.—It is doubtful if the attempts of reformers to spiritualize the Eucharist bring us, except so far as they pruned ritual extravagances, nearer to its original significance; perhaps the Roman, Greek and Oriental churches have better preserved it. This significance remains to be discussed; the cognate question of how far the development of the Eucharist was influenced by the pagan mysteries is discussed in the article [Sacrament].
That the Lord’s Supper was from the first a meal symbolic of Christian unity and commemorative of Christ’s death is questioned by none. But Paul, while he saw this much in it, saw much more; or he could not in the same epistle, x. 18-22 assimilate communion in the flesh and blood of Jesus, on the one hand, to the sacrificial communion with the altar which made Israel after the flesh one; and on the other to the communion with devils attained by pagans through sacrifices offered before idols. It has been justly remarked of the Pauline view, that—
“The union with the Lord Himself, to which those who partake of the Lord’s Supper have, is compared with the union which those who partake of a sacrifice have with the deity to whom the altar is devoted—in the case of the Israelites with God, of the heathen with demons. This idea that to partake of sacrifice is to devote oneself to the deity, lies at the root of the ancient idea of worship, whether Jewish or heathen; and St Paul uses it as being readily understood. In this connexion the symbol is never a mere symbol, but a means of real union. ‘The cup is the covenant’” (Prof. Sanday in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible, 3, 149).
Paul caps his argument thus:—“Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons: ye cannot partake of the table of the Lord and of the table of demons. Or do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he?” And these words with their context prove that Paul, like the Fathers of the church, regarded the gods and goddesses as real living supernatural beings, but malignant. They were the powers and principalities with whom he was ever at war. The Lord also is jealous of them, if any one attempt to combine their cult with his, for to do so is to doubt the supremacy of his name above all names. Both in its inner nature then and outward effects the Eucharist was the Christian counterpart of these two other forms of communion of which one, the heathen, was excluded from the first, and the other, the Jewish, soon to disappear. It is their analogue, and to understand it we must understand them, not forgetting that Paul, as a Semite, and his hearers, as converted pagans, were imbued with the sacrificial ideas of the old world.
“A kin,” remarks W. Robertson Smith (Religion of the Semites, 1894), “was a group of persons whose lives were so bound up together, in what must be called a physical unity, that they could be treated as parts of one common life. The members of one kindred looked on themselves as one living whole, a single animated mass of blood, flesh and bones, of which no member could be touched without all the members suffering.” “In later times,” observes the same writer (op. cit. p. 313), “we find the conception current that any food which two men partake of together, so that the same substance enters into their flesh and blood, is enough to establish some sacred unity of life between them; but in ancient times this significance seems to be always attached to participation in the flesh of a sacrosanct victim, and the solemn mystery of its death is justified by the consideration that only in this way can the sacred cement be procured, which creates or keeps alive a living bond of union between the worshippers and their god. This cement is nothing else than the actual life of the sacred and kindred animal, which is conceived as residing in its flesh, but specially in its blood, and so, in the sacred meal, is actually distributed among all the participants, each of whom incorporates a particle of it with his own individual life.”
The above conveys the cycle of ideas within which Paul’s reflection worked. Christ who knew no sin (2 Cor. v. 21) had been made sin, and sacrificed for us, becoming as it were a new Passover (1 Cor. v. 7). By a mysterious sympathy the bread and wine over which the words, “This is my body which is for you,” and “This cup is the new covenant in my blood,” had been uttered, became Christ’s body and blood; so that by partaking of these the faithful were united with each other and with Christ into one kinship. They became the body of Christ, and his blood or life was in them, and they were members of him. Participation in the Eucharist gave actual life, and it was due to their irregular attendance at it that many members of the Corinthian church “were weak and sickly and not a few slept” (i.e. had died). As the author already cited adds (p. 313): “The notion that by eating the flesh, or particularly by drinking the blood, of another living being, a man absorbs its nature or life into his own, is one which appears among primitive peoples in many forms.”