What’s more classic than a Reformed vs. Lutheran debate on the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper? Well, I will try to keep it friendly, even as I want to skeptically interrogate a recent Lutheran discussion on the real presence.

Andrew Packer is an old online acquaintance of mine. He’s knows all sorts of things about me! So I’d better not make him too mad. And Bryan Wolfmueller is someone who the very famous and always funny Hans Fiene has called the best Lutheran preacher in the country. So I’m interested to hear what they have to say. In a recent video, they discuss the way Lutherans understand the presence of Christ in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. I’d like to look at a few of the claims they make.

First, Andrew brings up one of my favorite terms, the Capernaitic eating. He says that this can sometimes also be called a Cyclopic eating. These names stand for the sort of eating that would be the very most “literal” understanding of John 6. People may be surprised to learn that Luther did not take John 6 literally. (He really didn’t! Go look it up.) Andrew and Bryan both deny that Lutherans hold to this sort of “literal” eating of Christ. They do not physically eat skin, bones, and meat, and they do not physically drink blood. It’s not like that, they say. What, or how, is it like? Well, they don’t offer much of an explanation in this video. They say that you have to use the expression “sacramental union” and accept it as a sort of miracle.

Secondly, Bryan says that we do not partake of “a part” of Christ’s body. We don’t get his toe, he says. Instead, we partake of “the nature.” By “eating Christ’s body,” then, it seems that what is really meant is “receiving Christ’s human nature through the sacramental union.” I will come back to this in a moment. But jot it down for now.

After this Andrew offers some pastoral remarks, notably the appeal to faith. Why is this the one miracle that you can’t believe? Bryan adds, “He can turn the whole Nile River into blood, but he can’t turn that wine into his blood?”

But hang on a minute. Lutherans don’t believe that Jesus turns the wine into blood.

Lutherans believe that the wine continues to be present as wine in the sacrament. They think that the blood of Christ accompanies the wine in some important sense, but they always say that it is in, with, and under the wine. The wine is still there too. It’s the Roman Catholics who believe that the wine in transformed into blood.

Ok, you got me there, they might reply. It was an overstatement. Whoops. But you know what we mean…

Ah, but not so fast. This slip reveals something that I have encountered a lot with Lutherans. Their more ordinary rhetoric implies something like transubstantiation. It also implies something like the Capernaitic eating mentioned above. After all, they just take Christ’s words literally. They don’t press for an explanation. They don’t bring in human reasoning to raise objections. Right? Well, except for when they do.

As Bryan also said, the reason that the Lutheran view isn’t a fully literal, local, and physical eating is that they believe that the “nature” of Christ’s humanity can be in some way separated or abstracted from its external features (accidents?). The invisible and internal nature can be communicated without the Christian needing to chew on flesh and blood.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

The Lutheran view employs the use of figures of speech, philosophical distinctions, and even a sort of systematic understanding. They believe that “eat the body” really means “receive the nature.” And while they do want it to be through the mouth, they do not actually mean that you have to chew and grind and swallow it down the esophagus.

Here’s an example of Martin Luther himself working through some of this:

Let me translate this for the sake of clearer understanding. In the first place, an object is circumscriptively or locally in a place, i.e. in a circumscribed manner, if the space and the object occupying it exactly correspond and fit into the same measurements, such as wine or water in a cask, where the wine occupies no more space and the cask yields no more space than the volume of the wine. Or, a piece of wood or a tree in the water takes up no more space and the water yields no more than the size of the tree in it. Again, a man walking in the open air takes up no more space from the air around him, nor does the air yield more, than the size of the man. In this mode, space and object correspond exactly, item by item, just as a pewterer measures, pours off, and molds the tankard in its form.

In the second place, an object is in a place definitively, i.e. in an uncircumscribed manner, if the object or body is not palpably in one place and is not measurable according to the dimensions of the place where it is, but can occupy either more room or less. Thus it is said that angels and spirits are in certain places. For an angel or devil can be present in an entire house or city; again, he can be in a room, a chest or a box, indeed, in a nutshell. The space is really material and circumscribed, and has its own dimensions of length, breadth, and depth; but that which occupies it has not the same length, breadth, or depth as the space which it occupies, indeed, it has no length or breadth at all. Thus we read in the gospel that the devil possesses men and enters them, and they also enter into swine. Indeed, in Matthew 8 we read that a whole legion were in one man. That would be about six thousand devils. This I call an uncircumscribed presence in a given place, since we cannot circumscribe or measure it as we measure a body, and yet it is obviously present in the place.

…In the third place, an object occupies places repletively, i.e. supernaturally, if it is simultaneously present in all places whole and entire, and fills all places, yet without being measured or circumscribed by any place, in terms of the space which it occupies. This mode of existence belongs to God alone, as he says in the prophet Jeremiah [23:23 f.], “I am a God at hand and not afar off. I fill heaven and earth.” This mode is altogether incomprehensible, beyond our reason, and can be maintained only with faith, in the Word.

(Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 37: Word and Sacrament III, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 215, 216.)

I have found this part of Luther’s eucharistic theology helpful, even if puzzling. First, Luther clearly denies that the “real presence” and the “true humanity” of Christ in the Lord’s Supper is a “circumscribed presence.” Christ’s body is not in the bread the way that flour is in a sack. Christ’s blood is not in the chalice in the way that wine is in a bottle. He is not present in the way that a man is present in a particular space. Whatever it is, it’s not like that.

Instead, Luther argues that Christ is present in two other ways. He is present in the way that angels and demons can be present in this world. This presence does have some sort of length, breadth, and depth, but it’s different somehow. (Imagine how many of them could dance on the head of the same pin…) Christ’s body is present in the sacrament in this sort of way. And Luther also argues for the “repletive” presence. This is the presence of omnipresence, of total simultaneous fulness in every direction. This leads to the ubiquity debates that are more well known.

But again, here we see the “simple” and “plain meaning” breaks down. Because Christ has Himself told us that his body, even his resurrected body, is not like that of a spirit. “Handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke 24:39). If we do not appeal to the circumscribed presence (as Luther does not), then we can’t make a straightforward parallel between the real presence in the sacrament and the incarnation. We aren’t just talking about Christ’s body as such. It does not seem that we have really moved past a “spiritual presence.” (Angels and demons are spirits, after all.) And if we are talking about the “spiritual presence” of Christ’s “human nature,” then it does seem that we are appealing to a concept, a virtue or power, or an abstraction, rather than simply “body and blood.” (We might also point out that if Christ’s blood isn’t in a circumscribed place along with the wine, then spilled wine doesn’t necessarily indicate that Christ’s blood is also on the floor. One could just as easily say that it has passed through and is no longer there, since it was only intended for the communication of the sacramental action in the first place.)

This is where the quick answer breaks down. And this is also where the “Why can’t you just believe in a miracle?” breaks down. It’s not that a person “can’t believe.” It’s that they are trying to follow the coherency and are having a bit of trouble. There seems to be shifting categories and propositions at work, often using common linguistic signs but with changing underlying meanings. And even if the Lutheran theologians feel pretty good about all of this, do the pastors really think they are passing this down to the ordinary people? Do ordinary people reject the notion of a circumscribed presence, or do think that the wine turns into blood?

The final sort of “presence,” the repletive presence, is one where Lutherans actually end up on their own. Roman Catholics, who do believe in transubstantiation, nevertheless do not believe that the attributes of deity are communicated to the human nature of Christ, certainly not in a way so as to make Christ’s human body omnipresent. They do not believe this because it would entail a breakdown in the distinctions between the two natures, with the humanity essentially being transformed into the divine. In fact, were God to give all of His divine attributes to Jesus’ humanity, then He would have to give those negations of limitations– infinity. No one argues for this, however, because it would literally be nonsense, the combination of contrary ideas in an absurdity. Exegetically, resisting this sort of confusion is also important. There are a great many Scripture passages which state that “God” is greater than Christ or that there are things that Jesus does not know. The classic explanation for these verses, the explanation which preserves Nicene orthodoxy, is that these apply to the humanity of Christ and not the deity of Christ. While Christ is not separated, there is still a very important reason to distinguish. This is not faithlessness or skepticism. This is pretty standard classical theism and Niceno-Constantinopolitan Christology. In the words of the Athanasian Creed, “Perfect God and Perfect Man, of a reasonable Soul and human Flesh subsisting. Equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, and inferior to the Father as touching His Manhood.” 

Along the same lines, there has to be a real sense in which Christ is not always bodily present. He tells us that he will be “leaving” and that he will “come again.” Even as He leaves, He will still be present? How? In a different sort of way. He won’t be present in the same way he was but rather in a spiritual way. But then, after some period of history, he will come again in the way that he had been here. “This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11). Invoking a repletive presence takes all the teeth out of this verse and others. And so, again, whatever sort of “real presence” is meant, repletive presence cannot give you any kind of ordinary or plain meaning. It has to give some sort of spiritual meaning.

After a certain point, all of the extra qualifications and pivoting starts to look like compensation. It’s certainly a walk back from the original confident statement of “We just believe the words of Christ.” As it turns out, the Lutherans, just like everyone else, have a number of questions that pop up, and they come up with a number of answers by which they seek to make the most sense of everything collectively.

It’s just that some of us don’t think that answers make all that much sense.

That’s my friendly response. I don’t think I will persuade everyone over to my position. (I haven’t even given it yet.) But I think I have at least shown where the questions have not actually been answered.