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Defenders Podcast
Defenders 3: Doctrine of the Church (Part 12): Assessment of Competing Views on the Lord’s Supper
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Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig. Today the Doctrine of the Church, Part 12. For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org We've been discussing over the last several weeks different views of the Lord's Supper, and today we want to come to some assessment of the competing alternatives. First, what might we say about the doctrine of transubstantiation? Well, it seems to me that this is a doctrine which does not enjoy plausible scriptural support. I think it's evident that it is not taught by Jesus at the Last Supper. When Jesus instituted the Last Supper, when he spoke those words of institution, this is my body, this is my blood. For he was there physically present with them. His body was there in front of them, his blood was coursing through his veins. So of course this is not literal. When he shows them the bread and the wine and says, this is my body, this is my blood, that is, I think, evident in the fact that he was corporally present with with them. So the words of institution do not provide any basis for thinking that Jesus was talking about a literal transubstantiation of the elements before them. Indeed, Jesus words are really a rather typical Semitic use of imagery. Let's look at a couple of other examples. First, Corinthians, chapter 10, verses 3 and 4. Here Paul is talking about how the Israelites, as they passed through Sinai, were fed by the manna. Then you'll remember that God miraculously supplied water for them as well. Paul says, all ate the same supernatural food and all drank the the same supernatural drink, for they drank from the supernatural rock which followed them, and the rock was Christ. Now here you have the identification of Christ with the rock from which the water flowed. But it obviously doesn't mean that Christ is literally a rock or that the rock is literally Christ. Paul is using imagery. Similarly, look over at Galatians 4 for another use of this sort of imagery. Galatians 4. 25. Here Paul is using Sarah and Hagar as images of the two covenants, the old and. And the new Covenant. In verse 23 he says, but the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, the son of the free woman through promise. Now this is an allegory. These women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai bearing children for slavery. She is is Hagar. Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia. She corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. Here he says that Hagar is Mount Sinai, and moreover, she is the present Jerusalem. She is an image of the Old Covenant. Sarah represents the New Covenant, the New Jerusalem. Again, obviously it would be inept to take Paul's words in a literal sense that Hagar is a mountain in Arabia, or that she is a city in Judea. Rather, this is the use of images for these things. So when Jesus says, this is my body, which is for you, and hands them the bread, or this is the cup of the New Covenant in my blood, and he hands them the wine, he is engaging in a symbolic presentation of a prophetic action. Very often in the Old Testament, the prophets were would be asked by God to do some action that would symbolize or be an image of the message that they were proclaiming to Israel. I think that's what you have here in the Lord's Supper, a symbolic prophetic action which symbolizes the giving of Christ's life. Jesus understood his death in terms of the suffering servant of the Lord of Isaiah, chapter 50, 53. In Isaiah 53:12 we read, Therefore I will divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors. Yet he bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors. Here is an explanation of the righteous servant's death. The servant of the Lord would give his life to atone for sin. I think that this is what Jesus is representing in presenting the symbols of the bread and the wine. Our sacramental brethren, Catholics and Lutherans might say, but you are ignoring one of the most powerful New Testament passages in support of a real presence in the body and blood of Jesus, namely John chapter six. You haven't said anything about John six. This is Jesus discourse on the bread of life. He tells people that he is the bread of life and that one must therefore eat of this bread and drink his blood in order to experience and eternal life. Let's turn to John chapter 6. Beginning in verse 35 and then skipping to 41 to 42 and then 48 to 51. Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst. The Jews then murmured at him, because he said, I am the bread which came down from heaven. They said, is not this Jesus the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, I have come down from heaven. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness and they died. This is the bread which comes down from heaven. That a man may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever, and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh. The Jews then disputed among themselves saying, how can this man give us his flesh to eat? So Jesus said to them, truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drinking indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in Him. I doubt that this passage has anything to do with the celebration of the Eucharist. Notice that the context here is not the Last Supper. This is a discourse that Jesus gives during the time of his ministry. Jesus isn't talking about the Eucharist. But suppose someone says this passage represents later Johannine theology, that this passage represents the early Church's theology In John's community. They are looking back on Jesus life and describing the Eucharist as they practiced it. Now I think the difficulty in interpreting this passage as a later retrojection of Eucharistic theology is the question then why isn't the passage inserted into the historical context of Jesus final meal with the disciples? Why here in the midst of Jesus ministry? Why not put it in the context of the Lord's Supper? You might say, but John already has a tradition of the Lord's Supper and so doesn't have room for it there. Ah, but that's not true. One of the odd things about the Gospel of John is that it has no Lord's Supper narrative. Unlike the other three Gospels, the other three Gospels have the story of Jesus celebrating the last supp, giving the bread, blessing the cup. But this is not in the Gospel of John. This passage could have easily been inserted where the other Gospels narrate the Lord's Supper as a perfect expression of the Eucharist. But it is not done. So that suggests that this isn't to be interpreted in the those Eucharistic terms. In fact, Jesus use of the title the Son of Man in this passage suggests that this is not later Johannine theology. The Son of Man was Jesus favorite self designation. Some 80 times in the Gospels Jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man. But only once outside the Gospels in the Book of Acts do you find Jesus referred to as the Son of Man. This was not a title that was used in the early church or in later Christian theology. So that suggests that we are dealing here with a tradition that comes out of Jesus ministry and should not be interpreted eucharistically, but rather as a metaphor of feasting spiritually upon Christ and imbibing the life that he gives. Moreover, even if the passage were about the Eucharist, the question would remain whether it should be understood metaphorically or literally. We have many other examples in John where Jesus uses symbols like the bread of life, symbols which his hearers misunderstood by taking them literalistically. So, for example, look at John 3:3, 4. Jesus discourse on the New birth. Speaking to Nicodemus, Jesus answered him, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus said to him, how can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born here? Nicodemus literalism prevented an understanding of what Jesus was really talking about. Spiritual rebirth. Nicodemus mistakenly thought that Jesus was speaking literally. Or turn over to John 4:10, 12. This is the story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus answered her, if you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, give me a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. The woman said to him, sir, you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Again, she is interpreting literalistically what Jesus is saying. How can you draw from the well when you don't have a bucket? Where are you going to get this living water? It was her literalism that prevented her from truly understanding what Jesus meant. Similarly, in John 4:31,33. Meanwhile, the disciples besought him, saying, rabbi, eat. But he said to them, I have food to eat, of which you do not know. So the disciples said to one another, has anybody bought him bread? They thought that Jesus was speaking literally. They wondered who brought him something to eat. We're not aware that anyone's given him anything to eat. But Jesus was talking about a different kind of food, a spiritual sustenance. One more example, John 11:11, 12. This is prior to Jesus departure to Lazarus grave site. Thus he spoke. And then he said to them, our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to wake him out of sleep. The disciples said to him, lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will recover. The disciples are thinking, no need to risk your life going to Bethany. And if he's just Asleep, he'll be fine. Then Jesus says to them, he's dead. I need to go and address the situation. So I think you can see that John frequently uses symbols to express deeper spiritual truths. The eating and drinking motif that we found in John chapter six is plausibly part of this eating the bread of life and drinking his blood. In fact, in the Jewish intertestamental literature, in the book of Sirach 24 1921, we have a kind of parallel to this. There we read, come to me, you who desire me, you who and eat your fill of my fruits. Those who eat of me will hunger for more, and those who drink of me will thirst for more. Here we have the idea of eating and drinking of the Lord. So it's not unusual that Jesus would employ this kind of symbolic imagery to talk about a kind of spiritual feasting upon Christ. In fact, to return to John chapter six, when you go down to verse 60, we read therefore many of his disciples, when they heard this, said, this is a difficult statement. Who can listen to it? But Jesus, conscious that his disciples grumbled at this, said to them, does this cause you to stumble? What then? If you see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before, it is the Spirit who gives life, the flesh profits nothing. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. Jesus own comments seem to suggest that he's not speaking literally. So I don't think that there is good biblical evidence. And for thinking that in the Lord's Supper the bread and the wine are literally transformed into the body and blood of the Lord. In fact, I want to press an objection to this point of view, and that is that the doctrine of Christ's real presence in the Lord's Supper seems confused with respect to Christ's resurrection body. Christ's resurrection body is a physical humanoid organism that the disciples could see and touch and that is now departed from our space, time, universe, but someday will personally come again. We shouldn't think of the resurrection body of Christ as some sort of immaterial spiritual reality. That is to depreciate and fail to understand the physical corporal nature of the resurrection of the dead, both in Jewish thinking and in early Christian theology. So once you understand that the body of Christ is his resurrection body, I think you can see that this is obviously not being eaten and his blood drunk by Christians all around the world. For one thing, it wouldn't be large enough to feed all of the persons who are taking the Lord's Supper at any one time in the world. The resurrection body of Christ is a finite, physical, humanoid body, and to spiritualize it is to fail to do justice to the doctrine of the resurrection. So I have difficulty with the doctrine of transubstantiation, not only because of its lack of biblical support, but because I think it is fundamentally confused with regard to a proper understanding of Christ's resurrection body, which has left this universe but will someday return again. So I'm not persuaded that transubstantiation is the correct view. So what about consubstantiation? The same objections that I've just shared would apply to consubstantiation as well. We are not literally drinking the blood and eating the body of Christ. But in addition to that, I would also press a further objection against consubstantiation, namely that it confuses the two natures of Christ. Remember when we dealt with the person of Christ and talked about the guidelines for legitimate Christological speculation about Christ, we saw that the watchword from the Council of Chalcedon is that you must neither divide the person nor confuse the natures. There is one person, Christ, in two distinct natures. You must not divide the person and you must not confuse the natures together. But that seems to me to be exactly what happens in Lutheran theology with respect to the communication of the attributes. Saying that the attributes of invisibility, immateriality and ubiquity are communicated over from the divine nature of Christ to his human nature, this confounds the two natures and so is not acceptable Christologically. What then about the Reformed view that there is a spiritual presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper? What I want to say here is that either this doesn't make sense at all, or else it is true of all sorts of various activities in which Christ is spiritually present. If Calvin meant that the real body and blood of Jesus are spiritually present, not physically or carnally, but spiritually, then frankly, I don't know what he's talking about. Because as I said, it is inherent to the resurrection body of Christ that it is corporal and physical. It is a physical body that Christ rose from the dead with. That body, if it is present, non physically and non bodily, just is not a body. That is a contradiction in terms. But if you say that Christ is present in his divine nature, in his spiritual nature, well, I would certainly agree with that. But then that's true of many, many activities in which we engage, isn't it? He's spiritually present in your devotional time as you read and pray and as you worship in worship services, as you sing hymns, or as you share your faith, Christ is present, we will often experience a deep spiritual communion with Him. So in that sense, the Lord's Supper isn't really a sacrament, it's an ordinance. Those who hold to this view of the Lord's Supper as an ordinance wouldn't deny the spiritual presence of Christ as we take the Lord's Supper. Of course they would say that he is present, but they would say that he is present not in his human nature, which is ascended to heaven and and will not come again until the return of Christ, but He is present in his divine nature, his omnipresent, spiritual, immaterial divine nature. So in celebrating the Lord's Supper, we commune with Christ in his divine nature or through the Holy Spirit, but his physical human nature is not present in because that is risen and ascended and will not return until the Second coming. That forms a nice segue to the final locus that we will talk about in our survey of Christian doctrine, namely the doctrine of the Last things. So in my thinking then, I go with the ordinance view not only of baptism, but also of the Lord's Supper. It is a memorial celebration in which we remember Christ's death on our behalf. We examine ourselves to see if we are holding to the faith, we confess our sins, and we commune with Christ spiritually as he is spiritually present among us. There are other topics to be discussed under the doctrine of the Church, such as church government and church offices. But as I shared earlier, these are topics on which I have not worked, so I'll not make any further remarks on this head. Well, that brings our study of the doctrine of the Church to a close. Next time we'll begin our final locus in our defender survey of Christian doctrine. And that will bring us to the the doctrine of the Last things. I'm looking forward to discussing it with you.