Truth Unites - An Incarnational Model of the Eucharist? With Dr. James Arcadi

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

In this video I discuss whether the mode of Christ's presence in the Eucharist can be compared to the nature of the incarnation. See Dr. Arcadi's book here: https://www.amazon.com/Incarnational-Eucharist-Current-Issues-Theology-ebook/dp/B07B7LXBN8/ See George Hunsinger's The Eucharist and Ecumenism here: https://www.amazon.com/Eucharist-Ecumenism-Current-Issues-Theology/dp/0521719178/ Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

Hey, everyone. I'm here today with Dr. James Arcadi, who is a great theologian, and he serves as the rector at All Souls, Anglican Church in Wheaton, Illinois. He's authored a lot of different books. He's taught at several different leading evangelical institutions. I'm going to put up on the screen an image of his book, an incarnational model of the Eucharist, and that's going to be our focus for this interview. He's done a lot of great work on this, and I think it was in our emails. He described his view to me as kind of in typical Anglicanian. fashion via media or middle way between low church Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. So I think this will resonate with a lot of my viewers for sure, but we're going to draw from some of his articles he's written as well. So James, how are you doing and tell us what is the weather like in the Chicago area today? I'm doing just great. Thanks, Gavin. Good to be with you here today. Thanks for having me on the show. Today is unseasonably warm here in Chicago land. So as a California native anytime it gets above 50. I can't believe I'm saying this, but my heart is warmed and when I'm in Chicago land, it's above 50. So yeah, doing all right here. Awesome. We just moved to Tennessee.

And for, by the way, for people watching, this is not my normal background, but I'm having sort of a studio built this week. So hopefully my next video that'll be out. But we just had a snow week here in Tennessee and my kids were home. It was the first time several of my kids had seen snow. So that was kind of fun, but we're kind of getting our start here in Tennessee. And gosh, I'm excited to talk to you. I guess maybe just a first question is, what would you say are the downsides? So one of the things I've seen in my YouTube career is a lot of Protestants have an impoverished view of the Eucharist. They just haven't thought very much about the Eucharist. It's kind of just this thing that's tacked on maybe once a month or once a quarter at the end after the sermon. What do you see as the

downsides when we don't have sufficient reflection about what is happening in the Eucharist or in the Lord's Supper, we can call it as well. Yeah, sure, yeah. I mean, many names and I'm not partial. I said a Eucharist. I think it's a little bit more Pauline grounded and it's kind of a little more ecumenical, but Lord's Supper, Holy Communion, Sacrament of the altar for the Lutherans, whatever, you know, I'm not, I'm not particularly about particular names there and such. And yeah, I think you're right. I mean, a lot of evangelicals, I myself come from a Baptist background before I became an Anglican, like many in my tradition and you know folks sort of think that either you have these kind of two extremes either it's sort of like kind of a low church memorialist or Zwingliian view or there's like the roman catholic view

with all the sort of like metaphysics that are entailed in that without anything between and and i kind of felt like well wait a minute is there is there more here going on is there more than what i had sort of seen growing up in my kind of baptist tradition um that i can but but still be kind like a protestant view of the lord's supper without having to go all over all the way to kind of Roman Catholic view. And then if you do some reading in church history, you kind of discover like, oh yeah, actually, there's a whole panoply of views,

a whole spectrum of views within Protestantism that articulate something in this sort of range here. And I guess what's lost, maybe what could be gained, I suppose, in terms of frequent participation in the Lord's Supper. Well, I think in many ways, what Christ is giving us is himself, and he's giving us his very presence.

And we get this through the, the word, we get this through the preaching of the word, we get this through the sermon, we get this by means of the Holy Spirit and our, you know, aesthetic experiences through song or prayer, what have you, but we can actually get Christ present, get Christ with us through the sacraments of his body and his blood. And in my regard, in my view, that we actually get him. We get his presence with us. And I think, well, why wouldn't we want that to come alongside of these other ways in which God makes himself known to us? You know, very well said. And there's so much to the Euchar that we could talk about, we're going to focus, and most of my questions are about kind of the mode of

Christ's presence. But just to mention, you know, for people watching this, there's so much else that we could also sort of explore on this topic. But just, you know, you mentioned something so important right there. So I'm going to leap ahead in the questions I sent you to one of the later ones. And let's do kind of a taxonomy of different views of the mode of Christ's presence. Because you kind of had just mentioned that sometimes people think of it as an all or nothing. There's like two options. you know, the highest possible view of real presence or no real presence whatsoever. So what I'm going to do is put up on the screen just to overwhelm everybody right out of the gate, this taxonomy that's, I think it's from one of your articles on this, but it may also be in the chapter

of the book that you sent to me, the T&T Clark book. So just I'll get people oriented. So while we're talking, this will be up here. But at the very top, it says mode, and then it says corporeal, pneumatic, and ordinary. So those might, we might think of the three broadest buckets maybe, ordinary on the far right, being very low view of Christ's presence, and then pneumatic, maybe some kind of spiritual presence or something in that. We have thinking, and then the corporeal, we'll talk through these.

But maybe I'll just let you kind of talk us through. What are some of the options and help us see a bit of the lay of the land here in terms of what are the options? Yeah, no, that's great, great initial layout there. So as I kind of gesture towards earlier, I think that. that views of Christ's presence in the Eucharist fall along a spectrum, a spectrum of views with many in between. And in terms of a broad categorization, like you outlined there, call out the mode

or call it kind of family resemblances or what have you, but those kind of three modes, at least how I see, sort of in the history of the church, different ways of explicating what it means for Christ to be present in the Eucharist. So one far side, let me call it the far right or whatever. I think that's how the graph has it, the ordinary mode, meaning that,

Christ is not present in the Eucharist in any more special sense than he is ordinarily present anywhere else. So if you think that God is omnipresent, then of course the second person in Trinity is going to be omnipresent as well. And so Christ is there in the bread, but he is also there on the table and outside and, you know, in my shoe and in my sandwich, whatever. Like, you know, Christ is everywhere because he's omnipresent. The next sort of like family or category of views, as you laid out there is the pneumatic, like, it's spiritual presence. and that can kind of have two connotations. One, either sort of like a Holy Spirit presence. So this you might see specifically more like in the reform kind of Calvinian tradition here

of like, you know, by means of the Holy Spirit, the bread and wine become vehicles by which Christ comes to us or we're connected to Christ. But you might also see Spirit in kind of a colloquial sense in that we kind of talk about like the spirit of something being like, it's kind of it, but not really. You know, like I'll be, I won't be there really, but I'll be there in spirit. We kind of say that when we mean, I'm not going to be there. You know, but there are, their spirit sort of just means like kind of the semblance of or sort of an appearance or what have you. We can talk a little bit more specifics about that later on there.

Then the next major kind of like family of views there I call the corporeal presence view. So these are all kind of views, a family of views that want to say that there's something, there's something bodily. There's something, you know, substantive or real about Christ's presence in the Eucharist, such that we can, we can interpret what Christ says, this is my body, in a literal sense. And so interpretations of that phrase also fall along that spectrum from kind of more literal to more metaphoric or figurative on that kind of ordinary or spiritual side of things. Now then, if you want me to get in, then we can get into various members of the family, call them cousins or call them like, you know, siblings or step cousins or whatever they have. But we've got sort of like subspecies within each of these

families of views that I think we can kind of like delineate different nuances for how particular individuals will explicate this. So you want to follow up on any of that there? Well, I'd love to hear more about that, but let me ask this question for for viewers who are wondering how different Christian traditions or denominations map onto these views where there's overlap. Can you give us just a brief sketch of that? Yep, sure. Yeah. So I think that the ordinary view, you might say, kind of no special presence. I think I might call it that way also. This is what we see, I think, broadly throughout much of evangelicalism, baptistic churches, free churches, many Pentecostal traditions, all the way in through to like

the Anabaptist Friends tradition, these kind of like views that actually don't even do the Lord's suffer, like the Friends tradition there as well. So I think most evangelicals kind of find themselves in, in that kind of baptistic camp without further thought. Now, whether that's required, I don't think I was actually required by, you know, Baptist faith and message or any sort of like confessions of the of that tradition. That's kind of like where you typically find those those kinds of views there. The pneumatic views I kind of mentioned I think you can see this in reformed traditions. There's debates of course within reform theology between kind of like high

church low church or you might say kind of like the Mercer'sburg sort of this tradition versus the Princeton kind of tradition and the eucharistic issues where we're kind of right at the heart of those kind of distinctions even as much as you go back to the disputes between say Zwingli and, you know, Calvin or Zwingli's followers in Calvin. There's almost kind of like a, there was sort of like a Zurich way of being reformed and a Geneva way of being reformed. And those, they had their different nuances. You might see that in the distinction between the ordinary and the pneumatic in terms of the reform appropriation of a sacramental theology. If you get into the corporeal views, that's where you're going to get traditions that are going to be on the

orthodox, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, kinds of traditions. traditions, but not necessarily only. I think that any sort of like, in my view, at least any kind of Protestant can help themselves to these kinds of views on the corporeal side, even if you're not a member of that kind of tradition explicitly. So as an alienly can, I'm kind of like, hey, you know, offering all kinds of views for people to take and have if they think that it makes the most theological sense for them. Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, and people who watch my videos a lot know that I'm an advocate for kind of a John Calvin-type spiritual presence view and have tried to argue that historically a lot of Baptists have basically been in that camp and contemporary Baptists need to reclaim some

of our own heritage. But I'm curious to learn more of kind of your, especially your incarnational view and maybe some of these that are pushing into the corporeal space. Because even that, I think a lot of times people realize or they don't realize how many different options there are for how you can understand this. But let me ask you this, because some people might be, they might be having kind of an anti-philosophy feeling right now and saying, you're over-complicating things. This is, we don't need all these metaphysical categories and theories and so forth. Jesus said, this is my body. Just take, you know, leave it at that. Don't over-complicate things beyond how Christ himself spoke. How would you push back against that and encourage them that we actually should have some patience for these

attempts to kind of construe this philosophically. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, I mean, you know, both philosophically or sort of like both metaphysically and also linguistically, because you just said right there, you know, well, Jesus says, this is my body. Why don't we just leave it at that? But it's interesting that a lot of people who say, we'll just leave it at that, don't leave it at that. They think that, oh, Jesus said, this is my body. And he didn't mean that that way. He didn't mean it literally. He met it metaphorically. And I said, well, why not? You know, why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? not? Why not think about sort of holding a literal interpretation of Christ's words as the forefront of our understanding of what Scripture is saying here? And that's actually in line, I think, with a pretty

standard, you know, evangelical, baptistic, hermeneutic of approaching scripture and sort of pillaging the literal sense before you start taking yourself towards metaphoric or other kinds of symbolic senses of the text. So I'd say, let's start there. Jesus said this, right? This is in scripture. We've got to do something. We've got to do something with that there. We've got to understand. understand what it is that Jesus said. He said, this is my body. That's kind of a weird thing to say, actually. You know, think about the scene there. He's got bread, he's got wine, it's a last supper. It's the night before he's going to be crucified. It's a really poignant, kind of like heavy moment here. And he takes a piece of bread and he shows the disciples and he says, take eat, this is my body.

Now, wow, what do we, what do we do with that? How do we understand that? And I think as Christians, as theologians, like it's incumbent upon us to try to seek understanding here. I think this is kind of the Anselmian mode. We have faith in the words of Scripture. We have faith in the words of Christ, but we don't always understand them. We need help to understand them. And I think this is where philosophy can come in as an aid or as an assistant to give us some language, give us some categories, to help us refine our understanding of what reality is so that we can better understand what it is that Christ has said in any place in scripture where Christ says various things, this being a particularly tricky one. Yeah. It's a great point that I think sometimes people don't realize that if we kind of shy away

from careful, intentional, philosophical thought, the alternative usually is just uncareful philosophy. And there's really no way to go about seeking to understand real presence without getting into some kind of philosophical categories. So basically, this interview is going to just explore your I'd love for people to learn about an incarnational model for the Eucharist. So I'm going to put up, this is a quote from one of the articles that you sent me that you've written. I'll read it and then I'll just ask you to kind of lay out a little bit of what is an incarnational model for real presence. You say the body of Christ uses the consecrated bread as an instrument. As such, the bread becomes part of Christ's body in the manner as the human nature becomes part of the composite Christ.

Thus, the sacramental union is an instrumental union just as the hypostatic and natural unions are. Maybe talk us through this and give us kind of an overview of what this view is and why you find it useful. Yeah, it was a lot packed into that quotation there. So thanks for finding that. I mean, how do we do this? So I think the first step actually is to do some Christology. So, and that's kind of where I, my kind of starting place is. The starting place actually is what Christ says. Okay, Christ says this is my body and that's kind of tricky and hard to understand that. Plenty of folks in the patristic period and on through kind of like a thread throughout Christian history have said,

well, something about the Eucharist and sacramental theology and Christology, there's connections there. There are ways in which these kind of two doctrinal areas are interrelated and, you know, mutually reinforcing or. or what have you. And in fact, there are plenty of folks who have said things like, well, you know, kind of like by analogy or by application, the way in which Christ is incarnate, the way in which the second person in Trinity is incarnate, can be utilized as a way of explaining how it is that Christ is present in the Lord's Supper. So I kind of take that. I think, well, let's really, let's really push that then. So let's think about our Christology, think about our Calcedonian definition there. And we say that the Orthodox line on Christ is that he's fully God and he's,

fully human, so two natures joined together in one person. This is the hypostatic union. Now, what's the hypostatic union? That's another tricky sort of way of kind of a tricky term to be explicating in our Christian theological frameworks. One way that some theologians have articulated what the hypostatic union is, is as like an instrumental union. So there's some kind of a joining together by efficient causality. of the human nature of Christ to the divine nature by means of the person using Christ's human nature as an instrument. I mean, I mean, don't mean an instrument in some kind of like denigrating kind of sense, but just sort of like as a means of extending one sort of like causal engagement with the world. Think of an instrument kind of in a neutral sort of sense there.

All right. So if that's, if that's kind of playing out there in Christology in order to join two things together, maybe we can also then apply that to Eucharistic theology as we're trying to join two things together. And that's then kind of the Christological or incarnational motif. Is it just as with Christ, we can say that Christ is fully God and fully a human being. So too, do I want to say on this incarnational model of the Eucharist, is the object there on the altar on the table that's fully, that's fully bred, continues to be bred, but also is the body of Christ. Same to with so too with the wine. that's wine, but also the blood of Christ. In Christology, we don't need to lose one or the other.

In fact, that's a Christological heresy if you lose one of the natures there. So why not then in Eucharistic theology? We also then say there are two things joined together in a union, a hypostatic like union, I want to say. It's not the hypostatic union, at least on my view, because that's what we have going on in Christology, but it's like the hypostatic union in terms of an instrumental union that we can call the sacramental union. How do we think about that? Okay, no, that's helpful. So I'm assuming that part of the goal here is to avoid some of the extremes in both directions of how real presence might be construed. It might be negated or construed too lightly or too loosely. On the other hand, it might be construed to mechanically, to carnally or crudely, possibly. Maybe I'd love to just see if you could reflect a little bit on that ladder danger. You know, for me, as I read through like the.

medieval development, especially leading up to Thomas Aquinas, there are views on the table that are pretty crude. I'm literally eating the flesh of Jesus. There's just no qualification whatsoever, and it gets into some dangerous territory there. But I'm curious, I guess, what do you see the dangers in that direction? Sure. Let me, if I, Mike, you brought up Aquinas and you brought up some of the, you know, the medieval discussions there as well. And I think what needs to be, one thing it needs to be, uh, specified is that the distinction between the official Roman Catholic view and what I'm offering here, this incarnational model, impanation is the term that gets used in the tradition there. So kind of like incarnation is incarnate like in fleshed impane. Panet is bread in Latin. So it's an impanation is like the incarnation. So impanation is shorthand for an incarnational model of the Eucharist. All right. But on transubstantiation has articulated in seed form, I'm I suppose in the early 13th century, then on through Aquinas, and then finally kind of codified in the Council of Trent.

It's not so much what is said about the presence of Christ's body that's different. It's what's said about the bread. So what's unique about the transestantiation is that the Roman Catholic has to say that the bread is no longer present. It's no longer there. Now, if they'll say like the empirical features of it, the accidental qualities, those are still there. It still looks, tastes, and seems like bread or what have you. But it actually isn't. The substance or the what it is of the thing has been removed and has been then replaced by

the substance or the what it is of Christ's body. So really, when you have that view, all you have is one thing there. You just have Christ's body. And you have all these like sort of like floating empirical features that are not actually connected to Christ's body. On the imponation view, I think, well, why do that? Why do we need to do that? We don't need to do that. We don't need to do that in Christology. We don't need to like, you know, remove the actual humanity of Christ in order for the divine nature to show up there and be present. We have two complete and whole nature's there, divine and human, joined together in the one person. Isn't that a simpler, more kind of like theologically economical way of thinking about how this might play out in the Eucharist?

So there's no need to deny the existence of bread. It looks like bread. It tastes like bread. It tastes like bread because it's bread. But that doesn't mean that Christ's presence can't be. There can't be there by means of his body because we think I think at least the instrumental union is what allows that to be incorporated into this larger hole that is that is christ's body so i think the advantage of the incarnational model over say the roman catholic model is that it uh it better utilizes christological categories and christological metaphysics in a way that the roman catholic view um doesn't and in fact actually uh folks like dun scotis and william ockham they noticed that as well So Scotus and Ockham both thought that impenician was a metaphysically more elegant and more simple way of articulating Christ's presence.

They just felt that Lateran 4 had required them to go with transubstantiation, which is the denial of the substance of Christ's body. So it's not really until we get to the later medieval period and then not until it's really codified at in some sense at Constance, Council of Constance in 1418 and later on at Trent, which is not until the 1560s that we actually get the full-blown Roman Catholic view. But of course, that's just contemporaneous with these other views, impenation, constantiation, and et cetera. So there's a little historical tidbit for you. Yeah. Well, let me ask about this, the history. And then also, maybe in a second I'll ask kind of,

how do you think a Roman Catholic might respond to this? Because I want to be as fair to them as possible. In my angle of approach to this, I've done a dialogue and then had some other emails and interactions with Brett Salkeld, who's a great Roman Catholic. theologian who's he's helped me understand. I mean, there are views even more sort of mechanical or more carnal or more flat in their construal of real presence, even more than transubstantiation. The transubstantiation is an alternative to that are coming along in the medieval era. So in my mind, I'm even thinking of those. I'm not necessarily just trying to criticize the Roman

Catholic view. I'm thinking of kind of all the options on the table. But just that is background. in agreement with you, when I look at church history, I tend to see more of this both-and way of thinking. From what I can tell, and the two church fathers that I see it the most explicitly in are Theodora and Augustine, where there's this both-and-it-its-explicitly Chalcedonian. It's just as Christ is both human and divine. So the consecrated host is both bread and the body of Christ, both wine and the blood of Christ. So that to me is so powerful. How do you think a Roman Catholic or someone who affirms a transubstantiation view, maybe even some of our Eastern Orthodox friends, how do you think they would respond to that appeal that this both and view has the greater portion of kind of historical tracking?

Well, I think on the Orthodox, I think actually it's quite harmonious with a lot of Orthodox themes within their theology. And the Orthodox don't have any kind of requirement in their canons to deny the existence of the bread. That's a purely Roman sort of like requirement there. And in fact, in my book, I interact with Sergei Bogov a bit and some other Orthodox thinkers who are also maybe not spelling out the metaphysics in the detail that I'm going into. But that same sort of theme of like, hey, Christ is two in one. And the Eucharist is an extension of or part of our incarnational thinking here. So how do we kind of articulate this duality in the Eucharist as in a similar manner as we articulate duality in Christology? So, you know, I tend to think these kind of like themes here holding both together.

This is more consonant with Orthodox, Lutheran, Eulcan kind of sensibilities, and not so much with Roman Catholic. Again, though, on the Roman Catholic, it's simply the, in my view, the requirement of the denial of the existence of the bread is what is really sort of sets that view apart from these other traditions. No such requirement about the denial of the existence of the bread is needed in Lutheran, English, and, you know, Orthodox kinds of settings. Now, why that? You know, my hunch is they were trying to really secure this, a conception of this being the body of Christ. So like, we really got to, we got to make sure we think that this object here is fully and completely the body of Christ. And Pope Innocent III at Lateran IV used this phrase, this word transestantiation, talk about the change of the substance, and then folks were kind of off to

the races trying to figure out how to secure the real presence with this one sort of like philosophical term that was used there in the early 13th century. But I don't think it was necessary that they had to go towards this denial of the bread. It became necessary, again, as I mentioned at Constance and then later on at Trent, such that today, that's just what one has to do if one's going to be a faithful Roman Catholic. Protestant here, you know, I think that was a bit of an error. I think that was a mistake. I think one didn't have to do that in order to get the goods of the real presence of Christ. And I think these other traditions, these other models, even these other models here in the medieval scholastic period make good on that, on that desiderata. Let me ask you this. One of the questions

that comes up with Thomas is whether a dog that eats the bread is feasting on Christ in any sense. And he's got different kinds of distinctions about that for your view on this. And for a for an, incarnational view or impanation. How would you answer that question of if a dog or, and then I'm also curious about an unbeliever, someone who doesn't have true faith? In what sense do you see them as feasting on Christ if they're partaking of the host? Yeah, great question. So I actually think that's a secondary question to the presence issue.

So whether or not you say this is the value of Christ or how you explain the metaphysics is a different question from who receives a. and how does one receive it and under what conditions does one receive it or even under what conditions does the body of Christ show up there so in my book i place a lot of emphasis on the instrumental efficacy of christ's work like christ's kind of like causal power and i place a lot i mean call me a little bardian here but i put a lot of emphasis on christ's freedom to show up where he wants to show up when he wants to show up so i think the incarnation for instance is a contingent event it's not necessary god in his good pleasure, in his grace, in his freedom became incarnate. The second person in

Trinity became incarnate, but there was nothing necessary or required about that. It was all a contingent act. And I think the medieval scholastics have shown us that if an act is a contingent act, it can be it can be ceased, it can be stopped. It wasn't necessary for God to do this. He could stop doing it. So too then with Christ's presence in the Eucharist. Christ is choosing to operate with, to use this object for his purposes, for his good pleasure, to, you know, encourage the hearts of the faithful, to unite himself to those who are following him, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When he does or when he doesn't, that's kind of up to Christ. And so I'm of mine that to say, like, within our Elycan tradition and three in our articles,

we tend to say that the wicked to use 16th century language there, an unbeliever, doesn't eat the body of Christ, even if they eat the sacrament. I think that that's great. We can make that work on this sort of metaphysical arrangement and just say, like, when Christ or the unbeliever or the dog or the church mouse or whoever is going to eat that object there, Christ has ceased to use it. He's no longer using it for his purposes, and therefore he doesn't necessarily eat that object. Now he could, I think, Christ has the freedom. Christ could make himself show up wherever he wants to for whatever purpose he wants to. I don't think we have any basis for assuming or holding that Christ is going to show up in all these ways that are unrelated to sort of our, you know,

sanctification, our growth in holiness, and et cetera. So, you know, for all I know, Christ can make his body present, you know, at the bottom of the ocean. But I have no idea if that's actually the case there. What I do think, though, is that Christ is showing up for us, you know, for us and for us and for our salvation. He comes to us, and he's with us always for the betterment of our souls, that we who are receiving it in faith can be confident that Christ is coming to us. Right. Okay. Interesting. Do you think it's fair to say that on an incarnational view, one could go either way on addressing this question of whether the unbeliever or the mouse feasts on Christ. Okay.

So that's kind of a separate issue then. It is, right. So, I mean, Lutheran, I mean, Luther was big on this, that the wicked do, you know, the unbeliever do eat the actual body and blood of Christ. They eat so to their detriment, to their damnation, to their condemnation. He thought that that's how the best way to understand what Paul's talking about in First Corinthians. I think on my kind of metaphysical model, you can go that way. That's no problem.

You can take that view or you can take this more, a little bit more. reform leaning view, which 39 articles like lead towards, and that's fine, because it's a, it's a subsequent or downstream issue from whether or not, or how we understand the presence of Christ in the elements themselves. Okay. Let me ask one more question about the view itself, and then we'll get into some practical questions, too. So I want to tee up an objection that you raise in your article in religious studies, and then so I'll just read how you phrased the objection here, and then I'll let you respond to this. The objection is, the liturgical utterance that is the impetus for real presence theories is not this is part of Christ or this is part of

the body of Christ, but this is the body of Christ. Does not a real presence theory require that recipients receive the whole body of Christ in the Eucharist? Why should we be satisfied with a metaphysical state of affairs that only gives us part of the body of Christ? How would you interact with that concern? Yeah, good objection I made myself there. So you can see a little bit how this kind of plays out when we think about the Christological situation there. When you think about Christ, we think of Christ being two, you know, divine and human, joined up into one, into one person there. On one sort of extrication of Christology, especially kind of some contemporary analytic discussions, there's a way of thinking about that by thinking about these two natures is actually parts

of the composite Christ. That is, Christ is a whole, you know, the person as a whole, any has these parts to him, divine and human. So you might be kind of like, oh, you know, I see Jesus walking down the street and like, you know, I'm only seeing part of him because I'm not seeing the divine nature. Well, the divine nature is invisible or what have you, you know, are you getting a diminished view of Christ because you only see his human nature? Well, no, because we think that the union is sort of like triangulating you to the divine nature and you can't really see the divine nature anyway. It's invisible with spirit, what have you. Well, so too then what I think, it's going on in the Eucharist, just like there's a part of Christ that's part of the whole.

So too, any part of your body is part of your whole. And in fact, in some sense, we kind of like speak this way all the time. You know, if you're a, I don't know, your, your kid comes up to you and you're saying hello to them and you give them a side hug, you know, and your arm is just like touching their shoulder and their back, you'd say, I just hug my son. Well, you didn't touch every single part of your son. You didn't take the total. of him, you know, you hug part of him. But that's sufficient for thinking that, yeah, you actually hug, you know, you hug your, you hug your son. You touched part of your son. You touched, you know, a part of this person. But by means of touching part, you got the whole as well. So too, then,

when we think both Christologically and we think about sort of bodily presence in something like the Eucharist. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. Well, I think people watching this will see how helpful your work is on this and hopefully be motivated to check out your, your, your book and some of your other works on this if they want to go deeper. Let me ask you some kind of practical questions about, you know, especially from an ecumenical standpoint, how do we come together? This has always been a source of grief for me that many of the things Christ gives us to celebrate our unity turn out to be the very occasions for division. And the sacraments would be one example of that. Spiritual gifts would be another. But with the sacraments, you know, one of my greatest reasons I

I love Protestant views is that they don't necessarily restrict a valid Eucharist as much as sometimes happens in some of the other traditions. This is actually probably my biggest concern on this whole topic is the restriction of a valid Eucharist. And so I'm kind of curious for you, you know, I hold to a spiritual presence view like John Calvin's view. You've charted out all these different options that are out there on the table. where do you see, where can a valid Eucharist occur on your, from your perspective? Yeah. Yeah. So again, I hate to be like the philosopher making these fine distinctions, but I think there is a

distinction there. Your view on the metaphysics and your view on the presence is actually related to, but not necessarily. It's independent of these other issues in terms of like persistence of presence, the valid form, the valid effector, you know, minister or what have you. You know, you could. I mean, there's nothing, I think, inherently, you know, logically impossible about having a very low, ordinary view of the Eucharist, but thinking, like, it can only be done in this very specific way, you know, like only on Thursdays in July, can a Baptist minister create, you know, the Lord's Supper or what have you. Okay, I mean,

that's kind of an odd view. But I mean, so the metaphysics and the presence is different from issues of validity, I think. Likewise, you know, I think on the view that I have, the incarnational view of the presence, that can be affected or brought about in lots of different traditions. In fact, that's just kind of what I thinking any time there is a Lord's Supper, whether you know it or not, whether you think it or not. So, you know, surprise, Baptist, I think you're getting Christ's body and blood, you know. Now, that's a little bit cheeky there, but what I mean by that is that it's just a distinction there. Now, so we pivot to other kinds of like theological sort of framework.

Within my sort of English and ecclesiological, you know, framework here, we think that, or I tend to think that, for instance, who can come to the Lord's Supper, you know, baptism is the only requirement for coming to the Lord's Supper. So baptism as, you know, both either profession of faith or infant baptism, that that's what we show that we're members of the covenant community. You can take a little more reformed understanding of that. You can take a more sort of Catholic understanding of what it means to be part of like the church. But that's what's what's necessary there. You know, we tend to think that it's, well, I mean, even with the Anglicanism, there's a spectrum. I tend to think that there is a, there's a benefit to sort of like a system by which the church authorizes particular individuals to play particular roles in the life of the family, the life of the church,

the life of the community. And I think the ordination is the way towards that. In our tradition, we have priests are the ones who do the ones who do the life of the community. the Lord's Supper deacons serve at or administer the sacrament but don't actually do the consecration themselves. You know, is that a necessary sort of thing? In my mind, that's a way of appropriating sort of the tradition that we have received within our tradition. I think within broad sort of like Catholic lower case C tradition, but the best ways of enacting the Lord's Supper. Again, freedom of Christ, I'm not going to say that Christ can't show up or won't show up

in other places and other times. I'm not going to place those restrictions on Christ. I don't always have confidence that I know that he's going to do that, whereas I have more confidence. This is from my perspective, kind of an epistemic position. I have more confidence in my knowledge that Christ is showing up when I'm utilizing, when we are utilizing the forms that are given to us in Scripture and the tradition. So it's kind of like a theological wisdom sort of like move, not like a metaphysical necessity kind of understanding of where we see, you know, valid, quote unquote, Eucharists. Okay. So I'm noticing that absent in your answer is any conception of apostolic succession where you have to have a lineage of bishops laying

hands on one another for a valid Eucharist? Would that be accurate for your view? It's absent from my view, but there are certainly Eilacons that think that. I'm of an alican perspective. There's a dispute with an alicanism with an apostolic succession and the office of the bishop is for the essay of the church or the Bene essay, essay being the being of the church, Benei essay being the well-being of the church. I'm a well-being perspective, which is a stream within Elycanism, and there are essay folks as well that think that, no, you have to have a bishop in order for this to be the church.

We can get into ecclesiological discussions if you want to, but that's a little bit tangential to the metaphysics of Christ's presence in the Eucharist. Right. No, no, I appreciate you letting me kind of throw out some things off the cuff here. The reason I think of that is just because of my appreciation for your comments about how, for example, Baptists may be unknowingly feasting on Christ in certain ways. And that was one of the questions I was going to ask you that you sort of already answered there. And that is, does someone need to believe in real presence in order to experience it? Because my intuition is very similar to yours, that the answer is no. And that sometimes someone might be not having all of these philosophical categories in their mind, but they might just be there in their church.

with the bread and the wine, thinking, thank you, Jesus. I'm experiencing you right now in a way that I can't even articulate, you know? I don't have the words. I don't have the categories, but it's still going on. Sure. As I said earlier, it's from Anselm. It's faith seeking understanding. But what's faith? Faith is a supernatural gift of the Holy Spirit. Faith is not something that I'm like doing or what have you. Like, I've got to figure something out. Faith is something that I'm something that I am receiving by grace of the Holy Spirit. You know, so if you're simply a baptized Christian who's like thinking like, Jesus is doing something, you know, there's bread, there's wine, something's going on.

I love God. I have faith in God. The Holy Spirit, you know, help me to receive what it is that you're offering me. That's great. You know, that that's fantastic. My hope is then that we all, all Christians will probe a little bit, you know, as we grow, when it's mature, we, you know, we move from the milk to the meat, so to speak, as Paul's phrase goes there. And we think a bit more deeply, not because we're trying to, like, solve something or, like, figure it out in order, like, you know, I don't know, control it, but more because this is an act of love. This is an act of exploration of who God is and what he's done for us. And I think he's given us these, you know, rational capacities, what have you, to probe into these, into these mysteries.

But they're mysteries. We're never going to be able to exhaust the incarnation. or the sacramental presence or any aspect of God. It's always kind of further up and further in with respect to how we're understanding God. So I hope actually that's encouraging. We're never going to be done. We're never done doing theology, but we can continue to grow in our knowledge and love of God through our exploration. Totally. Oh, yeah. My favorite line of Calvin and the institutes on this is when he says,

I'd rather experience it than understand it. But I don't want to wield that in the sense of just like you're saying. We don't want to say we shouldn't seek understanding of it. it, but there is this experiential dynamic of it. And hopefully, if nothing else, people watching this video or listening to it if they do the podcast, hopefully they'll just be a sense of, this is such a wonderful gift that Christ has given us. And something very intimate is happening through the Lord's Supper, something very wonderful and mystical and beautiful that we want to experience this. We want to partake of it. Let me ask you another practical question. We're

nearing the end here, but a lot of my viewers may be in a situation that has a very low view of the Eucharist, but they're exploring, they're learning, and they're desiring to kind of push into a richer experience of the Eucharist. Maybe they're at a church, maybe it's a pastor who's at a church that historically has had like a Zvinglian view, and they're trying to help their congregation move forward, or maybe they're just a participant. Do you have any suggestions on kind of just practically how a church can give more consideration to this in terms of, of the practicalities of it, the very aesthetics of it, questions of frequency. What goes through your mind for how you'd give someone counsel? Yeah, no, it's a great question. And I think this is

kind of a phenomenon we're seeing in kind of these low church, you know, non-denominational environments. I've had friends that are, there are church planters in like non-denom environments and they are doing storefront churches with like 20 people and they're being drawn to like weekly communion. They're thinking like this is this is part of our worship here. And this is as integral to our experience of Christianity as preaching and as singing songs and what have you. And I think that they're tapping into an intuition that has long been part of the Christian tradition. So I say, go for it. You know, more power to you. So you might just start there in terms of frequency, you know, whether if you're if you're going from a quarterly thing, maybe a quarterly celebration,

maybe you think about monthly. If you're at monthly, maybe you think about twice a month, you know. And so weekly has been the long tradition in many corners of Christianity. And I think that would be a great sort of target to get towards. And, you know, it doesn't take that long. That's always the allegation I hear is like, oh, who's going to stick around to do this kind of thing? It's like, well, I mean, you know, you can do a good sermon in X amount of time, and you can do the Eucharist in a good amount of time, too. And if it's important, like, people are going to want that. And I think people do, people do want that. You know, other kinds of, like, aesthetic aspect of things, like, I'm big on, like, the common loaf and the common cup, you know, because I think

the Eucharist is not just about our union with God. It is that. It's about this vertical union, but it's also about this like horizontal union with us and all other Christians. You mentioned kind of that, that unity sort of thing there. You know, we have one loaf here that we, that we break and we take off. And I think in many ways that follows the biblical pattern. You know, I don't think Christ had at the last supper a whole bunch of little, like, tiny wafers that were all over the place that he was passing out. He probably had like a loaf of bread. And he was ripping pieces off, and he was giving that to the people who are, to the disciples around the table.

Why not pattern our practices on that as well, similar with a common cup? And I, you know, I get the germs and I get, you know, COVID and all that kind of stuff and people want their own little individually, you know, hermetically sealed shot glasses and that sort of thing. Okay, I can understand that. But what about that cup there?

What about actually sharing from the same cup, where we have one bread, we have one cup that we share, which more clearly shows this like horizontal connectivity that we have with the Christians that we're presently celebrating with, then I think Christians across time and space even. So I might kind of move in frequency and then commonality. It might be two sort of like encouragements to those who want to like begin to experience a deeper kind of sense of what the Lord's Supper can be for them and their congregations.

That's really helpful. And I'll just share when I was a pastor in case this helps pastors out there, I took our congregation through the book by Thomas Watson called The Lord's Supper. Really short read, not too long. and lay Christians can get into it. It's not too technical. And it's also very devotional. It's not just about the theology.

It's very practical. Short book in the Puritan paperback series. That was really fruitful for us. We would pass it out, get together on a Saturday, and just discuss it. And just the very reflection on it started to knock dominoes over that helped us then think about practical things. So I just mentioned that in case it's helpful. I think my burden on this topic is a lot of Protestants think, well, if I want to experience a rich theology of the Eucharist, I have to leave Protestantism. And they may not even,

number one, they may not know all the riches of what is in Protestantism as your work, for example, helps us understand. They also may not realize the exclusivity of the system they're then stepping into, which will say, for example, that I've never had the Eucharist once in my life, never had a valid Eucharist once in my life, according to some systems of theology out there. So that's a burden on my heart. I don't know if you want to comment on that at all. Oh, no, totally. That's, I mean, we may, I'm going to share some sympathetic, some, some views here because that is kind of my take is that there's lots within Protestantism that one can remain faithful to. And I kind of think, as I mentioned

before, I kind of came from like low church non-denominational environments. You know, and one thing that we could emphasize, I think, in these contexts was like the preaching. You know, it's coming into contact with the word, you know, the word read and the word preached. And I thought, and then it's sort of like the penny drop him is like, oh, I can also come in contact with the word through his body and blood. So this isn't like in competition with the word preach or the word red. This actually augments and comes alongside of and is complementary to my experience of the second person of the Trinity. That's a very Protestant sort of like value that we have there as then just being expressed in a way that ties in with other sort of like, you know, tradition throughout the course of of Christian history.

So you can be a faithful Protestant and have a high sacramental view. And there may be some Protestant denominations within which it's easier to do that. Maybe Elyken, maybe Lutheran, maybe a Lutheran, maybe Presbyterian or high church, you know, Methodist or what have you. But that's not necessary. You know, one can try to find that even within the traditions they find themselves in if they're in these sort of more, you know, ordinary low church kind of traditions as well. Totally. And even among the Baptists, there are these movements of people trying to reclaim some of our own heritage on that, which we've largely. forgotten and we have an impoverished view as too often. So we have a lot of reforming to do.

But I love that combination in a worship service of the word preached and then a response of taking of Holy Communion is such a wonderfully wonderful sort of one-two combination for how we're encountering the Lord. So hopefully we'll be encouraging people to think about that. Let me ask you one kind of last substantive question and then I'll just finish with asking you about reading suggestions, if you have any. But I wanted to ask about John 6. And then the reason is, and basically just always comes up in the YouTube comments. You know, people always reference John 6.

And I think I often feel that people maybe haven't thought through the complexities of this. John 6 occurs before the Lord's Supper has been instituted. So I'll share my take on this and then, you know, tell me how you, how this strikes you. Because you're an expert on this topic and I'm not. But my feeling is John 6 is speaking. So for those just following along, John 6 is where Jesus speaks of eating his body and drinking his blood. But my feeling is this is talking about a larger spiritual reality. The Eucharist being the pinnacle expression of that reality, but not the exhaustive expression of that.

So that we can speak of even Old Testament saints feasting on Christ in a sense. Yeah. And then when the Eucharist, so the Eucharist has a relation to John 6, but it's not a kind of flat correspondence without any qualification. That's kind of my thinking about this. I'm just curious how that strikes you and how you help people think about that. I like that a lot. When I was writing my book on the Eucharist, I studied John 6 a lot and did some thorough exegetical and commentary work on it. And I kind of came to the point where I was like, No one has this figured out. And I'm not going to figure this out right now. And also, I don't think actually I need it. Like what I was looking at scripturally from the synoptics, you know, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and also then in Paul. Like, that was kind of building the biblical case that I thought was right there.

And so I didn't need to bring in, you know, make a decision on a kind of controversial passage there like John 6. Because again, people use it one way the other. I said, well, obviously Jesus says, eat my flesh. And so therefore, a little interpretation. And then someone says, like, well, obviously he meant that as a metaphor because the spirit gives life and the flesh prophet is nothing. It's like, well, okay, neither of those are obvious because they're both there and they're kind of mutually contradicting one another there. So I don't think you need John Six, as I kind of articulated, in order to get to kind of a real presence understanding within the biblical theological sort of framework. But I do think that you put your finger on something that is apt.

And that is, I think the Eucharist, this may be extreme, but the Eucharist is both literal and metaphorical. Okay. So like what you're saying there is that there is this kind of like reality going on here about what I would say is our union with Christ. We are joined to Christ. This is a Pauline sort of metaphor, but it's also a Joheenian metaphor. You know, the divine the branches. That's also another way of describing this connectivity to Christ that we have by means of the Holy Spirit and our, yeah, in this union with Christ. As you put it there, the Eucharist is like the pinnacle of that, or it's the

clearest form of that, or maybe it's the archetype, or you can kind of use some sort of language there. It's also literally the case, in my view, that the body and blood of Christ are present there and that we are joined to his body, but it's also pointing to a greater reality, too. The greater reality that I think, as you're saying there, that I'm agreeing with, that John 6 is also pointing to, and also John 15 in the vine of branches, like I mentioned, is also pointing there as well. So there's there's different ways of articulating this grander reality. One of those is specifically Eucharistic, which is also indicating illiteral reality. That's helpful. Well, James, it's great to talk to you and thanks for your work in this area.

I think it'll be really helpful for people. I'll put a link in the video description to some of your stuff, especially to the book on the incarnational model. Final thoughts here would just be, I'd love to ask for any recommended reading beyond that book, anything that you think would be helpful? You know, a lot of people might be watching this and they're just saying, I just need to learn more. I need to kind of dive in. I need some starting books or other things to look into. What would you recommend? Yeah, great. Sure. Well, yeah, you could read my book and read the footnotes. That's probably a good place to do some billiography stuff. You know, I was very influenced by George Hunzinger's book in 2008, Eucharist and

ecumenism. That was in the same Cambridge series that my book came out in. A bit more, you know, that's kind of heavy theological, but he's kind of coming from this more reformed perspective and trying to tap into some of these themes. And I actually think that the view I articulate kind of dovetails nicely with his view. So that's a good place to go there as well. You know, in the Orthodox dream, I really like Sergei Belgakov's work, the Eucharist in the Holy Grail, I think, is the one that his book that I was interacting with the most, or what was the my camera exactly. Alexander Schmayman too, his work from the Orthodox angle, for the life of the world and his book on the Eucharist are lovely and a bit more accessible too.

He's kind of writing a little bit more like a popular audience, more of like an orthodox specific audience, but also one that is, I think, a bit more accessible to those who are kind of the, you know, the not the initiated theologians or what have you. And then I've got a book coming out in a few years, hopefully I'm writing it right now, which is an introduction to eucharistic theology, which will lay out this sort of spectrum here. In a way, hopefully it'll be accessible to like, you know, the undergrad or kind of lay audience sort of approach there. Lay out the spectrum, do a bit of historical work there, but also kind of a more appropriate things of theologically. Sorry, one more book that I just remembered from the historical side of things,

which is Gary Macy's The Banquet, sorry, the Feast. I'm trying to look for it right now. I can send it to you, you can link it there, but Gary Macy was a particular Eucharistic theologian or sacramental theologian, he's written a couple of books, more on the history of things, which is a great kind of introduction if you want to do this historical survey, historical overview, sort of the thing. And then finally, sorry, I forgot a technical book there. If you really want to get into the medieval scholastic debates, Marilyn McCord-Adams's later medieval theories of the Eucharist, that is good stuff right there.

It's a bit of heavy lifting, but if you're really trying to understand what's going on in these medieval metaphysical discussions, And trying to get a flavor, too, for the actual fair amount of diversity within medieval discussions, that's a good place to go. Fascinating. Okay. Well, I'm going to link to several of those. I'll definitely link to the Hunsinger book because I agree. That one, to me, was kind of a standout book that helped me.

But several of those other books I might want to get now if I could find the time to read more on this topic. But James, thanks for your work on this. Thanks for the conversation. Hopefully we could keep talking about these topics. I think they're so interesting to people. and they're so needed right now, especially for a lot of Protestant churches who do have an impoverished work. So grateful for the time.

Thanks for taking the time to chat. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. All right, everybody. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time.