Truth Unites - Answering Taylor Marshall on the Eucharist

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

Gavin Ortlund responds to Taylor Marshall on the nature of real presence in the Eucharist.   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: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/  

Taylor Marshall put out a tweet about the Eucharist recently. He said, Dear Protestant friends, you're attacking Catholics because we believe the Holy Eucharist is really the body and blood of Christ. We get it. Y'all were not the first. John 6.67. After this, many of his disciples went back and walked no more with him. Please know that 100% of all early Christians believed in the real presence.

Y'all broke away and said, it's a community memorial service that we do maybe once a month. Welch's grape juice in plastic shot glasses isn't Christianity. Please study scripture in the early church. Now, I thought it would be worth engaging this a little bit because this is a common way of kind of framing the differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants about the Eucharist or the Lord's Supper or communion, as it's called various terms. And this kind of rhetoric, I know Protestants will often feel annoyed with this immediately, but I think we can also recognize that this rhetoric gains traction because there is a lot of Protestant eucharistic practice that is kind of anemic and shallow, and it's fair game to criticize Protestant practice. that is bad where it does exist. But it's not fair to frame the Protestant Catholic conversation about the Eucharist, as Marshall does here, as though there's this singular view from which the Protestants jump off and depart,

just like the unbelievers in John 6, who reject Jesus' words. So in this video, let's frame what the differences are between Catholics and Protestants on the Eucharist, and specifically looking back to the on-the-ground realities of the 16th century, What were the reformers actually responding to? You know, I would say, and I've said this many times, eucharistic theology was as important as anything involved in the Protestant Reformation. There were basically five issues going on on the ground. Number one, transubstantiation as the mechanism of real presence,

not real presence as such, but how that's understood. Number two, communion in one kind only. The reformers were saying we need both the bread and the wine. Number three, infrequent participation. Most people got the Eucharist once a year in one kind. The Protestants were saying we needed a lot more. Number four, adoring or spectating rather than eating and drinking. Protestants were saying, you can't just watch it.

The consecrated host go by on the street. You have to eat and drink and imbibe it into your body. And number five, superstitious belief and practice, which unfortunately was very common. So let's work through this by examining each of Marshall's sentences. First, he says you're attacking Catholics because we believe the Holy Eucharist is really the body and blood of Christ. But the primary battlefront of the Reformation was not, the Roman Catholics on one side affirming the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the Protestants on the other rejecting it. Most of the early Protestants affirmed real presence. What they rejected was

the particular required understanding of that from the Catholic side, and that's transubstantiation. I'll put up the definition of transubstantiation from the Catholic Catechism in just a second, but just to observe where the fault line is here first. This is the view that is required at the Council of Trent. What is anathematized by the Council of Trent is not just a memorialist view that rejects real presence, but rather any understanding of real presence other than transubstantiation. I'll put up this canon, for example, where you can, if you pause and read through, you can see the word conjointly here.

This is targeting various views in the realm of consubstantiation, which will define in just a second. So the point is, the Council of Trent isn't saying if anyone denies real presence anathema. It's saying if anyone denies transubstantiation anathema. So we can put up a couple of different options. This is one way to do it. It's a bit crude and rough, but you can think of a taxonomy of four possible views about the relation of the bread and wine to the body and blood of Christ. Memorialism denies real presence and thinks the words, this is my body and this is my blood symbolic and only symbolic. Consubstantiation is a complicated term. It's kind of itself a taxonomy of different views, but basically they're all having to do in some way where you've got the substance of

the bread and wine coexisting with the substance of the body and blood of Christ. So it's more of a both and. Spiritual presence views in the reform tradition, I think it's the second one I put up on the screen there, these affirm that we truly feast on Christ. Christ is objectively present in the elements, but in a spiritual and kind of dynamic manner. I'll flush that out a little bit in just a second. But the point for now is just to observe that the Council of Trent is anathematizing not just option one, but one through three. And let's be clear that options two and three there really are various kinds of real presence. Okay. Here's, so let's flush this out just a little bit. I've gone into this a little more elsewhere, but here's an example from John Calvin in the institutes.

I hear this all the time. People say, ah, spiritual presence isn't a real, real presence view. I don't think that's fair. And actually thoughtful people on the other side recognize. Now, this is a function of labels. Maybe the label spiritual presence isn't the best. I actually think it's a fine label, but for whatever reason, maybe it trips people up. John Calvin is very clear. Okay, this is not an empty sign. Basically, what he's saying in this passage is, we truly feast on Christ's flesh and we drink his blood. We are one with him in that act.

This nourishes us, and it seems incredible that it could happen. How can Christ be our food when he's so far away? Well, the Holy Spirit can do miracles. The Holy Spirit can do things we can't understand. He can unite what is separated by space. Then he speaks of our experience of Christ in the Eucharist as a kind of transfusion. Quote, that sacred communion of flesh and blood by which Christ transfuses his life into us.

Just as if it penetrated our bones and marrow, he testifies and seals in the supper. And that, not by presenting a vain or empty sign, but by their exerting an efficacy of the spirit by which he fulfills what he promises. So the great emphasis in a reformed view of spiritual presence is union with Christ. The experience of Christ in the Eucharist is one aspect of our broader communion with Christ that we experience through our union with Him. It's just as mystical as our union with Christ. As you see Calvin's view developed, it's very clear this is a form of real presence in the

way it gets cashed out by his followers like Martin Busser, Heinrich Bollinger, Peter Mortar Vermegris, Thomas Cranmer. They are rejecting a carnal understanding of real presence, but they're saying, no, we truly feast on Christ through the elements. That's the reform view. We know the Lutherans have a very robust doctrine of real presence. They don't always like the term consubstantiation, but they're definitely in the realm of real presence. Later Protestant traditions like the Methodists affirm real presence, even historic Baptists believe in real presence as I document in this video. It was really just the Zvinglians who rejected real presence, and this was controversial.

It famously led to the rupture with Luther in the 1529 Marburg colloquy. So this first sentence for Marshall is it really needs to be retired, even though this is a very common talking point. We got to get beyond this. This is kind of a cheap talking point that gets its energy and traction by just seizing upon some popular-level Protestant practice. But it completely glosses over where the real discussion has been happening historically, happens in ecumenism today, happens among thoughtful participants in each side and so forth.

What the Protestants were arguing was, yes, in the Eucharist, we feast on Christ, but that doesn't mean transubstantiation. So transubstantiation, I'll put up how it's defined in the Catholic Catechism, by the consecration of the bread and wine, there take place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ, our Lord, and of the substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This is a very specific interpretation of real presence. And what the Protestants were arguing was this is more of a medieval development or extension, not the patristic testimony. That is to say, not what you get. This isn't the general framework of the church fathers. Now, this is complicated, because we're dealing with different

language in the medieval era than you find in the church fathers. So it's a question, so the language is tricky, so I'm not acting like this is simple. But to try to be brief here, transubstantiation is using a very specific ontology or philosophy of being from Aristotle in which you distinguish between the substance and the accidents. The church fathers, what the early Protestants were all arguing is that the church fathers didn't think like that. Even if you use different terms, they tended to think more in Chalcedonian categories for real presence. It's a both and, just as Christ is both God and manned, so the Eucharistic species is both bread and Christ's body, both wine and Christ's blood. And they were arguing from the patristic testimony. You can read through Thomas Cranmer's

defense of basically spiritual presence view, how I would put this in terms of a taxonomy, and he's just going on and on from origin and from Augustin and from Ambrose and from Theodort and so forth. Same thing if you read through this amazing book by Peter Martyr-Mariegly. This is a great new edition of this. He's saying the same thing. He's, you know, it's like, dozens of pages just documenting, quoting church father after church father after church father after church father. Now, you can say they're wrong. You can say Kranmer and Vermeagli misread the church fathers, okay? You can say transubstantiation is the patristic view. It's just being articulated with little different terms there, or you can say it's kind of organically developing. Okay,

fine, that's all complicated. But the idea that the Protestants just reject real presence altogether, it just completely skirts over where our differences actually lie. Now, if you want to get really good, I've done a lot of reading on this, and I want to commend good books. I'll have some more good books at the very end of this video. If you want to get a really good book that kind of works through, what exactly is a view like Peter Marta Vermeglies, the spiritual presence view? This amazing book by George Hunsinger, the Eucharist and Ecumenism, goes through this. He uses the term trans-elementation to describe Vermegli's view. Okay? The imagery here is a metal rod put into a fire, and the rod takes on the heat and quality of the fire,

but it remains a metal rod. It doesn't melt away into the fire or something like that. There's no transubstantiation going on. It's still just a rod, but it's now also a part of the fire, dynamically taking on the quality of the fire. It's more of a both-hand. And on pages 74 and 75 of this book, he has these 11 bullet points where he distinguishes how transubstantiation and trans-elementation are different. He says transubstantiation focuses mainly on the idea of descent, trans-elementation on that of elevation. Trans-substantiation asserts that one substance is transmuted into another, trans-elementation, that one object is suffused with another's reality and power. Trans-substantiation concentrates mainly on the agency of the priest as exercised through the words of

institution, trans-elementation on the age of the Holy Spirit as invoked by the prayer, the opening prayer. Transubstantiation envisions a more fixed relation, trans-elementation, a more dynamic relation. For transubstantiation, the relation is that of one-sided containment, for trans-elementation of mutual indwelling. Trans-substantiation asserts that the body of Christ is enclosed in the consecrated bread, trans-elementation that Christ, by his spirit, assimilates the consecrated bread to his life-giving flesh so that it becomes one with the bread by which it is imparted. Oh, man, I could, you want to read more of these.

I feel like if I keep on just reading from the book, but I'm trying to give you, it'll get too boring, or it's not boring, but just I'll lose people with the details. We're getting into the weeds here. But I'm trying to convey just how nuanced it gets when you're trying to get into the differences between these different theories of real presence, because we're all our traditions.

We're all trying to articulate something deeply mysterious. because something mystical is happening here. But that's the kind of discussion that needs to be had, okay? Just acting like the Protestants are like the people in John 6th who just reject real presence altogether. This is not good. Another helpful thing is James Arcandi has done some great work on this. I did a video with him, you can see.

He argues for a sort of incarnational model of the Eucharist as well. It's a little different from this. and he has a great taxonomy of these different options. He's kind of mapped out where they all land. So you can see his work. Maybe that interview would be a good introduction to that. The point is, can we please retire this unfortunate caricature of Protestants rejecting real presence? And Protestants, can we take some ownership for this by reforming our practice and going back to our own roots?

You might be like, well, I'm a Baptist. Okay, go back to historic Baptist views. That's what I'm trying to say, you know. All right. Here's the next sentence from Marshall. He says, we get it, y'all want out the first, and then he quotes John 6. Now, here we have, so what we've already said can show that it's unfair to give a flat identification between Protestants and the unbelievers in John 6, as though, you know, the Roman Catholics believe John 6 and the Protestants disbelieve John 6. But we can already see why that will be problematic,

but we can go a step further here because John 6 has a lot to teach us about the nature of real presence and how it relates to union with Christ. There's a lot more reflection that needs to be done about this passage. This is where Jesus famously teaches that unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Now sometimes the discussion here gets framed like this. Some people say, on the one hand, feasting on Christ's flesh and drinking his blood in this passage simply is the Eucharist. And others say it has nothing to do with the Eucharist. and I think both of those are a mistake. We have to remember that the Eucharist had not been instituted yet at the time of this teaching.

So if Jesus is directly and exclusively talking about the Eucharist, his teaching would not be actionable to his contemporaries or even comprehensible. Jesus would be saying, in effect, if you don't eat me and drink me, you won't have eternal life. Therefore, wait around for a few more years until I institute the Eucharist, and then you'll be able to do what I'm talking about and even understand what I'm talking about. From a reform perspective, we would say

that feasting on Christ is a larger category, grounded in union with Christ, and the Eucharist is a kind of pinnacle expression of that reality. But it's not the only instantiation of feasting on Christ. And this is why we would say, even in the Old Testament, we can speak of people feasting on Christ.

And this is how Paul speaks in 1st Corinthians 10, 3 to 4, of the people under Moses. Now I go more into that, my dialogue with Brett Salkeld, which you can check out if you're interested at the great channel, Gospel Simplicity, check out his channel. That leads to Marshall's next sentence, and I'm going to come back to Brett Salkeld's work on this in a second. Marshall says, please know that 100% of all early Christians believe in the real presence. Now, I believe in real presence. I would definitely agree that some species of real presence is the predominating view of church history.

But this statement is historically naive. It's one of those things that I'm hoping we can kind of to put on the shelf and move beyond. Transubstantiation was officially defined in the 13th century as an alternative, not just to memorialist views, which did exist at that time, but also as an alternative to more crude and literalistic understandings of feasting on Christ, which also existed. So you have transubstantiation defined at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and then it's reaffirmed at the Council of Trent in the 16th century. The defining feasting. here, again, the Aristotelian ontology, the substance accidents distinction, is a very specific way of understanding real presence. And this, you know, as I've argued, I don't think that's

as patristic. But what we can observe for now is this. That view is emerging as an alternative to other extremes on either side. So in the 9th century, you see a debate between two monks, Ratromnis, who advocated for a spiritual interpretation of the Eucharist in which the elements represents Christ's body and blood figuratively, and then Pascasius Red Burtas, who advocated for more of a realist view in which the elements are identified with Christ's body and blood at the moment of consecration. Later on, Berengar of Tours advocated for more of a spiritual understanding of real presence in the 11th century, and this view falls afoul of transubstantiation. So the first thing that you can see is just that the idea that everybody believed in real

presence is just false. Okay, most people did, but retromness existed, and he wasn't kicked out of the church, and he wasn't disciplined for his view. You could say retromness was wrong, but he existed. It's not like the, you know, so we just got to know the history, but the more important thing to point out now is that the Roman Catholic view that eventually emerged transubstantiation was not just trying to correct retromness and Berengar. It was trying to correct overly crude and mechanical understandings of real presence on the other side of them.

And this is something that Brett Salkeld talks about in his book Transubstantiation, which I think is kind of the best of the Catholic side of things on these discussions. He very carefully combs through this medieval development, and he points out that when Beringar was summoned to Rome and forced to recant, the oath he had to swear was that Christ was in the presence physically and not. merely sacramentally, and one of the things Salceld is pointing out is that most people today see this kind of desacramentalized carnal way of construing real presence is a real problem, even from a Roman Catholic perspective. Transubstantiation is an improvement upon what's being required of Beringar there. So in other words, there's development going on in the tradition on this point. And what that helps us see today is there's kind of a spectrum of options. And it's not like, you know, what you get from Taylor Marshall's tweet is kind of this idea that there's just like,

you either affirm real presence or you deny it, but there's various ways you can understand real presence, some that even go further than transubstantiation. All right, here's the last few sentences. Y'all broke away and said, it's a community memorial service that we do maybe once a month, Welch's grape juice and plastic shot glasses isn't Christianity, please study scripture and the early church. Now, again, we can acknowledge that a lot of Protestants do have two kids. casual a view of the Eucharist, and that is reflected in some of the circumstantial questions here,

like, you know, what kind of shot glasses are used or whatever, though I don't think Marshall's comments are really even fair, even to them. I think what would be useful here is some discussion of what parts of circumstantial variation can there be in Eucharistic practice, versus what are the essential elements that must remain. Like can you use unpermented grapes? Can you use non-alcoholic wine? You know, there's all kinds of questions that come up here. And the Roman Catholic tradition has a more reasonable policy about these questions than some people are aware. They're more flexible than people realize. The Roman Catholic Code of Canon law stipulates that the wine used in the sacrament must be natural from the fruit of the vine and not spoiled. So, and there have been

disputes about where there is invalid matter used for the sacrament in certain cases. But what strikes you about this is how little is required. And I think it's a good thing. I'm not trying to be critical of this. I think it's a good thing to have, you know, for example, one of the things that's come up is for those who struggle with alcoholism, what do you do? And one of the things that has been allowed is for people in that circumstance to allow for them to partake of the sacrament with non-alcoholic wine as a sort of pastoral accommodation to their circumstance and so forth. And that's fine. And that's fine from a Catholic view. That's fine from Protestant views. But those kinds of questions are the things that we need to come up here.

Another big question in church history is different kinds of bread, unleavened bread versus leavened bread and so forth. All of our traditions have to wrestle with these kinds of circumstantial questions like frequency, what kind of bread and wine, what quantity, with what materials, in what manner and so forth. I personally don't think that using various kinds of grape juice or non-alcoholic wine is bad, though I think it should be done intentionally and with reverence. And so I understand that we can look out and see there's just a lot of casual practice. That's not good.

But those are the kinds of questions we need to work through here. But there's a more basic problem, even beyond all that. And that is the big picture that Marshall seems to be trying to portray here is that the Catholics have this rich practice, and the Protestants jumped off the ship to adopt a cheap practice as an alternative. And in the 16th century, I think it was nearly the opposite. As I've mentioned, lay Christians in the late medieval West hardly ever partook of the Eucharist. For most, it would have been once a year and in one kind only, and it had become a kind of spectacle in many places. plagued with various superstitious beliefs.

You know, you'll find people talking about if I, I'm not going to eat the consecrated host because I can keep it, put it in my pocket, go plant it in my garden, and hope to have better crops in the upcoming year, this kind of thing. Now, of course, that's not official teaching, but that's the kind of thing that was going on. And one of the concerns of the Reformation in response is frequent, meaningful participation through actually eating and drinking. Now, some of this is just circumstantial. So we can just say, yeah, there was error, there was going on.

But some of this is responding to official Catholic teaching. And I think the point of communion in both kinds here is important to press home. This comes up. I've done several videos on Jan Hussein and the Hussites. This is one of their grievances, that we need to have both the bread and the wine. And at the Council of Constance, 100 years or so before the Reformation, this was responded to quite harshly. Quote, certain people in some parts of the world have rashly dared to assert that the Christian people ought to receive the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist under the forms of both bread and wine, they communicate the laity everywhere, not only under the form of the bread, but also under that of the wine.

So they're complaining about those who advocate for communion in both kinds. Kines means both bread and wine. And the Council of Constance condemns this view, and it insists on certain other disputes like certain kinds of fasting done prior to partaking. And then it says that communion in one kind only has been held for a long time and is therefore a law. And those who insist on communion in both kinds are to be regarded as heretics and severely punished by their local bishops or the inquisitors of heresy. If you want to know what kind of punishment is in view there, see my video on the Hussites. That is just brutal to go into that.

It goes on to say, no priest under pain of excommunication may communicate the people under the forms of both bread and why. the Council of Trent maintained a broadly similar policy, though it's softer in the application. So this is why a fundamental tenet that united all the Protestant traditions is communion in both kinds. They're responding to this, and they're saying, look, number one, Jesus said, drink of the cup all of you. Those are the words of Christ. Number two, that is the universal patristic practice. You will not find one church father who advocated for communion in one kind only. And so in opposing this Roman Catholic view, they, and that's true of all the Protestants.

You can see it in the 39 articles, for example, Article 30. You can see it in the Lutheran and Reform standards as well. This is why when people are, people sometimes act like the Protestants don't have views in common, or they'll, and it's like we have the different Protestant traditions had a lot in common. And in responding to this particular view, they were drawing from the church fathers. And they were saying, look, this, again, and the violence coming by the requirement of the alternative, you can understand why people were protesting. It's like, Jesus said to drink.

All the church fathers believed in this. Now you're requiring with violent threat, an alternative view. You know, of course people are going to protest that. So you can see how backwards the framing is from what Marshall is saying, we didn't jump off ship, we are opposing abusive, innovative practice that came into being in the medieval era. From a Protestant perspective, that's what we'd say. Now, at the same time, we can admit, well, a lot of Protestants have drifted, fallen away into, as I say, anemic and shallow eucharistic practice. So we can own that as well. But as we all try to work at this, we've got to

try to frame the differences where they actually are. So hopefully our discussions about the Eucharist can get past some of these more derisive attacks on Protestants. All right, that's the end of this video, but let me recommend some of the books. And because I'm always trying to get good stuff out there, Richard Barcellus' book, The Lord's Supper is a Means of Grace, More Than a Memory, great book advocating for a real presence view from a Protestant perspective. Michael Haken's book, Amidst Us Our Beloved Stan's Recovering Sacrament in the Baptist Tradition. This is one of those books that's showing 17th and 18th century Baptist practice was real presence.

It's right there in the second London Baptist Confession of 1689. Another book on that is Stan Fowler's book more than a symbol. But my favorite to recommend is the old Puritan Thomas Watson, just simple book, The Lord's Supper. You can read it in an hour. It's a really edifying, wonderful book. So that's it on this. I think I'll move on from the Lord's Supper after this, though.

This topic is one that there's great interest. in this topic, which is a good thing. We need to keep working at this one. And we need to keep reforming our own practice. That'll be more of my focus, probably if I address this again, is trying to speak to Protestants and saying, how can we do better here? Hey, if you're interested in supporting Truth Unites, I truly appreciate that. I need the support. I'm doing fine, but I would like to keep growing so I can move forward in various ways. You can do that on the website. That is deeply meaningful to me. I really appreciate it. Thanks for praying. The main thing is pray. Pray that truth unites is a ministry that blesses people who watch that kind of re-centers.

I'm basically trying to do several things. General Christian apologetics, Protestant apologetics, general church history and theology, and then devotional videos. So I hope that each video kind of shepherds people to truth, shepherds people to the gospel, kind of basic gospel content is what I'm hoping it is. And I hope it's uplifting as well. All right, thanks for watching everybody. We will see you next time.