Theopedia

Transubstantiation

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

— 1 Corinthians 11:26

Definition

Transubstantiation is the Roman Catholic doctrine that at a priest’s consecration of the bread and wine in the Mass, their entire substance changes into the substance of Christ’s body and blood, while the outward appearances, or “accidents” (taste, color, texture, weight), of bread and wine remain and inhere in no underlying substance.1 The Fourth Lateran Council first made the doctrine an article of faith in 1215; the Council of Trent later anathematized anyone who denied it.21 Rome grounds the doctrine chiefly in a literal reading of Christ’s words at the Lord’s Supper, “This is my body” (Matt. 26:26).

Confessional Witness

The 1689 London Baptist Confession states, in words shared with the Westminster Confession, the Savoy Declaration, and the Philadelphia Confession, that transubstantiation is “repugnant not to Scripture alone, but even to common sense and reason,” and “overthroweth the nature of the ordinance, and hath been, and is, the cause of manifold superstitions, yea, of gross idolatries.”3 The same chapter’s previous paragraph already answers the doctrine’s chief scriptural argument: the bread and wine, it says, are truly related to Christ crucified and “sometimes called by the names of the things they represent, to wit, the body and blood of Christ,” but only in “terms used figuratively,” since “in substance and nature, they still remain truly and only bread and wine, as they were before.”4

No confession chapter engages transubstantiation’s own Aristotelian vocabulary of substance and accidents; the rejection is stated in the plain terms of the ordinance itself rather than in the doctrine’s later scholastic categories.

Biblical Basis

The words of institution are the doctrine’s chief scriptural support: “This is my body, which is given for you” (Luke 22:19; cf. Matt. 26:26; Mark 14:22; 1 Cor. 11:24). Scripture, however, regularly uses the same “is” construction to state a symbol’s meaning rather than its material identity: “the seven good kine are seven years” (Gen. 41:26); “the ten horns are ten kings” (Dan. 7:24); “these bones are the whole house of Israel” (Ezek. 37:11); “the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches” (Rev. 1:20).5 Applied to the Supper, “this is my body” states what the bread represents, not what it materially becomes, a reading confirmed by the fact that Christ spoke the words while bodily present, whole and unbroken, at the table where he sat.5 The same figure carries over to the cup: “this cup is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20) cannot mean the vessel itself is a covenant, and Paul calls the cup and bread a “participation” (κοινωνία) in Christ’s blood and body rather than the blood and body themselves (1 Cor. 10:16).5

Paul continues to call the element “bread,” not Christ’s flesh, both before and after the words of institution: “as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup” (1 Cor. 11:26; cf. 11:28; 10:16).5 Christ’s own gloss on his Bread of Life discourse tells against a literal, fleshly eating: “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all” (John 6:63).6 And a body carried up bodily into heaven at the ascension (Acts 1:9-11), to remain there “until the time for restoring all the things” (Acts 3:21), is on its face a body located in one place, not one multiplied onto every altar where the Mass is offered.

Historical Development

Augustine used biblical language to call the bread “the body of Christ” and the wine “the blood of Christ,” but read that language as figurative: “the Lord did not hesitate to say, ‘This is my body,’ when he was giving a sign of his body.”2 His influence held back a fully realist doctrine for centuries; only gradually, as the ministry came to be regarded as a sacrificing priesthood, did a theology of physical change in the elements harden into dogma.7 Calvin traces an early flashpoint to the eleventh-century controversy over Berengar of Tours, whose denial of a physical presence was answered with a confession, dictated by Pope Nicholas II, phrased so grossly physically (“chewed by the teeth… swallowed by the throat”) that even its own medieval defenders, the author of the Gloss and Peter Lombard, found it an embarrassment to explain.6

Paschasius Radbert, a ninth-century abbot, had already brought the doctrine out in explicit form in 831, opposed at the time by Ratramnus but gaining ground afterward. The term transubstantiatio itself was first used by Hildebert of Tours around 1134, and the doctrine was decreed an article of faith at the urging of Innocent III by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, which declared that the body and blood “are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the appearance of bread and wine, the bread being transubstantiated into the body and the wine into blood by divine power.”72 Scholastic theologians gave the doctrine its lasting philosophical framework by adapting Aristotle’s categories of substance and accident, the underlying reality of a thing as against its sensible properties, to explain how the elements could look, taste, and weigh exactly as before while no longer being bread and wine at all.8 The Council of Trent (1551) then set the doctrine in a series of canons anathematizing anyone who denied that Christ is “truly, really, and substantially” contained in the sacrament, or who denied that “the whole substance of the bread is converted into the body, and the whole substance of the wine into the blood,” a change “the Catholic Church fittingly calls transubstantiation.”9

Martin Luther, rejecting the doctrine while retaining a real bodily presence of his own, traced transubstantiation in his Babylonian Captivity of the Church to the medieval church’s captivity to Aristotle and Aquinas, at one point exclaiming that “the Holy Spirit is greater than Aristotle.”8 Calvin’s mature refutation appears in the final edition of the Institutes (1559), arguing at length that the doctrine has no support in the fathers of “the better ages” of the church and amounts to what the Schoolmen themselves, despite refining it, could still only “amuse themselves with more subtle delusions” trying to explain.10

Opposing Views

Roman Catholicism teaches that because the whole Christ, body, soul, and divinity, is present in even the smallest fragment of either element, a doctrine Aquinas named concomitantia, the church has historically withheld the communion cup from the laity, restricting it to the officiating priest, to avoid any risk that Christ’s blood might be spilled or otherwise desecrated.11 Because the change of substance is held to be permanent rather than confined to the moment of reception, the consecrated host may be reserved, carried to the sick, borne about in procession, and adored with the latria, the worship owed to God alone, that is owed to Christ himself; the Council of Trent made this worship a matter of dogma, anathematizing anyone who denied that Christ in the Eucharist “is to be adored with the worship of latria.”9 Rome further treats the Eucharist as a sacrifice, not only a sacrament, holding that the Mass re-presents, rather than merely recalls, Christ’s own sacrifice on the cross.2

Objections and Responses

John 6:48-65’s insistence on eating Christ’s flesh and drinking his blood shows that a real, oral eating of Christ’s actual body is necessary for salvation, which requires his flesh to be truly present in the Supper. This argument proves too much for Rome’s own system: if the discourse is about the Lord’s Supper and describes something necessary for salvation, then participation in that sacrament becomes necessary for salvation, which the Roman Catholic Church cannot consistently hold, since it also teaches that baptism alone already conveys the saving benefits of Christ’s redemption.12 Rome cannot make the Eucharist essential to salvation without either contradicting its own doctrine of baptism or Christ’s own words.

Where Scripture is unclear or silent, the doctrine still stands on the authority of an infallible church whose tradition has always taught it. Protestants answer, first, that Scripture alone is the church’s infallible rule of faith, so a doctrine that cannot be proved from the Bible cannot be received as an article of faith on tradition’s authority alone.12 Second, even granting tradition some weight, this doctrine fails tradition’s own claimed standard of having been held always, everywhere, and by all: its rise can be dated and traced historically, from Paschasius Radbert’s ninth-century formulation through Hildebert’s twelfth-century coinage of the term itself to the Fourth Lateran Council’s thirteenth-century decree, a genesis Calvin finds nowhere anticipated by the church fathers of “the better ages.”126

The doctrine does not really contradict the senses, since only the imperceptible substance changes while the sensible accidents Scripture and experience report remain exactly as before. This distinction creates a worse problem than it solves. Accidents, or sensible properties, are by nature the manifestation of some substance; the claim that properties can persist without any substance they belong to is “no more meaning” than “the assertion that an act can be without an agent.”13 The doctrine also requires disbelieving the well-attested testimony of the senses, something “God requires of no man,” and something Rome’s own system cannot consistently ask, since its adherents must trust their own eyes and ears to receive the church’s teaching authority in the first place.13

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Charles Hodge, “Chapter XX. The Means of Grace,” in Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 675-678. ↩ ↩2

  2. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 30, “Of the Lord’s Supper,” para. 6. ↩

  4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 30, “Of the Lord’s Supper,” para. 5. ↩

  5. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 43, “The Lord’s Supper,” Q. 14. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  6. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 17, sec. 12, 564-565. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. A. A. Hodge, chap. 43, Q. 12. ↩ ↩2

  8. Louis Markos, From Aristotle to Christ: How Aristotelian Thought Clarified the Christian Faith (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2024), “Part 1. How to Think Logically.” ↩ ↩2

  9. Council of Trent, Session 13 (1551), “Canons on the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist,” canons 1-2, 6, quoted in Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume III, 676-677. ↩ ↩2

  10. Calvin, book 4, chap. 17, sec. 13, 565-566. ↩

  11. C. Hodge, 3:677-678. ↩

  12. C. Hodge, 3:679-680. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  13. C. Hodge, 3:680-681. ↩ ↩2