Consubstantiation

It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all.

— John 6:63

Consubstantiation is the view, historically associated with Lutheran theology, that in the Lord’s Supper the body and blood of Christ are present together with the bread and wine rather than replacing their substance, as transubstantiation holds.¹ The Lutheran confessional books do not use the word “consubstantiation” itself; they speak instead of a “sacramental union,” by which Christ’s body and blood are received “not after a capernaitish, but a supernatural and celestial manner” together with the bread and wine.¹ “Consubstantiation” is a label coined in contrast to “transubstantiation,” describing the position from outside rather than naming it as Lutherans do.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 London Baptist Confession states, in words shared with the Westminster Confession, the Savoy Declaration, and the Philadelphia Confession, that the doctrine “which maintains a change of the substance of bread and wine, into the substance of Christ’s body and blood, commonly called transubstantiation… is repugnant not to Scripture alone, but even to common sense and reason.”² The same chapter adds that worthy receivers “really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually receive, and feed upon Christ crucified,” Christ’s body and blood being “not corporally or carnally, but spiritually present to the faith of believers.”²

No chapter of the confession names consubstantiation specifically; its sixth paragraph names and rejects transubstantiation alone. Its seventh paragraph’s “not carnally and corporally, but spiritually” formula nonetheless stands opposed to any doctrine of a bodily presence “in, with, and under” the elements, Lutheran or otherwise, without singling that doctrine out by name.

Biblical Basis

The crux text is the institution itself: “This is my body” (Matt. 26:26; 1 Cor. 11:24). Lutheran theology reads this “only in their strictly literal sense,” so that the bread does not merely signify Christ’s body but, by the sacramental union, truly is it.¹ Charles Hodge raises a grammatical objection to reading the text this strictly: Lutheran interpreters note that “this” (τοῦτο) in Matthew’s Greek is neuter while “bread” (ἄρτος) is masculine, and take that as proof the pronoun cannot mean “this bread.” Hodge answers that a neuter pronoun regularly refers to a masculine noun ad sensum, “this thing which I hold in my hand and which I give you to eat is my body,” and the thing Christ held and gave was the bread he had just taken and broken.³ A second problem, in his view, sits with the “in, with, and under” formula itself: qualifying “this is my body” to mean the body is present in, with, and under the bread already concedes figurative language, which undercuts the “strictly literal” reading the Lutheran doctrine’s own case depends on.³

Christ’s own later gloss on the same discourse tells against a bodily eating: “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all” (John 6:63). The Second Helvetic Confession appeals to this same chapter by name for the point that Christ’s flesh and blood are received “not corporeally, but spiritually by faith.”⁴ The New Testament’s own account of Christ’s ascension bears on the question as well: a body taken up bodily into heaven (Acts 1:9-11) and now seated there (Col. 3:1) is, on its face, a body located in one place rather than one distributed to every altar at once.

Historical Development

The doctrine’s confessional shape emerged from the failure of Luther and Zwingli to agree on the Supper at the Marburg Colloquy in October 1529.⁵ Melanchthon’s Augsburg Confession, presented to Charles V the following June, gave the Lutheran position its first confessional statement, affirming a “truly and substantially present” body and blood received “not only spiritually through faith, but also by the mouth” (the Augsburg Confession is treated at length in its own article).¹ Neither the Marburg conference nor Bucer’s and Melanchthon’s later attempts at mediation resolved the underlying disagreement about what “true presence” meant.⁵

The doctrine’s Christological grounding came from Martin Chemnitz, whom Charles Hodge calls, quoting Dorner, “the greatest of the divines of the age after the Reformation.”⁶ Chemnitz worked out the two-natures argument that Christ’s human nature, united to his divine nature, shares in the divine attribute of omnipresence, the ubiquity doctrine treated at its own dedicated articles, Communicatio idiomatum and Extra Calvinisticum.⁶ Chemnitz, with Jacob Andreae, went on to prepare the Formula of Concord in 1577, whose Article VII states the mature Lutheran position: the body and blood are received “not after a capernaitish, but a supernatural and celestial manner, by virtue of a sacramental union,” grounded in the claim that “the right hand of God is everywhere” and that Christ, in respect to his humanity, has “truly and in very deed, been placed” there.¹ Later Lutheran scholastics condensed this into the standard three-word formula “in, with, and under” the elements, the phrase most often associated with the position today.

Calvin’s mature critique appears in the final edition of the Institutes (1559), which devotes an extended section of its chapter on the Supper to refuting what it calls “the monstrous dogma of ubiquity.”⁷

Objections and Responses

“I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20) shows Christ is not confined to one place, so his body can be present, in, with, and under the bread, wherever the Supper is celebrated. Calvin answers that this promise cannot be about Christ’s body at all: if it were, a perpetual bodily connection with Christ would have to hold independently of the Supper, since the promise isn’t limited to it, which even Lutheran theology doesn’t claim. Read in its own context, the promise assures the disciples of Christ’s “invincible aid” as they carry out a difficult commission, not of his flesh accompanying them everywhere they preach.⁷

God is not bound by what philosophers call a local or circumscribed mode of presence; his power secures the manner of Christ’s presence even where reason cannot explain it. This is the Formula of Concord’s own stated ground: “God knows and has in his power various modes in which it is possible to be in a place (present), and he was not restricted to that single mode of presence which philosophers have been accustomed to call local or circumscribed.”¹ The Lutheran explanation of how this works appealed to the analogy of heated iron, where two substances interpenetrate without either being changed into the other. Charles Hodge answers that the analogy fails at the very point it needs to prove: heat does not become iron, nor iron heat; the two are merely juxtaposed in space. But the doctrine requires more than juxtaposition: it requires the human to become, in some sense, divine.⁶ Calvin presses the same point from Scripture rather than analogy: a human body is, by its nature, bounded by the dimensions of a human body, and Christ’s ascension into heaven demonstrated that his body “is not in all places, but on passing to a new one, leaves the one formerly occupied.”⁷

Related Doctrines

References

Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 43, “The Lord’s Supper,” 648-649. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 30, “Of the Lord’s Supper,” paras. 6-7. ↩ ↩²
Charles Hodge, “Chapter XX. The Means of Grace,” in Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), chap. 20. ↩ ↩²
The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), chap. 21, “Of the Holy Supper of the Lord.” ↩
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
Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Person of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 408-410. ↩ ↩² ↩³
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 17, secs. 16, 30, 585-586. ↩ ↩² ↩³