Theological Insights on Christ's Presence in the Eucharist

SPROUL: In our last session as we’ve been studying the Lord’s Supper, we looked at the controversy that erupted in the sixteenth century during the Protestant Reformation that focused on the question of the mode of the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. We looked at the doctrine of transubstantiation and what it was that was rejected by the reformers of Switzerland and Scotland and so on, and I mentioned at the time that the fundamental issue of the nature of the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper was not, in the final analysis, a philosophical debate about the proper use of the categories of Aristotle, of substance and accidens, as we looked at, but the primary issue was Christological. [00:08:00]

And this debate over the person of Christ was also rooted and grounded in a definitive ecumenical council’s decision on the church’s understanding of the union of the two natures in Christ. In 451 at the Council of Chalcedon, the church had to deal with heresies that were threatening the biblical understanding and orthodox understanding of the person of Christ, and the heresies were coming from two different directions. On the one hand, there was what was called the Monophysite heresy, which was being articulated by a man by the name of Eutyches, and in the Monophysite heresy—and I ought to write that word down here—Monophysite—sounds like stalactite or stalagmite or something like that. [00:113:80]

At the same time, from the other side, a heretic by the name of Nestorius was arguing that if you have two natures, a divine and a human, that can only mean that in Christ resided two persons. So if you have two natures, you have to have two persons. And so he was saying that in Christ there were two distinct persons and two distinct natures, and he thereby separated the divine and human natures into two distinct persons. So on the one hand, you have a blending or mixing together of the divine and human, and on the other hand, you have a dividing or separating of the two natures. [00:307:92]

So at this point, the church, in their Confession in 451 at Chalcedon, declared the following authoritative statements about the church’s view of Christology: one, that Christ is “Vera homo, vera deus,” that Christ has two distinct natures and those two natures are truly human and truly divine. Now notice at this point that this is speaking against the idea of Eutyches, who was saying that Jesus did not have a purely divine nature or a purely human nature; He didn’t have a true human nature; He didn’t have a true divine nature. [00:364:00]

Now comes the most important elements of the council of Chalcedon for future church history. In defining the view that the church held in the fifth century, the church attached to its Confession what is commonly referred to as the “Four Negatives of Chalcedon.” The reason they’re stated in this way is simple: that even in the fifth century at this council, the church understood that what they were dealing with in the incarnation was a supreme mystery, and that the church was not saying, “We have penetrated totally to the mystery of the incarnation. What we can say for sure is that there is a perfect union between the divine nature and the human nature and that these two natures are genuine. [00:503:48]

And so the four negatives are that the two natures are united without mixture, confusion, separation, or division. Those are the four negatives. However you understand the relationship between the human nature and the divine nature, you do not want to think of them in terms of being mixed together or confused, where the humanity is swallowed up by the deity or the deity is swallowed up by the humanity. We can’t have a humanized divine nature or a deified human nature because in these first two of the four negatives, the Monophysite heresy is rejected because this is exactly what Eutyches did; he blended the two natures, and so that you end up in one basic nature. [00:603:04]

Now when we come to the New Testament, we see aspects of Jesus, of the person, and the person is the God Man, but we see certain aspects of His life. For example, He gets hungry, He gets thirsty, He weeps, He bleeds. All of these elements manifest the true human nature that He possesses. God does not get hungry; God does not get thirsty; the divine nature doesn’t bleed. These are all aspects of the human nature. Now if we were to ask the question, to which nature does the body of Jesus belong, the answer’s rather obvious. His physical body is a manifestation of His human nature, not His divine nature. [00:794:44]

Now in addition to the four negatives, immediately after the four negatives, there’s a semicolon and the Confession of Chalcedon ends with these words, “Each nature retains its own attributes,” which means that in the incarnation, the divine nature does not stop being divine; the divine nature loses none of its divine attributes. In the nineteenth century, there was a heresy that plagued the church and—with respect to liberal theology—called the “Kenotic Heresy” based upon Paul’s hymn in Philippians two, when he says, “Have this mind among you, which was also in Christ Jesus who, being in the form of God, took His equality with God not as a thing to be grasped, but He emptied himself.” [00:865:24]

Now again, going back to Chalcedon, “each nature retains its own attributes,” so that in the incarnation, the divine nature continues to be immutable, eternal, omniscient, omnipotent and all the rest, and that’s easy for us to understand. It’s the other side that becomes a problem in the Lord’s Supper. What does it mean that the human nature retains its own attributes? The attributes of human flesh include that they are limited spatially, that it is not natural for a human body to be able to be omnipresent; omnipresence is not an attribute of human nature; it is an attribute of the divine nature. [00:1005:28]

So the Roman Catholic Church answered that by—and had developed this theory that was called the “communication of attributes,” which was dealing with their doctrine of ubiquity. Now the term “ubiquity” means the same thing as the word “omnipresence;” it just uses a different root tour: “ubi” means “where,” and “equis” means “equal.” And so the concept of ubiquity means something that has equal whereness; it can be here, there, and everywhere at the same time; it’s a synonym for omnipresence. Note the difference between ubiquity and iniquity. You have iniquity, I have iniquity, but you don’t have ubiquity and neither do I. [00:1131:00]

And Calvin said, and neither did the physical nature of Jesus. But the solution to that, again, by the church was to argue for a communication of attributes from the divine nature to the human nature, so that if the divine nature has the ability to be present at more than one place at the same time, that what happens in the mass is that the power of the divine nature—indeed, a very attribute of the divine nature, is communicated to the human nature. Do we see that? So it makes it now possible for the human nature, the body, to be present everywhere at the same time, because now the human nature is endowed with a divine attribute, which the reformers were saying completely violates Chalcedon at two points, certainly at the first point of mixture and confusion, because here, we’re mixing the attributes, and certainly with respect to the last statement where each nature retains its own attributes. [00:1181:12]

Now let me just say one more thing about this today. We see in the life of Jesus repeated instances where supernatural knowledge is made evident by Christ, where He knows things that no normal human being would know; but of course, the same thing could be said about the prophets in the Old Testament and the apostles in the New Testament, who are receptacles of the transfer of information from the mind of God to the human mind. And it’s one thing for the divine nature to communicate information to the human nature; it’s quite another for the divine nature to communicate deity to the human nature. If the divine nature communicates deity or divine attributes to the human nature, it would seem to me that that would, by necessity, involve a deification of the human nature, a confusion of the two natures, and a violation of the true humanity of Christ. [00:1297:92]