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Consubstantiation or Sacramental Union

Pastoral TLDR;

"Consubstantiation" is the label opponents gave the Lutheran view, and Lutherans reject it. Their own term is sacramental union: Christ's real Body and Blood are truly and substantially present "in, with, and under" the bread and wine, which remain bread and wine. The hermeneutical instinct behind it is a good one, take Christ's words as they stand and let the mystery be a mystery, and its refusal of Aristotle is a genuine advance on Rome. It fails on the same ground Rome does: the mechanism it uses to get Christ's body onto every altar communicates omnipresence to His human nature, which affirms real presence at the price of Christ's genuine humanity.

Table of Contents

  1. #The claim
  2. #The mechanism
  3. #Scriptural support
  4. #Historical witness
  5. #What Lutheranism gets right
  6. #Where it fails
  7. #Where I land
  8. #Sources

The Claim

Christ's Body and Blood are present together with the bread and wine. Both are there and neither replaces the other. This is why Lutherans prefer sacramental union to "consubstantiation," a term they did not coin and do not accept.

By divine promise Christ is truly present, even though the mode of that presence is a mystery. This differs from Transubstantiation, which holds that presence is achieved by the literal transformation of one substance into another. Here the bread stays bread.

Rather than explaining how Christ is present, the Lutheran tradition insists that He is present because He said so: "This is my body… This is my blood." Luther summarised it: "The Body of Christ is in the bread, and the bread is in the Body of Christ." The mystery is upheld by faith, not by the Aristotelian philosophy Transubstantiationism relies on.

The Mechanism

Here is where the trouble starts. Lutherans are often accused of having no mechanism when in fact they have a very specific one.

Luther held that the communicatio idiomatum (the communication of properties between Christ's two natures) is real rather than merely verbal. Attributes of the divine nature are genuinely communicated to the human nature, which is how Christ's body can be present wherever He wills it.

Moreland and Craig set out his appeal to the three scholastic modes of being in a place:

Mode Meaning
Localiter Body and space correspond exactly, as an ordinary object occupies its place
Definitive A thing occupies space illocally, "as, for example, in the case of an angel who may be in a house or a nutshell"
Repletive Filling all places and contained by none, which belongs to God alone

Luther held all three applicable to Christ's body simultaneously, with the second being the mode of His presence in the Supper (Moreland & Craig, 2003).

Bavinck records the Lutheran claim in its own words. By union with the divine nature the human nature received "singular, most excellent, super-great, supernatural, untraceable, unutterable, and heavenly prerogatives of majesty, glory, virtue, and power, which were not just created, finite gifts but divine and infinite endowments, such as the ability to make alive, omnipotence, omniscience, and discretionary omnipresence" (Bavinck, 2006, vol. 3).

That last phrase, discretionary omnipresence, is the important one that cannot survive Chalcedon.

Scriptural Support

Luther's hermeneutic is literal where possible. Christ's presence is received on the basis of His word, not mediated by human logic.

Historical Witness

González notes the controversial context: Luther rejected transubstantiation as "unduly tied to Aristotelian, and therefore pagan, metaphysics," and because the way it had been used tied it to the theory of the Mass as meritorious sacrifice, which ran contrary to justification by faith (González, 2010).

Allison offers the standard Lutheran analogy: "the relationship between water and the sponge in which it is contained: the water is not the sponge, and the sponge is not the water, but wherever the sponge is, there too is the water" (Allison, 2012). González notes Luther "never used such metaphysical terms, but would speak of the presence of the body of Christ in, with, under, around, and behind the bread and wine."

What Lutheranism Gets Right

The hermeneutical instinct is correct. Take the words as they stand and let the mystery be a mystery. Luther's suspicion of clever explanations that soften Christ's plain speech into nothing is a good one, and it is an instinct many have entirely lost. His insistence that Christ is genuinely given rather than merely pictured is right, and it is the thing memorialism cannot say.

The refusal of Aristotle is a genuine critique of Rome. Luther saw that the substance-accidents apparatus had no business with theology.

Luther: "It is not necessary that the bread and wine cease to be present… God is able to include His body also in the bread.".

Where it Fails

Metaphysics Denied, then Used

Lutherans avoid the Aristotelian categories of substance and accidents, and then reach for the scholastic modes of presence and a real communication of divine attributes to explain how the body arrives.

This is the awkward spot. The objection to Rome was that it explained the mystery with imported philosophy. The Lutheran answer explains the mystery with different imported philosophy, and then says the mystery should not be explained. Calvin caught this and pressed it: "there is a wide difference between these two assertions, that 'the bread is the body,' and that 'the body is with the bread'." If the words of institution must be taken with strict literal precision, then those who say "in, with and under" have already stopped taking them that way (Institutes, IV.XVII.XX).

You cannot both insist the words settle it and add three prepositions that the words do not contain.

The Christological Objection

This is the argument that decides it: The Ascension and the Presence of Christ.

If the human nature really receives divine attributes, including omnipresence, then Chalcedon's prohibition on confusing the natures has been breached. Moreland and Craig put it precisely: "it is very difficult to see how a human nature can really share all the attributes of deity without actually being deity" (Moreland & Craig, 2003).

They also dismantle the analogy Lutherans reach for. The fire-and-iron illustration, where iron takes on the fire's properties without ceasing to be iron, "is in the end unhelpful because the fire may communicate to the iron only such properties as are consistent with the iron's nature, such as heat and light; in the same way, deity may communicate to humanity only those attributes that are consistent with the nature of humanity."

Iron can glow. Iron cannot become omnipresent. The analogy proves the opposite of what it is deployed to prove.

Schaff's assessment of the ubiquity doctrine is: it "involves an important element of truth, but is a dogmatic hypothesis without sufficient Scripture warrant, and cannot well be reconciled with the fact of the ascension, or with the nature of a body, unless it be resolved into a mere potential or dynamic presence." He notes that Luther's own illustrations, the sun shining everywhere, a voice reaching a thousand ears, "all lead to a dynamic presence, which Calvin fully admits" (Schaff, History, vol. VII).

Luther's pictures, when followed carefully, actually land on Calvin's doctrine.

Bavinck's Internal Criticism

Bavinck's objection does not require any Reformed premises at all.

If the human nature receives divine attributes outright, "why should gifts be needed when divine attributes are shared!" Lutheran Christology "still speaks of gifts" but "actually does not know what to do with them," and it "no longer has room even for Christ's anointing with the Holy Spirit" (Bavinck, 2006, vol. 3).

That should stop a Pentecostal in their tracks. A Christology with no work left for the Spirit's anointing of the Son has impacted a lot more than the Supper.

Bavinck's verdict is that both Lutheran and Catholic Christology "contain within them a docetic element" because "the purely human development does not come into its own in them."

Where I Land

The Lutheran instinct is great even when its mechanism is wrong. Luther's refusal to let Christ's words be softened into nothing, his insistence that Christ is genuinely given rather than merely pictured, and his suspicion of tidy explanations are all honourable. Anyone rejecting his mechanism should be careful not to reject the concern that produced it, because the concern is right and most of us have abandoned it.

The genus majestaticum is the wrong answer to a right question. It ends up affirming real presence at the cost of Christ's genuine humanity. Foundations Course is not a technicality, it is the church's guard on the doctrine that our Saviour is one of us.

Other Communion views: Transubstantiation | Spiritual Presence | Memorialist Communion

Sources