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Spiritual Presence

Pastoral TLDR;

The Reformed view teaches that Christ is truly present in the Lord's Supper, not physically but by the power of the Holy Spirit. His human body remains in heaven, and believers genuinely feed on Him by faith. This affirms real presence while preserving the integrity of Christ's human nature, and it gives the Spirit the role the New Testament actually gives Him.

Table of Contents

  1. #The claim
  2. #The mechanism
  3. #Scriptural support
  4. #Historical witness
  5. #Horton's trinitarian move
  6. #Objection one - the biblical language affirms physical presence
  7. #Objection two - spiritual ascent is not in the text
  8. #Objection three - it fixes Christ to a chair in the sky
  9. #Where I land
  10. #Sources

The Claim

Christ is really present, but not locally or physically. The Holy Spirit lifts believers up to commune with the risen Christ, whose glorified body remains at the Father's right hand (Acts 1:9-11).

Calvin likened it to the sun's rays warming the earth from a great distance. Christ remains in heaven and truly nourishes us by His Spirit. The Supper is a means of grace rather than a memorial, and the bread and wine are true instruments of union with Christ.

The view avoids three positions at once:

  1. It rejects the Roman Catholic claim that the bread and wine literally become Christ's body and blood,
  2. the Lutheran claim that they are physically present "in, with, and under" the unchanged elements, and
  3. the Zwinglian claim that the Supper is a mental remembrance.
    Christ communicates Himself truly and spiritually to the faithful, as the Spirit applies the benefits of His body and blood to those who receive in faith.

One clarification that prevents most of the confusion: "spiritual" here is not the opposite of "real." It is the opposite of "physical." The Reformed claim is that a real Christ really gives Himself, and the agent by which He does it is the Holy Spirit.

The Mechanism

The mechanism is the one Christ Himself assigns the Spirit in John 16:14, taking what is Christ's and making it known.

John 16:14 - ESV

14. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

Ferguson answers the charge that Calvin's account is incomprehensible by pointing exactly there, and quotes Robert Bruce to fill it out: "while we do not get a different or a better Christ in the Supper from the Christ we get in the Word, we may well get the same Christ better as the Spirit ministers by the testimony of the physical emblems being joined to the Word" (Bruce, quoted in Ferguson, 1996).

That is a useful formulation. The Supper does not deliver a different Christ from the one preached. It delivers the same Christ by an additional means, and God has attached a promise to that means.

Gordon Fee arrives at the same place from Pauline exegesis rather than from Calvin: "the food of the Table is the Spirit's food in the sense that the Spirit, as the real presence, once more appropriates the provision of the cross to the one who eats by faith, in celebration with others" (Fee, 1994). Note the phrase "as the real presence." Fee, who was Assemblies of God and no Calvinist, lands the Spirit in exactly the role Calvin gives Him.

Scriptural Support

The biblical emphasis falls not on a transformation of elements but on the transforming presence of Christ through the Spirit as believers partake in faith.

Historical Witness

Schaff's summary of Calvin's achievement is accurate and worth having. Calvin "combines the realism of the one with the spiritualism of the other, and saves the substance for which Luther contended, but avoids the objectionable form." He accepts the symbolic reading of the words of institution and rejects corporal presence, oral manducation, participation by unbelievers and the ubiquity of Christ's body, "but at the same time he strongly asserts a spiritual real presence, and a spiritual real participation of Christ's body and blood by faith."

Schaff then singles out what Calvin actually added to the debate: "He lays great stress on the agency of the Holy Spirit in the ordinance, which was overlooked by Luther and Zwingli, but which appears in the ancient liturgies in the invocation of the Holy Spirit" (Schaff, History, vol. VII).

Before Calvin, Augustine occasionally described the Eucharist in terms of spiritual participation, and Bucer and Vermigli developed the line further. Calvin formalised it, positioning the doctrine against both Roman realism and Zwinglian minimalism.

Horton's Trinitarian Move

The best modern statement I have found is Michael Horton's, and its strength is that it makes the doctrine trinitarian rather than merely a clever solution to a spatial problem.

It is not simply Christ's divinity but the Spirit who makes Christ's reign universally present, so that even Christ's true and natural body and blood can be communicated to believers.
(Horton, 2011)

He quotes Philip Butin:

When this perichoretically trinitarian framework is recognized, Christ's ascension is no longer a "problem" for Calvin. To the contrary, it contributes a distinctively positive and "upward" emphasis to his entire theology of the eucharist. Calvin's approach at this point thus complements and completes the "downward" Lutheran emphasis on incarnation with an equal "upward" emphasis on resurrection and ascension. There is "a manner of descent by which he lifts us up to himself."
(Butin, quoted in Horton, 2011)

A theology of ascension "goes hand in hand with a theology of the Spirit," which is why "the Lord's Supper is a 'spiritual communion with Christ', not because it is unreal or a projection, but because until the second advent, all our participation in Christ is always by the Spirit" (Billings, 2018).

He draws on Alexander Schmemann from the Orthodox side: "The early Christians realized that in order to become the temple of the Holy Spirit they must ascend to heaven where Christ has ascended." Billings notes that Schmemann's words are "a stinging indictment of worship that has been reduced to mere 'entertainment' or mere 'teaching'."

Objection One - the Biblical Language Affirms Physical Presence

Roman Catholics and Lutherans object that the Reformed view makes Christ's presence too vague. They appeal to John 6 and to the words of institution as requiring a more literal reading. Jesus did not say "this is my spiritual body." He said "this IS my body" (Matt 26:26; Mark 14:22; Luke 22:19; 1 Cor 11:24). Paul's language in 1 Corinthians 10:16 and 11:27-29 seems to affirm actual participation in Christ's body and blood rather than a mental or spiritual ascent.

The answer has three parts.

The copula does not settle it. Calvin's point is that using est "to signify a transmutation into another substance, is a thing never heard of, in any country or in any language," and Carson's conclusion is that "even when 'is' is correctly identified as to type of copula, all further discussion is not thereby foreclosed." The full argument is in The Institution of the Lord's Supper. No one view wins on the verb alone.

The Reformed view does not weaken the participation language, it locates it. Ridderbos: "He who enters into communion with the thing also enters into communion with the person. For the Crucified One is the Living One" (Ridderbos, 1975). The participation is real and it is in the person of Christ. The disagreement is over where His body is, not over whether we receive Him.

And the ascension is decisive. If Christ's body is present in the elements everywhere, it must be omnipresent, which is a property of divinity rather than humanity, and Chalcedon forbids it. That argument is in full here: The Ascension and the Presence of Christ.

Objection Two - Spiritual Ascent is not in the Text

The objection: Scripture nowhere describes the Spirit lifting believers to heaven at the Supper. The "spiritual ascent" is a theological synthesis rather than an explicit biblical observation, and Calvin has therefore solved an exegetical problem with a metaphysical construction. That is the same charge the Reformed make against Rome's Aristotle.

First, the "lifting" language is not unique. Colossians 3:1-4 and Ephesians 2:6 already place believers with Christ in the heavenlies as a settled fact about their union with Him. Calvin is extending a stated relation into the Supper rather than inventing one for the occasion. Horton makes the same move: "Christ is not seated with us on earth, but we are seated with him in the heavenlies" (Horton, 2011). Whether that relation is activated in a particular way at the table is an inference, but the relation itself is text.

Second, every position on this question involves a synthesis at the point where Scripture stops describing. Rome synthesises with Aristotle. Wittenberg/Luther synthesises with a doctrine of communicated attributes. Zurich/Zwingli synthesises with a theory of signs. Nobody gets to stand on pure exegesis here, because the texts assert that Christ gives Himself and never explain how.

The question is not whether to synthesise but which synthesis does least damage to the texts and the creeds. On that test the Reformed account wins, because it is the only one that leaves both natures of Christ intact and the only one that gives the Spirit anything to do.

Objection Three - it Fixes Christ to a Chair in the Sky

Lutherans charged that the Reformed had a crude and literalistic picture of Christ's whereabouts, as though Jesus were sitting somewhere specific and unable to get out.

Horton answers it: "Reformed theologians were unfairly criticized by their Lutheran interlocutors as holding a crude literalism with respect to Christ's whereabouts… However, the Reformed concern was simply to point out the apparent contradiction between Jesus' own promise that he would depart in the flesh and not return until the last day, and his promise that he would be with them by his Word and Spirit" (Horton, 2011).

Calvin refused to speculate further than the evidence allowed: "'Shall we therefore, someone will say, assign to Christ a definite region of heaven?' … 'But I reply with Augustine that this is a very prying and superfluous question; for us it is enough to believe that he is in heaven'."

And Calvin's counter-question is the best line in the whole exchange. Critics "seem to think that 'Christ does not seem present unless he comes down to us.' But how is Christ less present 'if he should lift us to himself'?"

The difficulty people have with Calvin's account lies less with Calvin than with a Christology that "does not take the truth of the bodily resurrection and ascension of Christ with full seriousness" (Ferguson, 1996).

Where I Land

To be honest, this view is where I land. Four reasons:

  1. It affirms a real presence and a real feeding. It says everything Transubstantiation and Consubstantiation or Sacramental Union want to say about Christ genuinely giving Himself, and it says everything Memorialist Communion cannot say.
  2. It does not violate Chalcedon. Both natures keep their properties. Christ's humanity stays human. That is not a technicality; it is the church's guard on the doctrine that our Saviour is one of us.
  3. It gives the Holy Spirit the role the New Testament actually gives Him, taking what is Christ's and making it ours. Fee reaches the same conclusion from Pauline exegesis with no interest in defending Calvin, which is a good sign that the reading is being driven by the texts.
  4. It handles the eschatology, which no realist alternative does. "Until he comes" is not a decorative phrase. A doctrine that puts Christ's body on every table has removed the reason Paul says "until."

Two things I hold loosely:

  1. The mechanism is a mystery and should stay one. Chris Green states the priority correctly: "the how question, while important, is never as important as the question of who is present," and whatever the explanation, one must be able to say that the Christ who is present is "the 'whole Christ', the bodily-risen Christ who is present in his divine-human fullness" (Green, 2012). Green adds a caution: "anything that takes the mystery or scandal out of the Eucharist must be wrong."
  2. The difference between this view and the Lutheran one is not an essential one worth dividing fellowship over. Both affirm that Christ is really here, really giving Himself, really feeding His church. That is first-order. The mode is second-order, and I hold it as such.

Other Communion views: Transubstantiation | Consubstantiation or Sacramental Union | Memorialist Communion

Sources