And as they were
eating, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and
gave it to the disciples and said, “Take, eat; this is My
body.” Then He took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them,
saying, “Drink from it, all of you. For this is My blood of the new
covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. (Matthew 26:26-28 NKJV)
Called by various names—the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist, Communion—the meal at which Jesus gave bread to his apostles and called the bread His body and gave the fruit of the vine to his apostles and called it His blood is one of the two great sacraments or ordinances of the Church (the other being baptism). Various denominations have debated the sacrament of baptism:
1. When
should it be administered? Soon after the
birth of a child? As soon as a child can understand what it means to believe in
Jesus? When a child reaches the age of accountability, when s/he is held
accountable for any sins s/he may commit since Acts 2:38 (NKJV) says “be baptized every
one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins”? (The Jews teach that this age of accountability begins at age 13
for boys and age 12 for girls—corresponding roughly with the commencement of
puberty.) At an age corresponding to Jesus’s age when He was baptized?
2. How
should it be administered? By immersing the
entire body in water (as the Greek word baptizō/βαπτίζω actually
means)? Sub-question: Should the water be living/running water (as in the
Jordan River where John baptized), or can it be standing water (as in the Pool
of Bethesda or Siloam)? The Didache chapter 7 states: “And concerning baptism,
baptize this way: “Having first said all these things, baptize into the name of
the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, in living water. But if you
have no living water, baptize into other water; and if you cannot do so in cold
water, do so in warm. But if you have neither, pour out water three times upon
the head into the name of Father and Son and Holy Spirit.” (Remember, however,
that the Didache is not part of the inspired scriptures.) I discuss the proper baptismal
formula in my blogpost “Excessive Righteousness 2: Monotheism.”
Likewise, various denominations have debated the sacrament of taking communion:
1.
How frequently should it be taken?
Every first day of the week (as Acts 20:7 NKJV indicates: “Now on the
first day of the week, when the disciples came
together to break bread”)? Since the Jews have always understood the first
day of each week to begin at sundown on Saturday (based on the “evening and the
morning” language of the six days of creation in Genesis, should Christians take
it Saturday night or Sunday morning? Or since it is so precious, should
Christians take it only once per month or even once per year (during Passover
or Easter)? Conversely, one might argue that since Jesus uses the two
substances that were present in the Jewish meal, every day, should communion
(even if one is by oneself) be taken daily or at every meal?
2. Should
the wine be fermented or unfermented? (In the Qumran/Essene/Dead
Sea Scrolls messianic meal on which the Lord’s Supper may have been based, it
was to be [unfermented] new wine.) 1Q28a [1QSa] of the Dead Sea Scrolls
states: “[the Me]ssiah of Israel shall ent[er] and … [when] they gather at the
table of community [or to drink] the new wine, and the table … is prepared
[and] the new wine [is mixed] for drinking, [no-one should stretch out] his
hand to the … the bread and of the [new wine] before the priest, for [he is the
one who bl]esses the … bread and … new wine [and stretches out] his hand
towards the bread before them.”
3. Should
the bread be leavened or unleavened? (Since Jesus was
celebrating Passover, we assume that the bread was unleavened at the time He
instituted the meal, but if it is taken every week or month or day, does
leavening matter?)
4. Is
Jesus using metaphors or is He being literal about “My body … My blood”? This
question brings us to the issue of transubstantiation, the focus of this
blogpost.
Metaphor
There is no question that Jesus frequently uses metaphors. When He says “you are the salt of the earth” or “you are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:13-14 NKJV), He is not talking about the sodium content or any literal luminescence of His listeners. When He says “a good tree does not bear bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit,” in Luke 6:43 (NKJV) or Matthew 12:33-37, He is not literally speaking of agricultural matters. Neither is He concerned with literal agriculture in His parable of the sower (Matthew 13:3-9, Mark 4:1-9, and Luke 8:4-8) or His parable of the lost sheep (Matthew 18:12-14 and Luke 15:3-7). Instead, just as with His similes about the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:24-30), the mustard seed (Matthew 13:31-32, Mark 4:30-32, and Luke 13:18-20), the hidden treasure (Matthew 13:44), and the pearl of great price (Matthew 13:45-46), He is using analogy. The fruit trees, sower and seed, lost sheep, wheat and tares, mustard seed, treasure, and pearl all represent or stand for something or someone else. When He tells His disciples, “I have food to eat of which you do not know” (John 4:32 NKJV), He is not talking about literal “meat” or “food,” though the disciples think He is. Hence, protestants rejecting the teaching of transubstantiation, often say that the bread and wine of communion “represent” Jesus’s body and blood. Huldrych Zwingli emphasizes memorial aspect of communion: “do this in remembrance of Me” Luke 22:19 (NKJV). According to Zondervan Academic, John Calvin’s view is “usually called the spiritual presence view. It's not transubstantiation, and it's not consubstantiation. And it goes beyond Zwingli’s memorial view. For John Calvin, there are symbols that are very powerful. They are the signs of the bread and the wine He says they are indeed symbolic—they are signs—but they're not empty signs. They really do render that which they portray, so they render to us the presence of Jesus Christ and his salvific benefits: all the work of salvation that he has accomplished on our behalf.”
Transubstantiation
On the other hand, Catholics opt for a literal understanding of Jesus’s statements “this is My body … this is My blood.” Brittanica.com defines: “transubstantiation, in Christianity [as] the change by which the substance (though not the appearance) of the bread and wine in the Eucharist becomes Christ’s real presence—that is, his body and blood.” By receiving the Eucharist, Christian are understood to be literally consuming the body and blood of Jesus. At least some of Jesus’s audience in John 6:52-60 (NKJV) interpreted such statements by Jesus as being literal: “The Jews therefore quarreled among themselves, saying, ‘How can this Man give us His flesh to eat?’ Then Jesus said to them, ‘Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him … This is the bread which came down from heaven—not as your fathers ate the manna, and are dead. He who eats this bread will live forever.’”
Consubstantiation
Zondervan Academic explains consubstantiation: “A second historical view is that of Martin Luther, generally called consubstantiation, though that was not a term that he himself used. By consubstantiation, we mean that Jesus Christ is present in, with, and under the bread and the wine whenever the Lord’s Supper is celebrated. Luther very clearly distinguished his view from transubstantiation. There's no mystical change of the substance of the bread and the wine. However, when the church celebrates the Lord’s Supper, Christ is present in, with, and under the elements of the bread and wine.”
Consubstantiality
Edward
Lamoureux, a Catholic former professor of rhetoric at Bradley University, in
his introductory course on Kenneth Burke (it has been suggested in Wikipedia) taught
that Burke borrowed the concept of consubstantiation to explain his
concept of logology. Having never sat in Lamoureux’s course,
I cannot be certain of his teachings on Burke and “consubstantiation,”
but as the author of the Expanded Kenneth Burke Concordance, I can
assert that Burke was employing the concept of “consubstantiality”
long before Burke used the term “logology.” Furthermore, the only instance
I have found in which Burke uses the term “consubstantiation”
is in his later work The Rhetoric of Religion and, even there, Burke
does not attach any real importance to the term by including it in his Index
list of terms.
Burke
only uses the term “consubstantiation” at that one time,
on page 260, after he is discussing (on pages 257-258) the first three chapters
of Genesis, and there he appears to be using the term only as Theodor Reik uses
it. Burke analyzes Reik’s Myth and Guilt, the Crime and Punishment of
Mankind. In that work, Reik connects the two Trees of the Genesis Garden
of Eden (of Life and of the Knowledge of Good and Evil) with the
Cross of Christ which is frequently called a “tree” in the King James Version
(Acts 5:30, 10:39, 13:29; Galatians 3:13; 1 Peter 2:24 KJV). (Actually, the
Greek word translated “tree” in the KJV in those instances is xulon/ξύλον,
which means simply “wood” or anything made of wood.) Burke comments that from
his own “point of view, the … merging of Christ, the two trees and the Cross …
would suggest another route whereby the principle of sacrifice could be
shown to be implicitly present … in the vessels of life and temptation,
at the very beginning.” Burke is not commenting from a biblical studies
perspective; he is commenting on Reik’s application, not the Bible, itself.
Although Burke does not use the term “consubstantiality” (or
even “consubstantiation”) at this point, he easily could
have applied the term “consubstantiality” to the Trees
and Cross observation. It is a good illustration of “consubstantiality” in the
realm of physics (and even biology). In physics, the Tree of Life, the Tree of
the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Cross of Christ all have
consubstantiality (but not consubstantiation). They are all composed of a “common”
(con-) “substance” (-substant-)—i.e. wood or xulon/ξύλον. Burke
uses the noun “consubstantiality” more than a dozen times in his earlier works.
He uses the adjective “consubstantial” another dozen or so more times—but not
in The Rhetoric of Religion.
Whereas
The Rhetoric of Religion was first published in 1961, Burke’s first
mention of the terms “consubstantiality” and “consubstantial” was in his
1941 book The Philosophy of Literary Form where he comments that “in the
communion service, consubstantiality is got by the eating of food in common”
(pages 28-29). It is that common (communion) meal that makes Christians
consubstantial with each other. On pages 44-45, he speaks “of familistic
consubstantiality by which parents take personal gratification” in their
children. Parents and child are of the same “substance.” He even speaks of “the
delegation of one’s burden to the … scapegoat,” suggesting that the one whom we
scapegoat is actually of the same substance as we are. In Leviticus 16, the
scapegoat sent into the wilderness on the Day of Atonement took with him all of
the sins of Israel. He was consubstantial with Israel. In Christian theology, the
suffering servant of Isaiah 53, understood as Jesus, bore our griefs and
carried our sorrows. He consubstantially became our scapegoat. This is not the
same as the theological doctrine of consubstantiation.
On pages 29-31 of his 1945 book, A Grammar of Motives, Burke lists his types of substance which might qualify for consubstantiality, including “Familial substance … [which] stresses common ancestry in the strictly biological sense,” which substance he repeats on page 102. On page 372, he describes the Declaration of Independence as something that gave Americans of various ancestries consubstantiality, by giving them a common enemy—the Crown of England. On pages 21 of his 1950 book, A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke identifies the “offspring” as “consubstantial with its parents, with the ‘firsts’ from which it is derived.” He then presses this “firsts” concept to other circumstances. Needless to say, we can trace any and all humans back to some common (first) progenitor, such as Adam. This is to say that all humans have a certain level of consubstantiality with each another. There is certainly a closer level of consubstantiality, however, among members of the same contemporaneous family, living in the twenty-first century. There is a level of consubstantiality between rain, ice, clouds, seas, and rivers (H2O). There is a closer level of consubstantiality between the Illinois river and the Mississippi River, since one flows into the other. There is a level of consubstantiality between the Cross, the Tree of Knowledge, the framework of my backyard shed, my bookshelves, and even toilet paper. They all experience a descent, of sorts, from the trees God created on the Third Day (Genesis 1:11). There is a closer level of consubstantiality between Sawtooth Oak trees, Pin Oak trees, Bur Oak, Live Oak, and even Poison Oak, etc. There is an even closer level of consubstantiality between the large live oak behind my house and the smaller live oak trees that have sprung up from its acorns.
So, what consubstantiality
exists between Jesus’s body and bread and wine? There is a level of consubstantiality
in the fact that his flesh, like bread, wine, rocks, minerals, gasses, and
animals are all composed of “natural” substances (in “physics/φυσική”). There
is a closer level of consubstantiality in the fact that substances of His
flesh, like bread and wine, are all biologic, organic material/hulē/ὕλη. They were all living (biological
as opposed to mineral or gaseous) substances on Earth. Why would that be
significant for communion? Because only biological substances can die. When
the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), Jesus tabernacled in
living, biologic, organic material/hulē/ὕλη. Rocks and minerals neither live nor die, but Jesus’s body lived
biologically and died biologically.
As I mentioned in my previous blogpost on The Antichrist/s, “Like Judas and those who are described in Hebrews 6:4-6 (NKJV), [the antichrist/s] ‘crucify again for themselves the Son of God, and put Him to an open shame.’ An antichrist is not an agnostic, unbeliever, or even an honest atheist. Indeed, the antichrist knows who Jesus is! He ‘is a liar … who denies that Jesus is the Christ’” (1 John 1:22). The antichrists deny the incarnation of Christ. This has been taken by many scholars to indicate that (at least, an incipient form of) docetic gnosticism (the belief that Christ just “appeared” to come in human form, but did not actually do so) was present in the church(es) to whom John wrote in 1st and 2nd John (the only places in the New Testament that discuss the Antichrist/s), but docetic gnosticism does not rear its ugly head until the 2nd century. I find it just as compelling (or more so) to understand that they are making reference to the prologue of John's Gospel (and 1 John 1:1-3) where the Logos “became flesh and dwelt among us.” This denial of the incarnation of Christ is, then, tantamount to a repudiation of Jesus as Christ. So, I don't believe we need a 2nd century theological explanation in the epistles.
When Jesus came to Earth, He chose not to come as a mineral or as
a gas or a liquid. He came into a living, biologic, organic material/hulē/ὕλη, a body that lived biologically and
died biologically. Furthermore, He came, not as a lower-level living, biologic, organism,
such as a grain of wheat or a grape, or any vegetation, or insect or any other
zoological organism other than the highest living, biologic, organism that He
himself created: a man, the organism created in God’s image. Nevertheless, as a
man, He took on the nature of ALL biologic, organic material/hulē/ὕλη—He lived and died. Just as
wheat dies before it is baked into bread and as the grapes die
before being crushed into new wine, Jesus himself died, organically. I
point out on page 77 of my book The Logic of Christianity: A Syllogistic
Chain that “the
Crucifixion and Resurrection combine to form the Key Links” in the logic of
Christianity. “He died one of the cruelest deaths of any human. Jesus was
mortal.” On page 94, I conclude:
Thinking of the LEX TALIONIS, what should
we think the fair maximum penalty [for whatever sins we have committed] could
possibly be? Could it be any worse than
CRUCIFIXION? What kind of sin or crime
could one possibly commit that would suggest a fair maximum penalty greater
than Crucifixion? I cannot think of
one. If that is so, Jesus’ Crucifixion
was JUSTICE for any sin known to mankind.
Jesus did receive justice. He
received justice, not for his own actions, but for the actions of any human
that has ever lived. He paid the price. The CRUCIFIXION, then, is Judicial Rhetoric/The
Justice Link in the Logic of Christianity.
Ephesians 1:7, Colossians 1:14, Romans 3:24-25, and 1 John 1:7 all indicate that it is the blood of Jesus that redeems us and purifies us from sin. That is a fact that we might remember, as we “do this in remembrance of” Jesus (Luke 22:19), as Zwingli admonishes. As Paul teaches: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death till He comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26). True, there is metaphoric significance to the fact that bread often resembles human flesh and that new wine resembles human blood, but the fact that Jesus died organically as a scapegoat for our sins offers us all kinds of consubstantiality with Jesus, as His organic flesh—His body and blood—have consubstantiality with his organic creations of wheat and grapes. As we, in communion, all over the world share in the same organic meal of bread and new wine, we have consubstantiality with Christ and with each other.
As a final note, the passage where Burke uses the term “consubstantiation”
in The Rhetoric of Religion, page 260, states: “Reik’s interpretation …
circulates around the imagery of eating … with the ideas of both
transubstantiation and consubstantiation being conceived after the same image.”
The word “substance” in the Greek New Testament is hypostasis/ὑπόστασις,
with the “hypo-/ὑπό-” meaning “sub- or under,” as in a hypo-dermic
needle that goes under the skin (dermis) and the “stasis/στασις” meaning “standing.”
Together, the word hypostasis/ὑπόστασις means that which “stands under,”
as when wood “stands under” or is the “substance” of all wooden
furniture, etc., and as “Faith is the substance (hypostasis/ὑπόστασις)
of things hoped for” (Hebrews 11:1). This term hypostasis/ὑπόστασις is,
I think, misused by the later Church in trying to explain Trinity as a “hypostatic
(ὑπόστασις) union.” That will be the topic of my next blogpost.
