If Adam had not sinned would God the Son have still become Incarnate as a Man?
Note that the
question as worded pertains to the Incarnation not the Atonement.
Many would say that
there is no way of knowing the answer to this question, and they have a good
point. What Luis de Molina, the sixteenth century Spanish Jesuit
who is best known for trying to harmonize a strong Augustinian view of
predestination with free will, called "Middle Knowledge", the
knowledge of counterfactuals, what would have been under different
circumstances, properly belongs to God alone. For many Protestants
however, without having considered the question per se, the default answer
would likely be "no" because in their theology the Atonement was the
end of the Incarnation. If you remove
the need for the Atonement you remove the need for the Incarnation.
For earlier theologians who seriously considered the matter, this was not
the case. John Duns Scotus, a Scottish Franciscan friar of the
thirteenth-fourteenth centuries, and one of the most important Medieval
theologians even if Modern thinkers scoffed at him - the word dunce, which was
the name of those conical caps teachers made disobedient and obtuse students
wear back when teachers were concerned with imparting learning and had not yet
realized their calling to convince girls that they are boys and boys that they
are girls, was derived from his name - argued that the answer was “yes”. He argued this in both his Ordinatio, the published collection of the
lectures he gave in Oxford on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, and his Reportatio
Parisiensis, which contain similar lectures delivered at the University of
Paris. It was also a common although
not universal view among the theologians
of the Eastern Church.
That this would be
the case - the "yes" answer being common in the East - is
understandable when we consider one of the major differences in Eastern and
Western theology, that which has to do with the antelapsarian state of
man. John Calvin, in the second book of
his Institutes of the Christian Religion,
chapter two, section four, says of the consequences of the Fall upon the
freedom of man’s will that “although the Greek Fathers, above others, and especially
Chrysostom, have exceeded due bounds in extolling the power of the human will,
yet all ancient theologians, with the exception of Augustine, are so confused, vacillating,
and contradictory on this subject, that no certainty can be obtained from their
writings.” St. Augustine was, of course,
the leading doctor of the Western Church. Countless Reformed
theologians since have assumed without looking into it that the East is
Pelagian or semi-Pelagian but that is not the case and that is not really what
Calvin said. Pelagianism was a heresy that East and West joined in
condemning, but which was a heresy that arose in the West and which has
perennially plagued the West not the East. The East-West difference
is that the East does not have as exalted a view of the pre-Fall state.
Man was created in the image and likeness of God, the Orthodox say, and they distinguish
between the two, identifying the image of God with man’s reason,
responsibility, and the like, and the likeness with moral excellence. The Fall affected the likeness of God in
man, but prior to the Fall that likeness was not yet perfect. Man was created innocent, that is to say,
without moral flaw, but was to grow to perfection, which is another way of
saying maturity. He was to grow in the
likeness of God until he was as like God in righteousness and holiness as a
creature can be. The East calls this theosis and sees the Fall as
an interruption of the process. They
liken it to a child stumbling as he takes his first steps. While
this sounds to Western ears like downplaying the Fall, this is because the West
has followed St. Augustine in regarding man’s antelapsarian state as one of
moral perfection. The East regards the
Fall as seriously as does the West, and insists contra Pelagius that apart from
the Grace of God as given through Jesus Christ there can be no salvation, but
they see the end of salvation as the completion of the interrupted theosis
rather than the restoration of the status quo ante. Given that framework,
it is to be expected that a “yes” answer to the question would come more
naturally to Eastern theologians than to Western theologians.
I do not bring this
up to argue that the East is right rather than the West. I think
that we are better off for listening to orthodox theologians from all the
ancient Christian traditions rather than just our own, but replacing a Western
provincialism with a reverse provincialism in which the East is always right is
not an improvement, I bring it up because there are parallels
in the preceding discussion with the one that is about to follow with a new
question:
If Adam had not
sinned would there still have been sacrifices?
Here too, although
this question is as much about what might have been as the first, those who
would be inclined to answer the first question with "no" are likely
to answer "no" again. In this case, however, we might
expect a better argued reason for the answer. Sacrifices, the argument
goes, began after the Fall and pointed to the Ultimate Sacrifice of Jesus
Christ. God gave Adam and Eve skin coats to cover them as the first
picture of the necessity of the shedding of the blood of the Son of God to
atone for sin. Their sons offered sacrifices, showing the
practice was established that far back, and while it got corrupted by paganism,
God gave a pure sacrificial system to the Israelites in the Old Covenant, to
point them towards Jesus Christ, Whose True Sacrifice brought other sacrifices
to an end. Since the whole point of this was that Jesus Christ's death
atoned for man's sin, in the absence of sin there would have been no need for
any of this.
The problem with
this reasoning is not so much with what it positively affirms but with what it
leaves out. The Scriptures, Old and New Testaments, speak of
sacrifices other than sacrifices that a) involve death, and b) are offered on
account of sin or trespass, voluntary or otherwise. The hidden assumption in the argument
outlined in the previous paragraph is that in verses that speak of non-physical
sacrifices, "sacrifice" is used in a metaphorical sense, with
blood/death sacrifices being the literal thing that gives the metaphorical its
meaning. Even the physical
sacrifices of the Levitical sacrificial system that God gave to the Israelites
as part of the Mosaic Covenant, however, contain sacrifices that don’t fit the
model of death and blood, prefiguring Calvary.
There were the sin offerings and the trespass offerings to be made when
one had unknowingly sinned, the difference between the two basically being that
the one was for when no restitution was possible and the other for when it was. There were the daily burnt offerings and
sacrifices, which had reference to sin in a more general sense. Then there were the peace offerings which,
while not entirely unrelated to sin, were more about thanksgiving and
fellowship. The focus was on the positive
not the negative and this was even more the case with the sacrifices that were
offered in commemoration of events, or to mark the beginning of the month, or
to consecrate something or another. Not
all of the offerings involved animals.
There were also grain offerings – sometimes in the form of flour, sometimes
in the form of roasted grains, sometimes in the form of cakes, in each case
mixed with oil, and except for the cakes with frankincense as well – and there
were wine offerings or libations.
Sometimes these were offered with an animal sacrifice, sometimes they
were offered on their own. If
there were other types of sacrifices, even among the physical sacrifices of the
Levitical system, then perhaps the non-physical sacrifices are not metaphorical
after all. Perhaps there is a
deeper, more essential, meaning to the concept of sacrifice that might actually
be easier to see in these other sacrifices where it is not overshadowed by the
thought of man's sin and the need to atone for it. If that is the case, this might be,
depending upon what that deeper meaning turns out to be, a good case for the
“yes” answer to our question.
It is worth noting
here that the word “sacrifice” does not appear in the Authorized Bible until
the thirty-first chapter of Genesis.
This is the word זֶבַח
(zebach) which is most often rendered “sacrifice” and which is the word behind
most appearances of “sacrifice” in the Authorized Old Testament. Here it is used of the sacrifice that Jacob
offered when he and his uncle Laban had made a covenant between themselves
before going their separate ways. Now,
if you are familiar with the Old Testament or even just the most basic episodes
in its narrative history you are probably saying that this cannot be right,
because sacrifices appear much earlier.
What about Cain and Abel?
Yes, the account of
Cain and Abel in the fourth chapter of Genesis does indeed depict sacrifices,
but it does not use the basic word for sacrifice. What Cain and Abel each brought to the Lord
is called in the Authorized Bible an “offering” and this is a translation of
the Hebrew מִנְחָה (mincha) that is actually more common than the word
rendered “sacrifice” being rendered “offering” two more times than the total of
all uses of זֶבַח.
זֶבַח is a noun derived from a verb meaning “to kill” or “to
slaughter”. מִנְחָה, however, is derived
from a verb meaning “to bestow” or “to give”.
Interestingly, although the Hebrew uses מִנְחָה consistently for both
Can and Abel’s offerings, the translators who produced the Septuagint opted to
use different words. Cain’s offering is
described as a θυσία (thusia) which is the word one would expect had זֶבַח been used as it means “sacrifice”
whereas Abel’s is called by the plural of
δῶρον (doron) which is the basic Greek word for “gift” and so a more
literal translation of the Hebrew word.
What makes this an even stranger translation choice is that one would
expect the reverse since Cain’s offering was of the “fruit of the ground” and
Abel’s was of the “firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof”. Perhaps by using the word one would have
expected of Abel’s animal sacrifice for Can’s grain offering the LXX
translators wished to emphasize the difference in the nature of the gifts as an
explanation of why the one was rejected and the other accepted. If so they anticipated an interpretation,
i.e., that not being an animal sacrifice it could not prefigure Christ’s
Atonement, that is very popular in Christian pulpits but which makes little
sense given that grain offerings were later established in the Mosaic Covenant
and that the text itself offers the explanation that Abel brought the
“firstlings” of his flock and “of the fat thereof”, that is to say the very
best, but uses no such language of Cain’s offering. Cain’s offence, then, was most likely that
of Malachi 1:7:
Ye offer polluted
bread upon mine altar; and ye say, Wherein have we polluted thee? In that ye
say, The table of the Lord is contemptible.
That the first account of sacrifice in the Bible uses the
word for “offering” rather than the word derived from the verb for killing is,
I think, very instructive as to the basic, essential, nature of sacrifice. Later in Genesis, when Jacob is
contemplating how his brother will receive him upon his return, he uses this
same word for the extravagant gift he prepares in the hopes of appeasing Esau
should he still be miffed over the whole stolen birthright/blessing thing. Here the word is translated “present” in the
Authorized Bible. Even later in Genesis
it is the word used of the tribute that Jacob orders his sons to bring to
Pharaoh’s Prime Minister, who they do not yet know is their brother Joseph, on
their second trip to Egypt. Here too it
is rendered “present” which is the second most common translation of the word. When the recipient is another human being
rather than God “present” or “gift” is used, almost always with the sense of
“tribute”. This would appear to be the
basic idea behind an offering or sacrifice to God as well. It is the tribute that human beings as His
subjects, owe to the King of Kings.
Such an understanding rather clinches the case for a “yes”
answer to our question. For human
beings were always subjects of their Creator, the King of Kings, and as such
would always have owed Him tribute whether they had fallen from His favour through
sin or no. Even if one were to argue
that had man remained in his primordial, antelapsarian, condition he would have
had nothing to bring to God of the fruits of his labour, not even grain
offerings, because having to work the land was part of the curse and he would
still have been in the Garden, they would have been expected to bring the
sacrifice (θυσία) of Hebrews 13:15:
By him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise
to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name.
In this verse we come at last
to my point in raising these questions of what would have been. If sacrifice is in its truest essence human
beings bringing to God, the King of Kings, the tribute we owe Him as His subjects
and which would have been required of us even if we had not sinned, and if,
therefore, the idea of a propitiatory offering reconciling us to the God we
have offended as sinners, prefigured in the blood sacrifices of the Old
Testament and ultimately fulfilled in the Crucifixion, is the form that
sacrifice took after the Fall due to the sinfulness of man, we would expect
that after Jesus Christ fulfilled the propitiatory aspect of sacrifice once and
for all, its essence would remain in Christian worship, and that is exactly
what this verse, near the end of the epistle which most clearly spells out how
the death of Jesus Christ has satisfied the need for sacrifice for sin, says.
By His death on the Cross,
Jesus Christ did what the bulls and goats, sacrificed on the altar of the
Tabernacle and Temple, looking forwards to Him, could never do. He took away the sin of the world. Moreover, His Sacrifice was the Sacrifice
that established the New Covenant foretold in the Old. With the change in Covenant came a change in
priesthood and rite. These changes
reflect the fact that in the events of the Gospel, everything the Old Covenant
looked forward to has been fulfilled.
Under the Old Covenant the rite of entry and the outward sign of
membership in the Covenant people was Circumcision. While not a sacrifice per se, Circumcision
involved the shedding of blood. With
the establishment of Christ’s New Covenant, all ceremonial requirements for
shedding blood came to an end having been fulfilled with the shedding of His
blood on the Cross. So Circumcision was
replaced with Baptism, which does not involve the shedding of blood, and which
is a more perfect rite of entrance in that it can be administered to everyone,
male and female alike, as is entirely appropriate for a Covenant which, unlike
the Old Covenant that was national, is Catholic, for people of every kindred,
tribe, and nation. Where Baptism most
resembles the rite that was its equivalent in the Old Covenant is that it is
administered once and does not need to be repeated.
Other than Circumcision, the
most important part of the ceremonial aspect of the Old Covenant was the
sacrifices that the Levitical priesthood offered at the Tabernacle/Temple. These did have to repeated, some daily,
others, such as those assigned to the Feast Days and the Day of Atonement,
annually. Just as Baptism is the more
perfect replacement for Circumcision, so under the New Covenant there is a more
perfect ceremonial replacement for the Old Testament sacrifices, and that is
the Sacrament that we variously call the Lord’s Supper or Lord’s Table, Holy
Communion – this word means fellowship or sharing, and the Eucharist. This last is the Greek word for
thanksgiving, the verbal form of which is used by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 11
for the thanks given by the Lord in the institution of the Sacrament. Although a different word, the verb that is
usually translated “confess”, is used for giving thanks in Hebrews 13:15, it is
not improbable that this verse contributed to the rite replacing the Levitical
sacrifices being named “Thanksgiving” from the earliest days (it is so named in
the Didache, an early instruction
manual in right living, liturgy, and Church structure which was thought lost
until rediscovered around the middle of the nineteenth century, and which after
the discovery of similar Jewish manuals among the Qumran scrolls has usually
been dated to the first century).
Using the word “sacrifice” in
the context of discussing the Eucharist sends a certain type of Protestant into
hysterical fits. This is, perhaps,
understandable considering the state of the Sacrament in the West on the eve of
the Reformation. Masses were said
around the clock, often with no laity present or expected to be present. When the laity were present they seldom took
Communion and when they did receive it was only the host, the cup being
withheld from them. Instead of being
encouraged to receive the Sacrament, the people were encouraged to gaze at it
in adoration from afar. The underlying
theological problem behind all this was the idea that in the Mass Christ’s
Sacrifice was repeated and so each Mass was a sacrifice in itself that was
offered up by the priest, and which conferred its benefits regardless of
whether the beneficiaries were present or not.
This, at least, is how the Roman late Medieval theology on the matter
was understood at the popular level. To
what extent the popular theology reflected the official teaching of the Roman
Church at the time is debatable. St. Thomas Aquinas addressed the question of
whether Christ is sacrificed in the Sacrament in Summa Theologiae, Third Part, Question 83, Article 1. He argues in the affirmative, but his main
argument in the Respondeo, an argument that he borrows from St. Augustine, is
that just as we point to a picture and say that this is Cicero or Sallust, so
we say that the Sacrament, the depiction of Christ’s One Sacrifice, is that Sacrifice,
which was an argument that Zwingli could have endorsed. However, St. Thomas Aquinas represented the
Medieval theology of Rome prior to Trent at its best, in its most scholarly
form, which differed both from the popular theology and the dogmas coming out
of the Roman See. That people could pay
a price to have a Mass said in order to reduce their own temporal debt for sin
or knock time off of Purgatory for someone else, suggests that the Patriarch of
Rome and his subordinates cannot be wholly absolved of blame for what was going
on at the popular level. The fact that
they cleaned up some of the abuses and clarified their official doctrine in the
Council of Trent (1545-1563) demonstrates that they recognized this as well,
even if they were not willing to publicly admit their wrong doing. It was to this sort of thinking and the bad practices
it produced, that the Reformers reacted.
Or maybe they
overreacted. The abuses described in the previous
paragraph were distinctly Roman. The
Eastern Church never withheld the wine from the laity, encouraged them to adore
the host from afar rather than receive it, or sold private Masses. These abuses, therefore, are Roman rather
than Catholic. The Eastern Church did
and does, however, regard the Eucharist as a sacrifice. Since the Church Fathers going back to St.
Ignatius, the Patriarch of Antioch who was martyred early in the second century
and who had been taught by St. John the Apostle himself, spoke of the Eucharist
as a sacrifice, the idea that the Eucharist is a sacrifice is a Catholic one
and not merely a Roman one. The Reformers,
therefore, should have been very careful in approaching this, not to condemn
what was Catholic along with what was Roman, unless they had solid Scriptural
grounds to do so. Certainly, they were
on solid Scriptural ground in objecting to any teaching that suggested that the
Eucharist was another sacrifice of
the same type as Christ’s One Sacrifice, or that in the Eucharist Christ’s
Sacrifice was repeated, or that the
Eucharist adds to what Jesus
accomplished on the Cross. These,
however, are not Catholic ideas. They
might be Roman or have been Roman at one point in time, but they were never
taught by the Eastern Church. The
Eastern Church, however, did and does teach that the Eucharist is a
propitiatory sacrifice. How they can
teach that and not teach these other things, I will explain momentarily.
First note that the
Reformers, in reacting to Rome, rejected that idea common to the Eastern and
Roman Churches, that the Eucharist is a propitiatory sacrifice. They would allow for it being a sacrifice
only in the sense of a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. Calvin’s discussion of this can be found in
chapter XVII of the fourth book of his Institutes,
the second part of the chapter beginning at section ten being most relevant. In the tenth section he acknowledges that
the ancients spoke of the Eucharist as a sacrifice but says that they meant it
merely in the sense of a commemoration of Christ’s Sacrifice. As his argument proceeds, he acknowledges that
there are other sacrifices than the kind that involve death, although he
describes those who raise the point as “quarrelsome” and says that he does not
see the “rational ground” on which they “extend” the term to these other rites
(section thirteen). Clearly, the kind of
argument made at the beginning of this essay that sacrifice, in its essential
meaning, is tribute offered to the King of Kings, with the idea of death and
blood being external to the essence and a consequence of the Fall, would be
lost on Calvin. Since his mind was
shaped by training in law, he should not be too harshly blamed for this. He argues that as a sacrifice, the Eucharist
belongs to a class that includes all duties of charity and piety rather than
being unique, (section sixteen), and that in particular it is a sacrifice of
praise, prayer, and thanksgiving (section seventeen). His point in all of this is to so separate
the Roman “Mass” from the Lord’s Supper as to make them two different things
altogether than the one a corrupted version of the other. Amusingly, considering his opposition to
“superstition”, by this he succeeded in creating a new superstition, the
aversion to the very word “Mass” found among certain Protestants who seem to
think that all of popery is smuggled in by the use of this word which simply
means a service in which the Eucharist is celebrated.
In the Eastern Church, such a
service is commonly called the Divine Liturgy. The Eastern Church, as mentioned, regards
the Sacrament celebrated in the Divine Liturgy as a propitiatory
sacrifice. They do not, however, regard
it as being another propitiatory sacrifice adding that of Jesus Christ, or a
repetition of Christ’s Sacrifice. This
is because they regard it as being the One Sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The late Metropolitan Kallistos Ware,
writing under his pre-monastic name Timothy, explains:
The Eucharist is not a bare commemoration nor an
imaginary representation of Christ’s sacrifice, but the true sacrifice itself;
yet on the other hand it is not a new sacrifice, nor a repetition of the
sacrifice on Calvary, since the Lamb was sacrificed ‘once only, for all
time’. The events of Christ’s sacrifice
– the Incarnation, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the
Ascension – are not repeated in the Eucharist, but they are made present. ‘During the Liturgy, through its divine
power, we are projected to the point where eternity cuts across time, and at
this point we become true contemporaries with the events which we commemorate.’
‘All the holy suppers of the Church are nothing else than one eternal and
unique Supper, that of Christ in the Upper Room. The same divine act both takes place at a
specific moment in history, and is offered always in the sacrament.’ (Timothy Ware, The
Orthodox Church, 1963, rev. 1993, 2015 edition, pp. 279-280, bold
representing italics in original, citations in text from P. Evdokimov, L’Orthodoxie, p. 241 and 208
respectively)
The Eastern Church had to
clarify her views on this much earlier than the Roman Church. One notable example took place about a
century after the mutual excommunications of the Patriarchs of Rome and
Constantinople in the Schism. Lukas
Chrysoberges, the newly installed Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, was
barely in office in 1156 when a controversy arose due to the teaching of Soterichos Panteugenos, who had been chosen for the
next Patriarch of Antioch but had not yet been enthroned. Panteugenos taught that Jesus had offered
His Sacrifice only to the Father and not to the entire Holy Trinity. This was denounced as heretical, and
Chrysoberges was asked to preside over the Synod of Blachernae that Emperor
Manuel I Komnemnos called to meet in said quarter of Constantinople in 1157 to
decide the matter. The main issue was
the one just mentioned but Panteugenos had also taught that the Eucharist was
merely a figurative commemoration of Christ’s Sacrifice. His teachings were condemned and his
selection for the See of Antioch was nullified, although he was persuaded to
recant. Most significantly for our
purposes here, the Eastern Church declared in the council that the Eucharist
was not just a figurative commemoration, but the One Sacrifice of Jesus Christ
and to make the identification clear it was emphasized that it was not another
sacrifice, not a repeat of the sacrifice, but the One Sacrifice made present in
a sacramental fashion. Having had to
clarify her understanding of the Eucharist so soon after breaking fellowship
with Rome, she was clear on there being no repetition of or addition to the One
Sacrifice in a way that Rome was not,
and so did not go down the same path as Rome.
Although the Eastern
understanding excludes the ideas that were most objectionable to the Reformers
in the idea of the Eucharist as a propitiatory sacrifice, the ideas of adding
to or repeating the One Sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and was not coupled with the
corrupt practices of withholding the wine, encouraging the faithful to gaze
from afar rather than receive, charging for private Masses, etc., it likely
would not have met with a good reception among the continental Reformers. Dr. Luther logically ought not to have had
any problem with it considering his overall conservatism and especially his
strong view of the Real Presence which prevented him from reaching accord with
the Swiss Reformers in the Marburg Colloquy of 1529. It does not make much logical sense to
insist on the Real Presence of the Body and Blood in the elements of the
Sacrament without accepting the Real Presence of the One Sacrifice in the
Sacrament. Calvin, who already had a
low view of the Eastern tradition because of the differences between the Greek
Fathers and St. Augustine, and who held a considerably less literal view of the
Real Presence than Dr. Luther, would not likely have viewed the Eastern
position as much less objectionable than Rome’s. The real question, however, from the
starting point of the primacy and supremacy of Scripture, which both Dr. Luther
and Calvin affirmed, is what the Bible teaches concerning the relationship
between the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the Sacrament of Holy Communion.
Jesus Christ’s Sacrifice on
the Cross was the One Sacrifice that effectually removed the sin of the world
and accomplished salvation. It was also
a Sacrifice that established a Covenant.
In the words of Institution in Matthew 26:28, Mark 14:24, Luke 22:20,
and 1 Corinthians 11:25, Jesus pronounced over the cup of the Eucharist that it
was the “new testament” in His blood, i.e., the New Covenant. Understanding that Christ’s Sacrifice was a
Covenant Sacrifice as well as the Sacrifice that accomplished the salvation of
the world is essential to understanding what the Lord’s Supper is all
about. Important information about this
can be gleaned by looking at the establishment of the Old Covenant.
The Old Covenant was
established at Mt. Sinai, where Moses led the Israelites after their flight
from Egypt in the book of Exodus. The
formal establishment of the Covenant takes place in the twenty-fourth chapter,
where the LORD summons Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy of the elders of
Israel to worship (v. 1), allowing only Moses to come near Him (v. 2), Moses
tells the people all the words of the Lord and they promise to keep all of them
(v. 3), Moses records everything and rises early in the morning, builds an
altar, and erects twelve pillars for the twelve tribes (v. 4), they offer burnt
offerings and peace offerings of oxen (v. 5), Moses puts half the blood in
basins and sprinkles half on the altar (v. 6), the book of the Covenant is read
to the people and they again promise to do all that is contained in it (v. 7)
after which Moses sprinkles the people with blood and tells them to behold the
blood of the Covenant which the Lord has made with them (v. 8), then all those
who had been summoned go up the mountain where they see God and “eat and drink”
(vv. 9-11). In this formal
establishment of the Covenant we see a) the sacrifices, i.e., the actual
killing of the victims b) the act of sanctification by the sprinkling of the
blood, and c) the representatives of the people eating and drinking in the
presence of the Other Party to the Covenant, i.e., God. The first two of these, the killing of the
victim on the altar and the sprinkling of the blood, are the key components of
sacrifices that are offered on account of sin and which prefigure the Sacrifice
of Jesus Christ. Think especially of the procedure on the Day of
Atonement. The killing on the altar
prefigures the death of Christ on the Cross on Calvary, and the sprinkling of
whatever needs to be sanctified, such as the Holy of Holies, with the blood
prefigures Jesus Christ’s entry into the Heavenly Tabernacle with His Own Blood
as High Priest after the order of Melchizedek which is discussed at length in
the book of Hebrews. The part where the parties of the Covenant eat
and drink together is the standard conclusion of the making of a Covenant. It was seen earlier in the Pentateuch in the
passage that contains the first use of the principle word for sacrifice where
after Jacob and Laban have come to their agreement “Jacob offered
sacrifice upon the mount, and called his brethren to eat bread: and they did
eat bread, and tarried all night in the mount.” (Gen. 31:54). Indeed, it is seen even earlier than that
where Melchizedek, the priest of Salem alluded to in the references to Jesus
Christ as a priest after the order of Melchizedek, brings out bread and wine to
Abram and his confederates and to those they just liberated from the eastern
confederacy after the rebellion of the cities of the plain in the fourteenth
chapter of Genesis. In this passage,
the making of a Covenant is implied by the circumstances, only the final meal
is explicitly mentioned. Note the close
resemblance between that meal and a Eucharist.
Having looked at the formal establishment of the Old
Covenant we need now to back up in the book of Exodus to look at the event
which more than anything else in the Old Testament prefigures Jesus Christ and
the redemption He accomplished on the Cross.
God’s deliverance of Israel from literal slavery in Egypt, prefigures
His delivering His people of every nation from slavery to sin through Jesus
Christ’s death on the Cross. This is
why Christ’s work on the Cross is called “redemption”, a word that literally
means purchasing someone out of slavery.
God’s challenge to Pharaoh through Moses culminated in the plague of the
firstborn, in which the Angel of Death visited all the firstborn in Egypt, from
Pharaoh’s household down, The
Israelites were delivered from this plague in a manner that they would
commemorate forever in the Passover. It
was on the anniversary of the Passover that Jesus was crucified. In Exodus 12, God gave Moses the
instructions regarding the Passover.
They were to choose a spotless lamb per household on the tenth of the
month. On the fourteenth of the month,
the lamb would be killed before the assembly of the entire congregation of
Israel. This foreshadows the death of
Christ on the Cross. Then they were to
take the blood and strike it on the two side posts and the upper post of the
main entrance to the house. This, which
incidentally or not requires making a cross shaped motion, foreshadows Christ’s
entry into the heavenly Holy of Holies with His blood. Then, finally, they were to eat the
Passover:
And they shall eat the
flesh in that night, roast with fire, and unleavened bread; and with bitter
herbs they shall eat it. Eat not of it
raw, nor sodden at all with water, but roast with fire; his head with his legs,
and with the purtenance thereof. And ye shall let nothing of it remain until
the morning; and that which remaineth of it until the morning ye shall burn
with fire. (vv. 8-10)
So covenants were formally established with sacrifices after
which there was a shared meal. The
implication that the sacrifice itself became the meal is made explicit in the
account of the Passover. Do I really
need to state the obvious by saying that the Lord’s Supper, which was
instituted on the occasion of a Passover meal, is to Christ’s One Sacrifice
what that meal was to the Passover sacrifice or that Christ’s One Sacrifice
being a Covenant Sacrifice, the Lord’s Supper is the Covenant meal?
Now ordinarily Covenant meals were eaten once on the occasion
of the establishment of the Covenant.
The Passover meal was repeated in a commemorative way once a year on the
anniversary of the original event. The
Lord’s Supper, however, was to be eaten over and over again on a regular
basis. From the account of the first
Church in Jerusalem in its early days we learn that at first the Lord’s Supper
was celebrated on a daily basis (Acts 2:42, 46). Note
the juxtaposition in the second of these verses of the believers’ continuing in
the Temple of the Old Covenant, which was still standing at the time, and their
“breaking bread”, i.e., in the Lord’s Supper, in the houses where they met as
the Church. Here the two systems
temporarily overlap, but with Christ’s death having accomplished what the old
sacrifices of bulls and goats could only point to, the old system was already
essentially dead. What remained for
believers was to eat and drink of that One Sacrifice in the manner of which
Christ prescribed, through the means of bread and wine. The Lord’s Supper took the place in the
religion of the New Covenant that the sacrifices occupied under the Old
Covenant. It is hardly a coincidence
that bread and wine, in addition to being important elements of the Passover
meal, were the non-animal offerings required by the Mosaic Law. There is another reason, however, why the
meal in which the Sacrifice of the New Covenant is eaten by the faithful, is to
be repeated and far more often than the commemoration of the Passover.
The New Covenant is the Covenant of everlasting life. Man had lived under the dominion of Death
since the Fall. The Son of God, by
becoming Man, living the righteous life as Man that God required, taking the
sins of fallen man upon Himself and submitting to Death, defeating Death in the
process, smashing the gates of Death’s kingdom Hell, then rising Immortal from
the grave and ascending back to the right hand of the Father, obtained
everlasting life for us. It is offered
to us freely in Him to be received by faith.
This new life, everlasting life,
is like the old physical life in that it begins with a birth and is sustained
by food and drink. Entry into
everlasting life is described as a new or spiritual birth by Jesus Christ in
His interview with Nicodemus in the third chapter of St. John’s Gospel. In the sixth chapter of the same Gospel in
an extended discourse which takes place in the synagogue of Capernaum on the
day after the feeding of the five thousand He describes Himself as the Bread of
Life. In the course of this discourse He
talks about how it is God’s will that He, Jesus, preserve all those whom He has
been given, believers, in everlasting life. Therefore, when at the end of the discourse He
says that one must eat His Flesh and drink His Blood to have everlasting life,
it is apparent that He is talking about the means through which He accomplishes
this preservation. Everlasting life is
received in the new birth, and nourished and sustained by the food that is His
Flesh and Blood. In both chapters faith
is identified as the means by which we personally appropriate the Grace of
everlasting life both as the initial new birth and the sustaining food and drink. Both chapters also identify the means by
which God confers the Grace upon us. God
confers the Grace of the new birth through the Sacrament of Baptism (Jn. 3:5,
cf. 1:33), and the Grace of the sustaining of that life through the Body and
Blood of Jesus Christ, i.e., the Sacrament of the Eucharist. There is no contradiction between the
Sacraments conferring Grace and faith receiving it. The New Covenant is not between God and each
individual believer on a one-on-one basis as the evangelical expression “a
personal relationship with Jesus Christ” which is found nowhere in the
Scriptures would suggest. The New
Covenant is between God and the community of faith established by said
Covenant, the Church. The new life is the life of Jesus Christ
Himself and we share in it through union with Him which union also united us
with other believers in the New Covenant community that is His Body, the
Church. The Gospel Sacraments of Baptism
and the Lord’s Supper are both the external sign and seal of the new birth and
the sustaining of the new life with the food and drink of the Body and Blood of
Jesus Christ and the means through which that union is established and God
brings these gifts to his people. This
is not a mechanical operation. Nobody
receives the Grace conferred through the Sacraments except through the
appointed means of appropriation, which is faith in Jesus Christ. Since, however, the Sacraments occupy the
same spot in the Ordu Salutis as the preaching of the Gospel, the means through
which God works as opposed to the means through which we appropriate, they,
like preaching, work towards forming and sustaining in the believer, the faith
by which the believer receives the Grace.
Unlike the more fanatical types of Protestants who tended
towards schism and separatism, Dr. Luther had a good understanding of this. John Calvin’s understanding of it was not
quite as good as Dr. Luther’s but it was passable. See his refutation of the idea that the
Sacraments are only outer signs in the thirteenth section of chapter XIV of the
fourth book of his Institutes and
also note that Calvin begins this chapter by saying that the Sacraments are
“Akin to the preaching of the gospel”.
It is strange therefore, that they allowed their reaction against the
errors and abuses of Rome, to blind their eyes to the obvious reference to the
Lord’s Supper in the fifty-first to fifty-eight verses of the sixth chapter of
the Gospel according to St. John, and in the larger discourse in which they are
found. Calvin wrote of it that “this
discourse does not relate to the Lord’s Supper” (Calvin’s Commentary on John 6:53). Commenting
on the words “And I will raise him up at the last day” in the next verse,
Calvin compounds his error by saying:
From these words, it
plainly appears that the whole of this passage is improperly explained, as
applied to the Lord’s Supper. For if it were true that all who present
themselves at the holy table of the Lord are made partakers of his flesh and
blood, all will, in like manner, obtain life; but we know that there
are many who partake of it to their condemnation. And indeed it would have been
foolish and unreasonable to discourse about the Lord’s Supper, before he had
instituted it. It is certain, then, that he now speaks of the perpetual and
ordinary manner of eating the flesh of Christ, which is done by faith only.
This reasoning is entirely specious. It confuses the means of Grace, that is to
say, the intermediate means God has established to bring the Grace obtained by
Jesus Christ for sinful man on the Cross to
sinful man, with the means assigned to sinful man to appropriate said Grace to
himself. Faith is the only means of
appropriating Grace, this is what we mean when we speak of “faith alone”. The means of Grace in the sense of the means
through which God works to bring Grace to people include the preaching of His
Word, in both its aspects of Law, which works repentance by opening man’s eyes
to his need of Grace, and Gospel which proclaims that Grace, and the
Sacraments, of which the Eucharist is one.
Only those who make use of the means of appropriating Grace, faith,
actually receive the Grace conferred in either Word or Sacrament. John Calvin understood how this works, so it
is inexcusable that he pretended he did not here. It is also inexcusable that he argued the
Lord’s Supper cannot be referred to here because it would be “foolish and
unreasonable” to talk about the Sacrament before instituting it. This is St. John’s Gospel he was commenting
on, a Gospel written by an Evangelist who more than once quotes the Lord as
saying something and commenting that nobody understood it until much later
(2:22 for example and 12:16).
Lest I be accused of misrepresenting the Reformer, he does
go on immediately after what I just quoted to say:
And yet, at the same
time, I acknowledge that there is nothing said here that is not figuratively
represented, and actually bestowed on believers, in the Lord’s Supper; and
Christ even intended that the holy Supper should be, as it were, a seal and
confirmation of this sermon.
If it is “actually bestowed on believers” in the Lord’s
Supper, as Calvin here affirms, there is no good reason for him to think the
passage does not make reference to the Lord’s Supper. Since
Sacraments don’t work mechanically and Grace is not received apart from faith
it is quite silly not to see the Lord’s Supper in these verses. If the Lord’s Supper were not intended and
reception of the Lord by faith was all that was being discussed here, then why
after talking for quite some time about His being the true Bread of Life, does
Jesus all of a sudden introduce the idea of drinking His blood? What Calvin thinks is being stated in this
passage without direct reference to the Lord’s Supper, would have been conveyed
without the reference to drinking His blood.
That the Lord would needlessly complicate a metaphor in such a way as to
make it sound like He is talking about the Sacrament He would later establish
without actually talking about it is a truly incredible interpretation.
So the Scriptures teach that the Lord’s Supper is a) the
meal in which the Sacrifice establishing the New Covenant is eaten and b) the
Sacramental means by which the new life is sustained by the spiritual food of
the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.
This harmonizes very well with the understanding that the Eucharist is a
sacrifice, even a propitiatory one, but not in its own right, not by repeating
or adding to what Jesus Christ did, but because the One Sacrifice of Jesus
Christ, the only Sacrifice that is truly propitiatory, is Sacramentally present in it. Since this view harmonizes with the
Scriptures, we have good cause to call it the true Catholic understanding,
passed down from the Patristic era, preserved fairly well in the Eastern
tradition, and distorted, although not necessarily obliterated, in the Roman
tradition after the Schism.
While our Articles of Religion cannot be said to
enthusiastically embrace this view, neither do they disallow it. Our English Reformers were generally more
conservative than any of the continental Reformers and it shows here too. Articles XXVIII to XXXI treat of the Lord’s
Supper and the various controversies pertaining to it in the Reformation. We will not dwell on Article XXIX which
reiterates the assertion in Article XXVIII that faith is the means of receiving
Christ in the Sacrament by declaring the necessary flipside to that that the
wicked do not receive Christ and Article XXX prohibits the withholding of the
cup, with no exception for when a pandemic is underway. Article
XXXI is most relevant to our discussion here.
It reads:
The Offering of Christ
once made is that perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction, for all
the sins of the whole world, both original and actual; and there is none other
satisfaction for sin, but that alone. Wherefore the sacrifices of Masses, in
the which it was commonly said, that the Priest did offer Christ for the quick
and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables, and
dangerous deceits.
The “Wherefore” which starts the second sentence in this
ties the condemnation of “the sacrifices of Masses” as “blasphemous fables, and
dangerous deceits” to what was said in the previous sentence. Any idea of a Mass as a sacrifice that in
its own right does what the Offering of Christ did, repeats it or adds to it in
any way, deserves such condemnation. The
idea that that the Eucharist is a sacrifice because that One Offering of Christ
is Sacramentally present in it is not condemned in these words.
Which brings us to the subject of the Real Presence that is
treated earlier under Article XXVIII.
It affirms the Sacramental nature of the Lord’s Supper and the Real
Presence right at the beginning:
The Supper of the Lord
is not only a sign of the love that Christians ought to have among themselves
one to another; but rather is a Sacrament of our Redemption by Christ’s death:
insomuch that to such as rightly, worthily, and with faith, receive the same,
the Bread which we break is a partaking of the Body of Christ; and likewise the
Cup of Blessing is a partaking of the Blood of Christ.
It then addresses the Roman doctrine of
Transubstantiation. Transubstantiation
is not the same thing as the Real Presence.
The Real Presence was affirmed everywhere in the Church from the
Patristic era to the Reformation and is truly Catholic rather than merely
Roman. Transubstantiation is a late
Roman doctrine. It is how Rome
attempted to explain the Real Presence.
At this point it is worth noting that one of the big differences between
the Western and Eastern traditions is that the Eastern tradition is far more comfortable
in leaving things as mysteries without a rational or scientific explanation for
them than ours is. This is something for
which the East is right to criticize us.
Some things should be left as mysteries. This is one of them. Rome, not content to leave the Real Presence
unexplained, came up with Transubstantiation, the idea that in the consecration
of the Eucharist the bread and wine go away, leaving only their appearances behind,
and are replaced by the Body and Blood.
The Reformers, rejecting this explanation, repeated the basic mistake of
the Romanists of seeking to explain what did not need to be explained. Dr. Luther, the strongest defender of the
Real Presence among the Reformers, came up with an explanation that pressed to
its logical conclusion means that Jesus is present in the bread and wine – and in
the altar, the pew, the walls of the Church building, and the tree on the front
lawn – with the only thing special about the bread and wine being that in the
Eucharist attention is drawn to the Presence.
Zwingli, who saw the Sacrament as being merely a figurative
commemoration, argued that Jesus is spiritually present. That Jesus is spiritually present is true,
of course, but it is rather strange to maintain that this is what Jesus meant
when He said “this is My Body”. John
Calvin, who saw the Sacrament as being more than a figurative commemoration,
but held a view of the Real Presence that only he could distinguish from
Zwingli’s, came up with arguments against Dr. Luther’s understanding that
pressed to their logical conclusion amount to gross heresy. While Jesus as God is omnipresent, he
argued, His physical body can only be present in one place at a time, and is in
Heaven. Therefore it cannot be present
in the Sacrament. This reasoning
overlooks the fact that Heaven, in this sense of the word, is outside of space and
time, which are dimensions of Creation.
There might be something in God’s eternal presence outside of Creation
that corresponds to them, but the point is that Heaven is not a “place” in the
sense it would have to be for Calvin’s reasoning to work. It also tends to Nestorianism, by dividing
Jesus’ deity from His humanity, as Dr. Luther did not hesitate to point out. In each of these explanations, Rome’s mistake
of not being willing to let a mystery be a mystery, a far more fundamental
mistake than Transubstantiation itself, was repeated.
Of Transubstantiation our Article goes on to say:
Transubstantiation (or
the change of the substance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lord,
cannot be proved by holy Writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of
Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to
many superstitions.
The statement that it “overthroweth the nature of a
Sacrament” is an allusion to St. Augustine’s explanation of the Sacraments. St. Augustine said that a Sacrament was an “outward
and visible sign of an internal and invisible Grace”. These two components, the outward sign and
the inward Grace, were necessary for there to be a Sacrament, which both
signified the inner Grace and effectively conveyed it to the recipient. The combination was accomplished by adding
the Word to a physical element turning the latter into a “visible Word” and a
conduit of Grace. Transubstantiation overthrows by eliminating,
through explaining away, the physical elements, the bread and wine. The error in Transubstantiation is not that
it affirms the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament, but that in trying to
explain the Real Presence it teaches the Real Absence of the bread and
wine. In 1 Corinthians 11, St. Paul,
after giving an account of the Institution of the Eucharist, (vv. 23-25),
speaks of the consecrated elements both as “bread” and “the cup” (v. 26-28) and
“the body and blood of the Lord” (v. 27) The orthodox position is to affirm
that the elements are both at the same time.
The bread and wine do not cease to be bread and wine when they become
the Body and Blood of Christ. There is
no need to explain this with some clever philosophical theory about the
substance being switched out under cover the accidents or to postulate there
being two substances or some such thing.
The bread is the Body. The only
explanation given and the only explanation necessary is because the Word
through which the world was spoken into existence declared it be so.
When the Article goes on to affirm that the Body of Christ
is “given, taken, and eaten…only after an heavenly and spiritual manner” this
should be understood as the brilliant non-explanation that it is. The adverbs that suggest a Calvinist or even
Zwinglian understanding are removed from the Body one degree and applied only
to the manner. This allows for more
wiggle room in interpretation, which was Archbishop Parker’s purpose for
putting this in when he revised Archbishop Cranmer’s version of the Article
into its final form. This was done to
avoid committing the Anglican Church to either side in the increasingly
contentious debate between the German and Swiss sides of the Reformation. While this could be seen as a political
decision it was also providential in that it prevented the Anglican Church from
either throwing the baby of the Real Presence out with the bathwater of
Transubstantiation or adopting a rationalist explanation of what is best left a
mystery.
This also providentially prevented our Church from
repudiating the Catholic view that Christ’s One True Sacrifice is Sacramentally
present in the Eucharist in our repudiation of Rome’s twisted version of this
for, as much as the Lutherans and Calvinists deny it, the presence of Christ’s
Sacrifice in the Sacrament necessarily follows from the Real Presence of the
Body and Blood of Christ in the Sacrament, for the broken Body and shed Blood of
Christ are the Sacrifice. We have not
gone out of our way to openly declare this Catholic view, mind you. But then we have not shied away from the
word “Sacrifice” in reference to the Lord’s Supper either, albeit in language
that would have been acceptable to John Calvin. We included the Prayer of Oblation in every
edition of the Book of Common Prayer,
albeit in different places (end of Prayer of Consecration in the 1549 original
and American editions, after Communion in 1552 and all subsequent Church of England
editions, part in the one place and part in the other in the Canadian edition),
which speaks of our “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” and offering “ourselves,
our souls, and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy and living sacrifice”. The Book
of Common Prayer, which traditionally has been even more definitive of
Anglicanism than the Articles of Religion (which are printed in it), includes
stronger affirmations of the Real Presence than that which appears in Article
XVIII, including when immediately prior to the Words of Institution the priest
prays that “Hear us, O merciful Father, we most humbly beseech thee; and grant
that we receiving these thy creatures of bread and wine, according to thy Son
our Saviour Jesus Christ's holy institution, in remembrance of his death and
passion, may be partakers of his most blessed Body and Blood” and when in the
Prayer of Humble Access we ask “Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, So to eat
the Flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, And to drink his Blood, That our sinful
bodies may be made clean by his Body, And our souls washed through his most
precious Blood.” In the BCP Catechism, furthermore,
the Answer to what the inner Grace of the Lord’s Supper is reads “The Body and
Blood of Christ, which are verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful
in the Lord’s Supper”. In the Prayer
Book, therefore, we have preserved a stronger affirmation of the Real Presence
of the Body and Blood, which necessarily brings the Catholic view of the Real
Presence of the One Sacrifice in the Sacrament along with it, which is good,
because this view affirms the Biblical image of the Lord’s Supper as the meal
in which the Sacrifice of the New Covenant is eaten, nourishing and sustaining
the faithful in the new and everlasting life of Jesus Christ.
