Luther on the Lord’s Supper and Philosophy
For my part, if I cannot fathom how the bread is the body of Christ, yet I will take my reason captive to the obedience of Christ [II Cor. 10:5], and clinging simply to his words, firmly believe not only that the body of Christ is in the bread, but that the bread is the body of Christ. My warrant for this is the words which way: “He took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “Take, eat, this (that is, this bread, which he had taken and broken) is my body’” [I Cor. 11:23–24]. And Paul says: “The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” [I Cor. 10:16]. He does not say “in the bread there is,” but “the bread itself is the participation in the body of Christ.” What does it matter if philosophy cannot fathom this? The Holy Spirit is greater than Aristotle.
— Martin Luther, “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church”
4 February 2007 |
tags: Lord's Supper, Martin Luther
![[RSS for this post]](/images/feed-icon-14x14.png){kind=icon}
I guess that Luther is here taking a jab at transubstantiation as a rationalistic explaining away of the mystery behind the Eucharist. I have to say, I’ve never really understood this charge, since transubstantiation really doesn’t explain much of anything.
Substance, since it is not something which can be perceived in any way, is an inherently mysterious category. To say that the substance of the bread and wine have become the substance of the Incarnate Christ is really not much more explanatory than saying that the bread itself is somehow, mysteriously really Christ’s body (mutatis mutandis for the cup). To say that the accidents (or “species” as Trent has it) remain is not much more than just saying that the bread and wine are, to all appearances, just that. A crude refutation of transubstantiation one sometimes hears is that if one were to put the consecrated host to various chemical tests, it would be proven to be just bread. Of course it would. This commonsense observation is exactly what the theory of transubstantiation would lead us to expect. So in the end, what is transubstantiation other than the claim that the eucharistic species somehow are “really” the body and blood of Christ, even though they are, to every imagineable epirical test, merely bread and wine. The mystery is preserved and Aristotle is in no way claiming superiority – or even equality – with the Holy Spirit.
I’m mostly with you one this one. Two points for Luther, though. First, Luther didn’t find transubstantiation philosophically convincing either—he had tried to show the trouble with the theory just before this passage. (I can’t reproduce his qualms, though they struck me as a bit facile.) His point here, then, is to say that it doesn’t matter if transubstantiation is false; the mystery of the body and blood remains. This is important to say, second, because his main criticism of the whole thing is that we’ve gotten so tied up in these philosophical debates over the Eucharist that we’ve forgotten the promise the sacrament signifies, which is the most important part: “Whoever eats this bread will live forever” (John 6:51). He mentions Lombard’s Sentences, I think, as an example of a work which treats only these material aspects of the sacrament and fails to treat the faith that sustains it.
Briefly: whether or not transubstantiation works as a theory, we shouldn’t care, because the mystery of the Eucharist rests not on philosophy but on the Holy Spirit. I agree with him on a point of emphasis, but he may be inattentive to the reasons that the scholastics went to such great lengths to articulate themselves philosophically. (Admittedly, I’ve never heard good motivation for it either, though I have no qualms with the idea itself.)
I think I actually forgot to complete my thought in my first post. I tried to show there how transubstantiation was just fancy shorthand for saying that the bread and wine of the Eucharist somehow really are Jesus even though they are, to all appearances, just bread and wine. I take it that these are assertions which anyone who understands the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist in a certain way will need to make (I’m including Luther here). The promise of eternal life in the sacrament rests on the guarantee, at the Last Supper, that it is He who is Life who is present to us in the eucharistic species. I suppose that one could understand the Eucharist in as a sign which only signifies the promise of eternal life and so fulfil Luther’s criteria, but given Luther’s historical reaction to that possibility when it arose (in Zwingli, yes?), I would guess that Luther understood that promise to have more or less the same foundation that I ascribe to it. But to do this is to say, in longer and less technical terms, exactly what Trent seems to use transubstantiation to do.