“With all power and signs and lying wonders.” 2 Thessalonians 2:9
Among the more grotesque lying wonders of Roman Catholicism is the doctrine of transubstantiation. For eight hundred years the Church has taught that by some miraculous force a priest celebrating Mass is able to change ordinary bread and wine into the actual flesh and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. The word itself as a formal statement of Catholic doctrine dates from 1215, the year of Magna Carta; rather than being a step towards freedom as was Magna Carta, this invention was another means of enslaving the gullible and ignorant followers of the Pope.
The Fourth Lateran Council was convened in 1215. During one of its sessions it adopted the word transubstantiation to describe a belief in the metaphysical transformation of the emblems of bread and wine into Jesus’ actual body and blood. More than 300 years later, the Council of Trent in 1551 (held at the height of the Protestant reformation to help the Church to resist the inroads of Biblically informed thinking) defined the concept of transubstantiation in these extraordinary terms:
“…by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation” (Session XIII, chapter IV; cf. canon II).
Some Orthodox Churches also use the term “transubstantiation” (in Greek, metousiosis), but most of the Orthodox Christian traditions do not place the same emphasis on the doctrine that is evident in the Roman Catholic system. They likewise claim that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, but terms such as “trans-elementation” (in Greek, metastoicheiosis) and “re-ordination” (in Greek, metarhythmisis) are more common among the Orthodox.
During the Reformation, the doctrine of transubstantiation was criticised as an import into Christian teaching from Greek philosophy. Martin Luther in his On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (published on 6 October 1520) wrote:
“Therefore it is an absurd and unheard-of juggling with words,to understand ‘bread’ to mean ‘the form, or accidents of bread,’ and ‘wine’ to mean ‘the form, or accidents of wine.’ Why do they not also understand all other things to mean their forms, or accidents? Even if this might be done with all other things, it would yet not be right thus to emasculate the words of God and arbitrarily to empty them of their meaning.
Moreover, the Church had the true faith for more than twelve hundred years, during which time the holy Fathers never once mentioned this transubstantiation — certainly, a monstrous word for a monstrous idea — until the pseudo-philosophy of Aristotle became rampant in the Church these last three hundred years.”
As Luther says, it seems incredible that given the clear teaching of the Bible in relation to the emblems which represent the sacrifice of Christ that the Church should have felt compelled to import a weird teaching from pagan philosophy to cloud the very beautiful teaching of the Gospels. (It should be noted, however, that Luther’s own teaching of “consubstantiation” in relation to this subject also is erroneous.)
“This is my body”
Why did the Roman Catholic apostasy (and Luther and others) have such difficulty with this concept? When our Lord met with his disciples in the Upper Room on the night before he was crucified he used straight forward language to institute the ritual we memorialize each week at the Memorial Meeting. Matthew records the words our Lord used at that time: “And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament [ie covenant], which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (Matt 26:26–28).
From their frequent use at the Memorial Meeting these words are well known to us, as they are to most church goers because they are frequently quoted at Holy Communion or Mass services also. The Roman Catholic Church claims that when the priest quotes the words “this is my body” the wafer of bread he is holding miraculously becomes the flesh of Jesus, and that when he quotes the words “this is my blood” the wine becomes the blood of Jesus. A few moments thought should be sufficient to realize that this is not what our Lord intended when he used the words himself – after all, he was actually present bodily with the disciples as he spoke the words!
Bullinger makes this pithy statement about the phrase “this is my body”:
“Few passages have been more perverted than these simple words. Rome has insisted on the literal or the figurative sense of words just as it suits her own purposes, and not at all according to the laws of philology and the true science of language.” (Figures of Speech Used in the Bible, page 738)
The language used by the Lord is not unusual nor is it overly cryptic. These phrases are simple cases of metaphor. Exactly the same construction is used in many places in the New Testament in phrases which present no difficulty to understand. For example:
- I am the door of the sheep (John 10:7)
- I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman (John 15:1)
- That Rock was Christ (1 Cor 10:4)
- The seven heads are seven mountains (Rev 17:9).
In each case no reader would assume that the words are meant to be read as literally true – our Lord is not a literal door, vine or rock, but he is all of these things in a symbolic or figurative sense. The same linguistic logic should be applied to the Lord’s statements in Matthew 26 about the bread and the wine.
Eating his flesh
Another passage used by Romanists to support the doctrine of transubstantiation is John 6:53: “Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.” This is admittedly a profound verse and was intended by our Lord to be provocative. Sadly, not all of his hearers that day could cope with the profundity of his words. The record goes on to tell us: “Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it? … From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him” (v60, 66). There is a certain irony in the fact that the Roman Catholic Church has likewise found this a hard saying and also walks with Jesus no more!
What did our Lord intend his disciples to understand by these words? Whatever he meant, it cannot have any direct or specialized relevance to the emblems of his sacrifice because that ritual had not at this time been established. The context helps us to make sense of the imagery.
Earlier in the chapter the Lord had referred his hearers to the case of the manna that was provided in the wilderness – bread which came down from heaven to maintain the mortal existence of the Israelites as they journeyed to the Promised Land. He pointed out that the true bread of God could do more than sustain mere mortal existence: “For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world” (v33). When they asked for that bread “Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst” (v35). In verse 48 he again stated emphatically, “I am that bread of life”.
It is in this context that in verse 53 he refers to that which offers his disciples life, and in verse 63 he comes back to that idea: “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.” Peter, as spokesman for those disciples who did not stumble at this discourse, showed that he had appreciated the message: “Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life” (v68). The words of our Lord are a bread of far greater and more permanent value than even the manna in the wilderness.
“Once for all”
Transubstantiation is not just an arcane and weird perversion of Bible teaching. It is a fundamental denial of a basic Bible teaching about the sacrifice of Christ. For the Roman Catholic, the ritual of the Mass involves the offering of Christ as a propitiatory sacrifice. Every time the priest enacts the Mass he sacrifices the Lord again. Yet the writer to the Hebrews is emphatic about the efficacy of the Lord’s sacrifice “once for all”. He says that our Lord “needeth not daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifice, first for his own sins, and then for the people’s: for this he did once, when he offered up himself ” (Heb 7:27), and later says: “It is through that divine will that we have been set free from sin, through the offering of Jesus Christ as our sacrifice once for all” (Heb 10:10 Wey).
The emblems of bread and wine were provided and the ritual of the Memorial Meeting was instituted not so that we could sacrifice our Lord over and over again, but rather that we might memorialize his great sacrifice; that we might remember what has been done on our behalf and express thanks for the wonder of the grace extended to us “while we were yet sinners”. As the record in Luke says: “And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me”(Luke 22:19). There is no need to repeat the sacrifice of Christ, as the perverted teaching of transubstantiation might imply, but there is a need to remember it often, “and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching” (Heb 10:25).