Develop a Discipleship System
Holy Communion and the “Real Presence”
To begin with, you must know that I am a recovered alcoholic; and though raised in the Presbyterian Church, I spent the major part of my life as an agnostic. In the summer of 2002 I spent four months in treatment the first two months at the Ridgeview Center; the second two at Metro Atlanta Recovery Residences (MARR). At MARR, a faith-based (and much more confrontational) program, I was required to attend weekly church services, but these had little effect upon me. I was, however, beginning a redemptive process, which, if Calvin is right — as I believe he is — was sealed by Divine Providence.1
The first Communion experience was at a small Methodist church that I had begun attending with a friend from Ridgeview. The pastor was a recovered alcoholic; that, and the fact that I had taught his son several years before, was what attracted me. I found his services very enjoyable — informal, improvisatory, and friendly — a far cry from what I still regarded distastefully as "organized religion." Imagine my surprise, therefore, when some four Sundays later the pastor was dressed in a white and gold robe instead of his customary tie-less sport coat!
It had been so long since I had taken Communion that I didn't realize the significance of the attire until I noticed "Celebration of the Lord's Supper" on the order of service. Since the church was so small, and since I had been warmly welcomed there, I decided to go to the altar rail simply to fit in with the congregation. What happened next amazed me. As I approached the rail and knelt, I was seized by nervous excitement; and when the pastor handed me the bread, saying "the body of Christ, given for you," I knew, against all reason but beyond any doubt . . . that was exactly what it was.
I discussed this matter with the pastor the following Sunday, very briefly and in the most circumspect terms, learning (at least) that Communion was assumed within the Methodist church to be more than a ceremonial commemoration. With that in mind, I was very curious about what might happen the next time I partook of the Lord's Supper.
As it turned out, the next time would be a month later at the Episcopal church I decided to attend occasionally with another friend who is a member of that church. Although I feel very differently about it now, I found much of the liturgy boring and distasteful; consequently, I did not expect the Eucharist to affect me as deeply as it had before. Once again, I was in for a surprise, involving this time the second part of the sacrament.
When the priest gave me the bread, I did feel something akin to the earlier experience; but when the chalice bearer gave me the cup, I once again felt the rush of nervous excitement. An attractive woman in a white cassock (and, as I discovered later, a lovely person and a fine mother) handed me the cup; and her demeanor implied the utmost reverence for her task. When she handed me the cup with the age-old blessing, "the blood of Christ, shed for you," her low, urgent voice electrified me. Once again, and in exactly the same way, I felt the power of the sacrament as a living presence.
These were decisive experiences, but I should mention here my third Communion, taken a few weeks later at the Methodist church I decided to join. Its pastor, a gracious woman of singular kindliness, wisdom, and common sense, administered the sacrament with a gentle reverence that Wesley might have termed "winsome." As she did so, I experienced a fleeting but unmistakable visual image superimposed, as it were, upon the actual scene — the interior of an ancient stone sanctuary, dimly lit by sunlight, with a handful of communicants in homespun wool robes — and I felt, for a moment, the presence of all those who had been served at the Lord's Table during the span of nearly two millennia. And walking home from church in the bright spring sunshine, I was reminded of the Communion of Saints again, by the white and pink dogwood petals covering the ground after the night's rain.2
By then I was reading the Bible and some of the standard commentaries (e.g., Barclay, NIB) and beginning to study theology and church history. In none of my readings had I seen much discussion of the Lord's Supper, and I was wondering if the topic had been used up by the controversies of the sixteenth century. Fortunately, I have access to university library that supports a department of religion and, indirectly, a seminary; and thus I discovered an old book, The Mystical Presenceby John Nevin, that spoke to my need for understanding so directly that I marvel at having found it.
Nevin's book, written at Mercersburg and published in 1846, is available now as reprint (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1963) with an introductory essay by Richard Wentz on Mercersburg theology, a Christocentric theology of the Living Word influenced by the same German pietism that influenced Wesley. (Even as a reprint, I doubt the book is well-known; the copy I read was donated to the library in the 1960s and had never been checked out.). The author's exhaustive history of Eucharistic controversy is fascinating, but what really attracted me were the passages that reflect the title of the book and speak to my own experience so directly.
There are many such passages, because the author's purpose is to affirm the Real Presence, sharply distinguishing it from "a sign only, by which the memory and heart may be assisted in calling up what is past or absent, for the purpose of devotion" (p. 56). However, the following is very close to a thesis statement:
"It [the Eucharist] is not simply an occasion by which the soul of the believer may be excited to pious feelings and desires; but it embodies the actual presence of the grace it represents in its own constitution; and this grace is not simply the promise of God on which we are encouraged to rely, but the very life of the lord Jesus Christ himself. We communicate, in the Lord's Supper, not only with the divine promise merely, not with the thought of Christ only, not with the recollection simply of what he has done and suffered for us, not with the lively sense alone of his all-sufficient, all-glorious salvation; but with the living Savior himself, in the fulness of his glorified person, made present to us for the purpose by the power of the Holy Spirit" (page 57, John Nevin, The Mystical Presence; emphasis added).
Nevin returns, over the span of centuries of Eucharistic controversy, to the primacy and simplicity of Calvin's doctrine, the same that shaped the doctrine of the Anglican church and is the basis of Articles 16 and 18 of the Methodist Articles of Religion (Articles 25 and 28 of the Anglican Confession). The mystery of Christ's "real presence" has never been described more beautifully:
"I do not mind admitting that it is too high a mystery for my mind to grasp or my words to express. I feel rather than understand it. I can rest safely in the truth of God and embrace it without question. He declares that his flesh is the food, his blood the drink for my soul. I give my soul to him to be fed with such food. In the Lord's Supper, he bids me take, eat, and drink his body and blood under the sign of bread and wine. I have no doubt that he will truly give and I will receive. . . ." (Nevin, page 270).
Clearly, Calvin understood the disturbing language of John 6 the way it must be understood, as a language of the heart. As we know, Jesus was speaking "in figures" in John 6, highly metaphorical language (or as we should call it now, a metalanguage) that baffled the disciples then and has baffled Christians ever since. To try to understand this "language" better, I have been studying the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. It is hardly my purpose to comment here on that abstruse and subtle doctrine, except to note that while it may well be "repugnant to the plain words of Scripture" and undoubtedly "hath given occasion to many superstitions" (Article 18,The Book of Discipline, 2004), it is not repugnant to faith, and considered in itself, is far from "superstitious." Let us hope that during and following this Catholic Year of the Eucharist, there will be a more open discourse between Catholics and Protestants on the true meaning of Holy Communion. For some thoughts on transubstantiation, see "Catholic Documents on the Transubstantiation."
Closer to home, however, we have The United Methodist initiative for which This Holy Mystery*is the guiding document, along with some very helpful study guides. As the Rev. Felton and her colleagues show, due to exigent circumstance (for example, the difficulty of administering the sacrament during the days of circuit-riding or influence by neighbor denominations that regard the Eucharist primarily as an act of remembrance), "during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the rich Wesleyan understandings of the Eucharist were largely lost, and the sacrament became understood only as a memorial of the death of Christ" (This Holy Mystery,page 6). This Holy Mystery therefore reaffirms the true Wesleyan doctrine of the Lord's Supper, and to many United Methodists this may come as a happy surprise, as it did to me.
Although my personal reasons for welcoming this initiative should be clear enough, I would also suggest that the broader issue is the relation of the Lord's Supper to Wesley's scheme of salvation, in particular his concept of saving faith:
"Saving faith is not a speculative, rational, lifeless assent, a train of ideas in the head; it is a disposition of the heart. . . [and] whatever else it implies, it is a present salvation. It is something attainable, yes, actually attained on earth, by those who are partakers of the faith . . . Those who are partakers of this salvation by faith are saved from all servile fear; from the fear which has torment, fear of punishment, fear of the wrath of God. . . . Thus, they have peace with God through our lord Jesus Christ. They rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And the love of God is poured out in their hearts through the Holy Spirit who is given unto them."
(Sermon I, "Salvation by Faith"; emphasis added)
From the language of the passage, we may suppose reasonably enough that the Lord's Supper cannot have been far from his mind, as "the grand channel whereby the grace of his Spirit was conveyed to the souls of all the children of God" (This Holy Mystery, page 6). Many of the points made in This Holy Mystery are worth study and discussion, but the following one is particularly relevant, in showing the connection between the Lord's Supper and the "saving" faith that Wesley describes:
"Holy Communion is remembrance, commemoration, and memorial, but this remembrance is much more than intellectual recalling. Do this in remembrance of me (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24-25) is 'anamnesis' (the biblical Greek word). This dynamic action becomes re-presentation of past gracious acts of God in the present, so powerfully as to make them truly present now. Christ is risen and is alive here and now, not just remembered for what was done in the past."
(This Holy Mystery, page 8)3
My own experiences confirm the truth of that statement; and as I suggested at the beginning, I don't think they are atypical. Unusual, certainly, but not contrary to expectation, if indeed the Lord's Supper ought to make the "past gracious acts of God truly present" and if "Christ is risen and alive now" in the sacraments and in the hearts of those who partake. The only real question is, "How many United Methodists have felt the outpouring of grace in some way during Holy Communion?" I suspect the number is far greater than we know. The study groups that are being formed in response to This Holy Mystery and the study guides should, and probably will, encourage more open disclosure of personal experiences that are, quite rightly, private matters to be guarded with modesty and reverence.
The Lord's Supper has been very important to my spiritual growth, and I have had other experiences besides those mentioned above. The most emotional by far was on Easter Sunday, 2004, when I actually broke down at the altar rail, trying to choke back the tears of mingled grief and joy. This seems to have been the culminating event of my conversion, a breaking of the dam erected by shame and guilt, together with a powerful sense of the resurrected Christ in whom my sins had been washed away. I will treasure such experiences always, but I do not expect comparable "highs" at each Communion celebration. They are benchmarks of faith in a process of spiritual growth that is, for the most part, far more "ordinary," as the authors of This Holy Mystery suggest:
"As we encounter Christ in Holy Communion and are repeatedly touched by divine grace, we are progressively shaped into Christs image. All of this work is not done in a moment, no matter how dramatic an experience we may enjoy. It is, instead, a lifelong process through which God intends to shape us into people motivated by love, empowered and impassioned to do Christs work in the world" (page 10).
Thus, one purpose of the sacraments is precisely to remind us of our constant need for spiritual nourishment. Their "true substance" is indeed food, both material and spiritual, fused into unity by a metamorphic exchange of actual with metaphoric (but nonetheless "real") properties in the depths of our hearts. The Lord's Supper reminds us that all life is sacramental, and that even as the sacraments are transformed from the bread and the fruit of the vine into spiritual food, we too can be transformed from base matter into spiritual beings. And it should remind us, too, that grace truly abounds, not only in liturgical celebrations but in the most mundane of matters. It orders and directs our lives in mysterious and wonderful ways, many of them profound, and none too insignificant to pass unremarked.
1See Institutes, II. iv, "God's Providence" 17. 1: "When our lives are in turmoil so that we cannot think straight, we should still believe that God, in the pure light of his justice and wisdom, keeps our problems under his control, and finds the right solution." From The Institutes of Christian Religon, ed. by Tony Lane and Hilary Osborne (Baker Book House, 1987), p. 76.
2I experienced very much the same feeling at an Episcopalian high mass I attended recently. Like the Catholic Church (and even more so the Orhodox Church), Anglo-Catholicism celebrates the continuity of faith from post apostolic times to the present.
*Also available is a print study edition of This Holy Mysterywith commentary.
3See also Rudolf Otto's definition of anamnesis: "a genuine recognition of the holy in its own authentic nature, made manifest in appearance," in The Idea of the Holy, tr. John W. Harvey (2d ed.; New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 142-143.
Charles Duncan ([email protected]) is Professor of Humanities at Clark University in Atlanta, Georgia, and a member of Brookhaven United Methodist church.
"Holy Communion and the 'Real Presence'" Copyright 2005 Charles Duncan. Used with permission of the author. This article may not be reprinted without the express permission of the author. Other websites are welcome to link to it.
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