What Changed This Protestant's Mind About the Eucharist

As a Catholic, I believe that Jesus is really present in the Eucharistic elements.

That is to say, I believe that through a miracle the bread and the wine become Jesus’ real flesh and blood—while still appearing to be bread and wine (and that’s part of the miracle).

Does this sound crazy?

As a Protestant, I believed that the Lord’s Supper — Communion — was just a memorial feast. It was a commemorative ceremony we celebrated as a church or small group of believers to remember Jesus’ once-and-for-all sacrifice. I also believed that when Jesus said, “This is my body,” he was speaking metaphorically and instead meant, “This represents my body.”

But I changed my mind.

Jesus wasn’t instituting a mere memorial feast, He was giving us His real flesh and blood. Jesus wasn’t simply asking us to do something, once in a while, in memory of Him. He was giving us a gift.

I went from believing that the bread and wine were symbols of Jesus’s sacrifice, to believing that the bread and wine were Jesus.

This is why I changed my mind about Communion.

The Early Christians Knew It

The first convincing piece of evidence for Jesus being really present in the Eucharistic was the testimony of the Early Church Fathers. These were the men appointed to positions of authority by the apostles themselves. There were men who were taught by the apostles themselves—and this is some of what they had to say.

St. Ignatius, whose writings are amongst the earliest we have after the New Testament epistles, wrote,

“Consider how contrary to the mind of God are the heterodox in regard to the grace of God which has come to us. They have no regard for charity, none for the widow, the orphan, the oppressed, none for the man in prison, the hungry or the thirsty. They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not admit that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, the flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in His graciousness, raised from the dead.”

St. Justin Martyr, one of the earliest Christian apologists, writing around A.D. 148 wrote,

“…but as Jesus Christ our Savior being incarnate by God’s Word took flesh and blood for our salvation, so also we have been taught that the food consecrated by the Word of prayer which comes from him, from which our flesh and blood are nourished by transformation, is the flesh and blood of that incarnate Jesus.”

And, St. Irenaeus, around A.D. 180 wrote,

“[Christ] has declared the cup, a part of creation, to be his own Blood, from which he causes our blood to flow; and the bread, a part of creation, he has established as his own Body, from which he gives increase to our bodies.”

The witness of the earliest Christians is unanimous and shockingly clear: in Communion, the Eucharist, we receive Jesus’s flesh and blood.

Jesus’ Followers Knew It

The second convincing piece of evidence for Jesus being present in the Eucharist was, ironically, our Lord’s very words—-and the reaction of those that heard him.

The remarkable episode unfolds in the Gospel of John and I’m sure you know the story. After miraculously multiplying food for a crowd of thousands Jesus delivers what’s known as the “Bread of Life Discourse.”

In this incredible speech Jesus tells His followers that they must eat His real flesh. His realflesh. And He emphasizes it in shockingly graphic language, urging His followers to, literally, “gnaw” His flesh.

As an evangelical Protestant I heard this discourse explained as Jesus speaking metaphorically, but as I dug deeper, I was left wholly unsatisfied. Because Jesus gives no indication He’s speaking in metaphor. And because of the reaction of the crowd.

Remarkably, many of Jesus’s followers question His teaching, they mutter and they complain, and they leave. And Jesus makes no attempt to call them back, to explain. Even to the disciples, to whom He often explained Himself, He makes no attempt at clarification. That’s because, I’m convinced, He meant what He said—and He meant it literally.

And, like I’ve said, this is what the first Christians believed too.

The Christian Church Knew It

Finally, I’m convinced of the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist because of the witness of the whole of the Christian Church for 1,600 years.

Incredibly, until the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, Christians were unanimous in their belief that Jesus was present in the Lord’s Supper. Even the Eastern Churches, split from Western Christianity, maintained this very same belief in tandem.

While many of the early Protestant Reformers believed, and wrote strongly, for Jesus’s real presence in the Eucharist, some, like Huldrych Zwingli, argued in the public square that the Communion elements were merely symbolic.

Remarkably, however, the Christian Church was unanimous in support of Jesus being really present in the Eucharistic elements for 1,600 years and while Zwingli certainly had his fair share of arguments in his favour, and his own theological bent, what he was proposing was a break from what had always been believed.

Incredibly, if Zwingli was right about Communion being merely symbolic this meant, in turn, that the whole of the Christian Church had been wrong for 1,600 years.

I was, as an evangelical Protestant, a product of the Reformation even if I didn’t know it. I stood on the shoulders of a theology whose origin I hadn’t fully understood.

Do My Beliefs About Communion Really Matter?

Yes!

Communion was important to the New Testament community; it’s reflected clearly in the New Testament epistles.

The Apostle Paul writes, extensively, on the importance of how we take the Lord’s Supper—and what we believe about it. He writes about the very real spiritual dangers of taking Communion in an unworthy way—especially of the importance of satisfying any grudges you have against your fellow Christians before taking part. We see this, as well, reflected in the writings of the Early Church Fathers.

Communion is a serious thing. Even if, because of the erosion of time and our inherited theology, we don’t view it as such.

As an evangelical Protestant I balanced the evidence.

I didn’t know the Church was unanimous for 1,600 years. I didn’t know the early Church took Jesus at His literal word. I didn’t consider the reaction of those followers in the Gospel of John who left Jesus after hearing His difficult teaching—and the absence of any kind of clarification on the part of our Lord.

I balanced this, in my estimation, against a theology that originated around the same time as the widespread use of gunpowder—which ignores the witness of the Christian Church up until the 16th century, and the most logical interpretation of Jesus’s words.

I re-evaluated my stance on what exactly was happening in the Eucharist, and what Jesus really meant to institute, and I changed my mind.

The conclusion I came to was shocking, and the rest is history.

Originally posted on The Cordial Catholic