#961 Spiritual Eating in the Lord’s Supper and the Holy Spirit

Dr. craig’s response

When I began volume 5 of my Systematic Philosophical Theology on the Doctrine of the Church, I thought that the subject of the sacraments would be, frankly, boring. Was I wrong! It has proved to be incredibly fascinating and thought-provoking. Your excellent question, Dean, is an example of the interesting questions raised by the Lord’s Supper.

Given Calvin’s view that the resurrection body of Jesus is a physical body of flesh and bones, the idea that we eat it “spiritually” does seem to me either to collapse into Ulrich Zwingli’s figurative view or to be incoherent when taken literally. Calvin himself made it pretty clear what he meant by eating Christ’s flesh spiritually. The central idea of Calvin’s view is that during the Lord’s Supper we are somehow transported by the Holy Spirit’s action to heaven, where we feed upon Christ’s body and blood.

The unintelligibility of Calvin’s view is virtually admitted by the Reformer. Once we reject Zwingli’s figurative interpretation of spiritually feeding on Christ’s body and blood, what sensible account is there? Are we to think that during the Lord’s Supper we ascend physically to heaven, where we eat Christ’s flesh and drink his blood? That would be preposterous, since we obviously do not see people disappearing from the sanctuary during communion services. So should we instead think that we ascend spiritually to heaven in some way? But what does this mean, if not setting our thoughts on things above, as Zwingli maintained? In that case, why the emphasis upon the incomprehensible power of the Holy Spirit to lift us to heaven? Or do we, like Paul (II Corinthians 12.2-3), have out-of-body experiences during which we eat and drink Christ’s flesh and blood? Obviously not; and even if we had out-of-body experiences, we could not ingest Christ’s physical flesh and blood without having mouths. It makes no sense at all to say that a pure spirit consumes physical flesh and blood, as we are said to do. Appealing to the miraculous power of the Holy Spirit does nothing at all to render Calvin’s view intelligible. On the contrary, Calvin admits that it is incomprehensible.

What we need is a sense of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper that is not spatial or physical. We should do well to follow the lead of German theologians in distinguishing between the personal presence of Christ and the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. “The real presence” has reference specifically to Christ’s body and blood, whereas “the personal presence” has reference to Christ’s person. Eleonore Stump has provided a helpful analysis of what she calls “personal presence.”[1] She argues that in addition to direct causal contact with and cognitive access to another person what is needed for personal presence is, first of all, what psychologists call “shared attention.” This is the sort of mutual awareness that arises, for example, through the mutual gaze of two persons with each other. Second, she argues that non-propositional knowledge of another person, or knowledge by acquaintance, is also necessary for the personal presence of that person. So for a strong sense of personal presence, both shared attention and knowledge by acquaintance are needed. In order for God to be present to a person in space, it is not necessary for God to share a spatial mode of existence with him, as long as God can be known by that person. Stump maintains that for personal presence there has to be “the practical possibility of shared attention.”

Although Stump presents her account as an account of divine omnipresence, it seems to me that it is better construed as an account of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in believers. The Holy Spirit may be said to indwell us insofar as He is personally present to us. Sin is an obstacle to shared attention and, hence, to the personal presence of the Holy Spirit. It is therefore practically impossible for an unregenerate person as such to have the personal presence of the Holy Spirit. In the case of believers, sin may temporarily obscure or diminish our shared attention with the Holy Spirit, but He still indwells us in that it is practically possible through confession to be cleansed of our sin (I John 1.9) and so to share attention with Him and experience His personal presence. Indeed, given our ability to quash the Holy Spirit’s work in us through sin, we need to insist that significant personal presence does not require actual mutual shared attention, much less actual mutual closeness, but, as Stump says, the practical availability of such shared attention and closeness. Only those who are filled with the Holy Spirit enjoy the sort of rich shared attention and mutual closeness with God that Stump describes.

Now this sort of personal presence seems applicable to Christ’s presence to the believer in the Lord’s Supper. It is instructive to compare Calvin’s doctrine of the real presence with that of Reformed theologian Francis Turretin, who seems to be more closely aligned with Zwingli than with Calvin on this score. Turretin distinguishes presence from propinquity (Institutes of Elenctic Theology, vol. III, 506). “What is near is not always present and what is present is not always near.” He rightly notes that “Presence is not opposed to distance, but to absence.” Regardless of whether Christ’s body and blood are present or not, Christ can be conceived to be personally present to communicants receiving the Lord’s Supper. Turretin distinguishes a “spiritual and mystical” eating of Christ’s body with the mouth of faith from an “oral and corporeal” eating of Christ’s body with our physical mouth. He states flatly, “The body can no more eat spiritually, than the soul can eat corporeally.” This fact implies that our souls cannot eat the physical body of Christ in heaven, as Calvin asserted. Turretin believes that in the Supper, Christ’s body and blood are exhibited as they were in death, once given for us, the body broken and the blood poured out (III, 459, 468-469). But now Christ is risen and ascended into heaven. Christ’s body and blood as they were in death is a past state of affairs, no longer accessible except through the mind’s contemplation. Therefore, Calvin’s talk about our hearts and souls’ ascending to heaven through the power of the Holy Spirit to feast upon the body and blood of Christ seems to make no sense. Turretin believes that Christ “is indeed corporeally in heaven with respect to the existence of his body, but he is nonetheless present to our minds through faith with his spiritual presence. Therefore Christ’s body is truly present corporeally in heaven and truly spiritually present in our souls or to our faith, by which we receive him” (III, 518). This statement is naturally understood in terms of Christ’s personal presence to us despite his physical absence. Turretin affirms that “although Christ’s body is not locally present in the Supper, it does not cease to be truly present to the mind through the mediation of faith.” This view does not seem to be different from Zwingli’s understanding.