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The Lord's Table

More than a memorial: real presence, received by faith

Is communion only a symbol, a memorial of something long past? Most of the churches many of us grew up in say exactly that: bare memory, nothing more. But the New Testament, and the church’s main line before the modern era, treats the Lord's Table as something real, a genuine feeding on Christ, and part of what it means to abide in Him. The historic view is neither of the modern extremes. It is not transubstantiation, the bread physically becoming flesh, and it is not the bare reminder. It is a real spiritual presence: Christ truly given and truly received at His table, by faith.

John 6: the hard saying

Jesus says it, and keeps saying it, until it costs Him a crowd:

John 6:53-56 · KJV

Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you… For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.

John 6:63 · KJV

It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.

Hold both. The eating is real, and Jesus Himself says the flesh is not the point of it; the life is spirit. That is why this page says spiritual presence and not a change in the bread.

It is so hard that "many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him" (John 6:66). A familiar sermon points at that verse and compares anyone who believes in a real presence to those deserters. But the comparison runs backward. John says only that it was a hard saying and that they went back. The ones who stayed, like Peter, accepted the hard saying without fully understanding it: “to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). That is the posture this page asks for, not a theory.

"This is my body"

At the Last Supper Jesus does not say "this represents my body." He says:

Luke 22:19-20 · KJV

This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me… This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.

There is remembrance in it, yes, "this do in remembrance of me," but remembrance is not the whole of it. Paul makes that unmistakable.

Paul treats it as real

To the Corinthians Paul calls the cup and the bread a participation in Christ:

1 Corinthians 10:16 · KJV

The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?

"Communion" there is koinonia, a real sharing in. And Paul says taking it wrongly has real consequences: whoever eats and drinks unworthily is "guilty of the body and blood of the Lord… not discerning the Lord's body. For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep" (1 Corinthians 11:27-30), that is, some had become ill and even died. If the elements were a bare symbol, that consequence is hard to explain. Some read “not discerning the Lord’s body” as the congregation, since verses 21-22 are about the rich eating ahead of the poor, and that reading has a real basis in the passage; but the words “guilty of the body and blood of the Lord” two verses earlier are about the elements, and the two readings are not rivals.

And the verse in the middle of that warning has to come with it, because it is the one people are not told. Between the danger and the consequence Paul gives the remedy, and the remedy is not to stay away:

1 Corinthians 11:28

But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup.

And so let him eat. The instruction is examine and come, not examine and withdraw. This passage has been used for centuries to keep frightened people from the Table, and verse 28 is the verse that says the opposite: the man who knows he is unworthy and examines himself is precisely the man Paul tells to eat. "Unworthily" in verse 27 is an adverb about the manner of taking it, not an adjective about the person taking it. Nobody comes worthy. The believer who discerns the Lord's body is genuinely fed; the one who does not is genuinely endangered. The text treats the Table as having real spiritual reality.

It is part of abiding

Notice the words Jesus used back in John 6: "He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him" (John 6:56). That is the exact language of the vine: "Abide in me, and I in you" (John 15:4). The Table is one of the ways we abide, where the branch feeds on the vine and draws its life. Communion is not a ceremony performed near an absent Christ; it is a meal with a present one, part of the living connection by which we stay in Him. (See The Vine.)

What the earlier church held

This is not a novelty; the bare-memorial view is. Ignatius of Antioch, around 110 AD and a hearer of the apostles, called the Eucharist "the medicine of immortality" (To the Ephesians 20) and warned of those who "abstain from the Eucharist… because they confess not that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ" (To the Smyrnaeans 7). The fathers, the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and even Calvin in the Reformed tradition all held the sacrament to be more than a symbol. Calvin's own view is that Christ is truly present to the believer in the supper through the working of the Holy Spirit, even if not physically in the elements. That sentence used to rest on our summary of him, which is a poor way to make a claim about a man. Here he is on this very verse, and note where he puts the word provided:

Now, when the cup is called a participation, the expression, I acknowledge, is figurative, provided that the truth held forth in the figure is not taken away, or, in other words, provided that the reality itself is also present, and that the soul has as truly communion in the blood, as we drink wine with the mouth.

John Calvin, Commentary on 1 Corinthians 10:16

He says it again, and more broadly, on 1 Corinthians 10. Arguing that the Israelites in the wilderness ate real spiritual food, he draws the conclusion for every sacrament:

if the manna was spiritual food, it follows, that it is not bare emblems that are presented to us in the Sacraments, but that the thing represented is at the same time truly imparted, for God is not a deceiver to feed us with empty fancies.

John Calvin, on 1 Corinthians 10:3

And he plants himself between two errors by name: “Papists confound the reality and the sign: profane men… separate the signs from the realities. Let us maintain a middle course.” Whatever else that is, it is not a memorial-only reading, and it comes from the man most often cited for one.

Calvin grants "figurative" and then spends the rest of the sentence making sure nobody takes it further than he means. The figure is allowed on condition that the reality is present, and the measure he gives for how truly the soul communes is the plainest physical thing at the table: as truly as the mouth drinks the wine. That is not a memorial. A man who holds the bare-memorial view cannot say that sentence, and the Reformer most often enlisted for it did not hold it.

He is equally plain that the blessing is not mere thanksgiving over the cup. "To bless the cup, then, is to set it apart for this purpose, that it may be to us an emblem of the blood of Christ… the design of the mystical blessing in the Supper is, that the wine may be no longer a common beverage, but set apart for the spiritual nourishment of the soul." And so that the other side cannot claim him either, the same passage calls the Roman consecration "a kind of sorcery derived from heathens" and objects that withholding the cup from the people mutilates the sacrament. He belongs to neither side.

Lewis declined to say which account was right, and put the right posture simply: "the command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand" (Letters to Malcolm). The main line of voices before the Reformation, from the Didache and Justin through Cyprian, Chrysostom, Cyril, Ambrose and Augustine, treats the Table as more than a reminder; not one of them teaches that it is only that. Honesty requires the other half of the record, because some of the same Fathers use the language of figure. Tertullian, arguing against Marcion, writes that Christ "made it His own body, by saying, 'This is my body,' that is, the figure of my body" (Against Marcion IV.40). Bede says He substituted "for the flesh and blood of the lamb, the Sacrament of His own Flesh and Blood in the figure of the bread and wine" (Catena Aurea on Luke 22). And Chrysostom, of all people, says "this is a figure of that [sacrifice] and this remembrance of that... we perform a remembrance of a Sacrifice" (Homilies on Hebrews XVII). We do not think that makes them memorialists, and the reason is in the sentences themselves. Tertullian is not diminishing the Table; he is proving against Marcion that Christ had a real body, and his argument only works if a figure must be a figure OF something real, which is why he says in the same breath that Christ "made it His own body." Chrysostom, who elsewhere on this site says the communicant is fed on Christ, is distinguishing the one offering at Calvary from what we do at the Table, not emptying the Table. Figure in these men is not the modern bare symbol. But the word is there in their mouths, and a page that quoted only the seven who suit us would be doing the thing this site exists to stop. And two men before the Reformation, Ratramnus in the ninth century and Berengar in the eleventh, denied any change in the bread; the definition of 1215 was partly an answer to them.

The memorial-only view did come from the Reformation, but not from Luther and not from Calvin. It came from Zwingli, in Zurich. Luther and Zwingli met at Marburg in 1529 to try to agree, and they could not, because Luther held that “this is my body” means that Christ is truly present at the table, and Zwingli held that the bread is only a sign. Most American evangelical churches today hold Zwingli’s view. Most inherited it rather than chose it. And so many of them now believe that the view of Luther and Calvin, a real presence of Christ at the table, is a Catholic idea. It is not. It is the view of the Reformers themselves.

This is also where the modern Baptist memorial view has drifted even from its own confession. The 1689 London Baptist Confession, the historic Reformed Baptist standard, says worthy receivers "do then also inwardly by faith, really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually, receive and feed upon Christ crucified… the body and blood of Christ being then… spiritually present to the faith of believers." A real spiritual feeding, not a bare memory. So a congregation that flattens the Table into a symbol and nothing more has wandered not only from the early church and from John 6, but from the 1689 itself. (See Even From Their Own Confessions.)

And baptism too

The same pattern shows up at the font. Paul does not describe baptism as a bare symbol of a decision already made, but as a real participation in Christ's death and resurrection: we are "buried with him by baptism into death… that… we also should walk in newness of life" (Romans 6:3-4), "buried with him… risen with him through the faith of the operation of God" (Colossians 2:11-12). Sacrament, in the historic sense, simply means a physical sign God actually uses to give what it signifies. The Table and the font are not empty pictures; they are means of grace.

How early the record is

Before the argument about what happens at the Table, there is a fact about the documents that hardly anyone is told. The account of the institution on this page is not from a Gospel. It is from a letter, and Alexander Maclaren points out what that means:

The account of the institution of the Lord's Supper, contained in this context, is very much the oldest extant narrative of that event. It dates long before any of the Gospels, and goes up, probably, to somewhere about five and twenty years after the Crucifixion. It presupposes a previous narrative which had been orally delivered to the Corinthians… No reasonable doubt can exist, then, that within a very few years of our Lord's death, the whole body of Christian people believed that Jesus Christ Himself appointed the Lord's Supper.

Alexander Maclaren, on 1 Corinthians 11:24

1 Corinthians is older than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and Paul is correcting abuses in a practice already old enough to have developed abuses, using words he says he received. So the Supper is not a later churchly addition growing over the centuries. It is among the earliest things we can see the church doing, and it was already being done wrong, which is why we have the passage at all.

Two rites, from a man free with ceremony

Christ ranked ceremony far below mercy, and said so often: “I will have mercy, and not sacrifice” (Matthew 9:13). Yet at His angriest about ritual He would not abolish it:

Matthew 23:23 · KJV

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.

And not to leave the other undone. And that same man appointed two rites, one done once and one repeated. Alexander Maclaren, a Baptist preacher of the last century, put it in a sentence: “Jesus Christ, who cared very little for rites… did establish two rites, one of them to be done once in a Christian lifetime, one of them to be repeated with indefinite frequency.” Baptism happens once, because a person is born once. The Supper is repeated, because a person needs to be fed again and again.

And the presence this page speaks of is not only at the Table. A church can celebrate the Lord’s Supper with great care and never visit its widows, and Christ said He is in the widow too:

Matthew 25:40 · KJV

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

The same Christ who is received by faith in the bread is met by faith in the hungry man. A congregation that believes in His presence at the Table has no excuse for missing Him at the door.

One last thing, and it turns the verse around. Maclaren argues the familiar English points the wrong way:

"Do this," is the true meaning of the words, not "in remembrance of Me," but something far more sweet and pathetic — "do this for the remembering of Me." The former expression is equal to "Do this because you remember." The real meaning of the words is, "Do this in case you forget."

Alexander Maclaren, on 1 Corinthians 11:24

He is largely right, and it can be checked. The Greek is eis tēn emēn anamnēsin. Eis with the accusative points at a purpose, so the sense is nearer "unto my remembrance" than "in remembrance of," and emēn is a possessive, "my remembrance," not a genitive "of me." Scripture settles the direction better than the grammar does. Anamnēsis appears only four times in the New Testament: three of them are this command, and the fourth is Hebrews on the yearly sacrifices, "in those sacrifices there is a remembrance again made of sins every year" (Hebrews 10:3). There the rite makes the remembrance; it does not record one already in hand. That is Maclaren's direction, and it comes from the text.

Where he reaches past the evidence is the word real. "In remembrance of me" is not a mistranslation, and the grammar does not force his sharp choice between "because you remember" and "in case you forget"; Thayer even distinguishes anamnēsis, an unprompted recalling, from hypomnēsis, a remembrance prompted by something else. So take the contrast as a preacher's sharpening of a real feature of the text, which is what it is. And what it is worth is this. Read as "because you remember," the Table is for people whose devotion is in good order, and a man who feels cold has a reason to stay away. Read as "in case you forget," it is for people whose memory slips, which is everybody, and the cold man is exactly who it was appointed for. Maclaren calls it "not only the commandment of the Lord, but the appeal of the Friend, who wished, as we all do, not to be utterly forgotten by those whom He cared for." That is a different thing from a ceremony. It is a request.

The strongest objection, and it is a good one

Albert Barnes, on John 6:53BH, makes the argument that has to be answered. It is not mockery and it is not careless; it is an observation about what was physically in front of the disciples:

Nothing can possibly be more absurd than to suppose that when he instituted the Supper, and gave the bread and wine to his disciples, they literally ate his flesh and drank his blood. Who can believe this? There he stood, a living man — his body yet alive, his blood flowing in his veins; and how can it be believed that this body was eaten and this blood drunk?… Besides, there is no evidence that he had any reference in this passage to the Lord's Supper. That was not yet instituted.

Albert Barnes, Notes on John 6:53

Take both halves seriously. Christ was standing there with his blood in his veins when he said "this is my body," and John 6 was spoken more than a year before there was any Supper to refer to. Both are simply true.

The answer is that Barnes is arguing against a position this page does not hold. He names his target himself: the decree of Trent that the bread and wine are "changed into the body, blood, and divinity of our Lord." This page has never said that. What it holds is stated at the top and it is deliberately short of an explanation: more than a memorial, a real feeding on Christ, however the mystery is explained. Barnes's argument is fatal to a claim about the chemistry of bread. It does nothing to a claim that something is given at the Table which is not given by remembering.

And notice where Barnes lands when he states his own view. He says Christ meant that "by his bloody death… he would procure pardon and life for man; that they who partook of that" would live. Partook. He keeps the eating language because the text will not let him drop it, and he ends with a man receiving something rather than merely recalling something. The gap between Barnes and this page is narrower than the gap between Barnes and Trent, which is who he was actually writing against.

On his second point, that John 6 is not about the Supper: probably right, and it does not help the memorial view. If John 6 is not about the Supper, then Christ's language about eating his flesh and drinking his blood is about union with him in a still more direct sense, and the Supper afterwards uses that same language on purpose. A memorial reading has to explain why Christ chose, for a remembrance meal, the exact words that had driven disciples away in Capernaum.

The line, from the beginning

Put the whole record in order and it is one line, not two.

The apostles. Paul, about twenty-five years after the crucifixion, calls the cup and the bread a communion of the blood and body of Christ, and says that taking them wrongly had made people sick (1 Corinthians 10:16, 11:27-30).

The men who heard the apostles. Ignatius, around 110 AD, calls the Eucharist “the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ” and “the medicine of immortality.” Justin, around 150, writes, “Not as common bread and common drink do we receive these” (First Apology 66). Irenaeus, around 180, writes that “the bread, when it receives the invocation of God, is no longer common bread, but the Eucharist, consisting of two realities, earthly and heavenly” (Against Heresies IV.18).

The Fathers, east and west. Cyprian, Chrysostom, Cyril, Ambrose and Augustine all treat the Table as a real feeding on Christ. Some of them also use the word figure, and we have shown that above; none of them teaches that it is a figure and nothing more. For a thousand years nobody explained how Christ is present, and nobody had to.

The explanation made law. In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council used the word transubstantiation, and in 1551 the Council of Trent made it binding: the substance of the bread becomes the substance of Christ’s body. That is the first time the church required a theory of the presence, and not only the presence.

The Reformers. Luther rejected the theory and kept the presence. Calvin rejected the theory and kept a real spiritual feeding on Christ, as truly “as we drink wine with the mouth.” The 1689 London Baptist Confession says the same: believers “really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually, receive and feed upon Christ crucified.” Only Zwingli, in Zurich, said the bread is a sign and nothing more, and Luther would not agree with him.

The American church. Most evangelical churches in America now hold Zwingli’s view, not by decision but by inheritance, and many of them believe the older view is Catholic. It is not. It is the view of the apostles, of the men who heard them, of the Fathers, of Luther and Calvin, and of the Baptists’ own confession. The memorial-only view is the newest thing on the line.

This page holds what that whole line holds in common, and no more: Christ is spiritually present at His Table, as He promised to be wherever two or three are gathered in His name (Matthew 18:20), and we remember Him there as He asked. How He is present, Scripture does not explain, and we do not try to.

Where this lands

The Lord’s Table is not a funeral held for an absent Christ. It is a meal with a present one, where the branch feeds on the vine. You need not claim the bread changes its substance to take Jesus and Paul at their word that something real is given and received here. Come to the Table expecting to meet Him, because He said you would.

And the verse after the one this page rests on is about the people at the Table, not the bread:

1 Corinthians 10:17 · KJV

For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread.

The Table was given to make one body. The arguments about how He is present have divided it for five hundred years, and the men on every side of those arguments confessed the same God and the same grace:

Ephesians 4:4-6 · KJV

There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; One Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.

Paul’s instruction two verses earlier is “forbearing one another in love; Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:2-3). And to the church at Rome, about believers who differed on what could be eaten: “Him that is weak in the faith receive ye, but not to doubtful disputations” (Romans 14:1), and “judge this rather, that no man put a stumblingblock or an occasion to fall in his brother’s way” (Romans 14:13). A believer who holds the Table as only a memorial, and comes to it, is at the Table. Nothing on this page is a reason to keep him from it, or to think less of him there.

The writer of this page has been guilty of that very thing, arguing a brother past what his faith could bear, and has to try not to be. This letter is written so that the record can be seen, not so that anyone is hindered on his way to the Table.

Study the passages

Read them in context. Links go to BibleHub.

Holy Things, and the Counting of Them. The appointed times this meal grew out of are in My Feasts. Scripture quotations from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub. Ignatius of Antioch, To the Ephesians 20 and To the Smyrnaeans 7 (c. 110 AD); John Calvin on the spiritual presence; C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm. Greek koinonia ("communion, participation") noted. See also Baptism, the church's other ordinance.