Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 12.djvu/515

* LORD'S SUPPER. 457 LORD'S SUPPER. fices had been ofl'ered upon the cross and pre- sented in Heaven by Hira who was both victim and priest, the wliole system of animal sacrifices passed away. By a.d. 112, as we learn from Pliny's letter to Trajan, a practice consecrated to the Jews by the associations of centuries and observed by the Greeks and Romans from remote antiquity had disappeared. Sacrificial terms remained, but they grouped themselves around a remarkable and significant rite. The Lord's Supper was spoken of as a Trpoopd or oblation, as a dvffla or sacrifice, and as an dra/x^rjcris or memorial. The term hostia, victim, host, crystal- lized the same idea for later times. Viewed objectively, it earlj' became the cen- tral act of worship of the Christian Church. The feast was kept every Lord's Day, or even more frequently. The first converts continued stead- fastly not only "in the Apostles' doctrine and fellowship," but also in "the breaking of bread and in the prayers" (Acts ii. 42). Around the Lord's Supper gathered and grew the ancient liturgies of the Christian faith. It proclaimed in unmistakable imagery the Lord's death, and, by implication. His resurrection and ascension. It attracted to it all that was richest and best in symbolic ceremony and holy song. Subjectively, it became the Church's greatest and most precious means of grace. It was a new covcrtant. and. like the old. was a feast upon a sacrifice. "The one was on the lamb, the other on the Lamb of God. The one true, the other true. The one carnally true, the other spiritual- ly, and therefore even more true." As in the physical life the waste of bodily tissues is re- paired bj' food, so in the spiritual life the waste in the finer tissues of man's higher nature was Eaid to be repaired by the body <1nd blood of Christ, as "verily and indeed taken and received by file faithful" in the Lord's Supper. The spir- itual nourishment — the divine element — in the sacrament has been almost universally understood to be, in some real sense, the body and blood of the Saviour, and by receiving it Christians have from the beginning believed themselves to be united to God and in fellowship to one another in .lesus Christ. This is made plain by .Justin Martyr. After giving a detailed account of the service as it was celebrated in his day, including the distribution, among those present, of the loaf and the wine and water, he says: "And this food is called among us eucharist. and no one is allowed to take it unless he believes that what we teach is true, and has been washed in the laver for the remission of sins and for regeneration, and is living as Christ enjoined. For we do not receive these things as common bread or common drink, but just as .Jesus Christ our Saviour, by the word of CJod made flesh, had both ilesh and blood for our salvation, so we have been taught that the food over which thanks have been given by the word of prayer which comes from Him — that food from which our flesh and blood are by ns- similation nourished — is both the flesli and the blood of that .Jesus who was made flesh." The greatest devotional imanimity on the sub- ject prevailed for nearly eleven centuries. Then followed eight centuries or more of uninter- rupted controversy. "That presence.'' says Mil- man, "had as yet. in the eleventh century, been unapproached by profane or searching contro- versy, had been undefined by canon, neither agi- tated before council nor determined by Pope." The early Fathers were nut trained theologians. They were not careful and precise in their lan- guage regarding the Lord's Supper. But that the entire primitive Church believed in the real presence of Christ in the sacrament there appears to be no doubt. The .schoolmen, im the other hand, were philosophers. They asj)ired to reduce the Church's body of doctrine to an intellectual system. They sougiit to show that the doctrine of the Eucharist involved no rational antago- nism. Speculation, too, was rife; and it natural- ly found expression in the language of the domi- nant or Aristotelian school of philosophj-. The result was the metaphysical doctrine of tran- substantiation. The term was first officially used by the Latin Church at the Lateran ('oimcil of 121.5, and the doctrine became her recognized and authoritative teaching, so defined by the action of the Council of Trent (x.d. 1531). The subtle distinctions of theology were un- known to the common people, and the Reformers found it easy to persuade many that they were substituting for this doctrine a more primitive and spiritual one. But they met the same dif- ficulties as the schoolmen, and found it impos- sible to explain the mystery of the sacrament. The doctrine of transubstantiation. as popu- larly understood, at any rale, annihilated the natural. The bread and wine were, to all intents and purposes, no longer present. But Zwinglian- ism destroyed the supernatural, and made the Lord's Supper an empty symbol or bare memorial of a past event. It found no place for the rc.i sacramenti, the very heart of the sacrament — the 'inward and spiritual grace' so inseparalile from the sacramentum or 'outward and visible sign.' Another view, commonly but erroneously called the Lutheran, was known as consulistantialion. The word apjjears to have been coined by the opponents of Lutheranism and was derived from an expression of Luther's in his letter to Henry VIII. It represents the substance of the body and blood of Christ as coexisting in union with the substance of bread and wine, just as iron and fire are united in a bar of heated iron. The opinion which sought to establish a 'via media' between transubstantiation and consub- stantiation, on the one hand, and Zwinglianism on the other hand, is known as the Receptionist theory. This recognized a presence and insisted on its being spiritual, as opposed to material. B<it, in the last analysis, it must be admitted that this presence, according to Calvin and his fol- lowers, was not in the sacrament itself, and by virtue of the act of consecration, but in the heart of the recipient and by virtue of an act of faith on his part. This view ignored the res xarra- menti. as did Zwingli's. but preserved ami cher- ished the inrtus or beiteficia. and hence has been designated by some writers as •Virtualism.' . other view, and one held largely in the /Vnglican communion, is known as the Objective Real Presence. The adjective has been inserted in the definition as a safeguard against virtual- ism. Dr. Pusey saj-s: "Finding that the words Real Presence were often understood of what is in fact a real absence, we added the word 'ob- jective.' not as wishing to obtrude on others a term of modern philosophy, but to express that the life-giving body, the res sacramenti, is, by virtue of the consecration, present without us