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Responding to a post on ePiscoSour's blog, I ran on a bit long...so I moved it over here. I don't want to clutter his comments with my rant! Before you read this (if you read this) please know that Amy and I had a friend over this afternoon and we partook in some holiday cheer...in the form of three bottles of red wine. I'm not drunk, but I am mellow and my brain is perhaps not firing on all cylinders right now. You are warned. Indeed, ever since the memorialist push from Zwingli (followed in careful Anglican fashion by Cranmer...from a distance) there has been a strain of Protestant thought that considers the Eucharist nothing more than an intellectual thinking back to a past and done event. Modern, non-denominational (mostly fundamentalist) Christianity is the inheritor of that strain. This was not the original Protestant position, nor was it the position that fed the "mainstream" Protestant churches. (Nor, if you ask me, is it anywhere based in scripture. The Greek word we translate as "remembrance", as in "do this in remembrance of me", is a lot meatier than simple recollection. But I digress.) Luther described what happens in the Eucharist as consubstantiation, Christ "in, with and under" the bread. Calvin considered it a spiritual feeding, that as you eat the bread you also spiritually feed on Christ (in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving, as the old school BCP says). Mind, Calvinists don't always say the same thing as Calvin...I think he'd be appalled at some of the things written and said under his ism. (Again, I digress.) The point is, both of these grandfathers of Protestantism still insisted that Christ was somehow present.
Anglicans sit in a cozy middle, acknowledging the presence of Christ in the Eucharist without bothering to say how or when. Pusey preached very well on this...far better than I'd be able to write here. I think (and here I make an assumption) that Pisco's question was how one could call it communion without some notion that Christ is present. Unitarians are not famous for sacramental theology of the real presence, however one understands that. With whom are we communing? Yes, we can commune with Christ in prayer and therefore can commune with him even if he's not especially present in the bread and wine. But then why call this special action of worship "communion"? Reformation era memorialists rarely called it such...which is where we get the sobriquet, "The Lord's Supper" or "The Lord's Table" or the vulgar "The Lord's Board". Calling it "the Eucharist" is a nice compromise, as it simply means thanksgiving and can cover a multitude of theological sins. I think a lot of modern memorialists call it communion without thinking through what the word means. It's interesting to note that RC theologians have recently moved away from regarding the word "transubstantiation" as a reference to how the bread and wine become body and blood, and now consider it only a reference to the fact that it does happen. This brings Rome quite close to Pusey's (and most Anglicans') position. |
The doctrine of transubstantiation, as described and entrenched by Thomas Aquinas, is a far more nuanced and considered theology than a lot of Protestants acknowledge. This is mostly because the Reformation was a polemical movement...Protestantism. Positions were staked out in opposition, so whatever Rome said, it must be wrong. On top of this, the medieval peasant was not the most sophisticated thinker, so transubstantiation launched a whole lot of very superstitious piety which Aquinas would never have claimed as his own.