Is communion just symbolic?

Question 09064.

The memorial view of the Lord’s Supper holds that the bread and cup represent the body and blood of Jesus rather than becoming or containing them, and that the table is chiefly an act of remembrance and proclamation. It is the position of most Baptists and independent evangelicals, and it is regularly dismissed by everybody else as reducing the Supper to a bare symbol.

That criticism has some force where it is deserved, and in some churches it is thoroughly deserved. So I want to defend the memorial view properly, which means both showing why I hold it and admitting where those who hold it have made it smaller than it should be.

What the Memorial View Claims

The memorial view says that when Jesus took bread and said this is my body, He was speaking as He habitually spoke. I am the door. I am the vine. I am the bread of life. Nobody has ever suggested He was made of timber.

It says the elements remain bread and wine, and that their power lies in what they signify rather than in what they contain. It says that the benefit received at the table comes through faith, as we remember, examine ourselves and fellowship with the Lord and with one another, rather than through the eating itself.

And it says the Supper is a proclamation. As often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes. That is language of announcement, not of transaction.

The Case From the Upper Room

Start with the setting. Jesus was holding bread in His hands and speaking to men who could see His body in front of them. If this is my body meant that the bread had become His flesh, He was in the strange position of holding His own body while sitting in it.

He was also keeping Passover, a meal built entirely on symbolism. The lamb, the bitter herbs, the unleavened bread all represented something in the exodus story, and every Jew present understood that. When the head of a Jewish household says of the bread, this is the bread of affliction our fathers ate in Egypt, nobody imagines a transformation.

And there is the plain difficulty of the blood. Jesus offered the cup to Jewish disciples for whom drinking blood was among the strongest prohibitions in the law. Had they understood Him literally, the reaction would have been immediate and violent, and the Gospels record nothing of the kind.

What About John 6?

John 6 is where the argument usually goes next. Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. That is strong language and it must be dealt with rather than avoided.

Two things settle it for me. Jesus spoke these words before the Supper was instituted, so His hearers had no means of connecting them with a rite that did not exist. And He explains His own meaning in the same chapter: it is the Spirit who gives life, the flesh is no help at all, the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.

The chapter is about believing on Him, as verse 35 makes plain when it puts coming to me and believing in me in parallel with hunger and thirst. Eating and drinking is a metaphor for appropriating Jesus personally. That is a demanding thought, and it is not a doctrine of the elements.

Why the Memorial View Is Not Bare Symbolism

Now the honest part. Zwingli, who is usually blamed for this position, held rather more than he is credited with, but the popular version that filtered down into evangelical practice really did flatten the table into a memory exercise. Where that has happened, the criticism lands.

A sign is not nothing. A wedding ring is a symbol, and the man who loses his does not shrug. The flag on a coffin is a symbol, and nobody treats it casually. In Scripture, signs given by God carry weight precisely because He gave them, and to despise the sign is to despise what it signifies.

More than that, the memorial view has always affirmed a real communion at the table. 1 Corinthians 10:16 calls the cup a participation in the blood of Jesus. Something genuine happens when believers eat and drink in faith: fellowship with a living Saviour and with one another. What I deny is that this happens through the elements changing. What I affirm is that it happens.

Where Evangelicals Have Made It Too Small

I have to say this to my own side. Many evangelical churches take communion four times a year, at the end of a service, after the visitors have gone home, in about six minutes. The order of service treats it as an appendix. That is not a theological position; it is neglect wearing one.

If the memorial view is true, remembrance ought to be done well. Give it time. Explain it. Let there be silence long enough for self-examination to actually occur rather than being announced. Read the institution narrative rather than paraphrasing it.

The frequency question is worth asking too. Acts 20:7 describes the disciples gathering on the first day of the week to break bread, and Acts 2:42 has it among the four devotions of the earliest church. I would not be dogmatic, but the New Testament pattern looks considerably more frequent than quarterly. My article on how often the New Testament churches took communion works through the evidence.

Why This Matters Pastorally

Some will ask whether this is worth arguing about. It is, for two reasons. The first is that a view of the elements which makes them channels of grace inevitably puts a person between you and that grace, and history shows what follows.

The second is assurance. If grace comes to me through eating, then my confidence rests partly on how often and how properly I have eaten. If the table proclaims a finished work that I receive by faith, my confidence rests where the New Testament puts it, on what Jesus did once for all.

That is why I hold the memorial view as more than a negative position. It is not chiefly a denial of what Rome or Wittenberg taught. It is a positive account of a table where a finished work is announced to people who need reminding weekly that it is finished.

Charity in the Disagreement

Let me close the argument fairly. Believers I respect hold otherwise, and some of the most careful thinkers in church history have taken different views of this. Calvin held a spiritual real presence and argued it from Scripture rather than from tradition. Lutherans hold a sacramental union and would say the memorial view empties the words of the institution.

This is a secondary matter, in the sense that I fellowship gladly with those who differ and would not regard their churches as false on this account. It is not trivial, because it touches how grace comes to us, but it does not touch whether a person is saved.

So argue it, teach it, hold it with conviction, and do not let it become the thing you are known for. The table was given to unite the body, and there is a certain irony in what we have done with it.

Zwingli, Calvin and What Actually Divided Them

The memorial view is usually traced to Zwingli, and he is usually caricatured. His argument at Marburg was chiefly about the location of the body of Jesus, which he held to be at the right hand of God, and about the grammar of the words of institution. He did also speak of the Supper as a thanksgiving in which the believer is nourished by faith, which is rather more than the bare memory his critics allow him.

Calvin held something different again, and it is worth understanding because many who think they hold the memorial view actually hold Calvin’s. He taught that believers truly feed on the body of Jesus by the Spirit, who lifts them to where He is rather than bringing Him down to the elements. That preserves the ascension while affirming a real communion, and it is the most careful attempt anyone has made to hold both.

I find myself closer to Calvin on the reality of what happens and closer to Zwingli on what the elements are. That may sound like fence-sitting, and I would rather call it holding two things the New Testament holds. The memorial view I am defending affirms that the bread is bread and that the fellowship is real, and it declines to explain the mechanism, which is the honest position given how little we are told. See Colossians 3:1 on where the believer’s attention is directed.

What the Memorial View Asks of You

If the elements do not act upon you, then something is required of you, and that is the practical edge of the memorial view. Grace does not arrive through the eating; it is received through faith. Which means the difference between a communion that changes your week and one that does not is largely a matter of what you brought to it.

That is a demanding position rather than an easy one, and I think evangelicals have sometimes preferred it for the wrong reasons. It is easier to hold that nothing much is happening than to hold that something is happening and that I am responsible for meeting it. Come prepared, come repentant, come expecting to have fellowship with a living Saviour, and the memorial view will not feel thin at all.

Teaching It to a Congregation

If you lead a church that holds the memorial view, teach it rather than assuming it. Most members have absorbed a vague sense that the bread stands for something and have never been shown why, which leaves them defenceless the first time an articulate friend explains why their position is thin.

Teach it positively. The memorial view is not chiefly a set of denials about what the elements are not; it is an account of a table where a finished work is proclaimed, where believers have real fellowship with a living Saviour, and where a body declares that it is one. Preach through 1 Corinthians 11:23-34 occasionally rather than only quoting the institution words. My article on what the Lord’s Supper is works through the passage.

So, now what?

If communion has become routine for you, the answer is not a different theology of the elements. It is to come to the next one having actually prepared. Read the account in Luke 22 the night before. Come with something specific to confess and something specific to give thanks for.

And if you hold the memorial view because it is what your church does rather than because you have examined it, spend an evening with 1 Corinthians 10 and 11. Convictions you have inherited without testing tend to collapse at exactly the wrong moment. What do you actually believe is happening when you take the bread?

And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.

Luke 22:19 (ESV)