What is consubstantiation?

Question 09066.

Consubstantiation is the term commonly used for the Lutheran understanding of the Lord’s Supper, in which the body and blood of Jesus are truly present in, with and under the bread and wine, while the bread and wine remain fully bread and wine. Both are there together, which is what the prefix is meant to convey.

I should say at once that most Lutheran theologians dislike the word and do not use it of themselves, preferring sacramental union or simply real presence. That objection is worth taking seriously, and I will come to why. But the term is in general use, and the position it names is a genuine one held by serious believers.

What Consubstantiation Claims

The claim is that when a believer receives the elements, he receives bread and also the true body of Jesus. Nothing is annihilated and nothing is transformed. The bread stays bread all the way through, and the body of Jesus is present with it.

Luther’s favourite illustration was iron in the fire. Heat a bar of iron and you have iron and fire together in the same object, both fully present, neither having become the other. Consubstantiation, on this picture, is a union of two realities rather than a conversion of one into the other.

The presence is held to be objective, which is the point that matters most. On this view Jesus is present whether or not the recipient has faith, so that an unbeliever eating the elements truly receives the body, to his own judgement. That is a genuine difference from the Reformed and Baptist positions, in which what is received depends on faith.

Why Luther Held It

Luther broke with Rome over indulgences, purgatory, papal authority and justification, and he demolished transubstantiation’s Aristotelian machinery with obvious relish. But at the words of institution he stopped and would not move.

His reason was hermeneutical and, on its own terms, principled. This is my body. Luther held that where Scripture speaks plainly we must submit even when reason objects, and that the moment we begin explaining plain words as figures we have opened a door that cannot be shut. He suspected, not without cause, that the figurative reading was driven by philosophical discomfort rather than by exegesis.

At the Marburg Colloquy in 1529, Zwingli and Luther met to settle it and failed. Luther reportedly chalked hoc est corpus meum on the table and kept returning to it. The Protestant movement split at that table and has never fully recovered, which tells you how seriously both men took the question.

The Communication of Attributes

Consubstantiation rests on a piece of Christology that deserves attention, because it is where the argument actually turns. Lutherans hold that in the incarnation the attributes of the divine nature are communicated to the human nature, so that the human body of Jesus shares the divine property of being present everywhere.

If that is so, then His body can be present on ten thousand altars at once without difficulty. The Reformed replied that this compromises the true humanity of Jesus, since a body that is everywhere is not a body in any sense we can recognise, and that the two natures are united in one person without their properties being mingled.

I side with the Reformed here. The Chalcedonian definition guards against confusing the natures precisely because our salvation depends on His humanity being real. A human body is located somewhere, and Scripture says where His is: seated at the right hand of God, whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all things.

Why Lutherans Reject the Word

Now the fairness point I promised. Lutherans object to consubstantiation because it implies a philosophical explanation of how the presence works, and their whole complaint against Rome was that Scripture gives no such explanation.

Their position, properly stated, is that the presence is real and the mode is a mystery. They will say in, with and under, and then decline to say more. Calling it consubstantiation makes it look like an alternative theory of substances competing with the Roman one, which is precisely what they deny they are offering.

So when I use the word, as I have here because it is the term most readers know, I mean the Lutheran doctrine of real bodily presence without conversion of the elements. Anyone discussing this with a Lutheran friend should expect the word itself to be the first objection raised, and should concede the point gracefully.

Where I Disagree

My disagreement runs on three lines. The first is the language of the upper room, which I take as figurative for the reasons I set out in my article on whether communion is just symbolic. Jesus held the bread while His body sat at the table, and He spoke of the cup as the new covenant in the same breath.

The second is the location of His body. The ascension is not a piece of stage furniture. Acts 3:21 says heaven must receive Him until the time for restoring all things, and Hebrews has Him seated. A body genuinely present on every communion table in the world is difficult to reconcile with those statements.

The third is what an objective presence does to faith. If the body is received regardless of faith, then the benefit of the table is attached to the eating rather than to believing, and the door to a mechanical view stands ajar even though Lutherans firmly shut it in practice by insisting that faith alone receives the benefit.

What Consubstantiation Gets Right

I do not want to leave this as a list of objections. Luther was right that something real happens at the table and that the memorial position, in its thinner popular forms, has often said far too little. A believer who comes to the Lord’s Supper meets his Lord there, and any view that reduces the occasion to an aid to memory has lost something the New Testament plainly holds.

He was also right to resist explanation. There is a mystery here that neither transubstantiation nor consubstantiation nor my own position dissolves, and the temptation to over-define is not confined to Rome. 1 Corinthians 10:16 calls the cup a participation in the blood of Jesus, and that word deserves more weight than evangelicals usually give it.

And Luther’s instinct about plain reading is one I generally share. Where I part from him is in judging that the plain sense of a Passover meal full of signs is the sign sense, and that reading it so is not a retreat from the text but a submission to it.

Holding It as a Secondary Matter

This is a disagreement between brothers. Lutherans hold justification by faith alone, the authority of Scripture and the deity of Jesus, and the Reformation owes more to Luther than to anyone. I would gladly hear him preach and I would not accuse him of error on the gospel.

So I hold my position with conviction and I do not make it a test of fellowship. Consubstantiation is wrong, in my judgement, on the location of the body of Jesus and on the mode of His presence. It is not wrong on the gospel, and the distinction between those two categories is one every believer needs.

Marburg is a warning here. Two men who agreed on almost everything divided over the Supper, and the political consequences for the Reformation were considerable. Some of the sharpest divisions among believers occur over the meal our Lord gave to unite us, and I do not think He is indifferent to that.

Where Consubstantiation Came From as a Word

The term has an odd history. It appears in medieval discussion before Luther, used by theologians such as Duns Scotus to describe a possible alternative to the Roman position, and it was applied to Lutheran teaching by opponents rather than adopted by Lutherans themselves. That is why the Book of Concord does not use it and why Lutheran theologians correct anyone who does.

What Lutherans say instead is sacramental union: the body and blood are united with the bread and wine in the act of the Supper, by the power of the words of institution, in a manner that Scripture does not explain and theology should not attempt to. So consubstantiation names the position from outside, and names it in the vocabulary of the very scholastic philosophy Luther was trying to escape.

I use the word because readers know it and because there is no widely recognised alternative in ordinary English. But it is worth stating the objection plainly, since arguments that begin by misdescribing the other side rarely end well. See 1 Corinthians 11:24 for the sentence around which the whole disagreement turns.

Why Marburg Still Matters

There is a warning in this history for people who will never think about consubstantiation again after reading this. Two men who agreed on Scripture alone, faith alone and grace alone could not agree on the Supper, and the Protestant cause was permanently weakened by it. Luther is said to have told Zwingli that they were of a different spirit.

That sentence is the tragedy of the Reformation in seven words. Whatever the merits of either position, and I have set out where I stand, the judgement that a brother who differs here is of a different spirit was wrong and cost more than either man could have foreseen. Political alliances failed, and within a century Europe was at war partly along the lines those disagreements drew.

So hold your view of the Supper with conviction and hold your brother with charity. Whether you say consubstantiation, transubstantiation or the memorial view of the ordinances, the man beside you who differs is trusting the same Saviour, and the table you are arguing about was given by that Saviour to make you one. There is something worth sitting with in that. Ephesians 4:3 asks us to be eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, and it does not make an exception for theologians.

So, now what?

If your knowledge of these debates has come entirely from your own tradition’s summaries, go and read the other side in its own words. Luther’s Large Catechism on the Supper is short, forceful and available free online, and reading it will do more for your charity than a dozen articles about Lutherans.

Then come back to your own table with the question that actually matters. Not what is in the bread, but who died, and whether you are trusting Him rather than your understanding of a doctrine. Consubstantiation and transubstantiation are both attempts to honour a Saviour who told us simply to do this in remembrance of Him. Are you doing it?

Whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago.

Acts 3:21 (ESV)