The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” (1 Cor. 10:16)
In 1 Corinthians 10, the apostle Paul reminds us that through the Communion meal we have fellowship with the risen Christ. Although the Reformed and Lutheran branches are divided on exactly how this takes place, both believe in the real presence of Christ. Long-time friends and bons vivants John J. Bombaro (senior minister, Grace Lutheran Church in San Diego, California) and Mike Brown (pastor, Christ United Reformed Church in Santee, California) wandered over to their local watering hole to discuss how Christ is present to believers in his resurrection body today. They were kind enough to record the following conversation for posterity.
Bombaro: One of the things I really appreciate about your position, Mike, is that it strives to be deeply biblical. Your Eucharistic theology is strongly Trinitarian; that is to say, it includes the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It isn’t just about the Spirit, and it isn’t only exclusively about Jesus. There’s a sense in which anytime we’re talking about the sacraments, there has to be a Trinitarian component that’s present, and that’s obviously an important point of agreement between both of us.
In our previous conversations about this, you’ve emphasized that our union with Christ is not ideal or nominal—that is to say, it’s not in our head. This isn’t just sort of a titular thing—“Oh, I’m having a union with Jesus”—but it’s real and true in accordance with the incarnational existence of Christ. It’s at that point where we have agreement. But then we want to talk about what happens when we’re actually engaged in the Holy Communion—how it is made manifest and so on.
Before we start, I want to say that I lament in my tradition, as in your own to varying degrees, that many of our churches for various reasons will not make Holy Communion available to people at least weekly. If there’s nothing that Christ desires more than to be intimate with his people, then I have a responsibility equally not only to be reading the Scriptures and imparting the word through the sermon, but also to be providing the true body and blood of Christ in Holy Communion.
Brown: Absolutely. In fact, Calvin said it should be served at least weekly, if not every time the word is preached. I think what it really comes down to is this: What do you believe the Christian receives in the Lord’s Supper? The nature of the sacrament should determine the frequency. Some believe it helps us think about what Christ did, and it is partially that. Jesus says, “Do this in remembrance of me” (1 Cor. 11:24). It does cause us to reflect upon what happened. If it’s only that, then I could see how we should have this only once a month or once a year. But if the Lord’s Supper is more than that, if we’re actually receiving the body and blood of Christ in the sacrament and it is doing something for us, if we are communing with Christ who is now the pneumatikos or life-giving Spirit, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:45, then why wouldn’t I want to have this more frequently? So we have to start there. Is this a true means of grace, or is it something else?
Bombaro: If it is a true means of grace, then the deeper we reflect upon our sin and sinfulness, the greater our need will be for the remedy of that. In the Supper, Jesus explicitly says that it is given for the forgiveness of sins. We don’t go and get our lives right and then come to the Supper. Our lives are made right through communion with himself; he’s the sum total of the benefit. Though there is a remembrance aspect to it, it is also the pay dirt of the new covenant itself. The new covenant is the self-giving of Christ, who provides for us redemption, salvation, justification, and glorification. As Simeon said as he held the child Jesus in his arms, “Behold the salvation of God.” We have to go to where Christ will be present, doing for us what we need most: forgiving us and strengthening us in our faith.
Brown: That’s right. As Reformed people, we often put everything in covenantal context, so we would see it as part of the covenant renewal ceremony. God meets with his people in the Divine Service on the Lord’s Day, condescending to us in these means, which we need to help secure our perseverance in this life. God grants us sanctifying grace so we can press on in the Christian life. At first he gives us his law, of course, and tells us that we have not met his standard; but then he gives us his gospel in the preaching of the word, showing that he himself has met that standard for us in the person and work of Christ. Then, in giving his covenant promises, he attaches a covenant sign along with that, which is the Supper. This is something we see him doing throughout redemptive history, and he does that with his people every Lord’s Day as we gather together on Mount Zion.
Bombaro: Our pastors and priests should be more emboldened, because they are called and ordained to stand, speak, and act in the stead of Christ and with his authority. Christ desires to be close and intimate with his people, to speak to and touch them. I’ve had a parishioner say to me, “If you’re going to withhold anything from me, withhold your sermon, because that seems to be more subjective than the objectivity of Holy Communion where I’m getting the pure unadulterated word and sacramental presence of Christ himself.” Of course, this was said a bit tongue in cheek, but I think there’s an element of truth there. We should no more withhold this sacrament from people than we would withhold the reading of the Scriptures or the sermon itself. The higher view we have of the sacrament, the more we will desire it and have a devotion to it. I think both of us have mentioned in our correspondence with each other the lack of devotion to the Eucharist there is in the church presently. What do you attribute that to?
Brown: I see a lot of this going back to something like Charles Finney’s “New Measures,” in which we look for something that we think is going to be more practical, something that would give us more of a bang for our buck. If we’re hoping to see something in people, if it’s numbers we’re interested in, let’s face it—the Lord’s Supper isn’t going to give us that. If it’s excitement we want, the Communion meal isn’t going to produce the kind of excitement a rock concert would in church, or a light or puppet show or drama. In many cases, we see the Communion meal replaced with something we think is going to be more practical or give us a greater experience. But we have to go back to what God has designed. If we’re meeting with the Lord with his means, on his terms, receiving his promised blessings, then we have to go with word and sacrament. It’s as simple as that.
Bombaro: The fact of the matter is that we live amid mundane life. I’m not living on the pinnacle or the zip line or the bungee cord; I’m living in the daily grind of work, of coming home to chores, and that sort of thing. We don’t have to go to the Himalayas and assume the lotus position and chant our mantra in order to find God; he makes himself known to us plainly and regularly in the grind of ordinary life. He does so by means that are meaning-laden in Scripture and part and parcel of our everyday. He is not the hidden, distant God who occasionally breaks through; he is the ever-present One for us in specifically this: bread, wine, water. When Jesus was living on earth, he wasn’t in the holy places or palaces; he was over there in Peter’s house, he was in the synagogue. He wasn’t in the inner sanctum of the temple in Jerusalem; he was out among the people in the ordinary. That’s the nature of this self-giving God.
Brown: And he looked very plain. As Isaiah said, he didn’t have any kind of special beauty that we would desire him (Isa. 53:2). He wasn’t levitating six inches off the ground and glowing with a halo. He looked like anybody else. God has his hand so deep in his creation, so much in the ordinary, as you put it, that we shouldn’t be surprised he appointed something like word, water, wine—the ordinary things—as means of his grace. Every culture recognizes that taking a bath makes you clean. As clearly as this has been made known to us in ordinary life, regardless of your socioeconomic status, or what kind of education you have, we can see how Christ’s blood also washes away our sins. It’s the same with bread and wine: as these nourish the body, so Christ nourishes the soul. God has given us things that are simple, plain, ordinary. A worship service isn’t extraordinary; it’s extraordinary that we meet with God. Although the worship service itself—hearing the word and receiving the sacrament—can be boring, it is absolutely necessary, as necessary as it is for our bodies to eat a meal or to drink water. Go without those things and you die. Likewise, we have to have these means that God has appointed.
Bombaro: There should be a level of comfort among family and in the presence of our Father and Christ our brother, yet not the element of radical informality that indicates disrespect or self-aggrandizement. What do you do in your parish to heighten the drama, to draw attention to the profundity of what’s taking place—namely, that the king is present through these ordinary means? How do you signal that this moment is unlike any other in our week, when we realize we ought to be circumspect and reverent because the king is coming here in a powerful way to extend the royal scepter to absolve us of sin and of guilt?
Brown: In our church, we follow the historic liturgy. There’s a call to worship, an invocation, a salutation, and singing from psalms and hymns. We have a reading of the law, corporate confession of sin, absolution, confession of the faith; we hear the word preached in law and gospel, and immediately after we receive the Communion meal. As that meal is administered to the people, they come forward to receive the elements, return to their seats, and the service concludes.
The whole service is linked together, almost like a meal would be linked together in every single course so that it’s not just haphazardly thrown together. The sermon fits with the selected psalms, always leading up to this point of receiving the Lord’s Supper. To return to something you said earlier, John, even if the sermon failed, even if it became something the minister didn’t get quite right, there’s almost a safety net, if you will, in having the Lord’s Supper. You can’t mess that up too much. Christ should be present in the preaching of the gospel, providing pastors preach Christ and not themselves or something else. The Lord’s Supper is built into the liturgy that Christ meets with his people in this way.
Bombaro: I love that. Even if pastors talk in the sermon about a favorite book or recent movie, completely fumbling the ball in terms of expounding the Scripture, at least the people receive the unadulterated body and blood of Christ in the words of institution.
Brown: There’s the gospel.
Bombaro: In the Lutheran church we have what’s called the Halt Gottesdienst, the High Divine Service, where God is the active agent. The two high points in the Divine Service are the reading of the gospel and partaking in Holy Communion. The bridge between them is the sermon. I’m to take the gospel lesson that illuminates Christ as our Savior, redeemer, king of the world, and then bring God’s people to the Table where he is present. It’s the climax of the Divine Service whereby we have been absolved and forgiven by Christ himself and faith has been strengthened. We are then sent back out into the world, having met with the king, having received his word and his benediction. We’re strengthened for the fight once again.
Brown: We’re in full agreement with you here. The Divine Service has the kind of liturgy in which God speaks to his people and his people respond, and the central part of it is the word leading to sacrament.
Bombaro: When all the outside world says that God is not real, he’s not here, the last place where this ought to be said is within our own churches. How would you encourage pastors in your tradition to bring Holy Communion back as a fixed feature within the Divine Service or within the worship service itself?
Brown: First, I would encourage them to read our confessions. Article 35 of the Belgic Confession is pretty clear in that we believe we receive the body and blood of the Lord in the Lord’s Supper. Why would we want anything less than having it frequently? The Heidelberg Catechism questions 75–79 are also helpful. I would also ask where in the New Testament do we find this idea of monthly (or, sadly, less than monthly) communion, which has become common in so many Reformed and evangelical churches? It seems to me when you read of the disciples’ steadfast continuation in the breaking of bread and the prayers, they were breaking bread in the Communion meal every time they met for worship on the Lord’s Day (Acts 2:42). There’s nothing in the New Testament to give us the idea that it was less than weekly, so I would challenge people to think about that. If what we receive is the body and blood of Christ, then why wouldn’t we have that every week?
Bombaro: That’s a good point. I think there’s an element of pietism that has crept in too, which has pushed Holy Communion out to the periphery of Christian devotion. There are practices we can master on our own that are equal, if not superior, to that of attendance to the Holy Communion, whether it be your quiet time or your Life Application Bible, or your cappuccino ministry—whatever it may be. One local megachurch we are both familiar with offers Holy Communion as a separate “ministry” (it’s listed just under the Zumba ministry), which may occur once or twice a year there.
Now, part of it is that if we really believe Christ is showing up in this extraordinary and incarnational way, then there should be nothing we desire more than to be in his presence and to know he actually welcomes us. If you have any sort of concerns about where you stand with God, then knowing you’ve sinned against him in thought, word, and deed and have refused to do what he’s said, and done what he’s said you may not do, this is where you’re comforted. It is here that he says, “Welcome to my Supper. This is for the forgiveness of sins.”
Brown: It’s not for good people; it’s for bad people.
Bombaro: Nothing would reinforce that more. If we walk through the Divine Service, through the invocation of his name and his presence, the reading of the Scriptures, the confession, the absolution of our sins, and the Scriptures expounded where God’s grace has been extended to us because of and through Jesus Christ—if after all of that there’s any doubt, then he asks us to come to his banqueting table. He places it between our teeth and pours it down our throats, sending us then away with this message: My peace is with you.
Brown: It’s so beautiful, because you can’t get more personal than that. People are always seeking this, saying, “I want a personal relationship with the Lord.” How can you get more personal than Christ saying, “Here’s my body, here’s my blood. Put it in your mouth, eat, drink.” We have to see the tenderness and kindness of our Lord who condescends to us in that way so we can receive Christ himself, the whole Christ, in the Communion meal.
I find it interesting that many people who begin attending our church (after having been at another church) think Communion seems too frequent and redundant. But once they begin to understand what the Communion meal is and the assurance to their faith it brings them over time, they never want to go back. I’ve never heard anybody say, “Gee, I wish we did it less.”
Bombaro: People have said to me, “When you do it too frequently, it loses its significance—it’s not special enough anymore.” I explain that this is like telling your wife the next time she wants to bond with you in a marital act, “Sweetheart, we just do this too frequently. This just isn’t meaningful anymore.” This is evocative of Holy Communion—his body entering our body, his blood entering our blood and comingling with it in a life-making act. This is spiritual eroticism of the bridegroom with his bride. It can’t be too frequent.
Brown: That’s where we’re in agreement, John, at least as far as we go in our Lutheran and Reformed confessions (we can’t speak for everybody in our traditions). What we receive was never a matter of debate between Calvin and Luther. What we receive is nothing less than the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. It breaks my heart that we have so many people in my tradition who flinch when they hear this; that what we receive is the true and natural body and blood of Jesus Christ in the Supper.
Bombaro: During my days in the evangelical church, we would sing about the blood of Christ. But then I wondered, when I would ever actually come in contact with this blood of Christ that takes away the sin of the world? The plain and obvious answer from John 6 and 1 Corinthians 10–11 is in Holy Communion. There I am in union with the blood that takes away the sin of the world, which is the great declaration in Holy Communion: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” In our tradition it’s followed with “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” There is the presentation of his body and blood, and that’s it. The peace of the Lord be with you. This is our peace: his body and blood.
Brown: As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10, “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the body and blood of Jesus Christ?” That’s important to understand. I say each week in the words of administration that this is not for perfect people: don’t allow your weakness of faith or your failure in the Christian life to keep you from this Table; it is given to us in order to increase our faith in Christ by receiving the body and blood of Jesus Christ. It’s important that we understand that we’re communing or participating in the very blood of Jesus Christ. I think where our disagreement has been historically is the “how” and the “where” it’s received, but definitely not in the “what.”
Bombaro: We would say that the power is not in the priest; what the priest has is authority. The authority that’s been given to me is to speak the words of Christ, and it is the word of Christ that has power through the Holy Spirit. Just as there was an incarnational working of the Holy Spirit with respect to the Son of God in forming him in the womb of the Virgin Mary, so too the Holy Spirit is powerfully present when the word of God is spoken in Holy Communion. This has always been the Lutheran position. But at that point we would say there is an objectivity, an external reality to which our faith is to conform; what is received is something outside of us coming into us—namely, the objective presence of the body and blood of Christ, along with these elements of bread and wine. There we have the difference.
What’s of interest to me is an explanation of a couple of terms you had used. In one place you say that it’s received by faith, whereas it seems to me that Paul is saying that it’s received by these elements. In another place you say it’s received in faith. Now there the Lutheran links arms with you and says, “Amen, brother, yes,” that it is received in faith. He is present not by faith but objectively so by the bread and wine through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Brown: That’s a good and fair question on the prepositions. As I understand my tradition or confessions, I don’t think we would have a problem with using either one of those. I don’t think we mean anything different, and we would confess a certain objectivity to the sacraments. In other words, what I receive in the Communion meal is nothing less than the crucified body and shed blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is only received in faith. My faith doesn’t make the Communion meal the body and blood of Jesus Christ, but it is in faith or by faith that any benefit is received. When Christ was crucified on the cross, some people saw him only as a crucified criminal. Other people confessed that this was, in fact, the son of God. Nevertheless, he was crucified there on the cross objectively, and that’s something that could not be denied. The question of whether or not you receive any benefit from that crucifixion really comes down to whether or not you receive him in faith.
Bombaro: We’re in agreement there. I don’t want to offer an unfair caricature, but I was saying in my response that my faith does not make Christ any more present than whether someone believed that the man walking down the streets of Nazareth was in fact the Son of God—he was objectively there, whether you believed it or not. You are called to conform to that reality, and that’s what we’re saying about the Eucharist.
Brown: I would be in full agreement, and I think the Reformed tradition would be in full agreement with you there. The bigger difference between Reformed and Lutheran views is in the elements themselves: Is Christ in his body and blood received on earth or received in heaven? Or is it in this age or in the age to come? We believe that we receive nothing less than the crucified body and shed blood of Christ. This is a great mystery. It is a mystical union how Christ—in his incarnation, in his body and blood—is joined with his church on earth. It is one of the great three mystical unions in the Scriptures, the others being the hypostatic union and the Trinity. We can’t fully explain all this; nevertheless, we confess that when we receive Communion, koinonia (1 Cor. 10:16), it is the body and blood of Christ, but not that he has descended to earth in any way.
Bombaro: So the philosopher in me wants to latch onto a term you used, “a certain objectivity.” What is the Reformed understanding of that “certain objectivity”? When I talk about objectivity, I’m talking about externality; that is to say, with these elements, present along with them, there’s real blood, there’s real wine—there’s no question about that. But along with this bread and wine are the transformed body and blood of Christ, which is the Lutheran understanding. When you say “a certain objectivity,” are you saying there’s an overlap of the dimension we call “heaven and earth” in the sense that there’s a manifestation of Christ’s body and blood with respect to these elements?
Brown: When I say “a certain objectivity,” I’m saying it is objective in the sense that we receive Christ and his body and his blood. My faith doesn’t make that true. My faith is only the channel to receive the benefits of that.
Bombaro: This is an important point, Mike, because we’re in agreement there. Lutherans would also say that our faith does not impact in any way the objectivity of the presence of Christ with respect to our Eucharist. That is by his own doing and promise and by the power of the Holy Spirit in terms of the words of institution. The benefits exactly are appropriated by faith.
Brown: Whether “by” or “in,” we would see those as the same. The difference for us, I suppose, is that we believe the elements—the bread and the wine—are still bread and wine; they are not transformed in their substance. Rather, when we receive the sign in faith, we receive the benefits of the body and blood of Christ that are joined to the sign and cannot be separated. So they are distinct but not separate: sign and reality. That is, bread and wine, body and blood of Jesus Christ, if that makes sense.
Bombaro: I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but this is where I think Paul Tillich is a bit useful. Tillich has a good study between sign and symbol. A sign is something that points to something other than itself. For instance, if we’re riding down I-15, and I show you a road sign that says, “San Diego 15 miles,” is that San Diego? Absolutely not; it’s pointing to something other than itself. A symbol, however, participates in the reality in which it also exemplifies, but not entirely. This is what I’m getting at in terms of a meaning-laden symbol. If I were to take you to the border of San Diego to a marquee that says, “Welcome to San Diego, America’s Finest City,” are you then looking at San Diego? The answer is yes, but not in its entirety. It’s sort of a now and not-yet kind of thing, or in different terms, it is a participation in it. This is what we mean by symbol: it goes beyond being a sign; it actually participates in it. The meaning-laden bread and wine bring forth the meaningfulness of Christ’s self-giving in, with, and under, as we would say. Luther and Lutherans have no philosophy to articulate how Christ is really present in it; we just assert that Christ is present in the Eucharist. Luther likes to use this phrase in Latin: Spiritus Sanctus non est skeptitus, the Holy Spirit is not a skeptic. He makes assertions, so we just make the assertion without the explanation that Christ is, in fact, present with these symbols, not signs, as it were.
Brown: Looking at Belgic Confession 35, I don’t think we would have a problem with what you’ve said on the difference between sign and symbol, in the sense that when we receive the Lord’s Supper on the Lord’s Day we receive Christ. We’re not just receiving a bare sign that points to reality, which would be Zwinglianism, ultimately. I could come to the Lord’s Supper and say, “Wow, bread and wine. This really reminds me of what Christ did on Calvary two thousand years ago.” It may or may not do that. As the Heidelberg Catechism points out in question 75, however, it does much more than that. It unites us with the body and blood of Christ in heaven. There is this objective reality taking place.
The only difference, and it might be just a slight difference, is in our understanding of Christ in his body and blood right now, where he is located. We would see, in the Calvinistic and Reformed tradition, Christ at the right hand of the Father, where he remains until the last day. His divinity exceeds the bounds of his humanity, but it’s the Holy Spirit who ushers us to heaven where we are seated, as Paul says in Ephesians 2, in the heavenly places, so that we can commune and feast on the body and blood of Jesus Christ. We also have no philosophical category for how that happens. It’s a great mystery because, again, the union of Christ in his physical incarnational body with his church on earth is a mystical union—something we cannot rationally explain.
Bombaro: My point of critique is that it just seems to be contrary to Calvin and his whole doctrine of divine accommodation where God condescends and comes to us, that it reaches its apogee in the incarnation itself, and that the Eucharist seems to be the promise of divine accommodation through the incarnation in Christ. Would you comment on that?
Brown: I think that it is a condescension to us in that Christ meets us in the bread and the wine. The question that Calvin raises is simply where. He doesn’t deny that Christ meets us and that it is a great accommodation—bread and wine is about as accommodating as you can get. Calvin says that when God speaks, he uses baby talk to speak to us, and that the Lord’s Supper is one of his greatest speech-acts to us. It’s a visible word, but it really does commune with us. If he remains in heaven, is he any less present with us, if we’re joined to him by the Holy Spirit? If we come to the Supper recognizing his promise that in this we commune with the body and blood of Jesus Christ, is he any less present, or is the sacrament any less effectual than if he were present with us here on earth?
Bombaro: I think that’s where it slips into an element of discomfort for me, because I want to assert that Christ is objectively externally present in this way for us—that is, sacramentally present with the bread and the wine so that we can identify who he is and what he is specifically doing for us in this meal with all of the New Testament promises in that covenant.
I’m going to have a little fun with physics here. If heaven permeates the totality of the spatiotemporal—that is to say, if heaven isn’t, as it were, spatially detached and dislocated from the totality of the time-space dimension in which we live and move and have our being—then is there any distance for Jesus to travel to be present in the Eucharist, whether it be in San Diego, Saskatoon, or Sheboygan at the same time?
Brown: I always find it amusing when Lutherans bring this up, because it is funny. Clearly God can do as he pleases. When he left, was it in a spaceship or what happened? We have to go back to Acts 1 when the apostles were gazing up at heaven. It was pretty amazing that they had just seen their Lord ascending.
Bombaro: But your own Meredith Kline says that this cloud is the cloud of presence. It’s the Shekinah—the presence of God—with us. Christ being taken up into that cloud is the promise that he is not gone from us; he is present, ruling in the way he promised he would. The last thing he communicated to us was that he would be known in this Supper.
Brown: Indeed, and we wouldn’t disagree with that. But Kline would also say with our tradition that the divinity of Christ exceeds the bounds of his humanity, so that where he is present in his divinity does not necessitate his humanity to be present, because he still is a finite creature in his humanity, even though infinite God.
Bombaro: No distance travel—that’s what we would say.
Brown: No distance travel. We would still see a notable absence from Jesus, however, as he said there would be in his Upper Room discourse in John 14–16: he would leave, but he would not leave us orphans. There would be a sort of trading of places between the incarnational Christ here on earth and the sending of the Paraclete, who would do certain things personally for us: lead us into all truth, point us to Jesus Christ, glorify Jesus Christ, convict us of sin and righteousness and judgment, which the Holy Spirit has been doing since Pentecost.
Bombaro: There is a difference, and you’re right. But at the same time, I’ve opened up my discourse, saying that Christ himself made the promise never to leave us or forsake us: “Lo, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”
Brown: He also said, “I am going away, but I will not leave you orphans—I will send you the Holy Spirit.”
Bombaro: And that was followed by, “He was made known to them in the breaking of bread.”
Brown: And when “he opened up the Scriptures” to them.
Bombaro: That was noted also. Both in word and sacrament, his real voice and his real presence are with us in an objective kind of way. Here’s a quote from Luther that I think explains what he is getting at and what Lutherans are saying. It basically says that Christ does, as it were, ride in on the bread and wine. This is a quote from the Marburg colloquy, so he’s disputing with the Zwinglians here, not the Calvinists at this point: “When we baptize with water, we ought not to pay attention so much to what is said, but to him who speaks. Because God speaks, we must embrace the word.”
He’s setting the stage here. He lives in the context of the kingdom, so when the king speaks, his word accomplishes what it says. Mind you, this is actually a stroke of genius on Luther’s part, because the Marburg colloquy takes place in the castle of Phillip of Hesse, one of the German princes. This German prince is thinking: Wait a minute; if Zwingli doesn’t believe God’s word accomplishes what it says when it’s spoken at the altar, how am I going to trust these people on the battlefield? Luther answers:
So take for example a prince who gives orders to shoe a horse. A horseshoe is a lowly thing. There are many lowly things. To be hungry is a lowly thing. The command to baptize with water, we attribute not to the washing of the water but to the Holy Spirit. Concerning the element itself we are in agreement (namely, that it’s just water). We do not ascribe dignity to the bread, but to the word, and to him who speaks it: Jesus Christ. Just as when a prince sends his servant to shoe his horse, the piece of iron is given dignity by being attached to the horse’s foot. Give due honor to the cross, and it does many other things.
So what Luther is saying is that when the king speaks regarding this bread and wine in this context, his word accomplishes what it says, and there should be no doubt. This is my body, this is my blood, and we would say that objectively speaking.
Brown: And we would agree. When I go to the Divine Service, I will receive the body and blood objectively when I receive the Lord’s Supper. The only difference is that I don’t believe that Christ descends from heaven to earth, but that we’re waiting for that descent Acts 1 says will happen in the same manner as he ascended. We do this somehow in some way that we cannot explain, by means of the Holy Spirit, who causes us to commune with the body and blood of Christ. Similar to how you can’t explain how you are still eating bread and drinking wine, and yet you’re receiving the Lord in his body and blood here on earth, we can’t explain how we’re receiving it in heaven.
Bombaro: Let me put it just slightly differently. You spoke about him descending. We don’t believe that there is a descent at all, and that’s because the nature of the kingdom is contiguous; that is to say, his ruling and reigning in heaven is also on earth, and particularly in the context of his church. There will be a last day when he visibly and physically comes, and all will see him, but now it’s under the auspices of the word and sacrament.
Brown: We would absolutely agree with that.
Bombaro: What I’m saying is there is a contiguousness with respect to his kingdom. He doesn’t descend to be present in the Eucharist because this is his kingdom. He is present in his kingdom, on earth as it is in heaven.
Brown: We would agree with that, but it would only be through the means, word and sacrament, that he provided to us; in that sacrament, his physical body and blood is not there locally, because it is ascended into heaven where it will remain until the last day at the Parousia.
Bombaro: The location of heaven is precisely sacramental. The step further for us in terms of Lutherans would be that objectivity, that externality, because there is actually no movement from heaven to earth; it’s contiguous, seamless. I once related it to a movie from the 1980s, Time Bandits. It’s a story about dwarfs who stole a map with windows on it that open up to different time periods. When these windows open up, the dwarfs jump through them. Next thing you know, they appear at the Battle of Waterloo or something to that effect. The sacraments are exactly like that: They are the windows of heaven opening up here on earth, so that there isn’t a descent but rather again the manifestation of the kingdom.
Brown: We would agree with that.
Bombaro: We actually have the same doctrine with respect to the church. Luther said that the church and heaven are made manifest in the pure preaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments according to the gospel.
Brown: We would say that there is no time-continuum difference when we meet in the Divine Service—that we are meeting with the Lord himself. Of course it’s all still mediated by Christ; but at that moment, it is a holy operation God gives us where he meets with us on his terms—that is something completely different from anything else we experience during the week, and this is where we find Christ and his kingdom. The only difference is that in the Supper, we (the Reformed) would not see Christ physically present with the bread and wine; rather, we receive the physical body and blood of Jesus Christ in heaven somehow and in some way. That is the great mystery.
Bombaro: Where you would experience something different in terms of Lutheran worship at that point is that Lutherans will worship and adore the Eucharistic Christ—the Christ who is present in the Eucharist. We bow, genuflect, make the sign of the cross, and receive these elements as if we were embracing Christ. As Luther said in one place, “If I receive the body of Christ in my arms it would be for the purpose of embracing it.” In the Eucharist, there’s a devotional embracing of the sacrament because Christ is self-giving in that act.
Brown: I think there’s more overlap than disagreement between the Reformed and Lutheran positions.
Bombaro: Because we both assert the real presence of Christ and the fact that in receiving him in his body and blood we are receiving what Christ desires to give his church, which is himself and therefore all the benefits of the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. Oh that all the church believed, taught, and confessed this! It would be the strengthening of the church for all time.
Brown: The best thing any of us can do is to find a church that proclaims Jesus Christ in law and gospel faithfully each week, providing us with his body and blood in the Lord’s Supper.
