Calvin's Doctrine of the Lord's Supper

It is always affirming to find that someone else has thought of something that you’ve thought of too, but struggled to express. This is no doubt most likely with to happen with experiences and ideas that are not widely understood or discussed. Once such idea for evangelical Christians is the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper.

I have been pleasantly surprised recently to have two different friends express to me that they think there is more to the Lord’s Supper than the symbols of Christ’s body and blood, and the remembrance of his death. They aren’t sure how to put it, but they feel that our participation involves more than normal faith plus a symbolic act commanded by God. On both occasions I have been able to say, “well, there is Calvin’s view,” knowing vaguely that Calvin affirmed the real presence of Christ in the supper while denying that Christ is joined or identified with the bread and wine. This week I happened upon Calvin’s own argument while researching something else, and found the main points more clear than I expected. So, I thought it would be beneficial to offer this brief exposition.

Calvin’s doctrine contains three main points. First, the Lord’s Supper is something given by God to his people to confirm and sustain their faith. The words of Christ, “this is my body, given for you,” mean more than that the bread symbolizes his body. The bread is not just a reminder that Christ gave his body for us, it is also itself given to us in order that we can experience receiving Christ. Christ’s atoning death sets us right before God, and the bread and wine symbolize his body and blood that were sacrificed, but the bread and wine also allow us to “feel within ourselves the efficacy of that one sacrifice.” (Institutes 4.17.1) God gave the supper to us to be a source of assurance:

The body which was once offered for our salvation we are enjoined to take and eat, that, while we see ourselves made partakers of it, we may safely conclude that the virtue of that death will be efficacious in us. (4.17.1)

I suspect that to the critical evangelical thinker, it may sound as though Calvin is telling us to put our trust in the sacrament rather than Christ himself. I would suggest that just the reverse is the case. Calvin recognizes that true faith requires, in addition to recognizing truths about God, recognizing his active relationship to the world. Calvin understands Christ’s words of institution of the supper to be a promise that God works specifically through it. He invites us to take the whole experience of eating the supper as an experience given directly by God.

The second point flows from the first. Christ is really present in the supper. He is not to be identified with or located in the symbols, bread and wine. Nevertheless, he is present. Calvin himself struggles to express this, describing it as “a mystery which I feel, and therefore freely confess that I am unable to comprehend with my mind.” (4.17.7) Again, he says,

as to the mode, I will not be ashamed to confess that it is too high a mystery either for my mind to comprehend or my words to express; and to speak more plainly, I rather feel than understand it. (4.17.32)

Calvin does insist, however, that Christ is present through the Holy Spirit. He rejects the Roman Catholic and Lutheran views for doing violence to the incarnation and ascension, for those teachings “draw him down from heaven” (4.17.31) to make him present bodily in the symbols. Those views, furthermore, “leave nothing for the secret operation of the Spirit.” (4.17.31) So Calvin gives the Holy Spirit a definite, though ineffable, role. Through the Spirit Christ “raises us to himself.” (4.17.31)

The third point again flows out of the second. In the Lord’s Supper, we have communion with the body and blood of Christ, that is, with his incarnate humanity. His resurrected body remains ascended in heaven, but we are spiritually raised to experience his bodily presence in the supper. We experience something of what the Apostle John describes:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched… (1 John 1:1)

The uniqueness of Christianity lies in the incarnation, that God became man and dwelt among us. In the Lord’s Supper, this great fact becomes more than a memory because it is made real for every believer. For Calvin this is crucial because faith must be more than “simple knowledge.” As he puts it,

For as it is not the sight but the eating of bread that gives nourishment to the body, so the soul must partake of Christ truly and thoroughly, that by his energy it may grow up into spiritual life. (4.17.5)

This hearkens back to the first point, that the experience of eating the supper is something given by God. The real effects of eating and drinking bread and wine are to help us comprehend our dependence on Christ. But in the final analysis this is only because in Christ God took on human flesh. He invites us to communion with his bodily presence so that we will live out our faith in bodily life. Because God is incarnate, we draw closest to him not in mere meditation or introspection, but in reflective taking of the Lord’s Supper.

So there are the main points: the supper is “given for you,” in it Christ is really present, and in it we have communion with the incarnate Christ. These three points are interrelated and inseparable, but I think it helpful to consider them in turn. Overall, Calvin’s emphasis on the experience of God’s presence stands out. We are to “feel the efficacy” of what Christ has done for us and to find assurance in that experience. Calvin is perhaps more aware than many modern evangelicals of the close relationship between emotion, experience and faith; of the difference between mere belief and living by faith. A friend once commented to me that he sometimes wished he could just get a hug from God. I wish I had been able to say at the time, that the Lord’s Supper is where God gives himself to us in that way.