Transubstantiation

Taking the Lord at his word

Transubstantiation begins from taking the Lord's words at their plainest:

While they were eating, Jesus took bread, spoke a blessing and broke it, and gave it to the disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is My body.”

Matthew 26:26

Catholics note that Jesus did not say the bread stood for his body, but that it was his body. They read "My flesh is real food, and My blood is real drink" (John 6:55) in the same way, and see Paul's warning that whoever eats unworthily "will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord" (1 Corinthians 11:27) as a witness to a real presence.

The word comes from the Latin transsubstantiatio, a change of substance. It borrows the philosophical distinction between a thing's substance (what it is) and its accidents (what the senses perceive: colour, taste, shape). After the consecration the appearances of bread and wine remain, but what is there is no longer bread and wine but the body and blood of Christ. For this reason Catholics adore the consecrated host and reserve it in the tabernacle.

How the church came to say it

The early church spoke boldly of the bread and cup as Christ's body and blood. Ambrose taught in the late fourth century: "This bread before the sacramentary words, is the bread in common use; after consecration it is made of bread Christ’s flesh" Ambrose. How the change should be explained was long unsettled, and it was argued over in the West in the ninth and eleventh centuries. In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council spoke of the bread and wine as ‘transubstantiated’ by divine power, and in the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas explained the change by the distinction of substance and accidents Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 75.

Answering the Reformers, the Council of Trent (1551) declared that by the consecration the whole substance of the bread becomes the substance of Christ's body, and the whole substance of the wine the substance of his blood, a change "suitably and properly called Transubstantiation". It taught that Christ is present in the sacrament, body and blood, soul and divinity, truly, really and substantially Council of Trent, Decree on the Eucharist.

Where the traditions differ

The Orthodox also confess that the bread and wine truly become Christ's body and blood, but rather than define the manner in philosophical terms they leave it a mystery, and they give great weight to the prayer calling down the Holy Spirit (the epiclesis). Some seventeenth-century Orthodox documents did use an equivalent word.

The Reformation churches did not accept transubstantiation. Luther confessed the real presence of Christ's body and blood but held that the bread remains bread (consubstantiation); the Reformed, holding that Christ's body is in heaven, confessed a spiritual presence by the Spirit. Paul still speaks of eating "this bread" after the blessing (1 Corinthians 11:26), and the Heidelberg Catechism reasons from baptism:

as the water in Baptism is not changed into the blood of Christ, nor becomes the washing away of sins itself, being only the divine token and assurance thereof, so also in the Lord's Supper the sacred bread does not become the body of Christ itself

Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 78

The Thirty-Nine Articles likewise say that transubstantiation "cannot be proved by holy Writ" and "overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament" Thirty-Nine Articles, art. 28. Catholics answer, with Ambrose, that the word which made things out of nothing can surely change what already is, and that the doctrine simply receives Christ's word in faith. Both sides agree that the Supper is the Lord's own holy meal, at whose heart is Christ who gave himself on the cross. The traditions' views are set side by side under the Lord’s Supper; see also How do Catholics and Protestants differ?