Week #3 - What Happens to the Bread?: Transubstantiation, Consubstantiation, and Symbolism
Blog Series Intention Recap
At the Table: Understanding Communion from Passover to the Church
This Fifth Thursday series slows readers down at a table they think they already understand. Communion is one of the most practiced and least examined acts in the Church. Familiarity has made it efficient—but often shallow. This series invites us to recover depth, context, and meaning.
This series is not written to win arguments, flatten mystery, or introduce novelty. It is written to help believers come to the table with understanding, humility, and gratitude—recognizing that every time we eat the bread and drink the cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.
This page is a post in the series “At the Table.” Click here to see the rest of the posts.
Let’s jump into Week #3:
“What Happens to the Bread?”…
Ask a Catholic, a Lutheran, a Presbyterian, and a Baptist what happens at communion, and you will hear four different answers, offered by people who love the same Messiah, Yeshua (Jesus), and often the same apostle Paul. It is tempting to treat those answers as a scoreboard. This post does something different. Week 2 argued that Yeshua’s words are best heard first within their Jewish, Passover, and biblical setting. Week 3 asks the historical question: how did the Church move from one upper room to centuries of debate? The goal is not to decide who is wrong. It is to understand how we got here, to describe each view in words its own members would recognize, and to let Scripture keep the last word.
Why it Matters:
Christians who love the same Messiah answer “What happens to the bread?” differently, and the reasons are historical as well as biblical.
The New Testament gives us words like remembrance, proclamation, and fellowship. The scholastic vocabulary of “substance” came centuries later.
Each major view developed, at least in part, from an attempt to safeguard something its adherents understood Scripture to teach, which is why charity is not optional.
Hebrews’ “once for all” language shapes the question of sacrifice, and Catholic teaching itself says the Mass is not a new sacrifice, so the real question is what “making present” means.
Go Deeper:
Where Everyone Starts
Every tradition can begin with Paul:
“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 Corinthians 10:16–17, ESV)
The Greek word behind “participation” is koinōnia, meaning sharing or fellowship. None of the major Christian traditions considered here treats this meal as empty. The disagreement is about how the Messiah is present, what the elements are, and what believers receive at the table, not about whether the table matters. (Week 4 returns to what this fellowship does in the life of the church.)
The Early Church: Strong Words, Later Categories
Ignatius of Antioch, writing around AD 110, could call the Eucharist the flesh of the Savior. Justin Martyr, in the mid-second century, said believers do not receive it as common bread or common drink. Yet Tertullian and Augustine could also speak of the bread as a “figure” or “sign” of the body.
These writers leave us something less tidy than our later denominational categories. They could speak strongly about receiving the Messiah’s body and blood while also using the language of signs and figures. For them, “symbol” and “reality” were not necessarily opposites in the way later debates sometimes made them. What we do not yet find is the later scholastic explanation of how the Messiah is present through a change of substance. Their emphasis often falls instead on thanksgiving (the word Eucharist means “thanksgiving”), sharing, unity, and the holiness of the meal.
The Didache, one of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament, prays that as the broken bread was scattered on the hills and gathered into one, so the church would be gathered into God’s kingdom.
That prayer also reminds us that the earliest Christians did not come to the table looking only backward. The table carried a future hope: God’s scattered people gathered into His kingdom. We will return to that expectation in Week 5.
So how did one table produce so many explanations?
When the Question Changed
The question of how came into sharper focus in the ninth century, when Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus debated whether the bread is the same body born of Mary or a mystery that points to it. Over the following centuries, the Church looked for precise vocabulary.
By the early thirteenth century, the Western Church was already using the language of transubstantiation. The Fourth Lateran Council used the term in 1215. Later in that century, Thomas Aquinas gave the doctrine its classic scholastic explanation using Aristotelian categories of substance and accidents. Substance describes what a thing is; accidents describe its observable characteristics, such as appearance, taste, and texture. Aquinas argued that at consecration the substance of the bread and wine becomes the body and blood of the Messiah while their appearances remain. The Council of Trent reaffirmed and defined transubstantiation in 1551, during the Reformation.
Notice the order. The doctrine came before Aquinas’s famous philosophical explanation of it. That is a useful check against an overly easy story in which Greek philosophy simply created transubstantiation. Aristotle’s works were being recovered in the Latin West during these same centuries, and they shaped the language in which the doctrine was explained.
To be fair to the Catholic tradition, the doctrine sought to affirm the reality of the Messiah’s presence while avoiding both a crude physical understanding and a merely symbolic one. Catholic teaching distinguishes this change from an ordinary physical transformation: the appearances of bread and wine remain while their underlying reality is said to change.
And notice how late the precise vocabulary is. Nearly twelve centuries separate the Upper Room from Lateran IV’s use of the term transubstantiated. That does not mean Christians spent those centuries treating the bread and cup as bare symbols. Far from it. Christians used remarkably strong language about the table long before transubstantiation was formally defined. The important distinction is that the practice and theological conviction came before the precise philosophical explanation.
The Reformation: Same Question, Different Answers
Martin Luther insisted that “This is my body” be taken at face value. But in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520) he rejected transubstantiation as an imposition of Aristotle on Scripture. In Lutheran teaching the bread and wine remain bread and wine, while the Messiah’s true body and blood are sacramentally present and received with them. Lutherans generally reject the label “consubstantiation,” preferring to speak of sacramental union, since “consubstantiation” suggests a blending of substances they never taught.
Huldrych Zwingli read “is” as “signifies” and understood the Supper mainly as commemoration. At the Marburg Colloquy in 1529, Luther and Zwingli agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles and parted over this one. The Reformation was divided at the table.
John Calvin offered a distinct Reformed account. The Supper is not a bare memorial, and it is not a physical presence. Believers truly feed on the Messiah by the Holy Spirit, who lifts our hearts to Him in heaven. Reformed confessions speak of receiving Him “really and indeed,” but spiritually, not carnally.
Baptist and many Evangelical churches often hold a memorial view and call communion an ordinance. “Symbolic” need not mean “empty” there. It means obedience, remembrance, and public proclamation.
| Tradition | What happens? | Central concern |
|---|---|---|
| Roman Catholic | The substance of bread and wine becomes the Messiah’s body and blood while their appearances remain | The true, real presence of the Messiah |
| Lutheran | Bread and wine remain; the Messiah’s body and blood are truly received sacramentally | His promise: “This is my body” |
| Reformed | Bread and wine remain; believers truly commune with the ascended Messiah through the Spirit | Real spiritual communion with the Messiah |
| Baptist / Evangelical | Bread and cup remain signs | Remembrance, proclamation, obedience |
Same bread. Same cup. Same words of Yeshua. Very different explanations of what is happening at the table.
Eastern Orthodox Christians, not covered here at length, likewise affirm a real change of the bread and wine into the Messiah’s body and blood while generally placing greater emphasis on mystery than on defining precisely how that change occurs.
The Hard Question: What About Sacrifice?
But the differences involve more than what happens to bread and wine. For Protestants especially, the sharpest question concerns sacrifice. Hebrews says the Messiah has appeared “once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Hebrews 9:26, ESV). It contrasts Him with priests who stand daily offering the same sacrifices:
“But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God” (Hebrews 10:12, ESV)
“For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.” (Hebrews 10:14, ESV)
Catholic teaching does not say the Mass is a new sacrifice. It says the sacrifice of the cross and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are one and the same sacrifice, differing in the manner of offering, and that the Mass makes the one offering of Calvary present. It holds that this fits Hebrews because the Mass shares in that one offering and does not add to it. Protestants generally reject the idea that the Supper makes the Messiah’s sacrifice present in the Catholic sacrificial sense. They point instead to Hebrews’ emphasis that His offering for sin was completed once for all, and to the contrast between priests who keep standing and repeating and a Messiah who sat down because the work is finished.
This series finds Hebrews’ emphasis on the finished work hard to miss. But the goal is to describe the other view well enough that a Catholic friend would say, “Yes, that is what I believe.”
How does this help me understand the concept of “At The Table”?
Why the Church Still Disagrees
None of these traditions invented communion to be difficult. Each developed, at least in part, from an attempt to safeguard something it understood Scripture to teach. Catholic and Lutheran teaching sought to guard the conviction that the table is no empty ceremony. Reformed teaching sought to guard real communion with the ascended Messiah. Memorial traditions sought to guard the finished, once-for-all sufficiency of the cross. Whether each resulting doctrine succeeded is part of the debate we have inherited.
Coming to the Table with Clarity
Understanding this history should make us slower to caricature one another and quicker to return to Scripture.
Before asking what another tradition gets wrong, ask what it is trying to protect. Before defending the label you inherited, ask whether you can explain it from the text. And before importing centuries of Christian debate into the Upper Room, remember where the table began.
Transubstantiation, sacramental union, spiritual presence, and memorialism are all later attempts to explain a meal Yeshua first shared with Jewish disciples at Passover.
Israel’s story still sits underneath the table.
We need the Exodus to understand redemption. We need Passover to understand the meal. We need the covenants to understand the cup. And we need Israel’s Messiah to understand why the bread was broken.
So take time to read Exodus 12, Luke 22, Hebrews 9–10, and 1 Corinthians 10–11 together. As you read, resist the temptation to begin with a denominational label. Begin with the biblical story. Notice how Israel’s Exodus, Passover, covenants, and Messiah give the table its vocabulary before later Christians begin explaining what happens to the bread.
Communion was given for the Church to gather around, not to fight over.
And whatever else we believe happens to the bread, we should never forget the story that brought us to the table in the first place.
