The Moment That Divides the Churches

No consecration is more argued over than the consecration of bread and wine at the eucharist, and the disagreement is not a matter of emphasis but of what churches formally teach happens at that moment. Catholic doctrine, defined precisely at the Council of Trent in response to the Reformation, holds transubstantiation: the entire substance of the bread and wine is converted into the substance of Christ's body and blood, while every appearance, taste and physical property remains that of bread and wine, a philosophical distinction between substance and accident borrowed from Aristotelian categories and given binding doctrinal force. Orthodox churches affirm a comparably real change without committing to that specific philosophical vocabulary, generally preferring to call it a mystery rather than to define its metaphysics as precisely as Trent did.

Lutheran theology teaches a real presence of Christ in, with and under the bread and wine, explicitly rejecting transubstantiation as an unnecessary philosophical addition while still insisting on more than a symbol. Reformed Protestant theology following Calvin holds a spiritual real presence received by faith rather than a physical one, and Zwinglian and much of evangelical Protestantism treats the rite as memorial and symbolic, with no change to the elements at all. These are not differences of style: rejecting or accepting the doctrine of the moment of consecration is precisely the line that has kept these churches from sharing communion with one another for five centuries, which makes this single theological question one of the most practically consequential disputes to survive from the Reformation into the present.