Real Presence and the Theologies That Split Over It

What happens to the bread and wine has divided Christians more sharply than almost any other question. The Catholic Church teaches transubstantiation, the term fixed at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and defined against the Reformers at the Council of Trent: the substance of bread and wine becomes the substance of Christ while the outward appearances remain. The Eastern Orthodox affirm a real change without binding it to that scholastic vocabulary. At the Reformation the accounts multiplied: Luther held to a real presence in, with, and under the elements; Calvin taught a spiritual presence truly received by faith; Zwingli read the rite as a memorial. Sixteenth-century England fought and, in some cases, burned people over the difference.

The frequency question also resurfaced dramatically in the modern era. Centuries after Lateran IV's minimum annual requirement, ordinary Catholic practice still generally involved receiving communion only a few times a year, until Pope Pius X, in a series of decrees beginning in 1905, actively encouraged frequent and even daily communion for the laity and lowered the age of first communion for children, reversing a long-standing pattern of comparative rarity and restoring something closer to the frequency of the earliest centuries; a similar twentieth-century liturgical movement toward more frequent lay communion took hold, on somewhat different theological grounds, across several Protestant traditions as well. That one meal-rite can carry such incompatible theologies while its outward form and even its frequency of reception have shifted so much across history is itself a central fact of its story.