Four Views on the Lord’s Supper: The Symbolic View

“IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME”

Walk into a typical Protestant church building in the English-speaking world, and it is not unlikely that you will find a table engraved with these words of our Savior taken from Luke 22:19 (and quoted by the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:24). They come from the slightly longer statement, “Do this in remembrance of Me,” otherwise known as the “words of institution” for the Church’s regular observance of the Lord’s Supper.

By the statement above, Christ instituted the Lord’s Supper as one of two sacraments to be observed in His Church until He returns. In other words, this is an important statement. As such, it occupies a central place in shaping our understanding of the nature of the sacrament (and sacraments in general).

It is also prone to misunderstanding.

Standing on its own, this statement might be read so as to suggest that the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is entirely symbolic in nature. Whereas other views of the Lord’s Supper affirm the real presence of Christ in one sense or another, what we are calling here the symbolic view[1] of the Lord’s Supper defines the sacrament as only a memorial or commemoration of Christ’s sin-atoning death for the salvation of His people.

Indeed, the Lord’s Supper does correspond to the Passover, or Feast of Unleavened Bread, which was “a memorial” for God’s Old Covenant people to celebrate “throughout [their] generations” (Exod. 12:14). In eating the bread and drinking the wine, we do commemorate Christ’s death until He comes again to judge the living and the dead. The commemoration is both celebratory and instructional for us and for our children. As a memorial of what Christ did on our behalf, it is formative and strengthening to our faith. But is that all that the Lord’s Supper is as Christ’s appointed sacramental meal for the Church?

This view is widely held today among Anabaptists, Baptists, and Pentecostals. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Baptist Faith and Message 2000 includes this description of the sacrament: “The Lord’s Supper is a symbolic act of obedience whereby members of the church, through partaking of the bread and the fruit of the vine, memorialize the death of the Redeemer and anticipate His second coming.”[2] Likewise, the 1527 Anabaptist Schleitheim Confession of Faith opens its teaching on the Lord’s Supper with the words, “All those who wish to break one bread in remembrance of the broken body of Christ.”[3]

In the past, it enjoyed general popularity with both the Arminian Remonstrants and anti-Trinitarian Socinians during the time of the Reformation. The Socinian Racovian Catechism (originally published in Poland in 1605) contends that the “rite of breaking bread” is to be done after Christ’s institution “with the view of commemorating him, or of showing forth his death.”[4] But this restricted definition of the Lord’s Supper as symbolic—imposed both by sincere Christians and by heretics—is woefully incomplete.

While it is true that the Lord’s Supper is a memorial meal, it is much more than that. To take Christ’s statement—“do this in remembrance of Me”—out of its greater biblical and doctrinal context is to distort the text into a pretext for an anemic understanding of the Supper.

The Lord’s Supper is a means of divine grace. No mere ceremony, it is a family meal which Christians enjoy together with God in which they feast upon Christ the (Passover) “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). By this meal we feast on Christ’s body and blood as He is spiritually present in the Supper and received through faith. This is what Christ meant when He said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves” (John 6:53). By this ordinary means of divine grace, believers are spiritually nourished, strengthened, and assured in their earthly pilgrimage to the great wedding supper of the Lamb.

To the memorialist, we ask with the Apostle, “Is not the cup of blessing which we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ? Is not the bread which we break a sharing in the body of Christ?” (1 Cor. 10:16). Thus, the stakes are high. As Paul wrote to the Church in Corinth, “But a man must examine himself, and in so doing he is to eat the bread and drink of the cup. For he who eats and drinks, eats and drinks judgment to himself if he does not judge the body rightly” (1 Cor. 11:28-29).

In contrast to the memorialist confessions, catechisms, and statements of faith produced since the Reformation, we do well to present the following paragraph from the Westminster Confession of Faith:

“Worthy receivers, outwardly partaking of the visible elements, in this sacrament, do then also, inwardly by faith, really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually, receive, and feed upon, Christ crucified, and all benefits of his death: the body and blood of Christ being then, not corporally or carnally, in, with, or under the bread and wine; yet, as really, but spiritually, present to the faith of believers in that ordinance, as the elements themselves are to their outward senses” (WCF 29.7).

Zachary Groff (MDiv, Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary) is Pastor of Antioch Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Woodruff, SC, and he serves as Managing Editor of The Confessional Journal and as Editor-in-Chief of the Presbyterian Polity website.