The Myth of Consubstantiation

In 2009 I purchased a copy of Nathan Feldman’s Pocket Dictionary of Church History—overall, an impressive work that had an uncanny ability to cover a broad range of material to define terms concisely and accurately. More recently I purchased Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Exposing Myths about Christianity, which attempts to defend Christianity from its detractors without taking any one particular side in intramural discussions but offering arguments for all sides.

Both works, however, failed miserably in their discussion of the Lutheran doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. Feldman writes under the entry entitled “consubstantiation”: “Martin Luther developed the Eucharistic doctrine known as consubstantiation, which in time became closely identified with Lutheranism….Thus, for Luther there is a ‘real physical presence’ of Christ in, under, and around the Communion elements, but the bread and wine do not change in substance as in the Roman Catholic view of transubstantiation.” Russell makes the same error (p. 297): “Luther condemned transubstantiation and substituted the idea of ‘consubstantiation,’ in which the consecrated bread and wine are both bread and wine and the body and blood of Christ. Both interpretations depend on Aristotelian philosophy, so neither is a necessary way of defining how Christ is present.”

There are three major errors involved. The first is that “consubstantiation” is the term used to define the Lutheran doctrine. I have been a Lutheran for nearly half a century and that of the more confessionally attuned variety. (I’m a Missouri Synod Lutheran.) The term was never used in my confirmation instruction nor was it to be found in the Synodical Catechism, either of 1943 or 1986. In all my seminary education I may have heard the term once or twice, and then it was the sainted Dr. Robert Preus uttering the term with contempt and saying, “How can non-Lutherans say that we believe in consubstantiation? Don’t they read anything?”

Perhaps this was just an oddity of my experience. But if you look at the great Lutheran treatises on the Lord’s Supper written in the twentieth century, you would again and again notice the absence of the term. John Stephenson’s book on the Lord’s Supper in the Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics series fails to mention it. So too does Hermann Sasse’s work, This is My Body, a serious examination of Luther’s thoughts on the sacrament. You will not find the term in Werner Elert’s The Structure of Lutheranism or Edmund Schlink’s Theology of the Lutheran Confessions, and other such surveys of Lutheran doctrine. Nor will you find it mentioned in Lutheran dogmatics (such as Francis Pieper’s Christian Dogmatics) or, if it does merit mention in passing, it is stated with disapproval. If consubstantiation is Lutheran doctrine, Lutherans have been keeping it a good secret.

Is the problem that modern Lutherans don’t know their history? Could it be that the term was used by earlier Lutheran dogmaticians and has since died in obscurity? An examination of Philip Melanchthon’s Loci or Martin Chemnitz’s Loci—two early Lutheran dogmatics—will prove that idea wrong. Nor will you find John Gerhard, the greatest Lutheran dogmatician of the age of orthodoxy, giving his imprimatur to the term. In fact, he heartily disapproves of it in his Harmony of the Gospels (chapter 171, leaf 784):

Quando veram, realem et substantialem corporis (et sanguinis) Christi praesentiam nos credere profitemur, nequaquam vel impanationem, vel incorporationem, vel consubstantiationem, vel physicam inclusionem, vel localem praesentiam, vel delitescentiam corpusculi sub pane, vel essentialem panis in corpus conversionem, vel durabilem corporis ad panem extra usum coenae affixionem, vel personalem panis et corporis unionem statuimus. (Emphasis in original)

When we confess that we believe in the true, real, and substantial presence of the body (and blood) of Christ, in no way do we imagine either an impanation or consubstantiation or a physical confinement or a local presence or the hiding of a particle underneath the bread or the conversion of the essence of the bread into the body or the permanent joining of the body to the bread outside the use of the supper or a personal union of the bread and the body. (My translation)

If any of the Lutheran dogmaticians of the seventeenth century were to use such quasi-Aristotelian terminology as consubstantiation, it would have been John Gerhard. But he explicitly rejects that term.

Well, then, neither modern Lutheranism nor the golden age of Lutheran orthodoxy used that term for their position. But surely this must be the doctrine taught by the Lutheran confessions (the Book of Concord), right? Again, you will not even find the term mentioned, although the Formula of Concord does reject some of the same things Gerhard does (such as impanation and local presence) that are frequently equated with consubstantiation. If we can find no other source, must we conclude that Luther is the author of consubstantiation? Again you can look at all of Luther’s works—and his substantial sacramental writings have all been translated into English—and you will find that there are only two mentions of consubstantiation in the American Edition of Luther’s Works, once in a footnote (footnote 152 on volume 40, page 196) and once in an introduction (for volume 37), and in each instance merely to disabuse the reader of the notion that Luther believed in consubstantiation.

Serious non-Lutheran scholars also concur that Lutherans do not believe in consubstantiation. Richard A. Muller, himself a Reformed theologian and therefore without a Lutheran ax to grind, nevertheless writes these words about consubstantiation in his Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms (pp. 80-81):

According to the theory of consubstantiation, the body and blood of Christ become substantially present together with the substance of the bread and wine, when the elements are consecrated. This theory is frequently confused with the Lutheran doctrine of real presence. Consubstantio indicates the presence of Christ’s body according to a unique sacramental mode of presence that is proper to Christ’s body as such, and is therefore a local presence (praesentia localis, q.v.); the Lutheran view, however, argues a real, but illocal presence of Christ’s body and blood that is grounded in the omnipresence of Christ’s person, and therefore a supernatural and sacramental, rather than a local, union with the invisible elements of the sacrament….Consubstantio implies only a presence and not a union of Christ and the sacramental elements; it was taught as a possibility by Duns Scotus, John of Jandun, and William of Occam.

Muller not only points out that the nomen (name) of consubstantiation does not apply to Lutherans (the real term for the Lutheran doctrine is “the real presence”), but neither does the res (substance). And here we come to the second misunderstanding. Feldman states that the Lutheran view is that “there is a ‘real physical presence’ of Christ in, under, and around the Communion elements.” Such a definition would fit the view held by Scotus and company, but it ill fits the view of Lutherans, who do not believe in a local or “physical” presence. Moreover, while a person may believe in either consubstantiation or transubstantiation without believing in the sacramental union, the sacramental union is at the heart of the Lutheran view of the matter.

The third error (one made by Russell) is that Luther was beholden to Aristotelian philosophy in this matter. Nothing could be further from the truth. Already at the time of the Heidelberg Disputations (1518), Luther had rejected the use of philosophy in defining theology and stated that he was especially distrustful of Aristotelian metaphysics.

Well, if consubstantiation is not a Lutheran term and does not express the Lutheran doctrine, why do so many non-Lutheran books say that it is the Lutheran view? It began with John Calvin’s 1553 broadside against Lutheranism in which he accused the Lutherans of believing in consubstantiation. It was meant to be a polemical term, and in the years that followed it would often be accompanied by others such as “impanation,” “Capernaitic eating,” “artolatry,” and the like. But calling consubstantiation “the Lutheran view of the Lord’s supper” is as accurate as defining Pelagianism as “the Arminian view of salvation” or fatalism as “the Calvinist worldview.” While polemicists may speak in that manner, it is improper for those claiming to be impartial observers to describe a movement by using its enemy’s slurs and distortions.

The real doctrine that Lutherans teach about the Lord’s Supper can be described under three terms: sacramental union, oral eating, and eating of the ungodly. We speak of a sacramental union; the bread and wine are united with the body and blood of Christ, as Paul clearly teaches in 1 Cor. 10:16 and as our Lord’s words in instituting the sacrament state (“This is my body…This is the new testament in my blood”). The exact mode in which Christ can effect this sacramental union is never stated in Lutheran theology. We know that He is omnipotent and can be anywhere and everywhere He wants to be. He has more modes of presence than we can name or understand. (See Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration 102-103.) We also teach that one receives Christ’s body and blood through the eating of the bread and wine, not through ascending to heaven in a mystical experience. Because the body and blood of Christ come through the bread and wine, all who commune receive the body and blood of Christ, not just those who do so in faith. Thus, it is quite possible for the ungodly to eat and drink damnation upon themselves by receiving Christ’s body and blood without discernment, as Paul clearly warns in 1 Corinthians 11:27-30.

This is the Lutheran view in a nutshell. Don’t expect American evangelicals to grasp it—let alone explain it accurately—anytime soon.

Why We Need the Longer Creeds

The reader of my last two posts is probably aware that I am dwelling on a particular theme: what value is there in the oft derided “institutional church”? So far we have seen that the church will invariably develop an institutional side to it. I have also argued that creeds and confessions are an integral part of the Christian church, for believers in Christ and their teachers alike. Those who believe in a “creedless Christianity” often end up with a formula that often reads like a creed. People may try to escape creeds and confessions, but cannot.

Perhaps, though, the problem isn’t with having creeds and confessions, but rather insisting on particular creeds. Why cannot we all just accept something like the Apostles’ Creed and be done with it? Why do we Lutherans insist on our pastors confessing all the confessions that make up the Book of Concord rather than a much shorter creed? After all, if creeds are meant to be brief summaries of the Christian faith, the Book of Concord does not have economy of words. And even if one acknowledges the right of Lutherans to confess something like the confessions in the Book of Concord, cannot we acknowledge various other confessions used by other churches—such as the Second Helvetic Confession or the Westminster Confession or the Thirty-Nine Articles or the New Hampshire Baptist Confession—as equally orthodox, thereby meriting their adherents a right to the pulpits and altars of Lutheran churches?

First of all, we should not be intimidated by the size of the Book of Concord. At first glance, it looks as if it must have hundreds of doctrines for people to believe in. But there are only 21 doctrinal topics (and 7 matters of practice) that are addressed in the Augsburg Confession. These same topics are repeated in the Apology. Much of what the Smalcald Articles has to say can be found in the Augsburg Confession, and the Formula of Concord (the most detailed of the confessions) addressed a dozen topics that had been handled at least in a cursory fashion in earlier confessions. Thus, the number of topics to be found in the Lutheran confessions is not that large. Furthermore, if you were to print only the doctrinal statements and not the arguments for them (whether exegesis of biblical passages or appeals to history and the church fathers or refutations of opponents’ arguments), you would end up with something the size of a smallish monograph. (Of course, even though Lutherans pledge themselves only to the doctrinal content of the Book of Concord, we find it helpful to read the exegesis and argumentation for particular points of doctrine. Serious Lutherans may disagree with the exegesis of a particular passage or two, but no one who thinks that all of the exegesis in the confessions is rot and nonsense is likely to be a serious Lutheran.)

Moreover, you would find that the answers given on one topic cohere with the answers given on another. It is difficult to believe in the pervasive power of original sin, for example, and still insist that a believer can merit their salvation by their own works. It is not surprising, then, to see that Lutherans believe both that original sin retains its power in believers’ lives and that we are justified solely by grace through faith, while Rome believes that original sin is abolished by baptism and that believers can through grace attain perfection—and indeed must do so before entering heaven. Not surprisingly, Rome sees purgatory as a necessary means to get the less than perfect into heaven, while Lutherans see it as a needless idea and one that obscures salvation through faith in Christ. The answers given by each confession on original sin, justification, and purgatory line up. Thus, it would be difficult to adopt a Roman view of purgatory and original sin, but a Lutheran view of justification (or vice versa).

That also explains why we Lutherans do not accept other confessions of faith (such as those I named in the second paragraph) as equally legitimate as our own. To be sure, there are many commonalities, insofar as they all acknowledge the Trinity and the deity of Christ. Some acknowledge a similar position on justification. But one finds a serious disagreement between the Lutheran Confessions on the one hand and those of the Reformed, Arminians, and Baptists on the other hand over several key topics: the nature and use of the sacraments; baptism; the Lord’s Supper; the perfection that can be attained in the Christian life; the scope of free will; eternal predestination and the use of the doctrine of election; and the relationship of the two natures in Christ, to name a few. It isn’t merely that we disagree on a few topics, but that each confessional stance has its own overall point of view that gives rise to the disagreements on individual topics, much as Lutherans and Roman Catholics have different presuppositions that lead to their divergent views on original sin, justification, and purgatory.

We rejoice to the extent that the various major confessions—Roman, Eastern, Lutheran, Reformed, Arminian, Baptist, and Pentecostal—confess the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and other core Christian doctrines. But there are still major differences in these confessions over important topics—topics that Lutherans see as part of essential Christian doctrine. For example, we Lutherans wouldn’t like to see anyone discourage Christians by teaching them that they can achieve perfection while still here on earth. But Arminians wouldn’t like to see anyone discourage Christians by teaching them that they cannot achieve perfection while still here on earth. Lutherans find perfectionism to be a most destructive and damnable teaching, while Arminians find it to be a most comforting and encouraging teaching. To hear both messages preached from the same pulpit would confuse the ordinary Christian in the pew, especially since both Lutherans and Arminians insist that this is an important teaching, one that cannot be ignored or swept under the rug.

Our confessions remind us then that we Christians still have unfinished business. We are not yet in agreement even on important and fundamental questions, but must still work to bring about unity in teaching. The Reformation raised several questions on crucial topics, but no one answer was given by all Christians. Thus, our different confessions remind us that we can neither ignore these matters nor find agreement on them as of yet. Our divergent confessions underscore the doctrinal divisions that underlie the ecclesiastical divisions. If we want to heal the latter, we will have to deal seriously with the former. That is why ignoring later confessions and opting for only the Apostles’ Creed won’t work today.

Wauwawhat? (Part Three)

The Wauwatosa theologians not only revived biblical studies among confessional Lutherans, they also warned of the forms legalism could take in Lutheran circles. I will devote my next blog (the final one in the series) to paying final tribute to J.P. Köhler by looking in detail at an article he wrote against legalism and commenting on its continued relevance. But in today's blog I will talk about legalism inside and outside of Wauwatosa. As Köhler stated so well, legalism consists of deriving the power of the Christian life from the law rather than the gospel. Although confessional Lutherans might seem to be immune to legalism because we believe that we are saved by trusting in Christ rather than by doing the works of the law, there is an insidious means by which legalism can creep back into the church: preserving sound doctrine (noble task though it is) substitutes for believing it; in other words, we are tempted to become proud of our work of preserving orthodoxy rather than cherish the teaching God has given us. Moreover, Köhler argues, we can easily fall into legalism by overemphasizing a particular structure or style of organization for the church or by preaching a sanctification empowered by the law rather than the gospel.


Köhler’s words spoke to a confessional Lutheranism of the early 20th century that was often orthodox but had lost its first love (Rev. 2:4). Orthodoxy had become a game of “gotcha” rather than a reveling in the truth that our merciful God had revealed to us. There was also a rather dour attitude towards life in general that revealed itself in all sorts of prohibitions from going to the movies to installing lightning rods on barns. “For them, life was meant to be endured,” quipped one person about people of that generation. The joy of the gospel wasn’t there.

Köhler’s words were welcome, but unfortunately the Wauwatosa theology was not able to escape a legalism of its own. Köhler’s words in “Legalism among Us” are a candid but loving admonition to the Wisconsin and Missouri Synods. However, there was a torrent in Wisconsin of the 1920’s of what can only be called legalistic anti-legalistic writings, as writer after writer (from the renowned exegete August Pieper to elementary school teachers) wrote scathing denunciations of the Wisconsin Synod. The Synod had wanted merely to see the prisoners in the Bastille set free, but it got Jacobin terror instead.

Three incidents in particular stand out. Two school teachers denounced their pastor as a false prophet for not condemning what they considered vices. A college faculty and its governing board disagreed over the proper discipline for a couple dozen students. A parish pastor wrote a ham-handed attack on life in the Wisconsin Synod, complaining about everything from confirmation instruction to synod structure. In each instance the advocates of Wauwatosa were on the more rigorist side of the question and operated with little charity towards their opponents.

As a result the era of the Wauwatosa theology came to a formal end. Köhler left the presidency of the seminary in 1930 (and the Wisconsin Synod in 1933) and lived somewhat reclusively for his last twenty years. A handful of congregations left the Wisconsin Synod to form the Protes’tant Conference, unusually punctuated in more than one sense. That conference publishes the journal Faith-Life, which tends to have insightful articles by Köhler, less than useful (and perhaps less than truthful) encomiums to Köhler’s great musical and artistic abilities, and scathing denunciations involving personalities and events long forgotten. When I went through a stack of Faith-Life issues about twenty years, one article in particular stuck in my mind. It described how Köhler had criticized August Pieper out of the blue by saying at a dinner, “Pieper, du bist Pommer!” (“Pieper, you are a Pomeranian!”) This had taken place long before Pieper and Köhler parted company. Now one cannot read very much of Faith-Life without realizing that its writers deem August Pieper to be the Darth Vader of the Wisconsin Synod—the formerly noble knight who went over to the dark side. But there was no explanation as to why Köhler had made the remark, what it meant, and whether it was justified. If the reader didn’t instantly understand and assent, it was proof positive that the reader was hopelessly in error.

This is a negative legacy left by the Wauwatosa theologians, one that mars an otherwise positive inheritance. I would urge that the experience teaches us that those who rail against a particular form of legalism should be wary lest they fall into another form of that same vice.

Wauwawhat? (Part Two)

In my last post I noted that I sympathize with the goals of the Wauwatosa school. It sought to restore the primacy of exegesis even when doing systematic theology. It did not so much seek to overturn the conclusions of Missouri’s systematic theology as to add depth to it by making sure that it was not making use of a facile interpretation of a biblical passage but that it fully understood the context. But even as I praise it, I must say that to some degree that its more recent advocates have done injustice to the state of affairs in which Wauwatosa developed. Ironically I find myself having less trouble with the Wauwatosa theology itself than some of its would-be heirs, just as those of the Wauwatosa school objected less to the 19th century C.F.W. Walther than to his heirs in the early 20th century.


Most discussions of the Wauwatosa theology fail to consider the whole context of education in the early twentieth century. For one thing, the history given in the first volume of Northwestern Publishing House’s collected works of the Wauwatosa school is a little misleading. It correctly chronicles how much time the seminarians at the Missouri Synod’s Saint Louis seminary devoted to mastering the Latin of the Baier-Walther Compendium, but it fails to recognize that most Missouri Synod pastors were not trained there in the synod’s first sixty years or so, but at its practical seminary (which migrated from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Saint Louis to Springfield, Illinois, and would eventually return to Fort Wayne) and its pre-seminary partner schools in Germany. It was only in the early twentieth century that the synod thought it might be better if more of its ministers were given the highly academic training of Saint Louis than the more practical training of Springfield. To accomplish that, though, the Missouri Synod realized that it would have to drop some of its practices (such as the heavy use of Latin in the classroom) that proved too big of an obstacle to all but the best students.

And thus it is easier to understand the reason that the Wauwatosa school declined to copy Missouri’s model of education in its entirety. While the Missouri Synod still retained a more practical route of training for its ministers, the Wisconsin had only one option: six years of Gymnasium (the equivalent of a boarding high school and junior college) followed by seminary. Thus, it made little sense to foster a seminary curriculum that even the larger Missouri Synod found too impractical for most of its pastors and was revising even for its more academically minded students. And yet the histories gloss over this reason for why the Wauwatosa seminary developed the way it did.

In addition, the histories of the Wauwatosa theology seem blissfully ignorant of the larger picture of educational trends in the late nineteenth century. A mere state away from Wauwatosa was Augsburg College, which under the tutelage of Georg Sverdrup and the Lutheran Free Church sought both a more exegetical approach to theology and a broader cultural education than the traditional model provided, enamored as it was with Greco-Roman antiquity. And yet the late Leigh Jordahl in his doctoral dissertation argues that Wauwatosa was one of a kind in breaking from the Latin theological model. (Jordahl, trained in Norwegian-American circles, ought to have known better.) On a more global scale there was an intense debate on the direction education should go. Was academic specialization to be preferred to the teaching of a common curriculum? Should education be founded on practical truth rather than abstract theory? Indeed, was anything that was not in some way practical untrue? Was it possible to speed up learning by presenting abstractions (e.g., by giving entire paradigms of grammatical forms at once) rather than by having students learn more intuitively?

None of this lessens the value of the Wauwatosa theology. But it seems ironic that those who love Wauwatosa’s emphasis on understanding historical context seem to have overlooked some of the historical context of Wauwatosa.