Communing with Christ in the Supper

Recently, a video of Francis Chan surfaced in which he tries to explain what he now believes about the real physical presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. Without wishing to dissect the many erroneous arguments Chan made about the unity of the visible Church throughout the first fifteen hundred years of Church history and the role of preaching in the early Church, I do wish to make a few observations about his misplaced statements about how the Supper was viewed throughout Church history–and especially by a few of the leading sixteenth century Protestant and Reformed theologians.

Chan insists that the Church unanimously accepted the idea that the bread and the wine become the real physical body and blood of Jesus. He says, “for the first fifteen hundred years of church history everyone saw it as the literal body and blood of Christ.” But this fails to understand how the theory of transubstantiation was first formulated in the ninth century by Paschasius Radbertus, a Benedictine abbott, and how it was later adopted as dogma at the Fourth Lateran council in 1215. In his article “The Meal that Divides,” Keith Mathison gives a helpful survey of the development of Radbertus’ doctrine of transubstantiation, and an explanation of the controversy between Radbertus and Ratramnus over the presence of Christ in the Supper in the ninth and tenth centuries.

Chan then blames the Protestant Reformation for divisions that exist in the church—largely with respect to the Lord’s Supper. He says, “it wasn’t ’til five hundred years ago that someone popularized a thought that it’s just a symbol.” Of course, this is a failure to understand the contention between Luther and Zwingli, as well as the distinctions between the view of Calvin and the members of the Westminster Assembly. Read More

Also See:
Is Francis Chan Right about the Lord’s Supper?

I found Francis Chan's video full of oversimplifications, inaccuracies, and omissions. I am posting links to these two articles because they address a number of the erroneous arguments that Chan makes in the video.