The Glass of Wine in Church

 

The Glass of Wine in Church

A Short Essay on the Eucharist and the Deadliest Doctrine in Christian History

Imagine walking into a cathedral during Mass, holding aloft a simple glass of red wine, and asking the congregation: “Is this the blood of Christ, or does it merely represent the blood of Christ?” In most places today the question would provoke, at worst, an awkward silence or a polite theological debate. Five hundred years ago the same gesture could have gotten you burned at the stake. Over the centuries, that single question (whether the bread and wine of Holy Communion actually become the body and blood of Jesus, or whether they only symbolize them) has been the direct cause of schisms, wars, massacres, and judicial murders whose death toll almost certainly runs into the hundreds of thousands. No other doctrinal dispute in Christian history has been quite so lethal for quite so long.

The Catholic Doctrine: Transubstantiation

The official Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox position, formalized at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and refined at the Council of Trent (1545–1563), is called transubstantiation. After the priest speaks the words of institution (“This is my body…”), the substance (the underlying reality) of the bread and wine is entirely converted into the substance of Christ’s body and blood. What remains are only the “accidents” or appearances: taste, texture, chemical composition, and alcoholic content of wine. To the senses it is still wine; to faith and ontology it is no longer wine at all. It is Jesus Christ, whole and entire, under the humble forms of bread and fermented grape.

This is not presented as a metaphor or a vivid illustration. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1376) quotes Trent: “by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood.” To deny this change is, in traditional Catholic theology, to deny a dogma revealed by God and therefore to place oneself outside the bounds of salvation.

The Reformers’ Counterblast

When Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the Wittenberg door in 1517, the Mass was not even on the list. But within a few years the doctrine of the Eucharist became the fault line on which Western Christendom shattered. Luther rejected transubstantiation as an Aristotelian philosophical imposition on Scripture, but he still insisted on the real, objective presence of Christ “in, with, and under” the bread and wine (later called consubstantiation, though Luther hated the term). Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich went much further: the Lord’s Supper is a memorial meal, a symbolic act of remembrance; “is” in “This is my body” means “signifies.” To Zwingli, the Catholic Mass was nothing less than idolatry, the worship of a piece of bread.

The disagreement was not academic. At the Marburg Colloquy of 1529, Luther and Zwingli met face-to-face to see if the nascent Protestant movement could remain united. They agreed on fourteen and a half articles out of fifteen. On the half-article concerning the Lord’s Supper they could not agree. Luther reportedly took a piece of chalk and wrote on the table in Latin: HOC EST CORPUS MEUM (“This is my body”), underlined it, and said he would yield no further. The breach was permanent.

The Killing Begins

Once the Eucharist became the supreme loyalty test, the deaths started almost immediately.

• In Catholic lands, Protestants who denied transubstantiation were executed for heresy. The Spanish Inquisition alone put several thousand to death, many explicitly for “Lutheran” or “Calvinist” views on the sacrament.
• In Protestant lands, Catholics (and later Anabaptists who held a variety of spiritual or symbolic views) were executed for the opposite error: “idolatrous” belief in the Real Presence. Henry VIII burned John Frith in 1533 largely for Zwinglian sacramental theology; his daughter Mary burned almost three hundred Protestants, many for the same reason but in reverse.
• The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), often remembered as Catholic versus Protestant, was, at its core, a war over who had the right to define the meaning of the Lord’s Supper in any given territory. Modern estimates of the death toll in Central Europe range from four to eight million, a significant portion of the entire population.

Even within Protestantism the knife was turned inward. In Geneva, under Calvin’s consistory, denial of the (Calvinist) Real Spiritual Presence could bring banishment or worse. In Scotland, the Catholic priest John Ogilvie was hanged and quartered in 1615 for saying Mass. In England, after the Restoration, Presbyterians and other “symbolic” Protestants faced fines and imprisonment under laws that still required at least a Lutheran-like view of the sacrament for full civic rights.

The 19th-Century Aftershocks

The violence did not entirely end with the Peace of Westphalia. In 1857 the last person executed in Western Europe purely for sacramental heresy (a Spanish Protestant schoolmaster named Cayetano Ripoll) was garroted in Valencia for teaching that the Mass was not a sacrifice and the host was not literally Christ. As late as 1900, anti-Catholic riots in Italy and Spain sometimes turned deadly over processions carrying the consecrated host.

Why This Question, of All Questions?

Other doctrines (predestination, justification, the papacy, baptism) also divided Christians, yet none produced quite the same paroxysms of violence over so many centuries. Three reasons stand out:

1. Immediacy. The Eucharist is not an abstract doctrine debated in universities; it is reenacted every Sunday in every village church. Every communicant is forced to take a side simply by opening (or refusing to open) his mouth.
2. Idolatry. Both sides framed the dispute in the starkest possible terms: one side was worshipping a piece of bread as God; the other was denying the plain words of Jesus and depriving believers of the objective gift of Christ’s body and blood. There was no middle ground that did not look like treason against God himself.
3. Political utility. Because the Mass was the central public religious act in medieval and early-modern society, control of the altar was control of the public square. Rulers could not tolerate two contradictory definitions of the same ritual existing side by side.

Today

Walk into almost any church in the Western world now and raise your glass of wine with the old question. You will get a spectrum of answers: “Yes, literally,” “Yes, but mysteriously,” “No, but really yes in a spiritual sense,” “No, it is a symbol,” “It is whatever it means to you.” Almost no one will suggest killing you for your answer. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) and its successors slowly established the principle cuius regio, eius religio and eventually the more humane principle of individual conscience.

Yet the scars remain. Drive through central Germany and you can still trace the old confessional borders by the style of roadside crucifixes (three nails for Catholics, four for Lutherans, none at all for Calvinists). And every Easter, when hundreds of millions of Christians gather around an altar or a simple table, they are participating in a ritual whose precise meaning once justified the massacre of entire cities.

So the next time you are in church and the chalice is raised, remember that what looks like an ordinary glass of wine was once the most dangerous object in Europe, an object for which peasants, priests, princes, and theologians alike were willing to kill and to die. The blood of Christ, or merely its representation? Hundreds of thousands of real human beings paid with their actual blood so that we no longer have to give the same answer.