Of the Lord's Supper — Section 2

The Confession Read

In this sacrament, Christ is not offered up to his Father; nor any real sacrifice made at all, for remission of sins of the quick or dead; but only a commemoration of that one offering up of himself, by himself, upon the cross, once for all: and a spiritual oblation of all possible praise unto God, for the same: so that the popish sacrifice of the mass (as they call it) is most abominably injurious to Christ's one, only sacrifice, the alone propitiation for all the sins of his elect.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 29, Section 2

Introduction

Some truths can be spoken in a single word, and when God speaks that word the whole world leans forward to hear it. On a Friday afternoon outside Jerusalem, with the sun darkened and the earth groaning, the Son of God gathered his failing strength and uttered one word that has never stopped sounding: finished. John records it for us: "When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost" (John 19:30). The Greek verb is tetelestai, a word drawn from the marketplace and the counting-house, where it was stamped across settled accounts and discharged debts. It means, in full, "paid in full." It was the word a merchant wrote when a bill had been discharged to the last farthing, the word that closed the books and put the matter beyond dispute. And this is the word the dying Son of God chose as his last great declaration: the account is settled, the debt is gone, the work is done. Here, beloved, is the heartbeat of the gospel, and here also is the sharpest line of division in the church's history. For there stands in the middle of Christendom a table, set with bread and wine, and around that table a solemn question has been asked for five hundred years: does the church, when it gathers at this table, offer Christ again? Rome answers that it does, that in the mass the priest offers to God a true and proper sacrifice, propitiatory for the sins of the living and the dead. The Westminster Divines answer with a severity that still startles every reader of the Confession, that this pretended sacrifice is "most abominably injurious" to the one offering of Christ upon the cross. Between these two answers there is no room for compromise, because between them stands the finishedness of the cross itself. And do not imagine, dear listener, that this is a dispute for scholars in their studies, a quarrel over words that touches no living heart. It is nothing of the sort. Upon this single question hangs the peace of every believing soul, for if the sacrifice of Christ must be repeated, then it was never finished, and if it was never finished, then no man may ever be sure that his sins are gone. A believer at peace with God is a believer who has learned that the work is done; a believer who thinks something remains to be offered will spend his days striving, and never once rest. The doctrine we are about to unfold is therefore not a dry point of polemics but the foundation of Christian assurance, and it concerns the honor of the Son of God as much as the comfort of his people. When last we considered this ordinance, we stood in the upper room and watched our Lord institute the Supper on the night he was betrayed, and we saw that it is a meal and not a monument, a feast for pilgrims upon the road. Today we must press further, into the deepest and most contested ground of all. What did Christ accomplish once for all, and can anything ever be added to it? Does the Supper repeat his sacrifice, or does it remember it? Is the church a place where sacrifice is still offered, or a company gathered to give thanks that the offering is over? The answers to these questions will either fill our hearts with peace, or leave us perpetually striving to finish what is already done.

Scripture Foundation

The entire argument of this section is already written in the epistle to the Hebrews, which was given to the church precisely to answer those who would drag a finished sacrifice back to an altar. Listen first to Hebrews 7:27: "Who needeth not daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifice, first for his own sins, and then for the people's: for this he did once, when he offered up himself." The contrast could not be plainer. The priests of Aaron stood in their office day after day, repeating sacrifices that could never settle anything, and every one of those sacrifices was a confession of incompleteness. A thing that must be done again was never truly done. But Christ, our great High Priest, "needeth not daily" to offer anything, because what he offered he offered once, and what he offered was himself. The completeness of his person and the oneness of his offering belong together: because the victim was the Son of God, one offering sufficed where ten thousand animal victims had failed. The writer presses the same point with a second image in Hebrews 9:12: "Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us." Mark that word "eternal." Redemption that is eternal does not need to be renewed. An eternal redemption is one that stretches backward over every sin ever committed and forward over every sin yet to be committed, and there is no gap left for a fresh sacrifice to fill. The high priest of the old covenant went into the earthly sanctuary once a year, and had to return the next year because his work did not last. Christ entered once, into the true holy place, and obtained a redemption that never expires, and therefore he never needs to enter again. Then comes the passage that speaks most directly to the trembling conscience, Hebrews 9:26: "For then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world: but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself." Here is the little Greek word hapax, once, standing like a wall against every repetition. If Christ had to be offered again, then he would have had to suffer again and again from the foundation of the world; but he has appeared once, at the consummation of the ages, to put away sin. And the writer seals it with an argument from our own mortality in Hebrews 9:27-28: "And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation." As surely as a man dies only once, Christ was offered only once. There is a finality written into death itself that becomes the pattern of Christ's sacrifice. He will appear a second time, but not to be sacrificed again: he will appear without sin, not to atone but to save. The argument reaches its summit in Hebrews 10:10: "By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all." And then the writer contrasts the finished work with the endless round of the old priesthood in Hebrews 10:12: "But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God." The priests of the old covenant never sat down, because their work was never done; there was no chair in the tabernacle. But Christ, having offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down, because there was nothing left to do. A seated Redeemer is the sign of a finished redemption. And to remove all doubt, the writer states the conclusion with devastating simplicity in Hebrews 10:18: "Now where remission of these is, there is no more offering for sin." Where sins are forgiven, there is no longer any offering for sin. The very existence of a repeated offering would be proof that sins were not yet forgiven. To this the beloved apostle John adds the word that the Confession itself borrows, in 1 John 2:2: "And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world." The Greek noun is hilasmos, propitiation, the appeasing sacrifice that turns away wrath. Christ is himself the propitiation, not one propitiation among many, but the propitiation, the single sacrifice that satisfies divine justice and turns the anger of a holy God into the smile of a reconciled Father. If he is the propitiation, then no other propitiation can ever be needed, and to offer one is not to add to his work but to deny it. This is the firm biblical ground beneath everything the Confession teaches, and beneath everything the church has ever believed about the finishedness of the cross. Paul adds his own witness to the same truth in Romans 6:10: "For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God." Here again is that word of finality we met in Hebrews, "once," spoken of a death that can never be repeated. Christ died unto sin once, and having died unto sin once, he will never die again, because sin has no further claim upon him. His rising again is not a return to the old estate but an entrance into a new one, a life lived wholly unto God, beyond the reach of death and beyond the reach of any further sacrifice. And at the very hour he died, heaven itself bore witness to the finality of it all, for in Matthew 27:51 we read: "And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom." Mark the direction of that rent, from top to bottom, as if a hand from heaven had reached down to tear the barrier away. The veil that had hidden the holiest place, and that had stood between the worshipper and the presence of God, was rent once, and never sewn up again. The way was opened once for all, and the temple that had required its daily sacrifices stood exposed as a house whose work was over. These texts, with the epistle to the Hebrews at their center, speak with one voice, and that voice declares that the sacrifice of Christ is finished, never to be repeated, and never to be renewed.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Divines wrote this section, they had a very specific adversary in view, and we honor them best by naming that adversary plainly. It was not a theological abstraction but a living institution: the Church of Rome, and its central act of worship, the sacrifice of the mass. The Council of Trent, meeting in the century before the Westminster Assembly, had defined the matter with chilling precision. In its twenty-second session, Trent declared the mass to be "a true and proper sacrifice," in which "the same Christ who once offered himself in a bloody manner on the altar of the cross is contained and immolated in an unbloody manner." And lest anyone soften this, Trent pronounced an anathema upon anyone who said the mass is "only a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving" or "a bare commemoration of the sacrifice consummated on the cross, but not a propitiatory sacrifice." It is a striking providence that the doctrine Trent cursed is the very doctrine the Confession confesses. This is why the section opens with a triple denial. "In this sacrament, Christ is not offered up to his Father; nor any real sacrifice made at all, for remission of sins of the quick or dead." The Divines are answering Trent point by point. The word "quick" is the old English word for "living," so the phrase "the quick or dead" targets precisely Trent's claim that the mass is offered for "the sins, punishments, satisfactions, and other necessities of the faithful," living and dead. The Divines deny that any sacrifice is made at all, and they deny it specifically as a remedy for sin, for the living or for the dead. The mass, whatever else it may be, can never remit a single sin. But the section is not merely negative, and here its positive teaching becomes luminous. The Supper is "only a commemoration of that one offering up of himself, by himself, upon the cross, once for all: and a spiritual oblation of all possible praise unto God, for the same." Mark the two halves of that sentence, for they contain the whole Reformed doctrine of the table, and observe also how carefully the Divines chose their words. "Commemoration" is deliberate: the Supper recalls, it does not repeat. "Oblation of praise" is deliberate: the one thing the church may lay upon the table is her thanksgiving, never a propitiation. The Supper is first a commemoration, a making present to faith of what Christ did once upon the cross. It is not the offering itself, but the church's grateful looking back upon an offering already made. And second, it is "a spiritual oblation of all possible praise." The church does offer something at the table, but what she offers is not a sacrifice that takes away sin; she offers the sacrifice of thanksgiving and praise that responds to a sacrifice already finished. This is exactly the "sacrifice of praise" of which Hebrews speaks: "By him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name" (Hebrews 13:15). Here is a distinction the Reformers drew with care, because it unlocks the whole controversy. The word "sacrifice" has more than one meaning in Scripture. There is the propitiatory sacrifice, the sacrifice that atones for sin and satisfies the justice of God, and this Christ alone offered once for all. But there is also the eucharistic sacrifice, the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving that a redeemed people offer in response, the thank-offering of hearts that have already been forgiven. The church may, and must, offer the second; she may never offer the first. The Roman mass errs by confounding these two, by taking the sacrament of thanksgiving and turning it into a propitiatory sacrifice, by setting an altar where there should only be a table. The Reformed church restores the distinction, and with it restores the finishedness of the cross. It is this restoration that explains the severity of the section's final words. The mass is "most abominably injurious to Christ's one, only sacrifice, the alone propitiation for all the sins of his elect." The language is strong because the error is strong. To say that Christ must be offered again is to say that his first offering was not enough. To immolate him unbloody upon a thousand altars is to say that the blood shed at Calvary did not suffice. The Divines do not regard the mass as a mere mistake in the mode of worship; they regard it as an injury done to the honor of Christ himself, a blow struck against the perfection of his finished work. And they were right. A sacrifice that must be repeated is a sacrifice that has failed, and to repeat the cross is to un-finish it. Nor was their severity a thing of cold polemic; it was the severity of shepherds who saw their flock taught to run back, Sunday after Sunday, to an altar that could never quiet the conscience, when a finished cross stood open before them. To defend the finished work is not cruelty but mercy, and the Divines defended it with all the tenderness of men who had themselves fled to it. This is what the Divines meant, and it is what every faithful church must still mean today.

Theological Depth

The Reformers did not invent this doctrine; they recovered it from Scripture and handed it down with a clarity that still defines Reformed teaching. Calvin, in the fourth book of the Institutes, pressed the argument with the force of a man who had watched the mass obscure the cross for his entire early life. The mass, he wrote, is a sacrilege that "extinguishes the cross of Christ" and buries his death. His reasoning is as simple as it is devastating: if the mass is a true sacrifice, then the sacrifice of Christ was not perfect and perpetual, and his priesthood, which is untransferable and eternal, is handed over to men. Calvin fastened on the argument from Hebrews: because Christ's priesthood is his alone, because he offered himself once and sat down, no mere man can stand at an altar and offer him again. To claim to do so is to pull the eternal High Priest down from his throne and place a mortal in his stead. For Calvin, the question was never a matter of ceremony; it was a matter of whether the finished work of Christ remains finished. Turretin brought to the same controversy the full weight of the Genevan scholastic method, and his treatment in the Institutes of Elenctic Theology set a standard of rigor that later writers followed. He distinguishes with surgical precision between the sacrifice of the cross and the sacrament of the Supper. The one is an action of Christ alone, offered once to God, for the satisfaction of divine justice; the other is an action of the church, repeated often, in which Christ is not offered but received. Turretin notes that the Supper is called a sacrifice in the fathers only in an improper and figurative sense, a sacrifice of commemoration and of praise, never a propitiatory sacrifice for sin. To make it propitiatory is to ascribe to a creature what belongs to the Creator alone, to give to bread and wine a power that belongs only to the blood of the Son of God. The mass, on Turretin's accounting, is not merely an error; it is a usurpation, a creature reaching for the prerogative of God. To this Turretin added an argument that cuts the mass down by its own definition. Rome calls the mass an unbloody sacrifice, offered without the shedding of blood. But Scripture declares that "without shedding of blood is no remission" (Hebrews 9:22). A sacrifice from which no blood is shed is, by the very terms of the gospel, a sacrifice that can remit nothing. Either the mass sheds blood, in which case it is a fresh crucifixion of the Son of God, or it sheds none, in which case it is no propitiation at all. The adjective with which Rome hoped to soften the mass, the word "unbloody," becomes the proof of its impotence. An unbloody propitiation is a contradiction in terms, a sacrifice that cannot atone, an offering that cannot satisfy. The finished, bloody, once-for-all sacrifice of the cross needs no such ghost to stand beside it. Warfield, writing in a later age when the sharp edges of controversy had been smoothed by time, stated the positive truth with an elegance that has made it a standard of Reformed devotion. The Lord's Supper, he insisted, is a memorial feast and not a sacrifice; it does not renew the offering of Christ, but re-enacts it in symbol before the eye of faith. The church at the table does not offer Christ to God; God at the table offers Christ to the church. The direction of the giving is everything. In the mass, the priest gives something to God; in the Supper, God gives something to the believer. Warfield loved to press this reversal, because it turns the whole celebration from a work we perform into a gift we receive, from an anxious repetition into a glad remembrance. At the Supper, he said, we do not carry Christ to the altar; we carry ourselves to Christ. And upon this single hinge, the direction of the giving, hangs the difference between a religion of fear and a religion of rest: the one keeps the worshipper forever making an offering, the other sets him down at a table where the offering has already been made for him. Robert Shaw, in his Exposition of the Westminster Confession, gathers these threads into a single cord for the ordinary believer. He observes that the section teaches two things at once: negatively, that no real sacrifice is made in the Supper for the living or the dead, and positively, that the Supper is a commemoration and an oblation of praise. Shaw is careful to answer the Roman objection that the fathers sometimes spoke of the Supper as a sacrifice, explaining that they spoke of it only as a eucharistic or commemorative sacrifice, a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and never as a propitiatory one. And Owen, that prince among the Puritans, whose whole soul was steeped in the epistle to the Hebrews, declared that the one offering of Christ "doth eternally perfect" them that are sanctified, so that to add any further sacrifice is to accuse the sacrifice of Christ of insufficiency and to rob it of its glory. From Calvin to Owen the testimony is one voice: the offering is finished, the priesthood is Christ's alone, and the Supper is not a repetition but a remembrance and a feast.

Puritan Application

Rest, then, dear soul, in a finished work. This is the first and sweetest use of the doctrine. How much of our fear before God is really a fear that the payment was not quite enough, that some residue of sin remains for which we must still make satisfaction? How much of our restless religion, our resolutions and our penances, is an unspoken attempt to add a little of our own to the finished sacrifice of Christ? Hear the word again: tetelestai, it is paid in full. The debt that stood against you has been discharged to the last farthing, and God does not ask for a second payment on a bill already settled. To go back to the counting-house and insist on paying again is not humility; it is an insult to the One who paid. Rest in the finished work, and let that rest be the soil out of which every good work grows, for no man ever served God well who was still trying to pay for what Christ had already purchased. Let this doctrine also arm you against every re-crucifixion, wherever it appears. The mass is the great and obvious form of the error, and we are right to mark its abomination, but the same error wears subtler clothes in the believing heart. Whenever you fall into sin and sink into despair as though the cross had not covered that particular fall, you are acting as if Christ must be offered again. Whenever your conscience demands a penance that goes beyond repentance, a misery that adds to the cross, you are quietly rebuilding an altar. Beware the un-bloody mass of the anxious heart, the secret feeling that your sorrow must complete what Christ's blood left undone. Christ was offered once, for all the sins of his elect, and your particular sin, committed at this particular hour, was among the sins he bore. Flee to that finished work, and refuse every thought that would make the cross incomplete. Come, then, to the table with thanksgiving rather than fear. If the Supper is not a propitiatory sacrifice but a commemoration and an oblation of praise, then the dominant note of the meal is gratitude. You do not come to have your sins forgiven again; you come because they have been forgiven, once and for all, and you come to give thanks that they are. The table is not a place of dread, where you wonder whether the offering will take; it is a place of thanksgiving, where you feast upon the remembrance of an offering already accepted. Lay aside the spirit of the debtor and put on the spirit of the redeemed. Come with the fruit of your lips, giving thanks to his name, and let the Supper be what it was always meant to be: a sacrifice of praise, offered not to obtain mercy but to celebrate it. The bread you take in your hand is not a payment you make but a promise you receive; the cup you drink is not a penance you perform but a pardon already sealed. Approach the table as a child approaches a gift already given, with open hands and a full heart, and there will be no room left in the feast for the old terror of the unfinished. Guard the priesthood of Christ with a holy jealousy. The untransferable and eternal priesthood of the Son of God is the hinge upon which this doctrine turns, and it is under assault wherever any man is set between the believer and God. You have one High Priest, and he has offered himself once, and he ever lives to make intercession for you. You need no human priest to offer him again, for he is not offered again; you need no altar but the one where he finished the work. When any church, however ancient, claims to re-present the sacrifice of Christ, it is reaching for what belongs to Christ alone. Keep your conscience bound to the one Priest who sat down, and count no man your mediator but him. Finally, let the finished work loosen your grip upon this world. If the debt is paid and the veil is rent, if the holy place is opened and redemption is eternal, then the things of this life are no longer what they once were to you. A man who knows his account is settled before God can hold this world's goods, its honors and its anxieties, with a looser hand. The sacrifice is over; what remains is praise. Let your whole life become a "spiritual oblation of all possible praise," the thank-offering of a heart that has ceased to pay and begun to sing. Live as one for whom all is finished, and who has therefore nothing left to do but give thanks, and love, and wait for him who shall appear the second time, without sin, unto salvation.

Prayer

O Lord our God, who hast finished what our sins began and discharged what our debts required, we bless thee for the one offering of thy Son, made once for all, and for the finished word that sounded from the cross. We confess how slow we are to believe that the work is done, how readily we reach for some satisfaction of our own, how often our troubled hearts would drag the sacrifice back to an altar of our own making. Forgive the secret mass of our anxieties, and teach us to rest in the propitiation thou hast provided. We thank thee that Christ is not offered again, that his priesthood is his alone and is eternal, and that he has entered once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us. Grant that we may never confound the sacrifice of the cross with the sacrament of the table, nor turn our thanksgiving into an attempt to purchase what thou hast freely given. Make our coming to this ordinance a commemoration of his death and a spiritual oblation of praise, the sacrifice of lips that give thanks to his name. O thou who didst sit down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, because thy work was finished, sit also in our hearts, and finish in us what thou hast begun. Loosen our grip upon this passing world, fill our mouths with thanksgiving, and keep us looking for thy second appearing, when thou shalt come without sin unto salvation. We ask it for the sake of him who was once offered to bear the sins of many, even Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Nature of the Supper: Spiritual, Not Carnal Presence