Here's lots of people can agree about.

Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists would all agree

that Jesus Christ is truly present in the Lord's Supper.

However, there is considerable disagreement about what form exactly that presence takes.

Is the Lord present physically, spiritually, or in some other sense.

This has been no small debate in the history of the church.

After all, if Christ's death is so central to Christianity, then the thankful celebration of that death as instituted

by Christ himself is also profoundly important.

It's something even the great reformers disagreed on. Martin Luther and John Calvin,

though wonderfully united in so much of their theology, nevertheless had differing views of Christ's

presence in the Lord's Supper.

Trans-substantiation is the official teaching of Roman Catholicism.

Trans means change and substantiation means substance. The idea is that when the

bread and wine are blessed by the priest during the mass, the bread and the wine are

transformed into the actual physical body and blood of Jesus Christ.

Now of course it's obvious to anyone present that the form of the bread and wine doesn't change.

It still looks, smells and tastes like ordinary

bread and wine, but the teaching is that the substance has completely changed. The inner

hidden essence of the thing has changed, what Aristotle would have called

the essential qualities of the bread and wine.

So when a person eats and drinks the bread and wine, they are taking into themselves, quite

literally, the actual body and blood of Christ, and thus the teaching goes goes the grace of God. It's for this reason that someone

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