In a passage drawing on his readers’ experiences of Jewish and of pagan ritual sacrifice, St. Paul emphasizes the continuity of the Holy Eucharist with these familiar, though now superseded, practices.
In response to what he viewed as not merely a malformation but a destruction of the Eucharist in Roman practice, John Calvin was dogmatic that the Eucharist is not a sacrifice. He preferred the terminology for the sacrament of “the Lord’s Supper” in order to present it as a meal,1 which he saw as standing in sharp contrast to the sacrificial conception.2 While Calvin himself consistently maintained that the Eucharist represented a real sacramental communion in the body and blood of Christ, this disassociation of sacrament and sacrifice led much of later Protestantism to reject even the sacramentality of the rite. (more…)