Transubstantiation and humiliation

Kereszty acknowledges that recent theologians have objected to the “reification” of Christ’s presence in some scholastic theology: “They insist that the sacraments are a personal encounter between human beings and Jesus Christ himself.”  Talk of a change in the elements will “deprive the Eucharist of any intelligibility and distort Jesus’ personal presence into a quasi-materialistic ‘simple being there.’”

Kereszty doesn’t consider these objects wholly unfounded, and admits that sticking with the New Testament means seeings “sacraments in a personalist perspective: they are the sacramental extensions of the saving and worshipping acts of Christ in the Church, and the eucharistic presence is the personal, permanent presence of Christ himself.”  In his view, though, transubstantiation supports rather than undermines this personalism.

That is true, first, because a belief in substantial change underscores the mode of Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist.  ”On the cross, he hid his divinity,” and in the Eucharist “he even conceals his humanity.”  So far as we can tell from our senses, there are just things on the table.  Thus in the eucharist Jesus reaches “the ultimate stage of his self-emptying” and thus “also completes his redemptive work”: “In lowering himself to the lowest level of being, the elements of the material world, these material realities, transformed by human work into bread and wine, become the means of our redemption.”  He suggests that this perspective is all the more important today when “the material universe . . . may appear to unbelievers a mortal threat to their personal existence.”

It is true, second, because it’s through “ontological change of material realities” that the “most complete, permanent and intense personal presence of Christ” is realized.  When Christ is dwelling in a saint, he is “still only indwelling in him.”  But in the eucharistic elements He is more intensely present than even in the saint.

To which my main response is: For all the advances in Catholic views of the epiclesis, Eucharistic theology is still underwritten by a very inadequate pneumatology.  The Eucharist as the final stage of the Son’s kenosis?  No: Jesus is exalted, and if there’s a “humbled” person now, it’s the eternally humbled Third Person.  Pneumatology enables us to hold together two essential sides of Eucharistic theology – the exaltation of Christ on the one hand, the real movement from humiliation to glory in history and time, and the fact that the church continues to bear the cross, cruciformed by the Spirit of Christ until we are finally glorified with Him.  There’s a pneumatological deficit in the Kereszty’s second point too: It is good that He goes away, and the intense personal presence of the incarnate Son doesn’t depend on translated bread and wine but on the presence and operation of the Spirit, in the Eucharist, in the saint, elsewhere.

In short: More pneumatology.  Which is to say: More Calvin.