Real Presence vs. Memorial: What Divides Realism from Symbolism?

The dispute is not first about feelings or piety but about what kind of thing the words of Jesus do. A realist reading holds that 'This is my body' accomplishes what it signifies: the bread (and wine) somehow become or contain the actual body and blood of Christ, so that the communicant truly receives him. A memorialist reading holds that the phrase is a vivid figure of speech whose effect is to call the believing community to remember the crucified Christ in faith. In this view, nothing changes in the bread; the change is in the hearer's mind.

Underneath the surface grammar lies a question about language itself. The realist side presupposes that sacramental words can be performative in a strong, ontological sense — that they make present what they name. The memorialist side presupposes that Jesus spoke in a cultural idiom of substitutionary self-identification common at Jewish tables, where 'this is my body' functioned as a way of personally giving himself, not as a literal transformation formula. The two camps thus differ on whether ancient Near Eastern liturgical language is a vehicle of real presence or a vehicle of intense personal solidarity.

Because the question is metaphysical, it is also irreducibly christological. The realist view typically pairs a high doctrine of the union of divine and human natures in Christ with the conviction that a body so united can be communicated under signs. The symbolic view usually pairs a more distant doctrine of the relation between heaven and earth with the conviction that the ascended Christ is located at the right hand of the Father and is not therefore 'contained' in bread. The choice about presence is therefore downstream of a prior choice about how heaven and earth relate in the person of Christ.

Luke 22:19 sits inside a Passover meal Jesus will not finish, and the text itself contains both directions: 'This is my body which is given for you' (a phrase that sounds ontologically loaded) and 'this do in remembrance of me' (a phrase that sounds memorial). The verse therefore does not by itself adjudicate the debate; it is the hinge on which the two readings turn. To read this question fairly, one must hold both clauses together rather than elevate one against the other.

The historical divide is fairly recent in scale. The realist reading dominates the Catholic, Orthodox, and much of the high-church Lutheran and Anglican traditions, often using the philosophical vocabulary of substance, accident, and sacramental union. The memorialist reading emerges most clearly in the magisterial Reformation (especially Zwingli, and in modified form Calvin) and in later evangelical and free-church traditions, where the underlying philosophy is nominalist and the eucharistic action is treated as a sign acted out in faith. Any answer to this question is therefore necessarily philosophical as well as exegetical.