Have Anglicans gone Lutheran on Lord's Supper?

The Eucharistic doctrine of the 39 Articles is the same as that of the Continental Reformed, and this was by design. The correspondence between the English bishops and their Swiss counterparts substantiates this. The Anglican commentary tradition upholds it. It is not my opinion; it is undeniable historical fact.

I’m just going by what their Catechism actually says, along with what’s been compiled in the Denzinger collection or summarized by Ott or Garrigou-Lagrange, and careful study of what the terminology itself meant at the time. All the attributes that we would call “physical” fall on the ‘accident’ side of the substance/accident distinction that the Roman Catholic Church used to craft its conciliar definition of transubstantiation. When it stated that the ‘substance’ of Christ’s humanity replaces that of the bread and wine, while the accidents of the bread and wine remain, this meant that none of Jesus’ physical characteristics were involved in the transformation. The “whole Christ” being indivisibly present in each and every particle of the Host is simply incompatible with medieval and modern notions of physicality, as I explained above. That’s the plain meaning of the conciliar text as it would have been understood at the time. What this core of essential humanity (that is nevertheless distinct from Christ’s soul, which is also said to be present), is supposed to be, I have no idea. But it is in any case a straightforward denial of any physical change. It is instead presented as something supernatural, beyond the reach of the senses and thus beyond imagination and comprehension, a mystery.

 

Not according to St Paul's explanation of what the general resurrection promises. We have currently a mortal body. What we will eventually have is a spiritual body. Jesus of Nazareth had a mortal body before he had a resurrection spiritual body. His spiritual body is on the same pattern as his moortal body was but is not the same body as his mortal body, otherwise it would be a mortal one, not a spiritual one, it is now changed, no longer subject to corruption. Christ appeared differently to different people. Christ's spiritual body was not restricted in how it could appear. i.e. Materialising within a locked room. - Dematerialising before the eyes of two onlooking disciples. Sufficiently ambiguous that - none of his disciples dare ask him who he was.

Christ's resurrection body has the appearance of a human body but it is no longer 'human'. All human bodies are mortal, Christ's now is not, neither eventually will ours be. Anyone thinking that Christ now has a 'human' body should read John's description of it in Revelation.
.

 

I disagree with this completely and entirely. Citing those passages from 1 Cor. 15 that way is to attempt to “illuminate the obscure with the obscure”, and it overthrows the resurrection account in John’s Gospel. Better to proceed from the clear to the mysterious rather than the other way around. Whatever Paul meant by “spiritual body”, it cannot contradict Jesus’ statement that “a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.” Christ has only one body, a human body, the only body He ever had, if the Scriptures are true.

 

A 'Spiritual' body is not the vapourous, insubstatial manifestation of a ghost, wraith or spectre. Christ's 'Spiritual Body' is the first fruit of a host of 'new creations'. Nothing like it has ever existed before. It is nevertheless incorruptable, which makes it no longer like any human body that has ever previously existed on earth. Christ's body now, after death, resurrection, ascension and glorification, is unique.
.

 

Regarding 1 Cor. 15:44, I like what John Gill observed, "It is raised a spiritual body; not as to substance, but as to its quality." Gill went on to say:
"...the phrase is Jewish, הגוף הרוחני, "the spiritual body" (y) and the flesh of the righteous, being בשרם רוחנים, "spiritual flesh" (z), are to be met with in their writings." (y) Nishmath Chayim. fol. 37. 1. (z) Tzeror Hammor, fol. 9. 4.
I find it interesting that even though Paul was writing mostly to Gentiles, the Holy Spirit impressed upon him to include phrases that would 'ring a bell' with any Jews who happened to hear or read what he penned.

 

Now here is something I can unreservedly agree with Tiffy about!

With this "human body" he walked through walls, line shone from out of him, can withstand to eternally look directly into the face of the Ancient of Days himself, and has no artifacts of biology like hunger, pimples, or bowel movements. This is not a human body.

Even better to look at some eminent teachers to help us along the way. Therefore, can you cite any Church Fathers, Saxon theologians, or post-Reformation Divines, who agree with your view? You may have been drinking from the water of Rome without realizing it.

 

St Paul was of course highly trained in Jewish theology and would have naturally had an orthodox view on the possible physics of the resurrection and what it meant according to the evidence of witnesses. There were also Jews at Corinth that probably held high positions in the church there. Some of them even in opposition to Paul's teaching concerning Paul's possible innovations concerning the participation of women in worship, and the censure for bad conduct in the Eucharist, hence the 'Strong letter' broadly in support of 'Chloe's people'.
.

 

@Tiffy and @Stalwart, it's possible there may be a semantic difference at play here.

• I am saying that the pre-Resurrection and post-Resurrection bodies of Jesus were numerically the same body. This is obvious from the Gospel accounts themselves and does not require a long train of citations to clarify what is already perfectly clear in the text itself. I am not aware of anyone who disputes this.
• I do not see what is gained by a denial that this body was "human"; the Scriptures not only make no such declaration, but instead teach that an ultimate life of incorruption is part of our intended destiny as human beings. The Patristic dictum that "what is assumed is what is redeemed" applies here if it applies anywhere at all. If being human could not be changed from something mortal to something immortal, then the Incarnation was pointless. While the Resurrection accounts don't exactly say that he "walked through walls", they do say that he ate with his disciples. We have to be very careful not to take Paul's language in 1 Cor. 15 so rigidly that the Gospels' Resurrection accounts are forced into a Gnostic mold. Otherwise, the account of the risen Jesus and Thomas at the end of the Gospel of John is tantamount to a deception.
• I am not, of course, denying that Jesus' post-Resurrection human body also had some abilities that our bodies do not. I think we have to be careful which of these abilities we ascribe to Divine power and which abilities we ascribe to an immortal human body. His Resurrection, in addition to being the means of our salvation, and his being the "firstborn from the dead", also manifests his Incarnation as one of the Divine Persons.

 

Possibly.

The resurrection body of Jesus Christ was clearly patterned on the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth. It was scarred and mutilated in the same way as was his physical body. His resurrection body however was not a re-animated corpse, some kind of zombie within his original human body, it was an entirely NEW CREATION. The resurrection of the body, his body, and eventually our bodies, will entail CHANGE. We shall be changed, not just reanimated. Our 'Spiritual bodies' will be from the same intended 'blueprints' of our earthly bodies but without imperfections. The mortal must put on the immortal and we shall be new creations, because flesh and blood CANNOT inherit the kingdom of God. 1 Cor.15:50, 2 Cor.5:17, Gal. 6:15.

I'm not implying that Christ has lost his humanity through resurrection and ascension to the right hand of God, indeed he represents humanity, elevated as a life giving spirit, Second Person of a single Triune Godhead. God is by Jesus of Nazareth's own statement 'Spirit', and those who worship God must worship in Spirit and in Truth. A 'Spiritual Body' is the only actual body that God now has, according to Jesus, because God IS spirit and there is but ONE God.

I don't think so. There was never a time before or after the incarnation that The Christ has ever failed to do the will of God. Jesus of Nazareth said "If you have seen me you have seen The Father". John 5:37, John 14:7-9, John 15:24. God became human at the incarnation, humanity in Christ becomes the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, once each of us becomes reconciled to God. As humans all have sinned, as Spirit filled believers we can all become the righteousness of God. 2 Cor.5:16-21. Because God has reconciled himself to us in Christ, not holding our sins against us.

I believe that Jesus of Nazareth, during his ministry on earth as a human being, never went beyond what any sinless human being is capable of, through the exercise of faith. After his death and resurrection however Jesus Christ displayed behaviour that human bodies, (outside of the spirit and power of Christ himself), are utterly incapable of.
.

 

Three words too many. It is simpler and more in accordance with the plain sense of the text to affirm that the resurrection body of Jesus Christ was the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth.

Pope St. Leo the Great, Letter 28 ("The Tome")
But after the Lord's resurrection (which, of course, was of His true body, because He was raised the same as He had died and been buried), what else was effected by the forty days' delay than the cleansing of our faith's purity from all darkness? For to that end He talked with His disciples, and dwelt and ate with them, He allowed Himself to be handled with diligent and curious touch by those who were affected by doubt, He entered when the doors were shut upon the Apostles, and by His breathing upon them gave them the Holy Spirit (John 20:22), and bestowing on them the light of understanding, opened the secrets of the Holy Scriptures. (Luke 24:27) So again He showed the wound in His side, the marks of the nails, and all the signs of His quite recent suffering, saying, See My hands and feet, that it is I. Handle Me and see that a spirit has not flesh and bones, as you see Me have ; in order that the properties of His Divine and human nature might be acknowledged to remain still inseparable: and that we might know the Word not to be different from the flesh, in such a sense as also to confess that the one Son of God is both the Word and flesh. Of this mystery of the faith your opponent Eutyches must be reckoned to have but little sense if he has recognized our nature in the Only-begotten of God neither through the humiliation of His having to die, nor through the glory of His rising again. Nor has he any fear of the blessed apostle and evangelist John's declaration when he says, every spirit which confesses Jesus Christ to have come in the flesh, is of God: and every spirit which destroys Jesus is not of God, and this is Antichrist. But what is to destroy Jesus, except to take away the human nature from Him, and to render void the mystery, by which alone we were saved, by the most barefaced fictions. The truth is that being in darkness about the nature of Christ's body, he must also be befooled by the same blindness in the matter of His sufferings. For if he does not think the cross of the Lord fictitious, and does not doubt that the punishment He underwent to save the world is likewise true, let him acknowledge the flesh of Him whose death he already believes: and let him not disbelieve Him man with a body like ours, since he acknowledges Him to have been able to suffer.

Pope St. Gregory the Great, Magna Moralia
For in that God is a Trinity, the Holy Trinity, i.e. the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, raised up to life the extinct Flesh of the Only-Begotten Son.

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae IIIa, Q. 54, art. 3, resp.
Christ's body in the Resurrection was "of the same nature, but differed in glory." Accordingly, whatever goes with the nature of a human body, was entirely in the body of Christ when He rose again. Now it is clear that flesh, bones, blood, and other such things, are of the very nature of the human body. Consequently, all these things were in Christ's body when He rose again; and this also integrally, without any diminution; otherwise it would not have been a complete resurrection, if whatever was lost by death had not been restored. Hence our Lord assured His faithful ones by saying (Matthew 10:30): "The very hairs of your head are all numbered": and (Luke 21:18): "A hair of your head shall not perish."

But to say that Christ's body had neither flesh, nor bones, nor the other natural parts of a human body, belongs to the error of Eutyches, Bishop of Constantinople, who maintained that "our body in that glory of the resurrection will be impalpable, and more subtle than wind and air.

Obj. 1 and Reply

Obj.: It would seem that Christ's body did not rise entire. For flesh and blood belong to the integrity of the body: whereas Christ seems not to have had both, for it is written (1 Corinthians 15:50): "Flesh and blood can not possess the kingdom of God." But Christ rose in the glory of the kingdom of God. Therefore it seems that He did not have flesh and blood.
Reply: Flesh and blood are not to be taken there for the nature of flesh and blood, but, either for the guilt of flesh and blood, as Gregory says [St. Gregory, Moral. in Job 14:56, or else for the corruption of flesh and blood: because, as Augustine says (Ad Consent., De Resur. Carn.), "there will be neither corruption there, nor mortality of flesh and blood." Therefore flesh according to its substance possesses the kingdom of God, according to Luke 24:39: "A spirit hath not flesh and bones, as you see Me to have." But flesh, if understood as to its corruption, will not possess it; hence it is straightway added in the words of the Apostle: "Neither shall corruption possess incorruption."
​

Martin Luther, Commentary on 1 Corinthians 15
If someone were to say in view of St. Paul's declaration that "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God," that only the soul, or the spirit, and not the body will arise, as a number of heretics concluded, he is directly contradicting St. Paul's doctrine throughout this whole chapter...And what could be clearer than St. Paul's words, which state that flesh and blood, which is sinful now, cannot come into heaven?

Anthony Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (The New International Greek Testament Commentary)
The LXX regularly uses flesh and blood to denote humankind in its weakness and vulnerability, and in this sense Paul declares elsewhere that his revelation of gospel truth comes not from "flesh and blood" but from God...Apocalyptic emphasizes "a radical incompatibility between the present condition of human existence and the resurrected condition...Transformation is necessary." Indeed so, but this entails not only transformation from weakness to power (vv. 43-44) but also new creation in terms of deliverance from sin to a disposition of holiness. It is an axiom of Jewish-Christian theology that only the pure and holy can rest in the immediate presence of God. Hence Jeremias is correct to detect a parallelism that is more than merely synonymous between v. 50a and v. 50b. Each part takes up (in inverse order) the two aspects of the change described in vv. 43-44. A [soma] constituted by the presence and direction of the Holy Spirit entails: (i) holiness in place of sin (v. 50a); and (ii) the reversal of weakness, degeneration, and decay (v. 50b).
​

In Summary:

• The biblical text is clear that Jesus' resurrection was both a resuscitation and a glorification.
• Leo the Great, Gregory the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther believed the same, as did the other Fathers, the medieval Doctors, and the Reformers.
• They associated the denial of this central proposition of the Faith with the error of Eutyches, otherwise known as Monophysitism, which was condemned at the 4th Ecumenical Council, held at Chalcedon in the year 451.
• 1 Cor. 15:50 does not negate the assertion that Jesus' body post-resurrection continued to be constituted of "flesh and blood", as the Gospels' resurrection accounts make clear.
• It is therefore entirely possible our difference of terminology on this score is not merely semantic at all, but constitutes a genuine disagreement.

​

 

Then in what way was it changed from a body of flesh, which cannot inherit the kingdom of God, to a body of spirit, being able to do what a body of flesh could not do, to a body of spirit which can give life and fill all in all.
.

 

Did you read the post in its entirety? Flesh of itself can so inherit; sinful flesh cannot. See my quotations above.

 

That's very Gnostic, (sinful flesh). Since when can 'flesh' sin. Are you, the one that sins, flesh or spirit? What controls your disposition to sin? Your right hand, your left hand, your right or left eye, or your spirit? Does one take no responsibility for sins of commission or omission because the sinner can claim the flesh did them? It was sins of the spirit that Christ was most tempted over in the desert, not sins of the flesh. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. The Way that Jesus went to His Father was through death. That is the way we must all go, if we are to get there, just as he did. Flesh and blood cannot go there. Our bodies must be able to transcend both time and space to exist in the dimension we call heaven, where God reigns supreme.

We get a new body, a 'spiritual one', not the old one back. We do not yet know what we shall be, apart from the fact that we shall be as Christ now is, with a body as His is now. He is the first fruits of them that died. 1 Cor.15:20-23.
.

 

“The flesh” is a common metaphor in Paul’s writings for sinfulness. It’s obviously not literal. More obvious still, is the fact that I’m not defending Gnosticism, emphasizing as I am the physical nature of Jesus’ resurrection.

Back to the topic at hand, Jesus resurrection body was indeed the same body he had pre-resurrection, and it was indeed a body of flesh and blood and bone, just as the Gospels of Luke and John, and the Book of Acts, make clear. Exegetically, your interpretation of 1 Cor. 15:50 contradicts Jesus’ statement in Luke, and thus cannot be correct. I have cited Leo, Gregory, Aquinas, Luther, and one example from modern biblical scholarship, in support of these contentions. If that isn’t enough to get us on the same page, nothing will be.

 

The (mortal) life of (mortal) flesh is in the blood, Lev. 17:11. The blood sustains the flesh by carrying oxygen and nutrients to, and waste products from, the cells and tissues.

Jesus' resurrected body was flesh and bone (for shape and structure), but not flesh and blood (1 Cor. 15:50). His resurrected body is a re-formed, eternal, incorruptible body. There is no need for blood in a body sustained by the life-giving power of God. When we are raised, we will be made like Him: we will be given bloodless bodies re-created with physical shape and structure, built to be eternal. Our life will no longer be in the corruptible blood, but our life will be in Christ the life-giver and life-sustainer, to be with Him for eternity. Our bodies will not need oxygen and will not produce waste (a corruption).

How could the resurrected body be "the same body" as before, when it is so different? What of the bodies that rotted away and became nutrients for trees and plants, to the point where nothing is left of them but a few of the bones? What of the bodies that are burned in a fire? Does one's theology require that God call out of the corruption every single original mote that once formed the person's body and reassemble them? Since body cells constantly are dying and being replaced, which cells will He call up for the reassembly? This is nonsense. The resurrection body is not the same body as before, although there will be similarities in appearance that make us 'recognizable'. The resurrection body will be a new creation, as far from the old as our past sins and moral corruptions will be from us.

 

Okay I feel like we should backtrack to the last constructive post, which was this one:

We can all agree that Jesus always has numerically one body. The big advance (from our side) has been the point that after the Resurrection, he no longer has a fleshy human body; which explains all the supernatural things he could do that no human body can. This is what we mean by his heavenly body. This is what we consume in the Sacrament by faith, when we consume the Sacrament by mouth. It is not human flesh, it has a supernatural substance, is infinitely divisible, can glow, pass through matter (a wall or a piece of bread!), can survive being next to God Himself, etc. It is not a crime to consume it, since it's not fleshy; we don't cast out its elements in the toilet; we don't bite into Jesus' human fleshy body, etc. All the concerns which the church fathers and reformers expressed, are addressed by this heavenly body doctrine.

Invictus came back to say, that to deny this body was human is Gnostic, because it denies to us human bodies after the resurrection.

My response is simple:
It's unwarranted to connect His resurrected body and the ones we get upon the resurrection. His is a special case. Regular people are not an incarnation of God Himself. Regular people will not be the eucharist of someone. Jesus' heavenly body is a special one-of-a-kind case, which we should not connect to the larger narrative of human resurrection.

So we only need to consider his heavenly body, and look at what Sacred Scripture says about it. The case Tiffy has been making is pretty much unbeatable. It would also help to see how the church fathers and divines have understood this. It pretty much lines up with Tiffy. In sum, Jesus' resurrected body is heavenly and in no way resembles the flesh that was born from Mary.

 

There have been a few since then, especially this one:

The biblical text says he does, quoting Jesus himself: "See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39).

If the shoe fits, by all means wear it, but I made no such statement. I was in fact the one (bizarrely) accused of Gnosticism:

His incarnation is a special case. In his resurrection he is the "firstborn from the dead" (Col. 1:18), for "when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2).

It is difficult to see how. The bulk of his case, with respect, is built upon one verse - 1 Cor. 15:50 - being taken out of context, and then being made to do a lot of interpretive work, including overriding the plain sense of statements in the Gospels themselves.

Indeed it would. The whole matter actually goes to the heart of what the Chalcedonian Definition was all about, so it is very important to be aware of the history of interpretation here. That is precisely why I made a somewhat lengthy post (see above) including multiple such quotations, starting with Pope Leo, that are relevant to the broader topic as well as to the particular interpretation of 1 Cor. 15:50. Curiously, neither of you have acknowledged its existence, let alone made any effort to engage with the statements of the theologians cited. I'm not sure what that's about, but I do know that if posts containing inconvenient citations will simply be ignored, there's no point to any further discussion.

I will say that it is clear at this point that the difference is not semantic: we genuinely disagree.

 

Ok so this then is the core of the discussion I think. You think that after the resurrection Jesus was still pretty much the same as before. Do you have any evidence to support that idea, apart from that verse which can be interpreted in our favor? Who are the big theologians that teach the belief you advance. Please answer this: does Jesus right now still have pimples, and bowel movements, where he has to take periodic breaks from the Trinity and visit the privy.

 

It seems a more satirical approach is in order. My dear @Stalwart, you’re a good guy but you could test the patience of a saint. Let’s try this one more time, shall we? Here goes…

No. No. And again, No. As I said above,

I am not, of course, denying that Jesus' post-Resurrection human body also had some abilities that our bodies do not. I think we have to be careful which of these abilities we ascribe to Divine power and which abilities we ascribe to an immortal human body. His Resurrection, in addition to being the means of our salvation, and his being the "firstborn from the dead", also manifests his Incarnation as one of the Divine Persons.
​

Everybody got that?

The ones I cited above, for starters, which you’re still ignoring: just a few guys named Leo, Gregory, Aquinas, and Luther. Leo even connects the issue with Monophysitism. (Hint: That’s not good for your case.) I’ll cite John Damascene (The Orthodox Faith, IV.1) here as well, just for fun:

After Christ was risen from the dead He laid aside all His passions, I mean His corruption or hunger or thirst or sleep or weariness or such like. For, although He did taste food after the resurrection Luke 24:43, yet He did not do so because it was a law of His nature (for He felt no hunger), but in the way of economy, in order that He might convince us of the reality of the resurrection, and that it was one and the same flesh which suffered and rose again. But He laid aside none of the divisions of His nature, neither body nor spirit, but possesses both the body and the soul intelligent and reasonable, volitional and energetic, and in this wise He sits at the right hand of the Father, using His will both as God and as man in behalf of our salvation, energising in His divine capacity to provide for and maintain and govern all things, and remembering in His human capacity the time He spent on earth, while all the time He both sees and knows that He is adored by all rational creation.
​

Next…

Ah, yes, at last, the question of all questions: does Jesus take a dump in heaven? Answer: I don’t know, I’ve never been there. Certainly there’s nothing inherently absurd about the idea. With all the eating and drinking He told his disciples we’d be doing in heaven, it’s hard to imagine there not being a celestial lavatory up there somewhere. I’m willing to bet the answer is a firm “yes” concerning the time He at all that fish with the disciples before his Ascension, but who can really say?

Well, this discussion has certainly taken a turn for the strange and unexpected. It’s felt like traveling to a different planet. You guys have gone from questioning current Anglican Eucharistic doctrine to outright denying the Resurrection and then topping it off with a failed reductio ad absurdum regarding Jesus’ stools (and not the ones with three legs). And this amidst some really terrible reading comprehension, which somehow made me a Gnostic of the body-affirming variety. Really amazing. I can’t imagine what any non-Anglican reading this must be thinking. Can we conclude this discussion now?
Thanks!

 

Hold on, before you close the thread on us, thinking you have explained sufficiently to us dullards, it might be worth remembering that the issue was whether Christ is present in the Eucharist 'Spiritually' or 'Physically'. i.e whether the bread is literally his flesh and the wine is literally his blood. Even though it still looks to everybody with good eyesight to be 'Physically' bread and 'Physically' wine.

I may be wrong but I sense that those who say it must be literally Christ's body and literally Christs blood have a vested interest in also saying there is NO CHANGE in his human body which renders it a 'Spiritual' one.

So how come the bread and wine of the Eucharist still have to look, feel and taste like bread and wine. Why do they not materialise to us as Jesus Christ did when he 'ate a little fish'.

g4151. πνεῦμα pneuma; from 4154; a current of air, i.e. breath (blast) or a breeze; by analogy or figuratively, a spirit, i.e. (human) the rational soul, (by implication) vital principle, mental disposition, etc., or (superhuman) an angel, demon, or (divine) God, Christ's spirit, the Holy Spirit: — ghost, life, spirit(-ual, -ually), mind. Compare 5590.
AV (385) - Spirit 111,
Holy Ghost 89,
Spirit (of God) 13, __ Thomas declared Jesus to be "My Lord and My God" so Jesus must have been present in spirit as God.
Spirit (of the Lord) 5,
(My) Spirit 3, __ Jesus actually said, "It is I myself" so he must have been present in spirit.
Spirit (of truth) 3,
Spirit (of Christ) 2, __ Jesus Christ was not saying that he was not actually there.
human (spirit) 49,
(evil) spirit 47, __ Jesus was concerned that his disciples should not think him an evil spirit, (πνεῦμα pneuma).
spirit (general) 26,
spirit 8,
(Jesus' own) spirit 6, __ The spirit of Jesus was certainly there.
(Jesus' own) ghost 2 __ But he pointed out that his resurrection 'body' was not a ghost.

The fact that Jesus said to his disciples that he was not (πνεῦμα pneuma) does not necessarily mean he was not appearing to them in a resurrection spiritual body but in an unchanged flesh and blood mutilated and re-invigorated one. He may have been impressing upon them the fact that he was not a ghost, a demon, an evil spirit, Jesus certainly was not implying that he was someone else, so he certainly meant that his own spirit was present with them. He certainly did not imply that his human spirit was not present with them.

Is it really NECESSARY to inflict cannibalism on the people of God by suggesting that we consume literally the flesh and blood of a man who died 2000 years ago. Especially when the original institution of this symbolic ceremony of remembrance of his death until his future coming again, couldn't possibly have literally been his physical flesh or physical blood at the time he said those words. It was merely a figure of speech, not a statement of scientific physics.

If there actually IS a real presence in the elements of the Eucharist, then it is the Spiritual body and Spiritual blood of Christ, for Christ is not divided among us, on the contrary we are united in Christ because we all partake of the one bread, which is, spiritually, Christ, however far apart our communities may be when we celebrate the Eucharist.
.