It was natural for early Christians to think of the Eucharist as a sacrifice. The fulfillment of prophecy demanded a solemn Christian offering, and the rite itself was wrapped up in the sacrificial atmosphere with which Our Lord invested the Last Supper. The words of institution, ‘Do this’ (touto poieite), must have been charged with sacrificial overtones for second-century ears; Justin at any rate understood them to mean, ‘Offer this.’ . . . The bread and wine, moreover, are offered ‘for a memorial (eis anamnasin) of the passion,’ a phrase which in view of his identification of them with the Lord’s body and blood implies much more than an act of purely spiritual recollection.
[J.N.D. Kelly, *Early Christian Doctrines, 5th , revised ed., 1977, p. 196]
“Ignatius roundly declares that . . . The bread is the flesh of Jesus, the cup His blood. Clearly he intends this realism to be taken strictly, for he makes it the basis of his argument against the Docetists’ denial of the reality of Christ’s body. . . . Irenaeus teaches that the bread and wine are really the Lord’s body and blood. His witness is, indeed, all the more impressive because he produces it quite incidentally while refuting the Gnostic and Docetic rejection of the Lord’s real humanity.”
[J.N.D. Kelly, *Early Christian Doctrines, 5th , revised ed., 1977, pp. 197-98]
In the third century the early Christian identification of the eucharistic bread and wine with the Lord’s body and blood continued unchanged, although a difference of approach can be detected in East and West. The outline, too, of a more considered theology of the eucharistic sacrifice begins to appear.
In the West the equation of the consecrated elements with the body and blood was quite straightforward, although die fact that the presence is sacramental was never forgotten. Hippolytus speaks of ‘the body and the blood’ (through which the Church is saved, and Tertullian regularly describes the bread as ‘the Lord’s body’. The converted pagan, he remarks, ‘feeds on the richness of the Lord’s body, that is, on the eucharist.’ (De Pud. 9) The realism of his theology comes to light in the argument, ( De res. carn. 8) based on the intimate relation of body and soul, that just as in baptism the body is washed with water so that the soul may be cleansed, so in the eucharist ‘the flesh feeds on Christ’s body and blood so that the soul may be filled with God.’ Clearly his assumption is that the Saviour’s body and blood are as real as the baptismal water.
[J.N.D. Kelly, *Early Christian Doctrines, 5th , revised ed., 1977, p. 211]
Occasionally these writers use language which has been held to imply that, for all its realist sound, their use of the terms ‘body’ and ‘blood’ may after all be merely symbolical. Tertullian, for example, refers (e.g., Marc. 3,19; 4,40) to the bread as ‘a figure’ (figura) of Christ’s body, and once speaks (Ibid., 1,14) of ‘the bread by which He represents (repraesentat) His very body’. Yet we should be cautious about interpreting such expressions in a modern fashion. According to ancient modes of thought a mysterious relationship existed between the thing symbolized and its symbol, figure or type; the symbol in some sense was the thing symbolized. Again, the verb repraesentare, in Tertullian’s vocabulary (Ibid., 4,22; de monog. 10), retained its original significance of ‘to make present.’ All that his language really suggests is that, while accepting the equation of the elements with the body and blood, he remains conscious of the sacramental distinction between them. In fact, he is trying, with the aid of the concept of figura, to rationalize to himself the apparent contradiction between (a) the dogma that the elements are now Christ’s body and blood, and (b) the empirical fact that for sensation they remain bread and wine. Similarly, when Cyprian states (Ep. 62,13; cf. 63,2) that ‘in the wine Christ’s blood is shown’ (in vino vero ostendi sanguinem Christi), we should recall that in the context he is arguing against heretics who willfully use water instead of wine at the eucharist. In choosing the term ‘is shown’, he is not hinting that the wine merely symbolizes the sacred blood. His point is simply that wine is an essential ingredient of the eucharist, since numerous Old Testament texts point to it as a type of the precious blood. It is significant that only a few lines above (Ibid., 63,11) he had spoken of ‘drinking the Lord’s blood.’
[J.N.D. Kelly, *Early Christian Doctrines, 5th , revised ed., 1977, pp. 212-13]
Eucharistic teaching [at the beginning of the period from Nicea to Chalcedon], it should be understood at the outset, was in general unquestioningly realist, i.e., the consecrated bread and wine were taken to be, and were treated and designated as, the Saviour’s body and blood. Among theologians, however, this identity was represented in our period in at least two different ways . . . . In the first place, the figurative or symbolic view, which stressed the distinction between the visible elements and the reality they represented, still claimed a measure of support. . . . Secondly, however, a new and increasingly potent tendency becomes observable to explain the identity as being the result of an actual change or conversion in the bread and wine. . . . It must not be supposed, of course, that this ‘symbolical’ language implied that the bread and wine were regarded as mere pointers to, or tokens of, absent realities. Rather they were accepted as signs of realities which were somehow actually present though apprehended by faith alone.
[J.N.D. Kelly, *Early Christian Doctrines, 5th , revised ed., 1977, pp. 440-442]
