“Impanation” (literally in-bread-ing) and its twin term “invination” (in-wine-ing) seem to have come into circulation at the time of the Protestant Reformation, though I don’t know in which country or in which language they were first coined. The idea sounds to me like a copout. Rather than affirm either transubstantiation (like the Catholics) or consubstantiation (like the Lutherans), someone must have said something like, “We need a term that will satisfactorily convey our belief that the body and blood of the Lord are present in the species of the Eucharist, without going into details about how they got there. That’s a dispute we don’t need to get involved in.”
Pusey’s scathing remark is worth recalling:
These His impanators the Lord Jesus slays with the Word of His mouth, when … He says, “This is My Body.” He does not say, “In this My Body lieth hid.”
