[John 6:53] has been considered by
some a clear intimation that all which had been spoken before was to be
understood in the most common metonymical sense. They will have it that the
whole of this most solemn representation, in which, over and over again, the
necessity of eating Christ’s flesh and drinking his blood is urged, as that
without which men can have no life—was intended only to bewilder the confound
the carnal Jews; while the true meaning of it comes simply to this, that
we must be joined to the Saviour, by a believing reception of his doctrine, or
a simply mental correspondence with him at most in the power of his sufferings
and death. But surely no exegesis could well be more poor and flat than this.
It belongs itself emphatically to that very carnalism, to which it affects to
be in its own way so vastly superior; for it sticks plainly in the self-same
abstraction, which rendered it so difficult for the Jews of Capernaum to
understand our Saviour, and by which the things of the Spirit so generally are
made to appear foolishness to the mere understanding as such. The imagination that
Christ by the words, The flesh profiteth nothing, intended simply to
intimate that his flesh or body could do no good; and that he must be
understood therefore to refer in what he had said to a purely moral
communication with his person, must be pronounced well nigh as crass at the
notion of an actual moral manducation of his material flesh itself. Spirit and
flesh here are opposed in a quite different and far deeper sense. The one
represents the sphere of mere nature as embraced in the fallen life of Adam,
soul, body, and all. The other designates the higher order of existence of
which Christ himself is in the principle (πνευμα ζωοποιουν), and which reaches out from him
by the Spirit, as a new divine creation, over the whole range of our being. It
is this that quickenth or giveth life both to soul and body. The flesh on the
other hand, whether as soul or body, profiteth nothing.
The bearing of all this on the
question of the eucharist must be at once evident to every reflecting mind. The
passages before us has no direct reference to this ordinance, as it was
afterwards to be instituted. It refers to the Christian life in general. But
very plainly the idea here exhibited, is the same that is presented to us in
the institution of the Lord’s Supper under a different form. If such a view as
we have now taken of the extra-sacramental life of the believer, on the ground
of the representation here made by Christ himself, be admitted with any clear
and full conviction, it will not be possible to resist the impression, that the
sacrament itself can involve, to say the least, nothing less. Those on the
other hand who deny a real communication with Christ’s person in the eucharist,
must in the nature of the case deny also a real extra-sacramental union with
him to the same extent. This does not imply that the communion of the sacrament
and the general Christian life, are at least simply the same thing. It comes to
this only , that the order of life comprehended in the two cases is the same. A
man lives by his food, in the same sense in which his life holds as life,
and not in some different sense. So here, if the new life of the Christian be
at last a moral relation only to the Saviour, the power of the sacrament must
be of course of the same order. But if this new life stand in the form of a
real incorporation with the person of the Redeemer, the power of the sacrament cannot
hold in the form of mere good thoughts and good feelings. It must involve too a
real participation, under its own form, in Christ’s life. (John
Williamson Nevin, The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or
Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist [Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott
& Co., 1846], 242-43)
