“After God has received us once into His own family (that He may have us in the place not only of servants, but of sons that He may fulfill the parts of our best Father, solicitous about His offspring), He also immediately receives us to be nourished in the course of life that He may from time to time conserve and renew the life which He once gave until we reach heavenly immortality.
And not content with this (a pledge having been given), He wished to assure us of this liberality. For this purpose He gave another sacrament to His church through His only begotten Son, for a spiritual feast, where Christ testifies that He is the living bread by which our souls are fed unto a true and blessed immortality.
Because this mystery of the secret communion of Christ with us is incomprehensible to our minds, He exhibits its figure and image in visible signs best adopted to our capacity; yea, by giving pledges and marks He makes it as certain to us as if we saw it with our eyes.
Therefore, as by baptism, the sacrament of our initiation and entrance into the church, He wished to adumbrate our regeneration, so the holy Supper seals our spiritual nourishment and support by Christ, in memory of His death, in which He prepared for us the food of life by which we are sustained.
Threefold end: (1) the commemoration of the death of Christ.
Therefore, the end of this whole institution can be threefold. (1) A commemoration of Christ and of His death:
“This do in remembrance of me” (Lk. 22:19);
“As often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do show the Lord’s death till he come” (1 Cor. 11:26).
This commemoration is not only theoretical, but also practical—of things which Christ did and suffered for us, to celebrate with grateful minds the immense love of Christ, who did not refuse to suffer a dreadful death for us and to pour out his blood, as in the old Passover (which was a memorial of deliverance from Egyptian bondage) they celebrated the wonderful blessing received from God.
He wished to give the most appropriate symbol of this in the broken bread and the poured-out wine; and not only broken and poured out, but distributed to us that even from this it might be evident that all this was designed and obtained for us and that Christ offered Himself as a victim for the expiation of our sins for no other end than that He might afterwards give himself to us for food, upon which we may feed and be supported unto eternal life.
2. Our union with Christ and participation in His benefits.
(2) Our union with Christ and communion in His benefits, which are represented to us best by eating and drinking, as the food eaten by us is most intimately united with our nature and coalesces into one with it. Hence the partaking of the symbols is called the “communion of the body and blood of Christ” (1 Cor. 10:16) and Christ is said “to dwell in us, and we in Him” (Jn. 6:56). And He thus dwells and is united with us that we can call ours whatever is His.
3. The certainty of remission of sins and eternal salvation.
(3) Hence follows the certainty of remission of sins (Mt. 26:28) and of eternal salvation obtained for us by the death of Christ. This can no more fail us than the merit of His death and the efficacy of His Spirit can be void and fruitless.”
–Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, ed. James T. Dennison Jr., trans. George Musgrave Giger, vol. 3 (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1992–1997), 3: 428-429.
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