What is transubstantiation and is it a biblical or Church teaching?

Answer 1

Transubstantiation is a teaching of the Catholic Church. According to the Catholic Church, transubstantiation is the change of substance by which the bread and the wine offered in the sacrifice of the sacrament of the Eucharist during the Mass become, in reality, the Body and Blood of Jesus the Christ. This is not Biblical teaching.

Answer 2

Transubstantiation is the belief (and teaching of the Catholic church) that the bread and the wine in the Eucharist, become, in reality, the body and blood of Jesus the Christ. It is not biblical. When Jesus said, "This is my body … this is my blood", he didn't mean it literally, anymore than when he said, "I am the door" or "I am the vine", etc.

Answer 3

Catholic Answer

First of all, you must understand that the only thing that Our Blessed Lord left to us was the Church, and He entrusted His entire revelation to It to be taught to the people. Thus there is no other teaching than the Church teaching, of which The Bible is one part of that, howbeit, it was not promulgated as such until A.D. 382 by Pope Damasus I at the Council of rome.

Thus transubstantion - the principle - is a teaching of Christ's Church, and has been a constant teaching since the first century, howbeit the word and the explanation did not come into common use until the 11th and 12th centuries. St. Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th century, gave the most comprehensive explanation of this mystery.

And, of course, the concept was right there in the Bible - read the 6th chapter of St. John's Gospel carefully, and not how St. John carefully presents this concept beginning with the multiplication of loaves, and then gets into Our Blessed Lord's insistence on this teaching - even at the loss of His disciples - that's how important it is. Of course the Greek is much more explicit than our English Bibles as the verb that Our Blessed Lord uses to say "eat my Body", He changes to a verb used for an animal "gnawing" on a bone or such.

The concept itself is not the easiest thing to understand. Everything that we see is composed of two things (this is the philosophical way of defining things): substance and accident. Look at water, you can have steam, liquid water, ice, or snow. They are all the same "thing" - H20, but they certainly look different. If we didn't know better we would think that there were four different things. The H2O is "water", that is the "substance". The "accidents" are cold, hard, liquid, soft, vaporous, etc. In other words, you can change the accidents but the substance remains the same.

Another example might be wood, you could have a tree, a floor, or a pile of ashes. Same thing, they are all "wood", but with different accidents.

But in all the things we can look at in the world, the accidents can and do change, but the substance remains the same. The Eucharist is entirely the other way around, the "accidents": looks and tastes like bread - remain the same, BUT the entire substance, what it is, changes. So even though to every sense we have, even with sophisticated instruments, everything we can see, touch, etc. it remains bread; but the entire substance of bread has, through a miracle of God, changed into the substance of Jesus Christ, His Body, and Soul, His Humanity, and Divinity, are all present where previously bread had been present.

This is a great mystery, but, hey, God is all powerful, and so far beyond us as to be incomprehensible. But He condescended to become human so that we could comprehend Him. The fact that He also condescended to appear under the appearance of bread is no less a miracle than that he came as a human being.

from The Catechism of the Catholic Church, second edition, English translation 1994

1375 It is by the conversion of the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood that Christ becomes present in this sacrament. The Church Fathers strongly affirmed the faith of the Church in the efficacy of the Word of Christ and of the action of the Holy Spirit to bring about this conversion. Thus St. John Crysostom declares:

It is not man that causes the things offered to become the Body and Blood of Christ, but he who was crucified for us, Christ himself. The priest, in the role of Christ, pronounces these words, but their power and grace are God’s. This is my body, he says. The word transforms the things offered. (St. John Chyrsostom, pro. Jud. 1:5: J. P. Migne, ed., Patrologia Graeca {Paris, 1857-1866} 49, 380)

And St. Ambrose says about this conversion:

Be convinced that this is not what nature has formed, but what the blessing has consecrated. The power of blessing prevails over that of nature, because by the blessing nature itself is changed . . . Could not Christ’s word, which can make from nothing what did not exist, change existing things into they were not before? It is no less a feat to give things their original nature than to change their nature. (St. Ambrose, De myst. 9, 50; 52: J. P. Migne, ed., Patrologia Latina {Paris: 1841-1855} 16, 405-407