Assurances have been given that the efficacy of Holy Communion is not impaired by receiving one kind only. The official position of the Church of England, given in the archbishops' letter of 22nd July, reads, "While communion in both kinds is the norm in the Church of England in faithfulness to Christ's institution, when it is received only in one kind the fullness of the Sacrament is received none the less" (my emphasis).

The subject of communion in one kind, as opposed to two, has been a matter of debate for many centuries. Known as the doctrine of Concomitance, it is held that the whole of Christ is present under the appearance of bread and also under the appearance of wine. Eating the bread or drinking the wine, it is maintained, is as efficacious as imbibing both during the same Holy Communion service.

Earlier I asked on what precise biblical authority or indeed the authority of the Church this belief is held to be true. The above statement in the archbishops' letter deserves to be rigorously scrutinised and from this writer's viewpoint, challenged for contravening the Word of Scripture and the authority of the Church.

We are of course in the realm of Transubstantiation, the belief that at the point of consecration of the elements in the Holy Communion service, the substances of bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood of Christ, their appearances remaining as before. Essentially, this is a Roman Catholic belief that goes back to the time of the eleventh century when Hildebert de Savardin, Archbishop of Tours, first used the term to describe this change. The doctrine of Transubstantiation has since then been upheld many times by the Roman Catholic Church, not least by the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century.

The argument runs that during the first consecration the bread is transubstantiated into the substance of the whole of the Lord - his body, his blood, his soul, his personality and his divine nature. During the second consecration the wine is transubstantiated into his blood, his body, his soul, his personality and his divine nature. The concept of Concomitance maintains that because Christ is indivisible, his body cannot be separated from his blood or from his other human and divine attributes. Nor can his blood be separated from his body or from his other human and divine attributes. Thus he is said to be wholly present in each kind, bread and wine.

There seems little doubt that during the Middle Ages when the Roman Church withdrew offering the chalice to lay people, the doctrine of Concomitance, the inception of which closely followed that of the doctrine of Transubstantiation and which in turn depended on the latter doctrine, was developed to justify the administration of Holy Communion in one kind only.

At the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century the Fathers of the Church of England were determined to restore the chalice to lay people. Not least this was because they believed that biblical imperatives dictated that the Lord was encountered in the actual process of eating and drinking the elements. Another reason was that they wanted to indicate that the priests did not have a monopoly in deciding who could receive the wine and who could not.

Thus it was that in 1563, largely due to Archbishop Parker, that Article XXX was inserted into the Thirty Nine Articles, thereby becoming the bedrock on which the Church of England is governed. Entitled "Of both kinds", it states, "The cup of the Lord is not to be denied to the lay people: for both the parts of the Lord's sacrament, by Christ's ordinance and commandment, ought to be ministered to all Christian men alike".

Before we can examine the problem of Concomitance directly, we must rehearse the reasons why the Reformation Church rejected the doctrine of Transubstantiation. Article XXVIII ("Of the Lord's Supper") gives four reasons, viz: 1. It cannot be proved by Scripture, 2. It is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, 3. It overthrows the nature of a sacrament, and 4. It has given occasion to many superstitions.

In the context of Concomitance the third of the above four reasons is particularly relevant and it is this one that we shall now address. Why precisely does Transubstantiation overthrow the nature of a sacrament?

If we invoke the definition of a sacrament used in the Prayer Book Catechism namely "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given to us", then in Holy Communion the outward sign of course is the bread and wine and the inward spiritual grace the Body and Blood taken and received by the faithful.

The theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (developed from Aristotelian philosophy and endorsed at the RC Council of Trent) maintained that any object had to be understood in terms of its "substance" and its "accidents" (alternatively called "species"). The substance of an object is that which makes it what it really is. The accidents of the same object are those properties or characteristics that can be recognised through our senses.

Thus if we take bread as an example, what do we find? A piece of bread comes in many forms, depending on its colour, taste, shape, size etc., these being its accidents or properties. However the substance of bread is not characterised by any one or group of accidents and thus cannot be perceived by the senses. We therefore have to look elsewhere (i.e. outside our immediate sensory perception) in order to establish precisely what the substance of bread is.

In the case of bread which is an example of a material object, its essential substance might well be identified in terms of its basic chemico/physical constituency of atoms and molecules, a constituency which we cannot directly comprehend through our senses. Other material objects might require their individual substances to be defined mathematically. When we consider non-material objects, to know what their substances really are we might well have to find other determining criteria such as values, opportunities of experience, etc.

Before the time of St. Thomas Aquinas, defenders of Transubstantiation had to wrestle with the following problem: How was it possible for the Risen Body of Christ, now in Heaven, to enter and replace the transubstantiated bread and wine at a service of Holy Communion? It did not make sense for the Risen Body of our Lord to be in two places at once.

The Thomist' theory of Transubstantiation provides a clever and compelling explanation of how this difficulty can be overcome. At consecration the substance of bread is completely changed into the substance of Christ's Risen Body. However, all the accidents of the bread (i.e. its sensory appearances) remain unchanged - they remain exactly as they were before the act of consecration. At the same time, the accidents of Christ's Risen Body remain where they always were, i.e. in Heaven. What is on the altar, it is maintained, is the Real (substantial) Body of the Lord. The theory avoids the contradiction of the Body supposedly being in two places at the same time.

St. Thomas was careful to insist that the Body and Blood of the Lord are conjointly present in both kinds of sacrament, but because they are substantial and not accidental they are invisible and can only be conceptualised through faith.

The theory has an additional advantage. Distaste by worshippers of imbibing the Lord's glorified Body and Blood is avoided since what they taste is ordinary bread and wine.

At the Council of Trent (1545 to 1563), the doctrine of Transubstantiation was formally promulgated. Almost immediately afterwards and in response, the reformers of the Church of England led by Parker inserted into Article XXVIII the phrase that Transubstantiation overthrew the nature of a sacrament. They took this view for two main reasons. The first was that if the bread and wine after consecration cease to be bread and wine and become something different i.e. the Body and Blood of the Lord, then the two external or sensible signs (the accidents of bread and wine) of the sacrament cease to be sacramental signs. We are bidden to disbelieve our senses. What we see is not what is there. The signs become a guise which hides, rather than proclaims, the sacramental reality of grace imparted to us. The substantial reality of the Body and Blood of Christ is therefore very different from what we can see in the accidents of bread and wine.

A second difficulty which St. Thomas himself conceded, relates to the passage through the worshipper's body of the sacramental elements. In as many words he said that the consecrated material in the process of ingesting or swallowing had ceased to be the Body of Christ, in effect refuting his own theory of Transubstantiation and coming close to what most Anglicans believe.

A more recent objection to the Thomist theory pointed out by Bishop Thirlwell in 1869 runs on these lines: If a substance and its accidents are correlatives (have a direct relationship with each other), then "it can no more be possible for the accidents to exist without the substance than the parts without the whole". We might add that although philosophically it might be possible to conceive of a substance and its accidents to exist apart from each other, scientifically this cannot be. The accidents of bread and wine must originate from their appropriate substances.

Our discussion now brings us directly to the doctrine of Concomitance, and why like that of Transubstantiation it is unacceptable in the Church of England.

The crux of the whole matter, touched on earlier in this article, is whether when communion is received in one kind only, the fullness of the sacrament considered as a whole is received none the less. We have been assured in the archbishops' letter that the efficacy of Holy Communion is not impaired. But is this true?

As outlined above, the doctrine of Transubstantiation requires that the substance of Christ in his whole form enters both kinds - bread and wine - at the times of the two consecrations. Therefore, so the argument goes, to receive one kind is as efficacious as to receive two. That is true if - and it is a big "if" - the doctrine of Transubstantiation is to be believed. But as we have indicated, there are several important reasons why, historically, the Church of England has declined to accept it, and by derivation from it, the doctrine of Concomitance.

The Bible could not be more explicit over re-enactments of the Lord's Supper. St. Paul states unequivocally that we should "eat this bread and drink the cup" (I Cor. XI:26 NRSV). His words concerning Jesus' command do not permit any deviation and they do not carry any qualification as to the circumstances when one kind may be administered, e.g. at a time of illness. To drink the wine as well as eat the bread at the Lord's Supper must be accepted, in modern parlance, as part of a single package.

In Article XX ("Of the authority of the Church") it is ruled that "it is not lawful for the Church to ordain anything that is contrary to God's Word written". The reforming Fathers of the Church of England, in the face of much opposition in the middle years of the sixteenth century, were determined to restore the chalice to English lay people, and in this important respect they were successful.

The two incumbent archbishops, on the advice of a largely non-Christian and secular government, have lamely conceded that because of a mild incursion of swine flu, use of the chalice should be suspended for the time being. Their action must be seen as unscriptural and completely at variance with the law of the Church as reflected in the Thirty Nine Articles.

---Roland W. Morant is a cradle Anglican who has spent his professional life as a teacher, and latterly as a principal lecturer in education in a college of higher education, training students as teachers and running in-service degree courses.