Receptionism

Receptionism is a position about where to locate the change. It holds that the bread and wine are not altered by consecration, that no presence attaches to them as objects, and that the faithful communicant nonetheless truly receives the body and blood of Christ in the act of eating and drinking. The elements are unchanged; the reception is real. Everything turns on the communicant and the faith brought to the table, and nothing turns on what is left over once the service has ended, which is why churches holding the position have historically kept no reservation of the sacrament and no adoration of the remaining elements.

The Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571 are where the position is usually located. Article 28 states that the body of Christ is given, taken and eaten in the supper only after a heavenly and spiritual manner, and that the means by which it is received is faith. Article 29 draws the consequence that gives the position its edge: the wicked, though they press the sacrament with their teeth, do not partake of Christ. That article is the clearest confessional line between the Anglican formularies and the Lutheran confessions, which hold that the unworthy receive the body and blood as truly as anyone else.

Receptionism sits close to the Reformed doctrine of a spiritual presence, and some writers treat it as a variety of that position rather than a separate one. Where the two are distinguished, the line drawn is that the Reformed account offers a mechanism, the Spirit lifting the communicant to Christ, while receptionism declines to offer one and confines itself to saying that the gift is given in the receiving.

Anglicanism has never settled which eucharistic position its formularies require, and receptionism is one contender rather than the official answer. The Prayer Book of 1552 added a rubric explaining that kneeling to receive implied no adoration of any corporal presence of the natural flesh and blood of Christ. It was dropped in 1559 and restored in altered wording in 1662, and the history of that single paragraph is a fair summary of the whole question. The words of administration tell the same story: the 1559 book joined the 1549 sentence, which speaks of the body of Christ, to the 1552 sentence, which speaks of taking and eating in remembrance. Holding both together was a deliberate act of comprehension rather than an accident of compilation.

Richard Hooker, writing in the 1590s, is regularly claimed for receptionism, because he turned attention away from the elements and towards the recipient and refused to define the mode of the presence. The Caroline divines of the following century pressed further towards an objective presence without accepting transubstantiation. From the 1830s the Tractarians and their Anglo-Catholic successors rejected receptionism outright and restored reservation and adoration in many parishes, so the argument runs inside one communion and not only between communions.

Where Thomas Cranmer himself stood is a live scholarly argument rather than a settled fact. Serious cases have been made for reading him as a receptionist, as a virtualist, and as holding the Reformed doctrine of a spiritual presence. The evidence is his own successive revisions of the rite, and they do not all point the same way.