In 1529 at a Castle in Marburg, Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli debated the Eucharist. Luther wished to maintain the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine, and Zwingli wanted to avoid cannibalistic superstitions. In some ways they talked past each other, but for most of the Protestant tradition, Zwingli's views have won out. Few Protestants speak of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The bread and wine are mere symbols of remembrance and ecclesial community.

The difficulty the Protestant church now faces today, is what difference there is between its symbols and say, the M from McDonalds or the L from Lexus or the N from Nordstroms. Are the symbols of the Protestant church just some of many in a vast network of cultural simulacra?

It seems to me Jesus spoke directly to this confusion in John's account of the feeding of the five thousand. The crowd responds to Jesus's miracle with "supersize me." They wanted Jesus to be the McDonaldization of their religious tradition, feeding their stomaches. Jesus responds with one of John's many "I am" statements. "I am the bread of life." In essence, Jesus tells them that there is a hole within them, a desire so empty, so profound and pervasive, that no bread can fulfil it. They need a restoration to wholeness that goes well beyond mere bread alone. They needed the very presence of Christ himself to fill them and redeem them.

In Luther's debate with Zwingli, he kept drawing attention to Christ's words at the last supper, "This is my body." For Luther, the is in that statement means something more than a mere symbolic representation. There is a call to remember Christ symbolically, but something more than a symbol is going on here. This is not mere bread and wine for the disciples. This is Christ himself. At one point, Luther wrote Jesus's words in chalk upon the table he and Zwingli were debating over. Eventually Luther became so exasperated with Zwingli he  would just point to the word "is" whenever Zwingli would make his arguments.

Do Christians believe they are eating Christ literally? No. Even the documents of Vatican II teach that the presence of Christ in the Eucharistic event is a mystery. But within this mystery is an ontological necessity for our times today. It is not enough to symbolize Christ in bread and wine. We today are ready to return to Christ's teaching at the feeding of the five thousand for the hunger inside us, is ultimately an ontological one, a lack so pervasive the nature of our very existence is at stake.

For me, it seems that much of my work over the past four years in my doctoral research has been an attempt to re-carve Luther's "is" back onto the table. It is vital that Protestant Christians in particular learn to affirm the real presence of Christ in more than just the preached Word, or the sung hymns. It is not enough to say that God inhabits the praises of his people, or that God spoke to us through the sermon. We must learn to articulate more clearly what we mean by this presence, and articulate how it is that we can say that Christ can be present for us in the utter mystery of the Eucharist. The "is" in Jesus's statement, "this is my body," is more than a metaphor and it goes beyond the simulacra. This, it seems to me, is a deeply Protestant notion rooted in some of the Reformation's seminal thinkers. It is as relevant to us today as it was at that Castle in Marburg so many centuries ago.