Unleavened/Leavened Bread for the Last Supper

Zoxsasi

I'd like to know one thing:

Why does the CoC use leavened bread (i.e. with yeast)  to be used as the Body of Christ, when Christ Himself used unleavened in the last supper?

Also, which Church uses which type of bread?

Thanks

peterfarrington

Hi

This is a good, short, non-argumentative paper, which explores the symbolism of leavened and unleavened bread in the Scriptures.

http://www.prosphora.org/page27.html

I think that it is a symbolic thing, and so the Armenians have used unleavened bread, wishing to stress that in Christ the leaven of sin was absent, while other traditions have used leavened bread to symbolise that Christ is the first-fruits, and the leaven in our humanity of life. It does not seem to me that any issue had been made with using leavened or unleavened bread until the times came when people started looking at any difference in practice as being dangerous. Roman Catholics do believe that Christ probably used unleavened bread at the Eucharist. Eastern Churches which are in communion with Rome are allowed to use leavened bread, so for the Roman Catholics it is a matter of symbolism not of dogma. Apparently some groups or fellowships within the Rman Catholic have been given permission to use leavened bread. There is obviously not a dogmatic objection to using leavened bread.

It would also seem, from my brief research, that the West also used leavened bread until at least the 8th-9th centuries, and later in other parts of the West. This is the same as the change from the universal use of baptism by immersion in the West to baptism by pouring in the middle ages.

Personally I do not object to the use of unleavened bread - this is not entirely the same as bread without naturally occurring airborne yeast. The problem I have is rather with the use of a wafer made from paste and given individually to a communicant so that the important spiritual and mystical symbol of sharing one bread is lost.

I hope that since the practice of the Roman Catholic Church in this matter is relatively late, and there is a long tradition of them using what we would see as a more appropriate form, they might come to restore the Orthodox practice in their own life. (This is not so much a matter of leavened v unleavened, but rather one loaf, whether leavened or unleavened, shared by all).

My local Episcopal priest uses wafers and says that it is because it is to difficult to manage the ablutions otherwise, but I have explained that millions of Orthodox manage the ablutions each liturgy, and have done for 2000 years. I think there had also been a sense in the West that having wafers made 'professionally' of the best wheat etc was better than some local rural priest making breads from whatever poor materials he had to hand, but again it seems to me that the Eastern Churches, and even the Western Churches for a millenia, had managed fine even without supermarkets selling fine white flour on every street corner. So perhaps the Roman Catholics could reconsider. 

I know that when I have attended Baptist communions in the past I have always been disappointed in some way to be offered a small little glass of juice rather than share from a cup, and a cube of bread from a sliced loaf. In my own Plymouth Brethren background it was a good thing that we always shared one loaf of bread and one cup of wine, though they missed much of the value of the eucharist considering it only a commemoration of our Lord's Death.

Father Peter