“The Lord’s Supper”
The deeper I went into the history of Protestantism, the more complicated the familiar story became.
While the Protestant Reformation is often viewed as a clean, binary split between traditional Catholicism and a Scripture-focused Protestantism, the historical reality was a messy, fragmented evolution of competing theological movements.
The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was not one single movement. It was a collection of reform movements that challenged the authority, doctrines, and practices of the Western Roman Catholic Church. Martin Luther's 1517 challenge became one of the defining moments of the Reformation, but he was not the first person to question aspects of medieval Christianity. Centuries earlier, voices such as John Wycliffe and Jan Hus had already challenged elements of the prevailing ecclesiastical system.
Eventually, these reform movements produced a permanent division within Western Christianity.
Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Presbyterian, Anabaptist, and other Protestant traditions emerged from the Reformation and the movements that followed it. They did not all agree with one another, and they did not all reject the same things. Some remained much closer to the structure and worship of the medieval church than others.
The principles that later came to summarize broad Reformation convictions became known as the five solas:
Sola Scriptura — Scripture as the supreme authority for doctrine.
Sola Fide — Justification only by faith.
Sola Gratia — Salvation by grace.
Solus Christus — Christ as the basis and mediator of salvation.
Soli Deo Gloria — Glory to God alone.
These principles were enormously important, but they should not be treated as though every Protestant reformer signed one common manifesto called “The Five Solas.” They are a later summary of broad Reformation convictions, and Protestant traditions differed considerably in how they applied them.
The Catholic Church responded to the Protestant challenge through what is commonly called the Counter-Reformation, including the Council of Trent, which addressed disputed questions concerning Scripture and tradition, justification, and the sacraments.
And here is where the rabbit hole becomes interesting. The Reformation rejected much of the medieval Catholic system. But it did not reject everything. In fact, Protestantism retained far more of the Catholic inheritance than the simple Protestant-versus-Catholic narrative often suggests.
What Did Protestantism Actually Retain?
I continued following the Protestant movement backward—the Reformation certainly separated Protestantism from Roman Catholicism by challenging papal authority, disputing aspects of Catholic sacramental theology, and radically reshaping doctrines. However, separation did not necessarily result in complete departure.
The more closely I examined what remained, the more I asked what did Protestantism actually carry with them when they left?
Two practices especially caught my attention: the Lord’s Supper and Christian marriage. The Lord’s Supper stood out because of the expected obligation to take part in communion upon joining a church. When I first returned to a church environment, I would subconsciously avoid partaking. Consciously, I knew something felt off, even if I couldn’t articulate why I felt so uncomfortable. The only thing I knew for certain was that the ceremony itself did not align with what I understood it to be according to Scripture.
Neither the Lord’s Supper and marriage ceremonies is simply a Catholic invention. Both have roots that reach much further back. But the way these practices came to be understood, named, ritualized, and incorporated into Christian worship raises questions that takes me beyond the label Protestant and back to the Scriptures themselves.
From Passover to the Lord's Supper
Today, Christians commonly refer to the practice as Communion, the Eucharist, or the Lord's Supper. The terminology itself already reveals layers of theological development.
The New Testament does not present a ceremony called “Communion” in the way many churches practice it today. Paul refers to “the Lord's Supper” in 1 Corinthians 11. However, the Gospel accounts reveal that Messiah and the apostles were actively observing the Passover—gathering like everyone else at the time to eat the commanded Passover meal.
Passover was not something the Messiah needed to invent. It had already been commanded by His Father centuries prior. The Most High established the Passover as a perpetual memorial for Israel—with specific instructions on when and how to observe it—to remember their deliverance from Egypt. When the Messiah later sat at the Passover table and said, "Do this in remembrance of me," He was not inventing a brand-new church ceremony. He was infusing a deeper meaning into this already established, biblically commanded memorial. We cannot assume the Passover was abolished or replaced based solely on Paul’s reference to “the Lord’s Supper” in his letters. Passover was never an outdated ritual waiting to be swapped out for a church ceremony; it was—and is—a concrete, ongoing biblical observance.
That distinction becomes crucial because later Christianity steadily abandoned the context of a covenant observance, replacing it with the formal language of the Eucharist, Holy Communion, and sacramental theology. To understand how the Passover feast evolved into a highly stylized church ritual, one must look at the framework built by the early Church Fathers such as Ignatius of Antioch and Justin Martyr between the second and fourth centuries.
As the separation from Hebrew roots continued and grew within the Greco-Roman world, these early theologians began transforming Passover; shifting the focus away from a literal covenant and reframed the partaking of the bread (unleavened bread) and wine as "sacraments" carrying the literal or spiritual presence of Messiah.
At the same time, details like the washing of the feet—which occurred during Messiah’s final Passover meal in John 13—underwent a radical shift. Originally a profound, physical demonstration of humility and service among disciples, the Church Fathers eventually stylized it. Over the centuries, it was removed from the ordinary practice of believers and turned into a strict, symbolic ritual— they isolate the bread, wine, and foot-washing from a physical meal and surrounded them with elaborate church liturgy, the early establishment successfully engineered a completely new religious ceremony—one that looked vastly different from the biblical observance Messiah actually kept.
The Church of England, for example, refers to the practice interchangeably as Holy Communion, the Eucharist, the Mass, and the Lord's Supper and places it at the center of Anglican worship.
The Protestant Reformation sharply challenged Rome's understanding of the Eucharist, but the underlying sacramental framework remained intact. While the Anglican Articles of Religion explicitly rejected transubstantiation as unscriptural and dismissed the idea that Christ is repeatedly sacrificed during Mass, Protestantism simply adapted the theology rather than returning to the original biblical context.
For instance, the Anglican Catechism teaches that the physical bread and wine are outward signs while Christ’s body and blood are the inward reality received through faith. The debate, then, was never about whether Christians should remember the Messiah’s death. The real issue is whether this heavily modified Protestant framework actually reflects what was established in Scripture, or if it is just a reformed version of a man-made tradition.
The institutional control over the ritual remained entirely unbroken. While the Reformers stripped away the Latin liturgy, the gilded altars, and the word Mass, they kept the practice confined within the four walls of the church building and strictly tethered to the oversight of ordained clergy. Instead of returning to the intimate, family-centered, and community-wide setting of a literal Passover meal, Protestantism merely repackaged the traditional Catholic structure into a smaller, symbolic token. Believers were still expected to file down a church aisle, or sit quietly in a pew, to receive a wafer-sized piece of bread and a tiny sip of wine or juice from the hands of a church official.
Furthermore, this adaptation completely stripped the event of its physical substance as an actual feast dinner. By turning the "supper" into an individualistic moment of psychological reflection, Protestant practices completely divorced the bread and cup from a shared table of fellowship. The washing of the feet—already marginalized by the early Church Fathers—was largely discarded or treated as an obsolete footnote by most Protestant denominations. What survived the Reformation was not the biblically commanded Passover of the Most High, but a sanitized, institutionalized ritual that prioritizes church membership and denominational loyalty over the original covenantal context.
“‘And this day shall become to you a remembrance. And you shall celebrate it as a festival to יהוה throughout your generations – celebrate it as a festival, an everlasting law.”
