The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

Tertullian’s application of the word “Figure” to the Lord’s Supper.
No passage in any of the Fathers asserts that the elements in the
Supper are merely signs or symbols. The passages of TERTULLIAN, in
which the word "figure" is applied to the Lord's Supper, have been the
subject of much controversy. In the first of these passages, 427 he is
speaking of the prophecies concerning Christ. He first urges Psalm xcvi.
10, according to a reading peculiar to some of the Greek writers, of which
Justin also makes mention: "The Lord hath reigned from the wood." This
"wood," says Tertullian, is "the wood of the cross." "This wood," he
continues, "Jeremiah prophesies of (xi. 9)--that the Jews should say,
'Come, let us put wood upon His bread;' undoubtedly meaning upon His
body. For so did God reveal even in the Gospel, which you receive as
genuine, calling bread His body; so that, hence, already you may
understand that He assigned to bread the figura of His body, whose body
the prophet had figurated upon bread, of old, the Lord himself meaning in
after time to explain the mystery." In this passage nothing seems to us
more clearly Tertullian's train of reasoning than this: Jeremiah meant by
"wood" the cross, by "bread" Christ's body. Christ, by calling "bread" His
body, gave the key to Jeremiah's meaning. This bread is the figura, the
real thing which Jeremiah figurated, or couched under a figura; and this
bread is that figure (now opened), because this bread is my body. Jeremiah
calls Christ's true body, which was to have the cross laid upon it, bread.
Why? Because, replies Tertullian, there was to be a bread which should be
Christ's true body. Jeremiah calls that bread which was true body--and
Christ opens the mystery by declaring that there is a bread, to wit, the
Encharistic bread--which is His true body, "assigning to bread the figura
of His body," as the prophet before had assigned to His body the figura of
bread. He identifies the panis of the prophet with the panis of the
Communion; and, by consequence, as the panis of the prophet is really the
body which was crucified, so is the panis of the Communion really the
body which was crucified. That the Calvinistic interpretation is impossible,
is very clear. As Tertullian reasons, if the panis in
427 Adv. Marcion, III, XIX.