Warfield on The Sacrificial Feast

Reformed Evangelicals are clear that the Lord's Supper is not a propitiatory sacrifice, but many of the best writers are willing to use language of sacrifice to speak of the Supper.

Here is B. B. Warfield on the fundamental significance of the Lord's Supper as a perpetual sacrificial Passover feast (with a new symbol of Christ, the True Passover Lamb). He's more nuanced than we might expect and gives a positive account of the meal, rather than merely anti-Papist polemic:

All who partake of this bread and wine, the appointed symbols of his body and blood, therefore, are symbolically partaking of the victim offered on the altar of the cross, and are by this act professing themselves offerers of the sacrifice and seeking to become benificiaries of it. This is the fundamental significance of the Lord’s Supper. Whenever the Lord’s Supper is spread before us we are invited to take our place at the sacrificial feast, the substance of which is the flesh and blood of the victim which has been sacrificed once for all at Calvary; and as we eat of these in their symbols, we are – certainly not repeating his sacrifice, nor yet prolonging it – but continuing that solemn festival upon it instituted by Christ, by which we testify our “participation in the altar” and claim our part in the benefits bought by the offering immolated on it. The sacrificial feast is not the sacrifice, in the sense of the thing offered, that is eaten in it: and therefore it is presuppositive of the sacrifice in the sense of the act of offering and implies that this offering has already been performed. The Lord’s Supper as a sacrificial feast is accordingly not the sacrifice, that is, the act of offering up Christ’s body and blood: it is however, the sacrifice, that is the body and blood of Christ that were offered, which is eaten in it: and therefore it is presuppositive of the sacrifice as an act of offering and implies that this act has already been performed once for all.

'The Fundamental Significance of the Lord’s Supper' in Warfield, B. B., Selected Shorter Writings, ed. Meeter, John E., vol 1, (Nutley, NJ, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1970), p336f