Can someone please explain the difference between real presence and transubstantiation? The idiots version please!
The real presence is just what Christians traditionally believe about Christ being present in the eucharist. Anglicans, Lutherans, Catholics and others. From what I recall transubstantiation was a theory devised in the Middle Ages to argue how Christ might be present physically in a Eucharist wafer that still looks like a wafer.
Council of Trent (https://history.hanover.edu/texts/trent/ct13.html) On Transubstantiation. And because that Christ, our Redeemer, declared that which He offered under the species of bread to be truly His own body, therefore has it ever been a firm belief in the Church of God, and this holy Synod doth now declare it anew, that, by the consecration of the bread and of the wine, a conversion is made of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of His blood; which conversion is, by the holy Catholic Church, suitably and properly called Transubstantiation. This is the point at issue where to nature of the real presence was defined by the Council of Trent to be a physical transformation. The understanding expressed in the 39 articles - and often described as Real Presence - is to accept the presence of Christ in the Holy Sacrament in a real way, where that reality is not required to be physical. Is spiritual any less real than physical? Is physical any more real than Spiritual? Where do we find our realities? In many ways this position is much more atune to the the Orthodox and to the Lutheran Position than it is to the Roman position. The Lutherans speak of consubstantiation when bread and wine remain bread and wine yet acquire another level of reality, namely flesh and blood, and these two states co-exist. The Orthodox simply speak of Flesh and Blood and understand that all of it is ineffable, a holy mystery, and refuse to rule in our out the understanding of the Council of Trent, they simply have no position on it. The position taken in the 39 is to suggest that the position of the Council of Trent overturns the nature of a sacrament. The essence of that nature is that through the physical we encounter that which is not physical. Where do we find our realities?
I understand respect and accept that, in fact anything less would be unthinkable in your position. None the less, I feel I have answered the question you posed, on the understanding that none of us are idiots.