A History of the Reformation (Vol. 2 of 2)

by Thomas M. Lindsay

The real theological difference after all did not amount to so much as is generally said. Zwingli’s doctrine of the Holy Supper was not the crude theory of Carlstadt; and Luther might have seen this if he had only fairly examined it. The opposed views were, in fact, complementary, and the pronounced ideas of each were implicitly, though not expressly, held by the other. Luther and Zwingli approached the subject from two different points of view, and in debate they neither understood nor were exactly facing each other.

The whole Christian Church, during all the centuries, has found three great ideas embodied in the Sacrament of the Holy Supper, and all three have express reference to the death of the Saviour on the Cross for His people. The thoughts are Proclamation, Commemoration, and Participation or Communion. In the Supper, believers proclaim the death and what it means; they commemorate the Sacrifice; and they partake in or have communion with the crucified Christ, who is also the Risen Saviour. The mediæval Church had insisted that this sacramental union with Christ was in the hands of the priesthood to give or to withhold. Duly ordained priests, and they alone, could bring the worshippers into such a relation with Christ as would make the Sacramental participation a possible thing: and out of this claim had grown the mediæval theory of Transubstantiation. It had also divided the Sacrament of the Supper into two distinct rites (the phrase is not too strong)—the Mass and the Eucharist—the one connecting itself instinctively with the commemoration and the other with the participation.

Protestants united in denying the special priestly miracle needed to bring Christ and His people together in the Sacrament; but it is easy to see that they might approach the subject by the two separate paths of Mass or Eucharist. Zwingli took the one road and Luther happened on the other.

Zwingli believed that the mediæval Church had displaced the scriptural thought of commemoration, and put the non-scriptural idea of repetition in its place. For the mediæval priest claimed that in virtue of the miraculous power given in ordination, he could really change the bread and wine into the actual physical Body of Jesus, and, when this was done, that he could reproduce over again the agony of the Cross by crushing it with his teeth. This idea seemed to Zwingli to be utterly profane; it dishonoured the One great Sacrifice; it was unscriptural; it depended on a priestly gift of working a miracle which did not exist. Then he believed that the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel forbade all thought that spiritual benefits could come from a mere partaking with the mouth. It was the atonement worked out by Christ’s death that was appropriated and commemorated in the Holy Supper; and the atonement is always received by faith. Thus the two principal thoughts in the theory of Zwingli are, that the mediæval doctrine must be purified by changing the idea of repetition of the death of Christ for commemoration of that death, and the thought of manducating with the teeth for that of faith which is the faculty by which spiritual benefits are received. But Zwingli believed that a living faith always brought with it the presence of Christ, for there can be no true faith without actual spiritual contact with the Saviour. Therefore Zwingli held that there was a Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Supper; but a spiritual presence brought by the faith of the believing communicant and not by the elements of Bread and Wine, which were only the signs representing a Body which was corporeally absent. The defect of this theory is that it does not make the Presence of Christ in the Sacrament in any way depend on the ordinance; there is no sacramental presence other than what there is in any act of faith. It was not until Zwingli had elaborated his theory that he sought for and found an explanation of the words of our Lord, and taught that This is My Body, must mean This signifies My Body. His theory was entirely different from that of Carlstadt, with which Luther always identified it.

Luther approached the whole subject by a different path. What repelled him in the mediæval doctrine of the Holy Supper was the way in which he believed it to trample on the spiritual priesthood of all believers. He protested against Transubstantiation and private Masses, because they were the most flagrant instances of that contempt. When he first preached on the subject (1519) it was to demand the “cup” for the laity, and he makes use of an expression in his sermon which reveals how his thoughts were tending. He says that in the Sacrament of the Holy Supper “the communicant is so united to Christ and His saints, that Christ’s life and sufferings and the lives and sufferings of the saints become his.” No one held more strongly than Luther that the Atonement was made by our Lord, and by Him alone. Therefore he cannot be thinking of the Atonement when he speaks of union with the lives and the sufferings of the saints. He believes that the main thing in the Sacrament is that it gives such a companionship with Jesus as His disciples and saints have had. There was, of course, a reference to the death of Christ and to the Atonement, for apart from that death no companionship is possible; but the reference is indirect, and through the thought of the fellowship. In the Sacrament we touch Christ as His disciples might have touched Him when He lived on earth, and as His glorified saints touch Him now. This reference, therefore, clearly shows that Luther saw in the Sacrament of the Supper the presence of the glorified Body of our Lord, and that the primary use of the Sacrament was to bring the communicant into contact with that glorified Body. This required a presence (and Luther thought a presence extended in space) of the glorified Body of Christ in the Sacrament in order that the communicant might be in actual contact with it. But communion with the Living Christ implies the appropriation of the death of Christ, and of the Atonement won by His death. Thus the reference to the Crucified Christ which Zwingli reaches directly, Luther attains indirectly; and the reference to the Living Risen Christ which Zwingli reaches indirectly, Luther attains directly. Luther avoided the need of a priestly miracle to bring the Body extended in space into immediate connection with the elements Bread and Wine, by introducing a scholastic theory of what is meant by presence in Space. A body may be present in Space, said the Schoolmen, in two ways: it may be present in such a way that it excludes from the space it occupies any other body, or it may be present occupying the same space with another body. The Glorified Body of Christ can be present in the latter manner. It was so when our Lord after His Resurrection appeared suddenly among His disciples in a room when the doors were shut; for then at some moment of time it must have occupied the same space as a portion of the walls or of the door. Christ’s glorified Body can therefore be naturally in the elements without any special miracle, for it is ubiquitous. It is in the table at which I write, said Luther; in the stone which I hurl through the air. It is in the elements in the Holy Supper in a perfectly natural way, and needs no priestly miracle to bring it there. This natural presence of the Body of Christ in the elements in the Supper is changed into a Sacramental Presence by the promise of God, which is attached to the reverent and believing partaking of the Holy Supper.

These were the two theories which ostensibly divided the Protestants in 1529 into two parties, the one of which was led by Zwingli and the other by Luther. They were not so antagonistic that they could not be reconciled. Each theologian held implicitly what the other declared explicitly. Zwingli placed the relation to the Death of Christ in the foreground, but implicitly admitted the relation to the Risen Christ—going back to the view held in the Early Church. Luther put fellowship with the Risen Christ in the foreground, but admitted the reference to the Crucified Christ—accepting the mediæval way of looking at the matter. The one had recourse to a very shallow exegesis to help him, and the other to a scholastic theory of space; and naturally, but unfortunately, when controversy arose, the disputant attacked the weakest part of his opponent’s theory—Luther, Zwingli’s exegesis; and Zwingli, Luther’s scholastic theory of spatial presence.

The attempt to bring about an understanding between Luther and Zwingli, made by Philip of Hesse, the confidant of Zwingli, and in sympathy with the Swiss Reformer’s schemes of political combination, has already been mentioned, and its failure related.[39] It need not be discussed again. But for the history of the Reformation in Switzerland it is necessary to say something about the further progress of this Sacramental controversy. Calvin gradually won over the Swiss Protestants to his views; and his theory, which at one time seemed about to unite the divided Protestants, must be alluded to.

Calvin began his study of the doctrine of the Sacrament of the Holy Supper independently of both Luther and Zwingli. His position as the theologian of Switzerland, and his friendship with his colleague William Farel, who was a Zwinglian, made him adapt his theory to Zwinglian language; but he borrowed nothing from the Reformer of Zurich. He was quite willing to accept Zwingli’s exegesis so far as the words went; but he gave another and altogether different meaning to Zwingli’s phrase, This signifies My Body. He was willing to call the “elements” signs of the Body and Blood of the Lord; but while Zwingli called them signs which represent (signa representativa) what was absent, Calvin insisted on calling them signs which exhibit (signa exhibitiva) what was present—a distinction which is continually forgotten in describing his relation to the theories of Zwingli, and one which enabled him to convince Luther that he held that there was a Real Presence of Christ’s Body in the Sacrament of the Holy Supper. To describe minutely Calvin’s doctrine of the Holy Supper would require more space than can be given here, and a brief statement of the central thoughts is alone possible. His aim in common with all the Reformers was to construct a doctrine of the Sacrament of the Supper which would be at once scriptural, free from superstition and from the crass materialist associations which had gathered round the theory of transubstantiation, and which would clearly conserve the great Reformation proclamation of the spiritual priesthood of all believers. He went back to the mediæval idea of transubstantiation, and asked whether it gave a true conception of what was meant by substance. He decided that it did not, and believed that the root thought in substance was not dimensions in space, but power. The substance of a body consists in its power, active and passive, and the presence of the substance of anything consists in the immediate application of that power.[40] When Luther and Zwingli had spoken of the substance of the Body of Christ, they had always in their mind the thought of something extended in space; and the one affirmed while the other denied that this Body of Christ, something extended in space, could be and was present in the Sacrament of the Supper. Calvin’s conception of substance enabled him to say that wherever anything acts there it is. He denied the crude “substantial” presence which Luther insisted on; and in this he sided with Zwingli. But he affirmed a real because active presence, and in this he sided with Luther.

Calvin’s view had been accepted definitely by Melanchthon, and somewhat indefinitely by Luther. The imperial cities, led by Strassburg, which was under the influence of Bucer, who had thought out for himself a doctrine not unlike that of Calvin, had been included in the Wittenberg Concord (May 1536); but Luther would have nothing to do with the Swiss. As it was vain to hope that Switzerland would be included in any Lutheran alliance, Calvin set himself to produce dogmatic harmony in Switzerland. In conjunction with Bullinger, Zwingli’s son-in-law and successor in Zurich, he drafted the Consensus of Zurich (Consensus Tigurinus) in 1549.[41] The document is Calvinist in theology and largely Zwinglian in language. It was accepted with some difficulty in Basel and in Bern, and heartily in Biel, Schaffhausen, Mühlhausen, and St. Gallen. It ended dogmatic disputes in Protestant Switzerland, which was thus united under the one creed.

This does not mean any increase of Protestantism within Switzerland. The Romanist cantons drew more closely together. Cardinal Carlo Borromeo of Milan took a deep interest in the Counter-Reformation in Switzerland. He introduced the Jesuits into Luzern and the Forest cantons, and after his death these cantons formed a league which included Luzern, Uri, Schwyz, Zug, Unterwalden, Freiburg, and Solothurn (1586). This League (the Borromean League) pledged its members to maintain the Roman Catholic faith. The lines of demarcation between Protestant and Romanist cantons in Switzerland practically survive to the present day.