Reformation Church History

Transcription

1 Reformation Church History CH502 LESSON 08 of 24 W. Robert Godfrey, PhD Experience: President, Westminster Seminary California This is lecture number 8 in the series on Reformation Church History. In our last lecture we began to look at the theme of the controversy on the Lord s Supper that so divided Protestant from Roman Catholic, and indeed Protestant from Protestant. We were looking at Luther s approach to the issue of the Lord s Supper and wanted to concentrate at that beginning point on Luther s stress upon the Lord s Supper as a gift that God gives to us. It is His appointed means of blessing, His appointed means of coming in contact with Christ, and therefore tremendously important for Luther and a testimony to the gracious way in which God deals with us in general. As we said last time, Zwingli shared a number of the basic concerns of Martin Luther on the Lord s Supper; but he did come to the issue of the Lord s Supper from a slightly different perspective. Luther, as we said, concentrated his critique of the Roman position on the issue of Eucharistic sacrifice since the doctrine of Eucharistic sacrifice was grounded in an ocean of works righteousness. Zwingli comes at the issue from a slightly different perspective. For Zwingli, the key error of Rome is transubstantiation. Just as Luther rejected transubstantiation, so Zwingli rejected Eucharistic sacrifice; but Zwingli saw the issue of transubstantiation as more central an error, and therefore the one from which he drew his central reaction. Zwingli tended to reason that you couldn t have a sacrifice of Christ if Christ was not present, and therefore the foundational error was the error of transubstantiation. So Zwingli in his approach said, Let s do away with this doctrine of transubstantiation, which leads us so rapidly into idolatry. The great error of idolatry is always to focus on earthly things rather than heavenly things. This is precisely the mistake, Zwingli said, that the medieval church had made. It called us to bread instead of to Christ. It called us to the altar and to the actions of priests instead of to heaven and the action of Christ. 1 of 15

2 And so, Zwingli said, Let s banish from our minds any notion that Christ is miraculously called down to the altar. And let us recognize that that whole teaching of transubstantiation is an error and an idolatry on the part of the Roman church. In its place, Zwingli said, Let s stress the ascension of Christ. Christ is risen and ascended into heaven and seated at the right hand of the Father. That s what the Apostles Creed says. And so, Zwingli said, Let s stress that ascended character of Christ. Christ said that He was going to depart, that He would not be with us, and therefore the whole doctrine of transubstantiation not only is idolatrous but also is a violation of the Apostles Creed and the words of our Lord Himself. Therefore we need to get away from a notion that Christ is there upon the altar. When Zwingli then began to reflect on how he might positively express the doctrine of the Lord s Supper, he said we ought to think about the Lord s Supper as a memorial, or more particularly, as our pledge of allegiance. That is, let s remember that since what we receive as a blessing in the Supper is by faith, let s exercise our faith. Let us remember Christ, let us rest in His accomplished work, and let us by our use of the Lord s Supper testify to the world that we belong to Christ. Let it be that, let it be a testimony on our part of our faith in Christ. In 1526 Zwingli wrote, When you partake of the two elements of bread and wine, all that you do is to confess publicly that you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. And having been influenced by the writings of a certain Dutch writer, Zwingli came to think of the Lord s Supper as something like the wedding ring. The wedding ring isn t your wife or your husband. The wedding ring isn t the marriage itself. The wedding ring is only a reminder, a present reminder of a relationship that exists. And so, Zwingli said, the Lord s Supper isn t Christ. The Lord s Supper isn t the relationship that we have with Christ. It is only a present reminder, a useful thing that God has given us to help us remember His Son. We can see that while Luther and Zwingli both started with a profound critique of the medieval church, and while Luther and Zwingli both rejected a number of things that the medieval church had taught, they begin to develop their doctrines of the Lord s Supper from very different directions Luther stressing that the Lord s Supper remains God s gift and indeed God s gift of His Son to us, and Zwingli coming more and more to stress that the Lord s Supper is our act of remembrance in our act of loyalty to Christ. 2 of 15

3 We can then begin to pursue a little bit how, as Zwingli and Luther begin to write against each other in the late 1520s, they begin to critique specific things in one another. When Luther criticized Zwingli, he tended to look at a variety of things. For one thing, Luther said, Zwingli is too rationalistic. By that, Luther meant Zwingli doesn t really believe what the Word of God says. This was a most serious charge and one that annoyed Zwingli a great deal, but Luther persevered in that charge. And Luther said, What does the Bible say? The Bible says that Jesus declared, This is my body. But Zwingli says, This signifies my body. For Luther, it was a simple matter of believing what the Bible said. The Bible didn t say This signifies my body. The Bible said, This is my body; and therefore Luther says Zwingli has become a rationalist. He won t believe what the Bible says. He insists on submitting what we find in the Word of God to the judgment of his own reason. And this is the great error of Rome. Therefore, Luther said, we really see in Zwingli someone who isn t freed from the Roman bondage. Luther commented in one of his treatise, Zwingli is angry, too, because we warn people not to ask how it comes to pass that Christ s body is present in the Supper but simply to believe the words of God. That was the issue for Luther. Luther said, I believe what God said in the Bible, and Zwingli doesn t. Luther elaborated this in other words. When he talked to common people, he said, You can joyfully say to Christ, both at your death and in the last judgment, My dear Lord Jesus, there has arisen a strife about Thy words in the Supper. Some want them to be understood differently from what they say. However, since they cannot teach me anything certain, but only lead me into confusion and uncertainty, I have remained with Thy text as the words stand. If there should be obscurity in them, Thou wilt bear with me if I do not completely understand them, just as Thou didst forbear with Thine apostles when they did not understand Thee in many things. Thus I also have remained with these Thy words: This is My body. Lo, no enthusiast will dare to speak thus with Christ. So, you see, for Luther, Zwingli was an enthusiast, a fanatic, one who was denying the words of Christ, and therefore to be resisted. Zwingli responded by saying that Luther was too mystical, that he was refusing to use his mind, and he was refusing to think as 3 of 15

4 a theologian, that the words of the Bible have to be interpreted in the whole context of what the Bible says. And Zwingli said, Luther, in his claims of my being a rationalist, is just refusing even to think about what the words of the Scripture mean. Jesus, after all, said, I am a door, but that doesn t mean that Jesus is literally a door, and therefore we have to ask, What do words mean? How are they being used? And Luther has contented himself with being too mystical in his approach to Scripture. He s not willing to be a theologian. Zwingli also said, Luther has allowed his doctrine of the Lord s Supper to become too objective. He has planted Christ in the bread and in the wine, and he s not giving enough place to faith. We need to make faith more central. Whatever blessing we receive from the Supper comes to us by faith, and so Luther has made a mistake in not giving adequate stress to faith. Luther responded to that by saying that Zwingli was too subjective and that he had not given enough stress to God s gift, that God really had made a promise to us in the Lord s Supper. And the promise was that He would give His own Son to be a blessing to us through the use of the Supper. In other words, Luther was saying: Zwingli has failed to understand and to stress that there really is a communion that goes on in the Lord s Supper, that when we read 1 Corinthians 10 and 11, what we find there is that there is a cup of communion and a table of communion. There is a partaking of Christ; there is a need for a discerning of the body. And all of this, Luther says, speaks more than just memory and more than just faith. It speaks of the objective presence of Christ, according to the institution and promise of God. Luther said it is certainly true that, unless there s faith, one doesn t receive the blessing of Christ; but Luther went so far as to say that because Christ is present by the appointment of God, that one who receives the bread and the wine does receive Christ. But if one receives Christ without faith, then one receives condemnation. And Luther felt that was exactly the point that Paul was making in his warning about discerning the body in 1 Corinthians 11. And so Luther said we have to stress the communion that God has promised between Christ and the believer through the institution of the Lord s Supper, and Zwingli has allowed himself to become much too subjective. 4 of 15

5 Luther then said, Actually, Zwingli has not given enough stress to the importance of the body of Christ in our salvation. Luther, in effect, was arguing that there was a sort of spiritualizing tendency in Zwingli s theology that logically would lead to an undermining of the cross and of the incarnation. Zwingli did not undermine the cross and the incarnation certainly not by any intention of his. He affirmed those great doctrines, but Luther was afraid that Zwingli had become so sort of heavenly minded he placed so much stress upon the spirit and upon spiritual realities that there was no real central place for the body of Christ as the key to our redemption. Luther said, after all, God determined that the eternal Son of God had to become a man, that the body of Christ had to be broken upon the cross, that Christ s blood had to be spilled out for our redemption. And so Luther said the body and blood of Christ are at the very heart of the sacrifice He offers, and so they are at the very heart of the way in which we understand our salvation. It s not surprising, then, that Christ has promised that just as He died upon the cross in His body and blood to redeem us, so He continues to strengthen us by His body and blood in the Lord s Supper. That s what He promises to do. That s the way in which He continues to be our Savior and our Mediator. We are never freed from the need of the body and blood of Christ, and therefore God, through the Lord s Supper, ministers those to us that we might be built up in the faith. Zwingli responded that Luther can stress the body of Christ all he wants, but Luther is forgetting that the Word of God says that the body of Christ was taken up into heaven, that the body of Christ is not on earth. And so Zwingli comes back to his stress upon the ascension of Christ, and he says Luther doesn t understand the ascension. Luther doesn t give adequate place to the ascension. Christ is now absent from us. Christ, in His body, is seated at the right hand of God; and therefore He cannot be present in, with, and under the bread. Zwingli felt that he had a very strong argument here, and he pressed this argument with a great deal of enthusiasm. He said Luther is denying the ascension by the teaching that he has given, and he cannot explain to us how it can be that the Scripture can say that Christ s body is in heaven, and that He has departed from us, and yet Luther has the body on earth. 5 of 15

6 Luther, needless to say, was not persuaded by this line of argument, nor impressed by it; but it did encourage Luther to think more carefully about how it could be that the body was on earth. And it led to Luther s offering of an explanation. Luther only offered this explanation; he did not insist upon it, although later Lutherans including the Formula of Concord, to which we referred some lectures ago did later insist upon it. But Luther said, Zwingli says it can t be there. Let me offer one way in which the body of Christ could be there. And this is related, then, to what Luther and later Lutherans will teach about the ubiquity of Christ and about the communicatio idiomatum. Those are fancy words, but the meaning is relatively clear. Luther said when Christ was glorified, His two natures that is, His human nature and His divine nature began to share attributes. That s the communicatio idiomatum the communication of properties. For the purposes of the Lord s Supper, Luther was particularly concerned about the divine property of omnipresence. Luther said that the glorified Christ becomes omnipresent not only in His divinity but also in His humanity that the humanity is so glorified in heaven that it takes on the divine attribute of omnipresence. Therefore the body of Christ can be everywhere at once, and the Latin word for everywhere is ubiqua, and therefore the word ubiquity. Ubiquity is the teaching that the body of Christ, because of the ommunicatio idiomatum, is everywhere at once. Therefore, since the body of Christ can be everywhere at once, it can be in the bread and wine of the Lord s Supper. And so Luther said, Once again we see that Zwingli is just a rationalist. He doesn t want to believe that the body of Christ can be everywhere at once. He won t believe those things, and therefore he doesn t really believe the gospel. Luther went on to say, Don t tell me that the body is at the right hand of God, because after all, where is the right hand of God? Where is God s right hand? Luther said the right hand of God like God in every part of Him is everywhere. Therefore that very phrase, the right hand of God, precisely supports Luther s teaching of ubiquity and the communicatio idiomatum. So Luther felt that he had a very strong response to Zwingli. Zwingli, needless to say, was not persuaded and felt that, in fact, Luther by this doctrine of ubiquity was undermining the true humanity of Christ, the very thing that Luther had always wanted to defend and maintain. And Zwingli said, If you have a human body that s everywhere, is it really a human body anymore? 6 of 15

7 Isn t the very characteristic, the essential part of a human body, precisely the fact that it is limited in time and in space? Hasn t Luther violated the very things that he was most concerned to affirm and to maintain? So you begin to get a sense, I hope maybe more of a sense than you really wanted of the seriousness of these issues, how both of them were very much concerned to try to be biblical, to try to think about these issues biblically, and to develop the issues biblically. But they were not able to. They came at the issues from very different perspectives; and, in spite of an increasingly heated conflict in published writings in 1527 and 1528, they could reach no agreement with one another. It was that inability to reach any agreement or make any real progress that led to Martin Bucer and Philip of Hesse arranging the Colloquy of Marburg in early October of 1529, to which we referred in the last lecture. We want to look a little bit more at that colloquy to see what was accomplished. The meetings at Marburg did not begin terribly well. When they first met, Luther looked at Zwingli and Bucer and observed, You have a different spirit. That was not just a sort of generalized observation on having different points of view; what Luther seems to have meant by that was that they had the spirit of the devil while he had the Holy Spirit. And that was not a particularly auspicious beginning. But Zwingli and Bucer were so eager to make peace over this issue that they worked hard with Luther to try to show him that they really did agree. Luther and Zwingli talked over the whole range of Reformation doctrines, and Luther was amazed to find that they could reach entire agreement on fourteen articles of religion that related to the whole range of Christian truth. Even when they came to the fifteenth article on the Lord s Supper itself, Luther was initially surprised to see a large measure of agreement even there. They agreed, as we ve indicated before, that the Mass was not a sacrifice. They agreed to reject the doctrine of transubstantiation. They agreed that both bread and the wine ought to be given to communicants, and they agreed that the Lord s Supper was a sacrament of the true body and blood of Jesus Christ and that every Christian needed to partake spiritually of the body and blood of Christ. 7 of 15

8 This does seem to represent some movement on Zwingli s part. In other words, Zwingli seems to be willing to recognize that there is something given by God in the Lord s Supper, that the Lord s Supper is not primarily our activity. That s what had so concerned Luther. He felt that Zwingli was making, again, the Lord s Supper a work our act of allegiance, our memorializing. Here Zwingli was willing to recognize: No, God gives us something, and what He gives us is a spiritual contact with Jesus Christ Himself. But what they could not agree on was whether there was a bodily presence of Christ that phrase that Luther came to love, that Christ was in, with, and under the bread. After the formal meeting had adjourned, Luther tried one more effort at reaching an agreement on how Christ was present. Luther asked if Zwingli could accept this formula: that Jesus is present in His body essentially and substantively but not qualitatively, quantitatively, or locally. Those distinctions show the way in which Luther appealed back to his medieval train and to distinctions of scholastic theology that he usually didn t use; but what he was really trying to say is, Let s say that Christ really is present in His body in the bread, but let s not get that presence there in such a way that it could conceivably be an object of worship. Zwingli could not go that far. He felt the formulation still was too close to the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. That led Luther, in response, to continue to feel that there was something fanatical about Zwingli under the surface. And so they parted. They were unable to reach any kind of final agreement. Luther, in the last analysis, refused even to give Zwingli the right hand of fellowship, and Zwingli wept at the failure of Protestants to be able to draw closer to one another. That was, in a sense, the closest Luther and Zwingli ever got. They began to be more suspicious of one another after that meeting, but it does point to how seriously they took the issues how it was an issue over which they felt they could not compromise in faithfulness to the Lord. And the German-Swiss Reformation and the Lutheran Reformation were never able to overcome this central disagreement. We could leave the issue of the Lord s Supper there and go on to talk to other things; but before we do that, I would like to move on to something that s in one sense chronologically out of order. But I think maybe it is profitable to finish up this question of the Lord s Supper, and so I d like to go on with you at this point and look at John Calvin s view of the Lord s Supper. 8 of 15

9 John Calvin has not yet come along as a Reformer at the time of the meeting at Marburg between Luther and Zwingli. Calvin was only twenty years old and was not yet a Protestant, but Calvin represents a third alternative explanation of the Lord s Supper in a sense, and one which is an important alternative that Calvin hoped although his hope was not to be realized might lead to a reconciliation between Luther and Zwingli. So for the sake of continuity on this issue of the Lord s Supper, I d like to turn to Calvin s view of the Lord s Supper and an evaluation of his relationship to Luther and Zwingli on that subject. Then when we come to discuss Calvin later in this series of lectures, we can skip that issue of the Lord s Supper in regard to Calvin. Now Calvin is one of the great influential theologians of the Reformation and usually regarded as a superb theologian. Calvin has spawned a great Reformed and Calvinistic tradition that looks back to him as one of the great teachers of the church, one of the church s best teachers of the Bible. And yet it s amazing, when we come to the matter of the Lord s Supper, even some of the staunchest Calvinists have some trouble with Calvin s view of the Lord s Supper. Charles Hodge, for example, the great Princeton theologian of the nineteenth century, labeled Calvin s view of the Lord s Supper peculiar. [Robert Lewis] Dabney, the great Southern Presbyterian theologian of the nineteenth century, called Calvin s theology of the Lord s Supper strange and indeed incomprehensible and impossible. William Cunningham, the great Calvinist of Scotland in the nineteenth century and a great student of the history of doctrine, said Calvin s view was unintelligible invention and went on to say perhaps the greatest blot on the history of the churches of Calvin s labors as a public instructor. So even Calvinists have not always been enthusiastic about Calvin s view of the Lord s Supper, but I d like to pursue that, because I happen to think Calvin is right; but, more importantly for the purposes of this course, to see what it was Calvin tried to do in his teaching on the Lord s Supper. The first thing that we can observe is that Calvin agreed with both Luther and Zwingli on certain things. He agreed with Zwingli on the one hand that the doctrine of Christ s ascension must be very central in our understanding of the Eucharist, and that led him to disagree with Luther and the Lutheran theologians on the matters of ubiquity and the communicatio idiomatum. 9 of 15

10 Second, with Zwingli, Calvin stressed that there needed to be a central place given to faith as the reception of blessing, that he feared that particularly some of the later Lutheran theologians were not stressing faith enough as the avenue of blessing in the reception of the Supper. But, on the other hand, Calvin agreed with Luther that the Lord s Supper must be seen primarily as a gift that God gives to His people. And so he was very sensitive to the point that Luther wanted to make, that the Lord s Supper is not primarily something we do but is primarily something that God does for us in the gift of His Son. Secondarily, Calvin, with Luther, wanted to stress the vital importance and centrality of the body of Christ in our redemption. Our salvation is accomplished by the sacrifice of Christ s body, and Calvin stressed over and over again that we are united to Christ, including His body and blood, by the work of the Holy Spirit. Calvin often used to like to cite the words of Ephesians 4 in his old reading of that text, where he said that by the Spirit we become bone of Christ s bone and flesh of Christ s flesh. And in that way Calvin wanted to stress how intimately we are united with Christ and, therefore, how much, in particular, we are united with the body of Christ as the source of our redemption. Calvin is not just a compromiser between Luther and Zwingli, but he develops a distinctive approach to the Lord s Supper which, while closer to Luther s, he felt incorporated the greatest concerns of both Luther and Zwingli. Calvin often referred to the words of Augustine that the Lord s Supper should be understood as a visible word. That was a phrase that Augustine had used a number of times and that Calvin thought was very illuminating. The Lord s Supper is a visible word. What God says in the preached word, He shows in the visible word of the sacrament. Therefore, Calvin said, we ought to keep the two things as fairly parallel and similar, that the visible word is to be treated as rather parallel to the preached word and brings to us certain important blessings from the Lord. As we think about that visible word then, Calvin says, the visible word of the Lord s Supper particularly assures us that Christ is ever with us, forgiving us and encouraging us in growth that the Lord s Supper, because the elements of food and drink are used, are elements that speak of our spiritual nurture in Christ, that speak of our spiritual development in Him. So, Calvin said, we need to see this as a nourishing sacrament. The Lord s Supper nourishes us with Christ. What exactly is the nourishment? He 10 of 15

11 said the nourishment is Christ Himself. Calvin said in The Institutes, book 4, chapter 17, section 1: The signs are bread and wine, which represent for us the invisible food that we receive from the flesh and blood of Christ. Now Christ is the only food of our soul, and therefore our heavenly Father invites us to Christ that, refreshed by partaking of Him, we may repeatedly gather strength until we have finally reached heavenly immortality. This is a theme that reappears over and over again in Calvin, that we in our weakness need constantly to be strengthened by God. We could never stand on our own, and therefore God, in His mercy, gives us His Son to be our strength, to be our food, to be our encouragement. And we need that sacrament. We need to use that sacrament. So Calvin will often say, Just as we receive the bread and the wine, so by faith we receive the body and blood of Christ to the nourishment and strengthening of our body. We can almost say that if the phrase in, with, and under is particularly precious to Luther, the phrase just as is precious to Calvin. That s roughly equivalent, I think, to Luther saying with. Calvin wants to say: when we receive the bread and the wine by faith, we receive the body and blood with the bread and the wine. But Calvin did not want to go so far as to say that the bread is always in that the body is in the bread and the wine. That was where Calvin was not prepared to go all the way with Luther; but he was willing to say, in terms that sounded very much like Luther, that what we need is Christ. What we need is the flesh and blood of Christ, which were for our salvation. In his commentary on John 6, Calvin stresses the centrality of the flesh of Christ for us. He wrote, For as the eternal Word of God is the fountain of life, so His flesh is a channel to pour out to us the life which resides intrinsically in His divinity. For in His flesh was accomplished man s redemption. In it a sacrifice was offered to atone for sins, and in obedience yielded to God to reconcile Him to us. It was also filled with the sanctification of the Spirit. Finally, having overcome death, it was received into heavenly glory. You will only find life in Christ when you seek the substance of life in His flesh, for as soon as we depart from the sacrifice of His death, we encounter nothing but death. 11 of 15

12 So what Calvin wants to say is that we always need to remember that it is the flesh of Christ upon the cross that is our salvation, and it is with that saving work of Christ that we see in His flesh that God is constantly nurturing us and ministering to us. And so Calvin wanted to say God has promised Christ to us in the visible word, just as He promises Christ to us in the spoken word. And then just as surely as the spoken word offers Christ to us, if we receive Him by faith, so the visible word offers Christ to us, if we receive Him by faith. And so Calvin calls us to faith. Luther wanted to say God does more than just offer Christ in the Lord s Supper; He actually gives Christ in the Lord s Supper. Calvin is willing even to try to get fairly close to that distinction that Luther makes between offering and giving. Calvin, in The Institutes, book 4, chapter 17, at section 10 said: Truly He offers and shows the reality there signified to all who sit at that spiritual banquet, although it is received with benefit by believers alone, who accept such great generosity with true faith and gratefulness of heart. You see there how Calvin talks about offering and showing, on the one hand, and receiving with the other. Yet a little later in that chapter he goes closer to Luther and seems to say that God not only offers something but also He gives something. This is in section 33 of book 4, The Institutes, chapter 17. There Calvin says: And this is the wholeness of the sacrament which the whole world cannot violate, that the flesh and blood of Christ are no less truly given to the unworthy than to God s elect believers. Now that seems to be precisely Luther s language and concern. Christ is no less truly given to the unworthy than to God s elect believers. At the same time, it is true, however, just as rain falling on a hard rock flows off because no entrance opens into the stone, the wicked by their hardness so repel God s grace that it does not reach them. Besides to say that Christ may be received without faith is as inappropriate as to say that a seed may germinate in fire. So what Calvin really tries to do here is to draw a middle ground, Luther saying that Christ is not only given but received by the unworthy, although they have only blessing by faith and have condemnation by unbelief. Zwingli is saying Christ is only spiritually offered and is only spiritually received by faith. Calvin is saying that in between those two there is another position, which can say Christ is offered and given, but He is received only by faith. 12 of 15

13 One could wish that Calvin and Luther might have had opportunity to meet and to discuss that. It s not certain, by any means, that they would have agreed; but it is interesting that Calvin seems so to understand Luther and to want, in as many ways as possible, to draw near to Luther. But by the time Calvin became a very prominent Reformer, Luther was dead. And, again, Luther s successors were unwilling to change any of his teaching and indeed raised the doctrine of ubiquity to a greater importance than Luther himself had given to it. There is a story that Luther had read one of Calvin s treatises on the Lord s Supper. It s difficult to evaluate how accurate that story is, but it has some possibility of validity. According to that story, Luther had remarked, If that man and I could get together, we could settle our disagreements in half an hour. That may have been very much optimistic, but Luther felt in Calvin a greater appreciation than he ever had in Zwingli, apparently, of the necessity of saying God is really giving us something in the Lord s Supper. What He gives us is His Son, and what we need in the first place from the Son are all the benefits of His body and blood as He died on the cross in our place; indeed, that body and blood itself, as our nourishment to eternal life. Now we might ask: If Calvin says that Christ is truly offered and given in the Supper but that Christ is not in, with, and under the bread, how is Christ given? Indeed, if Calvin wants to stress the importance of the ascension, how is it possible that the Christ who is in heaven at the right hand of God can be the Christ that we will meet actually in the sacrament? Calvin responds to that by saying that there is a great mystery here that goes beyond our ability fully to understand or to describe. Luther would have been sensible to the truth of that remark. Calvin says this mystery of Christ s secret union with the devout is by nature incomprehensible. Yet he goes on to say, But we may try to say something about it. We say Christ descends to us, both by the outward symbol and by His Spirit, that He may truly quicken our souls by the substance of His flesh and His blood. He who does not perceive that many miracles are subsumed in these few words is more than stupid. But what is the miracle? Calvin goes on in Institutes 4, chapter 17, at section 32 to say: Now if anyone should ask me how this takes place, this lifting us up to heaven to commune with Christ, I shall not be ashamed to confess that it is a secret too lofty for either my mind to comprehend or my words to declare; and to speak more plainly, I rather experience than understand it. 13 of 15

14 Those who tend to think that Calvin is a great rationalist as a theologian may be surprised at those words here. Calvin is talking about something that he experiences but does not fully understand; but what he is saying is somehow, in the mystery of the Lord s Supper, by the power of the Spirit, Christ does not come down from heaven, but we are taken up to heaven. And there we commune with our ascended Lord Himself. So Calvin says ultimately there is a great mystery here, but it s a precious mystery. It s a mystery that God comes to us in our weakness, and He comes to us not only with the spoken word of His preachers to build us up in faith, but also He comes to us with the visible word of the sacrament to build us up in the faith. It s the same word, it s the same Christ, it s the same meaning; but in the Lord s Supper we have a different kind of experience of Christ and a reassurance to us of all that Christ is and says. Now Calvin dealt with the question of how frequently we should have communion. Zwingli had communion only once a year in Zurich. You say, Well, the Passover as a Jewish festival was only once a year, so we need communion only once a year. Perhaps that reflected Zwingli s theology. If the Lord s Supper is a remembrance, if it s an exercise of our remembering, then perhaps it s better to be infrequent. It s sort of like our celebrations of Christmas. They are precious, in part, because they are infrequent. If we had Christmas weekly, not only would we be bankrupt, but we would come to treasure the experience of Christmas far less. But having one annual remembrance of Christ s birth is precious. Calvin, on the other hand, said that we ought to have communion at least once a week. Most Calvinists have not followed that advice. The city council in Geneva wouldn t even follow Calvin s advice on that, but you see it reflected Calvin s and, I might say, Luther s conviction that the communion is a way of fellowshipping with Christ. Therefore it ought to be frequent. We would hardly say that we ought not to pray more than once a year so that we ll take prayer seriously; but we say prayer is a great blessing, so we ought to use it frequently. So Calvin said communion is a great blessing, and we ought to have it frequently to help us live with Christ and benefit from all that He does for us. Calvin said, Godly souls can gather great assurance and delight from this sacrament. In it, they have a witness of our growth into one body with Christ, such that whatever is His may be called ours. As a consequence, we may Christ-Centered Learning Anytime, Anywhere 14 of 15

15 dare assure ourselves that eternal life, which is His, may be called ours. So he says these benefits, imparted by the body and blood of Christ, are to nourish, strengthen, refresh, and gladden us. He is talking about how the Lord s Supper brings us confidence and brings us assurance in Christ, and he talks about how it s a way in which make progress in the Christian life. Calvin wrote, Let us carefully observe, then, when we wish to use the sacraments as God has ordained, that they should be like ladders for raising us on high, for we are heavy and cumbrous and held down by earthly things. Thus, because we are unable to fly high enough to draw near to God, He has ordained sacraments for us like ladders. If a man wishes to leap on high, he will break his neck in the attempt; but if he has steps, he is able to proceed with confidence. So, also, if we are to reach our God, we must use the means He has instituted for us since He knows what is suitable for us. I hope in this discussion of three different views of the Lord s Supper Luther s, Zwingli s, Calvin s you have seen something of the importance of the issue and why it was so central and why it was so divisive in the sixteenth century. This was an issue that was not peripheral to the gospel but affected the heart of the gospel and the heart of the church s ministry in the minds of many people in the sixteenth century. Whether you are persuaded by Luther or Calvin or Zwingli, I hope that you ll give the issue the kind of thought and reflection that they did and recognize that the church today has a great deal to learn from those teachers of the sixteenth century. In our next lecture, we ll turn to the subject of Anabaptism. Christ-Centered Learning Anytime, Anywhere 15 of 15