This Is My Body

The Presence of Christ in Reformation Thought

Davis, Thomas J.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781441206169
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

There are many general surveys of the Reformation available, and they all typically devote some space to how theologians such as Martin Luther and John Calvin understood the Lord's Supper and Christ's presence in the bread and wine. However, they usually do not provide a great deal of detail about the development of the Reformers' thoughts or the finer elements of their respective opinions. This volume by Thomas Davis fills these gaps with a more narrowly focused study. He devotes several chapters to Luther and to Calvin, examining their use of language and their understanding of the presence of Christ, both in the Lord's Supper and in the broader sense of his presence in the church.

1

“HIS COMPLETELY TRUSTWORTHY TESTAMENT”

The Development of Luther’s Early Eucharistic Teaching, 1517–1521

Luther’s early eucharistic teaching, particularly from the years 1518–19, has been viewed favorably by some ecumenically minded Catholic scholars.[1] They characterize his thought from this period as both Catholic and pastoral: Catholic in the sense that he did not deviate from Catholic doctrine, and pastoral in the sense that he sought to address proper preparation for eucharistic participation without striving to overthrow Catholic doctrine. In large measure this assessment is based on the strong emphasis Luther placed on the communion of the saints, understood as the church, as the locus of belief that established the objectivity of the grace given in the Eucharist.

By 1520–21, however, Luther’s understanding of the Lord’s Supper, as revealed in his eucharistic writings, had undergone a noticeable shift. No longer willing to let the church be the deposit of faith for Christians, one that they could draw on without personal commitment, he insisted that the individual’s faith played a much greater role—actually the crucial role—in the drama of proper eucharistic reception. Thus there appears to be a chasm that separates the two periods of Luther’s thought on the Eucharist, one that sets apart the so-called Catholic and pastoral Luther from the evangelical and dogmatic Luther.

There is a bridge, however, that connects these two periods in Luther’s thought: his Lectures on Hebrews. On the one hand, the style of commentary, along with many of its comments, is quite at odds with the commentaries Luther produced after having matured in his newfound faith. On the other hand, one finds in nascent form here two key components of Luther’s most developed eucharistic thought: the importance of personal faith and the idea of the Eucharist as primarily the testament, the last will, of Jesus Christ. Moreover, the date of these lectures, from the spring of 1517 to the spring of 1518, locates the genesis of these ideas of personal faith and testament, as they relate to the Eucharist, in a period previous to the 1518–19 works.

Therefore, what one can argue is that an analysis of Luther’s Lectures on Hebrews is essential to understanding how Luther developed his eucharistic teaching so as to be able to move from the emphases of the 1518–19 eucharistic work to those of his 1520–21 eucharistic writings. What one can conclude is that a neat distinction cannot be made between the 1518–19 Catholic and pastoral Luther and the 1520–21 evangelical and dogmatic Luther. Rather, Luther’s concern for an evangelical doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, based on his exegesis of Scripture, was already present by 1518.

This chapter, then, examines Luther’s views on the role of faith in preparation for the reception of the Sacrament and the benefit that is then derived from the Sacrament, first as those views are expressed in the 1518–19 works and then how those views changed in the 1520–21 works. An analysis of the Lectures on Hebrews then follows.

The Communion of the Saints and the Faith of the Church in Luther’s 1518–19 Eucharistic Writings

By 1518, the time of the Heidelberg Disputation, Luther had begun to garner the reputation of a pugnacious debater and fierce opponent. Yet his meditation on the Eucharist from that year breathed the spirit of humility one associates with the ideal monk. The title of the work bespoke Luther’s concern that eucharistic participants examine themselves before Communion: “Sermon on the Proper Preparation of the Heart for the Sacramental Reception of the Eucharist.” In a caring and gentle way, Luther sought to lead his readers through the appropriate mix of humility and confidence necessary to partake sacramentally of the Eucharist. He considered it the recipient’s duty to cultivate a sense of true humility; faith, as we shall see, while necessary, was not particularly the individual’s responsibility. In other words, Luther called on the individual to prepare for the Sacrament through humility; if the participant was humble, God through the church would grant the faith necessary for the Eucharist.

Luther made it clear that the confession of one’s sins and a true sense of sorrow must precede the reception of the Sacrament. The sense of sorrow, however, must not be borne down by an overreliance on the individual’s ability to confess all sin. Luther seemed to balance the notion of an engendered humility, which he thought to be absolutely necessary, with the church’s wisdom of requiring that only plainly mortal sins need to be confessed in order properly to receive the Sacrament.[2]

Confession served to bring to recipients knowledge of themselves as sinners in need. Thus confession acted not only as a medium to clear the path for grace; it also functioned to ward off self-confidence. In many ways, for Luther, self-confidence was the major barrier to grace, for such an attitude brought only God’s judgment, never God’s grace.[3] A thorough, though not necessarily exhaustive, confession helped to bring about this proper preparation of the heart.

Such preparation was typified for Luther in this prayer that he offered as a model petition to God: “Here I am, Lord Jesus Christ. Look upon my wretchedness, for I am poor and needy. Yet, so far I have been disdainful of your remedy, so that I do not sigh for the riches of your grace. Awaken in me, O Lord, a longing for your grace, and enkindle faith in your promise that I may not offend you, my most excellent God, by my perversity, disbelief, and satiety.”[4] Such a prayer, Luther thought, exuded both confidence in God’s mercy and dread at one’s own unworthiness. Such a mixture of confidence in God and humility, he believed, resulted in a purifying faith.[5]

Thus, according to Luther, the faith of the individual followed as a result of the Eucharist. It is portrayed as something bestowed on the sinner by the reception of the Sacrament. Indeed, there seems to be some sense in which Luther viewed the Eucharist as a finished work (opus operatum),[6] at least in the sense that he viewed the Sacrament as a work based not so much on the individual’s faith and participation in the Eucharist but more on the communion of saints, the church. Luther thought the communion of saints could serve to mediate the benefits of the Sacrament through saintly sharing and participation. Certainly, faith is necessary, he thought, for the Sacrament to be efficacious;[7] however, Luther saw not Christ but the Mother Church as a refuge for those too timorous in faith to be able to partake of the Eucharist on their own. The church was the place where the infirm in faith could be nourished. Luther drew on Bernard of Clairvaux as an exemplar: “Thus, Saint Bernard once said to a brother who was so excessively fearful and anxious that he refused to celebrate: ‘Go, my brother, and celebrate in my faith.’ This brother benefited by obeying and was healed from all the weakness of his conscience.”[8] The benefit of faith was available to the recipient through the Sacrament by means of another’s faith because, according to this work, Luther believed the essence of the Supper, its primary benefit, to be the communion of saints.

For Luther, this meant that one was incorporated into the body of Christ through the means of the Eucharist and thereby shared the benefits of belonging to that body; since the body, the church, had faith, then the recipient shared in that faith.[9] Luther drew on the ancient imagery of the church to underscore the unity the Sacrament created: “[The oneness of the saints] is figured in the elements of the sacrament, in which many grains, losing their individual diversity, are made into one bread; likewise with the grapes, which also lose their diversity and are made into one wine.”[10]

It served as a great assurance to the young Luther that the entire body of the saints was so united and thus one. Such a situation, Luther thought, made the benefit of corporate faith available to the individual. Such a benefit, to Luther’s mind, was truly necessary: one could never be certain of one’s worthiness to partake.[11] Certainly, the need for faith in the Word of God was not absent,[12] but that faith appeared as something to be shared as one of the benefits of belonging to the communion of saints, the church. This comfortable and comforting notion was underscored by the fact that when Luther spoke about faith in the Word of God he did not mean the Word of promise as found in the testament of Christ, as he later would so strongly come to emphasize as the object of the individual’s faith; rather, the Word he referred to here was Christ’s word of comfort: “Come unto me, all you who are weary.”[13] This word of comfort was important for Luther, who so strongly stressed that Christ’s call came for sinners, not the just.[14]

When one moves to Luther’s 1519 work “The Blessed Sacrament of the Holy and True Body of Christ, and the Brotherhoods,” one finds the same combination of individual preparation and corporate faith as found in the “Sermon on the Proper Preparation of the Heart.” The Supper is a balm for the sick, a hope for the hopeless and helpless. Proper preparation thus required self-knowledge of one’s state before God as a sinner; indeed, it is that recognition, Luther thought, that enables the Sacrament to render its fullest effect. The rhetoric Luther used to evoke a personal sense of need is powerful: “For this reason, it thus happens that this holy sacrament is of no or little use to those who have no misfortune or are not in fear or do not feel their unhappiness. For it is only given to those who need comfort and strength, who have full hearts, who carry frightened consciences, who suffer from sin’s temptation or who even have fallen into sin. What should it work for free and secure spirits, who neither need or require it? For as the Mother of God says, ‘He fills only the hungry and consoles those who are oppressed.’”[15] To drive home his point, Luther further emphasized that it was only after Jesus had made his own disciples sad, sorrowful, and anxiety-ridden by the recognition of the sin of betrayal among them that he deemed them worthy to receive the Sacrament, for it was at that point that the disciples needed strength.[16]

Once again, as in the former work, Luther used the notion of preparation of the heart, a frank look at one’s sinfulness, to gain a real sense of one’s need for the Eucharist in order to declare its value as a remedy to the soul’s distress. That remedy, however, comes in the form of a corporate faith, a sharing in the belief held by the communion of saints. Luther thought such a benefit to be the primary effect of the Eucharist. To go to the Sacrament, Luther observed, was to be in a community: thus the name “Communion.” He elaborated by comparing participation in the Sacrament to being a member of a city, where each citizen is a member of each other and of the entire city. Luther thus concluded, “This sacrament, received in bread and wine, is nothing other than a sure sign of this community and incorporation with Christ and all saints.”[17]

In this writing we find the same logic as in the 1518 sermon: Faith is required in order to receive the benefit of the Eucharist, but that faith does not necessarily have to be the individual’s faith. The individual may draw on the faith of the community of saints so that one may receive the Sacrament’s benefit. Again, preparation is personal and individual; reception takes place within the context of community via the community. Faith is seen as a common possession. Luther declared that “all the spiritual good things of Christ and his saints . . . [are] shared and common to him who receives this sacrament.”[18] Luther concluded the sermon with an appeal to the Sacrament’s unifying fruit: “The fruit of this sacrament is community and love, through which we are strengthened against death and all evil, . . . [so that] the particular self-serving love of self is uprooted by this sacrament and is replaced by a community-serving love of all people. Thus, through love, we are changed to one bread, one drink, one body, one community.”[19] Fellowship, the communion of saints found within the church, is the benefit, therefore, of the Lord’s Supper while at the same time serving as that which enables the participant to receive the benefit. In this treatise of Luther’s, the eucharistic celebration is the visible sign of a fellowship that strengthens Christians in their need, serving as the vehicle through which faith and love are made possible.[20]

Luther’s 1518 and 1519 writings on the Lord’s Supper belong together for they share the same spirit. One sees in them a stress on the individual sinner’s need to recognize the state of one’s sinfulness before God, on the benefit of belonging to the communion of saints as both the means and fruit of true eucharistic Communion, and on the community’s role in mediating both the faith that makes the Sacrament efficacious and the love that makes the Christian into Christ’s likeness. There is, in short, nothing here that would set Luther apart from the church of his day; indeed, as Lortz and others have pointed out, Luther in eloquent fashion articulated emphases fully acceptable to the church.

The Faith of the Individual and the Testament of Christ

Luther’s 1520 “A Sermon on the New Testament, That Is, on the Holy Mass” signals a decided shift away from the accents found in Luther’s 1518–19 eucharistic writings. Here, Luther explicitly moved to a consideration of the individual’s personal faith in the role of eucharistic participation while also downplaying the notion of communio sanctorum in favor of accentuating the testamental character of the celebration. The implications of this shift are worked out more fully in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, written within two months of the “Sermon on the New Testament,” and in Luther’s poignant farewell sermon to his fellow monks, given on Maundy Thursday of 1521 just days before Luther’s trip to the Diet of Worms, a trip from which he did not expect to return.

In terms of preparation for Communion, Luther’s 1520 “Sermon on the New Testament” still emphasized the need for the participant to recognize one’s sins, which, Luther thought, would result in a “hungry soul.”[21] What better preparation for the eucharistic meal than a spiritual appetite? However, in addition to this hunger, Luther now demanded t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. “His Completely Trustworthy Testament”: The Development of Luther’s Early Eucharistic Teaching, 1517–1521
• 2. “The Truth of the Divine Words”: Luther’s Sermons on the Eucharist, 1521–1528, and the Structure of Eucharistic Meaning
• 3. “An Intermediate Brilliance”: The Words of Institution and the Gift of Knowledge in Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology
• 4. Not “Hidden and Far Off”: The Bodily Aspect of Salvation and Its Implications for Understanding the Body in Calvin’s Theology
• 5. Preaching and Presence: Constructing Calvin’s Homiletic Legacy
• 6. Reflections on a Mirror: Calvin’s Preaching on Preaching (Deuteronomy 5)
• 7. “He Is Outwith the World . . . That He May Fill All Things”: Calvin’s Exegesis of the Ascension and Its Relation to the Eucharist
• 8. The Communication of Efficacy: Calvin’s 1 Corinthians Commentary and the Development of the Institutes
• 9. Discerning the Body: The Eucharist and the Christian Social Body in Sixteenth-Century Protestant Exegesis
• 10. Hardened Hearts, Hardened Words: Calvin, Beza, and the Trajectory of Signification
• Notes
• Index