By Angus Harley

I have a love-hate relationship toward Reformed theology. Some aspects are phenomenal, others unbiblical. Some of the non-Scriptural beliefs are rooted in Roman Catholic terminology and, to an extent, in its ideology. One area respects the Lord’s Supper. Many Reformed folks continue to use Roman Catholic terms, which they partially fill with some of the Roman Catholic ideas about the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper- terms such as “sacrament”, “eucharist”, “real presence”, and “sign”. As NCTers we ought to avoid these terms like the plague.

Traditional Catholicism

“Sacrament” is the mother that gives birth to the other terms. In Roman Catholic ideology, a sacrament is a form of spiritual medicine. When accompanied by the sacerdotal formulas- the priest’s verbal comments- the seven sacraments of Roman Catholicism become a sanctifier. They are not merely instruments of sanctification, or a ‘means of grace’, as it were. They become inherently healing, sanctifying, when the magical incantation is uttered by the priest. Thomas Aquinas was big on calling the sacraments “medicine”. As long as the sacrament is accompanied by a Harry Potter spell, the sacrament becomes in itself a sanctifier, a form of spiritual medication.

As to what we call the Lord’s Supper, the heart of the RC magical process is the “real presence” of Christ. The bread and wine by themselves are nothing. Unless the Christ himself, in his real and living presence, ‘inhabits’ and ‘transforms’ the bread and wine into his own actual body and blood, they are useless. Of course, the priestly incantation is the magic spell that brings Jesus to us, reminding me of the medium who called up Samuel.

Worse is to come. The bread and wine do not merely become Jesus (in his body and blood), but the priest offers Jesus up as a sacrifice to God for the sake of those participating in the mass. RCism will tell you that Jesus died once-for-all on the cross. On the priestly altar during mass, the crucified Jesus is now offered up as an unbloody sacrifice, an immolation, to propitiate sins. Confused? You ought to be! What is happening is that, Jesus, as specifically the One who died on the cross once-for-all, is projecting himself forth through the bread and wine as the One who was crucified. This  enables the priest to offer up as a sacrifice the already crucified Jesus again and again, but in a non-bloody way. The priestly altar and the mass is, to put it another way, a recapitulation of Calvary, reenacting his death over and over…but in an unbloody way! Remember, all the time, the bread and wine are his real and present body and blood!

Traditional RCism is adamant that the mass is no mere memorial of Jesus and his death, nor a representation only. It is his death coming to us, in his person, through the bread and wine. That is, the bread and wine are “signs”, not in our modern sense of something like a signpost, for Jesus is actually ‘in’ the bread and wine. The sign signifies his immediate and real presence. Those who do not believe all the above are anathematized (cursed)! And it is all celebrated in thanksgiving, for it is called the “Eucharist” (taken from Latin and Greek for ‘giving thanks’).

This is, of course, sophistry and mumbo jumbo. Jesus’ once-forever sacrifice puts an end to all sacrifices, bloody or non-bloody, or some sort of philosophico-heretical combo of bloody and non-bloody! His death was not only once-for-all, but he’s not scattered throughout the earth over and over and over, as in some sort of nightmareish Groundhog Day, divided up into chunks of bread and drops of wine. His humanity is not divine; and his divinity is not human, nor does the historical (the event of Cavalry) morph into the contemporary (what is done in the present).

Luther

In regard to the real presence, Luther tries to avoid the accusation of cannibalism (eating Jesus’ body) and vampirism (drinking Jesus’ blood) attached to the Roman Catholic teaching. Luther maintained that the bread and wine did not literally become Jesus body and blood, that is, the bread didn’t morph into his body, nor the wine into his blood. Even so, the body and blood of Jesus were so attached to the bread and wine, that they were alongside the bread and wine, to be in, with, and under it. The net effect is that the real body and blood of Jesus are literally present via the bread and wine. Luther is so adamant on this that he holds hands with the pope:

“I have often enough asserted that I do not argue whether the wine remains wine or not. It is enough for me that Christ’s blood is present; let it be with the wine as God wills. Sooner than have mere wine with the fanatics, I would agree with the pope that there is only blood.”[1]

Those “fanatics” were the Anabaptists, our baptist forefathers!

That being said, Luther denies that Jesus was sacrificed on an altar of the mass. However, he retained the term “sacrament”, conjoining it with “sign” and “eucharist”. The sacrament of the eucharist was a sign that had attached to it God’s promise and word. The bread and wine are not just props, mere memorials, or merely representing something or someone invisible. They fixed the external senses on an objective, visible manifestation of God’s grace to us. In that way, the bread and wine functioned just like the OT sacrifices. In drawing our attention to Scripture and its promises, Luther is striving to draw us away from the sacerdotal speech (magical incantation) of the priest as the ‘bridge’ for the transaction that goes on in the Lord’s Supper. The word of God and its promise are necessary to make the bread and wine a sacrament. The Word (the Son) through his written and pronounced word of promise makes the bread and wine both sign and sacrament, the result is that, the eucharist itself brings the Word (eternal Logos) to us. In this way, the eucharist is a sign bringing the eternal Word to us.

An additional major objection Luther has is that, unlike RCism, the sacrament itself is not a sanctifier or innately remedial, for faith is necessary for the sacrament as a sign to work positively..If faith is not present, the ‘Christian’ will receive no blessing, and Christ will not come to him. Whereas, in the RC position, Christ is present in the bread and wine, even if faith is there or not.

Luther jettisoned the idea of Jesus as an ongoing sacrifice, and the mass as a form of black magic. He takes the Christian to the word of God and its promise, and to the necessity of faith. Yet, Luther’s view upholds the abominable notion that Christ’s real body and blood are present in, with, and under the bread, which leads to a form of being ‘in, with, and under’ cannibalism and vampirism!

Calvin

Calvin thankfully avoids Luther’s twisted belief that Christ is in, with, and under the elements. Christ’s real physical presence is not in the bread and wine. Christ’s physical being was in heaven alone, and the blessing of the sacrament must be received by faith, and must be accompanied by the word of God and its promise. It was crucial, therefore, that the elder preach the word of God to explain the eucharist and its promise, so that the assembly understood its meaning.

Calvin distances himself from Luther on another aspect. Both men agreed that the eucharist was valid only with God’s word and his promise attached, and both also taught that for the eucharist to be spiritually edifying, it must be appropriated by faith. Yet, due to Luther’s belief in a form of real presence in the bread and wine, this entailed that an unbeliever could ‘eat’ Jesus’ body and blood in an unworthy manner. Whereas, Calvin, due to his position that Jesus was in heaven, said that there was no eating of the Lord’s body and blood except through faith. Unbelievers could not possibly participate in this spiritual meal.

Calvin adds that, the bread and wine, although not Jesus’ actual body and blood, were signs and symbols of Jesus’ real body and blood. Calvin does not think that the bread and wine merely represent, or point to, the body and blood of Jesus, but the bread and wine are sacramental signs that present the reality of the Jesus’ actual body and blood. Calvin writes:

For I do not allow the force of those comparisons which some borrow from profane or earthly things; for there is a material difference between them and the sacraments of our Lord. The statue of Hercules is called Hercules, but what have we there but a bare, empty representation? On the other hand the Spirit is called a dove, as being a sure pledge of the invisible presence of the Spirit. Hence the bread is Christ’s body, because it assuredly testifies, that the body which it represents is held forth to us, or because the Lord, by holding out to us that symbol, gives us at the same time his own body; for Christ is not a deceiver, to mock us with empty representations.[2]

Hercules statue was a mere representation; it did not symbolize or represent Hercules’ actual presence, his real presence. It merely, as to appearance, signified Hercules; it was a mere memorial. Whereas, the dove was not like a statue or mere memorial; it was a sign that signified the reality of the spiritual presence of the Spirit in person, his real spiritual presence. The Holy Spirit was not the dove, but was symbolized in, by, and through the bird. In other words, the dove was a sign-symbol (= pledge) of the Spirit’s actual and real spiritual, not physical, presence when Jesus was baptized.

The reader has to bear in mind that Calvin is teaching a union between the dove and the Spirit. For that reason, Calvin asserts that God is not mocked, as the bread and wine are not empty vessels, mere memorials or ‘statues’, for they actively signify and symbolize (are pledges) of Christ’s actual and real spiritual presence in his body and blood. Not that bread and wine morph into Jesus’ body and blood (RCism), or that his physical body and blood are mystically attached to the bread and wine (Luther), but that due to the faith trusting in the word, the promise of fellowship and life that the bread and wine represent concerning Jesus’ death comes to the believer.

The problem with Calvin’s view is that it retains some of the magic of RCism. He uses a similar method to RCism, but reverses its direction into heaven itself where Christ is. He writes:

“You see bread — nothing more — but you learn that it is a symbol of Christ’s body. Do not doubt that the Lord accomplishes what his words intimate — that the body, which thou dost not at all behold, is given to thee, as a spiritual repast. It seems incredible, that we should be nourished by Christ’s flesh, which is at so great a distance from us. Let us bear in mind, that it is a secret and wonderful work of the Holy Spirit, which it were criminal to measure by the standard of our understanding.”[3]

In other words, faith does not receive Jesus body and blood as being their in the bread and wine, but faith is transported, in conjunction with the bread and wine as symbols, to the spiritual and heavenly presence of the Son to feed through faith in what his body and blood accomplished for us.

In reading Calvin’s theology, I’m reminded of RCism and Orthodoxy’s understanding of religious icons, those paintings of so-called holy figures that were used in worship. Icons were/are mystical portals that the ‘believer’ goes through, as it were, to get immediate access to the heavenly person portrayed in the painting. And even though the Reformed group will deny it, it seems to me that the bread and wine are acting just like those icons: as mystical spiritual-portals to the Lord’s heavenly body and blood.

Zwingli

He removed all the mysticism associated with RC ideas of the Lord’s Supper. Jesus was not present physically in the bread and wine, nor was ‘in, with, and under’ them. He agreed with Calvin that Jesus body was in heaven. However, he didn’t believe in Calvin’s spiritual form of magic that took place by a combination of faith and the proclaimed word, by which the bread and wine became like spiritual portals into the presence of the heavenly Jesus to feed, by faith, off of the merit of his once-for-all death. The bread and wine are mere props, whereby the believer is reminded of the true, once-and-for-all sacrifice of the crucified Christ, until he comes.

There are a couple of debates we need to comment on concerning Zwingli’s view. The first is the claim that Zwingli did not believe that Christ was present during the Lord’s Supper. Zwingli is adamant that Christ was there. Too many Reformed practitioners misrepresent- and some twist- Zwingli’s ‘representative’ view to amount to the position that Christ is not present. This is because these believers are thinking exclusively within their Reformed definitions of the Lord’s Supper, and especially of the idea of the bread and wine spiritually signifying Christ (as in Calvin’s position). Zwingli held to the biblical position that when God’s people, by faith, gathered unto the Lord to worship him, to hear his word, then God gathered with them, and the Son was present to the eyes of faith. It was this spiritual faith that the believer enacted when participating in the Lord’s Supper.

The second debate centers on the supposed change in Zwingli’s position. Reputedly, he changed his view in later life and this is represented in his writing “Exposition of Faith”. To put is simply, Zwingli, in later life, is reputed to have come closer to Calvin’s view. I see no evidence of this in Zwingli’s Exposition of Faith. Here’s a snippet:

If I may put it more precisely, to eat the body of Christ sacramentally is to eat the body of Christ with the heart and the mind in conjunction with the sacrament. I will make everything clear to your highness, O king. You eat the body of Christ spiritually, but not sacramentally, every time your soul puts the anxious question: “How are you to be saved? We sin every day, and every day we draw nearer to death. After this life there is another, for if we have a soul and it is concerned about the future, how can it be destroyed with this present life? How can so much light and knowledge be turned into darkness and oblivion? Therefore if the soul has eternal life, what sort of life will be the portion of my poor soul? A life of joy or a life of anguish? I will examine my life and consider whether it deserves joy or anguish.’[4]

 Notice how Zwingli does believe in a sacramental ‘eating’ of Jesus’ body, but he clearly defines this as not being sacramental, in any traditional sense, but only spiritual. So he says to the king, “You eat the body of Christ spiritually, but not sacramentally, every time your soul puts the anxious question: “How are you to be saved? We sin every day, and every day we draw nearer to death.” The key here is that this type of eating happens outside of the Lord’s Supper, and it is an eating by faith.

The reason why there is room for misunderstanding is that Zwingli is himself operating with that horrible RC terminology concerning the Lord’s Supper. There are times, because of his reliance on this spurious language, that he gets himself into trouble, or, at the very least to our modern eyes, his theology looks suspiciously like RCisms, or Luther’s, or Calvin’s. Thus, even the best of them- Zwingli- can get tied in knots sometimes due to this unbiblical terminology.

Not cool!

And so I say we must drop all the RC language and terminology of mumbo jumbo. Not cool! It is not found in Scripture, misleads God’s flock, and often confuses any truth that is being presented from Scripture with Latin black magic. Let’s use God’s terms and theology alone. Amen!

[1] Martin Luther, “Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper,” in Luther’s Works Volume 37: Word and Sacrament III, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1961), 317.

[2] John Calvin, “1 Corinthians 11:Calvin’s Commentary”, StudyLight.org, accessed June 8, 2023, https://www.studylight.org/commentaries/eng/cal/1-corinthians-11.html.

[3] Ibid.

[4] G. W. Bromiley, ed., Zwingli and Bullinger, The Library of Christian Classics, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 258.