Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?
Romans 6:3
In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.”
1 Corinthians 11:25
As we continue to look at the practical outworking of God’s grace in the church and in the lives of Christians, we now come to the issue of the sacraments. Often neglected in evangelical circles, the sacraments were of vital importance to the Reformers. Indeed, if grace shaped the Reformers’ understanding of the nature and importance of preaching, it did much the same for their view of the sacraments: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Evangelical Protestants can somewhat sympathize with the passion behind the debates over baptism during the Reformation. If you have an interest in discussing or debating theology, you may have had some disagreements about baptism with someone on the issue. And even if we no longer call for the death penalty for those with whom we disagree, it can still be a heated topic. By contrast, debates over the Lord’s Supper often seem too abstract and nitpicky to us today, mostly because evangelicals do not know what to do with it. It is something we do because we are supposed to do it. But for the most part it is not something we understand or appreciate in any profound way.
When we look back to the Reformation, it can be surprising to see how much ink was spilled over the debates about the sacraments. There were few topics debated as often or as heatedly. But why? Why did the sacraments matter so much to the Reformers? In this chapter, we shall explore why they thought so often and deeply about them and also offer some thoughts about what this may indicate about our understanding of grace today. My hope is that it will help us to see the sacraments as a means of God’s grace.
Baptism
The Political Background to Baptism in the Reformation
All of the magisterial Reformers affirmed the importance of infant baptism. While Zwingli had a brief moment of hesitation on the issue in the early 1520s, he swung back to the paedobaptist side with a vengeance, even supporting the death penalty for those who deviated on this point.
Why the death penalty? Why treat disagreement on this matter as a capital crime? Part of the reason was political. The society that the Reformers inherited was shaped by the social and theological structures of a church-state relationship that had developed during the Middle Ages. The system assumed the material identity of church and state; every member of the state was also a member of the church, and vice versa. Medieval Christendom found it impossible to assimilate those who refused to belong to one or the other. The Jews provide a great example of this: How do you relate socially and politically in medieval Europe to those who by definition were not part of the church? The answer is: you do not. You marginalize and demonize them. This is why medieval Europe has such a horrific record of anti-Jewish persecution.
In the sixteenth century, various groups of Anabaptists who repudiated the practice of infant baptism were vulnerable for the same reason. Rejecting infant baptism was not simply an ecclesiastical move; it was a revolutionary political and social move as well. Anabaptists were considered dangerous enough to merit execution. That’s not to say that there were not also profound theological reasons why baptism proved (and continues to be) a source of controversy among Reformation Protestants. One of the most prominent reasons was that baptism was intimately connected to, and reflective of, the Reformers’ views of grace.
Baptism and Grace
Scripture is clear that there is a connection between baptism and grace, even if the nature of that relationship is disputed. First, and most obviously, baptism has a christological foundation. Christ himself is baptized by John the Baptist, which provides the occasion for the Father acknowledging his Son and anointing him with the Spirit. Christ himself uses the language of baptism in Luke 12:50 to refer to his suffering and his coming work of atonement. He then connects this to the disciples’ own future when he comments in Mark 10:38–39 that his disciples will be baptized with his baptism. Finally, the Great Commission of Matthew 28 places baptizing at the core of the mission of the church as she brings God’s grace to the nations.
In the book of Acts, becoming a Christian and receiving baptism are intimately connected, such that even the baptism by John is seen to have been inadequate (Acts 19:3–5). The language of baptism is also used of the work of the Holy Spirit. One of the contrasts between the time of John and the time of the apostles is that John baptized with water while post-Pentecost Christians are baptized with the Holy Spirit (Acts 11:16).
When we turn to the letters of Paul, the teaching on baptism is just as powerful in the language it uses. Romans 6:3 makes a profound connection between Christ’s death and our baptism. Galatians 3:27 makes a similar point. First Corinthians emphasizes that baptism is in the name of Christ (1:13) and is the entry point into the church (12:13).
Given all that we have said thus far—that grace is constituted by God’s action in Christ and applied to individuals by the Holy Spirit, and that the church is a work of God’s grace rather than the response of men and women to that grace—it should be clear that baptism is first and foremost an act of God. God is the agent in baptism, not the priest or minister who applies the water and pronounces the Trinitarian formula.
The primacy that the Reformers gave to the word because of their understanding of justification by grace alone through faith alone meant that there could be no baptism without the proclamation of that word. Baptism was significant because it was attached to the word that proclaimed Christ.
Protestants disagree among themselves on the theology of infant baptism and even on its legitimacy. Thus, Lutherans and Presbyterians baptize infants for different reasons, while Baptists repudiate the practice entirely—though even Baptists who agree on the subjects of the rite exhibit some diversity on what they believe its significance to be. In this section, therefore, we will look at some of the influential but diverse approaches to the matter among those who helped to forge the Reformation theology of grace alone.
Luther on Baptism
Baptism was a less contentious matter for Luther than the Mass. In the late Middle Ages the Mass, rather like indulgences, had become a money-grubbing opportunity for the church, whereby the grace of God could be exchanged on the basis of a cash transaction. This contradicted the very notion of a sacrament for Luther. Sacraments were gospel ordinances connecting the promise of God to human beings. They are something God does for us, not something we do for God. The church, thankfully, had not turned baptism into quite the same racket as the Mass.
Nevertheless, Luther did see a trivialization of the sacrament at the heart of the medieval approach to baptism. Medieval piety was focused on penance, and the confessional and the subsequent acts of penitential piety were the major building blocks of the Christian life. Baptism served as an initiation into the church, but after that it lost much of its practical significance. The typical Christian would not have looked to baptism to provide any kind of assurance or help in the midst of life’s daily struggles. Luther’s Reformation theology was an attempt to reassert the importance of baptism and place it back at the center of the Christian life.
Baptism was of crucial importance to Luther in his understanding of God’s grace, and this is best seen from the way in which baptism functioned in his own life. When tempted by the devil, Luther’s typical answer was to remind the Evil One that he had been baptized and therefore belonged to Christ. Luther did not point to his good works. He pointed to the objective work of Christ applied to him in baptism for his security at times of spiritual peril.
This was in large part because Luther’s path to justification by faith was shaped to a significant degree by his changed understanding of baptism. He came to see baptism as referring not to cleansing or a damping down of sin but as something pointing to death and resurrection.1 The individual self is dead in sins. In order to be saved, an individual must also die to this sinful self and rise to newness of life. That is the true meaning and significance of baptism. Thus, baptism featured heavily in his 1520 treatise The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, because this new understanding of grace and salvation meant that people also needed to see the new significance Luther was giving to the sacrament. For Luther, the essence of baptism lay in its connection to the promise of Christ. Baptism was signified with water, which pressed the gift of Christ on the recipient. As Christ had died and risen again, so the individual must be identified with him in death and resurrection through the sacrament. Moreover, the whole purpose of baptism was to underline the passive nature of the Christian as a recipient of grace. The dead person cannot rise under their own power. Resurrection is not an active human response. It is itself the powerful, life-giving act of God carried out on the dead person. We will return to the baptism of infants shortly, but we should note that the very helpless passivity of an infant—a point many Baptists today find so problematic about paedobaptism—is actually a key part of the symbolism of baptism for Luther and what it says about grace. Nothing more reflects the onesidedness of grace than the baptism of a tiny, helpless infant who can do nothing for itself.
Yet Luther did not believe that baptism was effective because of a magical power inherent in the elements themselves or in the priest performing the action. Baptism (like the Lord’s Supper) needed a linguistic context in which the grace of God in Christ was clearly and plainly declared. Christ always comes through his word. God’s grace was primarily effected through his word, and this meant that the liturgical action of baptism needed to be connected to the promise of God. In his 1519 work The Holy and Blessed Sacrament of Baptism, Luther argues for three things of importance in baptism: the sign, the thing signified, and the faith. The sign is the infant being plunged into water (Luther’s preference as to mode was immersion).2 The significance is death and resurrection, and this is so potent that it marks the baptized off from the unbaptized in a fundamental way. The baptized person is dead—and continually dying—to sin, and risen and continually rising to newness of life. The faith is confidence in resurrection in Christ at the last day.3
For Luther, the Christian must grow in faith and come to grasp the baptismal promises for herself over time, but this does not hinder the objective efficacy of the sacrament. Luther is comfortable declaring that the baptized child is sacramentally pure. The infant is declared righteous.4 Luther sees the struggle between sin and righteousness beginning with baptism and completed only in death.5 In short, baptism happens once with water, but it captures the essential meaning of the entire Christian life.
Christians from an evangelical background are likely to be confused and possibly disturbed by Luther’s high view of baptism. Justification by grace through faith sits very comfortably with the conversionist narrative we find in writers such as John Bunyan, many of the English Puritans, and later figures such as John Newton, John Wesley, and Charles Haddon Spurgeon. For many of a more evangelical or revivalist persuasion, emphasizing the efficacy of baptism seems to threaten the existential urgency of our need for faith.
However, what we see in Luther is a very different conception of the Christian life, one that is rooted in his understanding of grace. Luther does describe a crisis experience in his so-called autobiographical fragment (when he makes an exegetical breakthrough in his reading of Rom 1:17), but it is not clear that he is there talking about what later evangelicals regard as conversion. For Luther, baptism was the moment when he joined the church and became a Christian. And there is consistency within Luther’s theology. In a remarkable Table Talk, Luther parallels baptism with preaching and points to the fact that preaching does not depend on the prior faith of the individual:
You say you don’t baptize children because they don’t believe. Why do you preach the Word to adults who don’t believe, unless perhaps in the hope that they may believe? You do it on the strength of God’s command alone. For if you baptize me because I say I believe, then you baptize on account of me and in my name. Therefore, since you don’t know whether I believe or don’t believe, you do it only because of God’s command. It isn’t necessary to exclude children, since as a rule you baptize all, whether they believe or not. It would be a terrible thing if I were baptized on the strength of my confession. What would you do if you learned privately that a man who publicly desired baptism or the sacrament [of the altar] was an unbeliever? You couldn’t deny it to him, and yet you would know that he is without faith. So Christ offered [the sacrament] to Judas. Therefore, anybody at all should be baptized unless he has been publicly convicted of a crime, and let his faith and salvation be committed to God’s keeping.6
For Luther, both the word and baptism need to be understood in terms of God’s grace and thus the priority of God’s action. God is only gracious in Christ, and Christ comes from outside as a sovereign, unilateral, gracious decision of God. That which brings Christ is that which brings grace in an objective sense, the reality of which is in no way dependent on the intrinsic faith or reaction of the recipient. In baptism, the combination of sign and word presents the infant with Christ—with God’s objective grace. The presence of Christ is not dependent on the faith of the child; rather, the faith of the child is dependent on the presence of Christ. Were Christ not present, there could be no faith because faith would have no object. For Luther, making baptism a sign of the individual’s response to God would be to deprive it of that which makes it so important: that it presents and offers Christ and therefore God’s grace to the infant. We might also add that the category of baptismal regeneration is not the best way to characterize Luther’s position. It is true that he believes baptism makes the infant a Christian, but this is not simply a result of the act itself, as if the water possessed some intrinsic power of cleansing, but rather of the fact that Christ is truly offered to the child in baptism because baptism is attached to the promise of God in Christ, to be received by faith.
Zwingli on Baptism
Of all the magisterial Reformers, Zwingli was the one who dallied, albeit only briefly, with the idea of abandoning infant baptism and connecting the rite to public profession of faith. In part this was the result of the political exigencies in Zurich. Zurich was an independent city ruled by a town council. This gave Zwingli’s Reformation a more radical political context because power was not the preserve of an established nobility, as was the case in Wittenberg. Early in the Reformation, various radical figures were part of Zwingli’s inner circle. In addition, the hallmark of the Zurich Reformation—a strict emphasis on Scripture as the regulative guide for all aspects of life—meant that all matters pertaining to the church came under rigorous scrutiny.
Yet Zwingli’s short-lived dalliance with credobaptism ended with his ferocious support for paedobaptism. In his Commentary on True and False Religion, Zwingli’s argument for infant baptism is quite simple, and it moved discussion toward the later Reformed emphasis on the covenant of grace. He argued that because his Anabaptist opponents did not consider infants to be damned, they were conceding that they were under grace. Further, if the children of believers were not under grace, they would be worse off than the children of carnal Israel. Granted, his argument may not be compelling today, but in a culture where infant baptism was the default position, it had persuasive power. Furthermore, it points toward a more covenantal understanding of baptism.7
This covenantal aspect of Zwingli’s thought is clear at numerous points where he draws close parallels between circumcision and baptism. This is not a novelty with Zwingli, since many patristic and medieval writers, even Luther himself, had drawn the parallel. But Zwingli is careful to develop it in a covenantal direction. In a letter to fellow Reformer Urbanus Rhegius, Zwingli makes it clear that neither circumcision in the Old Testament nor baptism in the New saves in and of itself. However, because infant Jews belonged to visible Israel and received the covenant sign, infant Christians who belong to the visible church should also receive the covenant sign.8
Zwingli did not believe that baptism conveyed grace, any more than circumcision had done so. Rather, it sets the infant within the visible church and is a tangible expression of the grace that is available in and through the visible church. It puts the infant in a context of Christian nurture, and it witnesses to those who see others being baptized to the unconditional action of God in graciously building his church. Baptism is a matter of great corporate significance. If Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Baptists in their different ways emphasize the significance and benefits of baptism specifically for the recipient of the rite, Zwingli emphasized its benefits for the corporate body.9
Baptism in Calvin
Any treatment of the views of the Reformers on baptism needs to include Calvin. So what was Calvin’s view on baptism? As with the Lord’s Supper, Calvin stands somewhere between the view of Zwingli and that of Luther: the Lord’s Supper is not merely a sign or purely symbolic, but nor does it have quite the same real potency that Luther ascribes to it. Calvin’s views here connect to his general approach to the sacraments, which he defines as:
An external sign, by which the Lord seals on our consciences his promises of good-will toward us, in order to sustain the weakness of our faith, and we in our turn testify our piety towards him, both before himself, and before angels as well as men.10
At first glance, this seems to be a standard view of the sacraments, similar to what we might find in Augustine, that treats the sacraments as visible signs of invisible grace. The reference to promise, however, adds that important Lutheran insight—the sacrament is to be understood in connection with the word of God. We might even say that it functions as a kind of visible or tangible word, to borrow Augustine’s term. Indeed, for Calvin as for Luther, the word must be proclaimed before the sacraments because otherwise they are just meaningless, dead symbols.
Calvin develops the idea of the sacraments as seals, analogous to the seals placed on official documents. My will was drawn up by my lawyer and contains specific verbal instructions on how my property is to be disposed of after my death. Yet it is also notarized. An official stamp has been placed on the paper on which it is written, which authenticates the document and gives it authority. This is analogous to how Calvin sees the sacraments. The word of God preached is that which contains the promise of God’s grace, and the sacraments seal that grace on our hearts in a tangible manner. This is why preaching is important, for without preaching the seals are meaningless. But it is also why the seals are important, for the seals themselves press home the authority of the preaching.11
When Calvin discusses baptism, he describes it as consisting of three specific things: that our sins are forgiven in Christ, that we are united to Christ for the mortification of indwelling sin and for newness of life, and that we are united to Christ so as to be partakers in all his benefits.12 What is striking about all three is that they all are christological and deeply connected to God’s grace manifested in Christ. They are actions that God does. For Calvin as with Luther, baptism is primarily about what God does and only secondarily about our response.
Of course, the issue of the subjects of baptism arises for Calvin as well. Like Luther and Zwingli, he defends the baptism of infants on the grounds of the close analogy between circumcision and baptism, the identity of the promise of grace under the Old and New Testaments, and the covenant between the Old and New Testaments being of the same substance.13
Baptism and Grace: A Contemporary Reflection
To this point I’ve presented a summary of the Reformers’ understandings of baptism and its relation to God’s grace. It is beyond the scope of this book to attempt an analysis of Calvin’s arguments for baptizing children, still less to offer a comprehensive biblical case for such. Instead, I want to raise a simple question: what implication does our understanding of grace have for our understanding of the significance of baptism? My hope is that the answer to this question may prove more productive than the usual debates about subjects and mode.
We can reflect on this from both a paedobaptist and a credobaptist perspective. Some paedobaptists see the baptism of infants as a way of giving thanks to God for a new baby or of dedicating that baby to God’s service. In both cases, they understand baptism as something that they do. Calvin, by attaching baptism to Christ and the gospel, insists on understanding it as resting on, symbolizing, and sealing that which God has done.
By contrast, credobaptists will rightly have no time for such ideas as baptism as a means of giving thanks for children or dedicating them to the Lord. Yet many believe that baptism is the way in which we Christians profess our faith. In doing so, they make baptism something that we do, an act that rests on us. For this reason, there are some Baptist churches that will repeatedly baptize people who profess faith, fall away, worry they were not saved the first time around, and seek baptism again on another profession of faith. Such practice rests on the notion that the significance and potency of baptism depends on the faith of the subject. That also misses Calvin’s basic point that baptism is to be understood in connection with Christ and his grace.14
Yet we must also be wary of allowing the common focus of the debates on the subjects of baptism—believers only, or believers and their children?—to blind us to some areas of deep and significant agreement between Presbyterians and Baptists, especially Baptists who belong to the Particular Baptist tradition. Indeed, as we consider the evangelical church today, I would argue that the big divide on the issue of baptism is not simply—or perhaps not even primarily—between paedobaptists and credobaptists on the legitimate subjects of the sacrament. It is actually between those who see God as the agent in baptism and those who see human beings as the agents in baptism. This may surprise contemporary Baptists, but early Baptists agreed with the Reformed that God is the primary agent of baptism. We can see this by comparing the Westminster Confession on baptism with the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession. First, we’ll look at chapter 28 of the Westminster Confession of Faith:
Baptism is a sacrament of the new testament, ordained by Jesus Christ (Matt. 28:19), not only for the solemn admission of the party baptized into the visible Church (1 Cor. 12:13); but also, to be unto him a sign and seal of the covenant of grace (Rom. 4:11; Col. 2:11–12), of his ingrafting into Christ (Gal. 3:27), of regeneration (Titus 3:5), of remission of sins (Mark 1:4), and of his giving up unto God, through Jesus Christ, to walk in newness of life (Rom. 6:3–4). Which sacrament is, by Christ’s own appointment, to be continued in His Church until the end of the world (Matt. 28:19–20).15
Now, let’s consider chapter 29.1 of the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession:
Baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament, ordained by Jesus Christ, to be unto the party baptized, a sign of his fellowship with Him, in His death and resurrection; of his being engrafted into Him (Rom. 6:3–5; Col. 2:12; Gal. 3:27); of remission of sins (Mark 1:4; Acts 22:16); and of his giving up unto God, through Jesus Christ, to live and walk in newness of life (Rom. 6:2, 4).16
Some of the language is different, reflecting the respective sensibilities of Presbyterians and Baptists. But the heart of the theology is remarkably similar and shares in common the central point that the meaning of baptism is found in the action of God. Baptism is not primarily a response to God’s action. Instead, it is God’s action. It is grounded in the work of Christ and is a sign (and for the Reformed—and maybe Particular Baptists as well—a seal) of that work to the one baptized.
Given this, I am inclined to say that the difference between a Presbyterian like myself and a Reformed Baptist who holds to the teachings of the 1689 confession is not as great as that between a Presbyterian and a Roman Catholic or between the 1689 Baptist and a Southern Baptist who may see baptism simply as a wet means of professing faith before the world.17 Perhaps the biggest division over baptism is whether it is a means of grace or not.
The Lord’s Supper
The Significance of the Lord’s Supper in the Reformation
If the practice of infant baptism served as a point of continuity between the medieval church and the Reformers, dividing them only from the more radical groups of the sixteenth century, the theology of the Lord’s Supper not only divided Protestants from Rome but also from one another. In 1529 the German prince Philip of Hesse arranged for Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, and their respective allies to meet at the castle in Marburg to broker a theological agreement. Philip’s motivation was really not theological at all: he wanted to establish a military alliance between the German Lutherans in the north and Swiss Reformed in the south, for the mutual protection of their interests in the face of potential hostile action from the church or the Holy Roman Empire. That such an alliance required theological agreement is a sign of just how different the world of politics in the sixteenth century was from our own.
The discussions at Marburg witnessed to significant agreement on a number of theological matters but failed to produce a consensus on one vital point—whether the whole Christ, in his divine and human natures, was present in the consecrated elements of bread and wine at the Lord’s Supper. So acrimonious was the disagreement, and so fundamental did Luther regard that issue, that the Marburg Colloquy marks the formal beginning of the division between the Lutherans and the Reformed. While the two traditions have other emphases that distinguish them, it is this point, that of the nature of Christ’s presence in the Supper, that is the real dividing line.
Luther and Zwingli on the Lord’s Supper
Why was Luther so passionate about the Lord’s Supper? Much of the reason relates to his spiritual autobiography. Luther’s early fears of not being good enough to stand before a righteous God were precipitated by the requirement that he officiate at Mass. To put it crudely, Luther was nervous about his responsibility to “make” God and “handle” God as he consecrated and distributed the elements. How could he, a sinful man, come into such proximity with God and survive?
The solution to his fear was Luther’s realization that God is gracious to sinners in Christ alone, manifest in frail human flesh, and that the Supper brings the whole Christ, human and divine, to the recipient.18 Unlike the Roman Mass, where the action was from earth to heaven and the elements were offered up to God, in the Lutheran Mass (and the name “Mass,” while transformed in meaning, was retained), Christ came to earth and was offered to the congregants in the context of the proclamation of the gospel.
Luther’s thinking on the Mass underwent some development between his initial thinking in 1519 and his eventual clash with Zwingli at Marburg. Initially, his major concern was to refute the Roman emphasis on the sacrificial aspect of the Mass. While he considered the Roman idea of transubstantiation (the notion that the bread and wine turn into the body and blood of Christ) to be an error, he was more concerned to emphasize the Mass as promise. Thus, there was need for vernacular preaching to provide the promissory context of the Supper. Grasping Christ by faith in the word was necessary for grasping him by faith in the Supper. This was the position he presented in 1520 in two important treatises: A Treatise on the New Testament, That Is, the Holy Mass and The Babylonian Captivity of the Church.19 Luther captures the kernel of his thinking in the following passage from A Treatise:
If we desire to observe mass properly and to understand it, then we must surrender everything that the eyes behold and that the senses suggest—be it vestments, bells, songs, ornaments, prayers, processions, elevations, prostrations, or whatever happens in the mass—until we first grasp and thoroughly ponder the words of Christ, by which he performed and instituted the mass and commanded us to perform it. For therein lies the whole mass, its nature, work, profit, and benefit. Without the words nothing is derived from the mass.20
Here, the priority of the word is clear, and as we earlier noted the connection of the word to God’s grace, this reinforces the priority of grace: the action is from God to us, not from us to God. The Mass is full of grace because it is full of Christ. Only in the flesh of Christ can we find God to be gracious toward us, and so the Mass presses on us that God is gracious and merciful. It is powerful and real and offers Christ to the participant just as the word offers the same.21
This helps to explain why Luther responded so negatively to Zwingli. Zwingli’s theology of the Lord’s Supper really had two basic aspects to it. There was a horizontal dimension, which Zwingli derived from a meaning of the Latin word sacramentum, a military oath by which soldiers bound themselves together. Zwingli saw the Lord’s Supper as a rite by which Christians committed themselves to each other, a communal meal that reinforced communal loyalty and identity:
[The sacraments] fill the office of an oath of allegiance. For “sacramentum” is used by the Latin writers instead of “ius iurandum,” i.e., “oath.” For those who use one and the same oath, become one and the same race and sacred alliance, unite into one body and one people, and he who betrays it is false to his oath.22
For Luther, such a notion smacks too much of law, not gospel. It sounds like something we do, not something that God does for us, and is thus not a matter of grace.
The second aspect of Zwingli’s thought to which Luther objected was his insistence that the words of institution be understood symbolically, that “this is my body” actually meant “this symbolizes my body.” For Luther, this cast the Supper as nothing more than a memorial, with the benefits it offered being the opportunity for remembering the sacrifice of Christ. Zwingli writes:
Yet the sacraments do work faith, historical faith; for all festivals, trophies, nay, monuments and statues, work historical faith: that is, call to mind that a certain thing once took place, the memory of which is thus refreshed, as was the case with the festival of the Passover, among the Hebrews and of the seisachtheia, i. e., removal of debts, among the Athenians, or that a victory was won at a given place, as was the case at Ebenezer [1 Sam. 7:12]. In this way, then, the Lord’s Supper worketh faith, that is, signifies as certain that Christ was born and suffered.23
This view was anathema to Luther on three grounds. First, it reads the words of Christ symbolically when Luther believed that they should be read literally. Second, it removes from the Supper the incarnate Christ, and only in the incarnate Christ does one find the gracious God. Third, by making the Supper a memorial, it again makes the benefit it provides something dependent on the recipient, not something objectively offered to the recipient. To use Lutheran terminology, this makes the sacrament law, not gospel, and therefore not a matter of grace.
Underlying the differences between the two men was a major christological disagreement. Luther believed that there was a direct communication of properties between the divine and human natures in the incarnation, while Zwingli thought the communication was indirect and to the person. In layman’s terms (as it relates to the Lord’s Supper), this meant that Luther thought the humanity of Christ was present wherever the divinity was present. Zwingli thought that Christ’s body was localized in heaven—that any talk of his presence here on earth could only be spiritual. That was objectionable to Luther because it removed the humanity of Christ from the elements. He believed that Zwingli’s Christology made the Supper law, not gospel. Indeed, this was ironically what he regarded as the fundamental error of the Roman Catholic Mass, that it made the Supper a work—though the fact that the Roman Catholics still believed the body and blood were really present made their error less serious than that of Zwingli.
Calvin on the Lord’s Supper
It is against the background of the conflict between Luther and Zwingli that John Calvin’s approach to the Lord’s Supper should be understood. From early in his reforming career, Calvin showed a preference for Luther over Zwingli, in large part because of the way he regarded Zwingli as reducing the Supper to a mere symbolic memorial. Calvin believed the sacraments are signs and seals of the promises of God that have a real importance and impact on the believer. Yet Calvin could not follow Luther in his Christology. Luther’s belief in the direct communication of attributes jeopardized the reality of Christ’s humanity. If, for example, God’s property of ubiquity was directly communicated to the human nature, then the human nature became ubiquitous, and therefore in a very real sense Christ’s human body was unlike any other human body. Calvin, like Zwingli, believed that the human body (and soul) of Christ is located at the right hand of the Father until his return in glory at the end of time. Thus, Calvin’s treatment of the Lord’s Supper offers an account of the sacrament that attempts to avoid mere memorialism and strives to do justice to the seriousness that Paul attributes to the sacrament in 1 Corinthians 11, while also avoiding the christological problems of Luther’s position.
As in baptism, in the Lord’s Supper Calvin sees the believer’s union with Christ as crucial. Because God has united himself in the person of his Son to human flesh as part of the great economy of grace, so Christ’s flesh is of supreme benefit to us. It is our union with the incarnate Christ by faith that saves, and Calvin characterizes this with the language of eating or feeding. In the Lord’s Supper, to speak of eating Christ’s flesh and drinking his blood in purely memorialist terms is thoroughly inadequate and fails to engage the profound, biblical teaching on this matter.
Granted, there certainly is a symbolic aspect to the Supper. Eating and drinking the elements reminds us of Christ’s work on our behalf, his sacrificial death for our sins; and as bread and wine nourish the human body, so Christ’s body and blood nourish the human soul.24 It also impresses on the partakers their union with Christ and therefore their standing as heirs of all that belongs to him.25 Yet, for Calvin, there is more to the sacrament than just that which it symbolizes. There is a real feeding, by faith, on the body and blood of the Lord Jesus.26 This feeding is not coterminous with the physical eating of the elements advocated by the Lutherans. Rather, it is a spiritual feeding. The Holy Spirit unites us to Christ, thereby enabling us to feed on the flesh and blood of Christ by faith:
But though it seems an incredible thing that the flesh of Christ, while at such a distance from us in respect of place, should be food to us, let us remember how far the secret virtue of the Holy Spirit surpasses all our conceptions, and how foolish it is to wish to measure its immensity by our feeble capacity. Therefore, what our mind does not comprehend let faith conceive, viz., that the Spirit truly unites things separated by space. That sacred communion of flesh and blood by which Christ transfuses his life into us, just as if it penetrated our bones and marrow, he testifies and seals in the Supper, and that not by presenting a vain or empty sign, but by there exerting an efficacy of the Spirit by which he fulfills what he promises.27
In other words, the Supper makes a difference in that it offers a true, spiritual feeding on Christ in a way that is powerful and in line with Calvin’s view that the sacraments are not just signs or memorials of God’s promises but are also seals of the same, that they make a tangible difference.
We might say that Calvin uses the Holy Spirit to solve the geographical problem with which Luther and Zwingli were faced: How does the language of body and blood apply to the bread and wine, given that Christ has ascended to heaven? Luther did it by extending the scope of Christ’s humanity to be present wherever his divinity was present. Zwingli did it by essentially denying the reality of Christ’s presence at all and arguing for what one might somewhat caustically call a “real absence.” Calvin points to the role of the Spirit to unite the believer to Christ and so overcome this distance. In this way Calvin can speak of a real feeding by faith on Christ in the Lord’s Supper.
More Than a Memorial?
I suspect that the default position for most evangelical Protestants today is some kind of Zwinglianism. The idea of the Lord’s Supper as a memorial has obvious biblical support (“Do this in remembrance of me” [1 Cor 11:24]) and the advantage of being easy and simple to understand. And yet it would seem that the Bible requires us to see the Supper as more than just a prompt for the recipients to recall the death of Christ. It also reminds us of Christ’s absence (“For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” [1 Cor 11:26]). Further, there is a seriousness about the Supper such that Paul even ascribes dire and even fatal consequences to eating and drinking in an unworthy manner (1 Cor 11:29–30). For this reason, I believe Calvin was right to see the Supper as not merely a memorial but also as a means of grace, as something that actually does have an impact on the life of the believer.
One might respond at this point and ask: What “extra thing” do we have through the Lord’s Supper that we do not have through the preaching of the word? This eating of which Calvin speaks, what does it add to what the preached word has already given us? The answer to that, on one level, is “Nothing at all!” Both the word and the sacrament that can be attached to that word bring nothing but Jesus Christ. That which I grasp by the word through faith is that which I receive through the sacrament by faith: Christ. Ironically, it is this—that the Supper offers the same Christ as the word preached—that makes the Supper an important means of grace in addition to the word.
However, a few observations might help to reassure us that the sacrament is not superfluous. While the sacrament gives us the same Christ as the word, it does so in a different form, and that is no small thing. The form in which something comes is significant, as a moment’s reflection reveals. Take, for example, a husband and a wife. The husband may—indeed should—tell his wife every day that he loves her. That is a verbal declaration and is surely a typical part of a healthy, loving marriage. If a husband never says he loves his wife, there is almost certainly something wrong in the relationship. On occasion, however, he will also attach to that verbal statement a gift—say, a bunch of flowers, or a box of chocolates, some perfume, or a piece of jewelry. The gift is indicative of nothing that his words have not communicated. Indeed, if he never utters the words “I love you” and yet occasionally hands over a gift, the wife might legitimately wonder what exactly the gift means. The words that surround it, that are part of the marriage on a daily basis, are important for seeing what the gifts signify when they are given. So the gift represents nothing other than what the husband has already said to his beloved spouse.
But note as well that the gift itself makes a difference. It makes a difference when a husband backs up his words with actions, even if such actions might be relatively trivial in form. How much does a box of chocolates cost? A few dollars. Not even a day’s pay. And yet the gift can mean much as a tangible statement of the love that the husband verbally expresses every day.
To prove the importance of presents in reinforcing or sealing the idea of love, think of the likely outcome if the husband decides not to give his wife a gift on her birthday. If he offers as his defense the fact that he tells her he loves her every day and the gift is unnecessary, it is highly unlikely that such a defense will prove satisfactory to his wife. Indeed, I would not recommend that any reader be so rash as to try that experiment at home.
We can apply this analogy to Calvin’s understanding of the Lord’s Supper. The Supper gives us the same Christ to feed on in a different way from that provided by word alone. It involves taste, touch, even sight for those not blind. The Supper enriches the way we receive Christ—not that it is necessary for salvation, any more than a ring is necessary for a marriage, but it does reinforce and seal the promises. My wife may look at one of the rings I bought her and be reminded of the moment at which I gave it to her, but the ring’s significance runs deeper than a mere aid to memory. It embodies and represents my love in a profound way, and when I am absent from her there is a sense in which it makes her feel my presence.
Again, the analogy is imperfect. The point is this: the Lord’s Supper is more than a memorial. If it were just a case of recalling to mind the death of Christ, then words would seem quite adequate for the task. But the Lord’s Supper is a meal, and when we meet with friends over a meal, there is something intangibly intimate that is not present when we simply chat with them at the office or talk over the telephone. That Christ eats with his disciples and commands his followers to do the same again speaks of an intimacy and of a presence in a way that something intended as a mere memorial does not.
The Lord’s Supper is a means of grace because when it is attached to the word it presses Christ on the believer in a powerful way. To eat the bread and drink the wine is not only to be reminded of Christ’s sacrifice, but it is to know his presence through the Spirit. The Lord has given in the Supper a great gift to the church, one which those who take his grace seriously would do well to observe.
1. See chapter 3.
2. LW 35:30.
3. LW 35:35.
4. LW 35:32.
5. LW 35:30.
6. LW 54:98–99.
7. See C. N. Heller, ed., The Latin Works of Huldreich Zwingli, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: Heidelberg, 1929), 197.
8. W. J. Hinke, ed., The Latin Works of Huldreich Zwingli, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Heidelberg, 1922), 42–43.
9. On this point, see the helpful exposition of Zwingli on baptism in J. V. Fesko, Word, Water and Spirit: A Reformed Perspective on Baptism (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage, 2010), 60–65.
10. Institutes 4.14.1 (Beveridge).
11. Institutes 4.14.5.
12. Institutes 4.15.1, 5, 6.
13. Institutes 4.16.
14. I am conscious that many Baptists may disagree with my presentation of their views here. To clarify: I am referring to popular Baptist practice in order to highlight the significance of Calvin’s point, not to carefully thought-out theologies of adult baptism, especially (though not exclusively) those developed within the Particular Baptist tradition. Sadly, such theologies are often as irrelevant to Baptist practice as covenant theology is to many Presbyterian congregations. To quote Cicero (who had no views on baptism at all), “O tempora! O mores!”
15. Dennison, Reformed Confessions, 4:266.
16. Ibid., 4:566.
17. To qualify, there are many Southern Baptists today who see baptism as much more. E.g., Thomas R. Schreiner and Shawn D. Wright, eds., Believer’s Baptism: Sign of the New Covenant in Christ (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2007).
18. For a treatment of solus Christus, see Stephen J. Wellum, Christ Alone—The Uniqueness of Jesus as Savior (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017).
19. These texts can be found in LW 35 and 36 respectively.
20. LW 35:82.
21. For a more thorough discussion of the practical pastoral significance of Luther’s understanding of the Lord’s Supper, see Trueman, Luther on the Christian Life, 144–56.
22. Hinke, Latin Works of Huldreich Zwingli, 2:259.
23. Ibid., 2:254–55.
24. Institutes 4.17.1.
25. Institutes 4.17.2.
26. Institutes 4.17.5.
27. Institutes 4.17.10 (Beveridge).