PicoBlog

In October 1529, in Marburg, Hesse (in what is now Germany), leaders of the embryonic Protestant churches of Germany and Switzerland met to attempt to reach doctrinal agreement – an agreement important not only for the ecclesial life of the churches but as the precondition for a defensive military alliance. And so a veritable who’s who of the early Reformation assembled: Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Ulrich Zwingli, Johannes Oecolampadius, Martin Bucer, Justas Jonas, and more all gathered for discussion. Over several days of conversation, they reached agreement on all points except for one: the Lord’s Supper. But that one outstanding disagreement was one too many. The fierce, even vitriolic disagreement between Zwingli and Luther dashed Philip of Hesse’s hopes of an alliance which would join together the Lutheran territories, the cities of Southern Germany, and the Swiss – and more broadly, any hope of union between the various Protestant churches. Despite heroic attempts to mend the divisions between Lutherans and Reformed, agreement on the sacraments and above all Communion proved utterly impossible. Lutherans and Reformed simply could not agree about how to discuss the presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Lord’s Supper or whether those without genuine faith truly received Christ in the Supper.

Grounding their argument above all on Christ’s words at the Last Supper, “This is my body” and “This is my blood,” Luther and the Lutherans remained committed to the real, substantial presence of Christ’s body and blood in, with, and under the elements of bread and wine. They argued that the Reformed taught that the Supper was a meal of remembrance or made Christ’s presence in the Supper dependent on the faith of the recipient rather than Christ’s words of promise. The Lutherans worried that in so doing, by denying Christ’s substantial presence in the Supper, the Reformed had taken away what God had given us to be a comforting means of grace. Christ, they affirmed, was really, objectively present in the bread and the wine, distributed to all who partook of the Supper, faithful and faithless alike. The Reformed, meanwhile, argued that the Lutheran position contradicted Scripture’s witness about the reality of Christ’s humanity. The Lutheran view made him present in his human nature at every altar where Communion was celebrated – and human bodies aren’t omnipresent in that way! Christ’s body and blood were truly given the Supper, yes, but not in the bodily, crassly carnal way the Lutherans imagined, but spiritually. Such a gift, further, could only be received by faith. The faithless do not participate in Christ, and so (the Reformed argued) they could not be said to truly receive Christ’s body and blood in the Lord’s Supper, even if they eat the signs of his body and blood (that is, the bread and the wine). These positions hardened over the years, with the Lutherans and the Reformed penning polemics and even drawing up binding confessional statements condemning each other’s positions on the Lord’s Supper.

Beginning in March 1973, nearly 450 years after the Marburg Colloquy, the leading Lutheran and Reformed churches of Europe signed a document called the Leuenberger Konkordie, or Leuenberg Agreement, “to declare and to realize church fellowship.” In the statement, the Lutheran and Reformed churches declare that they agree about the right teaching of the Gospel and the right administration of the sacraments, and that the sixteenth century condemnations no longer apply to their church bodies. This year is the fiftieth anniversary of this important ecumenical document, and because it does not seem to be terribly well-known in North America, I thought it might be worth reflecting on the document and asking in what sense it represents a genuine overcoming of theological disagreement about the Supper.

The document as a whole is worth reading (you can do so here). It begins with a reflection on the common understanding of the Gospel as the free justification of sinners by God’s grace, conveyed to Christians by word and sacrament. It then turns to the agreement that Lutherans and Reformed have been able to reach on the key issues of Reformation-era doctrinal condemnation: the Lord’s Supper, Christology, and predestination. It concludes with reflection on what this realization of church fellowship means (including altar-and-pulpit fellowship). But I want to focus today on the section addressing the doctrinal condemnations pertaining to the Lord’s Supper.

The section in question is not terribly long, so I’ll quote the whole thing:

The Lord’s Supper

18. In the Lord’s Supper, the risen Jesus Christ imparts himself in his body and blood, given up for all, through his word of promise with bread and wine. He thus gives himself unreservedly to all who receive the bread and wine; faith receives the Lord’s Supper for salvation, unfaith for judgement.

19. We cannot separate communion with Jesus Christ in his body and blood from the act of eating and drinking. To be concerned about the manner of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper in abstraction from this act is to run the risk of obscuring the meaning of the Lord’s Supper.

20. Where there is such consensus between churches, the condemnations pronounced by the Reformation confessions of faith are inapplicable to the doctrinal position of these churches.

Depending on how you look at it, this statement is either a compelling summation of the shared features of Lutheran and Reformed eucharistic teachings that renders their differences comparatively unimportant, or an exercise in smooth talking that masks genuine and deep disagreement with a vague verbal formula. For what is immediately striking to me about this text is that the two primary questions about which the Reformed and Lutherans differed – the relationship between the bread and wine and Jesus’ body and blood, and the related question of the manducatio impiorum (whether unworthy or faithless communicants receive Christ in the sacrament) – are not mentioned at all.

Notice carefully what the text says about the presence of Christ in the Supper: in the Supper, “the risen Jesus Christ imparts himself in his body and blood, given up for all, through his word of promise with bread and wine.” In the Supper, the body and blood of Christ are with (the German text has “mit”) the bread and wine. This clearly states that in the Lord’s Supper, the faithful feed not only on the bread and the wine but on the body and blood of Christ – as the Lutherans and the Reformed both agree. But left unspecified is the question that divided Lutherans and Reformed, namely, how that feeding happens, how exactly the body and blood are with the bread and wine. Are they vere adsint (truly present), unter Gestalt des Brotes und Weines (under the form of the bread and the wine) as the 1530 Augsburg Confession puts it? Or instead exhibeantur (exhibited), as the Reformed liked to say? This text does not take a position on this question beyond ruling out an extreme memorialism, preferring instead to simply affirm a true feeding on Christ’s body and blood with the bread and wine.

Similarly, on the question of the manducatio impiorum, the text declares that Christ “gives himself unreservedly to all who receive the bread and wine” but then does not take a position on whether or not all who receive the bread and wine truly receive Christ. The statement does this by framing the discussion of reception not in terms of Christ but in terms of the Supper: “faith receives the Lord’s Supper for salvation, unfaith for judgement.” If it had said “faith receives Christ for salvation, unfaith for judgement” or “faith receives Christ for salvation, unfaith receives the sacrament of Christ for judgement,” this would indicate a position on the manducatio. But by framing the discussion of unworthy reception in terms of the Supper, the statement can simply say what all agree about, that faith receives the Supper for salvation and unfaith for condemnation. For indeed Lutherans and Reformed alike agree that the faithless recipient takes the sacrament to his or her condemnation, whether or not they are willing to say that such a recipient receives Christ, and also agree that the faithful recipient truly receives Christ for salvation. The question of the manducatio itself is deftly sidestepped.

So what are we to make of this text? If you want to see the clear triumph of one of the positions taken at Marburg over another, if the only way to resolve the dispute at Marburg would be with a clear consensus on the mode of the presence of Christ’s body and blood in the elements or the manducatio, I can’t imagine the Leuenberg Agreement satisfies. In fact, it seems to go out of its way to avoid addressing either the nature of Christ’s presence in the sacrament or the manducatio impiorum, the sticking points in Reformed-Lutheran sacramental discussions from the sixteenth century onwards. As such, it might be tempting to write off the document as the product of a doctrinally indifferent age, of a church that no longer considers theological positions important enough to break fellowship over. I imagine that many conservative confessional Protestants, and especially conservative confessional Lutherans, would read the text this way.

I don’t think that’s necessarily an unreasonable reading of the Agreement, but I want to offer another one. For the Leuenberg Agreement seems to me to be equally as much the product of some five hundred years of Protestant sacramental irenicism expressed by Reformed thinkers like Martin Bucer, John Calvin, John Jewel, and Girolamo Zanchi and also (if, it must be said, typically more occasionally) by Lutherans like Philip Melanchthon. For these thinkers, Reformed-Lutheran disagreement about the Supper was a relatively minor issue in light of general Protestant doctrinal agreement. Thus, for example, Jewel in his Apology of the Church of England says that it is “one only question, which is neither weighty nor great.” Indeed, such thinkers often take pains to note that the Reformed and Lutherans agree not only about key doctrinal questions about God, Christ, and salvation but even about most aspects of eucharistic theology. Thus Calvin writes that Lutherans and Reformed agree about the presence of Christ in the Supper and disagree only about the mode of that presence. Similarly, Zanchi, in his Judgement Concerning the Dissension about the Lord’s Supper, treats eucharistic theology under seven headings. He notes agreement over five of the headings, emphasizing that the Reformed and Lutherans agree that the faithful truly receive Christ’s body and blood in the Supper. In his construal, the Lutherans and Reformed only disagree about two of the seven headings, the relationship between Christ’s body and blood and the bread and wine and the manducatio impiorum. He mourns that these points of contention were even raised to begin with; he argues that as there is “no open mention in the Scriptures concerning the union of the body of Christ with the symbols or concerning the presence of the body of Christ in the Supper,” the debate is more about human invention than Scripture. The whole question about how Christ’s body and blood are united with the bread and wine, he thinks, could simply have been omitted without any detriment to the faith. And the debate about the manducatio, then, follows from and is dependent on that earlier disagreement. Both, in his view, are essentially logomachies, debates over words. Neither party, he says, should condemn the other over these points of disagreement. In this, he sounds very much like a precursor to the Leuenberg Agreement, which argues that the agreement the churches have reached on the core teachings about the Supper means that the Reformation-era condemnations no longer apply.

To be fair, it is worth noting that the irenicists who I mention generally do take a position on the disputed questions of the mode of Christ’s presence in the Supper and the manducatio. Neither Calvin nor Jewel nor Zanchi think it a matter entirely indifferent if one holds the Lutheran or the Reformed view on these questions. (Bucer, incidentally, might come the closest to such a position – at least the Bucer of the 1536 Wittenberg Concord.) Even that most irenic of divines, Richard Hooker, clearly favors the Reformed view and thinks the Lutheran one is in error, no matter how sympathetically he describes the Lutheran one (many of his nineteenth century interpreters who still cast a shadow over Hooker interpretation today somehow missed this, but so it goes). But even so, the Agreement’s emphasis on the shared features of Lutheran and Reformed eucharistic teaching is well within a long tradition of Protestant irenicism, an irenicism that is typically but not always Reformed in provenance.

And this irenicism is, I must confess, the tradition of Protestant sacramental thought with which I am most sympathetic. I am not unaware of the possible critiques of the Agreement, and I’ve tried to lay them out fairly here, but at the end I do think it says what needs to be said about the Lord’s Supper. I don’t deny that churches have the right to specify the doctrine of the Supper more than the Agreement does (as the confessions of the Lutheran and Reformed signatories of this document all do!). But I think that the Leuenberg Agreement is right that if we can agree that in the Supper, through the Word, the faithful really receive Jesus Christ’s body and blood with the bread and wine for salvation, that is enough for mutual recognition and altar and pulpit fellowship.

So does the Leuenberg Agreement mean that the problems of Marburg are finally solved? Perhaps not entirely, as sacramental theology remains a rich topic for theological endeavor and, frankly, we are still not of one mind. But I do think that it represents the triumph of a long and fruitful strain of Protestant sacramental irenicism which is honest about real theological differences but sees our shared understanding of the Gospel – and of the most important elements of the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper – as more basic. What this approach has meant, most practically, is that for the last fifty years Reformed and Lutheran have been able to commune at the same tables and have their ministers serve at each other’s churches after more than four hundred years of separation. In this sense, at least, the right hand of fellowship which was not extended at Marburg has now been offered, enabling our churches to fulfill a little bit better the prayer of Jesus that we may be one.

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