![]() Just as when an iron poker becomes red-hot if left in the fire long enough, so the bread and the wine actually contain Christ’s body after the prayer of consecration. In the view of Luther, Christ’s body and blood are present “in, with, and under” the bread and the wine. What was meant to be a place of comfort and a means of grace - both strengthening the believer and giving assurance of salvation - became an entanglement of ignorance and fear.Īll of the Reformers clearly rejected the medieval dogma of transubstantiation, but they were deeply divided over the answer to the question “How then is Christ present at the Table?” Protestant Dispute Not surprisingly, this dogma led to all kinds of superstitions, such as the worship of the elements themselves and deep anxiety about the reception of the Table. They ceased to be bread and wine, even though to all of one’s human senses that is what they seemed to be. According to this doctrine, at a certain moment in the church’s celebration of the Table, when the priest prayed for the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the bread and the wine, they were transformed into the very body and very blood of Christ. The medieval Church had defined the nature of Christ’s presence with regard to the elements of the bread and wine in 1215 through the dogma of transubstantiation. Is Christ present at the Table? And if so, how? That’s what Luther and Zwingli came to debate. But as contentious as these primary issues were, the nature of the Lord’s Supper was also heavily debated. When we think of the issues debated during the German Reformation, we think of matters such as justification and the authority of the Scriptures. Yet they were also both men, with the failings common to their kind. Both men were remarkable Christians whom God had used in spectacular ways to bring genuine reform to their respective lands of Saxony and Switzerland. To reach the castle was a stiff climb through medieval streets dotted with houses that dated from the very time when the two German Reformers also passed through the town on their way to the castle. It is, rather, the devotional experience underpinning that 'spiritual' use of the Bible, of an unmediated encounter with grace.A few years ago, while I was leading a group of Christians touring various Reformation sites along the Rhine in Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands, our tour group took a day trip to Marburger Schloss, or Marburg Castle, to see the famous site of the encounter between the two titanic Reformers Martin Luther (1483–1546) and Huldreich Zwingli (1484–1531). What gives this quarrelsome family of 'Protestants' analytical coherence is neither simple genealogy nor, as has been suggested, mere adherence to the Bible: since in practice both 'radical' and 'magisterial' Protestants have been more flexible and 'spiritual' in their use of Scripture than is generally allowed. The magisterial / radical division was maintained only with constant vigilance and exemplary violence, with Calvinism in particular constantly threatening to bleed into radicalism. Instead, this paper proposes we think of a Protestant ecosystem consisting of self-consciously confessional Lutheranism, a broad Calvinism which imagined itself as normative, and a collection of radical currents much more intimately connected to the 'magisterial' confessions than any of the participants wished to acknowledge. ![]() The confessionalisation thesis, which has dominated recent Reformation historiography, instead posits the two major Protestant confessions and Tridentine Catholicism as its categories, but this can produce a false parallelism in which the nature of the relationship between the confessions is oversimplified. ![]() The term 'Protestant' itself is a historical accident, but the category of western Christians who have separated from Rome since 1517 remains a useful one.
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