Well, I'm still listening to Tessellate (this week's Sunday Songs post) a lot, but here's something a bit different. Live trumpet over EDM isn't what I thought I'd hear a couple days ago. But I like it! It's novel and intriguing. It's pulsing with energy and yet gives its most unique component, the trumpet, center stage over the electronica. And while the trumpet's lines would probably start to get stale on their own, the lightly shifting beat keeps it fresh. I want to hear more of this guy!
Well damn if the title isn't super long, but this is the second essay I have. With a required length of 2500 words, I hit about 2639 words.
So this was for my class on Martin Luther. Each class member chose a topic that Luther discussed and researched it independently and then gave a presentation and wrote a full paper on it. I picked Luther's argument with Zwingli about Identical Predication and Real Presence in the Eucharist. This is a pretty heady religion subject, but as an academic class there should be nothing really inflammatory here on my part. My main document was Luther's "Confession Concerning Christ's Supper," which was a direct response to Zwingli over a subject previously discussed in his work "This Is My Body." There is also modern scholarship cited. One of the citations of a Dr. Torvend is actually of a speech he gave at a Lutheran conference this year which is not available online - I only have it because Torvend was my professor.
There isn't really a set prompt here. We were presenting findings on a subject Luther wrote on, with support from scholarly sources. Other than that we were pretty free.
As usual, this is my essay, made available so I can potentially receive feedback and to help others learn what I'm learning myself. I'm no expert, so seriously, none of the would-be paper thieves out there should use or even cite this. Still, I think I learned a lot to be able to write the essay, and hopefully you learn something too!
And if you know something about the subject, let me know if I got something right/wrong, or if you have interesting insights or thoughts about it! Same with folks who know things about writing essays! And I do love hearing when just other regular folks get some education out of my work.
As an added note, since this is a religion thing that's actually probably practiced by some of you folks, I'm interested in discourse about this stuff, but I'd rather not get into any arguments over Luther's actual position and its right-ness; I'm nonreligious after all, I'm not on any side trying to convince.
Max / Ego Word Count: 2639
Bread
and Wine, Body and Blood: Luther and Zwingli’s Debate
Over
the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist
In the 16th Century, the
winds of change were blowing through Europe and the Catholic Church. It was not
the first time the Church was undergoing changes and challenges to its
supremacy, such as in the 13th Century with heretical sects like the
Cathars or the Oxford Realists in the 14th Century[1],
but unlike the previous reform movements and reinterpretations of Church
doctrine, events leading to the 16th Century created the perfect
environment for reform. The existing interpretations of Christ’s role in an
individual’s life made it easy for the populace to interpret the Black Death, still
felt across Europe despite 100 years having passed, as the wrath of God. Church
corruption was more rampant than ever, with the Papacy’s vast riches ever more
obvious to the common folk. The Great Schism was fresh in the minds of many,
weakening peoples’ resolve in the complete authority of the pope and the
question of who to owe loyalty to was made all the more complicated by the rise
of secular kings and other leaders. This climate of discontent was punctuated
by the sale of indulgences, Church-sponsored certificates that pardoned sins
for a monetary cost. Indulgences widened the gap between the rich and the poor,
with the Church coming out on top.
Amidst all of the silent discontent, one
monk’s dissatisfaction with his own state of salvation was reaching a breaking
point. This monk was Martin Luther, a scholastically-trained Augustinian monk
in Wittenberg, Germany. After realizing an alternative lens (justification by
grace or faith) through which to view salvation, Luther began to write papers
questioning the methods of the Church and their basis in the Bible, ultimately
being declared a heretic. Unlike all the other heretics that attempted reform
in the past, this time Europe was ready for a change, and Luther built a
substantial number of supporters. However, Luther had to contend with something
he hadn’t expected: competition from other reformers building off of his ideas.
The most important early competitor was Huldrych Zwingli, a Swiss reformer who
agreed on many points with Luther but differed on a single critical point: the
Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and whether the principle of Identical
Predication was applicable to the sacrament. Martin Luther was a stalwart
opponent of Identical Predication with regard to the spiritual and a supporter
of the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and in Luther’s Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper he directly dismantles the
proposals of his opponents both theologically and grammatically.
One can’t fully understand the gravity
of this conflict without understanding the rest of Luther’s and Zwingli’s
theology, at least in a basic sense. Both Zwingli and Luther argue that the
Word of God (primarily through Scripture) is the ultimate authority on matters
of the spirit and that the Church had diverged radically from it. Both had
histories in humanist scholasticism, and both were ordained by the Church. Both
believed in justification by grace, rather than works as was believed by the
Church, meaning that no external works (beyond Baptism) needed to be done in
order to be saved to heaven. This point
formed the core of Luther’s theology, and from it he extrapolated many, many
novel ideas about the meaning of Scripture, covering every topic from baptism
to wealth. On the other hand, Zwingli’s writings were quite focused, revolving
around a different concept: complete fidelity to the Scriptures, and only to what is directly prescribed in
Scripture. If something was not commanded in Scripture, it was not meant to be
a part of religious life. Luther was more conservative, only ruling out
practices directly forbidden by Scripture, while allowing others to continue.
Zwingli also considered many elements of the Bible to be purely symbolic,
rather than rituals that were truly reoccurring in the Church.
Turning away from overall theology
to the specific issue at hand, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist was
the single issue that kept Zwingli and Luther from ever coming to any solid
agreement. The idea of Real Presence is that, during the service of the mass,
the priest re-enacts Christ’s presentation of the bread and wine, saying “This
is my body,” and “This is my blood,” and, through those re-enactments the bread
and wine are filled with the presence of Christ and eaten to gain unity with
Christ. The confusion comes from the process of Christ’s presence filling the
bread and wine, with the problem stemming from two concepts: the location of
Christ and the idea of Identical Predication. For the former, Zwingli believed
that Christ could not be bodily present in two places at once. Referring to the
Creed’s declaration that Christ “is seated at the right hand of the Father,”
Zwingli argued that he could not also be bodily present in the bread and wine
of the Eucharist. Luther argued in return that God is omnipresent, present in,
with, and under all things, and thus his right hand is also present in all
things, including the bread and wine. Since the individual pieces of his
argument, that God is omnipresent and that Jesus is at the right hand of God,
were taken directly and explicitly from Scripture, Luther left his argument for
the ubiquity of Christ to speak for itself, turning next to the difficulties
posed by Identical Predication.[2]
Put simply, Identical Predication is a
philosophical concept that two things of diverse natures cannot at once be one
thing; a tree is not a rock, a chair is not a door, and so on. If two things
cannot at once be one thing, then it would seem illogical that bread can also
be the body of Christ, or that wine can also be the blood of Christ. Zwingli,
seeing this, believed that there is no Real Presence in the bread or wine and
the meal is purely symbolic and memorial of the Last Supper. The Catholics,
faced with Identical Predication and a need for the Real Presence, proclaimed
the doctrine of transubstantiation, that when the body of Christ fills the
bread, the bread’s essence is annihilated, left only in form (or “accident”),
with the essence being entirely that of Christ. Thus, the bread is bread, then
it is the body of Christ, but is never essentially both, avoiding the issue of
Identical Predication. Luther is different in that he simply denied that
Identical Predication was an issue for the Eucharist, and that the bread does
indeed also become the body of Christ. Explaining how this could be possible
was the largest part of Luther’s Confession
Concerning Christ’s Supper, his open response to his opponents. Given that
transubstantiation is significantly closer to Luther’s ideas than Zwingli’s
symbolic Eucharist was, Luther found himself much more aligned with the Papacy
than with his own fellow reformers.
Luther’s argument takes several
forms in his Confession and other
works. One major point that Luther returns to repeatedly is how Zwingli’s
unconventional interpretation leads to deeply problematic theological
implications. More than any other point, this issue bothered Luther personally,
and it was on this basis that he refers to Zwingli as a fanatic and a
blasphemer. Luther was not only disapproving of the notions proposed by
Zwingli, he considered them to be deeply and personally offensive. This wasn’t
helped by Zwingli’s tone in his letters to Luther, where he came off as
scolding and condescending, and while Zwingli believed reconciliation between
them would be possible, sharp language and pointed jabs stood between them.[3] One
passage that the argument hinges upon was John 6:63, which contains the phrase
“It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail.”[4]
The exact meaning of what is meant by flesh and spirit is the main point of
contention between the two. Zwingli considered flesh to be the physical, with
spiritual being the divine and those matters pertaining to God. Because “flesh
is to no avail,” Zwingli understood that the embodiment of Christ in the bread
and wine during the Eucharist “would not be sacramentally efficacious,”[5]
and thus dismissed the importance of the Mass as a metaphorical ceremony rather
than a literal one. Luther’s retort was that flesh in the Scripture does not
refer to all physical things, but to humanity’s sinful nature. The spiritual is
“all that comes from the Spirit or is used by the Spirit for spiritual
purposes,”[6]
which can include physical things. Luther continues that “Spirit consists in
the use, not in the object.”[7]
Luther is especially adamant because he cannot bear the implications brought by
Zwingli’s ideas. He warns that denigrating Christ’s flesh devalues the entirety
of Christianity. His argument was that if Christ’s flesh is of no avail, then
“it can be of no avail on the cross or in heaven either!”[8]
Luther discredited Zwingli by equating
his single proposal with disbelief of everything Christianity stood for, but
that wasn’t enough for Luther. Turning to the law of Identical Predication
specifically, he reached out to Scripture to prove that the Word does not
contradict that law of identical predication. He does so rather resentfully,
explaining first that it should not even be necessary, as humans must confess
that they can “not comprehend his words and works,” and so should be content
with taking them at face value.[9]
But given that that argument would likely not convince Zwingli, he brings up
examples such as Psalm 104 reading “He makes his angels winds and his ministers
flames of fire,”[10]
lumping multiple natures into one being. While this alone would refute Zwingli,
he takes special care to also refute the Church and its doctrine of
transubstantiation, noting that the angels remained complete, in substance and
in accident, even after becoming wind.[11]
He also makes reference to the Holy Spirit descending as a dove in John 1, and
writes that where one nature is mentioned, it is sometimes referred to as the
other nature, establishing that one thing is still a complete representative of
both natures.[12]
This is because to Luther, the two elements, while they can be referenced
separately, have become a single new
nature. He provides examples of when multiple natures are referred to as a
single nature in common speech, such as “if I point to or hand over a bag or
purse and say, ‘This is a hundred gulden,’ both the gesture and the word ‘this’
refer to the purse.”[13] Statements
like these are made every day by all people, because when multiple natures are
combined they form a new nature comprised of both component natures; the purse
and the gulden are still purse and gulden, but are also now a purse full of
gulden. In this way he denies that identical predication is no obstacle to the
embodiment of Christ in the Eucharist, because when the priest performs the
sacrament “it is no longer ordinary bread in the oven, but a ‘flesh-bread’ or
‘body-bread.’”[14]
In this defense, his theology regarding the Trinity becomes obvious – there is
no contradiction in having three separate natures (Father, Son, and Spirit) all
be one God, as they are three separate facets of a single united nature known
as God. Thus it can be true that one God can be three natures and still be one
God. Following this pattern of thought, Luther was unswayingly devout in his
belief in God’s nature as “a Trinity of divine persons whose works
are…indivisible,” arguing fidelity to the doctrine of the Trinity that the
Church had been practicing for centuries.[15]
At this point Luther had made it
abundantly clear that, theologically, no obstacles existed to Real Presence in
the Eucharist. However, his argument was not complete as he turned to proving
that even the idea that there is no Real Presence is irreconcilable with
Scripture. Specifically, he focuses on the unambiguity of Christ’s saying
“Take, eat; this is my body” and “Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood
of the new testament, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins,”[16]
and the variations of those phrases that appear in the gospels of Mark and
Luke. Over the course of his Confession,
Luther examines many permutations of the phrase, how those permutations could
be construed as supporting his opponents’ views, and then breaking down why it
is unacceptable to interpret the gospels to say that. Such permutations he
denied included “Take, eat, in the bread is my body” and “With the bread is my
body” and “Under the bread is my body,”[17]
all of which are simply evasions of dealing with the Law of Identical
Predication which would make the representational concept of Scripture valid,
but are all different from what is really written. Luther attacks Zwingli and
his followers when he declares that even if “God himself gave them their choice
of a text, they would never fix on one as simple as this, yet they would always
be finding more holes and gaps in it than they find in this one.”[18]
Through his extensive and scholarly
denial of any Scriptural reading of the Eucharist and his explanation of the
problematic consequences that come with the beliefs carried by both the Church
and by other reformers, Luther attempted to establish that no other theology
could be correct. While debate continued, his words had a powerful effect, and
the Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper
is known as one of his most complete defenses of his treatment of the Eucharist
in his new tradition. He re-examined the long-held philosophical Law of
Identical Predication and tore down its relevance to Scripture, allowing his argument
for consubstantiation and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and
reinforcing the doctrine of the Trinity. Future theologians would debate and
augment his arguments, as John Calvin did when he adopted “the middle ground
between Luther and Zwingli,” arguing that Luther was being too conservative
while denying Zwingli as devaluing the Word of God.[19]
The debate over real presence continues today with theologians such as John
Macquarrie or J. de Baciocchi[20],
Luther’s position on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist remains
important for its historical opening of a dialogue regarding the sacrament and
as a scholarly argument that provides the vital underpinnings of many of the
theologies that grew out of the Reformation.
[1] Alessandro D. Conti,
"Johannes Sharpe's Ontology and Semantic: Oxford Realism Revisited," Vivarium,
43, no. 1 (2005): 1-2,
[2] Torvend,
Samuel, “Luther’s cosmic Christ and care for our wounded earth” (speech,
September 26, 2013).
[3] Martin Luther, "Confession Concerning Christ's
Supper," Luther's Works Volume 37: Word and Sacrament III, ed.
Robert H. Fischer, Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1961), 168
[4] John 6:63
[5] Kurt K. Hendel, "Finitum capax infiniti: Luther’s
Radical Incarnational Perspective," Currents in Theology and Mission,
35, no. 6 (2008): 423.
[6] Kurt K. Hendel, "Finitum capax infiniti: Luther’s
Radical Incarnational Perspective," Currents in Theology and Mission,
35, no. 6 (2008): 424.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Martin Luther, "Confession Concerning Christ's
Supper," Luther's Works Volume 37: Word and Sacrament III, ed.
Robert H. Fischer, Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1961),
246-247.
[10] Ps 104:4
[11] Martin Luther, "Confession Concerning Christ's
Supper," Luther's Works Volume 37: Word and Sacrament III, ed.
Robert H. Fischer, Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1961), 298.
[15] Mickey L. Mattox,
"From Faith to the Text and Back Again: Martin Luther on the Trinity in
the Old Testament," Pro Ecclesia, XV, no. 3 (2006): 287,
[16] Matt 26:26.
[17] Martin Luther, "Confession Concerning Christ's
Supper," Luther's Works Volume 37: Word and Sacrament III, ed.
Robert H. Fischer, Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1961), 306.
[19] Ian Christopher Levy,
"Affirming Real Presence from a Historical Perspective," Lexington
Theological Quarterly, 38, no. 1 (2003): 36-37,
[20] Ibid.,
p. 38-40.
Hope that was interesting and enjoyable folks! Back again soon with the final essay, and hopefully some AvW or MEHack stuff. I'll also be posting on Christmas about the cool stuff I'm getting.
Happy holidays I guess! Have a great Christmas Eve.
End Recording,
Ego.
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