Posted on by Jack Kilcrease

Stuck in the Middle: Between “Nestorian” and “Eutychian” Reformers

Confessional Lutheran Christology Part I

When it comes to Luther’s Christology and that of the subsequent Lutheran tradition, we must tread a fine line between the Scylla of claiming the Reformer was an absolute innovator and the Charybdis of claiming there was no meaningful difference between Luther and his medieval predecessors. There are, in fact, some interesting differences between confessional Lutheran teaching and the previous medieval tradition. However, the Lutheran Reformers were faithful students of Scripture and the ancient Church. Discontinuities existed between Lutherans and their medieval predecessors because the Reformers drew out the logic of biblical and patristic Christology. The seeming innovations of Lutheran theologians regarding the metaphysics of the Incarnation were, in fact, valid extensions of enhypostasis-anhypostasis Christology, sometimes termed “Neo-Chalcedonianism.”1

Throughout his career, Luther fought on the same two fronts that the ancient Church had. Like the early orthodox Church Fathers, Luther found himself combating both Nestorian and Eutychian Christological tendencies. As we will see below, in Luther’s mind, the Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli played the role of Nestorius. Kaspar Schwenckfeld played the role of Eutychus. Most popular accounts of Luther focus on the Reformer’s conflict with Ulrich Zwingli and his belief that Zwingli was essentially Nestorian. Sadly, this tends to distort the truly balanced nature of the Reformer’s Christology (i.e., rejecting both Nestorian and Eutychian tendencies), and therefore undercuts his continuity with the earlier tradition. 

Luther’s Conflict with Zwingli and “Nestorianism”

Nestorian Christology

The major source of strife between Luther and Zwingli was the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper.2 We will return to this conflict again in a future chapter, but it is worth touching on here because there was a Christological issue at the heart of the Reformers’ debate over the Eucharist. Zwingli, following an undercurrent in medieval theology, argued that there could be no substantial presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper because, as true man, he could not be present in multiple locations simultaneously. 

Although many Lutherans have charged Zwingli with Nestorianism,3 it would be more accurate to say that Zwingli simply followed an extreme interpretation of standard medieval Christology stemming from Pope St. Leo the Great’s Tome. While operating within the same trajectory of Chalcedonian orthodoxy, standard medieval Leonine Christology possessed a much more restrictive understanding of the communicatio idiomatum than did the Cyrillian tradition or the later Greek Fathers.4  

Leo strongly emphasized the duality of the person of Christ in an attempt to counteract Eutyches’s Docetic version of St. Cyril of Alexandria’s one-nature doctrine.5 To Cyrillians, it appeared that Leo inappropriately divided the person of Christ by speaking of actions that he performed as God alone (i.e., miracles, etc.) and actions that he performed as man alone (i.e., suffering, dying, hungering).6 From a Lutheran perspective, such a schematization implies an inappropriate division in Christ’s agency and person.7   

Later Western medieval theologians operated according to a line of reasoning very similar to Leo’s. For example, St. Thomas Aquinas argued that Christ was only mediator as true man.8 Therefore, Christians should not worship (latria) Christ according to his human nature.9 Instead, believers could only offer the human nature of Christ hyperdulia, a higher kind of veneration also due to the Virgin Mary.10

John Duns Scotus argued that since Christ had died only according to his human nature, his payment for sin was only finite. Thus, in and of itself, Jesus’s death was inadequate to cover the full infinite debt of sin. Christ’s atoning death only became an adequate payment for sin (acceptatio divina) because of God the Father’s gracious acceptance.11 In a word, whatever the intention of either Aquinas or Scotus, both descriptions of the role and work of Christ suggest a concept of the unity of the two natures that is merely notional or rhetorical, rather than real and hypostatic.    

During his conflict with Luther, Zwingli developed an even more extreme version of this medieval understanding of the communicatio idiomatum.12 According to Zwingli’s hermeneutical principle of alloesis, statements of the New Testament about Jesus’s person or actions could be divided up between ones that pertained exclusively to his divine nature and ones that exclusively pertained to his human nature. Zwingli also held that for a body to be a body it could only have a circumscribed presence. In the case of Jesus, this presence was now at the “right hand of God.” In accordance with medieval cosmology, Zwingli thought God’s right hand existed in a semi-local heaven located somewhere outside the solar system.13 In sum, contrary to the Cyrillian tradition, the human nature of Christ could not directly participate in the divine glory.  

Aquinas and Modes of Presence

Contrary to Zwingli, Aquinas and other medieval theologians did accept that the body of Christ could have multiple forms of presence (not simply circumscribed). The doctrine of transubstantiation14 posited that Christ’s body was miraculously multiplied in its substance when the priest confected the Eucharist.15 According to Aquinas’s scheme (followed in a modified form by other theologians), an entity could possess a number of different forms of presence. Aquinas termed the first form of presence circumscribed or local. Circumscribed presence pertained to normal human physical presence.16 

The second form of presence was definitive presence. To explain this form of presence, Aquinas gave the example of how God is fully present to all creatures. Another example would be how the soul can be in every part of the body without taking up space. Angels also have a definitive presence, since they are present with specific humans, but do not take up space. This presence is spiritual and cannot be attributed to bodies, although it is locatable.17 

Thirdly, Aquinas posited a sacramental presence, which was the nature of Christ’s mysterious physical presence in the Eucharist. This final category represented a real and substantial presence in the Eucharistic elements. Yet, this presence was mysterious insofar as it transcended the normal categories of physicality. In agreement with Zwingli, Aquinas accepted that Christ’s human nature remains in heaven. When the the Church celebrates the Eucharist, Christ’s body does not move from its place in heaven. Rather, Jesus substantially (i.e., not according to circumscribed physicality) multiplies to be on many altars at once.18  

Making Sacramental Presence Possible: Institutionalism vs. Spiritualism

For the medieval theologians, the Church and its supernatural power played an important role in explaining the possibility of Christ’s substantial presence in the Eucharist. Upon receiving the sacrament of ordination, the Holy Spirit gave priests a supernatural capacity to act “in the person of Christ” (in persona Christi) when celebrating the Eucharist. As a result, when speaking the words of institution the priest could miraculously transmute the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Jesus (i.e., as explained in the doctrine of transubstantiation).19 

Of course, as noted above, for Aquinas and the medieval theologians in general, Christ himself remained in heaven. The Holy Spirit worked through the institutional Church and sacraments to bridge the gap between heaven and earth. This allowed the priest to call down the elements in the consecration. 

The tendency to circumscribe Christ in heaven can also be found in the ideology of the Papacy that developed in the Middle Ages. Since Christ was gone in heaven, he needed a stand-in on earth or a “Vicar of Christ” (Vicarius Christi).20 A “Vicar” is, after all, a stand-in for one who is absent.  

As American Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson notes, this Leonine Christological reading of the communicatio idiomatum may explain why Western ecclesiology has so wildly swung back and forth between institutionalism and spiritualism.  In other words, one could argue that Zwingli developed his peculiar interpretation of the Eucharist as a result of working out the consequences of Leonine Christology without having recourse to the institutional Church as a mechanism for confecting Christ’s human presence. Zwingli believed Christ’s presence as true man was limited to heaven. But his theology also left him without the institutional Roman Catholic Church to make Jesus supernaturally present in magisterial teaching or through the supernatural power bestowed on priests to confect Christ’s Body and Blood from bread and wine. As a result, Zwingli believed the risen Christ simply remained trapped in heaven until his second coming.21 

Without the mechanism of the institutional Church to make the absent Christ present, Zwingli placed new emphasis on the invisible work of the Spirit (even apart from the Word of God). The Holy Spirit predestined the elect in the Church and even outside of it. Zwingli believed God would save the great philosophers and heroes of the pre-Christian world.22 

As a result of Zwingli’s influence, most Protestants only believed in the invisible work of the Spirit. His divine actions only became visible in the gathered community through certain signs possessed by true believers.23 Indeed, some recent interpreters of Zwingli have even spoken of the transubstantiation of the Eucharistic elements being replaced by the “transubstantiation of the gathered community,”24 which showed of signs of the invisible work of the Spirit.

Luther and Zwingli’s Disagreements on Idolatry

Most interpreters of the previous century have seen Luther’s response to Zwingli as a form of radical Cyrillianism. In many ways, Luther’s rejection of Zwingli’s formulation unveils the differing trajectories of the Wittenberg and Southern Reformations. However, Lutheran theologian Paul Hinlicky has argued that both traditions agreed that the late-medieval Latin Church needed serious reform due to its essential idolatry.25 

The problem is that the Reformers operated with significantly different conceptions of the essence of idolatry.  Zwingli, and John Calvin after him, protested against what the latter referred to as “superstitious worship.”26  “Superstition” as Calvin understood it (in agreement with Zwingli) was any worship that assumed God could be found in physical objects. Humanity’s fundamental problem was confusing creature and creator. 

To cure humanity of its idolatry, Zwingli and Calvin proposed a kind of proto-Weberian “disenchantment.”27 This entailed acceptance of sacramental symbolicism (Zwingli) or spiritualism (Calvin).28 It also led to iconoclastic campaigns against church artwork and, to a more limited degree, certain kinds of church music.29  Finally, both reformers developed a doctrine of the Incarnation that radicalized the medieval Leonine tradition’s emphasis on the duality of the person of Christ.

The Lutheran Reformation developed along a radically different trajectory. Although Lutherans superficially shared some common concepts with the southern Reformation (notably, justification through faith, etc.), Luther had a significantly different view of idolatry. As we have already seen, Luther held that the glory of the eternal God was hidden in the cross. Self-justifying humans want to rip away this mask and have direct communion with the eternal God based on their own righteousness.30 

Idolatry is not primarily the confusion of the temporal and eternal (i.e., a kind of Platonic conception of God and creation). Rather, idolatry is wrong trust. Humans trust in themselves and their works. Or sinners trust false gods, which can be anything to which God has not attached his word of grace. God only becomes present to creatures in his masks of physical objects. Therefore, it is not wrong, but rather obligatory, to look for him in his visible and auditory words.31 To break creatures of their desire to climb into heaven according to their own righteousness, God comes in the finite and tangible. Our ability to find God in his designated means of grace makes him supremely trustworthy.32 

The implication is that God breaks sinful humans of their self-justification and inculcates faith in his presence and trustworthiness by attaching his promise to the tangible means of grace. Zwingli and Calvin, on the other hand, insisted on a strict separation between the infinite and the finite. This gap plays on human anxiety and the need for self-justification against the threatening otherness of God hidden in his majesty.  

Luther’s Response to Zwingli on the Lord’s Supper

Luther responded to Zwingli’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper in a variety of ways, but we will focus here on his Christological arguments.  Luther’s first key concern was for the unity of Christ’s agency in the act of redemption. Quite specifically, Luther raised issues regarding Zwingli’s hermeneutical principle of alloesis. Recall that on the basis of this principle Zwingli divided up Christ’s actions between what he did as true God and what he did as true man. For Luther, because Christ is a single subject, what is predicated of his actions as either God or man must be predicated of the total Christ. Indeed, if Jesus’s death were not the death of God, then it would not save. As Luther later wrote in On the Councils and the Church: 

We Christians should know that if God is not in the scale to give it weight, we, on our side, sink to the ground. I mean it this way: if it cannot be said that God died for us, but only a man, we are lost; but if God’s death and a dead God lie in the balance, His side goes down and ours goes up like a light and empty scale. Yet He can also readily go up again or leap out of the scale! But He could not sit on the scale unless He became a man like us, so that it could be called God’s dying, God’s martyrdom, God’s blood, and God’s death. For God in His own nature cannot die; but now that God and man are united in one person, it is called God’s death when the man dies who is one substance or one person with God.33  

In fairness to Zwingli, his main goal in dividing up the actions of Christ between the two natures was to preserve Chalcedon’s two natures doctrine.34 Both St. Athanasius35 and Cyril36 stated that it is permissible to impute the actions of the man Jesus to the Second Person of the Trinity. Yet, when abstracted from the concrete unity of the Incarnation, the two natures perform different actions. It is, in fact, the human nature that suffers and dies. Considered in itself, the divine nature cannot die since it is impossible for divinity to suffer or die.  

Contrary to common misconception, Luther does not disagree with the assertion that considered in the abstract it is only the human nature that suffers, and ultimately God cannot: “[When Zwingli says] the Deity surely cannot suffer and die . . . then you must answer and say: That is true . . .”37 Nevertheless, it is correct to say that the suffering of the Second Person of the Trinity in Christ occurred, but through the human nature: “. . . but since the divinity and humanity are one person in Christ . . . [it is correct to say] the Son of God suffers.”38 Hence, as David Luy has shown in his brief study of Luther’s Christology, the sufferings of the divine person were not ontological, but hypostatic.39 

Late twentieth-century scholars like Marc Lienhard claimed that Luther’s view of Christic agency called for revision of the ancient catholic doctrine of the Incarnation or classical theism. But, as we have seen, they are seriously mistaken.40 That is to say, contrary to what many modern Hegelian-leaning Lutheran theologians have attempted to argue, there is no genus tapeinoticum, wherein what happens to the human nature causes a transmutation of Christ’s divine nature.  

Luther’s Conflict with Schwenckfeld and “Eutychianism”

Eutychian or Monophysite Christology

The fact that the two natures in Christ remain unchanged in their essential properties comes out particularly strongly in Luther’s late polemics against Kaspar Schwenckfeld.41  Schwenckfeld argued (in a manner similar, though not identical to many first-generation Anabaptists like Menno Simons42) that Christ possessed a kind of deified celestial flesh. Although, unlike Simons and other Anabaptists, he conceded that such flesh had been derived from Mary.  Such celestial flesh was a result of the two natures melding together. Jesus’s body then supposedly became increasingly divinized throughout his life.43  

Luther argued Schwenckfeld’s Christology confused the two natures.  For Luther, predicating qualities of each nature of the person of Christ was appropriate, but only within the concrete unity of the hypostatic union.44  The human qualities of Christ are real and attributable to the divine person in the way that an accident adheres in a substance.  Here Luther gives the example of how it might be appropriate to call an Ethiopian “white” in a very qualified sense because his teeth are white.  Although his skin is black, the Ethiopian bears the whiteness of his teeth.  Similarly, the divine person bears the qualities of human nature without transmuting them or being transmuted into them.45  

Here Luther is invoking a late-medieval theory of the Incarnation called “supposital union” first proposed by John Duns Scotus in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.46  In contrast to the Cyrillian body/soul analogy, supposital union suggests that the best analogy for the Incarnation is that the divine person bears the human nature like a substance bears an accident in Aristotelian metaphysics. Although the accident is a predicate of the substance, it in no way transmutes the substance into the accident, but rather sustains it.  Neither is the accident transmuted by being born by the substance.47  Consequently, contrary to what critics often claim about Luther’s position, the communicatio idiomatum (especially with regard to actions of the God-man) is hypostatic and does not affirm a kind of transmutation.48 

Substantial Differences Remained Between Zwingli’s Followers and Lutherans

Returning to Luther’s debate with Zwingli over the agency of Christ, some of the differences between Luther and his opponents can certainly be chalked up to disagreements about what linguistic rules are generated by the reality of the hypostatic union.49 Yet, there still remain real and substantial differences between Luther and Zwingli with regard to the agency of the incarnate Christ. Ontologically, and not merely linguistically, Luther believed it was appropriate to divide up the actions of the two natures only when abstracted from one another. In other words, one could only divide the actions of the two natures when considered apart from their concrete unity in the hypostatic union.

By contrast, at times Zwingli seemed to speak as if one could divide up the actions of Christ between the two natures even in the concrete unity of the Incarnation. Problematically, he thereby called into question the unity of the divinity and humanity. Zwingli would, of course, deny this. However, it is difficult to see how this is not the implication of his position in light of his theological language .  

Luther meme from Liturgy Matters group, Facebook, accessed August 7, 2024, https://www.facebook.com/lutheranmass

  1. See discussion in: Patrick T.R. Gray, The Defense of Chalcedon in the East (451-553) (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 104-172. ↩︎
  2. Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development, trans. and ed. Roy A. Harrisville (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 169-177. ↩︎
  3. See: K.J. Drake, The Flesh of the Word: The Extra Calvinisticum from Zwingli to Early Orthodoxy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 70; Mark Taplin, “Patristics and Polemics: Josias Simler’s History of Early Church Christological Disputes,” in Following Zwingli: Applying the Past in Reformation Zurich, eds. Luca Baschera, Bruce Gordon, and Christian Moser (London: Routledge, 2016), 78. ↩︎
  4. See: Richard Cross, The Metaphysics of Christology in the Late Middle Ages: William of Ockham to Gabriel Biel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023); idem, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation: Thomas Aquinas to Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);  Also, see comment in: Hermann Sasse, This is My Body: Luther’s Contention for the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2001), 150. ↩︎
  5. Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition: From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon), 465-479. ↩︎
  6. Leo the Great, Epistle 28.4; NPNFb, 12:41. ↩︎
  7. See good critique: Jenson, Systematic Theology, 1:130-133; Steven Paulson, Lutheran Theology (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2011), 94-96. ↩︎
  8. ST 3, q. 26, art. 2; FDP, 4:2153-2154. ↩︎
  9. ST 3, q. 25, art. 2; FDP, 4:2148-2149. ↩︎
  10. ST 3, q. 25, art. 5; FDP,4:2151. ↩︎
  11. See: Richard Cross, Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 104.  Also see the acceptance theory of the atonement: Robert Macintosh, Historic Theories of the Atonement (London; New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1920), 110-111. ↩︎
  12. Ulrich Zwingli, “Friendly Exegesis, that is, Exposition of the Matter of the Eucharist to Martin Luther, February 1527,” in Huldrych Zwingli Writings, 2 vols., trans. and ed. H. Wayne Pipkin (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1984), 2:319-22; Also see August Baur, Zwinglis Theologie: Ihr Werden und Ihr System, 2 vols. (Zürich: Georg Olms Verlag, 1983-1984), 2:425, 2:460, 2:473, 2:484-510. ↩︎
  13. Ulrich Zwingli, “On the Lord’s Supper,” in Zwingli and Bullinger, trans. G.W. Bromiley (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1953), 216. ↩︎
  14. See: Marilyn McCord Adams, Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Gilles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Brett Salkeld, Transubstantiation: Theology, History, and Christian Unity (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019). ↩︎
  15. ST 3, q. 75, art. 3-4; FDP, 5:2442-2444; ST 3, q. 75, art. 8; FDP, 5:2447-2448. ↩︎
  16. ST 3, q. 76, art. 4-5; FDP, 5:2451-2453. ↩︎
  17. ST 1, q. 8, art. 2-3; FDP, 4:2153-2154. ↩︎
  18. ST 3, q. 76, art. 1; FDP, 5:2449-2450; ST 3, q. 76, art. 4-5; FDP, 5:2451-2453. ↩︎
  19. ST 3, q. 78, art. 1; FDP, 5:2466. ↩︎
  20. See: Charles A. Coulombe, Vicars of Christ: A History of the Popes (New York: Citadel Press, 2003). ↩︎
  21. Robert Jenson, Unbaptized God: The Basic Flaw in Ecumenical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 119-131. ↩︎
  22. Ulrich Zwingli, “An Exposition of the Faith,” in Zwingli and Bullinger, 275-276. ↩︎
  23. See my argument in: Kilcrease, Justification by the Word: Restoring Sola Fide, 239-258. ↩︎
  24. Jacques Courvoisier, Zwingli: A Reformed Theologian (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2016), 76. ↩︎
  25. See observation in: Paul Hinlicky, Luther and the Beloved Community: A Path for Christian Theology After Christendom (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2010), 98. ↩︎
  26. ICR, 4.17.36; Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1412. ↩︎
  27. See observation in: Taylor, A Secular Age, 98-99. ↩︎
  28. See: B.A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2002).  Also see: Ulrich Zwingli, “Of Baptism,” in Bromily, Zwingli and Bullinger, 119-175; idem, “On the Lord’s Supper,” in Bromiley, Zwingli and Bullinger, 176-238. ↩︎
  29. See: Eire, War Against the Idols. ↩︎
  30. Heidelberg Disputation (1518); LW 31:40-41. ↩︎
  31. LC, 1.1; CT, 551-552. ↩︎
  32. Lectures on Genesis (1535-1545); LW 1:13-15. ↩︎
  33. On the Councils and the Church (1538); LW 41:103-4.  See excellent discussion in: Johannes Zachhuber, Luther’s Christological Legacy: Christocentrism and the Chalcedonian Tradition (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2017), 70-71. ↩︎
  34. See: Richard Cross, “Alloiosis in the Christology of Zwingli,” The Journal of Theological Studies, 47, no. 1 (1996): 105-122. ↩︎
  35. Athanasius, Four Discourses Against the Arians, 3.31-32; NPNFb, 4:410-411. ↩︎
  36. Cyril, On the Incarnation of the Word, 125-133. ↩︎
  37. Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper (1528); LW 37:210. ↩︎
  38. Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper (1528); LW 37:210. ↩︎
  39. David Luy, Dominus Mortis: Martin Luther on the Incorruptibility of God in Christ (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 109-194. ↩︎
  40. Marc Lienhard, Luther: Witness to Jesus Christ, Stages and Themes of the Reformer’s Christology, trans. Edwin Robertson (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1982), 138. ↩︎
  41. Paul Hinlicky, “Luther’s Anti-Docetism in the Disputatio de divinitate et humanitate Christi (1540)” in Creator est creatura: Luthers Christologie als Lehre von der ldiomenkommunikation, ed, Oswald Bayer and Benjamin Gleede (Berlin: De Gutyer, 2007), 139-185. ↩︎
  42. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers (Nashville: Broadman & Homann Publishers, 2013), 297-299. ↩︎
  43. Paul L. Maier, Caspar Schwenckfeld on the Person and Work of Christ: A Study of Schwenckfeldian Theology at Its Core (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004), 33-105; André Séguenny, The Christology of Caspar Schwenckfeld: Spirit and Flesh in the Process of Life Transformation (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1987). ↩︎
  44. Disputation on the Divinity and Humanity of Christ (1540); LW 73:263. ↩︎
  45. Disputation on the Divinity and Humanity of Christ (1540); LW 73:258. ↩︎
  46. Cross, Communicatio Idiomatum, 7-11. ↩︎
  47. Cross, Communicatio Idiomatum, 8-10. ↩︎
  48. Against the assertion of Rowan Williams that both divinity and humanity are altered.  See: Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (London: Bloomsbury Publishing 2018), 140. ↩︎
  49. Cross, Communicatio Idiomatum, 59-83. ↩︎

From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).

Cover image from Lucas Cranach the Elder, predella on altarpiece at St. Mary’s in Wittenberg, 1547, at Martin Junge, “Cranach painting reveals Luther’s understanding of the Bible and art of preaching,” Lutheran World Federation, May 1, 2019, accessed July 12, 2024, https://lutheranworld.org/blog/cranach-painting-reveals-luthers-understanding-bible-and-art-preaching; other images from