The gospel is a unilateral divine self-donation, in that an unconditional promise means a gift of the promiser himself in order to fulfill the terms of the promise. Therefore, Christians who receive the unilateral promise of the gospel are heirs to Christ’s very sacrificed person as a guarantee that he is at their disposal to fulfill his promise. This means that through the promise of the gospel we inherit Christ and everything that he possesses. Indeed, as Paul states, all true believers in union with Christ are “fellow heirs with Christ” (Rom 8:17). This reality is manifest in the Lord’s Supper wherein Christ wills his very physical being (body and blood) through which he brought salvation to believers. Therefore, to paraphrase Luther, in dying Jesus gives the inheritance of his body and blood to believers in order that they might receive the forgiveness of sins and eternal life through his promise attached to them.1
Returning to On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther’s second major difficulty with the medieval conception of the Eucharist is the doctrine of transubstantiation.2 The doctrine of transubstantiation teaches that the bread and the wine in the Lord’s Supper are transformed by the words of institution into the body and blood of Christ, although the outward appearance and qualities of bread and wine (Aristotelian “accidents”) remain intact.3 Although Luther affirmed the substantial presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist, he disliked the doctrine of transubstantiation the because it contradicts 1 Corinthians 10:16 which states that the bread and wine remain in the Lord’s Supper as the medium by which one receives Christ’s substantial body and blood.4 Luther considers the entire idea of transubstantiation an Aristotelian rationalization of the mystery of how the body and blood of Christ can become present through the bread and the wine.5
In spite of this criticism of transubstantiation, it is interesting to note that Luther does not consider belief in the doctrine to be tremendously problematic and allows that people could still affirm transubstantiation as a theologoumenon.6 What is most important to the Reformer is that one affirms the substantial presence of Christ’s flesh and blood in the Lord’s Supper. Although how one conceptually achieves this mysteriously physical presence is not unimportant, and the main point for Luther is that one knows that Christ is substantially present in his body and blood “for you” (pro me).7
For this reason Luther was considerably less tolerant of the sacramental symbolism of a figure like Zwingli.8 From Luther’s perspective, Zwingli ignores the divine promise that Christ’s flesh and blood will be present on essentially rationalistic grounds, namely, that bodies cannot be at more than one location at once. As we have seen Luther rejects this logic and affirms that although Jesus’s body remains a real body, it participates in God’s glory and can transcended the normal boundaries of physicality.9 After all, in the resurrection Jesus was able to walk through walls and appear and disappear at will. Jesus’s body nevertheless remained a real body. Christ could still invite Thomas to place his fingers in the nail holes of his very real hands and eat fish with the apostles. Likewise, the mysterious supernatural quality of Christ’s body in the Lord’s Supper does not negate its real physicality or his genuine humanity.
As we noted earlier, these difference between Luther and Zwingli on the sacrament are due in part to competing concepts of the communicatio idiomatum.10 Nevertheless, these differences also have implications regarding the nature of how the Word of God functions. For Zwingli, the words of institution are signifiers that merely signify.11 For Zwingli, how the signifiers “body and blood” can be validly applied to the signified “bread and wine” (which they do not match) is a puzzle that can only be resolved by sacramental symbolicism.12 For Luther, divine words are not mere signifiers, but promises that effect what they speak.13 This is the same principle that we have seen earlier in his views of confession and absolution. Hence the words “this is my body . . . this is my blood” possess divine power to bring about the presence of Christ’s flesh and blood.14 Faith must simply trusts that God’s words perform what they promise. To believe otherwise would be to trust in human reason over the God’s clearly stated promises.15
[1] LW 36:38.
[2] LW 36:28–35.
[3] See: Brett Salkeld, Transubstantiation: Theology, History, and Christian Unity (Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2019), 57–138.
[4] LW 36:33–4.
[5] LW 36:34–5.
[6] LW 36:35.
[7] Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, trans. Robert Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966), 379.
[8] Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology, 169–77; Sasse, This Is My Body, 134–294.
[9] Thomas Davis, This Is My Body: The Presence of Christ in Reformation Thought (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 41–64; Sasse, This is My Body, 148–60.
[10] Sasse, This is My Body, 148–54.
[11] See discussion in: Aaron Moldenhauer, “Analyzing the Verba Christi: Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and Gabriel Biel on the Power of Words,” in The Medieval Luther, ed. Christine Helmer (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020), 53–6.
[12] Ulrich Zwingli, “On the Lord’s Supper,” in Zwingli and Bullinger, 175–238.
[13] Moldenhauer, “Analyzing the Verba Christi,” 57–61.
[14] LW 37:180–88.
[15] LW 37:131.
From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word: Restoring Sola Fide (Lexham Press, 2022).
Image from “CTCR releases Addendum to ‘Communion and Covid-19’ opinion,” Reporter, Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, June 26, 2020, https://reporter.lcms.org/2020/ctcr-releases-addendum-to-communion-and-covid-19-opinion/.