2.5 Conclusion
As the eucharistic conflict emerged between the Lutheran and Swiss branches of the Reformation in the 1520s, a greater divergence on the understanding of Christ’s person also manifested. Zwingli’s position that Christ’s human body was no longer present in the earthly realm and therefore could not be corporeally present at the Lord’s Table opened up a chasm between the reforming camps. Luther’s doctrine of ubiquity, that Christ’s human body was in fact present not only at the Lord’s Table but everywhere, further widened this gulf. In this chapter I trace the development of this dispute through Zwingli’s later career to his immediate successors and show how the arguments for the extra developed within and alongside the dispute over eucharistic presence. We will begin with Zwingli’s later christology both at the Marburg Colloquy and in his final confessional works, Fidei Ratio and Fidei Expositio, and then turn to the extra’s reception in the emerging Reformed tradition up to the Consensus Tigurinus (1549).
Reflection on the Marburg Colloquy will offer an opportunity to elucidate the deeper theological disagreement over the extra Calvinisticum between the Lutheran and Reformed traditions that will mark their polemic throughout the sixteenth century and beyond. The debate at the historic meeting between Luther and Zwingli reveals the deeper currents of difference between the two reformers surrounding the conceptual framework underpinning the extra Calvinisticum. Zwingli and Luther’s positions stem from different understandings of the use of reason in theology. This methodological conflict issues into contrasting views of the locatability and finitude of Christ’s human body. In his later christology, Zwingli further develops the extra by incorporating both conciliar christology and an/enhypostasis understanding of Christ’s person—that the human nature of Christ subsists only in the hypostasis of the eternal Son. These alterations further solidify the unity of Christ’s person in Zwingli’s thought.
In the final section of the chapter I investigate the proliferation of the concept of the extra Calvinisticum in the nascent Reformed tradition through analysis of the early christology of Bullinger, Calvin’s use of the extra in the 1536 Institutes of the Christian Religion, and their agreement on the Eucharist, the Consensus Tigurinus. Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor at Zürich, carried forth Zwingli’s christological project in his An Orthodox Assertion of the Two Natures of Christ (1534). This work is the first Reformed treatise dedicated to christology wherein Bullinger develops Zwingli’s christology in response to not only Lutheran polemics but also christological errors from the radical wing of the Reformation. Calvin makes use of the extra in his first edition of the Institutes as a christological touchstone to avoid various eucharistic errors. In the Consensus Tigurinus of 1549, Bullinger and Calvin come to a compromise position on the nature of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper and in the process solidify the extra Calvinisticum as a unifying doctrine between Zürich and Geneva, thereby securing its place as a foundational element of the Reformed tradition. This dénouement between Geneva and Zürich would reignite the fervor of Lutheran theologians, initiating the so-called second eucharistic debate, which will be discussed in the next chapter.
The Marburg Colloquy has come to symbolize the discord within Protestantism, which has marked it from its earliest days. At this historic event Luther and Zwingli would meet for the first and last time, and the eucharistic controversy, which had been fomenting for five years, would be set as a defining boundary between the Reformed and Lutheran strands of the Reformation. The colloquy was an attempt to heal the theological divide between the reform movements in the Swiss Confederation and the Holy Roman Empire to clear the way for a Protestant alliance against the forces of international Roman Catholicism that threatened it. As early as 1524 alliances had been forming among the various evangelical factions within the Holy Roman Empire, with the Torgau League in 1524 and the Magdeburg League of 1525, which included both Philip, Landgrave of Hesse and John Elector of Saxony. After the Second Diet of Speyer, in March 1529, and the protest act, which would lend its name to half of the Western church, the situation in the empire changed and the need for a larger pan-Protestant alliance grew more desperate. As William Wright comments, “The security of the Protestants seemed gravely threatened again, by the emperor as well as by Catholic princes.”
Philip of Hesse was optimistic about the possibility of accord because to him the issue was primarily a disagreement over words. According to Wright, Philip had two main goals for the colloquy, namely, “the establishment of a pan-Protestant alliance” and “the recognition of Christian brotherhood among all Protestants, with an end to the Sacramentarian controversy.” Luther, on the other hand, had theological misgivings about the prospect of a political alliance for the sake of the gospel at this time:
In May 1529 he [Luther] argued that God has always condemned such alliances in the Old Testament. But the most vexing problem with an alliance such as Philip was proposing, one without a common confession, was that it would necessitate allying with the enemies of God. Such an act, the reformer wrote, would grant these enemies of God aid to the detriment of souls.
Zwingli was not opposed to an alliance with the German Protestants, but the matter was in the hands of the Zürich Council. He did not, however, find the possibility of rapprochement likely.
Luther’s reluctance and Zwingli’s pessimism were warranted. Despite the various political needs of the period, Luther and Zwingli would not be swayed by circumstance. The decisive factor in this debate was theological and intellectual, and neither Luther nor Zwingli would be content with mere verbal agreement. Heiko Oberman states:
Whatever further significance may and must be attached to the event Marburg 1529, i.e. the eucharistic debate between Luther and Zwingli, stands out as the example of the irreducible impact of intellectual history. The divisive nature of the discord cannot be contested: notwithstanding all the political pressures and economic interests involved, the Protestant leaders did not compromise or yield to the obvious need for establishing a united front.
Oberman draws our attention to the theological stakes at the colloquy; while both Luther and Zwingli felt the need for mutual protection in the face of mounting Catholic opposition, neither was willing to compromise the essence of Christian theology, which both thought was in the balance.
For this study of the extra Calvinisticum, the Marburg Colloquy reveals the growing divergence between the emerging wings of Protestantism. The root of this divergence is found in the opposing theological methods of Luther and Zwingli. Each side at the colloquy exhibited a differing view of the place of reason in the theological endeavor, which led to different criteria for true statements about Christ’s presence in the eucharistic elements and consequently the constitution of his human body. For Luther, reason is not a reliable tool for understanding Christ’s humanity, and revelation does not require reason for its interpretation and should not be made to conform to it. Zwingli, on the other hand, while not a rationalist, as some critics have claimed, understood reason as an auxiliary tool for the interpretation of Scripture along with the theological tradition. Particularly, he argues that with respect to Christ’s human nature and body reason can be a reliable guide to understanding its qualities, unless revelation specifies otherwise. This divergence in theological method drives Luther’s and Zwingli’s opposing doctrines of the extra Calvinisticum and ubiquity.
Related to the place of reason in theological method at the colloquy, Zwingli’s and Luther’s understandings of the body of Christ take center stage, with Luther arguing that Christ’s body can be simultaneously everywhere—in the eucharistic elements and in heaven. Zwingli counters that this conception of Christ’s body goes against the scriptural and patristic testimony, removes him from our common understanding of humanity, and compromises the reality of the incarnation and, therefore, salvation. For Zwingli, the only way adequately to account for the human body of Christ requires the extra Calvinisticum. The debate over the Eucharist and the spatial locality of Christ’s human body brings to the fore God’s omnipotence, developing brief arguments presented in Luther’s previous works against Zwingli. According to Luther, by his omnipotence God may make a body to be in two places at once or even in no place at all; God is not limited by the nature of created realities. Against this, Zwingli argues that, considered in the abstract, God may have this power, but this does not entail that God has, in fact, done this, nor does Luther properly take into account the distinction between God’s potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata. This debate over omnipotence suggests, following Oberman, that the division between the Lutheran and Reformed understandings of the body of Christ and the extra Calvinisticum have medieval roots in the division between the via antiqua and the via moderna.
According to Luther’s wishes and over the objections of Zwingli, no official record of the colloquy was made. Several participants took notes or recorded lengthy recollections after the event. Because of this, seven partial reports of the colloquy have come down to us. Various historians have used these sources to reconstruct the debate. The most extensive of these reconstructions is the work of Walter Köhler. Hermann Sasse, who makes use of these sources and the reconstruction of Köhler, has produced the most accessible English reconstruction, which will be used here.
The Marburg Colloquy was held from Friday, October 1, 1531, through Monday, October 4, with Philip of Hesse presiding over the debate as moderator. Preliminary discussions occurred on Friday between the major representatives of the Wittenberg and the Swiss delegations—Luther with Oecolampadius and Zwingli with Philip Melanchthon. The main debate took place in four sessions held on Saturday and Sunday. During the debate itself representatives of each party—Luther with occasional assists from Melanchthon for the Wittenbergers and Zwingli and Oecolampadius for the Swiss—traded arguments in an attempt to find a pathway for concord. Final negotiations took place Sunday evening with the signing of the Marburg Articles the following day. Although the debate ended in an impasse, at the behest of Philip of Hesse Luther proposed fifteen articles for agreement. The gathered parties were able to agree on fourteen of them. Although the Marburg Articles present a unified, public face to the colloquy, the division runs deep, to the level of theological method. Each party maintained its original view on the fifteenth point regarding the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper.
All parties could reject transubstantiation and agree to the status of the Lord’s Supper as a sacrament ordained by God and the need for communion in both kinds. Additionally, they even affirm that the Holy Spirit may “excite to faith” by the Supper and that spiritual feeding was necessary for all Christians, although whether this is achieved through the sacrament is ambiguous. The Marburg Articles and the colloquy bring the separation between Zwingli and Luther on christology into sharper relief. Luther, Zwingli, and their respective parties were deadlocked regarding the nature of Christ’s presence: “We have not reached an agreement as to whether the true body and blood of Christ are bodily present in the bread and wine.” Despite this continued disagreement the Articles called for “each side to show Christian love to the other side insofar as conscience will permit.” Some scholars have praised the Articles as a real step toward unity. For instance, the nineteenth-century Reformation historian Merle d’Aubigne declares that the Articles represent the “first bulwark erected in common by the reformers against Rome.” Most other scholars, however, have seen the agreement reached as paper-thin. Potter notes, “[T]he difference was wider than it might seem, an unbridgeable gap of highest import for the future.” This can be seen in the articles regarding the person of Christ, not so much for what is confessed but for the lack of specificity on any point of debate offered at the colloquy.
Luther opened the colloquy’s first session on an inauspicious note, which anticipated the ultimate outcome of the debate. According to Luther, more than enough had been written on the subject of the Supper, and his position was “absolutely firm.” After outlining the main issues before the gathered representatives, Luther set forth his understanding of the Swiss theologian’s rationale: “As to the Lord’s Supper, your fundamental principles are these: (1) You want to prove your case by way of logical conclusions; (2) you hold that a body cannot be in two places at the same time, and you put forward the argument that a body cannot be without limitation; (3) you appeal to natural human reason.” Luther recognized that the determining factor of the disagreement was christological and the understanding of how human reason relates to theological thinking either as a model of argument or an authority. This departure in theological method would underlie the argumentative strategies of both Luther and the Swiss delegations. The main point of contention was the use of reason in relation to interpreting Scripture, specifically the phrase “This is my body,” and its implication for understanding Christ’s body. These competing strategies undergirded Zwingli’s articulation of the extra juxtaposed with Luther’s espousal of ubiquity.
From the opening arguments, Luther’s position is intractable: “This is my body,” which Luther cites at least twenty-one times in the course of the debate, can only be understood as a statement of Christ’s corporeal presence in the elements. Addressing Philip of Hesse, Luther states, “I beg Your Highness’s pardon, but the words ‘This is my body’ have captured me. Even if Augustine or any other doctor would interpret the words symbolically, they should take place behind Christ and accept His interpretation.” For Luther, “This is my body” need not be interpreted as the quotation shows. It comes with the interpretation of Christ himself built in: “This bread is my bodily presence.” The four sessions of the colloquy had no obvious effect on Luther’s position, as he states firmly at the end of the final session, “I do not know of any other means but to give honor to the Word of God and to believe with us. I remain in my faith and I cannot give in.” Luther’s commitment to these words comes from his understanding of the nature of theology and reason. He declares late in the debate, “Every article of faith is a principle in itself and does not need to be proved by another.” According to Bernhard Lohse, Luther held that “reason cannot grasp trinitarian doctrine, the doctrine of the two natures, or the presence of Christ in the Supper. These as well as other doctrines can only be grasped by faith; reason can merely ‘think after’ them.” Reason needs to be enlightened by the work of the Holy Spirit to grasp the meaning of Scripture in these areas of Christian theology. For Luther, the affirmation of corporeal presence of Christ in the Eucharist stands on its own, proved by Spirit-enabled understanding and not reason or systematic theological principles.
For Luther, the Swiss refusal to agree with his doctrine can only be the result of their lack of spiritual enlightenment. This is illustrated by two comments at the close of session 4; Luther tells Zwingli and Oecolampadius to “ask God that you may be enlightened” and rebuffs Bucer’s parting desire for recognition as Christian brothers with the words, “It is quite obvious that we do not have the same Spirit.” For Luther, the colloquy was not about the interpretation of “This is my body” but a test of obedience and faith for the Swiss and South Germans. Would they hold to the word of God or the machinations of human reason? Luther did not come to the colloquy to persuade but to proclaim. He was clear on where he stood: “If we continued our discussion for a hundred years, still nothing would be proved. If you can do away with the text, I am satisfied.”
The chief strategy of Zwingli and Oecolampadius at Marburg was to demonstrate that Luther’s reading of “This is my body” was neither necessary nor consonant with other scriptural texts. Zwingli and Oecolampadius argued that the phrase must be interpreted by what Zwingli called the collation of Scripture. By this method, unclear and apparently contradictory text must be compared with other clear passages regarding the same subject. This comparison must be done with special care to the use of metaphorical and tropic language to avoid positing contradictions. The Swiss argued that Luther’s literal reading of the words of institution caused difficulties when compared with other teachings of Scripture, which resulted in contradictions; therefore, Luther’s reading was to be rejected in favor of interpreting the text as a trope. The Swiss had already used this method of argumentation against Catholic opponents during disputations at Zürich and Berne, and now attempted to assault Luther’s position with it.
In his initial argument against Luther, Zwingli set forth his method of collation of Scripture in Friendly Exegesis; to understand the argumentative strategy of the Swiss at Marburg it is helpful to backtrack to his description. Zwingli comments, “There are countless passages in both testaments which at first sight present the greatest diversity and the greatest opposition to each other, but when you compare them properly and without partisan bias, there is nothing more harmonious or plainer. The passage under discussion [‘This is my body’] is one of these.” Zwingli bases his understanding of the collation of Scripture on the presence of apparent contradictions and difficulties within the Bible and his overarching commitment to the impossibility of its falsehood. He holds that God accommodates the truth of the Scriptures in line with human language and tropes. Therefore the theologian must properly account for this accommodation to avoid absurdities. It is not as if any text can be collated with any other; rather the interpreter must seek proper comparisons that exhibit similarity or difference with reference to the same event, doctrine, or article of faith. For the question of the Lord’s Supper this entails comparison with other passages or doctrines that refer the relationship of believers to Christ’s flesh as well as the nature and current state of Christ’s body.
This is not merely a rational or rhetorical hermeneutic. Zwingli affirmed the centrality of the Spirit’s illumination and faith for interpreting the Bible: “Scripture is to be interpreted only under the lead and guidance of faith or anointing [of the Spirit], there is yet no one who cannot by the aid of hypocrisy make a show of faith.” Therefore, to avoid false interpretation one must in faith and bowing to the Spirit use proper interpretive method, which requires the ancillary of reason, to avoid attributing absurdities. For “if you assign to the Spirit what is not consistent with Scripture, you will introduce a confused and fanatical wonderment and make a mess of everything.” At the end of Friendly Exegesis, Zwingli sums up his method of argument against Luther as the collation of Scripture: “We do not rest on cunning, but now that, by reconciling apparent inconsistencies, collating Scriptures, we have brought things to the point that, whether one will or no, one is forced to admit that the words in question cannot have the simple meaning they present at first sight.” At Marburg, Oecolampadius and Zwingli attempted to do the same thing.
In his opening remarks before the colloquy, Oecolampadius concisely offers the Swiss argumentative strategy, which seeks to demonstrate by collation of Scripture that “This is my body” should be understood in a figural sense. Luther set the criteria for debate in his first speech, declaring that all must acquiesce to the Word of God and not resort to human reasoning: “I completely reject carnal or geometrical arguments, as e.g., that a large body could not fill a small space. God is above and beyond all mathematics.” Luther therefore places the burden of proof on Oecolampadius and Zwingli to show with “a valid proof from Holy Writ that these words do not mean what they say.” Oecolampadius is eager to do so and states in his opening remarks, “I am not desirous of appealing to reason or geometry—I do not deny the power of God—but possessing the sum total of faith, I speak by that.” His case has two key planks: John 6:63, “the flesh profits nothing,” and Christ’s bodily ascension into heaven:
It is the sixth chapter of St. John that explains the other passages of Scripture. There Christ (When speaking of His flesh) does not speak of a local presence. He even says “The flesh profiteth nothing” (John 6:63). . . . For Christ is risen (and sitteth at the right hand of the Father; consequently His body is not here on earth).
Throughout the exchange, Zwingli and Oecolampadius will return again and again to these points and employ the logic of the extra Calvinisticum, which rest for them not on human reason but the interpretation of the Word of God, as the alternative to Luther’s doctrine.
The divergence in the theological method in the argumentative strategies of Luther and the Swiss can be clearly illustrated by the flow of the argument in the first session of the colloquy, in which the Swiss repeatedly bring the debate to the collation of Scripture and Luther remains dogged in his understanding of “This is my body.” According to Oecolampadius, Luther proposes a bodily eating (manducatio corporalis), which has no use when the spiritual eating (manducatio spiritualis) is granted—that is, faith in Christ’s death manifest in the soul. This is what the “profits nothing” of John 6:63 means. For the Swiss, this text does not refer to the Lord’s Supper per se but shows the error of seeking bodily presence, which was the error of the Jewish crowd in the text, when the point is eating Christ spiritually—that is, having faith in his body slain. Therefore, by the collation of John 6:63 with “This is my body” one arrives at a spiritual rather than bodily eating.
Luther rejects this, saying that “it is not our business to judge whether it is useful or not.” It is not for human reason to pass judgment on the words, merely to obey them, whatever they may be. According to Luther, “[I]f He ordered me to eat dung, I would do it. Let not the servant inquire about the will of his Lord. We ought to close our eyes.” Luther’s recourse to what seems to amount to fideism annoys both Zwingli and Oecolampadius. At this point in the debate, the latter exclaims with a clear hint of exasperation, “Doctor, where is it written that we should go through the Scriptures with closed eyes?” Zwingli pushes the critique further by arguing that Luther is working from “prejudice” or a prejudgment of the meaning of a text in the face of any contrary evidence, and Zwingli rhetorically ties this to the “prejudice” of the heretic Helvidius, “who denied that Jesus was the only son of Mary because Scripture speaks clearly of ‘brothers.’ ” According to Zwingli, this was the error of failing properly to collate Scripture and clarify potentially ambiguous passages with clearer ones. Zwingli redoubles the use of John 6:63, and while he agrees that this does not prove that one must take “This is my body” in a figurative sense, it leads “us away from bodily eating.”
To bolster the appeal to John 6:63, Zwingli advances several arguments against a corporeal eating. He argues by collation of Scripture that est can mean significat. Also, Zwingli argues that the ascension of Christ renders the bodily presence impossible: “ ‘Me ye have not always’ Christ says in John 12:8, thus excluding a bodily presence.” Luther rejects all this: “I do not discuss the ‘is,’ but I am satisfied that Christ says it.” Zwingli accuses Luther of begging the question, or petitio principii. Luther rejects Zwingli’s argument and any application of John 6 to the matter at hand, claiming the burden of proof is with Zwingli: “The obligation to prove rests on you, not on me. But we will let that text in John 6 go, since it has no bearing on the understanding of the words of the Lord’s Supper.” With comments such as this, the inability of the Swiss strategy to move Luther and the ultimate futility of the colloquy’s debate is clear. Luther does not engage with the Swiss argument from John 6, which relies on collation to show that although Christ is not speaking of the Eucharist in this text, he is referencing corporeal eating and rejecting it. Zwingli sees Luther making the same error as the crowds in John 6 who misunderstand the call to faith in Christ come-in-the-flesh for a literal eating of his flesh.
Luther’s flippant rejection of the use of John 6:63 frustrates Zwingli to the point of incivility. As his key prooftext is dismissed entirely at the end of the morning session, Zwingli asserts almost in desperation, “And yet it can be proved that John 6 speaks of bodily eating.” Luther tersely replies, “Your logic is very poor.” Zwingli exclaims, “No, that passage will break your neck.” At this point he apologizes for speaking coarsely in an expression of his people, and Philip of Hesse asks Luther to accept the apology and move on. Thus ends the morning session of the first day of the colloquy. Unfortunately, this first session sums up the exegetical discussion of the whole debate.
Throughout the colloquy the divergent methodologies of the Swiss and the Wittenbergers make their rapprochement impossible. Luther is firmly ensconced in a tower built out of obedience to Christ’s words “This is by body.” Nothing will bring him out or knock it down. And if one agrees with Luther, one can applaud his commitment to the Word of God and his full-hearted devotion. Zwingli and Oecolampadius array all the weapons at their disposal to break down Luther’s fortifications, but to no apparent avail. They muster collation of Scripture, rhetorical analysis and the nature of tropes, the ascension of Christ, the spatial location of Christ’s human body, and the tool of logic. But Luther declares that all these arguments are unable to overturn the single statement “This is my body.” The fundamental impasse between the two sides is over reason as it applies to theology and Christ specifically. This disagreement is in line with the conclusion of Lee Palmer Wandel, who argues, “Marburg was a watershed, let me suggest, not because evangelicals disagreed over a theological point, but because the two sides were mutually incomprehensible: the very conceptual categories each took up to articulate his understanding of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist—each side’s physics and metaphysics—were, for the other, unintelligible.” In the following section, we will see how this divergence played out and contributed to the opposing doctrines of Christ’s body after the ascension.
Having set forth the methodological divide between Luther and the Swiss, let us turn to the place of the extra Calvinisticum proper in the argumentation at Marburg. In the second session, held Saturday evening, attention turns to the finitude and locality of Christ’s human body. The Swiss seek to destabilize Luther’s claim that “This is my body” requires a corporeal presence in the Eucharist. Zwingli and Oecolampadius use the extra to demonstrate the inadequacy of Luther’s position that requires a corporeal presence in the eucharistic elements and to offer an alternative case. They argue that because the body of Christ is like unto humanity in every way, sin only excepted, it is therefore spatially finite and locatable. Therefore, as a result of his bodily ascension into heaven he cannot be locally, and therefore corporeally, at the Lord’s Table. In the course of this argument, Zwingli and Oecolampadius advance the previous arguments for the extra by reflecting on the finitude of human nature, appealing to the eschatological correspondence between Christ’s body and that of the risen saints, enlisting the support of Augustine on the nature of a body and rejecting an appeal to divine omnipotence.
Oecolampadius and Luther trade texts over the ascension and the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Oecolampadius’s goal is to establish that there is an insurmountable difficulty if one holds that the body of Christ is both in heaven and at the Lord’s Table. Citing John 16:28, where Christ speaks of “leaving the world,” Oecolampadius argues, “This passage excludes the presence from the Lord’s Supper and compels us to admit a trope in the words of institution.” He buttresses this point by claiming that if the body of Christ is in heaven and at the Table, then “our hope of resurrection corresponding to the resurrection of Christ is destroyed.” Although he does not elaborate, his argument seems to be that the hope of resurrection rests on humanity attaining bodies like unto Christ’s resurrection body. If his resurrection body is ubiquitous, something possible for Christ only, according to Luther, because of the hypostatic union of the divine and the human natures in Christ, then any claim that humanity will be like him is destroyed because we are not united to divinity in like manner. Therefore, based on the eschatological likeness of the glorified body of Christ and the glorified body of the saints, the spatial locality of Christ’s body must be maintained. Otherwise, one has introduced a fundamental dissimilarity between the two, thus destroying the hope of resurrection.
Luther retorts that looking at the risen body in the sacrament does not destroy but establishes this hope. Frustration in the room seems to grow at this point as Luther responds:
It annoys you that I always stick to the words “This is my body.” I am not doing this without consideration. I confess that the body is in heaven, but I also confess that it is in the Sacrament. I desire to stick to these words that Christ is in heaven and that He is in the Sacrament. I do not ask what is against nature, but only what is against faith.
The methodological tensions issue into differing conceptualities of Christ’s body itself; for Zwingli and Oecolampadius Christ’s body is natural, while Luther rejects consideration of nature. The theological method of each party accounts for this difference. The Swiss focus on the scriptural assertion of Christ’s body as like unto the rest of humanity, which therefore authorizes the application of natural categories to it. Luther sees such an application as rationalism and is content to affirm Christ in heaven and at the Table without explication. The Swiss refuse to accept such a multilocal position and push Luther to offer an account of Christ’s presence.
Despite Luther’s rebuttal, Oecolampadius continues in his case that Christ’s human nature is finite by citing Christ’s words in Matthew 26:11—“The poor you will have with you always but you will not always have me”—and explains this statement with a summary of the extra:
According to His divinity, grace, and power Christ is present to all always and everywhere. If, however, He speaks of His absence, then necessarily He will be absent as far as His humanity is concerned. Thus in the Supper He cannot be present bodily. He has become “in all things like . . . unto his brethren” (Heb 2:17). As He is of one substance with the Father according to His divinity, so He is of one substance with us according to His humanity. What we are agreed on is that Christ is present in heaven (according to His divinity and humanity) and in the Supper (according to his divinity).
This argument is based on the scriptural testimony that in some sense Christ is not with his people always. In what sense is that? Since Christ is understood through the hypostatic union of the two natures, the same substance of the omnipresent Father and the full substance of finite humans, this absence must be reckoned properly of the human nature. Luther states, “[This is the] best argument you have put forward today. It sounds fairly plausible.” Nevertheless, he rejects Oecolampadius’s interpretation of the absence spoken of in Matthew 26:11. For Luther it is an absence of visibility but not of bodily presence.
Zwingli tags into the debate at this point and supports Oecolampadius’s argument that Christ’s body is in heaven with an argument from Scripture and with support from the church fathers. He introduces five scriptural passages to support the finitude of the humanity of Christ and its likeness to our human flesh (Rom. 8:3; Phil. 2:6ff.; Heb. 2:17, 4:15; 1 Cor. 15:28):
I will not allow these passages to be passed over. They show that the humanity of Jesus was finite like ours. “If Christ’s body is above, it must be in one place,” as Augustine says, supported by Fulgentius. Luther, however, makes it to be everywhere (ubique) as something infinite (infinitum). As our body is in one place, so also His body cannot be in two places, or as our bodies, after having been transformed into His image, would be without a place or in several places simultaneously.
Zwingli combines many arguments in this small quotation. First, he argues from Scripture establishing that Christ’s body is the same as the rest of humanity, sin only excepted, and that the resurrection body of believers is made after the likeness of Christ’s resurrected flesh. Zwingli is appealing to the whole course of Christ’s ministry, from the incarnation to his final coming and judgment of the world at the final resurrection. By so doing he establishes the permanence and consistency of Christ’s true human nature.
Zwingli supports this contention with a citation of Augustine and invocation of Fulgentius. This appeal to the fathers attempts to establish that this doctrine is not an innovation but has grounds in the earlier tradition. He is also driving a wedge between this tradition and Luther, who is introducing an innovation with the doctrine of ubiquity. Zwingli cites Augustine’s Letter to Dardanus to support his claim that a body cannot be except in a place: “Augustine says again, ‘Take away space from bodies, and you will have taken away the bodies.’ ” This is a significant step in the argument for Zwingli because as the debate progresses, he and Oecolampadius will push Luther to define in what sense regarding locality Christ’s body is present in the elements.
Zwingli supports his contention that Christ’s body must exist locally by drawing on the human experience of embodiment to the nature of Christ’s embodiment. The grounding for this move is based on the scriptural citations given. If Christ is in the “likeness of sinful flesh,” in “the likeness of men, and found in fashion as a man” and “like unto his brethren,” then by looking at the constitution of our own flesh we can make valid inferences about his flesh, insofar as the sinful nature of humanity is accounted for. Therefore, if human bodies have the property of being in a place and are finite, and this is not a result of sin but the very condition of humanness, then it is proper to understand Christ’s humanity as sharing these properties. If our body cannot be in more than one place, then neither can his, not because of any lack on his part but because of his gracious condescension to take up our humanity.
Zwingli further prohibits Luther’s claim that the preservation of properties applies only to the pre-resurrected body of Christ by arguing that the likeness of Christ to human flesh is maintained into the eschatological future, elaborating on the argument made formerly by Oecolampadius. Zwingli builds on the logic of 1 Corinthians 15:48; humanity is to be made unto the likeness of the resurrected Christ. But if the resurrected body of Christ is everywhere, then the resurrected bodies of believers will likewise share this quality “after having been transformed into His image.” According to Zwingli, the result would be bodies “without a place or in several places simultaneously.” Zwingli has already established from Augustine and common experience of human embodiment that such “bodies” would not be bodies at all.
Luther rebuffs Zwingli’s argument for the spatial locality of Christ’s human body as based on faulty reasoning. According to him, Zwingli has failed to reason properly and has committed the fallacy of argumentum ab accidente ad substantiam, an argument from the accidental qualities of a thing to conclusions regarding its substance. Luther’s rebuttal has power only if the locality of the human body is conceived of as an accidental property of humanity rather than as essential to its substance. The property of being in any particular place is certainly an accidental property. Luther misses the force of Zwingli’s argument because it is not that Christ is in any particular place that is essential, but that the human body must be in a place at all, that is, to be spatially localized or locatable. For instance, the property of being in Marburg or Wittenberg is not essential to any human body yet being at/in some place rather than no place seems to be. Zwingli indicates this in his response where he focuses on the word morphe in Philippians 2. “The word ‘morphe’ in Philippians 2 has these two meanings (divine infinite form, and human finite form). Christ is finite as we are finite.” It is not accidental for the form of a servant to be finite, but rather this is one of the distinguishing characteristics between the divine morphe and the human morphe. Zwingli returns to this point at the opening of the third session to further support this claim: “The words ‘morphe’ (form) and ‘schema’ (fashion) indicate that the body of Christ must occupy a certain space and exist locally.” By nature, Christ’s body must be locatable; if this locatability is removed, the form itself is destroyed.
In response to the argument of the Swiss, Luther supports the locality of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist with an appeal to omnipotence. Luther’s christological position at Marburg is determined by his reading of the words of institution, which by his understanding teach a corporeal and substantial presence, even if he is unclear whether this presence is local or not. “I am bound and held captive by the words of the Lord, spoken at the institution, and therefore cannot accede to your opinion on the basis of your remarks. The words ‘This is my body’ prove that the body of Christ can be in many places simultaneously. For these words prove the presence of the body in the bread.” According to Luther, confessing that Christ is both present in heaven and at the Lord’s Table is simply obedience to Christ’s words. For Luther, the corporeal presence, as we have seen, is beyond the bounds of human reason and need not be substantiated from other texts, because it is a principle of the faith in its own right and “every article of faith is a principle in itself and does not need to be proved by another.” If Luther is correct, then the texts that Zwingli and Oecolampadius marshal in defense of reading “This is my body” as a trope—texts mentioning the ascension or that Christ will not always be with his people—could sooner bear a figural reading than the words of institution.
Throughout the colloquy, Luther shows little interest in determining how the body of Christ can be present in the elements. It is enough for him that it is present without explanation. He cares little for how this is possible, resting it on God’s omnipotence rather than any consideration of physics (mathematics):
I do not want to hear mathematical distinctions in this connection. For God, as the Aristotelian philosophers also admit, can cause one body to be either in one place only, or in several places at the same time, or outside of every place, or He is even able to bring it about that several bodies are simultaneously in one place.
Luther claims that even if one brings physics into the discussion, divine omnipotence allows more options for a bodily presence with reference to locality than the Swiss acknowledge. To understand Luther’s claim here and the course of the Marburg debate, it is necessary briefly to set forth the medieval scholastic understanding of how a thing can be present. This medieval conception underlies Luther’s claim that a body can exist in one place (locally), in more than one place (multilocally), outside of place (illocally), or in the same place as another body (colocally).
According to the medieval scholastic tradition, a thing can be in a place in three ways: locally, definitively (illocally), and repletively. Each mode presupposes an Aristotelian conception of place, which can described as a container or receptacle view: “That is what place is: the first unchangeable limit of that which surrounds.” The place of a thing is thus determined by something that bounds it. The first way a thing could be in a place according to medieval scholastic conception corresponds exactly to this definition and is known as local or circumscribed presence. In this sense a body occupies a space in all of its parts and is denoted by a definite physical boundary, like water in a vase. This is the mode of presence of all normal physical objects. The second mode of presence can be labeled definitive or illocal presence. Richard Muller defines this mode as “the mode of presence characteristic of an immaterial but finite being, which by its nature is not confined dimensionally to a given locus, or place, but which in its power and operations is nevertheless delimited or defined.” This is the mode of presence of angels and the human soul. Medieval theologians also attribute this mode of presence to Christ’s body on the altar. The final mode of presence applies only to God, who is present wholly in all places yet contained by none, which is labeled “repletive presence.” Although these categories are not used with precision at Marburg, they represent the conceptual background for much of the debate over locality.
Luther wavers between affirming that the body is present illocally and refusing to come down on this question one way or another. Because God is all-powerful and not bound by physics (mathematics) he can make Christ present in an illocal manner. As Luther claims, “God is higher than all mathematicians. Christ can keep His body without space at a certain place. He is in the Sacrament (but) not as in a place.” To support the possibility of this and reject Zwingli’s appeal to Augustine on this question, Luther alludes to the distinction from the scholastics:
The schoolmen have held that one body can be in many places, or many bodies in one place, or that a body can be in no place at all. They say that God can do the same with all bodies, let alone the body of Christ. Who am I to measure the power of God? He maintains the largest organism existing, the universe, without space [a place]. Therefore the world does not have a place where it exists.
For Luther, the presence of Christ at the Table need not lead to a contradiction, as the Swiss maintain, since these various options for presence are possible given the divine power. He supports this idea with the example of the universe itself, which is a body but is not in a place, since according to the Aristotelian concept of place it lacks any other thing to bound it. Ultimately, even if it were possible for him to specify in what manner Christ is bodily present, Luther finds it of little importance. As he said at the beginning of the debate, he prefers to obey God’s word rather than to speculate on what has not been revealed through faith: “I leave it to God whether or not the body of Christ is in a place (in loco). For me this is enough: ‘This is my body.’ ”
Oecolampadius and Zwingli seem to concede the point that by his omnipotence God may be able to make a body in more than a single place. Yet, turning the table on Luther, they demand a scriptural text be given that shows that God in fact does do this; otherwise one is merely reasoning from the possible to the actual: “God certainly can make it possible for one body to be in different places at the same time. We, however, demand proof that He does so in the Lord’s Supper.” Pressing this point further Zwingli declares, “I have proved that Christ was in one place. It is up to you to prove that he is in no place or in many places.” Luther retorts, “[W]e do not owe you a proof.” Zwingli redoubles his demand, claiming one should teach no doctrine without supplying support from Scripture. At this point the debate reaches at least its narrative climax as Luther pulls back the tablecloth to reveal hoc est corpus meum scrawled upon the table. Luther proclaims, “This is our Scripture passage. You have not yet taken it from us, as you promised to do. ‘This is my body’—I cannot pass over the text of my Lord Jesus Christ, but I must confess and believe that the body of Christ is there.”
In the fourth session, Luther expresses exasperation over the discussion of whether Christ’s body is present in the Eucharist as in a place, but in doing so he fails to understand the purpose behind the argument of the Swiss theologians: “I am wondering why we quarrel about the ‘place,’ it being agreed by the whole of Christendom that God can exist outside of space or in a specific place.” This is the only evidence in the debate of Luther’s understanding of the communicatio idiomatum, which would allow the question of the omnipresence of God as repletive presence to resolve the question over whether Christ’s human body was in a place. For Luther, the quality of repletive presence is shared with the human nature, which therefore funds whatever sort of presence Christ’s body has on the Table, whether local or illocal. Nevertheless, it seems that Luther is failing to see the essence of the debate. Neither Oecolampadius nor Zwingli denied that Christ’s divinity transcends spatiality. Rather, the question at hand was the implications of Luther’s claim that Christ is present “substantially” and corporeally in the elements of the Table and therefore exists in many places via ubiquity. Luther assumes that he can appeal to divine omnipresence as if it proved ubiquity of Christ’s human body and a real and necessary sharing of attributes between Christ’s natures. For the Swiss, however, this very move is the question that must be resolved.
Zwingli and Oecolampadius press Luther to be consistent with regard to how he articulates Christ’s eucharistic presence. Based on the appeal to Augustine and Fulgentius, Oecolampadius argues that if the body is in the Supper “not as in a place,” as Luther claimed, then “the body of Christ is not really in the Sacraments ‘somatikos’ ” or corporeally because this would necessarily entail placeness. This argument reveals that for the Swiss the question is not bodies in general but the nature of a human body. All human bodies we have experienced exist only locally. Luther’s appeals to the universe as a body existing illocally and the definitive presence of angelic bodies and human souls are irrelevant to the discussion. Luther seeks to maintain an illocal, human corporeal presence, which is a contradiction or special pleading. Zwingli and Oecolampadius argue that Luther’s reading of the words of institution, far from securing the humanity of Christ as he hopes, renders Christ’s body not a body at all. Wandel argues similarly:
For Luther, it was inconceivable for God to have taken on a human body, in other words, precisely because that body was bonded, materially finite. . . . Christ’s body was not the same as the human body. God took on a body which looked like a human body, but was different, materially different. Physics might apply to human bodies, but not to Christ’s.
Therefore, according to the Swiss, Luther’s understanding of “This is my body” leads to deeper theological problems, which should force a figurative reading of the text to bring it in line with other passages of Scripture and Christian doctrine. Their alternative to this “nonlocal” presence of the body in the elements is a local presence of Christ’s body in heaven, which can be in only one place, while maintaining his continued presence according to his divinity everywhere—the extra Calvinisticum.
At the Marburg Colloquy, the arguments for the extra broaden from what we have seen in Zwingli’s earlier works through additional scriptural and theological arguments as well as support from the Christian tradition. Zwingli and Oecolampadius use the extra to demonstrate the inadequacy of Luther’s position, which requires a corporeal presence in the eucharistic elements and to offer an alternative case. They argue that because the body of Christ is like unto humanity in every way, sin only excepted, it is therefore spatially finite and locatable. Therefore, as a result of his bodily ascension into heaven he cannot be locally, and therefore corporeally, at the Lord’s Table. In the course of this argument, Zwingli and Oecolampadius advance the previous arguments for the extra by reflecting on the finitude of human nature, appealing to the eschatological similarity between Christ’s body and that of the saints, enlisting the support of Augustine on the nature of a body, and rejecting an appeal to divine omnipotence. In the final analysis we could compare the two sides at the Colloquy of Marburg as follows: Luther presents a christology that is determined by his understanding of the sacraments; Zwingli offers a doctrine of the sacraments determined by his christology. The division is deeper than the question of the Eucharist alone, since it involves competing views of God, humanity, and Christ’s hypostatic union. These divergent conceptualities will be perpetuated within the Lutheran and Reformed traditions.
Zwingli’s christology and his doctrine of the extra Calvinisticum are most fully expressed in the two confessional works written in the final year of his life: Fidei Ratio and Fidei Expositio. Owing to the similar confessional structure, audience, and time period of these works, they will be treated together. The treatment will be organized around the latter because of its clearer structure and greater attention to issues surrounding the extra. Fidei Ratio was Zwingli’s response to the calling of the Diet of Augsburg in the summer of 1530, in which he attempted to set forth his faith to Emperor Charles V. After having received from allies an outline of Luther’s confession presented at the Diet, which became the Augsburg Confession, Zwingli thought it prudent to set forth his own faith and that of his Zürich compatriots, so it might gain a hearing before the emperor and collected dignitaries.
Zwingli wrote the Fidei Expositio to Francis I of France at the urging of the French ambassador Lambert Maigret. Francis was entertaining the possibility of an alliance with the Swiss against Emperor Charles V. There is no evidence, however, that the king paid any attention to this work, which lay buried in the Royal Library in Paris. Despite its failure to sway discourse or events, “it remains the author’s last, and not least impressive, apology,” as Potter notes. Bullinger later published the work in 1536 along with the First Helvetic Confession. According to Bullinger, in Fidei Expositio Zwingli “sang a sort of swan-song upon the true faith when near his death.”
In these later works, Zwingli presents the fruit of his career as a reformer, theologian, and pastor, written in a form not primarily concerned with doctrinal controversy. In Fidei Ratio and Fidei Expositio, he sets forth his comprehensive and positive understanding of the Christian faith. He builds on his previous arguments for the extra and refines the doctrine. Zwingli argues for his understanding of the extra Calvinisticum based on the nature of Christ’s atoning work to be the mediator pro nobis. In order for this to be the case, Christ must be truly human and truly divine: if he is not truly divine, God is not truly for us; if he is not truly man, God is not truly for us. The eternal Son takes on a true human nature as the instrument by which the saving mercy and justice of God is both enacted and exhibited. For Zwingli, any deviation from the veracity of humanity would compromise this salvation, the gospel, and the Christian religion itself.
In these final two confessional works, Zwingli reasons from the nature of God and the human sinful condition and need for salvation to his understanding of the incarnation. In Fidei Ratio and Fidei Expositio, he grounds the incarnation on the soteriological purposes of God and his understanding of the essence of the Christian religion. Only the Creator, who is eternal, infinite, and uncreated, is to be trusted and worshipped. These qualities cannot be given to or ascribed properly to the creature without elevating it to divine status, which is blasphemous. The absolute nature of the Creator-creature distinction is not abandoned with the incarnation and stands at the basis of Zwingli’s understanding of the Christian faith. “This is the fountainhead of my religion, to recognize God as the uncreated Creator of all things, who solely and alone has all things in his power and freely gives us all things. They, therefore, overthrow this first foundation of faith, who attribute to the creature what is the Creator’s alone.” The difference between the Creator and the creature is absolute for Zwingli, and honor, worship, and the act of salvation are proper of God alone. This theocentric tenor motivated Zwingli’s thought; however, far from annulling the importance of the humanity of Christ, Zwingli’s doctrine of God solidifies its necessity. Since humanity has rebelled against the Creator and he desires, out of his goodness, to save them, the true God must become a true man.
Zwingli uses the Anselmic logic of satisfaction to explain why the incarnation was needed, which continues to ground his doctrine of Christ in his final works. He understands the purpose of the incarnation is to bring about the salvation of humanity through the sacrifice of the incarnate one who is mediator, through death, while at the same time preserving the nature of the divine, which is unique and unchanging, and the nature of the humanity of Christ, which must be truly and fully human. Further, the human nature of Christ secures the pro nobis quality of God since it was for this purpose only that human flesh was assumed: “For what he took on for our sake was derived from us, so that he is wholly ours. Therefore, for Zwingli nothing less is at stake in the incarnation than the very question of human salvation and the inviolability of God’s nature and character; only the one who is simultaneously truly God and truly man will suffice. The extra is an outworking of this understanding of the necessity of the God-man for the purpose of salvation. As truly God, Christ transcends spatial reality, and as truly human he takes on the complete and unaltered condition of human particularity, including spatial circumscription. Anything less for Zwingli would compromise the nature of the incarnation, the nature of God, and the pro nobis quality of redemption. This emphasis is constant from Zwingli’s earlier writings. The foundational theologic of the extra Calvinisticum in Zwingli’s thought is neither the divine nor the human nature but Jesus Christ, the God-man, as mediator, and this emphasis remains consistent from his earliest works to the end of his career. From his earliest reforming work until the end of his life Zwingli’s christology is determined by his understanding of soteriology.
In his final works, Zwingli grounds his doctrine of the extra Calvinisticum on a sophisticated understanding of the hypostatic union. In Fidei Ratio, after a brief confession of the Trinity according to the Nicene Creed and the Quinque vult, Zwingli produces the most systematic exposition of Christ’s two natures in his oeuvre. From his earlier christology through to Friendly Exegesis, Zwingli’s understanding and articulation of the hypostatic union developed to remove the early Nestorian tendency with his incorporation of “person” language in place of a vague unity between Christ’s natures. At the end of his life, he further specifies the nature of the hypostatic union through greater reflection on the person of the hypostatic union as the personhood of the eternal Logos. He begins with a statement regarding the reality and scope of the human nature, consisting in body and soul, and in fact the “whole man.” The whole human nature is united to the person of the eternal Son in one hypostasis. This is done in such a way that the whole human nature is united to the person of the eternal Son but not so as to constitute a new or other person, “but this in such a manner, that the whole man was so assumed into the unity of the hypostasis or person of the Son of God, that the man did not constitute a separate person, but was assumed into the inseparable, indivisible and indissoluble person of the Son of God.” As we have seen, one of the oft-made critiques of Zwingli’s christology is that he separates the natures so much that it devolves into Nestorianism, especially regarding his concept of the extra. To avoid this accusation, Zwingli here expresses the unity of the natures first, rather than the distinctiveness, and guards against the charge of Nestorianism with the concept of the anhypostasia-enhypostasia distinction, in concept if not in word. He expresses the same idea in Fidei Expositio along with an appeal to the general counsel of the church fathers:
He took up human nature into the unity of the hypostasis or person of the Son of God, not as if the humanity taken on were a separate person, and the eternal divinity were also a separate person. The person of the eternal Son of God assumed humanity into and by virtue of its own power, as holy men of God have truly and clearly shown.
To follow Zwingli’s thought here, I will briefly discuss the historical background of this christological concept, the possible sources for it in his thought, and its implication for the doctrine of the extra within his theology.
The origins of the formulation and the concept of the anhypostasia-enhypostasia are disputed. Scholars attribute the formal articulation of the distinction to Protestant scholastics while also finding the idea in post-Chalcedonian fathers; however, the historical formation of this distinction need not detain us. At its most basic articulation, the an/enhypostasia distinction attempts to express the Chalcedonian understanding of Christ’s one person. In the union of natures there is one person. The divine nature has prior personal existence; therefore, the human nature cannot have personal existence apart from the Logos, and the human nature subsists within the hypostasis of the Logos. G. C. Berkouwer states the distinction clearly: “With ‘anhypostasy’ is meant that the human nature of Christ cannot exist for a moment outside the Logos, while ‘enhypostasy’ indicates that the reality of the human nature is concretely that of the acting Lord.” This definition is not intended to detract from the reality of the perfection of the human nature of Christ. Rather, the distinction seeks to affirm that in no sense does or could the human nature of Christ exist apart from the personal existence of the Logos to which it is united, and in that sense the human nature is impersonal, considered in itself. It is not an abstract divine nature that assumes flesh but the eternal Son himself. With the addition of this concept, Zwingli’s christology arrives at its most mature form. Zwingli has moved beyond the vague notion of “one Christ” expressed in The Commentary on True and False Religion and further specified the nature of the “hypostatic” language he appeals to in Friendly Exegesis.
The source for Zwingli’s use of the anhypostasia-enhypostaia concept in his latter christology is unclear, but several possibilities exist. U. M. Lang has indicated that Zwingli might have taken this concept from John of Damascus, whom he studied throughout his career. Another possible source for the concept in Zwingli’s work could be the via antiqua, particularly Duns Scotus, in which he was trained and continued to engage throughout his life. Matthias Göckel has argued that the enhypostasis concept was already clear in the work of Aquinas, while Richard Cross has demonstrated its place in the thought of Scotus. In another work, Cross has claimed that the concept of the enhypostasis was widespread if not universal in medieval scholasticism. Zwingli’s use of the concept does not seem specific enough to draw a clear line of influence. Whatever its source, we see from the inclusion of the enhypostasis of the human nature in these later confessional works that Zwingli’s understanding of christology grew in sophistication over his career as he continued to engage with the Christian tradition. One benefit of this development was his offering of a firmer and more rigorous doctrine of Christ’s hypostatic union, which more securely grounds both his concept of the communicatio idiomatum and the extra Calvinisticum in the unity of Christ’s natures.
In Fidei Ratio, after establishing the unity of the two natures in the one person of the eternal Son, Zwingli discusses the crucial distinction that is maintained even in the hypostatic union. Following the Chalcedonian Decree, Zwingli characterizes this unity as one in which the particular characteristics of each nature remain intact:
And, although both natures, the divine and the human, have so preserved their character and peculiarity that both are truly and naturally found in Him, yet the distinct peculiarities and activities of the natures do not separate the unity of the person any more than in man soul and body constitute two persons.
This retention of distinct properties does not compromise the unity of the person, according to Zwingli, any more than acknowledgment of different qualities between the human soul and body results in two persons. As an example he uses an image of the effects on the soul and body when one is stabbed. A sword wounds the body but can in no way harm the immaterial soul. Each in this case is behaving according to its peculiar properties. It is a quality of a body to be wounded by martial attack and of the soul, owing to it immateriality, to be immune from such attacks. Yet, we still understand that the person as a whole is injured. Nevertheless, one does not agree that the sword wounds the soul. Zwingli uses this analogy to support his contention that neither the integrity of each nature with its peculiar properties nor the acknowledgment of this in our manner of speaking and interpreting Scripture results in a separation of Christ into two persons.
Zwingli also enumerates the properties and works proper to the character of each nature while unified in the same person:
Hence one and the same Christ, according to the character of the human nature, cries in infancy, grows, increases in wisdom [Luke 2:52], hungers, thirsts, eats, drinks, is warm, is cold, is scourged, sweats, is wounded, is cruelly slain, fears, is sad and endures what else pertains to the penalty and punishment of sin, though from sin itself He is most remote.
Zwingli pushes into the full humanity of Christ in all of its earthly emotion and weakness. Christ bears a human nature that is, for Zwingli, exactly as other humans possess, including the effects of sin on human existence, while remaining pure from its corruption. According to the divine nature, “with the Father He [Christ] controls the highest and the lowest [i.e., heaven and earth], he pervades, sustains and preserves all things, gives sight to the blind, restores the lame, calls to life the dead, prostrates His enemies with His word, when dead resumes life, ascends to heaven and sends from His home the Holy Spirit.” According to Zwingli, the divine nature is responsible for the upholding of the providential ordering of the world and the power behind the miracles seen in the earthly life. Here we see a much more trinitarian emphasis in Zwingli than he has hitherto presented, as the Son works in concert with the Father and the sending of the Spirit. Although these various peculiar acts are properly ascribed to the power of one nature or the other, Zwingli understands the agent of all these acts to be the same person, Jesus Christ: “All these things, however diverse in nature and character, the one and the same Christ does, remaining the one person of the Son of God.” While there are distinct qualities and acts that derive their source from one nature or the other, the active subject—the “who” or “whose”—is only the person of the eternal Son.
This union of action of the eternal Son who has assumed the full human nature, therefore, is the ontological ground for the linguistic convention in Scripture whereby attributes of one nature are predicated of another. With the addition of the enhypostasis concept, Zwingli can better account for this diversity of properties within the unity of the hypostasis, which is the fundamental insight of the extra. The one eternal person who subsists in two natures, one eternally and necessarily and the other temporally and contingently, has a unified action even though certain acts are properly attributed to only one nature. Therefore, Christ qua person can simultaneously uphold the world by the word of his power and be a particular human agent within the world he upholds, without separation of personal action.
Building on this understanding of Christ, Zwingli in both texts refutes Roman and Lutheran understandings of the Eucharist, which he argues compromise the integrity of the human nature. He begins with a statement of the presence of the “true body of Christ” in the Supper through “the contemplation of faith,” but denies “that the body of Christ in essence and really, i.e., the natural body itself, is either present in the supper or masticated with our mouth and teeth.” From this we can see the development of Zwingli’s view of the Supper from something like memorialism to a more sacramental view of Christ’s presence, in line with Barclay’s and Riggs’s assessment of Zwingli’s late period. This position is likewise expressed in Fidei Expositio: “The other thing which I have undertaken to set forth here is this—that that natural, material body of Christ’s, in which he suffered here and now sits in heaven at the right hand of the Father, is not eaten literally and in its essence, but only spiritually, in the Lord’s Supper.” Zwingli articulates his understanding of the Supper from the foundation of the previous discussion of the nature of Christ’s person and the retention of peculiar properties. As he is bodily in heaven, he cannot be so in the Supper.
This critique is largely aimed at the Roman concept of the Mass, but Zwingli quickly moves to reject the Lutheran doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ’s human nature following much of the argument we saw earlier. Zwingli, charting familiar territory from the colloquy, quotes Jesus’s words to his disciples that “the poor you will have always with you; but me you will have not always” (John 12:8). From this text and building off of the christology presented earlier, Zwingli argues that only recognition of the peculiar properties of each nature and their operation within the one person can account for the dynamic of presence and absence implied in Christ’s words. Christ could not be saying that he would not be with the disciples according to his divinity “for according to His divinity He is always present, because He is always everywhere.” Therefore this absence is with regard to the body of Christ, which according to the nature of human bodies is spatially circumscribed. If this spatial finitude is removed or compromised, as in the doctrine of ubiquity, humanity loses its stake in the incarnation. “For what he took on for our sake was derived from us, so that he is wholly ours.” Zwingli ties the understanding of Christ’s body to the human body of common experience. Owing that Christ took his flesh from his human mother so that he might be “wholly ours,” Zwingli asserts that the pro nobis nature of Christ is secured and established by his taking a true human nature without sin but with every other quality common to human existence.
From the pro nobis quality of the incarnation, Zwingli draws two corollaries: (1) “that the characteristics which are present in our body are also present in Christ’s body” and (2) “that whatever there is in Christ’s body, that was corporeal, belongs also to our bodies.” One can therefore rightly move from an understanding of the qualities of human nature, as it is known through common human experience, to understand Christ’s humanity. The human nature of Christ is not something other or fundamentally beyond human understanding to any degree higher than normal human experience is a mystery. This is further tied to the pro nobis quality of Christ: “For if anything which has to do with the nature and character of the body were in his body but lacking to ours, he would seem to have assumed that not for our sake.” Therefore, Zwingli draws on his christological formulations of the hypostatic union and the communication of properties both to reject the concept of ubiquity and to establish the extra, which secures the pro nobis quality of Christ’s incarnation because he truly shares their bodily existence in all its aspects and does not abdicate this state.
Contrary to his opponents’ claims, however, the limitation on Christ’s humanity does not compromise the unity of the person. “Neither is there any foundation for the assertion of the opponents that the humanity of Christ is wherever the divinity is, otherwise the person is divided; for this would destroy Christ’s true humanity.” For Zwingli, the nature of the unity between the human and the divine nature is not a matter of place or spatial identity but in the personal union of the eternal Son, which he has established with the enhypostatic human nature. According to the peculiar properties of each, the divine nature is everywhere and the human nature is in a specific place. The Word who is encountered in his universal presence, after the incarnation, is the one who has assumed a full humanity, suffered, died, risen from the death, and is ascended. Zwingli buttresses this claim with a comparison to the Triune life. The dynamic of the human and divine natures in Christ “divides the person just as little as the Son’s assumption of humanity divides the unity of the divine essence.” Just as the unity of the Trinity is maintained although the eternal Son takes to himself a human nature while the Father and the Spirit remain without such a nature, so also the human and divine natures are unified even if difference in place is asserted on the level of human nature.
Zwingli elaborates on the rejection of ubiquity and support for the extra by drawing on the eschatological uniformity of Christ’s body, the resurrection bodies of believers, and support from Augustine—arguments he utilized at Marburg and expands here. The first point Zwingli takes from Paul’s discussion of the resurrection of Christ in 1 Corinthians 15: “But Paul’s reasoning has its strength in this that whatever Christ’s body has, as far as nature, endowment and characteristics of body are concerned, it has for us, as our archetype as it were, and it is ours.” Therefore, as Christ rose from the dead pro nobis, so Christians will rise likewise and be as he is. Because the human resurrected body is not everywhere, the body of Christ, which is the archetype of this resurrected state, is not everywhere. Zwingli appeals once again to Augustine for the locality of Christ’s body:
From these sources drew Augustine, that pillar of theologians, when he said that Christ’s body must be in some particular place in heaven in virtue of its character as [a] real body. And again, “Christ’s body which rose from the dead must be in one place.” Christ’s body, therefore, is not in several places any more than our bodies are. And this view is not mine, but the apostle’s and Augustine’s and that of faith in general, which, though we had not witnesses to the fact, would suggest that Christ became in all things like ourselves.
Zwingli is clear that he is drawing not from philosophic reason but from the Scriptures and the theologians of the church to make his claim: “I have never taught a single word that I have not drawn from the divine Scriptures or the holy theologians.” Whether or not one is convinced by Zwingli’s claim on the matter, here and elsewhere he makes plain his design and intent to avoid any sort of innovation or deviation from the Christian tradition normed by the Scriptures.
In Fidei Expositio, Zwingli does move into a discussion of philosophical arguments against ubiquity, but only in an offhand way, saying to King Francis that he is discussing these arguments “if you should happen to come upon such.” The argument goes:
For all the learned have condemned as exploded and impious the opinion which some have ventured to maintain that Christ’s body is just as much everywhere as his divinity. For it cannot be everywhere unless in virtue of being infinite in nature, and what is infinite is also eternal. Christ’s humanity is not eternal; therefore it is not infinite. If it is not infinite, it must be finite. If it is finite, it is not everywhere.
Zwingli here is presenting a standard modus tollens argument, which can be expanded as follows:
1. To be everywhere is a property of something that is infinite.
2. What is infinite is also eternal (e.g., not bounded by any limitation including time).
3. Christ’s humanity is not eternal, since it had a beginning in time.
4. Therefore, Christ’s humanity is not infinite.
5. If Christ’s humanity is not infinite, it is finite.
6. If it is finite, it is not everywhere.
Therefore, Christ’s humanity is not everywhere.
After this aside “in order not to fail to meet the demand of philosophical argumentation,” Zwingli moves back to the “impregnable testimonies of Scripture.” The testimonies he turns to demonstrate the dynamic of presence and absence of Christ with examples of the virgin birth, ascension, and second coming. Zwingli self-consciously distinguishes between a scriptural and a philosophical argument against the doctrine of ubiquity and therefore in favor of the extra. By making this distinction and handling it in such a quick and nonchalant manner, he forestalls any attempt to place his concerns on a primarily philosophical foundation.
Moving on to the “impregnable testimonies of Scripture,” Zwingli presents an understanding of the extra that acknowledges the continued nature of this interplay of Christ’s presence and absence from the moment of incarnation through to the eschaton and perpetually. After restating his argument for the unity of the two natures in the one person, the maintenance of properties in this union, and the communicatio idiomatum, he frames his scriptural argument around the narrative structure of the Apostles’ Creed, moving from Christ’s birth through his ascension, heavenly session, and concluding with the second coming. Citing Luke 2:7, Zwingli argues that because of Christ’s birth, Mary is rightly called theotokos, for the one she bore was God, yet she bore, properly speaking, only the humanity while the divine nature is begotten of the Father before all ages. It is the whole Christ who is born and laid in the manger and simultaneously fills all things:
Furthermore, that he who occupies and fills the heavens and the realms below was laid in a manger applies to the human nature in like manner. But when these things are attributed to the whole Christ—his being born and laid in the manger—no difficulty arises, and that because of the conjunction and union of the two natures in one person.
Here we see Zwingli’s mature understanding of christology in application; while in former works he quickly applies such events as the birth of Christ to the human nature, he less frequently makes the clear connection to the unity of action and application to the person of Christ. While speaking in terms of nature it is only the human nature that is born and laid in a manger, since the eternal Son has no beginning in time and is not circumscribed by space, yet according to his person, Christ is at once in the manger and beyond it. Zwingli makes a similar point regarding the ascension, much as we have seen at the Marburg Colloquy:
This [ascension] equally applies to the humanity, in the main, though the humanity was not carried there without the divinity; indeed the latter carried and the former was carried. This humanity, as has been said, remains circumscribed forever; otherwise it would cease to be true humanity. But the divinity is unlimited and uncircumscribed forever; hence it does not move from place to place, but is everywhere and remains the same forever.
This is one of Zwingli’s most concise and clear expressions of the extra Calvinisticum: the person of Christ is simultaneously circumscribed and uncircumscribed according to the proper nature, and this relationship maintains forever. The dynamic of the divine omnipresence and the human spatial finitude is the same in the event of the incarnation and birth as well as the ascension; what changes is the particular locality of the human body. At the incarnation Christ’s human body exists in the accessible earthly sphere, while at the ascension it is no longer accessible there but resides in heaven. In the ascension both the human and the divine nature have a role, with the human nature being lifted and the divine the cause of the lifting. This phrasing in the quotation is infelicitous given that it might open up Zwingli once again to the charge of two active subjects. But given the immediately precedent articulation of the unity of the person, this statement should be understood as the unified action of Christ’s person, who in the ascension lifts qua divine and is lifted qua human.
Zwingli then turns to the presence of Christ after his ascension and here once again points to the interrelation of the presence and absence of Christ between his advents. Christ claims to be with his disciples “even unto the end of time” (Matt. 28:20) and yet to “leave the world” (John 16:28) and “not be in the world hereafter” (17:11). In what sense does Christ leave the world, and in what sense is he present? According to Zwingli, this can be clearly stated when the relationship of the two natures of Christ in the one person and the predication of properties is properly understood. Christ is present with his church according to his divinity, which continues to fill all things and because of this does not move from place to place. And he has left and is present no more according to his human body. For this christological reason he is not present as the Roman and Lutheran doctrines of the Supper indicate:
Therefore, the human leaves it [the world], and since it has left the world, you will understand, O King, as regards natural, substantial, local presence, it is not here. The body of Christ is, therefore, not eaten by us, literally or in substance, and all the more not quantitatively, but only sacramentally and spiritually.
Zwingli then moves to the words of the angels who address the disciples in Acts 1 immediately after the ascension: “Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.” Zwingli understands this text to be positing a likeness between the mode of the ascension and the mode of the second coming, which cannot be preempted at the Supper:
But how has he gone away? In a bodily and literal sense, and as he really is by the essence of his humanity. When, therefore, they say, “shall so come,” he means in bodily and literal sense and in substance. But when shall he so come? Not when the Church celebrates the Supper, but when she is to be judged by him at the end of the world.
Therefore, even while connecting this argument to his understanding of the Supper, Zwingli does not restrict the doctrine of the extra to reflection on the Supper but considers it the proper understanding of the human and divine natures of the one person of Christ from his incarnation through to the final state.
Throughout his career as a reformer, Zwingli’s christology develops according to the pastoral, theological, and polemical needs of the period. Based on his understanding of the soteriological function of the human nature of Christ, he concludes early on that Christ’s body must remain as other human bodies even after the ascension. From these insights he formulates the doctrine, which will be named the extra Calvinisticum, in his early rejection of transubstantiation. In light of the controversy over the Eucharist, he develops his christology to hold both the extra Calvinisticum and avoid separating the person of Christ. Throughout his opus the soteriological concern for the formation of christology and his christological rejection of corporeal presence and ubiquity remain consistent. The christology underlying these formations increases in rigor as Zwingli attempts to avoid any theologically fatal separation of Christ’s person. Zwingli moves from the language of “one Christ” in his earliest works to “one person” in Friendly Exegesis to a consistent enhypostatic view of Christ’s humanity, which subsists only in the eternal person of the Logos, in his final works. Correlative to this is his commitment to an understanding of the communicatio idiomatum, which preserves both natures. Zwingli has brought many of these themes together in his later work and connects the extra to the pro nobis nature of the gospel, displaying a greater vision for how the divine omnipresence and the human circumscription relate to Christ’s mediatorial career, from conception in Mary’s womb to coming again in glory.
Because of Zwingli’s sudden death in the Second Kappel War on October 11, 1531, as well as the death of Oecolampadius the following month and the lack of attention to these later works by his contemporaries, the concept of the extra as a focus of theological controversy might have died with him. In the next section, I will turn to the reception of the extra after Zwingli’s death by Bullinger and John Calvin through to the Consensus Tigurinus, which marks the official emergence of a more unified Reformed tradition and kicked off a new round of controversy over the divergent christological views with the Lutheran party.
Zwingli’s mature articulation of the extra Calvinisticum, which incorporated an enhypostatic understanding of Christ’s human nature and reflection on the extra’s import beyond eucharistic polemics, came only on the eve of his death, and these final works, Fidei Ratio and Fidei Expositio, failed to have a broad influence or readership. The doctrine of the extra, however, would not die along with Zwingli but was carried forward in the continued doctrinal debate with Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism through the work of Heinrich Bullinger and John Calvin. Each of these men, who would be the dominant leaders of the Swiss Reformation and beyond until the 1560s, argued for the integrity of Christ’s human nature against both ubiquitarianism and the growing challenge presented by elements of the Radical Reformation, which reenvisioned Christ’s humanity along docetic lines. The doctrine of the extra Calvinisticum is carried forward in the work of Bullinger and Calvin with clear affirmations of Christ’s existence beyond the flesh at the time of the incarnation, the circumscription of the human body, and the communicatio idiomatum terminating on the person. The enhypostatic understanding of Christ’s human nature established in Zwingli’s later works is neglected, and new questions come to the fore regarding the nature of heaven and the right hand of the Father.
In this section I outline the reception and development of the extra from Zwingli’s death in 1531 up to and including the Consensus Tigurinus of 1549. Over this period the fervor of the early eucharistic controversy subsided largely owing to the need for the Zürich reformers to regroup after the loss of Zwingli and the Wittenberg Concord of 1536. This document allowed for eucharistic détente between the Lutherans and the South German Reformed spearheaded by Martin Bucer, thereby isolating the Swiss. Yet this agreement did not represent an actual consensus. As Amy Burnett has argued, the “formula was made possible by terminological ambiguity and strategic silence.” Calvin’s signing of the Augsburg Variata in 1540 further isolated Zürich from the other Swiss Reformed communities. This version of the 1530 Augsburg Confession, amended by Melanchthon, softened the Lutheran distinctive position on the presence of the Supper, allowing for greater apparent unity between Calvin’s Geneva and Wittenberg. These attempts at resolving the eucharistic controversy were thwarted by the lack of substantial theological agreement with Luther and the emerging Gnesio-Lutheran party and the defeat of the Schmalkaldic League in 1547. After the defeat of the League, Emperor Charles V imposed the Augsburg Interim on all churches in the empire, which attempted to reinstate religious uniformity and cease the spread of Protestantism, including reinstituting the Mass and prayers for the dead. Lutheran submission to the Augsburg Interim would alienate Calvin in his attempts at rapprochement with the German Protestants. According to described [the Augsburg Interim] as an adulteration of the Christian faith.”
These events necessitated a united confession regarding the Lord’s Supper between Zürich and Geneva, which would have far-reaching assent from the emerging Reformed churches. This document, the Consensus Tigurinus or Zürich Consensus, drafted by Calvin and Bullinger in 1549, would form a unifying confessional basis for the Reformed churches. The Consensus would be the definitive document in setting forth the Reformed doctrine of the Lord’s Supper and consequently would cement the confessional separation of the Lutheran and Reformed wings of the Reformation. Central to this understanding was the doctrine of the extra Calvinisticum, which is one of the essential christological claims of the Consensus. This document represents the definitive confessional statement of the extra within the second generation of the Reformation and would be one of the chief sparks for the so-called second eucharistic controversy.
With the death of Zwingli, the Zürich Reformation suffered a devastating blow. Foes old and new threatened the gains made in the reform effort of previous years. In response to these struggles, the Zürich Council appointed Heinrich Bullinger to the Grossmünster, the highest ecclesial office in Zürich. They required an outsider who was both committed to the Reformation and yet not tainted by Zwingli’s military and political failure, as were Leo Jud and Oswald Myconius, after the fallout of the Second Kappel War. Bullinger, who is ever destined with the epitaph “Zwingli’s successor,” took up the reins of the evangelical cause in Zürich and functioned as one of the chief proponents of the Reformation in Switzerland and abroad until his death in 1575.
Before he took the main ecclesial position in Zürich, Bullinger had been an active, if minor, participant in the eucharistic controversy that occupied much of the 1520s. In these early works there is evidence that he had already come to some notion of the doctrine of the extra Calvinisticum through the influence of the Hussite Bohemian Brethren and his own reflections on the two natures of Christ. Bullinger had come to reject the doctrine of transubstantiation as early as 1525. And like Oecolampadius and later Zwingli, Bullinger was influenced by the sacramental thought and polemics of the Bohemian Brethren, especially their insistence on communion in two kinds: rejection of the adoration of the host and the claim that Christ’s ascension ruled out his corporeal presence on earth. In his De Institution Eucharistiae (1525), Bullinger further develops these ideas to formulate a rejection of the corporeal presence in the Eucharist based on Christ’s circumscribed body and the ascension. According to Stephens, in this work, “[Bullinger] writes that Christ, as he is a man, cannot at the same time be in many places, for the creed states clearly that he sits at the right hand of God and that he will not come from there until he comes to judge the living and the dead.” In these early works, Bullinger is treading much the same ground as Zwingli in the establishment of the doctrine. After his arrival in Zürich, Bullinger continued this development of christology in light of the theological challenges of the Reformation’s radical wing, in the earliest treatise dedicated to christology in the Reformed tradition, An Orthodox Assertion of the Two Natures of Christ (1534).
Bullinger first presented the substance of the Orthodox Assertion on the feast day of the patron saints of Zürich, Felix and Regula, in the fall of 1533 to counteract an emerging anti-Trinitarianism among the radical wing of the Reformation, which threatened to destabilize Zürich. The principal target of his polemic was Claudius of Savoy, who rejected not only the Trinity as polytheistic but also the two natures of Christ. Besides challenges to the full divinity of Christ, Caspar Schwenckfeld and others rejected the full humanity of Christ’s body, arguing rather that it was of a different substance from other human bodies. Christ’s body was composed from a heavenly flesh and came through Mary, not of her substance but merely as water through a pipe. Bullinger attempts to address both errors through a careful exposition of the ancient church’s confession of faith from the Scriptures, councils, and fathers of the church. Thus Bullinger adds to Reformed christology by incorporating additional theological arguments from the earlier theological tradition, thereby grounding Reformed christology in the councils and guarding it against the charge of novelty.
Bullinger begins his treatise by setting forth the heretical positions from the early church regarding the person of Christ, and divides them into those against his divinity, those against his humanity, and those against the unity of his person. After expounding these heretical positions, he asserts the orthodox and catholic doctrine of Christ in the form of a creed or confession, before moving on to expound the doctrine of Christ. Bullinger’s confession follows the trinitarian structure of the Apostles’ Creed, with three articles, on the Father, Son, and Spirit. The first and third part of this confession, on the Father and the Spirit, are cursory owing to the christological focus of the treatise. The first article, on the Father, is identical to the Apostles’ Creed. The third, regarding the Holy Spirit, incorporates elements of the Western reception of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed by asserting the equality of the Spirit with the Father and Son, incorporating the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son as well as highlighting the Spirit’s activity in revelation with the phrase “who spoke by the prophets.”
The second article, regarding Christ, of Bullinger’s opening creed is expanded considerably by including elements of the Chalcedonian Definition and incorporating within the confession itself the rejection of the ancient heresies. Bullinger declares both the full divinity and humanity of Christ. Christ is “the true and living son of the true and living God, begotten from eternity from the substance of the Father, and therefore coeternal or homoousios, that is consubstantial with the Father.” He has also become a “true man” by his incarnation. Bullinger then specifies what constitutes a true man, “consisting of a rational soul and our true flesh.” This “true flesh” is further qualified to exclude the ancient heresies that posit a less-than-human body and contemporary advocates of the same: “[H]e neither took with him from heaven nor formed from the air or ethereal substance, but, working together with the Holy Spirit, he assumed flesh from the substance of the spotless Virgin Mary.” Christ is therefore fully and completely what God is and what humanity is; this distinction of the natures is not taken away by the incarnation. Rather, the two natures are united in one person.
To express this union, Bullinger weaves in terms from the Chalcedonian Definition: “[R]emaining in these two substances or natures, indeed neither comingling them nor transforming one into the other, by the union and in an ineffable manner, they are united inseparably in one person.” He follows this up with a clause that attempts to close any doors for Nestorianism: “For we do not confess two Christs or Sons, but one Son true God and man.” And yet even in this unity of person the natures retain their properties: “He humiliated himself, therefore he emptied himself, which is the same as he humiliated himself. Therefore, we see the one Jesus Christ has two natures, divine and human, not having been intermingled with each other, but the properties being distinct.”
In this introductory creed, Bullinger demonstrates an awareness of and care to avoid the ancient heresies and protect the burgeoning Reformation from their sixteenth-century heirs. While not as advanced as the christology of Zwingli’s later works, lacking the teaching of Christ’s enhypostatic human nature and reflection on the communicatio, in this treatise Bullinger makes a more conscious attempt to situate the Reformed christology in the tradition of the councils and the church fathers. Structuring his confession around the Apostles’ Creed serves Bullinger’s broader purpose of securing the Zürich Reformation within the catholic and conciliar church against the radical reformers. Bullinger comments, “This is the orthodox confession of the catholic faith especially concerning each nature in Christ, which by its simplicity and purity easily shatters all the fog of error and heresies. This confession was guarded sincerely and entirely from the beginning by all the saints and elect of God.” He supports this claim by invoking the first six ecumenical councils, from Nicaea to Constantinople III, naming each with its date and purpose, and the work of Athanasius, Basil, Nazianzus, Cyril, Hilary, Augustine, and Ambrose. It is this conciliar and patristic understanding of the orthodox and catholic doctrine of Christ that Bullinger will seek to defend throughout the treatise. In later works touching on the extra he will carry forward and expand this emphasis on the continuity of Reformed christology with the councils, especially Chalcedon, and the church fathers.
In addition, Bullinger’s understanding of the necessity of the incarnation, and especially the necessary function of each nature in humanity’s salvation, follows the same logic as Zwingli. Both Zwingli and Bullinger emphasize the role of Christ as the mediator and his unique suitedness for this role because of his two natures. Both function with a basic Anselmic model. Only God properly has the power to save, and yet suffering and death are needed to atone. Stephens argues that soteriological concerns drive both Bullinger’s christology and his sacramentology in this text:
The necessity of the incarnation for our redemption is sometimes expressed explicitly in terms of the characteristics of the different natures. In discussing the body of Christ in the Eucharist, Bullinger maintained that no human being could help fallen humanity, but only God who is perfect. At the same time, however, redemption is not possible without the shedding of blood, which is possible only for human beings. Therefore, God, who is invisible and impassible, resolved that the Son should assume human nature, and so he was able to suffer and die for us.
Therefore God, in whom saving power, life, and love reside in impassible purity, takes to himself a passible nature to bring about human reconciliation.
In An Orthodox Assertion, Bullinger follows Zwingli’s lead in order to refute the rising tide of anti-Trinitarianism and docetic christology emerging from the Radical Reformation. By this he seeks to guard the Zürich church from both internal error and external aspersions. This text does avoid the explicit exposition of the extra Calvinisticum found in Zwingli’s later work, even though all the christological premises are in place already in Bullinger’s thought and within the treatise itself. Yet this work demonstrates both the continued emphasis on the soteriological necessity of Christ’s two natures found in Zwingli and broadens the theological base for Reformed christology by incorporation of conciliar christology and the fathers, which will form a central feature in later Reformed discussions. The absence of an explicit statement of the extra is likely due to the more irenic moment necessary for Zürich after the blow of Zwingli’s death and before the Wittenberg Concord of 1536. In this period of the early 1530s, Bullinger was more open and hopeful of eventual accord with the Lutherans, as Martin Friedrich has argued. This can be seen in the final section of the Assertion, which Bullinger calls a “digression” on the Eucharist, where he argues that the eating of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist is not corporeal but is through contemplation and faith, which is not available to the impious. In confessing this brief position, he does not engage in polemics either with the Roman Catholic or the Lutheran position. Only after concord with the Lutheran side seems impossible, after the Augsburg Interim and Luther’s final invectives against Zwingli, will Bullinger reintroduce the doctrine of the extra in the Consensus Tigurinus. Before turning to this document, I will briefly sketch the reception of the extra in the work of the other main author of the Consensus, John Calvin.
In the first edition of what would become his magnum opus, John Calvin clearly formulates the doctrine of the extra Calvinisticum and uses this doctrine to reject positions on the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper that violate his understanding of Christ’s circumscribed body. Much of the historical and theological scholarship on the extra has focused on the place of the doctrine in Calvin’s thought. Here I will focus on Calvin’s doctrine of the extra in the 1536 edition of the Institutes and seek to place this doctrine within the developmental line leading from Zwingli to the Consensus.
Calvin’s exposition of the doctrinal matrix that will become the extra takes place in his exposition of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, as a means of explaining the errors of the Roman and Lutheran doctrines. Calvin begins his discussion with a christological preamble, stating that so far the various positions, which he alludes to as the Roman, Lutheran, and Zwinglian positions, fail to get at the matter correctly. Therefore, by turning to christology before the sacraments proper, he indicates that the root of these eucharistic errors can be corrected only by a correct christological formulation. Calvin states:
Therefore, we must hold the following by way of summary. Christ, as he took our true flesh when he was born of the virgin, suffered in our true flesh when he made satisfaction for us, so also both in rising again received that same true flesh and bore it to heaven. For we have this hope of our resurrection and of our ascension into heaven: that Christ rose again and ascended. But how weak and fragile that hope would be, if this very flesh of ours had not entered into the Kingdom of Heaven! But it is the unchangingly true nature of a body to be contained in a place, to possess its own dimension and to have its own shape.
Calvin’s exposition draws on much the same resources we have seen already in the work of Zwingli. Christ’s body is the same as all human bodies, which he took upon himself both to suffer for their sake and so that they gain a share in his glorification. The ascension is an act by which the human body of Christ is removed from the earthly sphere into the heavenly. In addition, following the same line of Augustinian thought as Zwingli at the Marburg Colloquy, it is the nature of a human body to be in a place and to maintain its normal qualities.
Building on this christological foundation, Calvin addresses the question of ubiquity: “I know how certain obstinate fellows quibble to defend an error once rashly conceived, that the only dimensions Christ’s flesh ever possessed extended as far and wide as heaven and earth.” Although Calvin does not specify the proponents of this view, which is not surprising in the Institutes, when he rejects the eucharistic views of the Lutheran, Roman, and Züricher camps he names no names. The critique is directed toward the Lutheran attempt to overcome Zwingli’s argument against corporal, and therefore local, presence. Calvin will not allow this position to stand because it compromises the human nature of Christ. “What is this but to raise Marcion from hell? For who will doubt that if Christ’s body existed in this state, it was a phantasm?” Calvin will go on to state that such a body would not be a body at all, but lacking space and sensibility it would be indistinguishable from spirit.
Calvin then addresses the supposed prooftext for this position that Christ’s body is immense and exists beyond the bound of normal human circumscription: “They allege Christ himself has said: ‘No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man, who is in heaven.’ ” Calvin’s retort relies upon a proper understanding of the communicatio idiomatum: “But are they so senseless as not to see that this was said through ‘communication of properties’? Surely, when the Lord of glory is said by Paul to have been crucified [1 Cor. 2:8], it is not because he suffered according to his divinity, but because Christ, who cast down and despised, suffered in the flesh, was very God and Lord of glory.” Calvin has established his understanding of this term earlier in the work in his exposition of the second article of the Apostles’ Creed. After a discussion of how Christ can have two natures united in a single person through the analogy to the human constitution of body and soul, Calvin offered his understanding of the communicatio idiomatum:
Thus, also, the Scriptures speak of Christ; they sometimes attribute to him what must be referred exclusively to his humanity, sometimes, what refers particularly to his divinity; sometimes what embraces both natures but fits neither one alone. Finally, through “communication of properties” they assign to his divinity the things that belong to his humanity, and to his humanity those that pertain to his divinity.
Calvin expresses much the same definition of the communicatio as Zwingli, even using the same analogous argument from the distinctive properties of the human body and soul. Calvin, however, has a third category that Zwingli lacked—namely, that set of properties that apply not to either nature simpliciter but are possible only by the union itself. Chief among these for Calvin’s thought is the office and function of mediator between God and man.
Calvin combines his previous statements about the true humanity of Christ and his understanding of the communicatio to formulate his alternative reading of John 3:13 (Vulg.) and to refute the ubiquity doctrine:
In this way he was also Son of man in heaven, for the very same Christ, who, according to the flesh, dwelt as Son of man on earth, was God in heaven. In this manner, he is said to have descended to the place according to his divinity, not because divinity left heaven to hide itself in the prison house of the body, but because even though it filled all things, still in Christ’s very humanity it dwelt bodily [Col. 2:9], that is, by nature, and in a certain ineffable way.
Christ is able, according to Calvin, to simultaneously fill all things according to his divinity and be present on earth in the body, which is proper to the nature of that body, and based on his previous statements one can properly conclude that this relationship of omnipresent divinity and circumscribed humanity persists through the ascension afterward. Calvin shies away from a clear explanation of this dynamic, offering it as something ineffable. Later editions of the Institutes retain this compact statement, which has come to be a locus classicus for the extra Calvinisticum.
In Calvin’s exposition of this doctrine he must solve the problem of the mode of Christ’s human presence to the church in the interadventum. How is it that the human nature of Christ, and therefore the benefits he has secured through his incarnation, death, and resurrection, can be made present, when Christ’s human body is separated from his people? Zwingli addressed this problem through christological means with his enhypostasis christology, which allows for a unified action of the natures in the person. Calvin offers a different attempt to resolve the tension between the state of Christ’s circumscribed body and the right hand of the Father. Unlike his opponents, who opt to modify circumscription, Calvin finds the solution in his understanding of the Father’s right hand:
But though [Christ] has taken his flesh away from us, and in the body has ascended into heaven, yet he sits at the right hand of the Father—that is, he reigns in the Father’s power and majesty and glory. This Kingdom is neither bounded by any location in space nor circumscribed by any limits. Thus uncircumscribed, Christ can exert his power wherever he pleases, in heaven and on earth; he can show his presence in power and strength; he is always able to be among his own people to live in them, sustain them, strengthen, quicken, keep them, as if he were present in the body.
If the right hand of the Father, being the reign and power of God, is everywhere, Christ’s entering into this power allows him the power of action at all places. Muller has argued that here Calvin is using Melanchthon’s interpretation of Colossians 3:1. Muller concludes, however, that this Melanchthonian moment in Calvin’s thought is short-lived, to be replaced by his more recognizable pneumatological approach:
The pneumatological turn of Calvin’s eucharistic thought that became evident in the Institutio of 1539 and in the French and Latin catechisms of 1545, marks a significant alteration of direction. In both of these documents, the right hand of God is interpreted for eucharistic purposes no longer as divine power but, in accord with Calvin’s reading of the ascension, as a location, and the agency of the Spirit is the basis of union between earthly believers and the heavenly body of Christ.
While Calvin will quickly supplement this answer with a pneumatological bond that affects union with Christ, which we will see in the Consensus, this question of the nature of a place, heaven, and the right hand of the Father will become of great importance in later Lutheran-Reformed debate.
From this section of the 1536 edition of the Institutes, we can see that the extra Calvinisticum is present in Calvin’s earliest thought as a reformer. Yet the influence that produced this doctrine is unclear. While statements by Calvin at the Lausanne Disputation indicate that he derived at least some of these ideas from his reading of Augustine, there are also several indications that an additional line of influence might flow directly from Zwingli. The influence of Zwingli’s thought on Calvin’s eucharistic thought is hotly debated. In The Young Calvin, Alexandre Ganoczy argues that Zwingli influenced Calvin in the first edition of the Institutes, including his argument against idols and his rejection of the sacrifice of the Mass. He attributes Calvin’s similarities to Zwingli to Calvin’s reading of The Commentary on True and False Religion. Ganoczy, however, does not mention the influence with regard to Christ’s body being in heaven or the extra Calvinisticum. Muller too has indicated that Fidei Ratio possibly influenced Calvin’s understanding of the role of faith in the Lord’s Supper and with respect to the circumscribed body in heaven, even though Muller thinks this is modified with elements from Melanchthon.
Besides the similarities with Zwingli just mentioned, such as the rejection of ubiquity because it compromises the human nature of Christ and the insistence on a bodily ascension, two other aspects of Zwingli’s earlier thought can be seen in Calvin’s writings. From the claim that Christ is made like humanity in every way except sin, and from our common understanding of embodied human experience, Calvin, just like Zwingli, infers the necessary circumscription of Christ’s body: “But it pleased him [God] that Christ be made like his brethren in all things except sin [Heb. 4:15; cf. :17]. What is the nature of our flesh? Is it not something that has its own fixed dimension, is contained in a place, is touched, is seen?” Like Zwingli, Calvin also rejects an appeal to divine omnipotence to overcome Christ’s body being spatially located. He does so because it is a question not of what God can do in abstraction but of what he actually willed by his good pleasure to do. Echoing the Swiss delegation at Marburg, Calvin follows this with a move to the ascension as that which God has willed to do. These similarities are not sufficient to establish Zwingli’s influence on Calvin’s thought regarding the extra, but they do indicate a fundamental unity of theological purpose between the two figures in this doctrine. Calvin will build on these similarities to form a common confession on the eucharistic presence with Bullinger.
Amid the growing pressures of the defeat of the Schmalkaldic League, the imposition of the Augsburg Interim, and the precarious political position of the Swiss Confederation, Bullinger and Calvin engaged in a two-year negotiation to arrive at a mutually acceptable understanding of the Eucharist that could bind together the two poles of the Swiss Reformation. The product of this negotiation, through correspondence and two face-to-face meetings, was the Consensus Tigurinus, which eventually united the Swiss Reformation on the Eucharist. Scholars debate how much of their particular teachings on the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper Calvin or Bullinger had to relinquish for this consensus to come about. The document’s composite or compromise position gave room either for Calvin’s pneumatological construal of Christ’s presence or for Bullinger’s sacramental parallelism.
In this section I focus on the christological underpinnings of the Consensus and its declaration of the extra—that Christ’s human body is in heaven after the ascension. Like Zwingli before them, Calvin and Bullinger grounded their eucharistic teaching on the salvific role of the true humanity of Christ, the integrity of which could not be compromised in any doctrine of the Eucharist. The key to preserving the humanity is the spatial circumscription of the body of Christ, which after the ascension into heaven is no longer in the earthly sphere of existence. This doctrine of the extra and the complete rejection of corporeal presence in or alongside the elements mark the definitive theological break between the Reformed and Lutheran traditions. As Burnett has argued, “The Consensus Tigurinus expressed a theology of the Lord’s Supper that would become normative for the Reformed churches, and so made permanent the division of Protestantism.” As we will see, an essential component in this division was the doctrine of Christ’s body and its spatial locality, and therefore the extra Calvinisticum ought to be regarded as a constitutive theologoumenon of the Reformed tradition vis-à-vis Lutheranism.
The Consensus opens its exposition of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist by laying a christological foundation, following Zwingli and Oecolampadius’s method as utilized at the Marburg Colloquy. Article 1 of the Consensus states, “Since Christ is the fulfillment of the law and because knowledge of him comprehends in itself the sum of the gospel, there is no doubt that the entire spiritual government of the Church looks to this end, that is to lead us to Christ, for it is by following him alone that one comes to God who is the final goal of a happy life.” For Calvin and Bullinger, the sum of the gospel, and therefore the raison d’être of the evangelical movement, is Christ’s person and his personal governance of the church, and which is solely to be followed in matters of faith. This includes the church’s theology and practice of the sacraments: “Since the sacraments are supplements to the gospel, only one who begins with Christ can expound correctly and usefully their nature, power, office, and enjoyment.” Calvin and Bullinger argue that the sacraments are not the center of the Christian confession; Christ himself and his identity as the Son of the eternal Father become man must be the starting point for proper theological reflection. The sacraments are “supplements” (appendices); they do not stand on their own but have their meaning and power only in relationship to Christ, their author and securer. As Emidio Campi has argued regarding this christological introduction to the Consensus, “By taking Christology as the starting point of the exposition . . . the Consensio seems to emphasize that Christology set the ground rules for sacramental theology.” This follows the pattern we have seen from Zwingli’s works and from the Swiss at Marburg, placing the Consensus firmly within the trajectory of the previous work in both content and theological prioritization.
The act by which Christ is known and the benefits, nature, and power on which the sacraments draw is the incarnation and salvific work of Christ: “Thus it is consequently held that Christ, being the eternal Son of God and of the same essence and glory as the Father, clothed himself with our flesh in order to communicate to us by right of adoption that which belonged to him by nature, that we might truly be sons of God.” The hope of humanity’s adoption as sons and thereby partaking of all that Christ has offered to them is made possible by the assumption of the human nature whereby he is able to incorporate into his body the elect. This is effected by the union that believers have with Christ: “[I]t is necessary that we be made one with him and that we grow together in his body.” Through this union the salvation that has been wrought by Christ in the human nature is made accessible to his people, since in his flesh he is the priest and king of the human race. By his humanity Christ becomes “a priest on our behalf, who expiated our sins by the sole sacrifice of his own death . . . [the one who] now intercedes on our behalf in order that we may stand before God . . . an atoning sacrifice . . . [and] a brother who, from our condition as miserable sons of Adam, has rendered us blessed sons of God” as well as the restorer of the nature he has taken unto himself. By the incarnation, he is humanity’s king who rules, protects, and secures our afterlife until the time of resurrection: “And so he is to be considered in order that he may raise us to himself, the true God and Father, until that is brought to fulfillment which is finally to take place, when God is truly all in all.” As we saw earlier, Calvin and Bullinger defined their christology by the soteriological necessity of the incarnation and further developed this concept around the offices of Christ, which took on greater weight in Calvin’s use of the triplex munus. These aspects of Christ’s work were possible only because he took to himself the fullness of humanity, securing not only redemption by his atoning death but also continued intercession with the Father and the hope of resurrection. The integrity of Christ’s humanity and its soteriological function is thus proclaimed at the outset of the Consensus and shapes the confession’s statement on Christ’s presence in the sacraments.
The heart of the Consensus is the exposition of the sacraments and especially the understanding of Christ’s presence in the Supper, which is bracketed by reflection on Christ’s nature at the beginning and end of the document. The eucharistic theology of the text exhibits both Calvinian and Zwinglian themes regarding the nature of the Supper, the presence of the body and blood of Christ, and the activity of the Holy Spirit in effecting the blessing offered in the signs. Particularly prominent are Zwingli’s insistence on the ineffectuality of externals or objects of sense perception to effect internal spiritual realities, and Calvin’s attempt to bridge this divide with a strong pneumatological emphasis.
In article 21, the local presence is excluded based on the distance of Christ’s human body from the perceptual world: “The notion of any kind of local presence ought especially to be set aside. While signs are present in this world, they are discerned by the eyes and touched by the hands, but Christ, so far as he is man, is to be sought nowhere other than in heaven, and not otherwise than with the mind and the understanding of faith.” Christ according to his sensible nature has removed himself from the normal realm of sense perception. It is not by means of the senses that humanity now seeks him but rather through intellection and faith that allow us to move beyond the sensible appearance of things. Christ’s Spirit bridges the distance between the sensible and the suprasensible realms: “When by the power of his spirit Christ nourishes our souls through faith by means of eating his flesh and drinking his blood . . . we draw life from flesh offered once for all in sacrifice, and from bloodshed [sic] in expiation.” Here and elsewhere in the Consensus, Calvin’s emphasis on the bond of the Holy Spirit as effecting the presence of Christ and bridging any distance between the believer and Christ overcomes the pneumatological defect in Zwingli’s and Bullinger’s views.
For my purposes, the most significant feature of the Consensus is the definitive status of the integrity of Christ’s human nature and the consequent spatial circumscription of his body. On this christological basis, Calvin and Bullinger reject any form of corporeal presence within the elements of the Supper. Both the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation and the Lutheran position that situates the presence of Christ’s body in, with, and under the bread and the wine are rejected because they “either detract from his [Christ’s] celestial glory or are less than consistent with the true reality of his human nature.” For the Consensus, the reality and integrity of the human nature is compromised if it is conceived of as being in multiple places at once or takes on the divine property of omnipresence, which would render the human body not a body at all. Article 25 makes the reason for this more explicit by confirming the circumscription of Christ’s body and its distance from humanity by the ascension into heaven:
And lest any ambiguity may remain when we say that Christ is to be sought in heaven, this manner of speaking denotes and expresses to us distance of place. Although philosophically speaking there is no place above the skies, yet as the body of Christ bears the nature and mode of a human body, it is finite and is contained in heaven as it were in place; it is necessarily as distant from us by as great an interval of place as heaven is from earth.
This article forestalls any doctrine of ubiquity with a thorough affirmation of the circumscription of the human body of Christ and the difference of place between heaven and earth. Bullinger and Calvin qualify this statement with philosophical reserve, which leaves the statement ambiguous as to its exact meaning, giving a certain elasticity to the Consensus. How is it that “philosophically speaking there is no place above the skies” and yet Christ’s body exists there “as it were in place”? Is heaven a place, or is Christ’s body in heaven locally despite its not being technically a place itself? Whatever the answers to these questions might be, the theological rationale for this statement is very clear. Christ’s body is finite and bears the “nature and mode” of other human bodies. Therefore, for Bullinger and Calvin, its locality cannot be abandoned.
Some scholars have seen article 25 as a great concession on Calvin’s part. R. Ward Holder has argued regarding this article, “This truly was the triumph of Zwinglian theology. Calvin never previously suggested language that specified place. . . . In this case, we see Calvin achieving consensus by surrendering.” Paul Rorem concurs: “Calvin had always been careful not to express his understanding of heaven in simplistic spatial terms. The ascension of Christ’s body to heaven did imply distance, never put it as baldly as in the Züricher’s addition of a phrase, ‘is contained in heaven as in a place.’ ” Yet, whether Calvin conceived of heaven as a place is debatable, as Muller has argued.
Both Holder and Rorem overlook the preceding clause, which qualifies this statement, “Although philosophically speaking there is no place above the skies,” and the possible meanings of the phrase ut loco. Calvin makes the same assertion in his commentary on Ephesians 4:10: Non quod proprie locus sit extra mundum. The thrust of both Calvin’s comment on Ephesians and the statement in article 25 is to acknowledge the prevailing theory of Aristotelian physics that considered the highest sphere not a place because it is not surrounded by other bodies. Therefore, in whatever way one takes the phrase ut loco, the Consensus is drawing a clear distinction between the philosophical (according to physics) concept of place and their theologically construed concept. Even while acknowledging the common philosophical understanding, Bullinger and Calvin do not feel bound by it and can conclude things on theological grounds that are in tension with it. This also leads to the question of whether this statement is calling heaven a place. The phrase ut loco can be understood as either an adverbial or an appositional phrase. The English translations of the Consensus reflect this ambiguity, rendering it variously “as its place,” “as it were in place,” and “as in a place.” Given the two possible meanings of ut loco, and the foregoing repudiation of the notion that heaven is a “place” in the philosophical sense, Holder’s and Rorem’s claims that heaven is crudely construed here seem to fail.
In article 25, Calvin and Bullinger are making a careful yet vague claim that Christ’s human body continues to exist in a normal human mode of finitude and circumscription even after the ascension, and therefore exists “placedly” even if the “where” of its existence, philosophically considered, is not itself a place. This idea might be made clearer if one returns to the understanding of local presence in the medieval scholastics, which was based on the Aristotelian concept of place as container. To be locally present is to be surrounded by another body, the boundary between which constitutes the place a body is in. A common example of this is water in a vase. The place of the water is determined by its being contained within the walls of the vase. Calvin and Bullinger seem to state that Christ’s body exists in heaven locally; i.e., it is surrounded by whatever medium constitutes heaven. Heaven itself, however, is not a place since it lacks a surrounding body to contain it. We might conceive of a vase full of water in a vacuum. According to the Aristotelian conception of place, the vase is not in a place since there is no externally bounding body. Yet the water is still locally present since it remains bounded by the walls of the vase. In this example, the vase is not a place, yet the water exists locally in the vase. Christ’s body likewise exists locally in heaven, even if heaven philosophically considered is not a place. In their attempt to work out the implication of Christ’s human body and the ascension, Calvin and Bullinger conclude that while philosophically considered heaven is not a place, it is theologically. Yet the existence of Christ locally in heaven does not create a problem of distance between the believer and Christ, even though they are at a distance, because the Holy Spirit both effects union with him, even as ascended, and can make his body fully present despite distance in space, as the Consensus has established.
The Consensus Tigurinus marks the official confessional acceptance of the doctrine of the extra Calvinisticum within the Reformed tradition. In their attempt to hammer out concord on the eucharistic presence, Calvin and Bullinger produce a christologically determined sacramentology, in line with the previous thought of Zwingli and Oecolampadius. The document, however, lacks a thorough exposition of the underlying christology. Christ assumed a full human nature with every aspect of human finitude, and while his body is glorified by the ascension, this quality is not removed or changed. Bullinger and Calvin use this doctrine to reject both the Lutheran and the Roman concepts of the Supper that demand a corporeal presence at the Table. Through this agreement, the ground for further controversy with the Lutheran party has been set; this not only marks a definitive break within the Protestant ranks but reorients the debate of the Supper from the question of presence simpliciter to the mode of Christ’s presence, either spiritual or corporeal. The Consensus also brings to the fore new questions, which were only hinted at in previous debate, regarding the nature of heaven and the right hand of God, which will be taken up in the second eucharistic controversy sparked by the publication of the Consensus in 1551.
The confrontation between Luther and Zwingli at the Marburg Colloquy would contribute to a lasting division between the Lutheran and Reformed churches over christology. Each tradition developed rival understandings of the dynamic of Christ’s presence and absence: ubiquity and the extra Calvinisticum. The divergence on this point can be traced to different understandings of the relationship of reason and Scripture, which affect how the nature of Christ’s body and especially his ascension was conceptualized. Zwingli and Oecolampadius argue for a necessary finitude of Christ’s body, as a proper quality of all human bodies, and they used this doctrine as a touchstone to judge sacramental theology. In his later confessional works, Fidei Ratio and Fidei Expositio, Zwingli built on his previous doctrine and secured the unity of Christ’s person by his use of an enhypostatic understanding of Christ’s human nature. Calvin and Bullinger, each in his own way, would carry forward the doctrine of the extra culminating in its confessional acceptance in the Consensus Tigurinus. In this work, they maintain the emphasis on the integrity of Christ’s human and divine natures and establish the extra on the theological motivation of the salvific value of Christ’s flesh. They also made use of the doctrine to reject claims of corporeal presence in the eucharistic elements. The christological foundation for the doctrine seen in Zwingli, however, is weakened by a lack of attention to the nature of the hypostatic union and a careful articulation of the communicatio idiomatum. In some measure, the reception of the extra after Zwingli’s death up to the Consensus can be seen as a devolution from Zwingli’s late works. These doctrines, as well as the relationship between heaven, the right hand of the Father, and Christ’s presence, will increasingly come to the fore in the subsequent Lutheran-Reformed polemics of the second eucharistic controversy.
William J. Wright, “Philip of Hesse’s Vision of Protestant Unity and the Marburg Colloquy,” in Pietas et Societas: New Trends in Reformation Social History Essays in Memory of Harold J. Grimm, ed. Kyle C. Sessions and Phillip N. Bebb, Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, 4 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1985), 164. For more background on the colloquy, see ; Martin Lehman, “Introduction to The Marburg Colloquy and The Marburg Articles,” in Luther’s Works: Word and Sacrament IV, ed. Martin Lehman and Helmut T. Lehmann, 55 vols. (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1971), 38:5–14; George Richard Potter, Zwingli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 316–20; Hermann Sasse, This Is My Body: Luther’s Contention for the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1959), 187–215.
164.
163.
170.
, 320.
in From Ockham to Wyclif, ed. Anne Hudson and Michael Wilks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 463.
10.
These accounts can be found in translation in LW 38.15–85 and critical editions in WA 30.III. For an evaluation of these sources, see George John Beto, “The Marburg Colloquy of 1529: A Textual Study,” Concordia Theological Monthly 16, no. 2 (February 1945): 73–94; Walther Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch 1529: Versuch einer Rekonstruktion (Leipzig: M. Heinsius Nachfolger Eger & Sievers, 1929); , 220–23; 11–12.
, 222–23.
Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch.
, 223–68. I have used Sasse’s reconstruction because of its accessibility. All citations from these sources will also be supplied from Köhler’s reconstruction, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, which is the standard edition within the literature.
Sasse notes that a misprint occurred in the WA, which resulted in only fourteen articles. This was corrected in later editions; however, Beto follows this numbering. , 268n112; 91–93.
LW 38.88
LW 38.88.
LW 38.88.
Merle J. H. d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, vols. 1–5, trans. Henry White, Religious Heritage Library (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1976), 535. See also Owen Chadwick’s claims: “The Swiss proposed that they agree to disagree—they could be Christians in full communion with each other and yet hold different doctrines on the sacrament. The Lutherans said that this was not possible. But otherwise they agreed on common articles of faith. Hence the Marburg Colloquy did not do the harm which used to be attributed to it. There was a confession of an evangelical faith.” Owen Chadwick, The Early Reformation on the Continent, The Oxford History of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 237.
, 329.
, 229. “Felsenfest” (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 7).
, 231. Eure Fundamente seind diese: Ihr wollet schlüsslich beweisen: ein Leib kann nicht an zwei Orten sein, und bringet Argumente vom unbegrenzten Leib vor. Ihr weiset auf die natürliche Bernunft (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 8).
, 236. Verzeihet, gnädiger Fürft und Herr! Jene Worte, “das ist mein Leib” halten mich gefangen. Und wenn Augustin oder andere Lehrer wollen “die Zeichen auch deutten, so sollen sie hinder Christum tretten und deutten, wie ers deuttet” (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 12).
, 264. “Ich weiss kein ander Mittel, denn dass sie Gottes Wort die Ehre geben und glauben mits uns.” Ich bleib bei meinem Glauben und kann nicht weichen (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 37).
, 261. Jeder Glaubensartikel ist sich selbst Prinzip und bedarf nicht des Beweises durch einen anderen (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 34).
Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development, trans. Roy A. Harrisville (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999), 204.
, 203–5.
, 264, 265. “Bittet Gott,” dass Ihr zur Einsicht kommet. . . . sonder ist offenbar, dass wir nicht einerlei Geist haben (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 37, 38).
, 237. Wenn wir hundert Jahre lang mit einander stritten, es wird michts bewiesen. Schafft mir den Text heraus so bin ich zufrieden (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 13).
1526 and Berne, 1528: Neutralizing the Early Church,” Studies in Reformed Theology and History 1, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 80–82.
Ulrich in Selected Writings of Huldrych Zwingli, ed. H. Wayne Pipkin and Edward J. Furcha, trans. H. Wayne Pipkin (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 1984), 2.337. Infiniti sunt in utroque instrumento loci, qui prima specie antinomiam ac diversitatem summam prę se ferunt; sed iidem, dum recte et absque factionis studio conferuntur, nihil est illis concordius ac planius. Ex quibus hic noster unus est (Z V 701.23–27).
“That after the human tongue began, by means of tropes and figures and varieties of expression, to season its speech with sweet smelling spices, or paint it with varying hues, as it were, then the divine Goodness (which everywhere babbles to us like parents to their infants, and uses our own language), condescended in talking with us, to use our own tropes and figures.” Zwingli, “Friendly Exegesis,” 350. Quod posteaquam humanum os coepit tropis, figuris ac locutionibus orationem veluti odoribus aut pigmentis condere et variegare, divinam quoque bonitatem (quae ubique parentum instar nobiscum balbutit linguaque nostra loquitur) huc sese demisisse, ut et ipsa nobiscum loquens tropis ac schęmatismis nostris uteretur (Z V 729.27–730.4).
Zwingli, “Friendly Exegesis,” 352.
Zwingli, “Friendly Exegesis,” 353. Quandoquidem fide sive unctione magistra ac pręitore constat scripturam unice esse interpretandam, attamen nemo est, qui fidem hypocriseos artificio non possit ostentare (Z V 733.29–31).
Zwingli, “Friendly Exegesis,” 354. Et contra, si spiritu quidquam tradas, quod scripturę non est conforme, confusaneo fanaticoque stupore omnia miscebis (Z V 734.12–14).
Zwingli, “Friendly Exegesis,” 361–62. Non enim nitimur arte, sed posteaquam ex scripturae contradictione et collatione argumentisque ex eadem scriptura petitis rem huc adegimus, ut velit, nolit confiteri cogatur haec verba simplicem ac prima fronte sese offerentem sensum habere nequire (Z V 745.23–26).
, 231, italics in original. Fleischliche Beweise, geometrische Argumente verwerse ich gänzlich. . . . Gott ist über alle Mathematik (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 9).
, 231. Ich bitte also um “ein bestendige Beweisung” aus heiliger Schrift (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 9).
, 232. Nicht will ich aus der Vernunft oder aus der Geometrie heraus sprechen—dem göttlichen Vermögen widerspreche ich nicht—sondern dieweil ich des Glaubens Summe besitze, rede ich aus ihr (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 9).
, 232. Das 6. Kapitel Johannis erkläret die übrigen Schriftstellen. Christus redet dort nicht von lokaler Präsenz. ‘Das Fleisch ist nichts nütze!’ sagt er. . . . Denn Christus ist auferstanden, und sitzet zur Rechten des Vaters, also ist er nicht im Brote (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 9).
, 236. Darnach forsche ich nicht, ob es notwendig sei oder nicht, dazu sind wir nicht da (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 13).
, 237. Wenn Er mir gebieten würde, Mist zu essen, ich würde es tun, da ich genugsam weiss: es ist mir heilsam. Der Knecht grüble nich über den Willen seines Herrn. Man muss Augen schliessen (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 13).
, 237. Wo stehet geschrieben, dass wir mit geschlossenen Augen in der Schrift wandeln sollen, Herr Doctor? (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 13).
, 237. Der leugnete, dass nur Jesus der Sohn der Maria sei, weil ganz klar geschrieben stehe: Da, sprachen seine Brüder zu ihm (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 13–14).
There is a certain irony in Zwingli’s argument here, considering later Protestantism’s stance toward Mary’s perpetual virginity.
, 238. Dass Er verführt von leiblicher Niessung (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 14).
, 241. “Ich werde nicht sichtbar bei Euch sein,” sagt Christus, also ist er auch nicht im Nachtmahl leiblich (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 16).
, 242. Ich disputier nicht um’s “ist,” sondern bin zufrieden, dass Christus es sagt (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 18).
, 243; Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 18.
, 243. Eure Sache ist’s zu beweisen, nicht meine. Doch lassen wir das, es dienet nicht zur Sache (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 19).
, 244; Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 19–20.
Lee Palmer Wandel, “The Body of Christ at Marburg, 1529,” in Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Reindert Falkenburg, Walter S. Melion and Todd M. Richardson (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007), 197.
, 249. Diese Stelle schliesst die Gegenwart des Leibes Christi im Nachtmahl aus und zwingt, in den Worten des Herrn den Tropus zuzulassen (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 25).
, 250. Dass unsere Hoffunge auf die Auferstehung dahinfällt und uns genommen wird, wenn wir das Brot Christi Leib sein lassen (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 25).
, 250. Es störet Euch, dass ich immer an den Worten hänge: “Das ist mein Leib.” Das geschieht mit Grund. Mir genügt das, beweist Ihr dar Eurige. Ich bekenne mich zu Christus im Himmel, bekenne mich aber auch zu Christus im Sakramente. Ich will an jenen Worten hängen, das Christus im Himmel und im Abendmahl sei. Was gegen die Natur ist, kümmert mich nicht, wenn es nur nicht gegen den Glauben ist (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 25).
, 251–52. Daraus folgt: nach der Gottheit, Gnade und seiner Macht ist Christus immer und überall allen gegenwärtig. Wenn er aber sagt, er werde abwesend sein, so muss er nach seiner Menschheit abwesend sein. Ist er aber nach der Menschheit abwesend, so kann er nicht leiblich im Nachtmahl sein. Christus ist uns in allen Stücken ähnlich geworden; wie er nach der Gottheit gleichen Wesens mit dem Vater ist, so nach der Menschheit gleichen Wesens mit uns. Darin sind wir eins: Christus ist praesent, wie im Himmel, so im Nachtmahl (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 26).
, 252; Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 26–27.
, 255. Ich lasse es dabei nicht bewenden, die Worte anzuführen. “Ist Christi Leib droben, so muss er auch an einem Orte sein,” sagt Augustin. Wenn Christi Leib an verschiedenen Orten ist und wir ihm ähnlich werden müssen, so müssten auch unsere Körper gleichzeitig an mehreren und verschiedenen Orten sein. Wenn er allenthalben uns ählich ist, auch in unserer Gestalt erfunden wurde, und wir nicht an verschiedenen Orten sein Konnen, so kann er es auch nicht, eben weil er uns ähnlich ist. Wir bringen nichts Neues vor, Augustin, Fulgentius denken wie wir. Luther sagt, Christi Leib sei überall, also etwas Unbegrenztes. Christi Leib ist an einem Orte und kann nicht an vielen Orten sein (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 29).
For Zwingli’s use of the church fathers see Irena Backus, “Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Bucer and the Church Fathers,” in The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West, ed. Irena Backus, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 2:627–60.
, 258–59. Sasse does not give the citation for this passage from Augustine. This text comes from the “Letter to Dardanus,” PL 33:839. See translation of this letter in Augustine, Letters 156–210: Epistulae II, trans. John E. Rotelle (New York: New City Press, 2004), 232–50. Augustin sagt weiter: “nimm den Körpern die räumliche Umgrenztheit, so sind es keine Köper mehr” (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 32).
, 255. Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 29.
, 255; Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 29.
, 256. Μορφὴ im Philipperbriefe bedeutet beides, begrenzte und unbegrenzte Gestalt. Christus ist begrenzt, wie wir begrenzt sind (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 30).
, 260. Ich bleibe gefangen und gebunden in diese Worte des Herrn und kann daher um Eurer Glossen willen Eurer Meinung nicht beitreten. “Das ist mein Leib,” damit ist bewiesen, dass Christi Leib an vielen Orten sein kann (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 34).
, 261. Jeder Glaubensartikel ist sich selbst Prinzip und bedarf nicht des Beweises durch einen anderen (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 34).
“If you make a trope out of the words of the Lord’s Supper, why not make one out of ‘He ascended into heaven’ Mark 16:19?” , 243, see also 249. Wenn Ihr hier, beim Abendmahl, einen Tropus setzt, warum nicht hier bei den Worten:, “Er ist ausgestiegen gen Himmel”? (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 18).
, 251. Mathematische Harspaltereien will ich hier nicht hören. Gott—das geben sogar die Aristoteliker zu—kann machen, dass ein Körper nur an einem Orte oder an mehreren Orten zugleich oder ganz ausserhalb jeden Ortes ist, und dass zugleich mehrere Körper an einem Orte sich befinden (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 26).
For a more thorough discussion of these difference modes of presence, see Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1985), 238–43; Heiko A. Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 462; Alexander Balmain Bruce, The Humiliation of Christ in Its Physical, Ethical and Official Aspects (New York: A. C. Armstrong, 1895), 91n3.
Aristotle’s Physics, 212a20–21, citied in Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 55. For a fuller discussion of Aristotle’s view, see 50–71. See also the extended discussion of this concepts in Thomas F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976); Thomas F. Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997).
, 241–42.
For how this idea of definitive presence was formed in the Middle Ages through reflection on angelic nature, see David Keck, Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 109–12; Richard Cross, “Angelic Time and Motion: Bonaventure to Duns Scotus,” in A Companion to Angels in Medieval Philosophy, ed. Tobias Hoffmann (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 117–47; Martin Lenz and Isabel Iribarren, eds., Angels in Medieval Philosophical Inquiry: Their Function and Significance (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 20012), part 4.
, 275–77.
, 255, emphasis in original. Gott ist über alle Mathematiker, Christus kann seinen Leib ohne Ort wie an einem Ort halten. Er ist Abendmahl nicht wie an einem Orte (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 29–30).
, 258. Dass ein Körper an vielen Orten sein kann, umgekehrt viele Körper an einem Ort, ebenso ein Körper überhaupt an keinem Ort, dass Gott solches mit allen Leibern machen kann, von Christi Leib gar nicht zu reden, sagen auch die Scholastiker, das will ich nicht leugnen. Wer bin ich, dass ich Gottes Macht messen wollte? Den grossen Leib der Welt “enhält Gott ohn ein Statt, darum hat die Welt kein Statt, darin sie ist” (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 32). For this distinction in the medieval via moderna see , 462. For more on the influence of the via moderna on Luther in this debate, see Oberman, “Via Antiqua and Via Moderna.”
, 261. “Gott geb, er seh in loco oder nicht,” das überlasse ich Gott. Mir genügt: “Das ist mein Leib” (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 34).
, 256. Gewiss kann Gott einen Leib an verschiedenen Orten sein lassen, aber dass er das im Abendmahl tut, dafür verlangen wir den Beweis (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 30).
, 257. Ich hab bewiesen, dass Christus an einer Stat ist gewesen; beweiset Ihr herwiederum, dass er gar an keiner oder aber an vielen Steten sei (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 31).
, 257. Das seid Ihr schuldig zu tun, und nicht Beweisung von uns fordern, denn wir find Euch keine schuldig (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 31).
, 257. Allhie stehet unser Schrift. Die habt Ihr uns noch nicht abgedrungen, wie Ihr Euch erboten habt, wir bedrürfen keiner andern. Meine allerliebsten Herrn, dieweil der Text meines Herrn Jesu Christi alba stehet: Hoc est Corpus meum, so kan ich warlich nicht füruber, sondern muss bekennen und gleuben, dass der Leib Christi da sei (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 31).
, 262. Wir wundern uns aber, warum wir über den Ort streiten, wo es doch feststeht und von der ganzen Christenheit angenommen ist, dass Gott ausserhalb von Ort und Raum existieren kann (Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 35).
, 262; Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch, 35.
Wandel, “The Body of Christ at Marburg,” 201.
Ulrich Zwingli, “Christianae fidei brevis et clara expositio ad regem Christianum,” in Huldreich Zwinglis sämtliche Werke, ed. Emil Egli and Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider, Corpus Reformatorum, 93.5 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1991), 6.5:50–163, hereafter Z VI.5.
James T. Dennison Jr., “Introduction to Fidei Expositio,” in Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation, ed. James T. Dennison Jr., 4 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformed Heritage Books, 2008), 1:176.
, 396.
, 396.
Heinrich Bullinger, “Preface to Exposition of the Christian Faith,” in On Providence and Other Essays, ed. Willian John Hinke, trans. Henry Preble (Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1983), 236.
Huldrych Zwingli, “Fidei Expositio,” in Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation, ed. James T. Dennison Jr., trans. S. M. Jackson (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformed Heritage Books, 2008), 1:180–81. Hic est religionis nostrę fons, ut deum agnoscamus esse, qui increatus creator rerum omnium est, quod ille unus ac solus omnia habet, gratis donat, quodque primum hoc fidei fundamentum evertunt, quicumque creaturę tribuunt, quod solius creatoris est (Z VI.5 61.3–7).
For a discussion of the Anselmic nature of Zwingli’s soteriology in Fidei Ratio, see Gottfried Wilhelm Locher, Zwingli’s Thought: New Perspectives, trans. Milton Aylor and Stuart Casson, Studies in the History of Christian Thought 25 (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 165.
186. Nam quod propter nos adsumpsit, de nostro est, ut totus noster sit (Z VI.5 140.14–141.1).
Huldrych Zwingli, “Fidei Ratio,” in Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation, ed. James T. Dennison Jr., trans. S. M. Jackson (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformed Heritage Books, 2008), 1:114; Z VI.5 792.18.
114. Id autem hoc modo, ut totus ille homo in unitatem hypostaseos sive personę, filii dei, sic sit adsumptus, ut peculiarem personam homo non constituerit, sed adsumptus sit ad filii dei personam inseperabilem, indivisibilem et indissociabilem (Z VI.5 793.2–5).
See for examples of these claims, E. M. Henning, “The Architectonics of Faith: Metalogic and Metaphor in Zwingli’s Doctrine of the Eucharist,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 10, no. 4 (1986): 357n80; , REFO500 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 88; in The Oxford Handbook of Christology, ed. Francesca Aran Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 278.
, 183. Adsumpsit autem humanam naturam in unitatem hypostaseos sive personę filii dei; non quasi homo adsumptus peculiaris persona et ęterna divinitas quoque persona peculiaris sit, sed quod persona ęterni filii dei in et ad unitatem suam hominem adsumpserit, quemadmodum sancti dei homines vere et clare demonstrarunt (Z VI.5 68.1–6).
F. LeRon Shults, “A Dubious Christological Formula from Leontius of Byzantium to Karl Barth,” Theological Studies 57, no. 3 (September 1, 1996): 431–46; Uwe Michael Lang, “Anhypostatos-Enhypostatos: Church Fathers, Protestant Orthodoxy and Karl Barth,” Journal of Theological Studies 49 (October 1, 1998): 630–57; Matthias Göckel, “A Dubious Christological Formula? Leontius of Byzantium and the Anhypostasis-Enhypostasis Theory,” Journal of Theological Studies 51, no. 2 (October 2000): 515–32.
, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1954), 308.
Ivor Davidson, “Theologizing the Human Jesus: An Ancient (and Modern) Approach to Christology Reassessed,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 3, no. 2 (July 2001): 129–53; Oliver D. Crisp, Divinity and Humanity: The Incarnation Reconsidered, Current Issues in Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 72–89.
655; Alfred Schindler, “Zwingli als Leser von Johannes Damascenus,” in Auctoritas Patrum: Zur Rezeption der Kirchenväter im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert, ed. Leif Grane, Alfred Schindler, and Markus Wriedt (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1993), 185–95.
For the concept in Thomas Aquinas, see Göckel, “A Dubious Christological Formula?,” 526–27; for Scotus, see Richard Cross, Duns Scotus, Great Medieval Thinkers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 117–21. For the Scotian influence on Zwingli’s thought, see Daniel Bolliger, Infiniti Contemplatio: Grundzüge der Scotus- und Scotismusrezeption im Werk Huldrych Zwinglis (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
Richard Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation: Thomas Aquinas to Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 245n26.
114. Quamvis autem utraque natura, divina videlicet et humana, ingenium ac proprietatem suam sic servaverit, ut utraque in illo vere et naturaliter esse deprehendatur, adhuc tamen naturarum distinctae proprietates et opera personae unitatem non dissociant. Non magis quam in homine animus et caro duas personas constituunt, (Z VI.5 793.5-10).
183.
115.
115. Hinc unus et idem Christus pro humanae naturae ingenio vagit, incrementum capit, proficit sapientia, esurit, sitit, edit, bibit, aestuat, alget, vapulat, sudat, vulneratur, trucidatur, timet, tristatur et caetera, quae ad mulctam et poenam peccati attinent, fert; nam ab ipso peccato alienissimus est (Z VI. 5 793.17–22).
The extent to which Zwingli stresses the weakness and development of Christ’s human nature was not well received in his day and went beyond the mainstream Catholic theology of the period. Responding to this section of Fidei Ratio, John Eck accuses Zwingli of outright heresy: “But Zwingli consents to explicit heresy when he says here of our Lord Jesus Christ that He increased in wisdom, for which he has elsewhere as the reason that Christ is subject to limitation and measure in His human nature. But this is the heresy of Nestorius . . . hence this part of the Confession is to be absolutely rejected, since the whole Church admits that Christ even according to His human nature is omniscient.” John Eck, “Refutation of the Articles of Zwingli,” in On Providence and Other Essays, ed. Willian John Hinke, trans. Henry Preble (Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1983), 71.
115. Cum patre summa et ima temperat, omnia permeat, sustinet ac fovet, caecos illustrat, claudos restituit, mortuos evocat, hostes verbulo sternit, mortuus ipse vitam resumit, coelos petit, spiritum sanctum de suo mittit (Z VI.5 793.22–25).
115. Et haec omnia unus idemque Christus, quantumvis natura ingenioque diversa facit, una dei filii persona manens (Z VI.5 793.22–24).
115; 183. It is interesting to note that by the end of Zwingli’s career, while his doctrine has not changed with regard to predication, he has abandoned the use of the term alloiosis.
126–31; 184–93.
126. Coena verum Christi corpus adsit fidei contemplatione. . . . Sed quod Christi corpus per essentiam et realiter, hoc est: corpus ipsum naturale, in cęna aut adsit aut ore dentibusque nostris manducatur (Z VI.5 806.7, 12–13).
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 72–73; Alexander Barclay, The Protestant Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper: A Study in the Eucharistic Teaching of Luther, Zwingli and Calvin (Glasgow: Jackson, Wylie, 1927), 100–103.
186. Alterum vero quod me hic expositurum recepi, hoc est, quod in coena domini naturale ac substantiale istud corpus Christi, quo et hic passus est et nunc in coelis ad dexteram patris sedet, non naturaliter atque per essentiam editur, sed spiritualiter tantum (Z VI.5 140.2–5).
126–28; 186–89.
126. Nam secundum divinitatem semper adest, quia semper ubique est (Z VI.5 807.3–4).
186. Nam quod propter nos adsumpsit, de nostro est, ut totus noster sit (Z VI.5 140.14–141.1).
187. Unum quod hi modi, qui adsunt nostro corpori, Christi quoque corpori adsint; alterum quod, quicquid in Christi corpore est, quod ad corporis modum pertinet, nostrorum etiam sit corporum (Z VI.5 141.2–4).
187. Nam si quicquam, quod ad corporis modum et proprietatem attinet, in illius esset corpore, quod nostro deesset, iam videretur istud non nostra causa adsumpsisse (Z VI.5 141.5–7).
126. Nec est, cur causentur adversarii humanitatem Christi esse, ubicunque est divinitas, alias dividi personam; nam id tolleret veram humanitatem Christi (Z VI.5 807.7–9).
126. Ita non dividit personam, sicut humanitatem adsumpsisse filium non dividit essentiae unitatem (Z VI. 5 807.11–12).
126–27.
187. Sed Pauli argumentatio cum hic robur habeat: Quicquid Christi corpus habet, quod ad modum, dotes et proprietatem corporis pertinet, nobis habet tanquam noster archetypus nostrumque est (Z VI.5 141.16–19).
187. Ex his fontibus hausit theologorum columen Augustinus, ut dixerit Christi corpus in aliquo coeli loco esse oportere propter veri corporis modum; et iterum: “Christi corpus, quod a mortuis resurrexit, in uno loco esse oportet.” Non est igitur Christi corpus magis in pluribus locis quam nostra corpora, quę sententia non nostra est, sed apostoli, sed Augustini, sed ipsius omnino religionis, quę, etsi testibus destitueremur, suadet tamen Christum per omnia nobis similem esse factum (Z VI.5 141.21–142.6).
187. Cum ne verbum quidem unquam docuerimus, quod non ex divinis aut literis aut theologis hauserimus (Z VI.5 142.10–11).
188. Si quando in eam incideres (Z VI.5 143.7).
188. Nam docti omnes pro explosa et impia damnarunt hanc sententiam, qua quidam ausi fuerunt adseverare Christi corpus perinde esse ubique atque divinitatem. Ubique enim esse nequit, nisi quod natura infinitum est; quod infinitum est, simul est ęternum. Christi humanitas non est ęterna, ergo neque infinita. Si non est infinita, ergo nequit non esse finita. Si finita est, iam non est ubique (Z VI.5 142.18–143.5).
188. Ut philosophicę ratiocinationi non deessemus, si quando in eam incideres, o rex, ad impenetrabilia scripturę testimonia accedemus (Z VI.5 143.6–8).
188–89.
188. Porro, quod in pręsepium depositus est, qui coelos ac inferos implet ac tent, eodem modo ad humanitatem pertinet. Verumtamen cum ista toti Christo tribuuntur, nasci ac poni, nihil incommodi oritur; id autem propter duarum naturarum in unam personam coniunctionem et unionem (Z VI.5 144.7–11).
188–89. “Ascendit ad coelos” [Lk 24, 51]. ęque ad humanitatem principaliter refertur, cum tamen sine divinitate non sit lata humanitas, sed illa ferebat, hęc ferebatur. Illa, ut iam est dictum, perpetuo circumscripta manet; nam alias desineret esse vera humanitas; hec vero perpetuo infinita et incircumscripta est, unde non transit a loco in locum, sed eadem indidem perpetuo manet (Z VI.5 144.12–17).
189.
189. Ergo humana relinquit. Quę cum mundum reliquerit, intellige, o rex, naturali, essentiali localique pręsentia; non est ergo hic. Non editur itaque a nobis naturaliter aut per essentiam corpus Christi, quanto magis non mensuraliter, sed solum sacramentaliter et spiritualiter (Z VI.5 145.3–7).
189. At quomodo abiit? Corporaliter, naturaliter et quomodo per humanitatis essentiam vere est. Cum ergo dicit: “Sic veniet”—nimirum corporaliter, naturaliter ac per essentiam. Verum quando sic veniet? Non cum ecclesia coenam celebrat, sed cum per illum sub mundi finem iudicanda est (Z VI.5 146.8–12).
Bullinger refused to accept the Wittenberg Concord on the Lutheran terms and pressed for a clearer statement on the nature of Christ’s presence and the place of faith for the reception of the blessings of the Supper. Martin Friedrich, “Heinrich Bullinger und die Wittenberger Konkordie: Ein Ökumeniker im Streit um das Abendmahl,” Zwingliana 24 (1997): 59–79. Further, the Concord avoided the christological underpinnings of the eucharistic controversy, which for the heirs of Zwingli left the heart of the conflict unaddressed. “Finally, Bucer entered the arena of Christology, only to declare it closed. The Wittenberg Concord had avoided Christology, for the Swiss this was impossible. But the difference between ubiquity achieved through the communication of the two natures’ properties and the local placement of a human body was irresolvable. Therefore, Bucer took the question up, only to declare it invalid.” Ward Holder, “The Pain of Agreement: Calvin and the Consensus Tigurinus,” Reformation & Renaissance Review 18, no. 1 (March 2016): 88.
Amy Nelson Burnett, “From Concord to Confession: The Wittenberg Concord and the Consensus Tigurinus in Historical Perspective,” Reformation & Renaissance Review 18, no. 1 (March 2016): 53.
Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 99. See also Willem Nijenhuis, “Calvin and the Augsburg Confession,” in Ecclesia Reformata: Studies on the Reformation (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 97–114.
“Despite the apparent concessions to Protestant sensibilities in its teaching on justification, the Interim lays out a plan for a church that both served the interests of the empire and made the priest the central figure of religious life. The Interim’s opponents insisted on the absolute autonomy of the church and on the centrality of the believing layperson.” Nathan Baruch Rein, “Faith and Empire: Conflicting Visions of Religion in a Late Reformation Controversy—The Augsburg Interim and Its Opponents, 1548–50,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 1 (March 2003): 50.
, 176.
Emidio Campi, “The Consensus Tigurinus: Origins, Assessment, and Impact,” in Shifting Patterns of Reformed Tradition, Reformed Historical Theology 27 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 117.
“The Consensus Tigurinus expressed a theology of the Lord’s Supper that would become normative for the Reformed churches, and so made permanent the division of Protestantism.” 57.
118–20.
Bruce Gordon, The Swiss Reformation, New Frontiers in History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 140.
Bullinger’s influence throughout the Reformed movement can be seen through his voluminous correspondence. See Rainer Henrich, “Bullinger’s Correspondence: An International News Network,” in Architect of Reformation: An Introduction to Heinrich Bullinger, 1504–1575, ed. Bruce Gordon and Emidio Campi (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 231–41.
Amy Nelson Burnett, Karlstadt and the Origins of the Eucharistic Controversy: A Study in the Circulation of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 85–87. Burnett argues that in Bullinger’s 1525 unpublished work, Against the Idolsbread, he “drew on arguments made by the Bohemian Brethren to condemn the veneration of the host. Thus he stated that bread was a created thing, and whoever worshipped a created thing instead of the Creator was an idolater” (88).
W. P. Stephens, “The Person and Work of Christ in the Theology of Heinrich Bullinger,” Reformation & Renaissance Review 17, no. 3 (November 2015): 235n30, citing Heinrich Bullinger, Heinrich Bullinger Werke: Theologische Schriften, ed. Zwingliverein in Zurich (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zurich, 2008) 2:104.25–105.7.
Heinrich (Zürich: Christoffel Froschouer, 1534), hereafter Assertio Orthodoxa. The title of this work has been variously translated into English: “The Two Natures of Christ” ( 235); “Orthodox Statement on both of the two Natures of Christ” in Bruce Gordon, “Heinrich Bullinger,” in The Reformation Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Early Modern Period, ed. Carter Lindberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 172; “An Orthodox Assertion of the two natures of Christ” in Edward A. Dowey, “Heinrich Bullinger as Theologian: Thematic, Comprehensive, and Schematic,” in Architect of Reformation: An Introduction to Heinrich Bullinger, 1504–1575, ed. Bruce Gordon and Emidio Campi (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 45. I will use the short title An Orthodox Assertion in English and Assertio Orthodoxa in Latin.
Mark Taplin, “Bullinger on the Trinity: ‘Religionis Nostrae Caput et Fundamentum,’” in Architect of Reformation: An Introduction to Heinrich Bullinger, 1504–1575, ed. Bruce Gordon and Emidio Campi (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 78–79; Dowey, “Heinrich Bullinger as Theologian,” 45.
Yasukazu Morita, “Bullinger und Schwenckfeld,” in Heinrich Bullinger 1504–1575 Gesammelte Aufsätze zum 400. Todestag Zweiter Band: Beziehungen und Wirkungen, ed. Ulrich Gäbler and Erland Herkenrath, Zürcher Beiträge zur Reformationsgeschichte 7 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1975), 143–56. Bullinger will label those who hold such positions as “the Phantasmatics” and refute the ancient exponents of these views, Marcion, Valentines, and Apelles. Bullinger, Assertio Orthodoxa, B8v–B9r.
Bullinger, Assertio Orthodoxa, B7r–B10r.
Bullinger, Assertio Orthodoxa, B10r–B11r.
Bullinger, Assertio Orthodoxa, B10r.
Bullinger, Assertio Orthodoxa, B11r.
Bullinger, Assertio Orthodoxa, B10r. Verum et viuum veri et vivi dei filium, genitum ab aeterno de substantia patris, ideo et coaequalem sive ὁμοουισιον, id est, consubstantialem patri. My translation of this text thoroughout.
Bullinger, Assertio Orthodoxa, B10r–v. Quam necque de coelis secum tulit, neque de aëre vel de aere vel sydribus finxit, sed cooperante sancto spiritu ex substantia intemeratae virginis Marie assumpsit.
Bullinger, Assertio Orthodoxa, B10v. Manens in duabus illis substantiis sive naturis, non ipsis quidem inter sese commixt is vel conversis, sed societate et modo quodam ineffabili in unam personam inseparabilem unitis.
Bullinger, Assertio Orthodoxa, B10v. Non enim duos Christos aut filios confitemur, sed verum deum et hominem unum filium.
Bullinger, Assertio Orthodoxa, H56r–v. Humiliavit seipsum, Proinde inanivit se, idem est quod humiliavit se. Videmus ergo unum illum Iesum Christum duas habere naturas divinam et humanum, non sibi invicem immixtas, sed proprietate distantes.
In his section on the two natures of Christ alone, Bullinger cites Hippolytus, Amphilochus, Chrysostom, Antiochus, and Tertullian. Bullinger, Assertio Orthodoxa, H56v–H60r.
Bullinger, Assertio Orthodoxa, B11r. Haec est catholicae fidei in primis utriusque in Christo naturae orthodoxa confessio, quae una ac sola simplicitate et puritate sua facile discutit omnem erroris ac haeresum caliginem. Haec confessio syncere et illibate custodita est ab initio a sanctis et electis dei omnibus.
Bullinger does not mention the seventh ecumenical Council of Nicaea II, likely owing to this Council’s approval of the veneration of images. Bullinger, Assertio Orthodoxa, B11r–v.
237.
Bullinger, Assertio Orthodoxa, I64r–I67v.
E. David Willis, Calvin’s Catholic Christology: The Function of the So-Called Extra Calvinisticum in Calvin’s Theology, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966); Heiko A. Oberman, “The ‘Extra’ Dimension in the Theology of Calvin,” in The Dawn of the Reformation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986); (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011); (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 58–92. See the introduction for review of this literature.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 1st ed. (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1975), 142. Itaque sic in summa habendum est. Christus, ut veram nostram carnem induit, cum e virgine natus est, in vera carne nostra passus est, cum pro nombis satisfecit; ita eandem veram carnem et resurgendo recepit et in coelum sustulit. Haec enim nobis nostrae resurrectionis et in coelum ascensionis spes est, quod Christus resurrecit et ascendit. Porro, quam infirma et fragilis spes foret ista, nisi haec ipsa nostra caro in Christo vere suscitata et in regnum coelorum ingressa esset? Atqui haec est perpetua corporis veritas, ut loco contineatur, ut suis dimensionibus constet, ut suam faciem habeat. John Calvin, Ioannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia, 59 vols. ed. Guilielmus Baum, Eduardus Cunitz, and Eduardus Reuss, Corpus Reformatorum vols. 29–87 (Brunswick: Schwetschke, 1863–1900), 58.iii.121, hereafter CR 58.iii. All citations of the Institutes (1536) from the CR have been checked against the original Basel edition of the text and are identical to it in substance.
This can be seen through Calvin’s quotation of Augustine’s “Letter to Dardanus” to this effect at the Lausanne Disputation in October of 1536. John Calvin, “Two Discourses on the Articles (1536),” in Calvin: Theological Treatises, ed. J. K. Reid (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 2000), 42.
Calvin, Institutes (1536), 143. Scio quid cavillentur cervicosi quidam, quo errorem semel susceptum obstinate tueantur: non alias unquam dimensiones habuisse Christi carnem nisi quam longe lateque coelum et terra patent (CR 58.iii.121).
Calvin, Institutes (1536), 143. Quid hoc est, nisi Marcionem ex inferis suscitare? Quis enim dubitet corpus Christi phantasticum fuisse, si ea conditione fuit? (CR 58.iii.121). The reference to Marcion here is connected to Calvin’s reading of Tertullian’s descriptions of Marcion’s teaching. At the Lausanne disputation on October 5, 1536, Calvin makes the same argument against his Roman opponents. Calvin, “Two Discourses on the Lausanne Articles (1536),” 40.
Calvin, Institutes (1536), 145.
Calvin, Institutes (1536), 143. Verum suntne obtuso adeo sensu, ut non videant id dictum per communicationem idiomatum? Qualiter a Paulo (1 Cor. 2) Dominus gloriae crucifixius dicitur, non quia secundum divinitatem sit passus, sed quia Christus, qui abiectus et contemptus in carne patiebatur, idem Deus erat et Dominus gloriae (CR 58.iii.122).
Calvin, Institutes (1536), 70. Sic et de Christo scripturae loquuntur. Attribuunt illi interdum, quae ad humanitatem singulariter referri oporteat, interdum, quae divinitati peculiariter competant, nonnunquam, quae utramque naturam complectantur, neutri seorsum satis conveniant. Postremo, et per idiomatum communicationem, ipsius divinitati assignant quae humanitatis propria erant, et humanitati quae as divinitatem spectabant (CR 58.iii.66).
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 205.
Calvin, Institutes (1536), 143. Ad hunc modum et filus hominis in coelo erat, quia ipse idem Christus, qui secundum carnem hominis filis habitabat in terris, Deus erat in coelo. Qua ratione, eo ipso loco, descendisse dicitur secundum divinitatem; non quod divinitas coelum reliquerit, ut in ergastulum corporis se abderet, sed quia, tametsi omnia impleret, in ipsa tamen Christi humanitate corporaliter, id est, naturaliter habitabat et ineffabili quodam modo (Col. 2) (CR 58.iii. 122).
Calvin, Institutes (1536), 143–45.
, 26–31.
Calvin, Institutes (1536), 145. Caeternum, tametsi carnem suam a nobis sustulit et corpore in coelum ascendit, ad dexteram tamen patris sedet, hoc est in potentia, maiestate, et gloria patris regnat. Hoc regnum nec ullis locorum spatiis limitatem, nec ullis dimensionibus circumscriptum; quin Christius virtutem suam, ubicunque placuerit, in coelo et in terra exerat, quin se praesentem potentia et virtute exhibeat, quin suis semper adsit, in iis vivat, eos sustineat, confirmet, vegetet, conservet, non secus ac si corpore adesset (CR 58.iii. 123).
Calvin, Institutes (1536), 143; Richard A Muller, “From Zurich or From Wittenburg? An Examination of Calvin’s Early Eucharistic Thought,” Calvin Theological Journal 45 (2010): 249.
Muller, “From Zurich or From Wittenburg?,” 254. For the development of the pneumatological aspect of Calvin’s christology and especially as it related to the extra, see .
, 28–31.
Calvin, “Two Discourses on the Lausanne Articles,” 40–42.
For an overview of this scholarship, see Muller, “From Zurich or From Wittenburg?,” 243–46.
Alexandre Ganoczy, The Young Calvin, trans. David Foxgiver and Wade Provo (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1987), 151–58.
This possibility is also not entertained by Willis, who neglects entirely the question of influence on Calvin’s early thought by antecedent reformers. The only contemporary investigated is Jacques LeFévre, the French humanist; however, Willis concludes that it is unlikely for Calvin to have taken his doctrine from LeFévre, and then he immediately turns to medieval and ancient sources. , 43–44.
See Muller, “From Zürich or From Wittenberg?,” 247.
Calvin, Institutes (1536), 144. Placuit autem, Christum fratribus per omnia similem fieri, excepto peccato. Qualis est nostra caro? Nonne quae certa sua dimensione constat, quae loco continetur, quae tangitur, quae videtur? (CR 58.iii.123).
Calvin, Institutes (1536), 144–45.
Paul Rorem, Calvin and Bullinger on the Lord’s Supper, Alcuin/GROW Liturgical Study 12 (Bramcote, UK: Grove Books, 1989); Timothy George, “John Calvin and the Agreement of Zurich,” in Calvin and the Church, ed. Timothy George (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1990), 42–58; Emidio Campi and Ruendi Reich, eds., Consensus Tigurinus (1549): Die Einigung Zwischen Heinrich Bullinger Und Johannes Calvin Über Das Abendmahl (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2009); See also the series of articles published in Reformation & Renaissance Review 18, no. 1 (March 2016), which was dedicated to the Consensus.
For the most up-to-date discussion of the eucharistic views of Bullinger and Calvin, see , 81–111.
57.
John Calvin and Heinrich Bullinger, “Consensus Tigurinus, 1549,” trans. Torrance Kirby, Reformation & Renaissance Review 18, no. 1 (March 2016): 35. Article 1 Cum Christus sit finis legis, et eius cognitio totam in se evangelii summam compraehendat, non dubium est, quin huc spectet totum spirituale ecclesiae regimen, ut ad Christum nos ducat: sicuti per eum solum ad deum pervenitur, qui ultimus est beatae vitae finis. Emidio Campi and Ruendi Reich, “Consensio Tigurinae,” in Campi and Reich, Consensus Tigurinus, 127.
Calvin and Bullinger, “Consensus Tigurinus,” 2016, 35–36. Article 2 Cum autem sacramenta sint evangelii appendices, is demum et apte et utiliter de eorum natura, vi, officio et fructu disseret ( 127).
103.
Stephens argues that this christological introduction is evidence of the theological priorities of Zürich: “It is significant for Bullinger’s theology that in The Zurich Agreement (1549), which is concerned with the sacraments, the starting point is Christ. The opening articles appear to come from Zurich (there is no parallel in these opening articles to the twenty articles offered by Calvin to the Synod of Bern in March 1549).” 232.
Calvin and Bullinger, “Consensus Tigurinus,” 2016, 36. Article 3 Sic ergo habendum est Christum, cum aeternus esset dei filius eiusdem cum patre essentiae et gloriae, induisse carnem nostram, ut iure adoptionis id, quod natura proprium habebat, nobis communicaret, nempe ut simul filii dei ( 127).
Calvin and Bullinger, “Consensus Tigurinus,” 2016, 36. Article 5 unum cum ipso nos effici et in eius corpus coalescere oportet ( 128).
Calvin and Bullinger, “Consensus Tigurinus,” 2016, 36. Article 4 Ita Christus in carne sua considerandus est nobis sacerdos, qui peccata nostra unico mortis suae sacrificio expiavit . . . qui nunc intercedit pro nobis, ut accessus nobis ad deum pateat . . . victima expiatrix . . . frater, qui nos ex miseris Adae filiis effecit beatos dei filios ( 128).
Calvin and Bullinger, “Consensus Tigurinus,” 2016, 36. Article 4 Atque ita considerandus, ut ad se deum verum et ad patrem nos evehat, donec impleatur illud, quod tandem futurum est, nempe ut sit deus omnia in omnibus ( 128).
See, for instance, , 8.
Calvin and Bullinger, “Consensus Tigurinus,” 2016, 40. Article 21 Praesertim vero tollenda est quaelibet localis praesentiae imaginatio. Nam cum signa hic in mundo sint, oculis cernantur, palpentur manibus, Christus, quatenus homo est, non alibi quam in coelo nec aliter quam mente et fidei intelligentia quaerendus est ( 136).
Calvin and Bullinger, “Consensus Tigurinus,” 2016, 40. Article 23 Quod autem carnis suae esu et sanguinis potione, quae hic figurantur, Christus animas nostras per fidem spiritus sui virtute pascit . . . ex carne semel in sacrificium oblata et sanguine in expiationem effusio vitam hauriamus ( 137).
111–12; , 21–22. For further discussion of the Holy Spirit’s activity according to the Consensus, see “For it is God alone who acts by his Spirit; and when he employs the service of the sacraments he neither infuses his own power into them nor does he derogate in any respect from the efficacy of his Spirit.” Calvin and Bullinger, “Consensus Tigurinus,” 2016, 38. Article 12 Deus enim solus est, qui spiritu suo agit et, quod sacramentorum ministerio utitur, in eo neque vim illis suam infundit nec spiritus sui efficatiae quicquam derogat ( 131) and “For as he enlightens in faith none but those whom he has preordained unto life, so by the secret agency of his Spirit he brings about that the elect actually receive what the sacraments offer.” Calvin and Bullinger, “Consensus Tigurinus,” 2016, 38–39. Article 16 Nam quemadmodum non alios in fidem illuminat, quam quos praeordinavit ad vitam, ita arcana spiritus sui virtute efficit, ut percipiant electi, quod offerunt sacramenta ( 133–34).
Calvin and Bullinger, “Consensus Tigurinus,” 2016, 40. Article 24 vel coelesti eius gloriae detrahunt vel veritati humanae eius naturae minus sunt consentanea ( 137).
Calvin and Bullinger, “Consensus Tigurinus,” 2016, 41. Article 25 Ac ne qua ambiguitas restet, cum in coelo quaerendum Christum esse dicimus, haec loquutio locorum distantiam nobis sonat et exprimit. Tametsi enim philosophice loquendo supra coelos locus non est, quia tamen corpus Christi, ut fert humani corporis natura et modus, finitum est, et coelo ut loco continetur, necesse est a nobis tanto locorum intervallo distare, quantum coelum abest a terra ( 138).
91–92.
, 45.
John Calvin, Commentarii in Pauli Epistolas Ad Galatas Ad Ephesios Ad Philippenses Ad Colossenses, ed. Helmut Feld, Ioannis Calvini Opera Exegetica, II (Genéve: Librairie Droz, 1992), 16:227.
Cees Leijenhorst, “Place, Space and Matter in Calvinist Physics,” Monist 84, no. 4 (October 2001): 524.
Respectively, 53; , 264; John Calvin and Heinrich Bullinger, “Consensus Tigurinus (1549),” in Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation, ed. James T. Dennison Jr., trans. I. D. Bunting (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformed Heritage Books, 2008), 1:545.
The concept of a vacuum or void space was a controversial and hotly debated issue in medieval and early modern physics. See Edward Grant, Much Ado about Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
118–20.