A Formula for Parish Practice

Using the Formula of Concord in Congregations

Timothy J. Wengert

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781506427034
• eBook ISBN: 9781506427041
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Reference

This book combines a rich description of the (Lutheran) Formula of Concord (1577) with experiences in today's Lutheran parishes to demonstrate how confessional texts may still come to life in modern Christian congregations. Timothy Wengert takes the Formula of Concord, traditionally used as ammunition in doctrinal disagreements, back to its historical home, the local congregation, giving pastors, students, and theologians a glimpse into the original debates over each article.

The most up-to-date English commentary on the Formula of Concord, A Formula for Parish Practice provides helpful, concise descriptions of key theological debates and a unique weaving of historical and textual commentary with modern Lutheran experience. Covering the entire Formula of Concord the book includes discussion questions at the end of each chapter.

Article Seven (Part One)

When Jesus Throws a Party,
He Shows Up (the Real Presence)

She was one of the smartest children I ever confirmed. At the time, however, she was only in fifth grade, daughter of an oil hauler and the town’s first-grade teacher. Like almost every other child her age, Michelle was eager to attend classes to learn more about the Lord’s Supper in anticipation of receiving the sacrament on Maundy Thursday of Holy Week. It was always a special event. For the first time the children had their pastor as a teacher. We would meet three times and cover worksheets that explained the names for the Eucharist, sample the bread and wine, and, especially, learn what the Supper was. As the Small Catechism states, they discovered that the Sacrament of the Altar “is the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ under the bread and wine, instituted by Christ himself for us Christians to eat and to drink,” and that the benefits are “forgiveness of sin, life, and salvation” (Lord’s Supper, 2 and 6, in BC 2000, 362).

Without fail I would instruct the children that there were two questions one could ask about Christ’s presence. First, how do we know Christ is present in the Supper? Answer: he promises to show up (“This is my body”). The second question — how is Christ present in the Supper? — I explained, is the only question they’ll ever hear whose correct answer is “I don’t know.” After three weeks of instruction I visited each family so that the parents could hear what their children had learned and give their blessing to their children’s participation in the Supper. (It was actually simply a sneaky way to instruct the parents. After hearing his daughter Abbie answer my questions to her, her father Dave exclaimed, “She knows more than I do!” — which was the point.)

As one might imagine, Michelle knew all the answers. Six names for the meal, facts about the Last Supper, how Jesus had promised to show up — all these answers and more came tumbling off her lips. Then I asked, “How is Jesus present?” Silence. I prodded (shame on me!), “Come on, Michelle, this is important!” Her fair skin began to redden. Mom and Dad leaned forward. Finally, she blurted out, “Pastor Tim, I don’t know!” “Right answer, Michelle,” I responded, and she just groaned.

History

What Michelle did not know was that she had (finally) given the same answer Luther gave in his 1529 debate with Ulrich Zwingli. The two reformers, from Wittenberg in Saxony and Zürich in Switzerland, respectively, had been waging a paper war over the presence of Christ in the Supper since 1525. Zwingli had insisted that the words “This is my body” meant “This signifies my body” or “This is a sign of my body,” because the finite bread cannot contain the infinite Christ. Paraphrasing John 6:63 (to some degree in line with Platonic philosophy’s distinction between matter and spirit), Zwingli argued that “the flesh” of Christ in the sacrament “was of no avail; the spirit makes alive.” His colleague from Basel, John Oecolampadius (the Greek form of his German name, Hausschein), added the argument that Christ’s body could not be present in the meal because it had ascended to the right hand of God. When the landgrave of Hesse, Prince Philip, in an effort to resolve the conflict and insure a united political front against the emperor, Charles V, summoned the theologians to his castle in Marburg in early October 1529, the debate took place. Zwingli kept asking Luther to explain how Christ was present in the bread and wine. Luther responded, “Don’t ask me mathematical (or: geometrical) questions!” That is, to the question “How is Christ present?” Luther responded, “I don’t know.”

It is not as if Lutherans were unable to dream up responses from physics or philosophy. Although Luther dismissed transubstantiation as too complicated and an unnecessary importation of Aristotle into theology, one could — by his lights foolishly — try to explain Christ’s presence in the following way. Aristotle had said that everything is made up of qualities (accidentia) that change and quiddities (essences; substantia) that do not. In the Lord’s Supper the “accidents” or appearance of the bread and wine remains while the “substance” changes into Christ’s body and blood (hence: transubstantiation). This theory had become the official doctrine of the Roman Church in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council. Luther preferred the duck test (“If it looks like bread, tastes like bread, and feels like bread, it is bread”) and simply argued that Christ is present “in” the bread or (in language closer to that of Roman doctrine) “under” (the form of) the bread.

At one point, when pressed by Zwingli in writing, Luther did speculate about how one might answer the “how” question using nominalist philosophy, in which he had been trained at the university. God’s presence is such that all of God can be in a single walnut shell and leave room for the nut, and yet, at the same time, the entire universe cannot contain God. In any case, as Luther consistently argued, God’s “right hand,” to which Christ ascended, is not a place. In the Scripture it is always a metaphor for God’s power and rule. Human rules of time and place simply do not apply there. The point is that when God makes a promise (“This is my body”), God shows up. Leave the physics to God!

Although Zwingli and Luther reached an impasse at Marburg, the prince asked Luther to compose a set of articles of faith. Of the fifteen articles, only the one on the Lord’s Supper could not be agreed on. Even there, however, the reformers agreed, in opposition to Roman Catholic teaching, that the Lord’s Supper was not a sacrifice to God by the priest, that both bread and wine should be offered to all who commune, and that receiving the Supper in faith was central to the Supper’s purpose. Only on the question of Christ’s presence was there disagreement.

In 1531 Zwingli and Oecolampadius, the main disputants with Luther, died, and an opportunity arose for rapprochement. One participant at Marburg, Martin Bucer, the reformer in Strasbourg (then a part of the empire, now in France), had been impressed enough with Luther’s arguments to contact Melanchthon for further discussion. Bucer worried that the Wittenbergers’ insistence on the “real presence” of Christ’s body and blood “in” or “under” the elements of bread and wine would lead to a worship of the bread apart from its use in the Supper (Christ trapped in the bread) and to a return to the Roman “sacrifice of the Mass.” He also thought that while believers might receive Christ’s body and blood in the Supper, the ungodly were not worthy to receive it and did not. Negotiations finally led to a dramatic 1536 meeting in Wittenberg between Bucer, accompanied by other pastors from southern Germany, and Luther and his colleagues. After some tense moments, both sides agreed that Christ’s body and blood were received “with” the bread and wine and that, in order that our faith might not undermine Christ’s promise, all participants, whether worthy or not, received Christ. This Wittenberg Concord was so important that forty years later the concordists quoted it in the Solid Declaration. “With the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ are truly and essentially present, distributed, and received.” This does not mean “that the body and blood of Christ are localiter, that is, spatially enclosed in the bread or are permanently united in some other way apart from reception.” Finally, the power or effectiveness of the sacrament “does not rest upon . . . the worthiness or unworthiness of the one who receives it” (SD VII.12–16, in BC 2000, 595–96).

With this agreement relative peace returned to the Protestant side. On this basis both Bucer and an exiled French pastor serving the French-speaking refugees in Strasbourg, John Calvin, were able to subscribe to the Augsburg Confession (albeit an officially altered version that spoke of Christ’s presence “with the bread”). To be sure, some Swiss cities, especially Bern and Zürich, refused to accept the Wittenberg Concord and continued to teach that Christ was not present in the meal but that it was a memorial of Christ’s death where “Christ’s body” was the assembled congregation of believers, which feeds on Christ spiritually by faith. Granted, there were tensions among the agreeing parties. In the 1540s Luther was heard to complain about Bucer’s views and seemed even to support transubstantiation in a letter to Christians in Venice, turning his ire toward the intransigent Swiss cities and their pastors in a 1544 tract on the subject. Some questioned Melanchthon’s position, which differed somewhat from Luther’s. (See the historical section on article 7, part 2.)

After Luther’s death real trouble broke out in Hamburg. In 1552 a pastor there, Joachim Westphal, who had studied in Wittenberg under Melanchthon and Luther, became concerned about Calvin’s understanding of the Lord’s Supper. Three years earlier, in 1549, Calvin had entered into an agreement with the successors to Zwingli in Zürich, notably the chief pastor, Heinrich Bullinger. In this so-called Zürich Consensus, published in 1551, Calvin had moderated his understanding of Christ’s effective presence to accommodate the spiritualizing views of the Zürich theologians. In 1552 Westphal collected what he considered suspicious statements from the consensus and other sources, and followed it the next year with a thoroughgoing commentary on the biblical passages, attacking Calvin in the process. Calvin returned the favor with published condemnations of Westphal, calling him a bread worshiper and hoping for a united Lutheran attack on the Hamburg pastor. In private correspondence Melanchthon, too, was contemptuous of Westphal’s position, but he never publicly supported Calvin (with whom he also did not fully agree), something his students would do a decade later.

Neither side fully appreciated the other. Calvin held that the person of Christ was present at the Lord’s Supper but not trapped in the bread and wine. Instead the Holy Spirit gathered our spirits by faith to God’s right hand, where the communicants fed on Christ by faith. Westphal, on the contrary, reproduced Luther’s position quite accurately. Christ’s body and blood are truly present under the forms of bread and wine. Calvin mistakenly thought Westphal believed in consubstantiation, where the bread’s substance is joined to the substance of Christ’s body in a permanent manner. Westphal imagined that Calvin denied Christ’s presence with the meal, as had Zwingli.

In 1555 a similar dispute broke out in Bremen, another important maritime trading center in northern Germany with close ties to Hamburg. In this case Johann Timann and Albert Hardenberg came into open conflict when Timann published an attack on the Polish-born John à Lasco, a friend of Hardenberg whose theology matched Calvin’s. Here the dispute focused more on the christological question (cf. article 8). Was it correct to say that Christ’s humanity, by virtue of the union between Christ’s human and divine natures, was everywhere (and thus capable of being in the Supper)? Hardenberg thought this destroyed the integrity of Christ’s humanity (since a property of human beings is to be in a single place). Like Melanchthon, he deeply distrusted the notion of the “ubiquity” (ability to be everywhere) of Christ’s body and blood and the way Timann described how Christ’s human and divine attributes were in communion with each other. Timann and his supporters insisted that Christ’s body and blood were present in and with the bread and wine, and they felt they were using orthodox Christian distinctions to defend their positions. Among others who later came to Timann’s defense were Johann Brenz, the reformer of Württemberg, and Martin Chemnitz, then a pastor in the city of Braunschweig. The latter’s views of Christ’s presence, arising from his study of the Bible, the church fathers, and Luther, came to shape fundamentally the text of the Formula of Concord.

A third controversy broke out in Heidelberg and involved a former student of Melanchthon, Tileman Hesshus. When the principality of the Rhenish Palatinate accepted the Reformation in the late 1550s, Hesshus, at Melanchthon’s recommendation, became chief professor of theology at its university in Heidelberg. Immediately a fight broke out there between Hesshus and several clergy over the nature of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper. Hesshus, although skeptical about certain claims regarding ubiquity, insisted on Christ’s real presence in the Supper, stating at one point that “the bread is the true body of Christ.” Melanchthon, when asked by the Palatine elector for an opinion, rejected both the Bremen church’s claim that the bread is the substantial body of Christ and Hesshus’s position. He preferred the language of 1 Corinthians 10:16, namely, that the bread is the koinonia or association with the body of Christ, which happens only in its proper use (see article 7, part 2). He rejected the notion of the ubiquity of Christ’s body and criticized Hesshus for rejecting the use of the patristic word “symbol” (as in “the bread and wine are symbols of the body and blood”).

As a result of Melanchthon’s letter, both Hesshus and his chief opponent were removed from office. However, they were soon replaced by Zacharias Ursinus and Caspar Olevianus, both Reformed (Calvinist) theologians who helped write the important Reformed statement of faith, the Heidelberg Catechism. Melanchthon died in 1560, but when his letter to the elector became public, he was roundly attacked posthumously by many Gnesio-Lutherans. In the 1560s attempts at rapprochement between the various parties, led by Jakob Andreae, a disciple of Brenz, failed, among other reasons because the Reformed theologians of Heidelberg insisted that the finite bread was not capable of bearing the infinite Christ.

Finally, when in the late 1560s the Wittenberg theological faculty started criticizing theologians like Andreae and Brenz for their insistence on Christ’s ubiquity, suspicions began to arise regarding the Wittenbergers’ fidelity to Lutheran teaching. While someone like Chemnitz thought he was faithfully developing Luther and Melanchthon’s eucharistic theology, theologians at Wittenberg began to take Melanchthon’s position in a quite different direction. A series of documents produced by the Wittenbergers in the late 1560s and early 1570s revealed these shifts, albeit hidden under an insistence on their fidelity to Lutheran theology. Although earlier scholars labeled the work of these theologians, which included Melanchthon’s son-in-law Caspar Peucer, crypto-Calvinist, a more accurate designation may be crypto-Philippist: “crypto” because of the concealed nature of their position, and “Philippist” because they thought they were developing the consequences of Melanchthon’s perspective. In essence they denied any real “communication of attributes” between the two natures of Christ (see article 8) and insisted more and more on a spiritualized presence of Christ in the Supper, since Christ’s humanity had ascended to the right hand of God in heaven. Initially protected by the Saxon elector, August, who refused to believe they were not Lutheran, they quickly lost favor and were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy in 1574 when a misdirected letter by one of the main supporters of this position, critical of the elector’s wife, became public. Two died in prison; Peucer was released after a decade of captivity. With the collapse of crypto-Philippism in Saxony, the stage was set for the development of the Formula of Concord.

The Heart of the Matter

Each year, in the required course on the Lutheran Confessions at the seminary, we spend a good deal of time on the Lord’s Supper and the disputes over it during the Reformation. One year two students who had become Lutherans later in life happened to be sitting across from each other in a discussion session. Both admitted that, although they had been members of Lutheran congregations for five and fifteen-plus years, respectively, only in my course on the Confessions had they discovered that Lutherans believe in Christ’s real presence in the sacrament.

Now, the first thought of this professor of Lutheran Confessions and editor of The Book of Concord was, predictably, to demand the names and addresses of their pastors in order to read them the riot act. That did not happen. However, a second reaction prevailed. Think of the pastoral effect! Imagine receiving the Lord’s Supper for all those years and never knowing the comfort of Christ’s presence and the gifts of forgiveness, life, and salvation that his presence brings. The heart of Christ’s presence is not a doctrine, it is a promise: “Here I am for you.” Never to hear that promise spoken directly to you personally and communally to the entire group would be the greatest tragedy of all. That is why Lutherans are so adamant about this point in their discussions with other Christians. What matters most to us is just this: Christ promises to show up. His body and blood are truly present with the bread and wine. What could be more glorious, more comforting than that?

Every year, prior to confirmation, the education committee and I would interview each confirm and to determine what he or she had learned. One young woman, unlike Michelle, had clearly not learned very much, or so it seemed, judging from her inability to answer our questions. Perhaps it was nerves (her mother was on the committee), or perhaps she was just not very keen on the subject. Finally, out of desperation, I asked, “Didn’t you learn anything, Joanne?” She paused; her eyes filled with tears, and she recounted this one thing. “You told us one time that our altar rail [modeled, as it happened, after those in many Scandinavian immigrant churches] was in the shape of a half-circle because the other half was in heaven, and Christ is in the center both here and there.” Tears began to role down her carefully made-up cheeks. “Ever since my grandpa died last February, I remember that.” A confession of faith by the Saxon church in 1551 made this very point. The Lord’s Supper is both intensely individual (“not just for others, but for you”) and intensely communal (it is the church’s meal). Perhaps that Scandinavian altar rail in a semicircle, in which a copy of the famous statue of the welcoming Christ in the Copenhagen cathedral often graces the altar, can remind us of that fact. “Here I am, for you all and for you individually.” What matters is the presence of the living Christ with the bread and wine, binding us all together in heaven and on earth.

The Text of the Epitome

Concerning the Holy Supper of Christ

[1] Although those who teach Zwinglian doctrine are not to be counted among the theologians of the Augsburg Confession — since they separated themselves from this confession immediately, at the time it was presented — we, nonetheless, want to report on this controversy because they are insinuating themselves and spreading their error under the name of this Christian confession.

Status controversiae

The Chief Issue between Us and the
Teaching of the Sacramentarians on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Article One
• Article Two
• Article Three
• Article Four
• Article Five
• Article Six
• Article Seven (Part One)
• Article Seven (Part Two)
• Article Eight
• Article Nine
• Article Ten
• Article Eleven
• Article Twelve
• Glossary
• Index