Lift up your hearts!

Reformed sacramentology is more interesting than you think

It is rather popular, both in the Lutheran circles in which I grew up and in the Anglican circles I now inhabit, to speak dismissively of Reformed sacramental theology, especially concerning the Eucharist. “We believe in the Real Presence” - you can hear the capital letters - “and they think they’re just having a memorial meal.” “We’re truly receiving Jesus in the Supper, they’re just eating bread and drinking wine” (or, in a North American context, juice). Sometimes their anemic sacramentology is alleged to place Reformed Protestants outside historic Christianity; the argument is that the Reformed reduce a central means by which God extends grace to us to a rather boring, empty ordinance which we perform for God.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I actually read Calvin on the Lord’s Supper in Book IV of the Institutes for the first time! Here was a sophisticated and moving, robustly Trinitarian doctrine of the Eucharist. Calvin takes great pains to make clear that the Eucharist is not a bare sign of Christian obedience or belonging but instead was a moment in which (through the Spirit’s power) we feed on the life-giving Body and Blood of Christ. He asserts in his disputes with the Gnesio-Lutherans that the Reformed and Lutherans all agreed that Christ was truly present in the Supper, disagreeing only as to the mode of his presence. Whatever you might say about Calvin, or indeed Calvin’s doctrine of the Supper, the Eucharist is no mere memorial. And as I have read more deeply in the Reformed tradition, I have found that Calvin, if perhaps possessing a particularly beautiful account of the Supper, is by no means alone.

What I want to do here is not to attempt to defend the truth of any one view of the Supper, Reformed or otherwise, over and against the others; such a project is obviously impossible in a little Substack article, and I confess that my preference is for mediating formulae like those of the Leuenberg Concord anyway. My aim is more modest: to offer a few examples to show that sixteenth century Reformed teaching on the Supper is at least interesting, far richer than the caricature that it is often reduced to in anti-Reformed polemic, and closely connected to the history of Christian thought.

There are many facets of the Reformed view of the Supper that I could use to make this case, but I want to focus on one: the place of spiritual ascent in Reformed eucharistic doctrine and spirituality. This theme has been treated fairly extensively in Reformation scholarship (nothing that I’m saying here is particularly novel!) but is often still fairly unknown within the churches.

Where do ideas of ‘ascent’ fit in Reformed eucharistic thought? One way to think about it is that the Reformed want to hold together two truths about the Lord’s Supper.

On one hand, they want to say that in the Supper, the faithful truly feed on the Body and Blood of Christ. Calvin is not the only one to assert that the Reformed and Lutherans agree on the true feeding on Christ’s Body and Blood. The Italian Reformed theologian Girolamo Zanchi, for example, asserts much the same in his Judgement of Girolamo Zanchi Concerning Dissension About the Lord’s Supper (a Latin text that I’ve been working on translating into English with the Wittenberg Center for Reformation Studies). He writes that Lutherans and Reformed agree that the nourishment offered in the Supper is “not a fantastic or imaginary but the true body of Christ and the true blood of Christ.” Given how often people seem to think that when the Reformed talk about a spiritual presence of Christ or spiritual feeding upon Christ in the Eucharist they really mean a less-than-real presence or feeding, this is worth highlighting.

On the other hand, though, the Reformed want to assert that Jesus’ humanity is only present substantially in heaven, where he ascended after his Resurrection. At core, this is about what it means for Jesus to be truly human as well as truly divine. What the Reformed will stress is that if Jesus is truly human, possessing a truly human body, his human nature can only be properly (or substantially) present in that body. If Jesus’ humanity is substantially present at every Eucharistic celebration, or indeed (as some Lutherans argued) is omnipresent, Jesus is no longer really human anymore. In that case, his humanity would be somehow swallowed up by his divinity, because humans have bodies, and human bodies just don’t work like that. It gets articulated in much more complex and technical language, but I think this is the worry at the heart of Reformed objections to Lutheran Christology. They want to preserve rigorously Christ’s humanity, and worry that Lutherans fail to do so.

But this might seem to pose a problem. How can it be that we really, truly feed on Christ’s true body and blood in the Lord’s Supper, if Christ’s body and blood are not here but up in heaven? Here is where ascent comes in: the Reformed answer will be that, through the power of the Holy Spirit, in the Supper we ascend by faith to heaven to be with Christ and feed on his life-giving flesh. Calvin rather famously loved the part of the eucharistic prayer where the minister says to the people “Sursum corda” (typically rendered in English as “lift up your hearts”), because for him this is precisely what the Eucharist is about: a lifting up of our hearts to heaven to feed on Christ there by the Spirit’s power, by which Christ “lift[s] us up to himself.” In “a secret too lofty for either my mind to comprehend or my words to declare,” Calvin writes, Christ “bids me take, eat, and drink his body and blood under the symbols of bread and wine. I do not doubt that he himself truly presents them, and that I receive them” - all this spiritually, and by the Spirit’s power.

We see much the same in the Italian reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli’s famous 1548 Oxford Treatise and Disputation, where the Italian exile in England debates transubstantiation. Writing against adoration of the elements, he writes that “in adoration the mind should not turn to the symbols,” but rather during the communion rite he “does well” who “turns his mind to adore Christ reigning in heaven.” Chrysostom is particularly important to his account; he writes that the great patristic thinker and preacher “took all possible care to shift the minds of the communicants from crass signs and outward symbols to meditation on things heavenly and divine,” teaching “how we are to ascend to heaven when we communicate.” It is not that the bread and wine are unimportant they; are for Vermigli as well as for Calvin instruments of our reception of Christ’s Body and Blood. As Vermigli puts it, the Spirit uses them “as instruments to better impress faith in our minds.” But in a way they are used to be transcended, material signs given to lead us to the immaterial: “we should draw our mind away from earthly elements to the body and blood of Christ in heaven”, Vermigli writes, to such an extent that we might say that the bread and wine do not even exist in comparison to the glory of Christ’s heavenly presence.

This Spirit-aided movement from this material world of flux to the more real immaterial world, a movement that uses material things to aid a movement inward and upward away from materiality, should sound familiar to historians of Christian spirituality. Specifically, it sounds a lot like many mystical accounts of the soul’s ascent to God, especially Augustinian-inflected ones. Now, I want to be careful here: my point is not necessarily that the Reformed view of the Supper is “mystical” or that everyone who participated in it was a “mystic.” But it does indicate a shared Scriptural, theological, and philosophical background - especially that of Christian Neoplatonism. Augustine, after all, discusses both in his description of mystical visions in the Confessions and in his treatment of the soul’s ascent in De Trinitate, a move away from the material to the spiritual. Even Pseudo-Dionysius - who was rather ill-loved by many early Protestants - talks about the point of sensible symbols in the liturgy (including the bread and wine of the Synaxis) being means to lead us from the material to the intelligible! David Bentley Hart titled a well-known article, “The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients.” DBH might be aghast at the comparison, but it strikes me that the Reformed entirely agree - and that this is key to understanding their view of Communion.

Again, my point in all this is not to prove that the Reformed view is correct. But it is to say that (whatever else it is) it isn’t boring! This isn’t a simple, bare eating of bread and wine — no, this is a drama of spiritual ascent, of the Spirit lifting the faithful to heaven to feed on Christ in their hearts by faith, with thanksgiving (as the prayerbook has it), a feeding that is not less real than physical eating but more real than it! Lifted up to heaven, adoring in mind and heart the risen and ascended Christ, worshippers enjoy a foretaste of the heavenly feast where they will rejoice in God’s presence for all eternity. As Richard Hooker, that great exponent of a high Reformed account of the Eucharist, writes in the Lawes: “why should any cogitation possesse the minde of a faithfull communicant but this, O my God thou are true, O my soule thou art happie?”