Miscellany #6

On Reformed Eucharistic theology, Protestant exegesis & the literal sense, a conference recap, and more!

Apologies, friends - my conference schedule this month has thrown off my writing schedule a bit, and as a result I’m getting a few of my October pieces in just under the wire. So here is the end-of-month round up miscellany post!

More on Reformed Eucharistic theology

Thanks for the wonderful comments on yesterday’s piece about Reformed views of the Supper. A few people mentioned something that I thought was worth highlighting: it is not only anti-Reformed Lutherans or Anglicans who fail to rightly understand historic Reformed communion doctrine; many churches which claim the name ‘Reformed’ do the same! Part of this might be attributable to the highly selective appropriation of Reformed theology, and Calvin in particular, among many contemporary Baptists and nondenominational Protestants, in which “Calvinism” is reducible to TULIP and nothing more. But it is worth noting that the problem is older than, say, the popularity of the ‘Young, Restless and Reformed’ movement: the nineteenth century debates between John Williamson Nevin and Charles Hodge were in large part due to the former’s attempt to rescue Reformed sacramental theology from the oblivion to which it had been consigned. And so perhaps those of us who want to argue that the Reformed view is a rich and beautiful account of how God uses water, bread, and wine as instruments of grace do have to admit that Reformed views of the sacraments seem prone to decaying into a mere memorialism. This doesn’t mean that such views are wrong, of course, but it seems worth thinking about why it happens, and does raise the question of how those committed to Reformed sacramental teaching can mitigate against such characteristic damage (to borrow Lauren Winner’s term).