Today’s Readings Podcast Description

“This is my body.” Luther wrote it on the table at Marburg and would not move. Zwingli would not grant that a true human body can sit in heaven and lie in a thousand pieces of bread. The split was not over the Mass as sacrifice. On that they agreed with Calvin: Christ offered himself once; the Church does not buy God with a new victim.

What Zwingli actually taught is thinner than Luther and thicker than the later slogan “mere memorial.” The bread signifies. The flesh of John 6:63 cannot give life to the soul; the Spirit does. Eating the body is trusting the death. Yet late Zwingli still said there is no Lord’s Supper unless Christ is present—host and feast—eaten sacramentally and spiritually by a believing mind, not carnally in the mouth of the unworthy. The table is the Church’s public pledge and thanksgiving, a wedding ring that seals the union it is not. Calvin kept the finite humanity and tried to restore a real feeding on flesh and blood by the Spirit. That is the map under today’s reading: table, not altar; praise, not propitiation; one priest, not a thousand.

Today’s Readings:

John Calvin — Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, Chapter 18, Sections 12–17 (with a brief orientation to Zwingli’s eucharistic theology)

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