Nevin’s Appropriation of and Departure from Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology
Randall C. Zachman
A paper given at the 2025 Mercersburg Convocation, June 2-3, 2025, and published in the New Mercersburg Review.
This article will consider the different ways John Williamson Nevin, a prominent theologian in the Mercersburg movement, attempted to restore the Eucharist to what he insisted was its central place in the life of the Protestant, and especially the Reformed, Church in America, and the role played by the Eucharistic theology of John Calvin in that process. Nevin made two distinct attempts to restore the Eucharist to its central place in the Reformed Church, one doctrinal and the other liturgical. His first attempt took place in 1846 in The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, where he attempted to restore the centrality of the Eucharist doctrinally. In this phase, Nevin faithfully appropriates the Eucharistic theology of John Calvin, grounded in Calvin’s understanding of our mystical union with Christ, even as he attempts to update Calvin’s theology for the nineteenth century. The second attempt took place in 1862 in The Liturgical Question, which is Nevin’s defense of the revised liturgy of Holy Communion for the German Reformed Church. In this phase, Nevin comes into direct conflict with Calvin’s understanding and practice of the Lord’s Supper, even as he appeals to Calvin’s understanding of the mystical presence of Christ in the process. Nevin claims that the mystical presence of Christ in the Eucharist necessitates the presence of priest, altar and sacrifice, whereas Calvin claims that priest, altar and sacrifice abolish the mystical presence of Christ.
- Restoring Calvin’s Doctrine of the Supper to the Reformed Church in America.
Turning first to the doctrinal attempt, Nevin insists that the Eucharist is the central fact of Christianity, such that one’s view of the Lord’s Supper will directly affect the way one views both the person of Christ and the Church.[1] Moreover, the doctrine of the Eucharist is one of the most important topics in the whole history of religion, as it focuses on the mystical union of the believer with Christ.
It may be regarded indeed as in some sense central to the whole Christian system. For Christianity is grounded in the living union of the believer with the person of Christ; and this great fact is emphatically concentrated in the mystery of the Lord’s Supper; which has always been clothed on this very account, to the consciousness of the Church, with a character of sanctity and solemnity, surpassing that of any other Christian institution.[2]
Nevin also claims that there is an instinct in the religious nature of human beings in general that leads them to feel and apprehend the central importance of the Eucharist to the religious life of humanity.
The solemn circumstances in which it was originally instituted, the light in which it has always been regarded in the Church, and the very instinct, we may say, of our religious nature itself, which no rationalism can effectually suppress, all conspire to show, that it forms the inmost sanctuary of religion, and the most direct and close approach we are ever called to make into the divine presence.[3]
Accordingly, Nevin claims that the Eucharist gives a visible representation of the heart of Christianity. “The mystery of Christianity is here concentrated into a single visible transaction, by which it is made as it were transparent to the senses, and caused to pass before us in immediate living representation.”[4]
Given his understanding of the centrality of the Eucharist to our relationship with God in general, and its role in Christianity in particular, it is easy to see why Nevin was alarmed by what he considered to be the “falling away” of the Protestant, and especially the Reformed, Church from the Reformed and Reformation doctrine of the Eucharist. “Never was there a time when it was more important, that this Church should understand and fulfill her own mission; and in no part of the world perhaps is this more needed than just here in America, where the tendency to undervalue all that is sacramental and objective in religion, has become unhappily so strong.”[5] Nevin was especially concerned with what he took to be the Puritan understanding of the Supper, as represented by his formed teacher at Princeton, Charles Hodge. Nevin thought that the Puritans went too far in expunging the doctrine of transubstantiation from the Church in America. “To clear ourselves of transubstantiation and the mass, is it necessary that we should strip the sacrament of all mystery, and refuse to allow it any objective force whatever?”[6] Given the interrelationship noted above between the doctrine of the Supper and the doctrines regarding Christ and the Church, it is not surprising to find Nevin claiming: “Low views of the sacrament betray invariably a low view of the mystery of the incarnation itself, and a low view of the Church also.”[7] Nevin is also alarmed that the Puritans are breaking all relationship with the Lutherans in their low view of the Eucharist, as though the Reformed Church represents the entirety of Protestant Christianity.[8] Moreover, the Puritans lose all contact with the early Church, and therefore threaten the catholicity of Reformed doctrine.[9] Nevin sees in the Puritans the same removal of all mystery from the Church that he sees in the Rationalists of his day, and which he also sees reflected in the falling away from the Eucharist in the Methodists, Arminians, Socinians, Baptists, and Quakers.[10]
- The Doctrines of the Eucharist in the Reformation.
In order to understand Nevin’s concern with the loss of the Reformation’s doctrine of the Eucharist, it would be helpful to review the different views of the Supper that emerged from the Reformation, focusing on the relationship between the sign and the reality signified. For Rome, the sign is the appearance of bread and wine, and the thing signified is the body and blood of Christ which is substantially present under the appearance of bread and wine. The sacrament benefits those who partake of it in a state of grace, feeding them unto eternal life. “In the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist, are contained truly, really, and substantially, the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and consequently the whole Christ.”[11] The Mass as sacrifice, offered by the priest on the altar, also benefits those for whom it is offered as a propitiatory sacrifice, be they living or dead. “The sacrifice of the mass is not only a sacrifice of praise and of thanksgiving; or, a commemoration of the sacrifice consummated on the cross, but it is a propitiatory sacrifice that ought to be offered for the living and the dead for sins, pains, satisfactions, and other necessities.”[12]
For Martin Luther, the sign of the sacrament is the body and blood of Christ, whereas the reality signified is the promise of the forgiveness of sins, which is the opposite of a sacrifice we would offer to God.
According to its substance, therefore, the mass is nothing but the aforesaid words of Christ: “Take and eat, etc.” [Matt. 26:26], as if he were saying: “Behold, O sinful and condemned man, out of the pure and unmerited love with which I love you, and by the will of the Father of mercies [2 Cor. 1:3], apart from any merit or desire of yours, I promise you in these words the forgiveness of all your sins and life everlasting. And that you may be absolutely certain of this irrevocable promise of mine, I shall give my body and pour out my blood, confirming the promise by my very death, and leaving you my body and blood as a sign and memorial of this same promise. As often as you partake of them, remember me, proclaim and praise my love and bounty towards you, and give thanks.”[13]
When a believer eats and drinks the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine, she is personally assured of the forgiveness of her sins.
When I preach his death, it is in a public service to a congregation, in which I am addressing myself to no one individually; whoever grasps it, grasps it. But when I distribute the sacrament, I designate it for the individual who is receiving it; I give him Christ’s body and blood that he may have the forgiveness of sins, obtained through his death and preached to the congregation.[14]
For Ulrich Zwingli, the sign is the bread and wine, and the thing signified is the giving of the Son for us in his death. Grace is not to be sought in the sacrament, but only in the death of Christ.
To eat the body of Christ spiritually is equivalent to trusting with heart and soul upon the mercy and goodness of God through Christ, that is, to have the assurance of an unbroken faith that God will give us the forgiveness of sins and the joy of eternal salvation for the sake of his Son, who gave himself for us and reconciled the divine righteousness to us. For what can he withhold from us when he delivered up his only-begotten Son?[15]
When you eat and drink the bread and wine, you give thanks for the handing over of the Son for sinners, for with the Son God will give you everything else. “Christ wished to have a joyful commemoration of himself by this supper and thanks given publicly for the blessing which he has bountifully bestowed upon us. For the Eucharist is a thanksgiving.”[16]
For John Calvin, the sign is the bread and wine, and the thing signified is the body and blood of Christ. When you eat and drink the bread and wine, Christ through the Spirit offers himself to you, his own body and blood, to be the food and drink for your soul unto eternal life.
“Pious souls can derive great confidence and delight from this sacrament, as being a testimony that they form one body with Christ, so that everything which is his they may call their own.”[17]
The Supper both represents and presents the body and blood of Christ to the believer, to be received by faith. “I admit, indeed, that the breaking of bread is a symbol, not the reality. But this being admitted, we duly infer from the exhibition of the symbol that the thing itself is exhibited.”[18] However, the reality represented and offered in the Supper must be sought in heaven, with the help of the sacrament as a vehicle or ladder, through the work of the Holy Spirit, following the exhortation of the early Eucharistic liturgy to “lift up your hearts.” “They are greatly mistaken in imagining that there is no presence of the flesh of Christ in the Supper, unless it be placed in the bread. They thus leave nothing for the secret operation of the Spirit, which unites Christ himself to us. Christ does not seem to them to be present unless he descends to us, as if we did not equally gain his presence when he raises us to himself.”[19]
- The authoritative Eucharistic doctrine of John Calvin.
According to Nevin, the Eucharistic doctrine of the Reformed Church view is authoritatively stated and interpreted by John Calvin. “No authority in the case can be entitled to greater respect. He was emphatically the great theologian of his age. On this point, moreover, he is clearly the organ and interpreter of the mind of the church, in whose bosom he stood.”[20] In contrast, Nevin attempts to marginalize the influence of Ulrich Zwingli on the Reformed understanding of the Supper. “It is not necessary that we should trouble ourselves much, in the present inquiry, about the opinions of Zuingli or Oecolampadius. . . . The relation of Zwingli to the proper life of the Reformed Church, must be allowed to have been exceedingly external and accidental.”[21] It seems to me that Nevin creates a major problem here in his interpretation of the Reformed doctrine of the Eucharist. Nevin does not seem to realize that he is not only opposing Puritans, whom he accuses of falling away from Reformed doctrine; he is also opposing one of the major sources and authorities of Reformed doctrine, from whom Puritans like Hodge are explicitly drawing. Nevin wants to reduce the Reformed tradition to Calvin; Hodge wants to reduce it to Zwingli. They are both wrong. The Reformed tradition contains two distinct understandings of the Eucharist, with the dominant understanding coming from Zwingli, and the minority understanding coming from Calvin.
In light of the authority he grants to Calvin, Nevin develops five principles that should guide any Reformed doctrine of the Supper. First, “the communion of the believer with Christ in the Supper is taken to be specific in its nature, and different from all that has place in the common exercises of worship.”[22] In particular, the presence of Christ in the Supper is different from the presence of Christ in preaching. Second, “the sacramental transaction is a mystery; nay, in some sense an actual miracle. The Spirit works here in a way that transcends, not only the human understanding, but the ordinary course of the world in every other view.”[23] We can see in this principle Nevin’s rejection of the Rationalist attempt to remove all mystery from the Christian life. Third, “the old Reformed doctrine includes always the idea of an objective force in the sacraments.”[24] The force of the sacraments is something faith receives, not something it creates. Fourth, and most importantly,
the doctrine proceeds on the assumption, that the Christian salvation stands in an actual union between Christ and his people, mystical but in the highest sense real, in virtue of which they are closely joined to him, as the limbs are to the head in the natural body. They are in him, and He is in them, not figuratively but truly; in the way of a growing process that will become complete finally in the resurrection. The power of this fact is mysteriously concentrated in the Holy Supper. Here Christ communicates himself to his Church.[25]
Finally, the fifth principle insists on the central role of the human nature of Christ in the Supper.
“In the old Reformed view of the Lord’s Supper, the communion of the believer in the true Person of Christ, in the form now stated, is supposed to hold with him especially as the Word made flesh. His humanity forms the medium of his union with the Church.”[26]
With regard to the first principle, it is not clear to me that Nevin fully understands or appreciates the central role of preaching in Calvin’s theology. In contrast to Nevin, Calvin does equate the self-giving of Christ in preaching with the self-giving of Christ in the Supper. Speaking of Christ as the bread of life, Calvin says:
Wherefore he once gave himself that he might become bread, when he gave himself to be crucified for the redemption of the world; and he gives himself daily, when in the word of the gospel he offers himself to be partaken by us, inasmuch as he was crucified, when he seals that offer by the sacred mystery of the Supper, and when he accomplishes inwardly what he externally designates.[27]
It also seems to me that Nevin might emphasize the objective force of the sacraments more than Calvin does. Calvin tends to locate the force of the sacraments in the Spirit, and not in the sacraments themselves.
- Nevin’s five principles guiding the Reformed doctrine of the Supper.
Over and above the five principles that Nevin develops from Calvin’s Eucharistic theology, he develops five more principles of his own that should guide the doctrine of the Reformed Church in America of his day. First, Nevin draws a clear line between the affections generated by participation in the Supper, and the force of the sacrament itself.
A gracious state, accompanied with gracious affections in the transaction itself, is the indispensable condition of a profitable approach to the Lord in the holy sacrament. And yet, as before said, it is not our faith at all that gives the sacrament its force; nor does this consist at all in the actings of our faith, or penitence, or love, or any other gracious affection, that may be called into existence at the time. These constitute not, and create not, the presence of Christ in the case. On the contrary, the presence forms the ground from which all such affections draw their activity and strength. The force of the sacrament is in the sacrament itself.[28]
The one affect that Nevin always links with the Supper is solemnity, but unlike Calvin and Zwingli, he does not see the response of gratitude to be an essential part of the sacrament.
Second, as we have seen, Nevin wants the Church to see the doctrine of the Supper in the context of the system of truth found in the Bible. “The view we have already taken then, of the new creation in Christ Jesus, and his mystical relation to the Church, has all served only to open the way for placing the ordinance in its true and proper light.”[29] Third, Nevin wants the Church to see the doctrine of the Eucharist in light of the longing of humanity for union with God. Nevin echoes Irenaeus and Schleiermacher by seeing human nature as being incomplete until the incarnation of the Word. Thus the incarnation answers a longing built into human nature itself. “Our nature reaches after a true and real union with the nature of God, as the necessary complement and consummation of its own life. The incarnation then is the proper completion of humanity. Christ is the true Ideal Man.”[30] History also longs for the incarnation, especially in light of the fall into sin. “The necessity of a real union with the divine nature, became a necessity at the same time of redemption, the loud cry of suffering humanity after an atonement for sin.The development of this want, might be said to form thus the great burden of history, onward from the fall.”[31] Finally, the history of the religious life of humanity itself reveals the longing for the incarnation and the self-offering of Christ in the Eucharist, for no religion except Christianity can cross the gulf lying between God and humanity. “All [religions] prophesy of Christ; for all proclaim the inmost want of humanity to be a true union with God. . . . All ends in an insurmountable dualism. An impassible gulph continues still to divide the nature of man from the nature of God.”[32] This gulph is only crossed by the incarnation of the Word of God.
Fourth, Nevin insists that the doctrine of the Eucharist must be established on the foundation of the mystical union of the believer with Christ, for the sacrament fosters and increases that union in a unique way, which he takes to be the central point of Calvin’s doctrine.
In full correspondence with this conception of the Christian salvation, as a process in which the believer is mystically inserted more and more into the person of Christ, till he becomes at last fully transformed into his image, it was held that nothing less than such a real participation of his living person is involved always in the right use of the Lord’s Supper.[33]
Nevin insists that this mystical union with Christ is not only with the Holy Spirit, or with his divine nature, “but with Christ himself in his whole living person; so that he may be said to be fed and nourished by his very flesh and blood.”[34] Finally, in keeping with Nevin’s appeal to religious feeling, the doctrine of the Eucharist must satisfy the Christian heart and understanding, which he did not think that the Puritan doctrine was capable of doing. “All true Christians, whatever their theory with regard to the point may be, feelthat their union with Christ is something different than this.”[35]
- Updating Calvin for the nineteenth century: Christ as life-giving Spirit.
Although Nevin upholds the centrality of the mystical union of Christ with believers, which he derives from the theology of Calvin, he seeks to update the way this union takes place so that it is more adequate to the theological sensibilities of the nineteenth century. In particular, Nevin insists that the Spirit does not raise believers up to heaven to commune with Christ’s body and blood there, as Calvin taught. Rather, Christ lives in the Church as Spirit, and unites himself with believers by his Spirit. After the resurrection, the whole person of Christ was lifted up to the sphere of Spirit, and this seems to be Nevin’s understanding of his ascension into heaven. “The Spirit of Christ, in his own person at least, fills the whole man, body and soul. All is spiritual, glorious, heavenly. His whole humanity has been taken up in the sphere of the Spirit, and appears transfigured into the same life.”[36] Nevin develops this insight on the basis of Paul’s provocative claim that the second Adam became a life-giving spirit. “He became for others, what he was thus shown to be within himself (1 Cor. 15:45), a quickening or life-giving spirit; from whom the power of a new creation was to be carried forward under the same form in the world, by the Church.”[37]
Nevin therefore agrees with Calvin that the Spirit is the way that we attain our mystical union with Christ, but he argues that this is because Christ is present to the Church in the form of the Spirit.[38] On the one hand, this means that Christ is present in the Spirit, not in the flesh.[39] On the other hand, Nevin insists that “his Spirit constitutes the very form and power of his own presence as the incarnate and everlasting Word.”[40] Thus the mystical presence of the incarnate Word is the Spirit, which is the self-communication of Christ.
Here then we see the nature of the mystical union, as it holds between Christ and his people. . . . Its sphere is that of the Spirit. In this sphere, however, it is in the highest measure real; far more real, indeed, than it could possibly be under any conceivable form. Christ is not sundered from the Church by the intervention of his Spirit. On the contrary, he is brought nearer to it, and made one with it more intimately, beyond measure, in this way, than if he were still outwardly in the midst of it as in the days of his flesh.[41]
The other modification that Nevin makes to Calvin’s theology is to adopt Schleiermacher’s maxim that the origin of Christianity is supernatural—i.e., the Word of God becoming flesh—but this supernatural origin becomes natural. “The first miracle, and the only miracle, we may say, of Christianity, is the new creation in which it starts. All else is but the natural product and expression of the life, thus introduced into the world. Nothing so natural, as the supernatural itself in the Savior’s person.”[42] It is not entirely clear how this can be the case according to Nevin, since he has nothing like Schleiermacher’s original perfection of humanity by which the supernatural influence of Christ can become natural. But this transition seems to be facilitated by the way in which the incarnation completes both nature and history, in the ways we detailed above. “Christianity forms no violent rupture, either with nature or history. It fulfills, and in doing so interprets, the inmost center of both.”[43] Christianity is supernatural in that it is not simply a product of the nature or history coming from Adam. However, it becomes natural by completing both nature and history, thereby forming the true center of both.
The supernatural has become itself the natural; not in the way however of putting off its own distinction, as compared to what nature had been before, and still is under any other view; but by falling into the regular process of the world’s history, so as to form to the end of time its central stream.[44]
The life of Christ conveyed through the center of nature and history becomes mine when it is formed in the center of my person by the Spirit. “Christ’s life as a whole is borne over into the life of the believer as a whole. That is, it works as a human life; and as such becomes a law of regeneration in the body as truly as in the soul.”[45] Once the life of Christ is formed in my center, I receive the life that will allow me to triumph over death, even as Christ triumphed over death.
The new life of which he is the subject is his union with Christ, and which now forms his central being, cannot perish. It is everlasting and indestructible in its very nature. When the man dies, his true life thus rooted in Christ, surmounts the catastrophe, and in due time displays its triumph in the glories of the resurrection.[46]
To explain how this happens, Nevin turns to the organic metaphors of the vine and the branches, or the head and the body. The life in the head repeats itself in the body; the life in the vine reproduces itself in the branches.
The new life, in the Spirit, first in Christ and then in his people, extends to the whole man; and being in both organically the same, is found in the end to repeat itself, with true reproduction outward as well as inward, to the utmost extremities of the body of which he is the mystical head. Thus every Christian may be said to be in Christ potentially from the beginning, all that he is destined to become actually when his salvation shall be complete.[47]
This claim is not as clear as Nevin seems to think it is. Since all organic life is subject to suffering and death, it is not clear how the supernatural gift of eternal life in Christ can be communicated through history in a natural, organic process. Even though Calvin’s idea that believers commune by the Spirit with the glorified and life-giving body of Christ in heaven does not fit in well with the philosophy of the nineteenth century, it did have the advantage of making a clear distinction between our present mortal lives and our future immortal lives.
- The Reformed doctrine of the Eucharist according to Nevin.
Turning to the doctrine of the Eucharist proper, Nevin, following Calvin, insists that the grace offered in the sacrament is Christ himself, who is present in the power of the Spirit, as we have seen above. “Christ communicates himself to us, in the real way now mentioned, UNDER THE FORM of the sacramental mystery as such. . . . His presence is identified with the sacrament itself. . . . All this is by the Spirit.”[48] Nevin is especially concerned to reject the notion, coming from Zwingli via the Puritans, that the Supper is primarily commemorative of Christ’s death. Rather, believers receive Christ himself through the Spirit, to nourish and strengthen them in grace.[49] Nevin rejects the notion of oral eating, as taught by the Lutherans and Roman Catholics, and insists, with Calvin, that it is the soul that is fed by Christ’s self-offering in the Supper.
The participation of Christ is wholly spiritual. He communicates himself, by the Spirit, to the soul of the believer, in a central way, according to the general law of creation to which this mystery belongs. . . . It is the soul or spirit of the believer that is immediately fed with the grace, which is conveyed to it mystically in the holy ordinance.[50]
However, when Nevin turns to the observance of the Supper itself, he shifts his focus from the communication of the life of Christ, which has been central until now, to the death and sacrifice of Christ, which overcomes the power of sin and death. Nevin focuses in particular on the power of Christ’s life to overcome our death, which he fully took upon himself. “Christ became man, not for himself, but for the race; that he might take our burden upon him as his own; that he might conquer death for us in our room and right; that he might lift thus our fallen nature, as such, into everlasting union with God.”[51] This corresponds to the way that history prophesies of the incarnation of the Word, through the cry of humanity for deliverance from sin and death. “Only in this form, does he still the gnawing hunger of humanity, by supplying it with the very substance of life itself; a hunger which is otherwise like the grave, that never cries, ‘It is enough.’”[52] The death of Christ also delivers us from sin, and provides the ground of our justification before God. “We are sinners and as such stand in need of redemption. Only through the medium of Christ’s sufferings and death, can we come to have any part in his glory. He must be our righteousness, in order that he may be our life.”[53] However, unlike Calvin, for whom the sacrifice of Christ appeases the wrath of God against sinners, Nevin insists that the atoning power of Christ’s death lies in the power of life that was present even in his death.“What becomes of his sins, the curse of the broken law, the sentence of death already lodged in the inmost constitution of his nature? The life, which is in Christ, includes all that is needed to meet in full the demands of the entire case.”[54]
Since Christ instituted the Supper on the night before he was handed over to suffering and death, the Supper gives an especially vivid representation of the sacrifice of Christ in his death.
We need no new atonement; but we do need to fall back perpetually on the one sacrifice for sin, which Christ has already made upon the cross, appropriating the power of it more and more to our souls, as the only ground of salvation. The Lord’s Supper accordingly, concentrating in itself as it does, in some sense, the force and meaning of the whole Christian life, has regard to this sacrifice always as the great object of representation.[55]
Since Christ offers his life for the sake of a dying world, it makes sense that the life of Christ should be conveyed to us by means of Christ’s death.[56] Echoing Calvin’s criticism of Zwingli’s teaching, Nevin insists that we can only receive the benefit of Christ’s sacrificial death if we are mystically united to Christ himself in the Eucharist. “The Eucharistic communion then, serving to confirm our interest in the one sacrifice accomplished on the cross, must include a true participation in the life of him by whom the sacrifice was made.”[57] This explains why for Nevin the primary affect related to the Supper is “immeasurable solemnity.”[58]
There are times in this doctrinal phase when Nevin seems to want to move beyond seeing the Supper as a living representation of the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ, to seeing it as being a sacrifice in its own right. He points out that the Supper has much in common with the sacred meals of other worshipping communities, who ate the food sacrificed to their gods in order to come into deeper communion with those deities.[59] This view is reinforced by his claim that the Supper takes the place of the meal of the Passover lamb sacrificed in the Temple in Jerusalem.[60] Nevin seems to be especially influenced by the view of the early Church regarding the Eucharistic sacrifice. “The sacrament was felt, from the beginning, to involve not simply a memorial of Christ’s sacrifice, but the very power of the sacrifice itself, as made present in his glorified life.”[61] This leads Nevin to state that the Supper is in fact a sacrifice on its own account, and not simply a representation of Christ’s one sacrifice of himself on the cross.
In the Lord’s Supper especially, the idea of a living Savior, the true fountain of life for the world, perpetually surrounded and enshrined the idea of the Savior who once hung upon the cross. The sacrifice in this way came to have a present reality; it lived in the presence of the glorious life which had been perfected by its means; and it is not difficult to understand how it might even come to seem then like a new and fresh transaction in the solemnity of the Eucharist.[62]
Nevin’s endorsement of the Eucharist as a sacrificial transaction in its own right is quite unexpected, given his stated intention to restore the Reformation doctrine of the Supper to the Church of his own day. For if there was one thing that Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and all other reformers agreed upon, it was that the Supper is most definitely not a sacrifice. For Luther, the teaching that the sacrament is a sacrifice annuls its character as a divine promise of forgiveness. For Zwingli, the claim that the Supper is a sacrifice denies the efficacy of the handing over of the Son for us, which the Supper commemorates and celebrates. For Calvin, Rome’s teaching that the Mass is a sacrifice is catastrophic, as thereby “the sacred Supper of Christ was not only obscured and perverted, but altogether obliterated and abolished, vanished away and disappeared from the memory of man.”[63] The installation of priests to offer this sacrifice robs Christ of his eternal priesthood. Hence Calvin would never call pastors in the Reformed Church “priests.” Calvin also insisted that all altars be removed from Reformed churches, as the very presence of an altar denies the efficacy of Christ’s death. “This much, indeed, is most certain,—the cross of Christ is overthrown the moment an altar is erected.”[64] Thus it is quite clear that for Calvin any suggestion that the Eucharist is a sacrifice offered by a priest on an altar directly contradicts the holy Supper of Jesus Christ.
I come now to the crowning point—viz. that the sacred Supper, on which the Lord left the memorial of his passion formed and engraved, was taken away, hidden, and destroyed, when the mass was erected. While the supper itself is a gift of God, which was to be received with thanksgiving, the sacrifice of the mass pretends to give a price to God to be received as satisfaction.[65]
- Restoring the centrality of the Supper liturgically: priest, altar and sacrifice.
When we come to The Liturgical Question of 1862, we find Nevin moving from an
attempt to use doctrine to make the Eucharist central to the life of the Reformed Church to his attempt to do the same via the revised liturgy of the Church. Nevin claims that the center of all liturgy is the mystical presence of Christ in the Supper.
A liturgy is not just a collection of prayers and other single forms of devotion, but a whole order or scheme rather of public worship, in which all the parts are inwardly bound together . . . by their referring themselves always to what must be considered the last ground of all true Christian worship, the mystical presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist.[66]
This means that even when the Church is not celebrating the Eucharist, the liturgy should still refer itself to that center. “No liturgy, then, can be worthy of its name, which is not framed in such way as to make the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper its cardinal office.”[67] However, Nevin goes on to insist that the mystical presence of Christ in the Supper, which he derives from Calvin’s Eucharistic theology, necessarily entails the presence of priest, altar, and sacrifice, which directly contradicts Calvin’s understanding of the Supper.
Where there is no sense of the mystical element in worship, growing forth from its universal centre in the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood, there can be no power to sympathize with the priestly element, with its conceptions of altar and sacrifice drawn from the same source.[68]
Calvin was so concerned to remove all suggestion that the Supper is a sacrifice that he only used a table for communion, and only brought it into the chancel on the four Sundays a year when the holy Supper was celebrated. Nevin, on the other hand, rejects the substitution of the table for the altar: “the priestly office of the church shall also be recognized as something more than a metaphorical fancy or fiction; and that the declaration, ‘We have an altar,’ shall not be stultified to mean, We have a table only, and nothing more.”[69] Nevin also reiterates his insistence that the Supper itself is a sacrificial transaction with God, linking this notion with Calvin’s doctrine of the mystical presence of Christ in the Supper.
Seeing the root and foundation of all Christian worship to be in the mystical presence of Christ in the Sacrament of the Holy Supper; and seeing in this again the exhibition of his broken body and shed blood as the actually present virtue of his one offering of himself, “made once, but of force always, to put away sin;” it requires that some earnest be made with these sacrificial ideas, so that they shall be felt to carry with them the power of a real transaction at the time with God, based on something beyond the minds of the worshippers themselves.[70]
Nevin also claims that the altar in Christian worship is directly analogous to the altar in Israel’s sacrifices. “We feel at once what the liturgical means, in this view, in the old priestly services of the Jewish temple, where the transaction of the altar served to mediate objectively, as we may say, between the Hearer of prayer and his worshipping people.”[71] Nevin accordingly advises that all prayer in the liturgy be directed toward the altar, as the objective mediator between the Christian worshippers and God. “Let all faces, in the time of prayer, be turned toward the altar.”[72] Indeed, he describes the whole orientation of the revised liturgy as “a liturgy for the altar.”[73]
Needless to say, Calvin is no longer the central authority for the liturgy of the Supper as he was for the doctrine of the mystical presence of Christ. Far from deferring to Calvin, Nevin says of the liturgical committee: “They were not to feel themselves slavishly bound by the practice of the fathers of the Reformed Church in Switzerland and Germany.”[74] It is clear at this point that Nevin not only goes directly past, but also emphatically against, Calvin in his understanding of the Supper, in an attempt to link the Reformed Church directly to the doctrine and practice of the early Church. It was his hope that “a Liturgy might be produced at last which will be a bond of union both with the ancient Catholic Church and the Reformation, and yet be the product of the religious life of our denomination in its present state.”[75] Unfortunately, the insistence on priest, altar and sacrifice breaks entirely with the Reformation in general, and with Calvin in particular.
Conclusion.
Nevin is to be highly commended for recovering the distinctive Eucharistic theology of John Calvin regarding the mystical presence of Christ in the Supper, and the centrality of the mystical union of believers with Christ, during a time in America where these themes were eclipsed by the influence of Ulrich Zwingli and the rise of Rationalism. In spite of his splendid work in historical theology, Nevin did not succeed in his attempt to elevate the Eucharist to the center of the doctrinal and liturgical life of the Reformed Church in America. However, he did succeed in initiating two major controversies regarding the Eucharist, first by pitting Calvin against Zwingli regarding the doctrine of the Supper, and second by bypassing and even contradicting Calvin himself in his appeal to the liturgies of the early Church, with their notions of priest, altar and sacrifice. The first move is ecumenical only in relation to the Lutherans, the second move is ecumenical only in relation to Rome.
[1] John Williamson Nevin, The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, edited by Augustine Thompson, OP (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2000), p. 3.
[2] Ibid. p. 47
[3] Ibid., pp. 232-3.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., p. 100.
[6] Ibid. p. 130.
[7] Ibid., p. 233.
[8] John Williamson Nevin, The Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord’s Supper, edited by Linden J. DeBie, Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2012, p. 230.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Nevin, Doctrine, p. 321.
[11] The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent translated by Rev. H. J. Schroeder, O.P., Rockford, Illinois, Tan Books and Publishers, 1978, p. 79.
[12] Ibid., p. 149.
[13] Martin Luther, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, translated by A.T.W. Steinhaeuser, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959, p. 40.
[14] Martin Luther, The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ—against the Fanatics, translated by A.T.W. Steinhaeuser, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959, pp. 348-9.
[15] Ulrich Zwingli, An Exposition of the Faith, in Zwingli and Bullinger, edited by G. W. Bromiley, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1953, p. 258.
[16] Ulrich Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, edited by Samuel Macauley Jackson, Durham, North Carolina: The Labyrinth Press, 1981, p. 200.
[17] John Calvin, Inst. IV.xvii.2, in Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, translated by Ford Lewis Battles, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960, pp. 1361-2.
[18] Ibid., p. 1371.
[19] Ibid., p. 1403.
[20] Nevin, Mystical Presence, p. 63.
[21] Ibid., p. 59.
[22] Ibid., p. 112.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid., p. 113.
[25] Ibid.,
[26] Ibid., pp. 117-18.
[27] Calvin: Institutes, p. 1364.
[28] Ibid., p. 173.
[29] Ibid. p. 231.
[30] Ibid. p. 188.
[31] Ibid., p. 189.
[32] Ibid, p. 190.
[33] Ibid., pp. 50-51.
[34] Ibid. pp. 53-4.
[35] Ibid., p. 179.
[36] Ibid., p. 166.
[37] Ibid. p. 211.
[38] Ibid., p. 213.
[39] Ibid. p. 182.
[40] Ibid., p. 185.
[41] Ibid., p. 215.
[42] Ibid., p. 196.
[43] Ibid., p. 193.
[44] Ibid., p. 232.
[45] Ibid., p. 163.
[46] Ibid., p. 203.
[47] Ibid., p. 220.
[48] Ibid., p. 171.
[49] Ibid., p. 169.
[50] Ibid., p. 174.
[51] Ibid., p. 198.
[52] Ibid., p. 226.
[53] Ibid., p. 169.
[54] Ibid., p. 226.
[55] Ibid., p. 170.
[56] Ibid., p. 225.
[57] Ibid., p. 171.
[58] Ibid., p. 237.
[59] Ibid., p. 234.
[60] Ibid., p. 237.
[61] Ibid., p. 129.
[62] Nevin, Doctrine, p. 322.
[63] Calvin: Institutes, p. 1429.
[64] Ibid., p. 1431.
[65] Ibid., p. 1435.
[66] John Nevin, The Liturgical Question, Henry B. Ashmead, Book and Job Printer, 1862, p. 23.
[67] Ibid., p. 26.
[68] Ibid.
[69] Ibid., p. 27.
[70] Ibid., pp. 27-8, emphasis mine.
[71] Ibid., p. 28.
[72] Ibid., p. 35.
[73] Ibid., p. 38.
[74] Ibid., p. 47.
[75] Ibid., p. 49.
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