Reformed Eucharistic Theology and the Case for Real Presence
Linden J. DeBie and W. Bradford Littlejohn
[This article first appeared in Theology Today, 2015]
Earlier this year, the second book in our new series, The Mercersburg Theology Study Series, appeared. The Mercersburg movement was a largely-forgotten but theologically profound nineteenth-century reform movement in the German Reformed Church led by the theologian John Williamson Nevin and the historian Philip Schaff, professors at Mercersburg Seminary. Perhaps the most well-known episode in this little-known movement came in 1848 when Charles Hodge of Princeton Seminary, likely the most powerful theologian in America at the time, and Nevin’s erstwhile friend and teacher, published a blistering review of Nevin’s magnum opus, The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist.[1] This book, together with Nevin’s nearly book length historical essay, “The Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord’s Supper,”[2] published in response to Hodge, comprised volume one of the Mercersburg Theology Study Series.
But although a number of nineteenth-century church historians and Reformed theologians have come across The Mystical Presence, and a few have also read Hodge’s review and “The Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord’s Supper,” few have ever had the opportunity to encounter this fierce literary debate in its rawest, fullest form, since the only outlet Nevin could find for his response was the obscure denominational magazine of the German Reformed Church, The Weekly Messenger. There it appeared, along with the full text of Hodge’s review, in thirteen weekly installments in the summer of 1848,[3] and there, alas, it has remained, gathering dust in the basements of a few Pennsylvania libraries, until now.
With volume 2 of the series, Coena Mystica: Debating Reformed Eucharistic Theology, we seek to bring this key chapter in nineteenth-century Reformed theology fully into the light of day, and thus into conversation with the most recent historical scholarship on Reformed eucharistic theology, against which, it must be said, Nevin’s work holds up remarkably well for a 160-year-old relic. Aside from that fact, however, the towering status of Charles Hodge in nineteenth-century American theology and his enduring legacy of influence on modern Reformed and evangelical theology, [4] should be sufficient to highlight the ongoing historical and theological interest of this debate.
When Hodge wrote his review in the renowned Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review[5] no less, such was his prestige and authority among the American Reformed that many assumed he was an authority on Reformed sacramental history, and his critique had settled the question. Nevin, however, was not about to admit defeat.
Although once a loyal Princeton man himself,[6] Nevin, soon after he took over as president of the German Reformed seminary in Mercersburg, was struck by the seeming malaise among the German Reformed, which he believed was caused by its departure from its confessional tradition. He believed the cure might be a celebration of the Heidelberg Catechism, including a series he would author on its history and genius. With typical Puritan enthusiasm he plunged into study of the beloved symbol and produced a series for the denominational newsletter (1840). It was welcomed and lauded by all, including Princeton. But buried within the series was a startling fact that was barely noticed—except by Joseph Berg, an influential German Reformed pastor in Philadelphia, anti-Catholic crusader, revivalist preacher, and eventually professor of theology at New Brunswick Theological Seminary and a few of his closest friends.
The buried IED was news that Calvin taught the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. This, for Berg, signalled Nevin’s softness on Rome’s errors, and he eventually convinced the Classis of Philadelphia to file charges against the Mercersburg professors, but they were exonerated by a wide majority at synod. Still suspicions remained and accusations continued to fly. Nevin responded with his Mystical Presence, thinking both to settle the matter of Reformed eucharistic doctrine once and for all, and at the same time to summon the denomination and American Protestant Christianity as a whole to a higher ground of religious practice. So the Mystical Presence was not only an attempt to vindicate Nevin and Schaff and recover in essence the doctrine of the Reformed on the Lord’s Supper, but also to restore the sacraments to their place of prominence more generally, to stress and elevate church liturgy, and to insist on catechetical instruction over the modern revivalistic methods then taking over in Protestant worship. Finally, they wanted to heal the rift caused by the Reformation, restoring historic catholicity to Protestantism via a critique that would expose the failures of Roman Catholicism as well as the failures of Protestantism, in expectation that a new, higher synthesis might be achieved.
Given Nevin’s rather grand ecclesiological ambitions, it is perhaps no surprise (though it was to Nevin) that Hodge’s critique went far beyond mere quibbling over historical theology. To be sure, Hodge spent a great deal of time setting the record straight, as he saw it, over the true 16th and 17th century Reformed sacramental doctrine, which he took to be much closer to Zwingli than to Calvin (although he occasionally, with more zeal than consistency, also sought to reinterpret Calvin to bring him in line with this lower doctrine). But he also had a great deal to say on the larger theological implications of what Hodge saw as Nevin’s departure from Reformed orthodoxy, implications that included pantheism, Sabellianism, Eutychianism, and more. Interesting as these latter issues are, we do not have space to look into them here, but will confine ourselves predominantly to the historical debate, narrowly concerned with answering the question “In what way is Christ present in the Eucharist?”
Both are in no doubt that Christ is present in some sense—so Hodge is not, at least, the mere memorialist that many of his American contemporaries had become. The question, Hodge reminds us, is “what is the mode of his presence?” And he insists that, contrary to the arguments of Nevin, it cannot be corporeal as the Catholics teach. Nevin replies, exasperated, that his Mystical Presence never describes it as a corporeal or local presence, nor does it ever claim that the Reformed taught so. Hodge is misleading his readers to even make the point.
But that does not mean the two agreed and the disagreement begins with their understanding of perception. To make clear what the Reformed actually believe, Hodge resorts to the faculty psychology, or as we would call it today, mental philosophy, popular at the time at Princeton and generally throughout America. Hodge says that things are made “present” to the mind either by the object being locally perceived by the senses or apprehended by the intelligence subjectively. According to Hodge, the mode of Christ’s presence in the Supper is the latter and this, he says, is the way the Reformed always understood the presence of Christ in the Supper.
Nevin rejects this idea, and he argues that there is another way to understand presence, one that would have been preferred by Calvin who did not have the dubious advantage of Lockean empiricism. Both the theory of local presence and “presence to the intelligence,” says Nevin, would have been rejected by Calvin, since both are found in the sphere of nature. Instead, Calvin insisted that the mystical transaction exists exclusively in the sphere of spirit and is thus simultaneously fully objective although internally received. Moreover, Nevin regards this as the source of Hodge’s inability to appreciate the way the bread and wine might as mysteries convey Christ.
Brian Gerrish, in his authoritative study of Calvin’s eucharistic theology, Grace and Gratitude, confirms Nevin’s judgment on this point with qualifications, noting that for Calvin, “the gift is given to all who communicate, pious and impious, believers and unbelievers,”[7] though Calvin wasn’t as clear as we might like on the topic. Indeed, this ambiguity is bound up with Calvin’s complex statements on the relation between eating and believing.[8] For Hodge, since the “presence” of Christ in the sacrament is nothing more than his presence to the mind by faith, the “eating” in the sacrament is simply equivalent to believing, and thus no unique grace is on offer in the sacrament that is not available through—indeed, already received by—the exercise of saving faith in Christ’s atonement. For Nevin, however, it is crucial to emphasize that eating is different from simply believing, as Calvin certainly did at times teach, and that a unique grace is therefore on offer in the sacrament. Not only are the benefits made present by the Sacrament, but the very power and presence of Christ’s life is received by the faithful believer. Indeed, one of Nevin’s great contributions is his retrieval of this remarkable early Reformed language about the life-giving power of Christ’s glorified humanity, albeit received incorporeally. Nevin marshals numerous quotations from Calvin to this effect, among his favorite a passage from the Institutes: “The flesh of Christ is like a rich and inexhaustible fountain that pours into us the life springing forth from the Godhead into itself.”[9]
Hodge strenuously opposes any such distinction of “Christ’s benefits” and his “life,” and indeed considers Calvin’s use of the latter notion to be at times simply incomprehensible. The sacrificial efficacy of his death, argues Hodge, is the only benefit of which believers partake in the Eucharist. Such, he judges, has always been the Reformed view, even if he concedes that Calvin sometimes also taught a participation in the power of Christ’s risen life; this he deems an “uncongenial intrusion of Lutheran theology” into Reformed thinking, which was thankfully purged in the seventeenth century.[10] As a historical matter, Nevin makes mincemeat of Hodge’s attempt to marginalize Calvin at this point, showing that this emphasis on participation in the life of Christ found its way into most of the sixteenth-century Reformed confessions.
However, Hodge had good evidence when he argued that Calvin’s doctrine of the Word clearly indicated that no grace greater or different than that had by the Word comes by way of the sacraments. To illustrate this, Hodge insisted that “all the Reformed likewise taught, Calvin perhaps more earnestly than others, that our union with Christ since the incarnation is the same in nature as that enjoyed by the saints under the old dispensation.”[11] Such a doctrine, argued Hodge, left no room for any sacramental grace beyond the atoning benefits of Christ’s death, which could be imputed to the elect in any age. Nevin shows convincingly by way of rebuttal that Calvin, whether consistently or not, strenuously maintained against Westphal that even the Old Testament saints partook, by the Spirit, of the vivific power of the incarnate flesh of Christ.
It is not hard to see why both men found this question difficult to resolve with historical and conceptual satisfaction. Gerrish points out that neither Hodge nor Nevin “did justice to Calvin’s persuasion that by faith in the proclaimed word Christ becomes ‘flesh of our flesh,’’ which is to say neither really appreciated the way in which the word in Calvin took on sacramental significance. But likewise, the sacrament took on the character of proclamation! Calvin’s innovation was to have the word assume the role previously held by the sacraments in medieval theology. His point of departure was the theology of Augustine, who recognized that the words uttered over the sacrament were not some magical formula. Rather the authentic word is the word operating in the sacrament, which becomes effective because it is believed. Gerrish wrote, “The difference between the word and sacrament is simply that the sacraments picture what the word declares: namely Christ.” Thus, for Calvin, there was no antagonism between the pedagogical and sacramental operations of the word. But what is not to be misunderstood is that Calvin was not elevating the word at the expense of the sacraments. His unique elevation of the significance of the word in his theology effectively cast the word in what had been traditional eucharistic language. So it was not so much the elevation of the word above that of the sacraments, so common in nineteenth-century Protestant America, as it was the elevation of the word to equal status with the sacraments.[12]
On the relation of Calvin’s own theology to the Reformed confessions, we encounter a curious reversal of roles between Nevin and Hodge. For although Nevin will critique Hodge’s conception of doctrinal history as essentially static and mechanical, and will make considerable appeal here, as elsewhere in his work, to the concept of the organic development of doctrine, it is actually Hodge who argues for a positive historical development of Reformed eucharistic doctrine. He does this reluctantly, to be sure, without ever wanting to quite admit to it, and seems intent at times on trying to show that his doctrine is really the same as the 16th-century Reformed doctrine always was. But as we have noted already, he concedes the presence of an “uncongenial foreign element” in the theology of Calvin and many of the confessions he influenced, and deems that as the tradition matured and grew to greater clarity in the 17th-century, it left this behind and came fully into its own as a purely Reformed doctrine. Nevin, however, for all his rather romantic optimism about the historical development of doctrines, recognizes the same shift in the 17th century and pronounces it a decline, an abandonment of the true heart of the tradition.
Now, of course, we recognize both these narratives to be oversimplistic. A range of different influences and emphases played a role in the confessional formulations, and a variety of different trajectories persisted throughout the 17th century. This is not to imply that Nevin’s historiography is shallow or naïve. His treatments of the “second sacramental war” and the circumstances surrounding the composition of the Heidelberg Catechism, for instance, remain impressive feats of scholarship.[13] Moreover, his attention to the historical context and development of the confessional documents puts to shame Hodge’s clumsy taxonomy, in which he simply divides them up into three classes based chiefly on how well they comport with his own view. Thus, despite the fuller insights of modern scholarship on 16th-century eucharistic debates, Nevin’s work remains a landmark contribution of historical theology.
Moreover, despite working a little too hard to smooth out differences among the early Reformed, Nevin at least succeeds pretty thoroughly in depriving Hodge of substantial support in Calvin for his basically Zwinglian sacramentology. To be sure, even Nevin himself admits that he is doing a bit more than simply repeating Calvin, but is seeking to bring him up-to-date, making use of the insights of German idealist philosophy and theology. The result, as Brian Gerrish notes, is “some special pleading and occasionally a slight shift of Calvin’s own emphasis” in Nevin’s rendition, and yet Gerrish concludes that on the whole, “the position advocated [by Nevin] is firmly based on the pronouncements of the Reformer” [Calvin].[14]
The importance of all this for contemporary Reformed theology, with its renewed ecumenical engagement with Rome and Orthodoxy, not to mention the Lutheran and Anglican traditions, is considerable. As Gerrish wrote with George Hunsinger very recently in support, Calvin and the Reformed confessions will be utterly misunderstood if we ignore the clear insistence “that the sacraments are not ‘mere reminders;’ that communion with Christ is not simply about beliefs in Christ; that the ecclesial body of Christ is not just an ‘association of like-minded individuals.’ Certainly we will continue to argue over whether there is something offered in the Eucharist not found elsewhere, and we will do it in spite of difficulty expressing what that ‘something more’ might be. But as Gerrish wrote and Hunsinger more recently made even more abundantly clear, either way, if the Reformed are to succeed in ecumenical theology, they will need to “throw their weight on Calvin’s side of the Reformed boat.”[15]
[1] Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, Number 20 (1848), 227-278.
[2] The Mercersburg Review 2:5 (Sep. 1850): 421-549.
[3] The Wednesday, May 24, 1848 edition of The Messenger to the Wednesday, August 6, 1848 issue.
[4] Hodge was a father figure to American evangelicals and to some extent even today a primary source of the outline of American evangelical faith. His influence on theology in America in general by way of his long tenure at Princeton Seminary, his involvement in training hundreds of Presbyterian clergy, scholars and denominational leaders, his authorship of the enormously popular devotional work The Way of Life along with his commentary on Ephesians, and his international fame as editor of the Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review find few rivals in American theology. And although his Systematic Theology has been set aside for the most part, except among certain very conservative, traditional Presbyterians, as a critical part of the aforementioned outline, it has shown remarkable staying power.
[5] Which he founded with the board of directors in 1829 and edited. The British Quarterly (1871) declared this journal “greatest purely theological Review that has ever been published in the English tongue” and Dr. Lyman Beecher,the hugely popular Presbyterian divine, leading revivalist and social activist, called The Biblical Repertory “. . . the most powerful organ in the Land.”
[6] It is important to note that, although Nevin did study under Hodge at Princeton, it is a mistake to describe Hodge’s relation to him as one of mentor, or Nevin as Hodge’s prodigal, as many have. Hodge had only taken the chair of Biblical Languages a year before Nevin entered Princeton and the two were but 7 years apart. Hodge was born in 1797 and Nevin in 1803. And while Nevin studied Hebrew under Hodge, he took it upon himself to master the subject and soon was far ahead of Hodge in skill. This led to his taking over Hodge’s course in Hebrew while Hodge studied in Europe (expressly to beef up his language skills). So Hodge was Nevin’s teacher, but hardly his mentor. And although there was no bad blood expressed between the very young men at the time, one has to wonder.
[7] Brian Gerrish Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 138.
[8] See Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude, 130-33.
[9] Institutes, McNeill, ed., 2:1369.
[10] Testifying to the sad obscurity of Nevin’s work we have the Dutch theologian Gerrit P. Hartvelt (Verum Corpus: Een studie over een central hoofdstuk uit de avondmaalsleer van Calvijn. Delft: W.D. Meinema, 1960), echoing Hodge’s fear that Calvin’s idea of a emanating power proceeding from the body of Christ available to communing believers, was a dangerous alien invasion into Reformed theology, in which the ordinary lean of the Reformed toward Antiochene categories is replaced by an appeal to Alexandrian Christology. Still, as Gerrish pointed out, Hartvelt’s Calvin is essentially Nevin’s.
[11] Coena Mystica, 36. Hodge wrote: “If any one doubts this assertion, let him read Calvin’s Institutes B. iv. c. 14 § 20–25.” Calvin wrote in this section (Institutes, ed. McNeill, 2:1296–1301): “But we utterly reject that Scholastic dogma (to touch on it also in passing) which notes such a great difference between the sacraments of the old and new law, as if the former only foreshadowed God’s grace, but the latter give it as a present reality. Indeed, the apostle speaks just as clearly concerning the former as the latter when he teaches that the fathers ate the same spiritual food as we, and explains that food as Christ [1 Cor. 10:3].” But if Hodge means to suggest that Calvin saw no difference between the sacramental dispensations, his case weakens. Calvin concluded his chapter 14 of his Institutes writing, “Yet in this respect also we admit some difference. For both [Old and New Testaments] attest that God’s fatherly kindness and the graces of the Holy Spirit are offered us in Christ, but ours is clearer and brighter. In both Christ is shown forth, but in ours more richly and fully . . . when Christ was revealed sacraments were instituted, fewer in number, more majestic in signification, more excellent in power” (2:1303).
[12] See Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude, 76, 82–86, 107.
[13] Indeed, it is worth noting that recent work by eminent Reformation scholar Emidio Campi has vindicated in substance Nevin’s contention that the central conflict in the decade following the Consensus Tigurinus was not between the “Lutherans” and “Reformed” but between the Gnesio-Lutherans and the Philippists, whom Calvin could largely treat as allies.
[14] See Brian Gerrish, Tradition and the Modern World, 58-59, n. 200. See also, Gerrish, “John Calvin and the Reformed Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper,” 85-98.
[15] Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude, 190. See also Hunsinger, Eucharist and Ecumenism.
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