John Calvin on How To Use Words: Eucharist and Power

Chapter 5: Sacramental Practices and the Question of Power

In an important sense, this entire dissertation is an exploration of the way Calvin understood Reformed life and identity as a life of participation in Christ.  This chapter takes up this same theme as it is refracted in the lens of Eucharistic theology and practice.  Paying attention to the Eucharistic context of this communal identification with Christ will bring more clearly into focus the political significance of such doctrinally shaped identities.  So what follows is not so much a general treatment of Reformed Eucharistic theory as it is a tracing of Reformed resistance to established cultural power, insofar as that cultural resistance was registered in and by a complex cluster of Eucharistic ideas and practices advocated in Calvin’s theological writing.

I.  Introduction

     

In the Reformed liturgy worshipers were instructed to “raise our spirits and our hearts on high” at each celebration of the Lord’s Supper.  The liturgical admonition of the sursum corda enacted a form of Eucharistic piety that sought to enjoy God’s benefits through a piety of ascent beyond the physical signs.  The Eucharistic danger, urged on Calvin’s readers at least, was the possibility of missing these heavenly blessings by means of an unhealthy and idolatrous obsession with the sensuous and the material.

     

The finer points of transubstantiation – the eucharistic claim that Christ’s body is the substance invisibly present behind the visible accidents of the bread – may have been lost on the laity in the medieval period.  But its effect on popular piety, especially the significance of the senses in general and of sight in particular, were profound.  Explaining the connections between the Mass and the rich artistic traditions of medieval Christianity, Garside refers to the “visual splendor” of the late medieval liturgy.  This “intensification of the sensuous” in the Catholic Mass is seen most clearly in the elevation of the Host during the liturgy of the Mass.  The laity’s “insistence upon actually seeing the elements is, perhaps, the supreme expression of the medieval drive for visualizing the sacred” (1966: 175-6). 

     

The liturgical drama appealed to the whole range of senses - not just sight alone.  The increasing frequency with which priests kissed the altar, the size of altars, the use of candles and crosses, the elaborate symbolism of the priest’s vestments, the ritualized gestures of the celebrating priest, liturgical music, the design of architectural space as a representation of heaven – all these features of the medieval liturgical experience combine to suggest the intensification of a sensuous piety.  Given this liturgical appeal to the senses, it is not surprising that the elevation of the consecrated Host would have appealed to popular piety and found its way into the liturgical drama.  Garside characterizes these phenomena as “expressions of that drive toward the palpably real, that insistent demand for the concrete in faith and worship, that attempt to bind the spiritual to the material . . .” (1966: 175).  

     

Corresponding to the popular desire to behold the consecrated Host in the liturgy was the growing practice of displaying and viewing the Eucharistic elements in public.  Christopher Elwood recounts how on Corpus Christi Day various towns and cities would all gather to venerate the Eucharistic host as it was paraded through the streets.  Increasingly, French royalty used such processions as a celebration of kingship and royal power.  The simultaneous presence of the Eucharistic host and the king in a festive procession, so Elwood argues, would leave little doubt in the imagination of French citizens that the power present in the elements was being claimed by the king himself.  Moreover, as royal processions (quite apart from those on Corpus Christi Day) became an increasingly common event, these processions borrowed a great deal from the Corpus Christi processions.  By the end of the Middle Ages, “the transformation of the Eucharist from an essentially parochial and spiritual symbol to a symbol thoroughly invested with public, political meaning was complete” (1999: 25).  The symbolic connections between sacramental power and royal power reinforced the perception of living in a unified social order (une roi, loi, foi).  By recovering the social role played by Catholic claims regarding the Eucharistic elements as sacred media of divine power, we can begin to see the political significance of the Protestant rejection of long established rhythms of eucharistic piety.  

     

In sixteenth century Europe, public arguments about social identities and social space were also theological arguments.  So the framework for negotiating public questions was not “religious” viewpoints and values over against “non-religious” ones.  The framework was itself one of differing religious visions and ways of life.  The debates were between contested religious institutions and identities.  Put more concretely, both Catholics and Protestants understood themselves and their social environments more or less theologically.  Social arrangements and the persons located by and acting through them were what they were by virtue of their (imaginatively pictured) relation to God.  Thus all forms of human power were sanctioned and legitimated by their implicit or explicit claim to be mediators of divine power.  Both Catholics and Protestants operated with a strong, if often implicit, belief that all finite things participate in God’s own infinite life.

     

But in terms of theological debates that were particularly Christian, the matter was more fine-tuned yet: all of social life was a form of participating in Christ and in Christ’s body.  This social assumption was embedded deep in the European imagination, encompassing notions of politics, power, economy, social authority, family, and even notions of mystery and beauty.  No single ritual act crystallized these concerns as did the Eucharist.  Arguments about where and when and how the Eucharist was to happen were arguments about society, power, and identity.  (This means that there was a symbolic surplus to all religious discourse in the sixteenth century, not that religious discourse should be read reductively in functionalist terms).  In this chapter I explore how this debate about the nature and presence of Christ’s Eucharistic body informed and influenced Calvin’s rhetorical attempts to provide texture to a Reformed social identity.  This conjunction of Christ’s body, religious practices and social identities has been helpfully explored by Beckwith, though she focuses on the devotional literature of the fifteenth century.

     

Attending to Calvin’s theological arguments in their social contexts will help us imagine the various ways eucharistic discourse shaped the imaginations and practices of Calvin’s readers.  Serene Jones helpfully elucidates the significance of humanism and rhetoric to Calvin’s entire theological project.   Brian Gerrish’s analysis highlights this rhetorical approach with respect to the Eucharist in particular.  Speaking of Erasmus’ influence on Calvin, Gerrish notes:

The aim of theological study was practical: to transform the heart and the mind.  And not only the purpose but also the very sources of theology called, in his opinion, for a rhetorical rather than a dialectical method.  True theology is a matter not of marshalling formal arguments more clever and subtle than those of one’s opponents, but of grasping the poetics of scriptural discourse and letting it make a better person of you.  Calvin agreed.  He did not object to the systematic theology of his day because it was systematic, but because it was abstract, speculative, and unedifying (1993: 17).

It is not difficult to see that the goals of Calvin’s Eucharistic theology were both rhetorical and practical.  When Calvin criticized priestly mumbling and dramatic gesturing during the celebration of the Mass, he sought to persuade his readers to reject a way of practicing faith that denies the reality and unity of Christ’s body and the role of sacraments as a benefit to the Church.  When he criticized localized presence, adoration of the elements, and the parading of elements through the streets, he invites his readers to re-envision their relation to political authorities, culture, and social space.  

     

The practice of celebrating the Lord’s Supper was a political enterprise for Calvin and his readers primarily because it promoted a circulation of power and authority in European culture that was in sharp conflict with symbolic mappings of the circulation of power operative in contemporary social and political arrangements.  According to Calvin, the reign of the ascended Christ left space for finite political authorities, but only as temporary and subordinate servants whose authority would be erased with the glorious return of Christ anticipated in every Eucharistic celebration.  And the legitimacy of such powers was calibrated to the practical function of their earthly and temporary roles.  This political vision constituted a radical departure from the standard picture of kings and authorities as sacred sites of divine power.  Since Catholic culture was itself grounded in the symbolic center of the Eucharist, rival descriptions of eucharistic practice strike at the symbolic heart of the dominant cultural imagination.

     

Theologically speaking, this chapter turns to Eucharistic symbolism and practice as a new lens through which to analyze the basic theological themes of previous chapters.  As Gerrish argues, “the theme of grace and gratitude, presented in the words and actions of the Eucharist, shapes [Calvin’s] entire theology and makes it from beginning to end a eucharistic theology” (vii).  Furthermore, Gerrish contends that Calvin’s understanding of the Eucharist, “even if it was not his central dogma, is a better indication of Calvin’s primary theme than is the double decree.”  So in dealing with the Eucharistic practice of early Reformed communities, we are not at the periphery but at the center of the early Calvinist imagination.

     

In what follows I will explore several different aspects of Calvin’s writing on matters of Eucharistic theory and practice.  Rather than exhaustively surveying this well-worn terrain, I will focus on those features of Calvin’s Eucharistic theology that bring into sharpest relief his rhetorical attempts to promote forms of religious practice that rightly reflect divine glory.  Thus, I will focus on his theory of signs, his notion of Christ’s ascended body and the presence of that body in the elements, and finally on the platonic piety of ascent and on the theology of power conveyed by that piety. 

A.  Feasts and Signs: Eucharistic Theology as Cultural Criticism

     

In the section in the Institutes criticizing the adoration of the eucharistic elements (4.17.33-35), written largely in 1536 and 1543, Calvin says of the Feast of Corpus Christi, “they devised rites utterly alien to the institution of the Supper . . . They consecrate the host, as they call it, to carry it about in procession, to display it in solemn spectacle that it may be seen, worshiped, and called upon” (4.17.37).  The editorial footnote citing the institution of the Feast of Corpus Christi by Pope Urban IV in the 1264 bull Transitus (in 4.17.35) joins Calvin’s remark to Elwood’s social analysis of Corpus Christi as a sacramental/political reality.

     

Rejecting the popular European practice of adoring the elements - both within the church liturgy and in public processions - Calvin asks, 

Was it a matter of no importance to adore God in this form as if nothing was prescribed for us?  When the true worship of God was concerned, ought they to have undertaken so lightly what not a word of Scripture ever supports? . . . [God] bids us receive the Sacrament, not adore it [accipi sacramentum non adorari iubet] (4.17.35/CR II: 1038).

Here Calvin argues from the need for all forms of worship to be prescribed by the clear Word of God in Scripture.  

     

There is also an argument regarding the ascent of Christ’s body and the correlative piety of ascent.

For, in order that pious souls may duly apprehend Christ in the Supper, they must be raised up [erigantur] to heaven.  But if the function of the Sacrament is to help the otherwise weak mind of man so that it may rise up [sursum assurgat] to look upon the height of spiritual mysteries, then those who are halted at the outward sign wander from the right way of seeking Christ . . . And for this same reason it was established of old that before consecration the people should be told in a loud voice to lift up their hearts [sursum corda] . . . [Scripture] bids our minds be raised up [sursum erigi], and seek him in heaven, seated at the right hand of the Father [Col. 3:1-2].  According to this rule, we ought rather to have adored him spiritually in heavenly glory than to have devised some dangerous kind of adoration, replete with a carnal and crass conception of God [carnalis crassaeque de Deo opinionis] (4.17.36/CR II: 1039).

At the end of this chapter I will return to Calvin’s eucharistic piety of “ascent.”  For now I simply point out that, in the above comment, Scriptural narrative and ancient liturgical formulas combine to signal an alternative to prevailing practices of adoring the elements.  The arguments Calvin makes parallel those made against the use of images and statues in Book I.  Calvin’s platonizing piety of ascent corresponds, theologically speaking, to a particular picture of God’s glory and of how that divine glory is related to finite things.  Moreover, his eucharistic theory is a kind of cultural criticism aimed at dismantling the symbolic-political legitimacy of a profound and pervasive social practice in Europe: celebrations and processions like the feast of Corpus Christi which derive their legitimacy from the practice of adoring the elements.  For communities to adopt the Reform movement and the sacramental changes it promoted would have amounted to a rupture in the symbolic texture of public ritual that functioned to reinforce presently existing structures as manifestations of sacred power.  

     

According to Calvin, the practice of adoring the elements departs from Scripture and ancient liturgy and distorts the upward movement of piety, but it also constitutes a simple case of idolatry.  Far from being simply a mistaken attempt to worship the true God, Calvin says, “they have forsaken the living God and fashioned a God after their own desire.  For what is idolatry if not this: to worship the gifts in place of the Giver himself?” (4.17.36).  In the cultural practice of elevating the host and adoring it, says Calvin, God is dishonored and the Sacramental gift is turned into an idol.  Calvin’s Eucharistic theology connects the nature of religious practices to the central features of his theological account - worship and gratitude.  The test case for Eucharistic practices, as for all religious practices, is whether they properly orient human lives and communities to God in worship and gratitude.  While Calvin might tolerate some squabbles about what specific acts count as a violation of that basic maxim, there was no debate about the criterion of judging religious practices by their fittingness with respect to divine glory.

     

Without attempting to exhaustively canvas Calvin’s eucharistic theory of signification, I want to at least explore the basic contours of Calvin’s theory of eucharistic signs.  If the elements are not to be venerated in the liturgy, if they are not to be paraded through the streets during the Corpus Christi festivals and coronation ceremonies, what exactly is the significance of the Eucharistic elements in the drama of God’s dealings with the world?

     

Although Calvin saw himself as providing a eucharistic theology that would appeal to both Lutherans and Zwinglians, neither side was thoroughly convinced by his attempts at mediation.  Bullinger (Zwingli’s successor) charged Calvin with sounding too Catholic in claiming that the sacraments confer grace.  And the Lutherans charged Calvin with agreeing with Zwingli that in the Supper only the bread and wine are truly present.  To his own contemporaries, then, there was enough ambiguity in Calvin’s eucharistic thought, or lack of clarity in its development, to elicit considerable disagreement over his attempt at forging a mediating position.  Gerrish charts some significant revisions in Calvin’s eucharistic thought in successive editions of the Institutes.  Whereas in the 1536 edition Calvin was rejecting a real and substantial presence of Christ’s body in the Supper, by 1559 this had become something quite different: a rejection of transubstantiation as the way to understand how Christ’s body was present in the meal.  For various reasons, probably a mix of genuine movement on Calvin’s part and decisions about rhetorical strategy, Calvin’s eucharistic theology moved from skepticism about the presence of Christ’s body in the elements to a radically qualified interpretation of how Christ’s body is in fact present.  Even so, the ontological category of “presence” may not be the best framework in which to understand what Calvin was saying.  Nevertheless, the shifting expressions of his basic Eucharistic convictions may explain why his contemporaries saw him in so many different lights.  Moreover, there was some slipperiness within the 1536 edition itself, furthering differences of interpretation regarding just what Calvin was saying.  Rather than actually harmonizing Luther and Zwingli, Calvin tended to swerve back and forth between them, especially on the vexed questions about the “real presence” of Christ’s body and the “instrumentality” of the sacraments.

      

I have briefly mentioned Calvin’s historical conversation partners in order to show that the theological debate regarding the ontological status of the Eucharistic elements was a socially significant debate.  Different communions of Christians staked their identities on differing understandings of whether or how the bread and wine mediate the body of Christ and thus the power of God.  For Calvin, the elements are not pictured as the exclusive mediators of divine grace.  Rather, believers share in Christ’s life by being incorporated into Christ’s body by faith.  The Lord’s Supper “testifies and seals” the truth and reality of this sharing,

not by presenting a vain and empty sign [inani aut vacuo signo], but by manifesting there the effectiveness of his Spirit to fulfill what he promises . . . Therefore, if the Lord truly represents [repraesentat] the participation in his body through the breaking of bread, there ought not to be the least doubt that he truly presents [praestet] and shows [exhibeat] his body.  And the godly ought by all means to keep this rule: whenever they see symbols appointed by the Lord, to think and be persuaded that the truth of the thing signified is surely present there (4.17.10/CR II: 1009-1010).

Clearly the efficacy of the sacramental signs is located not in the power of the finite media themselves, but rather in the faithfulness of the God who promises to be present with the signs.  The eucharistic drama, for Calvin, turned primarily on a Trinitarian account of the “effectiveness” of the Spirit in joining the faithful to Christ’s body, and thus not a pageant involving the clergy’s ability to imbue the elements with divine power.

     

Despite Calvin’s insistence that sacramental efficacy is tied to God’s promises, the Eucharistic theory he develops is not purely voluntarist.  The Supper’s significance and function in the religious life is not exhaustively pinned to divine policy.  There has to be some sort of fittingness; the elements or signs themselves have to be appropriate or analogous representations (hence visible “signs” of an invisible grace).  The visible symbol “not only symbolizes the thing that it has been consecrated to represent as a bare and empty token [nuda et inanis tessera], but also truly exhibits it” (4.17.21/CR II:1020).  Might God have instituted any kind of “symbol” as a sacrament of the believer’s participation in Christ’s life?  This question is certainly speculative and as such would elicit suspicion from Calvin himself.  Yet Calvin’s Eucharistic theory pushes against any possible arbitrariness in the relation between sacramental signs and the reality signified.  Were the sign to have nothing to do with, say, the general idea of “nourishment,” then such a sign would lack the analogical appropriateness to the way believers are nourished by their union with Christ.  Such a sign would be “a bare and empty token.”  This affirmation of bread and wine as natural and appropriate signifiers of nourishment was an important claim in Calvin’s criticism of transubstantiation. 

     

Gerrish points out that the tendency of some interpreters of Calvin to place him in the medieval voluntarist tradition has led to the assumption that Calvin’s theory of eucharistic signs was not all that different from Zwingli’s.  The late medieval emphasis upon divine freedom and transcendence carried with it “a flight from secondary causality and . . . a reassertion of the sovereignty of God as the only cause,” so the argument goes.  Further, many see Calvin as standing in this tradition and thus participating in a theological movement that de-emphasized created or secondary causes.  Arguing along these lines, then, Calvin’s willingness to talk of the elements as signs, symbols, or figures can be interpreted as evidence that God “does not in any sense remain bound to objects even after having chosen them.”  The question here is how to understand Calvin’s comments on the Eucharistic elements as instrumental causes.  Calvin’s basic theological claim is that divine power is not “transferred” to created objects.  (I return to the problem of “transferred” power later in this chapter).

     

Calvin’s worry about divine glory being “transferred” to finite objects resonates with his treatment of idolatry throughout the doctrine of creation in Book I.  Calvin attempts to isolate the uniqueness of the Reformed eucharistic theology in the principle of soli deo gloria: the orientation to God as the sole object of worship and praise in contrast to all things finite guides the eucharistic theory.

Would they have God to act by the sacraments? We teach so. Would they have our faith to be exercised,

cherished, aided, confirmed, by them? This, too, we assert. Would they have the power of the Holy Spirit to be exerted in them, and make them available for the salvation of God’s elect? We concede this also. The

question turns upon this — should we ascribe all the parts of our salvation entirely to God alone, or does he himself by using the sacraments transfer part of his praise to them?” (Mutual Consent in CJCC, p. 215).

This concept of “transfer” occurs frequently in Calvin, and is one of the keys to understanding the relations between the themes of presence, power, and worship in Calvin’s writing.

     

This resistance to a “transfer” of power appears in the Genesis Commentary (1554) as well.  Calvin’s comment regarding the “tree of life” in the garden of Eden betrays how deeply Calvin’s biblical exegesis was a form of cultural criticism.

For we know it to be by no means unusual that God should give to us the attestation of his grace [power] by external symbols.  He does not indeed transfer his power into outward signs; but by them he stretches out his hand to us, because, without assistance, we cannot ascend to him” (Genesis Commentary, 1948: 116, italics mine).

Why would Calvin need to point out that the “tree of life,” like all worldly symbols, is not a site of divine power?  The comment might appear unimportant, even esoteric, given that what’s at stake is one pastors’ interpretation of one little detail in the Genesis creation story.  But the comment betrays that Calvin is not nearly as interested in giving tours of Eden as he is in mapping the way power works in the lived reality of the culture he and his readers inhabited.  The everyday world of the senses – sight, touch, and sound especially – had mistakenly become, thought Calvin, a sacred landscape within which one might meet the divine in a great variety of material things.  European culture was suffused with representations of divine power – mediated to believers in the many relics of the saints, in the holy places which were destinations of pilgrimage, and, especially, in the elements of bread and wine supernaturally transformed in the hands of the priests into Christ’s very body.  

     

Calvin’s comment about the “tree of life” signals that he was trying to read the dynamics of culture through the reading of sacred texts.  Whether or not God “transfers” God’s own power into “outward signs” was a question meant to scrutinize more than the meaning of Genesis; at stake was the European imagination.  Calvin was trying to fashion a different world for his readers, a world where religion is reconfigured (platonically) as an ascent beyond the senses to the heavenly realm of God’s power.  In this alternative imaginative landscape, God’s power belongs to God alone, and is never transferred to anything finite, leaving God’s glory single and undiluted.  Soli Deo Gloria here becomes a passionate drive of the Reformed imagination to alter conventional wisdom about the traffic between heaven and earth.

     

Throughout his career, Calvin’s treatment of the Lord’s Supper made clear that, far from being yet one more theological topic, it was the primary test case for whether God’s purpose for creating the world was being fulfilled or thwarted.

The question turns upon this — should we ascribe all the parts of our salvation entirely to God alone, or does he himself by using the sacraments transfer part of his praise to them? (Mutual Consent in CJCC, p. 215).

At stake in the Eucharistic life of the Church was both God’s identity and the identities of Calvin’s audiences.  Would their sacramental practices be an offering of praise to the God whose power is not transferred to finite media?  Or will their sacramental life idolatrously distort the boundaries between Creator and created, between that which alone is worthy of praise and that which offers the praise?  And these questions about God’s identity are simultaneously questions about Calvin’s readers: Are they idolaters or are they communities of praise, rendering to God the worship that fulfills the purpose of their very existence?  Such concerns were more than diagnostic; they were meant to persuade.  Calvin sought to move his readers from the position of idolaters threatened by the wrath of God into worshipers who render God praise.

B.  Calvin’s general sacramental theology in Institutes, Book IV

     

Whether the structure of the Institutes is pictured in creedal or Trinitarian terms, Calvin’s sacramental theology as developed in Book IV must be understood in the context of the grand theological vision.  In terms of the Apostles’ Creed, the sacramental theology of Book IV can be read as a commentary on the fourth stanza, the affirmation of the Church as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.  It is that particular Church, called into existence by the Father, through the Son, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, that organizes its ongoing life of worship by means of the sacraments.  In Trinitarian terms, the sacramental theology of Book IV can be read as a reflection on the particular institutional practices chosen by God through which to distribute the benefits of Christ’s work to the faithful in the power of the Holy Spirit.  Insofar as the Church and its ministry are God-given helps, gifts of God’s mercy to a community still plagued by sin and on pilgrimage, the sacraments are understood as the organizing practices of the Christian life lived in fellowship with God’s family.  They are “another aid [adiumentum] to our faith related to the preaching of the gospel” (4.14.1/CR II: 941).

     

Calvin’s general reflection on the nature of sacraments will clarify his vision of the role played by the institutional church and its ministry – especially the sharing of the Supper - in the drama of God’s redeeming activity in the world and in the lives of the faithful.  Sacraments are properly understood only when seen in connection with God’s promises and the faith those promises elicit.  Sacraments always come joined to God’s promises “as a sort of appendix [appendicem quandam adiungi], with the purpose of confirming [confirmet] and sealing [obsignet] the promise itself” (4.14.3/CR II:942).  From the start, Calvin refuses to see the sacraments apart from God’s gracious will towards sinners in Christ.  The heart of the gospel, grounded in the will of the Father, accomplished in the Person and Work of the Son, and received by the faithful in the power of the Spirit, is that God wills to be gracious towards sinners, adopting them by faith into a real sharing in God’s own life.  Herein lay the promises of God which constitute the essence of faith’s way of knowing God.  Accompanying these divine promises in the providential and redemptive activity of God are the sacraments that “confirm” and “seal” them.

     

Yet the picture of sacramentally confirmed and sealed promises of God is more a beginning point than an exhaustive definition.  What this language does not make clear is Calvin’s view of the sacraments as a form of a participation in Christ and his benefits, a genuine union with God.  While the language of “confirming and sealing” illumines the epistemic dimension of Calvin’s sacramental theology, it does not similarly capture the “mystical union” between Christ and the Church.  There is also the metaphysical or ontological dimension of the sacrament.  

     

For Calvin, the sacraments offer yet one more layer to the many ways in which God’s relations with humanity can be described as “accommodation.”  More to the point, it is the bodily character of human lives that that God respects and honors in the institution of the sacraments within the Church’s life.

Here our merciful Lord, according to his infinite kindness, so tempers himself to our capacity that, since we are creatures who always creep on the ground, cleave to the flesh, and, do not think about or even conceive of anything spiritual, he condescends to lead us to himself even by these earthly elements, and to set before us in the flesh a mirror of spiritual blessings.  For if we were incorporeal (as Chrysostom says), he would give us these very things naked and incorporeal.  Now, because we have souls engrafted in bodies, he imparts spiritual things under visible ones (4.14.3).

Calvin views the physical character of the sacramental signs not as signaling that God’s promises are deficient in some way, but that human finitude and corporeality would retain an unreliable grasp of these promises without sacramental helps.  Following Augustine, Calvin says a sacrament “represents God’s promises as painted in a picture and sets them before our sight, portrayed graphically and in the manner of images [graphice atque eikonos expressas statuat]” (4.14.6/CR II: 945).  Primary for Calvin is that the sacramental signs are visible, graphic images.  So despite Calvin’s claims about God’s merciful accommodation to our “earthly” natures, it is primarily human sight which governs Calvin’s treatment of sacramental signs.  These signs are not to grab and capture sight, but are to function as an ascending stairway by which faith ascends to the invisible mysteries hidden in the visible signs.

     

Calvin’s claim that the sacraments “have been instituted by the Lord to the end that they may serve to establish and increase faith” depends, obviously, on the claim that the faith of the Church is constantly in need of being established and increased.  Because the Holy Spirit is the primary agent in creating and nourishing faith, the sacraments are to be seen not in competition with but as the form taken by the operation of the Spirit (see 4.14.10).  This intimate connection of Sacrament with Spirit means that Calvin’s theology of the Spirit as the power of faith’s union with Christ and Christ’s benefits is to be understood institutionally and communally, not simply individually.  The soteriological rhetoric of “union with Christ” in Book III is unfolded here in the ecclesial rhetoric of the Church’s sacramental sharing in Christ in which the Church continually enacts its identity as the body of Christ. 

     

Calvin is especially concerned to guard against any confusion of sacramental “matter” and “sign,” of sacramental “truth” and “figure.”  Such distinctions serve to clarify the role played by sacramental observances in the life of faith.  To fail to distinguish matter and sign, thinks Calvin, would be to mistakenly assume that the sacramental signs themselves carry their benefits purely objectively.  He worried about the danger within Catholicism that relations between God and the faithful would be made a matter of sacramental transactions in a way that undermined the importance of faith.  To emphasize the role of faith in sacramental participation, Calvin stresses the intimate connection between sacraments and divine promises.  Only when sacraments are apprehended “in faith” (4.14.15) are they effective.  Only then does the worshiper receive not only the sign/figure but also the matter/truth of the sacrament, which is Christ himself.  “I say that Christ is the matter [materiam] or (if you prefer) the substance [substantiam] of all the sacraments; for in him they have all their firmness [soliditatem], and they do not promise anything apart from him” (4.14.16/CR II: 952-3).  Faith is the Spirit powered bond that unites believers to Christ and Christ’s benefits.  And sacramental rituals do not make an end run around that basic claim.  Instead, they provide the divinely appointed means or helps by which faith can cling ever more tightly to Christ himself.  

     

Calvin wants his readers never to loose sight of the theological vision worked out thus far in the Institutes, namely, that salvation refers to the drama whereby God adopts sinners into a participation in God’s own life, making them collectively an ever brighter reflection of God’s image and glory.  Just as the theme of “glory to God alone” governs Calvin’s concerns about justification, grace, and faith, so too it governs his estimation of sacramental dynamics.  Erroneous sacramental theology, far from being a trivial affair, jeopardizes the mission of a Church whose sole end is the glory of God.

     

This positive sacramental vision is accompanied by a critical principle: apart from faith, persons receive only the “sign” and not the “matter” of the sacrament.  While this position provides critical leverage against a presumptuous reliance on the purely objective working of the sacrament, it also raises the troubling possibility that sacramental efficacy is contingent upon the subjective worthiness of the participant.  Such a situation would make it appear that God’s grace is trumped by human inadequacy.  When taken primarily as a psychological claim about the recipient’s state of mind, Calvin’s sacramental theology will appear unpersuasive and inconsistent.  But if it is primarily a theological claim – a claim about the subservience of the sacraments to the ongoing mission of the Spirit in joining sinners to Christ – then the claim appears at least plausible.  

     

It is the Spirit who creates and sustains faith in fallen human creatures.  It is the Spirit that readies the mind and affections to hear and receive the gospel and that accomplishes the union whereby Christ’s life and benefits are shared with the faithful.  It is this claim about the work of the Spirit that lay behind Calvin’s insistence that sacramental efficacy requires a reception of the sacraments “in faith.”  In spite of the popular conception of early Protestantism as the beginning of individualist and interior religion, it is more correct to describe it as an alternative pneumatology with an alternative institutional logic.  The basic theological drama remains the Trinitarian incorporation of sinners within the divine life.  But the Spirit’s relation to faith and the sacraments is such that sacramental efficacy is radically reconfigured.  It might help to think in descending levels of abstraction.  The grand theological vision focuses on the grace whereby God wills to share God’s own life with creatures.  This Trinitarian sharing by creatures – who are not only finite but sinful - actually happens in such a way that it is mediated by a sharing in the person and work of Christ.  And only at this level does it come into view that the Holy Spirit gathers the body of Christ by means of the sacraments. 

     

Calvin’s attempt to situate the Church’s sacraments within the broad scope of biblical narrative provides an interesting contrast to his criticism of the multiplication of the sacraments within Catholicism.  For Calvin, the Church’s (two) sacraments are not novel but share in a long lineage that joins the Church to God’s past covenants.  The sacraments, then, are part of a long biblical story that includes Adam and Eve’s tree of life, Noah’s rainbow, Abraham’s smoking pot, Gideon’s fleece, Hezekiah’s sundial, and Israels’ manna in the wilderness.  In all these cases, God marked “with his Word the things he has created, [so] that what were previously bare elements [nuda elementa] may become sacraments” (4.14.18/CR II: 955).  Moreover, Calvin sees continuity between the Church’s sacraments and the idolatrous religious practices of various pagan cultures.  Calvin assumes, of course, that all human communities are fundamentally religious in impulse and orientation.  But Calvin adds that this ubiquity of religion is always accompanied by the institution of practices and ceremonies.  Thus Calvin sees in the Church’s sacramental life God’s gracious provision for a deep human need: they are “definite exercises of piety” [certa pietatis exercitia] or “aids to true piety” [verae pietatis adiumenta] (4.14.19/CR II: 956).

II.  The Lord’s Supper, Christ’s Body, and Christian Identity

     

The theological and practical significance of the Lord’s Supper permeated the whole of the Institutes.  Across the entire spectrum of theological topics treated - right worship and idolatry, God’s accommodating relations with humanity, Christ’s presence, person, and work, Word and gospel, or the proper roles of civil and ecclesial authorities - the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was never absent from view.  And as Gerrish reminds us, the themes of divine grace and human gratitude, so characteristic of the theological whole, provide the basic logic for Calvin’s understanding of the Eucharist.  Thus Calvin’s explicit treatment of the practice in Book IV is simply a gathering into focus of a constant theme and problem, not an explicit turn to a new topic.  Given the practical nature of Calvin’s literary-theological aims, it should not surprise us that a religious practice so central to the turbulent political climate of the mid-sixteenth century should appear in so many places throughout the Institutes.

     

Yet the claim that the Eucharistic theme of divine gifts and human gratitude pervade all editions of the Institutes should not imply that Calvin’s eucharistic theology was immune to development, new emphases and new arguments.  It would be a mistake to proceed as if Calvin’s Eucharistic theology were stable developmentally and conceptually throughout his lifetime, even though I am here focusing on the final Latin edition of the Institutes.  That the final form of Calvin’s chapter on the Supper in the 1559 Institutes was more of a “patchwork” than a seamless integration of previous editions is borne out by the vestiges of its original structure in the final form.  In the 1536 edition Calvin’s thoughts were more or less ordered under what he called three “uses” for which the Supper was instituted: its use in confirming faith, in eliciting gratitude, and in encouraging love among the faithful.  By 1559, the third use shows up in section 38 with little connection to what has gone before.  Thus while the early form of explication continues to be visible, Calvin’s teaching on the Supper came to be expressed through a different lens, with different emphases becoming dominant and different problems lying closer to the surface of the text.

A.  The Eucharist as Feast and Gift.

     

One of the strength’s of Gerrish’s interpretation of Calvin’s eucharistic theology is his discussion of the Reformed Supper as a practical aid to piety.  Given what Calvin says about sacraments in general, the heart of eucharistic teaching concerns the life of faith, not abstract ontological questions about God’s “presence.”  Calvin’s final arrangement of the Lord’s Supper material privileges the metaphorical framework of God the Father adopting children into the family and feeding them with the Supper.  This metaphorical framing did not demand that Calvin abandon earlier emphases altogether, but it did demand that the practice of the Supper be seen from a particular metaphorical and theological vantage point.  This theological framing of the material is central to Gerrish’s analysis of Calvin’s eucharistic piety.  The introduction to the section on the Lord’s Supper in the 1559 edition is crucial to Gerrish’s thesis.

God has received us, once for all, into his family, to hold us not only as servants but as sons.  Thereafter, to fulfill the duties of a most excellent Father concerned for his offspring, he undertakes also to nourish [alendos] us throughout the course of our life . . . For as in baptism, God, regenerating us, engrafts us into the society of his church and makes us his own by adoption, so we have said, that he discharges the function of a provident householder in continually supplying to us the food to sustain and preserve [sustineat ac conservet] us in that life into which he has begotten us by his Word (4.17.1/CR II:1002).

This metaphorical framing of the Supper as God’s fatherly provision for a family in continual need of nourishment should be seen as part of Calvin’s rhetorical effort to shape his readers lives and imaginations.  Far from being a matter of obscure scholarly wrangling, eucharistic debates were public conversations about the social world and social identities, about the rhythmic patterns of religious practices and the power of those practices to confer an identity upon communities.  To participate in the “spiritual banquet [spirtuale epulum]” (ibid) is to mark oneself publicly as one of God’s adopted children.

     

The metaphorical imagery of feeding a family provides explanatory power throughout Calvin’s treatment of the Supper.  Calvin articulates the appropriateness of bread and wine as “symbols” by appeal to the analogy of food and nourishment.  “As bread nourishes, sustains, and keeps the life of our body, so Christ’s body is the only food to invigorate and enliven our soul.”  So too does wine symbolize by analogy the benefits of Christ’s blood.  “These benefits are to nourish, refresh, strengthen, and gladden” (4.17.3).  Calvin summarizes his teaching concerning the two sacraments handed down to the Church from the New Testament in the following way:

Baptism should be, as it were, an entry into the church, and an initiation into faith; but the Supper should be a sort of continual food [alimentum] on which Christ spiritually feeds [pascit] the household of his believers . . . baptism is but one [Eph. 4:4-6], and is not a thing oft-repeated.  But the Supper is repeatedly distributed, that those who have once been drawn into the church may realize that they continually feed on Christ [assidue pasci] (4.18.19, 1536/CR II: 1064).

Calvin’s point is that the Christian community continually draws its life from Christ himself.  That community is what it is only insofar as it is continually fed by Christ.  And what goes for the Church goes for individual Christians as well.  So far forth, the metaphorical framework of feeding functions to emphasize this continual dependence on Christ’s power.  It also functions to pick out the eucharistically relevant feature of the Church, namely, its existence as God’s adopted family.

     

Calvin’s notion of a sacramental “feast” is so closely tied to notions of divine grace that it will be helpful here to explore briefly Calvin’s treatment of Christ’s body given in the Supper as the paradigmatic divine gift to humanity.  Just as Calvin’s doctrine of creation and redemption are expressed in terms of graciously given gifts and the appropriately grateful human reception of those gifts, so too with Calvin’s teaching on the Supper.  Central to Calvin’s eucharistic theology is the understanding of Christ’s body in the elements as a gift to the community.  Jesus’ words of institution – “given” for you – signal for Calvin the gift-character of the meal itself.

[T]he very powerful and almost entire force of the Sacrament lies in these words: “which is given for you,” “which is shed for you.”  The present distribution of the body and blood of the Lord would not greatly benefit us unless they had once for all been given for our redemption and salvation (4.17.3).

Once for all, therefore, he gave his body to be made bread when he yielded himself to be crucified for the redemption of the world; daily he gives it when by the word of the gospel he offers it for us to partake, inasmuch as it was crucified, when he seals such giving of himself by the sacred mystery of the Supper, and when he inwardly fulfills what he outwardly designates (4.17.5).

The theological depth of the sacred supper is registered in terms of its participation in the never-ending circulation of gifts between God and humanity.  Jesus Christ’s body has been given once (in the crucifixion), and it continues to be given “daily” (in the gospel) in such a way that it is “sealed” (in the Supper).  This means that believers can trust in the efficacious character of the Supper because it is nothing less than the Spirit’s work of distributing Christ’s body – a distribution that cascades from the cross through the preached gospel to the eucharistic bread itself.  Here the incarnation, the preaching of the gospel, and the sacramental meal are all bound together in an economy of divine giving.  God gave once, continues to give, and seals the giving.  And Calvin’s eucharistic theory is driven by the goal of fashioning religious practices that capture this divine drama.  

     

Calvin’s repeated contrast between the Reformed Supper and the Catholic Mass turns on this notion of sacramental participation as the grateful reception of a gift.  In this vein he criticizes priests for thinking they can

apply [the Mass] particularly to this man or that, as they pleased, or rather to everyone who was willing to buy such merchandise with coin.  Now, although they could not reach Judas’ price, still to resemble their author in some respect, they have kept a similarity in number.  Judas sold him for thirty pieces of silver [Matt. 26:15]; these persons, according to the French reckoning, sell him for thirty pieces of copper; Judas, once; these, as often as they find a buyer (4.18.14, written 1536).

Heightening the contrast, Calvin characterizes the Mass as an attempt to sell the body of Christ.  In an attempt at polemical humor, Calvin wryly notes that the only salient difference between Judas and Catholic priests is that Judas charged more.  Calvin is focused here on a particular dimension of medieval sacramental practice – that of applying Masses to particular persons or groups for a fee.  For Calvin the relevant feature of the practice was its incongruity with a theological claim about the body of Jesus Christ, once for all “given” and now daily “given,” as the divine gift to humanity.

     

Calvin’s understanding of the Supper as a drama of divine gift giving pressed against culturally dominant practices related to the Mass.  Much ink has been spilled on whether Calvin was a “systematic” theologian.  His rhetorical sensibilities (especially his vision of theology as a practical enterprise aimed at making his readers better Christians) often obscures an important sense in which Calvin is genuinely “systematic.”  His theological writing evidences a systematic pursuit of a coherence between beliefs Christians hold about God and the world, on the one hand, and the practices which identify religious observance and social interchange, on the other.  What this means for his eucharistic theology is that if eternal life is pictured radically as gift, then certain implications for the logic of participation in sacramental practices emerge.

     

Nowhere is Calvin’s criticism of the sacrificial economy of the Mass more pointed than in his treatise on The Necessity of Reforming the Church (1554).  His critical comments regarding the sale of Masses – a “disgraceful traffic” in the “public mart,” the church having become an “ordinary shop” where everything is for sale - echo Calvin’s accusations of Trent on matters of justification.  Just as in soteriological matters any mention of “merit” appeared to Calvin as figuring the divine/human relation as a market-place relation (“heaven for hire,” Calvin called it), so too in eucharistic matters the selling of private Masses made the churches into “just ordinary shops.”  The difference Calvin sees between market relations of buying and selling on the one hand, and relations of gift-giving on the other, inform Calvin’s polemic with prevailing Catholic theory and practice on a number of topics.

     

Gerrish looks primarily to Calvin’s criticism of the Mass in the 1559 Institutes for evidence that the broad theological significance of “gratitude” is at the heart of Calvin’s eucharistic thought.  That the Supper is figured as a gift signals continuity with Calvin’s doctrine of Creation where all humans have and all they are is figured as gift.  Thus the image of God the Creator as the Fountain of all good and the corresponding human disposition of thankfulness is the primary eucharistic image as well.  In the eucharist, the “fountain” now flows explicitly from the Father to the Son and through the Son’s flesh to humanity in the power of the Spirit.  But the centrality of the pairing gift-gratitude remains in focus.

Calvin’s Sacramental Economy of Salvation

     

The “chief function” of the sacrament, says Calvin, is to “seal” [obsignare] and “confirm” [confirmare] faith (4.17.4/CR II: 1004).  The problem – as Calvin’s Catholic and Lutheran opponents saw immediately – is that this relocation of the Supper’s significance appears to empty the eucharistic practice of its metaphysical weight, making of it a merely epistemological affair.  Calvin’s opponents worried that the emphasis upon the epistemic function of the Supper implied that the bread and wine were merely signs of a grace that was made available quite apart from those signs.  This criticism is not, it turns out, quite on target.  Yet Calvin’s own writing on the matter opened the door to such criticism, and he would spend the rest of his life repeatedly explaining why such a charge failed to take seriously what he meant by “faith.”  For Calvin, “faith” is the receiving of Christ in the life of the believer - a real participation in Christ and not simply believing true things about Christ.  Yet what are we to make of the relation between faith’s participation in Christ and the participation in Christ’s body that had been so critical to the Church’s eucharistic imagination?  

     

Calvin’s answer is sometimes hard to follow.  The Supper is an image of a “secret union” [arcanae Christi cum piis unionis] with Christ, a “mystical blessing” [mystica haic benedictio] whose purpose is to “confirm [confirmet] for us the fact that the Lord’s body was once for all so sacrificed for us that we may now feed upon it” (4.17.1/CR II: 1002-3).  The Supper, then, is not itself a sacrifice, but functions to “confirm” that believers presently feed on Christ’s body in faith.  Put another way, it is a visible sign of an invisible and incomprehensible union with Christ.  Neither the language of “visible sign” nor that of “confirming” faith clarifies the relationship between faith’s participation in Christ’s flesh and the feeding on Christ’s flesh that happens in the Supper.  As is often the case in theological debate, the employment of particular metaphors does not finalize an issue but rather creates new problems that need to be explained and explored.  

     

Calvin’s treatment of the “bread of life” discourse in John 6 appears to press even harder the non-essential character of eucharistic participation in Christ.  Christ’s testimony that his flesh is real food and his blood real drink refers primarily, says Calvin, to the incarnational mission culminating in crucifixion and resurrection, not to the sacrament itself.  Calvin uses this principle to identify the sacramental meal as a divinely given help to faith, and not as the exclusive medium of grace itself.  The Sacrament is always to be seen in tandem with the gospel as Word and promise.  God’s self-offering to humanity is the heart both of the gospel and of the Supper itself.  The difference is that this divine self-offering and its reception in faith happens “more clearly” [illustrius] in the Sacrament than in preaching (4.17.5/CR II: 1005).  Christ is the bread of life quite apart from the Sacramental signs, yet those signs function to make ever clearer God’s self-offering in the body of Christ.  The importance of the rite within the economy of salvation, in other words, derives simply from the fact that the church should avail itself of the helps provided by God, not from the supposition that the Supper is, strictly speaking, necessary for salvation.  

     

This means that “faith” in Christ is prior to sacramental participation in Christ in a certain way.  While it is true that the “faith” by which believers are joined to Christ in the power of the Spirit is required if the Supper is to be an efficacious sacrament, it is not true to say that the Supper is necessary for there to be faith.  For Calvin the Supper is not a necessary mediation of divine grace.  It is rather one of the ways God mercifully guides and guards the Church’s always unsteady faith.  “I hold that men bear away from this Sacrament no more than they gather with the vessel of faith.”  And with faith as the empty vessel in which believers receive Christ and his benefits, the Supper itself “is a help [adminiculum] whereby we may be engrafted [inseramur] into Christ’s body, or, engrafted, may grow more and more together with him [coalescamus], until he joins [uniat] us with him in the heavenly life” (4.17.33/CR II: 1035).  The institutional and communal “helps” provided by God are essential features of Christian existence.  Calvin re-locates the significance of sacramental practices from exclusive mediations of grace to divinely given helps to faith.  While this clearly subordinates sacramental feeding on Christ to faith’s participation in Christ, it also presupposes that “faith” cannot flourish outside the communally given helps graciously offered by God.  Thus while this picture of the Supper undercuts the Catholic institutional system understood as the sole conduit of grace, it replaces it not with a Protestant individualism but with an alternative institutional framework.

     

Section nineteen of the treatise Mutual Consent (written 1551) is titled, quite audaciously, “Believers Before, and Without the Use of the Sacraments, Communicate with Christ.”  Calvin says later in that section:

It is mere ignorance, therefore, that makes some cry out, that the figure of the holy Supper is

made empty and void, if the ungodly do not receive as much in it as believers. If they hold that the same thing is given to both indiscriminately, I could easily subscribe to their inference, but that Christ is received

without faith is no less monstrous than that a seed should germinate in the fire. By what right do they allow themselves to dissever Christ from his Spirit? (Mutual Consent in CJCC: 219).

Against the Catholic claim that the Sacraments confer grace to all unless obstructed by mortal sin, Calvin claims that Christ is received and present in faith quite apart from sacramental participation.  He also claims (in the above quotation) that positing sacramental efficacy apart from faith amounts to separating Christ and the Spirit.  Calvin shifts the debate away from questions of the reliability of God’s promises and presence in thickly institutional and objective notions of sacrament to the perichoretic unity of the Trinitarian persons.  It is not the primary job of the sacraments to exhibit an objectivity that mirrors divine reliability.  The Supper is certainly about God’s promises, but for Calvin these promises are received in faith and sealed by the presence of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus the divine Gift, the Father whose favor Jesus makes present, and the Spirit who joins the faithful to Christ – this trinitarian economy is not to be undercut by claims about sacramental objectivity.  Prevailing Catholic notions of sacramental grace violate a Trinitarian picture of salvation, argues Calvin, because the peculiarity of the Spirit’s work is missed.

     

This focus on a sacramental sharing in or union with Christ picks up and further articulates the broad theological vision of human life as fulfilled and completed only by participation in the life of God by means of Christ.  Believers receive the fruit of great “assurance and delight” [fiduciae ac suivitatis] from the Supper because in it “they have a witness of our growth into one body with Christ such that whatever is his may be called ours.”  Then Calvin continues:

This is the wonderful exchange which, out of his measureless benevolence, he has made with us; that, becoming Son of man with us, he has made us sons of God with him; that, by his descent to earth, he has prepared an ascent to heaven for us; that, taking on our mortality, he has conferred his immortality upon us; that, accepting our weakness, he has strengthened us by his power; that, receiving our poverty into himself, he has transferred his wealth to us; that, taking the weight of our iniquity upon himself (which oppressed us), he has clothed us with his righteousness (4.17.2).

Here Calvin makes explicit the theological connections between Sacramental dynamics and the rhetoric of justification.  The richness of Christian faith demands a plurality of expressions within various doctrinal topics.  The truth and reality of the sharing between Christ and the faithful is a mystery beyond comprehension, and needs to be refracted theologically in multiple frames.  In the doctrinal language of “justification,” that sharing in Christ is pictured as an “exchange” whereby Christ becomes sin and sinners become righteous.  In eucharistic language, that sharing in Christ is pictured as a growing together of the ecclesial body with the body of Christ in which these benefits were won once and for all, and on which the community of the faithful continues to depend for its nourishment.

     

Yet is not Calvin’s sacramental drama still open to the charge that the eucharistic elements themselves serve a merely epistemic function, reminding believers, by portraying to them, the union with Christ they enjoy quite apart from the sacrament?  It was Calvin’s debate with Zwinglians that clarified his position that sacramental sharing in Christ should not be reduced to categories of knowledge.  No one “should think that the life that we receive from him is received by mere knowledge” (4.17.5).  What categories of knowledge or belief cannot capture, thinks Calvin, is the “true partaking” [vera communicatione] (4.17.5/CR II: 1006) of Christ’s body or flesh which is the incomprehensible heart of the sacramental meal.  This eucharistic position parallels his argument that justifying faith is not mere knowledge (and cannot be captured by the forensic model alone), but a genuine union with Christ.  In both, Christ is not to be pictured as remaining distant or external to the faithful.  By faith, “we embrace Christ not as appearing from afar but as joining [unientem] himself to us” (4.17.6/CR II: 1006).  Sacramental sharing in Christ is a “living experience” [vivo sensus] in which we “grasp the efficacy of his death” (4.17.4/CR II: 1004).  And this “living experience,” far from mere knowing or believing, is the experience of a mystery that exceeds human capacities.  Concerning the sacramental meal, Calvin is driven to admit, “I rather experience than understand it [experior magis quam intelligam]” (4.17.32/CR II: 1032). 

      

Gerrish asks “what it means to call the Supper a ‘sacrament’ if, as it appears, the Supper effects nothing that is not already happening” (127).  Is there any sacramental “plus”?  Is there any way in which the sacrament is in excess of what already happens in faith?  Or is the sacrament rendered superfluous by its primary “use” being the confirmation of a faith that is already there according to Calvin?  Gerrish’s analysis warrants attention.

The first use of the Lord’s Supper is to confirm the promise that the Lord’s body, once given up for us (pro nobis semel traditum), is now and always will be ours.  He has been so engrafted into us, and we into him, that an actual exchange (commutatio) has occurred: his riches for our poverty, his strength for our weakness.  The point of the Sacrament is that it promises these things by picturing them.  As bread nourishes the body, so Christ’s body is the food of our spiritual life.  Similarly, the strength, refreshment, and good cheer that wine brings to the body Christ’s blood imparts to us spiritually (127).

Gerrish is here trying to specify why it is that the Supper is not superfluous, even though it “effects nothing that is not already happening.”  The Sacrament does something even the preached Word of the gospel does not, it “promises these things by picturing them” (ibid, italics mine).  The preached word is sacramental in the sense that it presents Christ to the hearers, but that same gospel comes to believers in picture form too, and that is the peculiar function of Sacraments in Calvin’s thought.

     

So the Supper pictures for believers that they are (have been, still are, and will be) nourished by Christ’s body.  Gerrish presses the matter further by asking “whether the Sacrament actually offers us something or only confirms that we possess it already.”  Rather than solve the ambiguity, Gerrish points out what is already clear: that the Supper is a kind of “object lesson” in which believers are taught that they have a “continuing connection to his [Christ’s] bodily existence” (1993: 127).  While true, this focus on the epistemic dimension on the Supper is insufficient.  But this interpretation is remedied a few pages later.

This, in short, is what makes the Supper a sacrament: not that it brings about a communion with Christ, or a reception of his body, that is not available anywhere else, but rather that it graphically represents and presents to believers a communion they enjoy, or can enjoy, all the time . . . The reason why it was instituted was not because something happens there that happens nowhere else, but because daily communion with the body and blood of the Lord is too mysterious to comprehend: it can only be attested and represented.  And it is always possible to have and to enjoy it more abundantly (133).

Here Gerrish acknowledges that Calvin’s concerns were as metaphysical as they were epistemic.  The Supper – like faith itself – is about a mysterious communion between sinful human creatures and the flesh of Christ.

     

The last claim in the above quotation requires amplification: the participation of believers in the body of Christ can always be had “more abundantly,” says Gerrish.  Calvin’s picture of the Church is that of a Church on pilgrimage.  Though the dominant rhythms of European religious devotion were overturned by Calvin’s rejection of penance, priestly absolution, and merit, the notion of the life of faith as a journey remained.  It was not a journey toward divine forgiveness.  It was a journey that begins in that forgiveness, venturing out for a fuller experience of it amidst a host of enemies and dangers.  Only when this sense of faith’s capacity to increase throughout life is understood can we understand the role played by the Supper for Calvin’s readers.  Gerrish comments:

The role he assigns to the Lord’s Supper in the life of the church presupposes that communion with Christ is not whole and perfect from the very first, but subject to growth, vicissitudes, and impediments.  He does not think of ‘receiving Christ’ as a crisis decision, achieved once and for all, but rather as a magnitude subject to variation.  In fact he is willing to say of receiving Christ what he refuses to admit concerning justification: it is partial (ex parte).  An infinitesimal faith in Christ is enough for receiving justification, but a fuller possession and enjoyment of Christ is always open to the believer.  It is with this fuller possession that the Eucharist has to do (1993: 134).

To restate my argument in this subsection, Calvin’s largely epistemic approach to the Supper must be seen in the larger context of Calvin’s metaphysical picture of the way believer’s share in Christ’s flesh.  Thus the Supper “confirms” faith, not merely in the sense that it heightens awareness of a union with Christ had by other means, but also in the sense that it augments and deepens faith’s sharing in Christ.   

The Ascension and Eucharistic Presence of Christ’s Body

     

One of the challenges in interpreting Calvin’s eucharistic thought is to refrain from assuming that the category of “presence” is the key to unlocking the heart of every eucharistic theology.  The tendency to frame all eucharistic question in terms of the question of “presence” becomes all the more acute for a project like this one, in which I have repeatedly appealed to the social context of Calvin’s writing.  That social context had, as one of its defining features, a particular set of social arrangements whose plausibility depended on appeals to the way God’s power is present to, or inheres in, created things.  This is all true; but the category should not be allowed to function as the only grid through which to interpret Calvin.  If we listen to the tone and texture of Calvin’s eucharistic writing, it suggests strongly that the category of “presence,” while obviously important, does not provide the primary key to his eucharistic theory. 

     

Yet notions of “presence” cannot possibly be avoided.  Calvin’s debates with his opponents required that he explicate the metaphysics presupposed by his notion of “feeding on Christ.”  Nothing is more central to Calvin’s theology in general and to his eucharistic theology in particular than the claim that God’s saving actions are embodied in a graced connection between sinful humanity and the body in which the incarnate Christ worked out their salvation.  This connection to Christ’s body is not constituted by the mere act of belief or memory, but by a genuine participation or communion in Christ’s glorified body.  Within this broad frame, the category of “presence” plays a limited, though important, role.  Thus, the attention paid to the theme of “presence” in this section will be responsible analysis only if it refrains from riding roughshod over Calvin’s own writing, inscribing the problem of “presence” as the only eucharistic category worth talking about.  Given that I am interested in the way Calvin promoted doctrines and practices that provided a politically significant shape to the identity of the Reformed communities, the category of “presence” cannot simply be left aside.  But we must also press on the political and identity-conferring significance of the fact that the category of “presence” did not govern all else in the sacramental practice of Calvin’s readers.

     

No one has emphasized more clearly than Gerrish the qualification of “presence” imagery by metaphors of “adoption” and “feeding.”  Gerrish’s thesis is that domestic metaphors are the primary imagistic frame for conveying both the drama of salvation and the drama of the eucharistic celebration.  God the Father bountifully provides for his (adopted) children.  This characterizes both God’s creative relation to humanity and God’s redemptive relation to them in Christ.  With regard to the two main sacraments, Gerrish emphasizes Calvin’s tendency to speak of God as adopting children into the family by baptism and providing them nourishment all their lives in the Lord’s Supper.

     

Having acknowledged that the notion of eucharistic “presence” has been theologically re-situated by Calvin, we can proceed to an inquiry of Calvin’s notion of Christ’s “presence” in a more appropriate way.  And here I want to simply note that we are dealing with a theologian for whom biblical narratives and categories structure every theological topic.  Concretely, that means that eucharistic theorizing has to be connected to Calvin’s explication of biblical texts having to do with the ascension of Christ’s body into heaven.  In the development of his Christology, Calvin (beginning at 2.16.5) leaves off accumulating Scriptural testimonies referring to how Christ saves, and begins commenting on the Apostle’s Creed (first added in 1539).  Right now I simply want to point out Calvin’s comments on the creedal statement that Christ “ascended into heaven.”  Calvin uses the theme of ascension to emphasize that Christ’s body has been removed from the earthly sphere.  For Calvin, this means that talk about Christ's presence is, in effect, talk about the presence of Christ’s majesty or power, and therefore not about the local presence of his body.

     

The ascension marks the most “useful” kind of presence for believers, not an absence.  “For Christ left us in such a way that his presence might be more useful [utilior] to us – a presence that had been confined [continebat] in a humble abode of flesh so long as he sojourned on earth” (2.16.14/CR II: 381).  Christ’s earthly body was a “confined” presence, a confinement overcome not in the resurrection, but only in the ascension.  Calvin interprets the gospel of John’s explicit link between Jesus’ leaving and the Spirit’s coming as emblematic of the greater usefulness of Christ’s post-ascension presence as opposed to the presence of his earthly body.  “Carried up into heaven, therefore, he withdrew his bodily presence from our sight, not to cease to be present with believers still on their earthly pilgrimage, but to rule heaven and earth with a more immediate power [sed ut praesentiore virtute iet coelum et terram regeret]” (ibid/ibid.).  That the ascended Christ is “ruling” is the true meaning of the creedal claim that Christ is now “seated at the right hand of the Father” (see 2.16.15).  And it is this kingly “rule” of the ascended Christ that is mediated by both the ecclesial and civil authorities in their respective ways.  But Calvin’s main concern is to show that the presence of Christ’s rule is “more immediate” than it was during his earthly life in a locatable body.  “Yet he truly inaugurated his Kingdom only at his ascension into heaven” (2.16.14).  This emphasis upon the presence of Christ’s rule within the world should qualify the popular view of Protestantism as simply a religion of transcendence over against Catholicism’s immanence.  

     

But when one reads Calvin’s interpretation of Christ’s ascension with an eye to his position on how Christ is present in the eucharistic meal, it is the distinction between Christ’s “body” and his “power” or “energy” that is most striking.  “As his body [corpus] was raised up above all the heavens, so his power and energy [virtus et efficacia] were diffused and spread beyond all the bounds of heaven and earth.” (2.16.14/CR II: 382).  Against Luther, Calvin takes the ascension of Christ’s body to entail the absence of that particular locatable body on earth.  The preferred terms for discussing the ubiquitous presence of Christ in the world are, instead, Christ’s “power” and “energy.”  The theological possibility that Christ’s “body” might somehow be omnipresent, and thereby present in the eucharistic elements, was not a persuasive one to Calvin.  For him Christ’s physical body signaled an inherent localization, a body in which Christ’s power and energy were “confined in a humble abode of flesh” (see above).  Apparently, the ascension of that earthly body did nothing to ameliorate the confining character of the body.  Instead, the pouring forth of the Spirit becomes the ubiquitous presence of Christ’s power.  Relying on Augustine (material added in 1543), Calvin can characterize this as a distinction between Christ’s “bodily” and “spiritual” presence (2.16.14).  Yet this way of speaking – Christ is spiritually, but not bodily present in the meal - becomes confusing when he argues with Catholics that he does not deny a notion of bodily presence.  Furthermore, while it is certainly a “present power” (2.16.17), it is nevertheless a form of Christ’s kingly rule that is now “hidden,” only to be fully manifest when Christ returns in judgment.

     

One can see this in Calvin’s sermons on the ascension, which are characterized by a patterned movement from Jesus’ resurrection to his ascension to his presence in the Supper.  In these sermons, preached in French to the Genevan citizens and transcribed by Calvin’s secretaries, we can see Calvin at work to articulate his theology to lay audiences.  Far from an anti-institutional or non-sacramental reading of soteriology and faith, Calvin repeatedly emphasizes the need for Christian communities to engage in sacramental practices.  In Sermon 12, “First Sermon on the Ascension,” Christ’s ascension is parsed in terms of the absence of his body but the presence of his power, defending believers from all evil.  Calvin assures his readers that the ascended Christ has dominion over demons, and that they need not fear Christ’s enemies.  The reason for such confidence is that

his power extends to us, as it is spread through heaven and through earth . . .That is how being far from Jesus Christ, with respect to His body, we are near Him with respect to His power. And this is what He shows us in the Supper . . . But how shall we come to seek Him in the Supper? If we come here according to the way the Papists come here to seek the body of God, we are mistaken. For it is the most execrable idol there is to think that this bread that we take here is the body of Jesus Christ. We must, then, seek Him on high, and knowing that He is in heaven let us not doubt at all however that He is with us by His grace, so that just as we see and touch the symbols, likewise, Jesus Christ truly accomplishes in us what the symbols signify to us: namely, that He dwells in our souls (italics mine, p. 175-6 in CJCC).

One wonders to what extent Calvin’s audiences would have tracked the subtle eucharistic claim that Christ is “far” with respect to his “body” but “near” with respect to his “power.”  But on the other hand, this claim was at the very heart of the early Reformed communities.  The movement’s iconoclastic rejection of the Catholic veneration of the eucharistic elements was an easily identifiable feature of Reformed faith.  Yet this denial of the local presence of Christ’s flesh in no way inhibited confidence in the presence of God’s Spirit to all of created reality, human life, and history.    

     

In Sermon 15, “Fourth Sermon on the Ascension,” Catholic eucharistic practices amount, in Calvin’s fertile imagination, to carrying Christ around in a box, playing with him like a doll:

Although He has gone up to heaven, and it is written that when He returns to earth it will be just as He was seen to go up, still those who call themselves Christians have never ceased looking for Him here below. Thus it has come to pass that they look for Jesus Christ in bread and wine, and they wish to hide Him in a box, and they wish to carry Him here and there, and to play with Him as with a doll. How come such superstitions, unless our nature is as ready to lower things as a stone? And when I say that we are inclined

to lower things, we want to drag down God all the time, with all that we know of Him, and we would like Him to be like us. We see, then, by experience that men have always wished to have Jesus Christ with them in the flesh, but we see, on the other hand, that the angels, wishing to rid us from such speculations, said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand still, looking into heaven?” True it is that in looking for our Lord it is very necessary that we raise our spirits to heaven, but we must not look for Him according to our senses and our understanding; thus faith must now control (p. 199 in CJCC).

Here Calvin makes an explicit connection between prevailing eucharistic practices and his more general theological anthropology.  Given that one feature of human sinfulness is an “inclination to lower things,” a desire to “drag down God all the time,” it is no surprise to Calvin that popular religion has come to practice its faith in such a way that it wants to have “Jesus Christ with them in the flesh.”  Calvin here connects the eucharistic question of the manner of Christ’s presence with the church’s difficult task of celebrating and waiting in the period of history between the two arrivals of Jesus Christ.  Getting the eucharistic celebration right, doctrinally speaking, is simply another way in which the church is to be faithful to its identity and mission in history.

     

In the debate between Sadoleto and Calvin regarding Geneva’s allegiance to the reform, an exchange about eucharistic practices was at the heart of communal identities.  The Catholic Sadoleto charges Calvin with localizing divine power (mirroring the exact charge Calvin makes against Catholics): He asks the Genevans whether they want to side with 1500 years of Church unity or with sectarian innovations introduced within the past twenty five years.  Sadoleto argues, “I will say nothing of the Eucharist, in which we worship the most true body of Christ.  Those men . . . endeavor . . . to enclose [includere] the very Lord of the universe, and His divine and spiritual power therein (which is altogether free and infinite), within the corners of a corporeal nature, circumscribed by its own boundaries [suis cancellis circumscripta est]” (Olin: 35/CR V: 378).  Even Gerrish, whose sympathies with Calvin run deep, suggests that Calvin’s attempt to locate Christ’s body in heaven is no less problematic than his opponents’ attempt to locate it in the bread.    

     

Calvin’s response to Sadoleto, written in August 1539, attempts to reverse the charge of “confinement”:

In the case of the Eucharist, you blame us for attempting to confine [includere] the Lord of the universe, and His divine and spiritual power (which is perfectly free and infinite) within the corners of a corporeal nature with its circumscribed boundaries [suis cancellis est circumscripta] . . . We have always distinctly testified, that not only the divine power of Christ, but His essence also, is diffused over all, and defined by no limits [nullis finibus limitari], and yet you hesitate not to upbraid us with confining it within the corners of corporeal nature!  How so?  Because we are unwilling with you to chain down [affigere] His body to earthly elements.  But had you any regard for sincerity, assuredly you are not ignorant how great a difference there is between the two things – between removing the local presence of Christ’s body from bread, and circumscribing His spiritual power within bodily limits [localem corporis Christi praesentiam a pane removeri et spiritualem Christi potentiam circumscribi corporis cancellis] (Olin: 64-5/CR V: 399-400).

In Sadoleto’s appeal Calvin sensed a real threat to the Reforming cause.  Here eucharistic differences were being articulated in an attempt to align Geneva with one side of a contentious conflict over communal identity.  Calvin addresses the Genevans with rhetoric that resonates with the worship/idolatry polarity so central to his theological vision.  A particular theological conceptuality was employed in order to argue for the necessity of a new communal identity and new arrangements of power in Geneva.  The Genevans are not to be among those who “gaze stupidly at the visible sign [ad signum visibile obstupescat]”.  Rather, they are those whose minds ascend to Christ (ibid).

Specifying the Presence of Christ’s Body

None but the utterly irreligious deny that Christ is the bread of life by which believers are nourished into eternal life.  But there is no unanimity as to the mode of partaking [participandi ratio] of him (4.17.5/CR II: 1005).

[I]nquisitive men demand an exaggerated mode of presence [hyperbolicum praesentiae modum], never set forth in Scripture (4.17.33/CR II: 1033).

[H]e [Heshusius] unworthily includes us all in the charge of teaching that the bread is the sign of the absent body, as if I had not long ago distinctly admonished my readers of two kinds of absence, to acquaint them that the body of Christ is indeed absent in respect of place [abesse quidem loco], but that we enjoy a spiritual participation in it [spirituali eius participatione], every obstacle from distance being surmounted by his divine energy [virtus].  Hence it follows, that our dispute relates neither to presence nor to substantial eating, but only as to the mode of both. We neither admit a local presence, nor that gross or rather brutish eating of which Heshusius talks so absurdly when he says, that Christ in respect of his human nature is present on the earth in the substance of his body and blood, so that he is not only eaten in faith by his saints, but also by the mouth bodily without faith by the wicked (Clear Explanation – written 1561 – TT, p. 270/ CR IX: 472).

When Calvin focuses on the Supper’s function of “confirming” the benefits of Christ’s work in the lives of the faithful, he tends to refer to believers as “partakers” [participes] in Christ’s body (4.17.1/CRII: 1003), or to their “growth into one body with Christ” [in unum corpus nos cum chriso coaluisse] (4.17.2/CR II: 1003).  This “body” talk emphasizes the linkages between the body in which Christ worked out the world’s salvation and the ecclesial body in which the benefits of that work flow into the lives of the faithful.  But he does not always refer to Christ’s body.  He can say that the soul is “quickened to spiritual life by [Christ’s] power [virtute in vitam spiritualem vegetetur]” (4.17.5/CRII: 1006).  Elsewhere it is a “partaking of Christ’s flesh [carnis Christi communione animae nostrae]” (4.17.6/CR II: 1006).  And even when he does talk in terms of Christ’s body being present in the meal, which is rare, qualifications abound – as can be seen in the following passage.

Such is the presence of the body (I say) that the nature of the Sacrament requires a presence which we say manifests itself here with a power and effectiveness so great that it not only brings an undoubted assurance of eternal life to our minds, but also assures us of the immortality of our flesh.  Indeed, it is now quickened by his immortal flesh, and in a sense partakes of his immortality (4.17.32, italics mine).

What is important is not simply that Christ’s body is present in the elements, but that the meal itself assures believers that their bodies have been joined to Christ’s own body in a real sharing.  The meal is a visible symbol of something transpiring on an invisible plane.

     

Calvin agrees with Augustine that “the same body which Christ has offered as a sacrifice is extended in the Supper.”  But he immediately adds a distinction regarding the “manner of eating” Christ’s body: “having been received into heavenly glory, the body breathes life upon us by the secret power of the Spirit” (4.17.34).  Here is the standard picture: Christ’s body is offered in the Supper, but it is primarily the “life” and “power” of that ascended body that is in focus. Calvin explicitly claims that the eucharistic presence of Christ’s virtue/power does not mark the absence of Christ’s body, but rather the mode in which Christ’s body is eucharistically present.  The conceptual distinction between “body” and “power” actually turns out to be a Trinitarian distinction: Christ’s body is present in the meal only in the sense that the Spirit’s power joins believers to Christ’s body by lifting them to heaven.  Paradoxically then, Christ’s body is extended in the meal, but only from heaven.  Human bodies, even Christ’s, are finite and located in space.  This is why Gerrish can charge Calvin with affirming a “local presence” of Christ in heaven even though Calvin rails against Catholic claims of a “local presence” of Christ in the elements (Gerrish, 1993: 176).  

     

But apparently the “power” of bodily affects need not be confined.  This is one of the keys to understanding Calvin’s eucharistic theology as a theology of power.  What makes the flesh of Christ powerful is its relation to the Spirit.  Properly speaking, then, it is the Holy Spirit that is the “power” of Christ’s body, insofar as it is the Spirit that proves powerful in joining humanity to the Fount of all its redemptive good.  In this strange way, the finite body of Jesus Christ in all his doing and suffering does not wear its power on its face.  In Calvin’s trinitarian economy of power, the effects of the redemption worked in Christ’s body are manifest only in the presence and work of the Spirit.  

     

The biblical depiction of Christ’s ascension, heavenly reign at God’s right hand, and bodily return in judgment provides Calvin with the conceptual and imaginative resources for resisting rival eucharistic theories.  Jesus’ statements to the disciples that he will depart and in turn send the Spirit (John 14-16), that he will not always be with them (Matthew 26:11), that he will remain with his disciples always (Matthew 28:20), and the Acts 1 account of the visible departure of Jesus’ resurrected body – all these combine to frame a complex interplay of the risen Christ’s presence and absence.  Of Christ’s promise to be present always with the disciples, Calvin argues that this is “restricted to majesty, which is always set over against body; and flesh is expressly distinguished from grace and power . . . Christ withdrew his bodily presence from his disciples in order to be with them in spiritual presence” (4.17.28).  Of the sending of the Holy Spirit, Calvin argues that the sending makes sense only as a substitution for the absence of Christ’s presence in the flesh.  And with regard to the ascension narratives, Calvin argues that the language of Christ’s body “departing” and “ascending” are to be taken definitively.  “Does it not imply moving from one place to another?  They deny this: according to them, height signifies only the majesty of his rule.  But what is the manner of the ascension itself?  Is he not lifted up on high before his disciples’ very eyes?” (4.17.27).  Moreover, Calvin interprets the testimony that Christ will return bodily from heaven in judgment at the Last Day to mean that “the body of Christ from the time of his resurrection was finite, and is contained in heaven [ac coelo comprehendi] even to the Last Day” (4.17.26/CR II: 1025).  When pressed by critics along these literal lines, regarding where in “heaven” Christ’s body is presently located, Calvin refuses to countenance such a “superfluous” question.  I cannot imagine why an interpretation like his should not respond to such an obvious question.  Not responding at all makes it appear that the symbolic, “majesty of his rule” interpretation of the ascension wins the day argumentatively.  

     

On one hand, Calvin emphasizes that Christ’s presence in the eucharistic elements, and in the world, is the presence of Christ’s majesty and power, not the presence of Christ’s body or flesh, which has ascended.  On the other hand, a real communion in Christ’s body or flesh is essential both to the logic of salvation and to the drama of the eucharist.  Calvin emphasizes that it was the incarnate Christ who worked out the world’s salvation.  Believers enjoy the benefits of Christ’s work only to the extent that they share in Christ’s flesh or body.  Moreover, the manner in which the flesh of Christ enjoys a full sharing in the life of the Triune God is used as an analogy for how sinful humans enjoy a share in the life of Christ’s flesh. 

[T]he flesh of Christ is like a rich and inexhaustible fountain that pours into us the life springing forth from the Godhead into itself.  Now who does not see that communion of Christ’s flesh and blood [communionem carnis et sanguinis Christi] is necessary for all who aspire to heavenly life? (4.17.9/CR II: 1009).

Just as God the Creator is the Fountain and Source of all the good that flows into creation – especially into the flesh hypostatically assumed by the divine Word - so too the Incarnate Christ is the Fountain and Source of that redemption whereby sinners are adopted into God’s family and remade into the divine image.  The fountain imagery describes not only God’s creative and redemptive relationships with the world, it describes as well God’s inner trinitarian relations.  What gets poured into the faithful, says Calvin, is that same life that had already been poured into the flesh of Christ by the Triune God.  What is here described is a pattern of cascading goodness.  The life that circulates among the Trinitarian persons is the life that was poured into the human nature assumed by the divine Word.  And sinful humanity is itself pulled into that same circulation of divine life as it is engrafted into a sharing in Christ’s flesh.  This dramatic vision of the Church’s participation in the life of God is what makes sense of what is happening in the eucharistic meal.  Calvin emphasizes these trinitarian connections in his commentary on John 6.  Thus the whole eucharistic drama pivots on the issue of a true sharing in Christ’s flesh or body.  For Calvin, this is the truth of the claim that the Church is the body of Christ.  Theologically speaking, Calvin’s aversion to Lutheran theories of the ubiquity of Christ’s body and to Catholic notions of transubstantiation do not translate into an Anabaptist or memorial eucharistic theory.  What is offered in the meal is a genuine sharing in Christ’s body.  That this sharing happens in and through the presence of Christ’s “power” is, I would suggest, the unique feature of Calvin’s attempt at eucharistic mediation. 

     

Calvin’s reflections on the presence of Christ’s body resonate with his broad concern to guard the glory of God by refusing to confine it within any finite media.  Here the media in question are the sacramental elements of bread and wine.  Calvin interprets Catholic teaching as “imagining that Christ is attached  [affixus] to the element of bread,” that the body of Christ was a “local presence [locali praesentia]” (4.17.12/CR II: 1010) or a “physical presence [modo carnalem eius preaesentiam]” (4.17.13/CR II: 1012), or “enclosed in bread [sub pane inclusum]” (4.17.15/CR II: 1013).  Such views, according to Calvin, misinterpret the significance of the ascension.

For as we do not doubt that Christ’s body is limited by the general characteristics common to all human bodies, and is contained  in heaven [coeloque contineri] (where it was once for all received) until Christ return in judgment, so we deem it utterly unlawful to draw it back under these corruptible elements or to imagine it to be present everywhere (4.17.12/CR II: 1010).

Here both Catholic transubstantiation and Lutheran ubiquity are marked as non-starters.

     

This theological error results primarily, Calvin argues, from an under-appreciation of the ministry of the Holy Spirit in joining believers to Christ (cf 4.17.12).  Calvin contends that the Reformed claim for a “spiritual eating” is not the opposite of a true and real eating, as his opponents claim.  Rather, “the manner is spiritual because the secret power of the Spirit is the bond of our union with Christ [nobis spiritualis, quia vis arcana spiritus nostrae cum Christo coniunctionis vinculum est]” (4.17.33/CR II: 1034).  Calvin’s resistance to prevailing sacramental practices can be seen, on one level, as the construction of an alternative rendering of the Trinitarian economy of salvation.  What Calvin wants to emphasize is the Spirit’s sacramental role of joining the faithful to the (salvific) body of Christ in heaven.  And a theology of power emerges in which neither the ordained clergy nor the eucharistic elements themselves are ontologically reliable conduits of the power of grace.  That power belongs to the Spirit alone, though clergy and sacrament remains instrumental servants of the Spirit’s agency.

     

The faithful need to participate in Christ’s body because their salvation is found precisely in his sharing with them the rewards that accrue to the life of obedience he lived out in a human life.  That the immediate context of faith is the presence of the Spirit is not an undercutting of this claim, but a trinitarian specification for how it happens.  Arguing against Lutheran claims of the ubiquity of Christ’s body, Calvin says:

For they think they only communicate with it if it descends into bread; but they do not understand the manner of descent by which he lifts us up to himself . . . they insist on the local presence [locali Christi praesentiae] of Christ.  Why so?  Because they cannot bear to conceive any other partaking of flesh and blood except that which consists in either local conjunction and contact or some gross from of enclosing [nisi quae vel loci coniunctione atque contactu, vel crassa aliqua inclusione constet] (4.17.16/CR II: 1015).

All these criticisms of Catholic and Lutheran eucharistic theology employ the language used in Book I to describe idolatrous demands to have a god physically near, demands which dishonor the true God by not honoring the majesty of the immeasurable God who cannot be located in any of the things God made.

     

There were primarily two theological claims that governed Calvin’s eucharistic theology – once concerns divine glory and the other Christ’s human nature.

Let us never (I say) allow these two limitations to be taken away from us: (1) Let nothing be withdrawn from Christ’s heavenly glory – as happens when he is brought under the corruptible elements of this world, or bound [alligatur] to any earthly creatures.  (2) Let nothing inappropriate to human nature be ascribed to his body, as happens when it is said either to be infinite or to be put in a number of places at once (4.17.19/CR II: 1017).

The first claim about divine glory resonates with Calvin’s comments on idolatry in Book I regarding the mingling of the incorruptible God with corruptible things or picturing divine power as “bound” to particular finite things.  Yet the divine Word’s assumption of a human nature in the incarnation introduces a certain tension into Calvin’s theology of worship and divine glory.  Whereas Calvin’s notion of worship relies on sharp distinctions between the glorious infinity of the Creator and the dependent goodness of finite things, the incarnate Christ has this liturgical boundary running right through his person.  Calvin does not appear to worry that a finite thing – namely, Christ’s human nature – is worshipped as divine.  The worry is not there because Christ flesh is taken up into unity with the divine nature in such a way that it would be impossible to direct worship to one nature and not to the other.  The principle worry runs in a quite different direction.  Calvin worries that Christ’s status as divine, and therefore as a proper object of human worship, has led some to stop drawing sharp boundaries between creation (Christ’s body) and Creator (the divine Word).  He relies on Augustine to support this boundary maintenance between the ubiquitous divine nature of Christ and the located human nature of Christ (see 4.17.28).  

     

Calvin can make surprisingly quick movements from eucharistic debates regarding the presence of Christ’s body to charges of heresy regarding the ontological divide between Creator and creatures.  This is not surprising if, as I am arguing, Calvin’s theological assumptions about the relation between Creator and creatures, the Infinite and the finite, inform all of his specific theological worries and proposals.  Calvin takes his opponents as arguing that Christ’s body is present both in heaven and under the bread, visibly in the former and invisibly in the latter.  It is the alleged invisible presence of Christ’s body in the bread that Calvin rejects.  Calvin differs from his opponents on whether it is appropriate “for the nature of the glorious body [gloriosi corporis] to submit to the laws of common nature” (4.17.29/CR II: 1029).  Is Christ’s risen, ascended, and glorified body still finite in the same way that other human bodies are finite?  Calvin answers “yes.”  To deny this, argues Calvin, would be to affirm with Servetus that “His body was swallowed up by his divinity.”  And it is precisely here that Calvin detects a transgression of the ontological divide.

But if to fill all things in an invisible manner is numbered among the gifts of the glorified body [glorificati corporis], it is plain that the substance of the body is wiped out [corpoream cubstantiam aboleri palam est], and that no difference between deity and human nature is left (4.17.29/CR II: 1029).

But some . . . say that because of the natures joined in Christ, wherever Christ’s divinity is, there also is his flesh, which cannot be separated from it . . . So, indeed, did Eutyches teach, and Servetus after him.  But from Scripture we plainly infer that the one person of Christ so consists of two natures that each nevertheless retains unimpaired its own distinctive character [ut cuique tamen sua maneat salva proprietas] . . . Eutyches was rightly condemned.  It is a wonder they do not heed the cause of his condemnation; removing the distinction between the natures and urging the unity of the person, he made man out of God and God out of man.  What sort of madness, then, is it to mingle heaven with earth [coelum terrae potius miscere] rather than give up trying to drag Christ’s body from the heavenly sanctuary? (4.17.30/CR II: 1031).

Both comments resound with charges of ignoring boundaries and mingling realities that pervade the description of worship and idolatry in Book I.  While Christ’s body is glorified due to its assumption by the divine Word, it does not cease being finite.  Here again we see the policing of the finite/infinite border.  The alleged double form of Christ’s body – both visible in heaven and invisibly present everywhere – ruptures the “unity” that characterizes all human bodies.  If his opponents are right, “will not a new definition of a body then have to be coined?”  “But it is the true nature of a body to be contained in space, to have its own dimensions and its own shape” (4.17.29). 

     

Calvin’s worry about the “location” of Christ’s ascended body is an attempt to guard the Chalcedonian affirmation of Christ’s person as existing in two natures.  What is in jeopardy, according to Calvin, is the traditional affirmation of Christ’s human nature.  He charges his eucharistic opponents with Marcionism, by which he means picturing Christ’s human nature as a mere “phantasm or apparition [phantasma vel phantasticum]” (4.17.17/CR II.1016).  He had previously extended the accusation to include not only Marcion but the Manichees as well – who allegedly devise for Christ “either a heavenly or spectral body [fingerent Christi corpus vel coeleste, vel phantasticum]” (4.11.25/CR II: 1024).  Constructively, Calvin wants to forge a view of Christ’s presence in the Supper that does not “fasten [affigat] him to the element of bread nor enclose [includat] him in the bread, nor circumscribe [circumscribat] him in any way” (4.17.19/CR II: 1017).  Moreover, whatever claims are made about human participation in Christ’s ascended body should neither “parcel him out to many places at once, or invest him with boundless magnitude to be spread through heaven and earth.”  And then Calvin immediately invokes the theological criterion for such judgments: “For these things are plainly in conflict with a nature truly human” (4.17.19).  

     

It is clear that guarding Christ’s human nature was a primary theological worry.  And according to Calvin, Catholic transubstantiation or Lutheran ubiquity theories are “plainly in conflict” with traditional Christological claims.  They both failed insofar as they violated the boundary between finite and infinite.  Christ’s body, like all finite bodies, occupies its own space.  While the body’s power and majesty extend to the sacramental elements, Calvin provides an argument regarding the nature of Christ’s ascended body that aims at undercutting prevalent assumptions about the drama of the Mass.  There were many aspects to this Reformed attack on the Mass.  But this line of reasoning in particular aimed to disrupt imaginatively patterned assumptions about what was happening in the Church’s central sacramental drama, and to put in its place an alternative imaginative practice of the ascent of the Church to share in Christ’s ascended body.  Calvin, no less than his culturally established opponents, connected eucharistic practices with notions of politics and power.  Yet the internal logic of the reformed sacrament attempted to shift the emphasis from God’s reliable descent within an established institutional practice to the church’s role in aiding the faithful in the upward movement of piety.

A Sacramental Spirituality of Ascent.

     

Calvin’s eucharistic reflections on the ascended body of Christ results in a Trinitarian theology of the Spirit that emphasizes the Spirit’s role of making possible a real sharing in Christ’s body in spite of a spatial distance that remains.  This notion of a Spirit-powered sacramental ascent warrants further attention.  Calvin’s theological description of the divine drama of God’s graceful action on behalf of sinners brings with it a corresponding piety of ascent.  For example, the “wonderful exchange,” whereby righteousness and sin are exchanged between Christ and sinners, can also be articulated in the eucharistic framework of descent/ascent: “by his descent to earth, he has prepared an ascent to heaven for us” (4.17.2).  The reversal of movement – from God’s descent to the ascent of pious minds - at the heart of Calvin’s proposed alternative needs to be explored not just because it signals differing pieties, but because these differing pieties signal different ways agents inhabit their social and political worlds. 

     

In good platonic fashion, the realm of the senses are seen as a gateway to the intelligible or heavenly realities.  This can be seen in Calvin’s insistence on the incomprehensible mystery of the sacrament, which is linked explicitly to the problem of the physical absence of the body of Christ in which the faithful share sacramentally:

Even though it seems unbelievable that Christ’s flesh, separated from us by such a great distance, penetrates to us, so that it becomes our food, let us remember how far the secret power of the Holy Spirit towers above all our senses, and how foolish it is to wish to measure his immeasurableness by our measure.  What, then, our mind does not comprehend, let faith conceive: that the Spirit truly unites things separated in space (4.17.10).

There is nothing more incredible than that things severed and removed from one another by the whole space between heaven and earth should not only be connected across such a great distance but also be united, so that souls may receive nourishment from Christ’s flesh (4.17.24).

There are two primary claims in the above comments.  First, believers are separated from the ascended body of Christ.  And second, in spite of the distance believers really do share in Christ’s flesh in such a way as to be nourished by it.  What is “severed” and “removed” can also be “connected” and “united,” because of Calvin’s view of the arcana spiritus sancti virtus, the secret power of the Holy Spirit.  What is missing here is, of course, Calvin’s explanation of the Spirit’s role in transporting believers in a movement of ascent to the – now heavenly – salvific body of Christ.  Calvin’s repeated criticism of the desire to see and touch the presence of divine power is signaled when Calvin notes that this activity of the Spirit “towers above all our senses.”  

     

All eucharistic models entail problems of various kinds.  What is interesting about Calvin’s understanding of the Supper is the particular kind of problems attending it.  Gerrish rightly identifies the problem of the spatial distance between Christ’s body and believers, yet his interpretation seems uncharacteristically unsympathetic to Calvin.

  

The notion of a spatial separation between the body of Christ and the eucharistic elements, however, seems bound to exclude not only an oral partaking of it but also the true partaking that Calvin wants.  His attempts to bridge the gap, so to say, do not convince because they are couched in metaphors that, for the most part, strike his readers as fantastic (1933: 177).

Of course Calvin’s explanation of how believers eucharistically commune with Christ’s flesh is “fantastic,” if by that Gerrish means something like, “would require a miracle.”  What eucharistic theory that depends on a genuine union with Christ’s body could possibly avoid the “fantastic” in this sense?  I am not arguing that Calvin’s eucharistic theory is persuasive on all counts, only that the eucharistic miracle it requires is no less plausible than, say, the miracle of the ubiquity of Christ’s body or the miracle of transubstantiation.  

     

Having specified the particular problem of Calvin’s understanding of the Supper, we have at least landed on the importance of the spirituality of “ascent” in Calvin’s theology.  Back behind the particular details of Calvin’s eucharistic theory is a notion of faith and piety as an elevation or ascent of the faithful made possible by the power of the Spirit.  It is this piety of ascent that leads some to discern a platonizing element in Calvin’s theology.  Lang, for example, argues that Calvin’s eucharistic theory of Christ’s presence reveals an indebtedness to a platonism characteristic of all humanists.  Such platonism is viewed in contrast to the Aristotelian optimism about the senses in scholastic thought.

The two actions – our eating and Christ’s feeding – happen in parallel on two different levels of reality.  While Christ himself never leaves his heavenly abode, God’s Spirit establishes a personal, intimate relationship between Christ and ourselves, forming a kind of channel or bridge that connects heaven and earth . . . Like many humanistic thinkers of his time, Calvin felt more at home with Plato than with Aristotle, the favorite philosopher of scholastic theologians . . . His teaching on the Lord’s Supper simply restores Augustine’s Platonic view by renewing the distinction between the visible sacramental sign and the invisible sacramental reality, a distinction scholasticism had blurred (In Sacred Games, 1997: 324-5).  

Calvin is well aware that he is proposing an alternative sacramental imagination.  Prevailing eucharistic practices, according to Calvin, hinge on notions of Christ “come down” that in actuality are a “dragging” or “drawing” Christ down to earth.  This is problematic because it represents a refusal of the faithful to be “lifted up” to the heavenly Christ.  Thus the sacramental elements are not ontological sites of divine power, they are “ladders” to aid in the climb heavenward.

     

This sacramental and platonizing piety of ascent is the liturgical correlate of Calvin’s understanding of divine glory.  Yet again we see that Calvin is always at pains to develop a consistent set of metaphors and images across a number of theological topics, even though he is no slave to an abstract and speculative “system.”  Our confidence is not to “inhere in the sacraments [in sacramentis haerere], nor the glory of God be transferred [transferri] to them.  Rather, laying aside all things, both our faith and our confession ought to rise up [surgere] to him who is the author of the sacraments and all things” (4.14.12/CR II: 950).  Here the ascending movement of sacramental piety is combined with a concern to guard God’s glory by not confusing the instrument with the author of all good.  With statements such as these, it would be hard to argue that the popular piety and religious rituals of sixteenth century people had nothing to do with “theological” ideas.  Those ideas or beliefs may not have always been articulate on a conscious level, but debates about the status of eucharistic symbols always bore some relation to what people thought about the nature of God and power.  This complex theological topic – whether finite media have the ontological power to possess or mediate or convey the glorious power of the infinite – showed up, in sixteenth century Europe anyway, in popular debates about the status and meaning of the eucharistic symbols.  

     

The theological debate about signs and power can be found in commentaries and sermons as well.  In a passage from Calvin’s Genesis commentary (1554) which I have already mentioned, a sacramental theology of the “ascent” of the mind to God is pitted against an incarnational picture of the sacraments as the visible symbols in and through which God descends to meet the faithful: “[God] does not indeed transfer his power into outward signs; but by them he stretches out his hand to us, because, without assistance, we cannot ascend to him” (1948: 116).

     

In Sermon 11, “On the Resurrection,” Calvin interprets the Johannine passage about Christ “preparing a place” for his followers – traditionally associated with the general resurrection- as referring to an invitation to “soar upward” in faith.

Now what follows? That we may go no longer to look at the sepulcher as these women, by whose ignorance and weakness we are served, but that we may soar upward, since He calls us and invites us there, since He has shown us the way, and He has declared to us that He has entered into possession of His heavenly Kingdom to prepare us a room and a place there when by faith we shall find Him there (Sermon 11, CJCC: 159).

Here the women in the gospel stories (usually lauded for their fidelity to Jesus in contrast to the fickle male disciples!) become stand-ins for sensually oriented Catholicism.  Their looking for Christ in the tomb symbolizes the “ignorance and weakeness” of Roman Catholic infatuation with the local presence of Christ in the eucharistic meal.  Warned of this folly, true Christians, says Calvin, will “soar upward.”

     

This platonic piety of ascent signals a re-orientation of the religious imagination.  And such an imaginative shift required a new metaphysic just as it required a new piety.  Thus Calvin’s piety (an existential posture of ascent) is connected to his ontology (a certain way of figuring the relation between divine and finite power).  As I pointed out in chapter one, it is primarily the language of worship and the glory of God that most clearly surfaces these connections.  Calvin is clear that his theology of power is concerned above all to guard the glory of God by properly distinguishing between uncreated and created powers.  Figuring the religious life and imagination in terms of “ascent” functions, critically, to guard against thickly sacramental constellations of power.  Constructively, it promoted an alternative way of relating both to God and to social and political orders and institutions.

Eucharist and Politics

     

The interpretive question I want to address in conclusion is as follows: how might we account for the profound symbolic and political rupture that accompanied the Protestant Reformation without exaggerating or mis-characterizing that rupture?  My limited inquiry into the texture of Calvin’s attempt to fashion particular kinds of social agents cannot provide any definite answer to such a large question.  Yet I am arguing that any attempt to explore such a question cannot ignore the theory and practice of worship influenced by Calvin’s writing.  More specifically, I have sought to show that the imaginative and symbolic outcome of Calvin’s theological rhetoric – seen in Geneva and elsewhere – was not what one would characterize as the advent of the “secular.”  I am not proposing an answer to the question of whether and how Calvinism contributed to modern culture and politics.  What I do propose is that Calvin’s theological writing should not be read exclusively through the lens of historical effects (Calvin as pre- or early-modern).  Put another way, Geneva was no less a “sacred” place than Paris, even though what counted as “sacred” society and politics was differed in important ways.  But neither am I trying to argue that we should substitute for Geneva-the-proto-democracy the notion of Geneva as the site of unchecked moral tyranny and ubiquitous ecclesial power.  Certainly it was the case that the civil authorities in Geneva oversaw the conversion to the Reforming cause and played an active role in guarding its cause among Genevans.  But this did not require a particularly sinister and oppressive view of political power.  It is explained in large part simply by stating the fact that early Calvinism maintained the sacred character of the whole of social and political life.  On this point, the magisterial Reformers did not depart from the Christendom vision of medieval Catholicism. 

     

I have come across no finer analysis of the political significance of Reformed eucharistic practice than that of Elwood:

The theologies of the eucharist formulated by Reformed Protestants, which rejected the predominant Catholic construal of the sacrament, involved radically new ways of symbolizing power.  Although the association of the sacrament with power was never entirely rejected by the Reformed – certainly not by those identified as Calvinist – they came to be harshly critical of attempts to locate power definitively in any visible thing.  And because the eucharist served to symbolize power considered in a general sense, and not sacred potency alone, the effect of the Calvinist reorientation was not restricted to the realm of theological definition.  It influenced the way ordinary men and women conceived of political power, interpreted their social world, and established the relation between the sacred and society (1999: 4).

Elwood’s central contention is exactly right.  The complex sacramental practice championed in Calvin’s theological writing amounted not to a neglect of power but to an alternative account of power.  Furthermore, Elwood is right to claim that the upshot of this symbolic rupture, at least critically, was that any readers shaped by Calvin’s theological rhetoric came to be “harshly critical of attempts to locate power definitively in any visible thing.”  All my efforts in this chapter have been devoted to exploring why this critical disposition was theologically coherent and plausible for Calvin and Calvin’s readers.  In sum, Reformed resistance to prevalent constellations of power in sixteenth century Europe was an unsurprising response of social agents shaped by Calvin’s theological vision.  Such a claim is not an overreaching attempt to discern pure motives of historical agents, nor to posit some dubious account of historical causation.  It is simply an attempt to illumine why particular theological commitments could have fostered or contributed to certain kinds of cultural resistance.

     

Elwood remarks that Calvin’s contributions to a Reformed eucharistic discourse 

offered more than a simple championing of God’s transcendence – the characteristic theme of the early Reformed movement (and a concentration of quite a few recent studies of Calvinist and Reformation thought).  In Calvin’s effort to offer a positive account of the efficacy of the eucharist, his emphasis on sacramental instrumentality and on the relation of sign and signified made possible for his many readers new and potentially revolutionary ways of conceiving of power, its operation, and its relation to temporal authority” (1999: 9).

  

In the footnote (p. 174), Elwood cites as examples Guy Swanson’s Religion and Regime (1967), Donal Kelley’s The Beginning of Ideology (1981), and Carlos Eire’s War Against the Idols (1986).  And then the following suggestive comment: “Although I use the interpretive categories of immanence and transcendence upon which these authors rely so heavily, I suggest that the Calvinist perspective is conveyed more reliably by the notion of divine freedom and by attending to the theories of signification and symbolization Calvin and others developed to preserve this notion” (1999: 174-5).

     

Elwood is suggesting that what distinguishes Calvin’s theological concerns – in the Eucharist and more broadly – is not simply the transcendence of God but instead the “freedom” of the God whose transcendence requires an equally radical notion of immanence.  So the position is better described as a concern to guard the freedom of God’s immanence than as a concern to emphasize the pole of transcendence over against the pole of immanence.  This seems right to me, particularly because it illumines the difficult tangles in which Calvin involves himself.  For example, in both his description of “faith” as mystical union with Christ and of the eucharistic elements as not only “representing” but also “presenting” or “showing” Christ, Calvin is at pains to argue that his theological vision is not to be caricatured as simply a rallying cry for God’s absence, distance, or otherness.  As he frequently said, he is arguing not for God’s absence to the world, but for a particular way of understanding the mode of God’s presence.  I think Elwood’s thesis is a promising avenue for pressing these claims further.  

     

These kinds of questions go to the heart of my attempts to discern a Calvinist metaphysic.  What is the infinite God’s relation to the complex finite world and what entailments does this carry in the practical realms of worship and politics, religious practices and social arrangements?  This question of the mode of God’s presence links the worship/idolatry conversation of chapter 2, the conversation about how believers participate in Christ of chapters 3-4, and the eucharistic presence of Christ’s flesh of chapter 5.  Moreover, by drawing out these linkages I am trying to suggest that Reformed attempts to imagine and enact a sense of communal identity were worked out against important background beliefs about God.  So while theological arguments are never exclusively the determinants of social realities, they often play an important role.

     

While I agree with Elwood’s thesis, I should say something about what makes the “transcendence” interpretation of Calvin so fresh and persuasive in Kelly, Eire, and Swanson.  Their strength lies in their ability to illumine the social context of theological ideas.  When, for example, we are shown how both political practices and popular piety were deeply indebted to a thickly sacramental view of God’s power, how both relied on definitively locatable sites of divine power, then we can begin to understand the counter-cultural force, persuasiveness and practicality of Reformed proposals about worship and culture.  There was an unavoidable social protest embedded in Protestant forms of religion.  Taking up Calvin’s theological stance would have gone a long way towards undercutting one’s imaginative allegiance to the rhythms and assumptions of Catholic Europe.  These proposals about transcendence have strength because they can make plausible why Reformed theology was different, why it was feared by many authorities, why it was persuasive, and most importantly, why it resulted in such massive changes across a number of different spectrums of reality.

     

Elwood says Calvin’s eucharistic theology “was driven by two distinct and complementary principles: the principle – already familiar from earlier Reformed treatments of the sacrament – of God’s absolute freedom and the principle of the true communication of Christ’s body to believers” (1999: 72).  While appreciating Elwood’s approach, I think there are interpretive advantages to emphasizing the notion of divine glory and human worship rather than the notion of “divine freedom.”  Put another way, for Calvin, preserving God’s freedom and guarding the glory of God were two parts of the same urgent theological-rhetorical task: fashioning communities of praise and thanksgiving.  Still, I am in material agreement with Elwood here.  The reason for prioritizing divine glory and human worship is that it enables an approach to Calvin’s theological writing that attends to the social and cultural issues that provoked much of the writing in the first place.   

     

Sixteenth century debates about worship and idolatry were, in a deep sense, debates about power – what it is and how it circulates.  Elwood’s argument is that Calvin’s account of sacramental signification “involved the construction of a distinctive economy of power.”  What was this Calvinist “economy of power” according to Elwood?  Calvin held that “the eucharistic elements were in effect degraded from their position as media for the appearance of divine power – bearers of God’s body – and reduced to the status of mere instruments of the Spirit without any subsistent virtue” (1999: 74).  Given the prevalent use of the consecrated elements in Corpus Christi processions, in Kingly coronation processions, and in general as a political and social symbol of the organic unity of medieval society, Calvin’s semiotic theory amounted to a kind of cultural criticism.  Such a theory would, for example, have thrown into question the widespread use of sacramental imagery by French Kings in order to suggest that they themselves had been invested with divine power in an analogous way.

     

Elwood’s explanation of the Reformed semiotics of politics and power inherent in Calvin’s eucharistic theory is the best I have come across, even if I would express the matter in a slightly different way.

For the convert to Calvin’s sacramental view, the social world ceased to be organized by the idea of an immanental power proceeding from the presence of God’s body in the eucharist.  In a sense we might say that the social order lost its sacred ground.  Since the relation Calvin established between sign and transcendent reality precludes the idea of an unequivocal investment of power in any determinate, finite locus – a person, thing, or institution – the very idea that divine power can be discerned in the created order with any degree of certainty was called into question.  According to the economy posited by Calvin’s eucharistic theory, whatever potency can be discovered in temporal experience is the result not of a divine assignment of power but of God’s deployment of power through instruments.  Calvin’s reader would then be less likely to be impressed by claims to political authority and social coherence based on the notion of immanental power . . . To an extent, then, the world inhabited by readers receptive to Calvin’s view was becoming ‘rationalized’ or ‘disenchanted,’ to use Max Weber’s terminology, as the symbols of immanental potency were displaced  (1999: 75).

The qualifier beginning the final sentence (“To an extent . . .”) needs to be specified further.  We do not yet have in Calvin the creation of the “secular” space as a distinct plane of reality from “spiritual” or “religious” reality.  Elwood does recognize this.  “Rather than being regarded as either sacred or secular, political and social orders, by analogy with the sacramental elements, were likely seen by the attentive reader of Calvin’s writings as God’s instruments, possessing no inherent or abiding virtue and exercising power only as a result of the active determination of God” (1999: 75). 

     

This is all true, as far as it goes.  Readers shaped by Calvin’s writing would be wary of thinking of any finite realities as sites of divine power, especially when such claims depend on an alleged self-binding of God to those realities.  Any casual reader of Calvin would have been equipped with the critical principle that God does not “transfer” God’s power or glory to anything finite.  The problem, it seems to me, is that this line of interpretation does not go far enough.  As I have attempted to argue in Chapter One, Geneva was no less a “sacred” space than Paris, even though it was “sacred” in a different way.  To say that a Calvinist reading of social and political orders resulted in a “disenchanted” secular sphere is misleading.  Such orders were degraded to mere “instruments” of God’s inalienable agency.  Yet Calvin’s God was always exercising power through such instruments in a way that invited a proper deference to established orders.  Granted, it was God’s ordination and not the orders themselves that warranted such observance.  But Calvinist social agents lived in a differently enchanted world, not a disenchanted one.

 On this see Elwood (1999: 75): “The Reformed worshiper who was instructed at each celebration of the Lord’s Supper to “raise our spirits and our hearts on high” was likely to have gleaned the basic elements of Calvin’s theocentric and transcendentally concentrated conception of power.  In the Reformed Sursum corda one was in effect reminded of a critical distinction between the God who transcends all creation and physical signs and temporal orders that impinge upon and organize everyday life.”

 The Body Broken: The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the Symbolization of Power in Sixteenth Century France.  Oxford Univ. Press, 1999.  See also Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture.  Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991.

 Elwood also notes the social and political disruption to this order caused later by Protestants who refused to decorate their houses or show proper respect to the passing host during the feast.  This public and symbolic action rendered them “foreigners” in an important sense.  Often Protestants staged their own processions, singing songs that mocked the cultic veneration of the host (e.g. the priest turns bread into a god that is worshiped, then eaten, digested, and deposited into a toilet).  In protestant slang, “going to mass” was code for, well, using the toilet.  And in addition to these public rhetorical assaults there was increasing incidents of iconoclasm – often targeting the host itself (1999: 154-55).

 Donald Kelly refers to the “cohabitation of divine and human” in the Eucharist which was paralleled by similar patterns in society and its institutions.  In Catholic Europe, this meant that any rejection of the Mass was also a rejection of the authority on which it depended as well as the political institutions that guaranteed it (1981: 323f).

 Beckwith (1993) argues that although eucharistic practices may have been the symbolic center of religious identity in medieval Europe, such practices were not the only way people identified themselves with the body of Christ.  “For there were all kinds of other ways in which, in the devotional literature of the late Middle Ages, Christ’s body was the focus of a complex symbolics of identification and role-playing.  Christ was eaten in the eucharist.  He was also looked at, identified with, imitated, violated, played with in an almost alarming variety of shifting social roles” (4).  Using devotional literature, as opposed to focusing only on scholarly theological discourse, Beckwith is able to suggest how broad segments of the populace interacted with imagery of Christ’s body.  She argues that “Christ’s body was the arena where social identity was negotiated, where the relationship of self and society, subjectivity and social process found a point of contact and conflict” (23).  Incidentally, by focussing on the 15^th century, Beckwith shows that the symbol of Christ’s body was already a contested symbol before the arrival of Protestantism.  Particularly interesting here is the extent to which Lollardy in England prefigures in many respects the “Reformed” theology of worship traced in Eire’s War Against the Idols (1986).

 See the argument of Serene Jones, in Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety (1995).

 Elwood’s central thesis regarding the symbolics of power in the Reformed Eucharist emphasizes the interpenetration of symbolic worlds – ecclesial, social, and political:  “Why should the eucharist have played such a crucial role in the political and social unrest that characterized the sixteenth century?  The key to answering this question is to recognize that the eucharist was the central symbol defining power in the late medieval and early modern periods . . . In the late Middle Ages, both theological definitions and popular religious practices placed the eucharist at the very center of religious life and underlined its status as the preeminent locus of divine power within the Christian’s world of experience.  It is in large measure due to the persistence of this concentration on the sacrament’s capacity to provide powerful effects that the doctrine of the eucharist supplied such fertile ground for religious dispute in sixteenth-century Europe” (1999: 4).

 Gerrish (1993: 2).  The paragraph from which I have quoted connects the theological importance of eucharistic ideas in Calvin’s thought to the historical importance of eucharistic practice for the identity of early Reforming communities: “The association of Calvin’s name with the ‘terrible’ decree of predestination, as he himself admitted it to be, really needs no documentation.  Harder to recognize is that Calvinism actually began its existence in the Reformation era as a distinct variety of sacramental theology, more particularly as a distinct interpretation of the central Christian mystery of the Eucharist.  This is not to say that the Lord’s Supper, not predestination, must therefore have been Calvin’s central dogma.  (A theologian’s ‘center’ is not necessarily whatever distinguishes his or her thinking from the thinking of everyone else.)  Much less is it to offer a theological explanation for the existence of the Reformed or Calvinistic churches.  Political realities are much too complicated for that.  The point is simply that it may require an effort at disengagement from established stereotypes if one is to ask – without prejudice – about Calvin’s own Calvinism.”

 Ritus enim excogitarunt a coenae institutione prorsus extraneos . . . Consecrant hostiam, ut vocant, quam circumferant in pompa; quam spectandam, dolendam, invocandam solenni spectaculo exhibeant (CR II: 1039-1040).

 On the terminology of “substantial” eating, Elwood is helpful.  As a result of arguments against the Zwinglian danger of conceiving the elements as mere tokens or naked signs of the body, Calvin eventually came to affirm a partaking of the “substance” of Christ’s body.  But earlier, in the 1536 Institutes, Calvin had argued that the substance of Christ’s body was not present in the elements.  These objections to a “substantial” eating were all removed in future editions.  But by adopting the term, he did not refer to a changing of the bread’s substance into Christ’s body, but to a real or genuine sharing in the whole Christ (Elwood, 1999: 67-8).

 See Gerrish (1993: 2-3).

 Gerrish (1993: 10)  Calvin moves from criticizing his Roman Catholic opponents for making Christ’s body in the eucharist “real and substantial” (1536), to criticizing them for imagining it “contained there, locally confined” (1539), to criticizing them for imagining the substance of the bread and wine is “transubstantiated into the body and blood” (1559).  These are not random selections of what Calvin said, but his own revision of the same sentence in the successive editions.

 See Gerrish (1993: 10-12).

 The current distinction between signs and symbols – where only symbols participate in what they signify – does not work when applied to Calvin’s eucharistic theory.  Elwood comments on the appropriateness of the concept of “symbol” to sixteenth century Reformed belief and practice: “Although in the larger body of his writings he did not use the word ‘symbol’ with great frequency, Calvin did not hesitate to employ it when speaking of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.  It is, then, very far off the mark to argue that the word has no application to his eucharistic thought.  Calvin regularly used both the Latin words symbolum (symbol) and signum (sign) to designate, at various times, the eucharist, liturgical aspects of the sacrament, and the eucharistic elements of bread and wine.  However, in French he showed a clear preference for the term signe (sign) and a variety of roughly synonymous terms (figure, marque, enseigne; figure, mark, badge).  That symbolum and signum could be used interchangeably, and that signe in French could be used to translate the Latin symbolum in Calvin’s own translations or translations approved by him indicate that the distinction between sign and symbol characteristic of modern thinking does not particularly suit Calvin’s conception.  It suggests as well that signe as used by Calvin might carry with it some of the connotations we associate with the word ‘symbol.’  Since, then, the terminology is pertinent to Calvin’s way of speaking of the eucharist, a proposal for its careful and qualified use in interpreting his thought and that of his associates seems not without warrant” (1999: 8).

 For an excellent discussion of the metaphoric logic of Calvin’s use of the terms “sign” and “seal,” see R.S. Wallace (1995), ch. 11.

 Short Treatise (In the CJCC: 175, italic mine): “It is a general rule in all sacraments that the signs which we see must have some correspondence with the spiritual thing which is figured. Thus, as in baptism, we are assured of the internal washing of our souls when water is given us as an attestation, its property being to cleanse corporal pollution; so in the Supper, there must be material bread to testify to us that the body of Christ is our food. For otherwise how could the mere color of white give us such a figure? We thus clearly see how the whole representation, which the Lord was pleased to give us in condescension to our weakness, would be lost if the bread did not truly remain.”

 Quotations are from Gillian McDonnell, John Calvin, the Church, and the Eucharist (1967), cited in Gerrish (1993: 7).

 On these options, see Muller (2000: 73-4).

 Calvin explicitly refers to the two dimensions of sacramental effects in the following: “Therefore, the sacraments have effectiveness among us in proportion as we are helped by their ministry sometimes to foster, confirm, and increase the true knowledge of Christ in ourselves; at other times, to possess him more fully and enjoy his riches” (4.14.16).  This dual effect of both “knowing” and “possessing” Christ in the sacrament correlates to the claim that Christ is both represented and presented in the sacramental sign.

 Preserving God’s agency in the ministry of the sacraments is a form of guarding divine glory: “The only question here is whether God acts by his own intrinsic power (as they say) or resigns his office to outward symbols.  But we contend that, whatever instruments he uses, these detract nothing from his original activity.”  This claim guards against a view in which “the cause of justification and the power of the Holy Spirit are enclosed in elements, just as in vessels or vehicles” (4.14.17).  Here we see, in a sacramental mode, Calvin’s metaphysical aversion to any claims that appear to localize the divine power and presence in finite things.  

 “What I have said is not to be understood as if the force and truth of the sacrament depended upon the condition or choice of him who receives it.  For what God has ordained remains firm and keeps its own nature, however men may vary” (4.14.16).

 The “patchwork” claim is from Gerrish (1993: 125), who mentions there the problem with the three “uses” as well.

 The following comment reveals that Gerrish’s domestic framing of baptism/eucharist as adoption/feeding, while important, does not exhaust or capture Calvin’s metaphorical moves.  “For baptism attests to us that we have been cleansed and washed; the Eucharistic Supper, that we have been redeemed.  In water, washing is represented; in blood, satisfaction” (4.14.22).  Yet in Gerrish’s defense, he does not claim that the adoption/feeding framing sits by itself, only that it organizes all other eucharistic claims.

 Sic quum panis nobis in symbolum corporis Christi datur, haec statim concipienda est similitudo; ut corporis nostri vitam panis alit, sustinet, tuetur, ita corpus Christi vegetandae ac vivificandae animae unicum esse cibum . . . [benefits of the wine] fovere, reficere, confirmare, exhilarare (CR II: 1004).

 The Short Treatise begins with this imagery as well: “Since it has pleased our good God to receive us by baptism into his Church, which is his house, which he desires to maintain and govern, and since he has received us to keep us not merely as domestics, but as his own children, it remains that, in order to do the office of a good father, he nourish and provide us with every thing necessary for our life” (Tracts, vol. 2, 157).

 “Indeed, the Supper itself is a gift of God, which ought to have been received with thanksgiving.  The sacrifice of the Mass is represented as paying a price to God, which he should receive by way of satisfaction.  There is as much difference between this sacrifice and the sacrament of the Supper as there is between giving and receiving.  And such is the most miserable ungratefulness of man that where he ought to have recognized and given thanks for the abundance of God’s bounty, he makes God in this his debtor!” (4.18.7, written 1536).

 “Then, again, there is a profanation common to all these religious rites, viz.,that they are made the subjects of a disgraceful traffic, as if they had been instituted for no other purpose than to be subservient to gain. Nor is this traffic conducted secretly or bashfully; it is plied openly, as at the public mart. It is known in each particular district how much a mass sells for. Other rites, too, have their fixed prices. In short, any one who considers must see that Churches are just ordinary shops, and that there is no kind of sacred rite which is not there exposed for sale” (NRC [1554], 207); “Who is ignorant that sacraments have now for a long time been sold in churches, as openly as the wares which stand exposed in the public market? Other rites, too, have their fixed price, while as to some a bargain is not struck till after long haggling” (NRC [1554], 255).

 Gerrish finds Calvin indebted to Luther particularly on the point of criticizing the Mass as a contradiction to the posture of gratitude appropriate for believers (1993: 146-156).

 The following comments by Gerrish are helpful on this point: “That the sacraments are not absolutely necessary for salvation does not devalue them as efficacious means of grace.  Rather, it defines their efficacy as dependent on the sacramental word, and their effect as by no means limited to the moment of reception . . . The need (not the necessity) of them lies in the fluctuation of the life of faith and the incompleteness with which the gift of communion with Christ is received.  There is a sacramental ‘plus.’  But there is not a different gift, only a different manner of giving insofar as a sacrament recruits all the five senses, not hearing only, and so presents the one and only gift still more effectively – that is, more clearly and forcefully” (1993: 162-3).

 “As the use of the sacraments will confer nothing more on unbelievers than if they had abstained from it, nay, is only destructive to them, so without their use believers receive the reality which is there figured. Thus the sins of Paul were washed away by baptism, though they had been previously washed away. So likewise baptism was the laver of regeneration to Cornelius, though he had already received the Holy Spirit. So in the Supper Christ communicates himself to us, though he had previously imparted himself, and perpetually remains in us. For seeing that each is enjoined to examine himself, it follows that faith is required of each before coming to the sacrament. Faith is not without Christ; but inasmuch as faith is confirmed and increased by the sacraments, the gifts of God are confirmed in us, and thus Christ in a manner grows in us and we in him.” (Mutual Consent in CJCC: 205).

 Haec est mirifica commutatio, qua pro immensa sua benignitate nobiscum usus est: quod filius hominis nobiscum factus nos secum Dei filios fecerit; quod suo in terras descensu ascensum nobis in coelum straverit; quod accepta nostra mortalitate suam nobis immortalitatem contulerit; quod suscepta nostra imbecillitate sua nos virtute confirmaverit; quod nostra in se recepta paupertate, suam ad nos opulentiam transtulerit; quod recepta ad se qua premebamur iniustitiae nostrae mole sua nos iustitia induerit (CR II: 1003).

 While the following claims sound similar to many of the claims Calvin makes about justification and faith, they concern the nature and dynamics of the eucharistic meal.  “And although my mind can think beyond what my tongue can utter, yet even my mind is conquered and overwhelmed by the greatness of the thing.  Therefore, nothing remains but to break forth in wonder at this mystery, which plainly neither the mind is able to conceive nor the tongue to express” (4.17.7); “I leave no place for the sophistry that what I mean when I say Christ is received by faith is that he is received only by understanding and imagination.  For the promises offer him, not for us to halt in the appearance and bare knowledge alone, but to enjoy true participation in him.  And indeed, I do not see how anyone can trust that he has redemption and righteousness in the cross of Christ, and life in his death, unless he relies chiefly upon a true participation in Christ himself.  For those benefits would not come to us unless Christ first made himself ours” (4.17.11).

 The textual support cited for the claims about receiving Christ “partially” are as follows: Catechismus, Q. 346, OS 2:139; TT 2:90; Calvin to Bullinger, 25 February 1547, CO 12:486-88.  Also to the point on this interpretation of Calvin’s eucharistic theory are the following remarks by Gerrish: “In the Sacrament God does still more clearly what he always does, providing his children with the bread of life; and they in turn enact the meaning of authentic human existence as a continuous sacrifice of praise.  The contrast sometimes alleged between an evangelical piety and a sacramental piety finds no support in Calvin” (1993: 158).  

 On this point see Gerrish (1993): It should be clear from the Institutes “that no discussion, if it wants to take Calvin on his own terms, can be wholly determined by the question of the Real Presence.  From the first, Calvin shows his anxiety that all the wrangling over the Real Presence might push aside what is actually, for him, the main point.  He deplores the frightful controversies over how Christ body is present in the bread, and how the body is swallowed by us.  The question is why, or to what end, there is a Lord’s Supper at all.  The answer, he believes, is disclosed in what the sign signifies: when we see the bread extended to us, our thoughts should be on the analogy of life-giving nourishment” (13).  Yet “presence” is not simply discarded: “Calvin’s appeal to the metaphor of spiritual food does not resolve the problems of the Real Presence and the instrumentality of created things, but it does put these problems in a distinct perspective” (14).

 “What becomes clearer in the final edition of Calvin’s Institutes is that the father’s liberality and his children’s answering gratitude, or lack of it, is not only the theme of the Lord’s Supper but a fundamental theme, perhaps the most fundamental theme, of an entire system of theology.  It conveys, as nothing else can, the heart of Calvin’s perception of God, humanity, and the harmony between them that was lost by Adam and restored by Christ.  The cardinal role of grace and gratitude is not surprising, since piety or godliness, as Calvin understands it, is grateful acknowledgement of the father’s gifts.  Piety and its renewal as faith in Christ – this is the subject of Calvin’s pietatis summa.  The holy banquet is simply the liturgical enactment of the theme of grace and gratitude that lies at the heart of Calvin’s entire theology, whether one chooses to call it a system or not.  It is, in short, a ‘eucharistic’ theology” (Gerrish, 1993: xx).

 Sermon found in CR 48: 585-596.

 Sermon found in CR 48: 613-622.

 “It does not seem to have occurred to him that others might find his language every bit as crass as Luther’s more extreme utterances sounded to him.  A local presence in heaven is not less problematic than a local presence in the bread and wine” (1993: 176).

 Ea, inquam, est corporis praesentia, quam sacramenti ratio postulat; quam tanta virtute tantaque efficacia hic eminere decimus, ut non modo indubitatam vitae aeternae fiduciam animis nostris afferat, sed de carnis etiam nostrae immortalitate securos nos reddat.  Siquidam ab immortali eius carne iam vivificatur, et quammodo eius immortalitati communicat (CR II: 1033).

 Sed manducationis modum notavit [Augustine]: quod scilicet in coelestem gloriam receptum, arcana spiritus virtute vitam nobis inspiret (CR II: 1037).

 Defending his understanding of Christ’s body against Westphal’s charges in 1556, “But when I say that Christ descends to us by his virtue, I deny that I am substituting something different, which is to have the effect of abolishing the gift of the body, for I am simply explaining the mode in which it is given. He [Calvin’s interlocutor] rejoins, that I am deceiving by using the term body in an ambiguous sense. But I thought I had sufficiently obviated such cavils by so often repeating, that it was the true and natural body which was offered on the cross. From what forge the fiction of a twofold body proceeded, I know not: this I know, that I hold it detestable impiety to imagine Christ with two bodies. I know, indeed, that the mortal body which Christ once assumed is now endued with new qualities of celestial glory, which, however, do not prevent it from being in substance the same body. I say, then, that by that body which hung on the cross our souls are invigorated with spiritual life, just as our bodies are nourished by earthly bread. But as distance of place seems to be an obstacle, preventing the virtue of Christ’s flesh from reaching us, I explain the difficulty by saying, that Christ, without changing place, descends to us by his virtue.  Is it to use subterfuge, when I simply define the mode of that eating which others mystify by a perplexed mode of teaching it?” (Second Defense, CJCC: 260-61/CR V, 41-120; underline mine).  

 quia hoc tandum ad maiestatem restringitur, quae semper opponitur corpori, ac nominatim caro a gratia virtuteque discernitur . . . reliquerit Chritus discipulos praesentia corporali, ut futurus sit cum illis praesentia spirituali (CR II: 1028).

 The future conformity of believers’ resurrected bodies to Christ’s resurrected body also requires this view of Christ’s ascended body: “The immensity which they imagine the flesh of Christ to possess, is a monstrous phantom, which overturns the hope of a resurrection. To all the absurdities they advance concerning the heavenly life, I will always oppose the words of St. Paul, that we wait for Christ from heaven, who will transform our poor body and make it conformable to his own glorious body. Need we say how absurd it were to fill the whole world with the single body of each believer?” (Mutual Consent, CJCC: 226).

 “And that no ambiguity may remain when we say that Christ is to be sought in heaven, the expression implies and is understood by us to intimate distance of place. For though philosophically speaking there is no place above the skies, yet as the body of Christ, bearing the nature and mode of a human body, is finite and is contained in heaven as its place, it is necessarily as distant from us in point of space as heaven is from earth” (Mutual Consent, CJCC: 206). – Note, the ascension is read not as the removal of the body from the sphere of “space” altogether, but as simply the removal to a different “place.”  He seems to admit that, “philosophically speaking,” this makes no sense.

 “When Paul teaches that Christ dwells in our hearts by faith, he does not substitute an imaginary for true habitation, but reminds us in what way we may ascertain the possession of so great a blessing. We acknowledge, then, without any equivocation, that the flesh of Christ gives life, not only because we once obtained salvation by it, but because now, while we are made one with Christ by a sacred union, the same flesh breathes life into us, or, to express it more briefly, because ingrafted into the body of Christ by the secret agency of the Spirit, we have life in common with him. For from the hidden fountain of the Godhead life was miraculously infused into the body of Christ, that it might flow from thence to us” (Mutual Consent, 223; italics mine).

 See especially his treatment of John 6:51, 57.

 At 4.17.9, Calvin refers to Eph 1.23; 4:15-16; 5:30, 32; I Cor. 6:15.

 “For I do not simply teach that Christ dwells in us by his Spirit, but that he so raises us to himself as to transfuse the vivifying vigor of his flesh into us. Does not this assert a species of presence, viz., that our souls draw life from the flesh of Christ, although, in regard to space, it is far distant from us?” (Second Defense, CJCC: 266).  “Moreover, if the reason for communicating with Jesus Christ is to have part and portion in all the graces which he purchased for us by his death, the thing requisite must be not only to be partakers of his Spirit, but also to participate in his humanity, in which he rendered all obedience to God his Father, in order to satisfy our debts” (Second Defense, CJCC: 161).

 Calvin is aware that this emphasis upon the distinction between the two natures puts pressure on him to articulate the unity of the natures in Christ’s one person as well.  “Nor have we any difficulty in agreeing with him [Heshusius], when he adds, that it is impossible to comprehend how the body of Christ is in a certain part of heaven, above the heavens, and yet the person of Christ is everywhere, ruling in equal power with the Father. Nay, it is notorious to all, how violently I have been assailed by his party for the defense of this very doctrine. And, in order to express this in a still more palpable form, I employed the trite dictum of the schools, that Christ is whole everywhere, but not wholly, (torus ubique sed non totum;) in other words, in his entire person of Mediator he fills heaven and earth, though in his flesh he is in heaven, which he has chosen as the abode of his human nature, until he appear to judgment.” (Clear Explanation, CJCC: 466-67).

 Atqui haec est propria corporis veritas, ut spatio contineatur, ut suis dimensionibus constet, ut suam faciem habeat (CR II: 1030).

 “What is the nature of our flesh?  Is it not something that has its own fixed dimension, is contained in a place, is touched, is seen? . . . Flesh must therefore be flesh; spirit, spirit – each thing in the state and condition wherein God created it.  But such is the condition of flesh that it must subsist in one definite place, with its own size and form.  With this condition Christ took flesh, giving to it, as Augustine attests, incorruption and glory, and not taking away from it nature and truth” (4.17.24); “Christ’s body was circumscribed by the measure of a human body.  Again, by his ascension into heaven he made it plain that it is not in all places, but when it passes into one, it leaves the previous one” (4.17.30).

 Etsi autem incredibile videtur in tanta locorum distantia penetrare ad nos Christi carnem ut nobis sit in cibum, meminerimus quantum supra sensus omnes nostros emineat arcana spiritus sancti virtus, et quam stultum sit cius immensitatem modo nostro velle metiri.  Quod ergo mens nostra non comprehendit, concipiat fides, spiritum vere unire quae locis disiuncta sunt (CR II: 1009).

 Nihil magis incredibile quam res toto coeli et terrae spatio dissitas ac remotas, in tanta locorum distantia non solum coniungi, sed uniri, ut alimentum percipiant animae ex carne Christi (CR II: 1023).

 In addition to Lang, see Carlos Eire, War Against the Idols; Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, Vol. 2; Louis Dupre, Passage to Modernity; Charles Partee, Calvin and Classical Philosophy.

 “To them Christ does not seem present unless he comes down to us [ad nos descendat].  As though, if he should lift us to himself [ad se nos evehat], we should not just as much enjoy his presence!  The question is therefore only of the manner, for they place Christ in the bread, while we do not think it lawful for us to drag him from heaven [eum e coelo detrahere] . . . For since this mystery is heavenly, there is no need to draw Christ to earth [Christum elicere in terras] that he may be joined to us” (4.17.31/CR II: 1032).  “[O]ur Lord in instituting the sacraments by no means surrounded us with impediments to confine us to the world. He rather set up ladders by which we might scale upwards to the heavens; for nowhere else is Christ to be sought, and nowhere are we to rest than in him alone.  What? did Christ, I would ask, die and rise again that he might cease to be the cause and groundwork of our salvation? Nay, he has furnished us with aids to seek him, while he remains in his own place.” (Mutual Consent, CJCC: 215, italics mine).

 The following remarks from “Mutual Consent” make this clear: “Besides, if any good is conferred upon us by the sacraments, it is not owing to any proper virtue [power] in them, even though in this you should include the promise by which they are distinguished. For it is God alone who acts by his Spirit. When he uses the instrumentality of the sacraments, he neither infuses his own virtue [power] into them nor derogates in any respect from the effectual working of his Spirit, but, in adaptation to our weakness, uses them as helps; in such manner, however, that the whole power of acting remains with him alone (CJCC: 203); “Thus the sacraments are sometimes called seals, and are said to nourish, confirm, and advance faith, and yet the Spirit alone is properly the seal, and also the beginner and finisher of faith. For all these attributes of the sacraments sink down to a lower place, so that not even the smallest portion of our salvation is transferred to creatures or elements” (CJCC: 204);  “[W]e must also hold that the grace of God is by no means so annexed to them [the sacraments] that whoso receives the sign also gains possession of the thing. For the signs are administered alike to reprobate and elect, but the reality reaches the latter only.” (CJCC: 204)

 This is not to deny the obvious development that, whereas once civil authorities were in the service of ecclesial authorities, the situation had reversed by the 15^th and 16^th centuries.  But even with this reversal, there had not yet appeared the modern notion of a public or “secular” sphere that had been severed from the (private and interior) claims of religion.

 Elwood’s focus on the alternative semiotics of the Reformed eucharist would benefit from at least mentioning the important historical role played by anti-sacerdotal attitudes and by the shift to a more practical and biblically oriented piety.