Position · 1525

Memorialism

The view that the Lord’s Supper is a memorial of Christ’s death, in which bread and wine are signs and Christ is present to faith rather than bodily in the elements.

History

Roots

Medieval theology had argued about the Eucharist for centuries, and the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) made Transubstantiation the official account of how bread becomes Christ’s body. Doubts never vanished. In the ninth century Ratramnus of Corbie described the elements as figures, and in the eleventh Berengar of Tours was made to recant a symbolic reading. These were minority voices, but Reformation writers later cited them as precedent.

The direct source of the memorial view was a letter by the Dutch lawyer Cornelis Hoen, written around 1521. Hoen argued that in “This is my body” the word “is” should be read as “signifies,” the way Jesus says “I am the vine.” The letter reached Zurich, and Huldrych Zwingli published it in 1525. Zwingli later credited Hoen with showing him how to read the words of institution, calling the letter “a pearl of great value: is has the sense of means” (Christian History, secondary).

Causes

The memorial view grew out of the Reformation’s attack on the Mass. Once the reformers rejected the Mass as a repeated sacrifice, the question became what the Supper was instead. Andreas Karlstadt, Martin Luther’s former colleague at Wittenberg, published tracts in 1524 arguing that when Jesus said “this,” he pointed to his own body, not the bread. Zwingli found Karlstadt’s reading forced, but he agreed with the conclusion.

Zwingli set out his position in his Commentary on True and False Religion (March 1525), and Zurich abolished the Mass that Easter. The first Reformed communion was served at tables, with bread and wine passed among the people. Johannes Oecolampadius in Basel reached a similar view, reading “body” as “figure of the body.” Philip Schaff’s account of the dispute (secondary) gives the sequence and lists the pamphlets.

The quarrel with Luther escalated through the late 1520s. Luther answered in That These Words of Christ, “This Is My Body,” Still Stand Firm (1527) and Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper (1528); Zwingli and Oecolampadius replied in kind. Philip of Hesse, who wanted a Protestant military alliance, brought the two sides to Marburg in October 1529. They agreed on fourteen articles and most of the fifteenth, but the Marburg Articles record that “we have not been able to agree at this time, whether the true body and blood of Christ are corporally present” in the bread and wine. The failure kept Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism apart.

Influence

Zwingli died at the battle of Kappel in 1531. His successor Heinrich Bullinger kept the Zurich line but moved toward John Calvin, and the two signed the Consensus Tigurinus (1549). From then on the Reformed mainstream held Calvin’s Spiritual Presence, not a bare memorial.

The memorial view lived on among the Anabaptists. The Schleitheim Confession (1527) describes the bread as broken “in remembrance of the broken body of Christ” and limits the table to those united by baptism. Menno Simons and later Mennonite confessions kept the same emphasis. Baptists were more divided. The Second London Confession (1689) copied Westminster’s spiritual presence: worthy receivers “inwardly by faith” feed on Christ crucified (ch. 30.7). But by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries most Baptists, especially in America, held the memorial view. The Southern Baptist Baptist Faith and Message (2000, art. VII) calls the Supper “a symbolic act of obedience” by which members “memorialize the death of the Redeemer and anticipate His second coming.” Much of modern Evangelical practice, including churches with no confession at all, assumes the same.

Key ideas and contributors

“Is” means “signifies.” Zwingli argued that Scripture often uses “is” figuratively (“I am the door,” “the rock was Christ”), so a figurative reading of “This is my body” is natural (Matthew 26:26). The words describe what the bread represents, not what it becomes.

The flesh profits nothing. Zwingli’s key text was John 6:63: “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all.” Eating Christ in John 6 means believing in him. Physical eating of his body, even if it were possible, would do nothing for the soul.

Christ’s body is in heaven. Zwingli held that Christ’s human body, like any human body, is in one place. Since he ascended and sits at the Father’s right hand, his body cannot also be on many altars (Acts 3:21). This was the point where he clashed hardest with Luther, who taught that Christ’s glorified humanity shares the divine omnipresence.

Remembrance and proclamation. Jesus said “Do this in remembrance of me,” and Paul says the church proclaims the Lord’s death until he comes (1 Corinthians 11:23–26). On the memorial view the Supper looks back to the cross and forward to the return, and its power lies in what it calls to mind.

The church’s pledge. Zwingli treated a sacrament as an oath or pledge of allegiance, like a soldier’s oath. In the Supper the congregation publicly declares that it belongs to Christ and to one another. The act is something believers do, more than something God gives through the elements. This is why later memorialists usually call it an “ordinance” rather than a sacrament.

Other contributors: Oecolampadius, whose patristic arguments gave the view scholarly weight; and Bullinger, who carried Zurich’s position into the wider Reformed world while softening it.

Key controversies

Luther and the words of institution. Luther insisted the words must be taken as they stand. At Marburg he reportedly chalked Hoc est corpus meum (“This is my body”) on the table and refused to move from it. He argued that Zwingli’s reading split Christ’s two natures, and that a sign which gives nothing makes the Supper a human work. The Lutheran alternative is Sacramental Union.

Catholic condemnation. The Council of Trent answered all the Swiss reformers directly. Canon 1 of its thirteenth session (1551) condemns anyone who says Christ is in the Eucharist “only as in a sign, or in figure, or virtue.” Catholic and Orthodox writers point to the long patristic witness to a real presence (Transubstantiation, Orthodox Eucharistic Mystery).

Calvin’s middle way. Calvin thought Zwingli was right to deny a local presence in the bread but wrong to make the Supper a bare sign. In the Institutes (book 4, ch. 17) he taught that the Spirit unites believers to Christ’s true body in heaven, so they really feed on him. The text both sides argued over was 1 Corinthians 10:16: if the cup is a “participation” in Christ’s blood, critics ask, how can it be only a reminder?

Was Zwingli a memorialist? Historians still argue about this. In his Account of the Faith (1530), submitted to Charles V, Zwingli wrote that “the true body of Christ is present by the contemplation of faith,” which sounds like more than recollection (Macauley translation, quoted by David Ould, secondary). B. A. Gerrish’s typology (in his essay “Sign and Reality” in The Old Protestantism and the New, 1982; summarized by Melvin Tinker in Churchman, secondary) labels Zwingli’s view “symbolic memorialism,” set beside Bullinger’s “symbolic parallelism” and Calvin’s “symbolic instrumentalism.” W. P. Stephens, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli (1986), argues that Zwingli’s view was richer than the label “mere memorial” suggests. The phrase “Zwinglian” in popular use may describe later evangelical practice better than Zwingli himself.

Baptist second thoughts. Some Baptist scholars argue that the memorial view was a nineteenth-century narrowing of their own tradition, which had held spiritual presence in 1689. The essays in Baptist Sacramentalism (2003, ed. Anthony Cross and Philip Thompson) make this case. Defenders reply that the memorial view simply follows the New Testament’s language of remembrance and avoids any hint that grace works through physical things.

What “remembrance” means. Critics from many traditions argue that the biblical word for remembrance (Greek anamnesis) means making a past saving event present, as Israel did at Passover, not just thinking about it. The World Council of Churches’ Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (1982) built on this reading. Memorialists accept that remembrance is more than mental recall but deny that it changes the elements.

What remains unresolved

Memorialism and its critics agree that Christ is not sacrificed again and that faith is needed to receive any benefit. They disagree about whether God gives anything through the bread and cup that he does not give through the preached word. For memorialists, the Supper’s simplicity is its strength: nothing happens to the elements, and everything depends on faith. For critics, that simplicity drains the meal of the communion Paul describes.