Position · 1520

Sacramental Union

The Lutheran teaching that Christ’s true body and blood are present “in, with and under” the bread and wine, which remain bread and wine.

History

Roots

Medieval theology had settled on Transubstantiation: at the consecration the whole substance of the bread becomes Christ’s body, and only the appearances of bread remain. The Fourth Lateran Council used the word in 1215, and Thomas Aquinas gave it its classic philosophical form. But late medieval nominalists were less sure of the reasoning. Pierre d’Ailly, the Cardinal of Cambrai, argued in his commentary on the Sentences that it would be easier to believe real bread remains alongside Christ’s body, and accepted transubstantiation only because the Church had decided it.

Martin Luther read d’Ailly as a student and said so. In The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520, Project Wittenberg) he called transubstantiation “a monstrous word for a monstrous idea,” built on Aristotle and unknown to the Fathers for twelve hundred years. He did not deny the presence. He denied the explanation. Bread and body could both be there, he suggested, the way fire and iron are both present in a red-hot iron, “so mingled… that every part is both iron and fire.” Here he still treated the matter as an opinion believers were free to hold.

Causes

What hardened Luther’s view into a confession was a fight on the other flank. In the mid-1520s Andreas Karlstadt, his former colleague, argued that Jesus pointed to his own body when he said “this is my body.” Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich, helped by a letter from the Dutch humanist Cornelis Hoen, read “is” as “signifies,” and Johannes Oecolampadius in Basel read “body” as “figure of the body.” Zwingli also leaned on John 6:63 (“the flesh is no help”) and on the claim that Christ’s risen body is in heaven and cannot be in many places at once (see Memorialism).

Luther answered in two long treatises: That These Words of Christ, “This Is My Body,” Still Stand Firm (1527) and Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper (1528). The second laid out three modes in which a body can be present: the ordinary local mode, a spiritual mode that takes up no space (as when the risen Christ passed through closed doors), and a divine mode by which Christ, one person with God, is present wherever God is. The Formula of Concord later quoted this passage at length (Solid Declaration VII).

Philip of Hesse wanted a Protestant alliance and brought the two sides to the Marburg Colloquy in October 1529. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles. The fifteenth affirmed the sacrament of “the true body and blood of Jesus Christ” but recorded 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” (Marburg Colloquy, secondary, quoting the articles). The story that Luther chalked Hoc est corpus meum on the table is traditional; later histories such as Philip Schaff’s (secondary) tell it without citing a source.

Formulation

The Augsburg Confession (1530) put the Lutheran position in one sentence: the body and blood of Christ “are truly present, and are distributed to those who eat the Supper of the Lord,” and it rejects “those that teach otherwise” (Article X). Luther’s catechisms said the sacrament “is the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ under the bread and wine” (Small Catechism; Large Catechism). The Smalcald Articles (1537) said bluntly that “the bread and wine in the Supper are the true body and blood of Christ” (III.6).

The term itself came from a compromise. In the Wittenberg Concord of 1536, Martin Bucer and the south German cities reached agreement with Luther, and the articles described the link between bread and body as a sacramentalis unio, a sacramental union (Wittenberg Concord, secondary). The Formula of Concord later cited the 1536 articles as the source of the phrase.

Influence

The doctrine became the line that divided the Protestant world into Lutheran and Reformed churches. After Luther’s death, the Reformed Consensus Tigurinus of 1549 between John Calvin and Heinrich Bullinger provoked the Hamburg pastor Joachim Westphal to attack Calvin in 1552, opening a second round of controversy. Inside Lutheranism, Philip Melanchthon’s revised Augsburg Confession (the Variata, 1540) had softened Article X, and his followers in Electoral Saxony were accused of Calvinism. Elector August purged these “Crypto-Calvinists” in 1574 (Crypto-Calvinism, secondary). The Formula of Concord (1577) then settled the Lutheran position in detail, and it entered the Book of Concord in 1580.

In the twentieth century the question was reopened ecumenically. The Leuenberg Agreement of 1973 declared church fellowship between most Lutheran, Reformed and United churches in Europe without requiring agreement on the mode of presence (CPCE). In the United States, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America entered full communion with three Reformed churches through A Formula of Agreement (1997, ELCA). Confessional Lutheran bodies did not join these agreements.

Key ideas and contributors

The words mean what they say. Everything rests on the words of institution (Matthew 26:26–28). Luther refused to read “is” as “signifies” because nothing in the text demands it, and because a testament, the last will of a dying man, is not the place for figures of speech. Paul’s statements that the bread is “a participation in the body of Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:16) and that unworthy eaters are “guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 11:27–29) are read as confirming a real presence.

Two things, one sacrament. Bread remains bread; the body is truly present. The Formula of Concord explains that the phrases “in the bread, under the bread, with the bread” serve to reject transubstantiation and to indicate “the sacramental union of the unchanged essence of the bread and of the body of Christ.” It compares this to the incarnation, where the Word became flesh without ceasing to be God (Solid Declaration VII).

Oral eating, and eating by the unworthy. Lutherans hold that the body is received with the mouth, “not in a gross, carnal, Capernaitic, but in a supernatural, incomprehensible way.” So even “unworthy, godless hypocrites, as Judas” receive it, though to their judgment. This manducatio indignorum is the sharpest test of the doctrine, since it shows that the presence depends on Christ’s word, not on the faith of the receiver (Solid Declaration VII; Epitome VII).

No sacrament apart from its use. The Formula adopts the rule “nothing has the nature of a sacrament apart from the use instituted by Christ,” meaning the whole action of consecration, distribution and reception. Lutherans therefore reject the Roman Catholic practice of reserving and processing the host, while also rejecting the idea that the body is present only to faith.

Christology underneath. Because Christ’s divine and human natures are united in one person, Lutherans argue that his human nature shares in divine attributes, including the ability to be present where he wills. Johannes Brenz in Württemberg pressed this toward a doctrine of ubiquity, Christ’s body present everywhere. Martin Chemnitz, in De duabus naturis in Christo (1570), preferred to speak of Christ being present wherever he promises to be. The Formula of Concord holds both lines together (Person of Christ). This reading of the communication of attributes is a Lutheran development within Chalcedonian Christology.

Key controversies

The Zwinglian objection: figurative language and the ascension. Zwingli argued that Scripture often uses “is” figuratively (“I am the vine”) and that John 6:63 rules out any benefit from eating flesh. He held that a true human body is in one place, and Christ’s is at the right hand of God until he returns (Acts 3:21). Lutherans replied that “right hand of God” means God’s power, which is everywhere, not a place in the sky.

The Calvinist objection: a spiritual feeding without a local presence. John Calvin stood between the two. He taught that believers truly feed on Christ’s body, but by the Holy Spirit lifting them to heaven, not by Christ’s body coming down into the bread (see Spiritual Presence). In the Institutes he devoted sections to refuting “consubstantiation and ubiquity,” arguing that a body everywhere is no longer a true body (4.17.16–19). The Reformed also taught that the eternal Son is not confined to his human nature (the so-called extra calvinisticum), which Lutherans saw as splitting the person of Christ. On eating by the unworthy, the Reformed held that unbelievers receive only bread. Theodore Beza mocked the Lutheran view in terms the Formula of Concord quoted in order to reject them.

The Catholic objection: substance cannot remain. The Council of Trent condemned anyone who says “the substance of the bread and wine remains conjointly with the body and blood” (Session XIII, canon 2, 1551). Canon 4 also condemned the view that the presence lasts only during use, aimed at the Lutheran rule on reservation. The Reformed Heidelberg Catechism, from the other side, answers that the bread is not changed into Christ’s body (Q78, Lord’s Day 29) and treats the elements as signs and seals.

The name “consubstantiation.” Critics, Calvin among them, called the Lutheran view consubstantiation: two substances combined in one. Lutherans have generally rejected the label, because it suggests a physical mixture or a philosophical theory like the one they rejected in transubstantiation, when their claim is only that Christ’s word makes his body present (Sacramental union, secondary). Luther’s own fire-and-iron image gave critics some grounds for the charge.

Ecumenical agreements. Leuenberg and A Formula of Agreement treat the remaining differences as not church-dividing. Confessional Lutherans stayed out of them; the German theologians of the Ratzeburg Conference, for example, objected that Leuenberg’s wording on the Supper left room to deny the oral eating and the eating by the unworthy (Ratzeburg theses). The Reformed side has its own critics, who see the Lutheran Christology as the real obstacle.

What remains unresolved

Lutherans and the Reformed agree that believers truly receive Christ in the Supper. The open question is whether that presence is tied to the bread itself, so that it is there for whoever eats, or tied to the believer’s faith and the Spirit’s work. Behind that sits a disagreement about how Christ’s human nature relates to his divinity. Ecumenical agreements have found ways to share the table without settling it.