Bucer’s Wide Angle

In his contribution to Martin Bucer: Reforming Church and Community (73), Ian Hazlett calls attention to Bucer’s sense of the breadth of the issues involved in the debate over real presence:

“for Bucer by now the issue of the presence of Christ in Communion goes far beyond fixing one’s attention on the elements of bread and water, and pondering on the relationship between them and the body of Christ. It is within a much wider constellation of concepts that the matter is to be considered, namely faith, Christian community, the (mystical) body of Christ, ministry, the Holy Spirit, love, the promises of Christ, edification and nurture, covenant, thanksgiving, remembrance, the Word of God, the church, and so on. The apparent focussing of the debate on the elements in the 1520s concealed to some extent the fact that on many of these wider issues there was also dissonance, even among the Reformers themselves.”

Most of those involved in the debate failed to see the issues involved, with the exception of Calvin, who, in Bucer’s opinion, “managed to present the gamut of issues involved in a systematically integrated fashion, possibly partly as a reaction against traditional ‘scholastic’ methodology.”