Saving the flesh

Melanchthon wrote, “The views of Erasmus might have caused greater tumults if Luther had not arisen to arrest them . . . all of this tragedy about the Lord’s Supper started from him.” Melanchthon had in mind Erasmus’s Neo-platonic disparagement of matter, which infected Zwingli and filtered into Anabaptist theology.

Roland Bainton summarizes Luther’s response: “The foci for Luther were God, man and the world, not spirit and flesh. These were never separated. God himself is in flesh. The incarnation literally means being in flesh. God is present in all physical reality, and Christ as God is ubiquitous and does not need to be made present in the elements of the Lord’s Supper by any miracle. The minister serves not to put Christ into the bread but only to disclose his presence. Spirit and flesh are not separated in man. Both of them together constitute in him a whole, and this is why the physical may be employed as a means of communication with the divine. Music, images, and the elements of the sacraments all have their place. Especially, the Word of God does not dispense with the external, nor communicate itself directly, but only through the Scriptures and the sacraments.”

The Reformation saved the flesh.