Social Eucharist

The intimate link between the eucharistic and ecclesial body of Christ was a commonplace of medieval theology, and continued into the early Reformation. Thomas Davis writes that “before the Protestant conflicts over the presence of Christ’s true body in the Eucharist came about, it was a common pastoral/devotional emphasis” (69).

In a 1519 treatise on the sacrament, Luther wrote that “To receive this sacrament in bread and wine, then is nothing else than to receive a sure sign of this fellowship and incorporation with Christ and all his saints. It is as if a citizen were given a sign, a document, or some other token to assure him that he is a citizen of the city, a member of that particular community.” He followed with a discussion of the one-and-many imagery of 1 Corinthians 12, arguing that “if one wishes to understand the sacrament” one needed to grasp the nature of the body of Christ.Indeed, the “natural” body is presence in the eucharist precisely so that Christians could be “drawn and changed into the spiritual body.” It is in fact “more needful that you discern the spiritual than the natural body of Christ . . . . For the natural body without the spiritual profits us nothing in this sacrament” (70-1).

After 1520, though, “Luther began to emphasize more the individual rather than the social aspect of the Eucharistat least, he made the social consequence of the Eucharist dependent upon the personal (that is, faithful)appropriation of Christ’s natural body, the order was thus reversed In 1518/1519, the social aspect directed the individual, by 1523, the individual directed the social” (71). And at the same time, the sacramentarian controversy was brewing.

Davis argues that Luther’s exegesis of 1 Corinthians shifted accordingly: “Luther’s strategy, in fact, involved taking the two possible understandings of Christ’s bodynatural and spiritual/socialand separating them out in the Corinthian context chapter 11 refers to the natural body, chapters 10 and 12 refer to the social/spiritual body, and the chapters must remain exegetically distinct” (72).

For Zwingli, the same chapters of Corinthians were central to his understanding of the eucharist. Rather surprisingly, Davis argues that Zwingli emphasized the natural body in his eucharistic discussions as much as Luther, though the two understood the power and presence of that natural body differently. For Zwingli, the natural body was crucial for the operation of the sacrament because the believer contemplates what Christ accomplished in that body.

Zwingli wasn’t denying the presence of the natural body; he was specifying the mode of presence. He confessed, “I believe that m the Holy Eucharist, / e, the supper of thanksgiving, the true body of Christ is present by the contemplation of faith. This means that they who thank the Lord for the benefits bestowed on us in His Son acknowledge that he assumed true flesh, in it truly suffered, truly washed away our sins by His blood; and thus everything done by Christ becomes as it were present to them by the contemplation of faith” (74).

This common contemplation of the work of Christ in His natural body formed the church into a body: “Faith m Christ’s sacrifice creates the bond that unites Christians into one body, and by discerning Christ’s bodily work, one is then led to the ethical imperative to discern the social/spiritual body ‘Therefore, if we are members of his body,’ Zwingh stated, ‘it is most necessary that we should live together as Christians as Paul says’” (75). As much as for Luther, the social body results from individual connections with the natural body, but they differ concerning the mode of presence of the natural body.

Thomas Davis, “Discerning the Body: The Eucharist and the Christian Social Body in Sixteenth Century Protestant Exegesis,” Fides et Historia 38 (2006) 67-81.