Transubstantiation and Univocity

Gregory ( The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society ) follows Amos Finkelstein’s genealogical tracing of the modern scientific worldview to Scotist univocity. To illustrate the effect of Scotism on the Reformers, he points to their rejection of transubstantiation, which implies a “denial of sacramentality a it was understood in the Roman church” (43) and a significant shift in the understanding of how God relates to the world. Instead immanence and transcendence being “correlative,” they were seen to be in conflict.

Here’s the sentence here he links the metaphysics and the eucharistic theology: “Whether it was explicitly recognized by its protagonists or not, the denial that Jesus could be really present in the Eucharist – which is particularly clear, for example, in Zwingli’s spatial dichotomizing of Jesus’ divine and human natures, and the claim that ‘he sits at the right hand of the Father, has left the world, is no longer among us’ – is a logical corollary of metaphysical univocity” (42).

Gregory’s account is objectionable on several grounds, but the most obvious sleight of hand here is to make Zwingli stand in for the Reformers as a whole. How many readers will realize that Luther vociferously battled Zwingli (and hence stood on the side of “sacramentality”), and that Calvin was equally opposed to Zwinglianism? Gregory makes it sound as if Zwingli’s admittedly dualist eucharistic theology was the most logical outcome of Protestant metaphysics. In fact, many of the Reformers rejected Zwingli.