Melancthon Proposes Unity

THE death of Luther (February 18, 1546) left Melancthon at the head of the Reformation in Germany; and his views on the Supper were almost, if not identical with, those of the Reformed, i.e. the Swiss as distinguished from Lutherans. 

His love of peace and his respect for Luther had caused him to hold

his views in abeyance while Luther lived; but after Luther’s death, this very love of peace led him into a war that lasted as long as he lived; for, holding views so favorable to those of the opposition, and believing besides that, even in the widest difference of opinion on this subject, there was nothing that justified any division, much less such bitter contention, between the friends of the Reformation, his desire for peace induced him to propose a union of Lutherans and Zwingli ans. 

This immediately caused a division among the Lutherans, and developed what Mosheim calls 

the “rigid Lutherans” and the “moderate Lutherans,” the moderate Lutherans favoring union, and the rigid Lutherans attacking with renewed vigor all together, 

and Melancthon in particular.

A Difference of Opinion

In these events lies the secret of the difference of opinion between the Reformers on the Lord’s Supper. 

In the beginning Luther had inclined to the symbolical explanation of the Supper, and even at this time was not decidedly against it. 

But now that Carlstadt preached it, and the fanatics pushed the

symbolism to the length of despising the Supper entirely; and Carlstadt being in a measure, however slight, mixed up with them, Luther having to meet all this, rejected all idea of any symbolical meaning in the words, “This is my body,” and adopted that view from which, to use his own words, he would not be moved by “reason, common sense, carnal arguments,” nor “mathematical proofs.”

In the way in which the subject was brought prominently before him, it appeared to him that, to hold the view of the bread and wine being symbols was akin to fanaticism, if not fanaticism itself. 

And when Carlstadt, after being banished from Saxony, went to Switzerland, and was admitted as pastor and professor of divinity at Basel; and when before this Zwingli’s writings, maintaining the same views, had reached Luther, the whole company was held by Luther to be opponents of the truth; and he being as strenuous against this as against anything else that he deemed error, and his opponents in this holding the truth, and necessarily defending it, it could not but be that the result must be division. 

It is true that in this controversy Luther was stubborn; but in view of all the circumstances amidst which it arose, surely our charity will not be unduly taxed in excusing it. If he had been less strenuous in defending what he held to be true, the world would not have had the Reformation then. 

But however worthily our charity be bestowed in this instance, it fails to be so, when the scenes and the actors have all passed from the stage, when the Reformation has escaped the breakers and rides securely, and his successors stubbornly resist the truth for no other reason than that “Luther believed thus, and so do we;” and so cease to be reformers, and become rigid Lutherans.

The Lord’s Supper

It was a natural and an easy step to the next point, the Lord’s Supper
instead of the papal mass. 

--And here opens a new scene of controversy. 

Opposition is not confined between the reformers and the papacy; on this subject it opens between the reformers themselves. 

And the zeal that ought to have been exerted unitedly in maintaining a solid front in attacking the papacy, was in a great measure spent in opposing one another. 

The contending parties on this subject were Luther on one side, and Carlstadt and Zwingli on the other. 

The papal doctrine of the mass is, that the bread and the wine in the sacrament are veritably the actual flesh and blood of the Lord; and that either is as much so as both together; and that therefore it is superfluous to administer both to the laity; and so the bread alone is given instead of bread and wine. This is Trans-substantiation; i.e., “change of substance”. 

Luther renounced this, and held that although the bread and wine are not the real body and blood of the Lord, yet Christ is really present with the bread and wine. This is Con-substantiation; i.e., “with the

substance”. 

Carlstadt and Zwingli denied both, and held, as is now held by Protestants almost everywhere, that the bread and wine are only memorials of the broken body and shed blood of the Lord Christ.