Debating the Sacraments: Print and Authority in the Early Reformation. By Amy Nelson Burnett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
When Lutheran seminarians learn about the controversy over the Lord’s Supper, it normally features Luther as protagonist and Zwingli as antagonist in a debate concerning the literal interpretation of the words of institution, all playing out in the public forum of 1529’s Marburg Colloquy. In her most recent book, Amy Nelson Burnett offers an alternative view, where the famous interpretative conflict between Luther and Zwingli represented only the final embers of a debate a decade in the making. The controversy itself, Nelson Burnett argues, was influenced by a host of other characters, principally Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt and Erasmus of Rotterdam, and it raged not only between Luther and Zwingli, but Wittenberg pastor Johannes Bugenhagen, Basel humanist Johannes Oecolampadius, and Strasbourg ex-Dominican Martin Bucer, among many others. To that end, she frames it as a controversy between two broadly defined parties: the Wittenbergers (thus, not just Luther) and the Sacramentarians (thus, not just Zwingli). It also extended to many other theological topics, ranging from hermeneutics to church authority, baptism, and sacramental theology in general, and cut across clergy and lay, uneducated and educated, German and Latin audiences. It resulted in a shift away from Luther as the central figure in the Reformation toward Protestant confessional traditions with their own irreconcilable sacramental views.
This extensive volume is divided into three parts. Part One covers the basic context for the debate. The two primary sources for criticism of the Wittenberg position were “Erasmian exegesis and late medieval Eucharistic heresy” (51)—the biblical humanism of Erasmus and the dissemination of medieval heretical ideas from the English reformer John Wycliffe and the radical Bohemian Taborites, which shaped many of the southern German and Swiss Sacramentarians. If there were a contrast between Luther and Zwingli at this stage, it would be their relation to Erasmus, whom Luther and the Wittenbergers moved away from theologically, while Zwingli embraced him. The first of the critics came not from southern Germany or the Swiss Cantons, but Wittenberg itself in the form of Karlstadt. Luther’s former colleague was the first in the Reformation to argue against Christ’s bodily presence, not the “real” presence (which was the real point of contention, as Nelson Burnett notes, since nearly all the parties believed Christ was present in some sense), in 1524. Karlstadt departed decisively from the Wittenbergers by employing Erasmian exegesis while also retaining a German mysticism that Luther was simultaneously shedding. The southern Germans (via Oecolampadius) and Swiss (via Zwingli) entered the conversation on the heels of Karlstadt, who happened to visit Strasbourg and Zurich in 1524–1525. While Zwingli shared more in common with Karlstadt (and, by extension, Erasmus, who stayed out of the debate and denied rejecting the bodily presence), Oecolampadius represented a more substantial theological response that elicited an answer from Bugenhagen at an early date.
Part Two focuses on the debate proper as it unfolded between the Wittenbergers and Sacramentarians from 1526 to 1529. Nelson Burnett specifically identifies a German translation by Martin Bucer of Bugenhagen’s 1524 commentary on the Psalms as the transition into this next phase. Bucer’s translation was more a German rewriting of the commentary that reflected south German theology and exegetical principles. Bucer took great liberties in translating Bugenhagen’s Latin in order to make it more accessible to a lay audience—more of a free rendering than a literal translation (“conveying the sense and translating concepts rather than words,” 128)—and that included speaking against the bodily presence when attacking the Roman veneration of the Eucharistic host in Bugenhagen’s comments on Psalm 111. To make matters worse, not only was the translation of Psalm 111 published independently, but it did not list Bucer as translator because the printer thought Bugenhagen’s name would sell better. This set off immediate rejoinders from Bugenhagen and Luther, including Luther’s important 1527 treatise That These Words, in order to defend a Wittenberg position many were now equating with Bucer’s translation of the Psalm 111 commentary. In response to the Wittenberg apologetic, Oecolampadius became their principal opponent in 1526. According to Burnett, “it was Oecolampadius who introduced into the public debate a number of ideas that [Zwingli] adopted and that would later be called ‘Zwinglian’” (156). Zwingli’s influence only emerged with the recourse he made to Christological arguments in support of his view, as well as his opposition to the implicit authority Wittenbergers assumed for Luther. Luther’s responses in the course of 1527 and 1528 helped to crystallize the debate we now identify as the Sacramentarian controversy. It was Luther who codified the essential arguments of his opponents, such as the literal session of Christ at the right hand of the Father, the Christological implications of that view, and the figurative interpretations of the words of institution. Luther also shifted the terms of the debate away from specific exegesis of specific passages toward a rigorous affirmation of faith in Christ’s words over human reason. It is in this framework that the Marburg Colloquy occurred and that the lines of the sacramental debates have been drawn down to our day.
Part Three more briefly details the outworking of the debates for Lutheran, Reformed, and Anabaptist traditions. For the Wittenbergers, catechetical literature served to prepare communicants for the sacrament by increasingly focusing on what they were to receive in the sacrament, not simply the confession of sin and need for forgiveness, as it had been earlier in the Reformation. Subtle differences continued to emerge within the Sacramentarian camp, between south German and Swiss thought, as well as between Anabaptists and those Sacramentarians who did not reject infant baptism. Ultimately, what happened at the Marburg Colloquy in 1529 reveals a transition away from the actual debates that had already come to a head in the preceding years. For Nelson Burnett, the colloquy caused a shift from the authority of Luther to a new confessional authority that emerged with the 1530 Augsburg Confession, its south German analogue, the Tetrapolitania, and the articles contributing to and following them. Beginning with Marburg, the Wittenberg theology of the Lord’s Supper increasingly had less to do with Luther and more to do with evangelical Lutheranism as a confessional tradition.
For those interested in the Reformation, there will be numerous opportunities to celebrate the quincentennial of certain writings or events in the life of Luther and his fellow reformers. Following the traditional interpretation of the Sacramentarian controversy, one may be tempted to commemorate that particular quincentennial in 2029. But, if what Nelson Burnett argues is true, a more fitting date would be 2024. And when it is commemorated, it should not be reduced to a dramatis personae of Luther and Zwingli, but rather a multifaceted debate within increasingly diverse Reformation parties that established different theological trajectories, not just for the Lord’s Supper, but for biblical hermeneutics, sacramental theology, and confessional authority, and thus serves as an important bridge to the equally diverse and conflicting Protestantism of today.
Richard J. Serina, Jr.
Ringwood, NJ