The Sacrament is a sign, but at the same time it is more. It conveys to us God’s grace. That is what Luther had learned in his fight against the ‘sacramentarians’: only in the Real Presence of the true body and blood of Christ do we have that assurance which the Lord’s Supper gives us. Luther himself never doubted this Presence. It was the silent presupposition of everything which he had said in his early writings on the Sacrament as a sign and seal attached to Christ’s promise. He had seen then where the figurative understanding of the sacramental words was bound to lead. If ‘This is my body’, ‘This is my blood’ were understood figuratively, then there would be no assurance that ‘given for you’, ‘shed for you’ were to be taken literally. Then the proprium of this Sacrament would be lost, the eating and drinking of what Christ had sacrificed for us, and with it the Real Presence of the whole Christ, according to his divinity and humanity, in his Church on earth, here and now, as an anticipation of our eternal union with him. No one who knows Luther can assume that he would have been satisfied with Calvin’s doctrine, which, in spite of all realistic language, did not admit of more than that spiritual manducation which all Reformed churches teach.
From This Is My Body by Hermann Sasse, Augsburg Publishing House, 1959, p. 267.
Thank you for this article, but could you tell us what is a “spiritual manducation”? What do you think Calvin meant by that words?
Also: according to you, do the christian has a real participation to the Christ’s flesh and blood by faith (out from the sacrament), or not?
If not, what about the salvation of he who belive but never eat the blessed bread? (Jn 6. 53)
In Christ
Hi Timothy,
I apologize for the delay in my response. I have been dealing with some things offline over the past few months that have prevented me from keeping up with the blog.
By “spiritual manducation” Calvinists mean that in the Sacrament Christians ascend to heaven spiritually to partake of Christ’s body and blood by faith, and that what you are receiving in your mouth is not anything more than bread and wine. So if you partake without faith, you only receive bread and wine and not the body and blood of Christ. Lutherans, on the other hand, teach that in the Sacrament you are receiving the true body and blood of Christ regardless of whether or not you have faith (thus St. Paul’s warnings in 1 Corinthians 11 about eating and drinking judgment on oneself).
There is a sense in which we participate in the death of Christ by faith. However, Sasse’s point is that Calvinists/Reformed do not go beyond this. One can spiritually partake of Christ’s body and blood easily enough without the Sacrament at all. And yet Christ tells us “this is My body” and “this is My blood”, and commands us to partake of it, and St. Paul tells us that the participation in Christ’s body and blood that we have in the Sacrament goes beyond mere spiritual eating and drinking.
Hope this helps!