Concerning the Lord's Supper, Zwingli teaches, in opposition to the Romish mass, that it is a commemoration, not a repetition, of the atoning sacrifice of Christ, who offered himself once for all time, and can not be offered by any other; that bread and wine signify or represent, but are not really, the broken body and shed blood of our Lord; that he is present only according to his divine nature and by his Spirit to the eye of faith (fidei contemplatione), but not according to his human nature, which is in heaven at the right hand of God, and can not be present every where or in many places at the same time; that to eat his flesh and to drink his blood is a spiritual manducation, or the same as to believe in him (John vi.), and no physical manducation by mouth and teeth, which, even if it were possible, would be useless and unworthy and would establish two ways of salvation--one by faith, the other by literal eating in the sacrament; finally, that the blessing of the ordinance consists in a renewed application of the benefits of the atonement by the worthy or believing communicants, while the unworthy receive only the outward signs to their own judgment.
He therefore rejects every form of a local or corporeal presence, whether by transubstantiation, impanation, or consubstantiation, as contrary to the Bible, to the nature of faith, and to sound reason. He supports the figurative interpretation of the words of institution [733] by a large number of passages, where Christ is said to be the door, the lamb, the rock, the vine, etc.; also by such passages as Gen. xli. 26, 27 (the seven good kine are seven years), Matt. xiii. 31-37 (the field is the world; the tares are the children of the wicked one; the reapers are the angels), and especially Luke xxii. 20; 1 Cor. xi. 25 (the cup is the New Testament in my blood). He proves the local absence of Christ's body by the fact of his ascension to heaven, his future visible return to judgment, and by such passages as, 'I go to prepare a place for you;' 'The poor you have always with you, but me you have not always;' 'I go to my Father;' 'The heaven must receive him until the times of restitution of all things.' He also points out the inconsistency of Luther in maintaining the literal presence of Christ in the sacrament, and yet refusing the adoration; for wherever Christ is he must be adored.
I add his last words on the subject from the Confession sent to King Francis I. shortly before his death: 'We believe that Christ is truly present in the Lord's Supper; yea, we believe that there is no communion without the presence of Christ. [734] This is the proof: "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matt. xviii. 20). How much more is he present where the whole congregation is assembled to his honor! But that his body is literally eaten is far from the truth and the nature of faith. It is contrary to the truth, because he himself says: 'I am no more in the world" (John xvii. 11), and 'The flesh profiteth nothing" (John vi. 63), that is to eat, as the Jews then believed and the Papists still believe. It is contrary to the nature of faith (I mean the holy and true faith), because faith embraces love, fear of God, and reverence, which abhor such carnal and gross eating, as much as any one would shrink from eating his beloved son. . . . We believe that the true body of Christ is eaten in the communion in a sacramental and spiritual manner by the religions, believing, and pious heart (as also St. Chrysostom taught). And this is in brief the substance of what we maintain in this controversy, and what not we, but the truth itself teaches.' To this he adds the communion service, which he introduced in Zurich, that his Majesty may see how devoutly the sacrament is celebrated there in accordance with the institution of Christ. This service is much more liturgical than the later Calvinistic formulas, and includes the 'Gloria in Excelsis,' the Apostles' Creed, and responses.
Closely connected with the eucharistic controversy are certain christological differences concerning ubiquity and the communicatio idiomatum, which we have already discussed in the section on the Formula of Concord.
Zwingli's doctrine of the Eucharist is unquestionably the simplest, clearest, and most intelligible theory. It removes the supernatural mystery from the ordinance, and presents no obstacles to the understanding. Exegetically, it is admissible, and advocated even by some of the ablest Lutheran scholars, who freely concede that the literal interpretation of the words of institution, to which Luther appealed first and last against the arguments of Zwingli, is impossible, or, if consistently carried out, must lead to the Romish dogma. [735] Philosophically and dogmatically, it labors under none of the difficulties of transubstantiation and consubstantiation, both of which imply the simultaneous multipresence of a corporeal substance, and a physical manducation of Christ's crucified body and blood--in direct contradiction to the essential properties of a body, and the testimony of four of our senses. It has been adopted by the Arminians, and it extensively prevails at present even among orthodox Protestants of all denominations, especially in England and America. [736]
Zwingli is no doubt right in his protest against every form, however refined and subtle, of the old Capernaitic conception of a carnal presence and carnal appropriation (John vi. 63). He is also right in his positive assertion that the holy communion is a commemoration of the all-sufficient sacrifice of Christ on the cross, and a spiritual feeding on Christ by faith. But he falls short of the whole truth; he does not do justice to the strong language of our Lord, especially in John vi. 53-58, concerning the eating of the flesh of the Son of Man (whether this be referred directly or indirectly to the Lord's Supper, or not). After all deduction of carnal misconceptions, there remains the mystery of a vital union of the believer with the whole Christ, including his humanity, viewed not, indeed, as material substance, but as a principle of life and power.
This Calvin felt. Hence he endeavored to find a via media between Zwingli and Luther, and assumed, besides the admitted real presence of the Divine Lord, a dynamic presence and influence of his glorified and ever-living humanity, and an actual communication of its life-giving power (not the matter of the body and blood) by the Holy Ghost to the worthy communicant through the medium of faith--as the sun is in the heavens, and yet with his light and heat present on earth. This theory passed substantially into the most authoritative confessions of the sixteenth century, and must therefore be regarded as the orthodox doctrine of the Reformed Church.
On three other points--namely, original sin, the salvation of infants, and the salvation of the heathen--Zwingli had peculiar views, which were in advance of his age, and gave great offense to some of his friends as well as to Luther, but were afterwards adopted by the Arminians.
4. The Reformation was born of an intense conviction of the sinfulness of man and the absolute need of a radical regeneration. Zwingli makes no exception, and describes the corruption and slavery of the natural man almost as strongly as Luther, although he never passed through such terrors of conscience as the monk in Erfurt, nor had he such hand-to-hand fights with the devil. [737] He derives sin from the fall of Adam, brought about by the instigation of the devil, and finds its essence in selfishness as opposed to the love of God. He goes beyond the Augustinian infralapsarianism, which seems to condition the eternal counsel of God by the first self-determination of man, and he boldly takes the supralapsarian position that God not only foresaw, but foreordained the fall, together with the redemption, that is, as a means to an end, or as the negative condition for the revelation of the plan of salvation. He fully admits the distinction between original or hereditary sin and actual transgression, but he describes the former as a moral disease, or natural defect, rather than punishable sin and guilt. [738] It is a miserable condition (conditio misera). He compares it to the misfortune of one born in slavery. [739] But if not sin in the proper sense of the term, it is an inclination or propensity to sin (propensio ad peccandum), and the fruitful germ of sin, which will surely develop itself in actual transgression. Thus the young wolf is a rapacious animal before he actually tears the sheep.
5. Zwingli was the first to emancipate the salvation of children dying in infancy from the supposed indispensable condition of water-baptism, and to extend it beyond the boundaries of the visible Church. This is a matter of very great interest, since the unbaptized children far outnumber the baptized, and constitute nearly one half of the race.
He teaches repeatedly that all elect children are saved whether baptized or not, whether of Christian or heathen parentage, not on the ground of their innocence (which would be Pelagian), but on the ground of Christ's atonement. He is inclined to the belief that all children dying in infancy belong to the elect; their early death being a token of God's mercy, and hence of their election. A part of the elect are led to salvation by a holy life, another part by an early death. The children of Christian parents belong to the Church, and it would be 'impious' to condemn them. But from the parallel between the first and the second Adam, he infers that all children are saved from the ruin of sin, else what Paul says would not be true, that 'as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive' (1 Cor. xv. 22). At all events, it is wrong to condemn the children of the heathen, both on account of the restoration of Christ and of the eternal election of God, which precedes faith, and produces faith in due time; hence the absence of faith in children is no ground for their condemnation. [740] As he believed in the salvation of many adult heathen, he had the less difficulty in believing that heathen children are saved; for they have not yet committed actual transgression, and of hereditary sin they have been redeemed by Christ. We have therefore much greater certainty of the salvation of departed infants than of any adults.
This view was a bold step beyond the traditional orthodoxy. The Roman Catholic Church, in keeping with her doctrine of original sin and guilt, and the necessity of water-baptism for salvation (based upon Mark xvi. 16 and John iii. 5), teaches the salvation of all baptized, and the condemnation of all unbaptized children; assigning the latter to the limbus infantum on the border of hell, where they suffer the mildest kind of punishment, namely, the negative penalty of loss (poena damni or carentia beatificæ visionis), but not the positive pain of feeling (poena sensus). [741] St. Augustine first clearly introduced this wholesale exclusion of all unbaptized infants from heaven--though Christ expressly says that to children emphatically belongs the kingdom of heaven. He ought consistently to have made the salvation of infants, like that of adults, depend upon their election; but the churchly and sacramental principle checked and moderated his predestination theory, and his Christian heart induced him to soften the frightful dogma as much as possible. [742] As he did not extend election beyond the boundaries of the Catholic Church (although he could not help seeing the significance of such holy outsiders as Melchizedek and Job under the old dispensation), he secured at least, by his high view of the regenerative efficacy of water-baptism, the salvation of all baptized infants dying in infancy. To harmonize this view with his system, he must have counted them all among the elect.