THE PROVENANCE OF JOHN CALVIN'S EMPHASIS ON THE ...

Supper of 1528, 718 Luther employs the three categories localiter or circumscriptive,
definitive, and repletive, in order to exegete different "modes of presence," particularly
modes of Christ's presence, including his sacramental presence. 719
For his part, Calvin ever eschewed philosophical categories and definitions with
respect to the Lord's Supper, resigning questions of "how" wholly to the mystery of the
"secret and incomprehensible virtus of the Holy Spirit." 720 Might he have thought that in
doing so, he was following the trajectory of Luther's early sound bite "The Holy Spirit
is greater than Aristotle"?
2) In his sermon "The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ—Against the
Fanatics" of 1526, published in Latin in 1527, Luther likewise speaks of the presence of
Christ in the sacrament. Drawing an analogy between the coming of Christ into the
womb of the Virgin Mary with the word of the angel Gabriel, Luther declares:
As one cannot deny the fact that she thus becomes pregnant through the Word,
and no one knows how it comes about, so it is in the sacrament also. For as soon
as Christ says: "This is my body," his body is present through the Word and the
power of the Holy Spirit (Spiritus sancti virtute). If the Word is not there, it is
718 Upon reading this treatise, Martin Bucer wrote in a letter to John Comander: "As soon as
Luther published his great confession on the holy Supper, I began to realize that he by no means taught a
local inclusion of Christ in the bread, or any such conjoining of Christ with the elements, which would be
unworthy of Christ either as true man or as reigning in heaven" (LW 37:158, with reference to WA
16:247). Bucer was never "won over" to Luther's view, but he did see in it opportunity for concord, an
optimism which gave rise to the Marburg Colloquy of 1529. LW 37, 158, citing WA 26, 247.
719 LW 37:215; WA 26:261-509. See also e.g., Lohse, Martin Luther's Theology, 230; Marc
Lienhard, Luther: Witness to Jesus Christ: Stages and Themes of the Reformer's Christology, trans.
Edwin H. Robertson (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1982), 216; Wandel, The Eucharist in
the Reformation, 104.
720 For this, Calvin was caricatured by late-sixteenth century Lutherans, of which Oberman
writes: "Though the drawing is executed with a wealth of 'loving' detail . . . its central statement is clear:
Calvin audaciously stretches to grasp the mysteries of God; he even dares to seize the the Holy Spirit, a
bird which vainly flaps its wings to escapte his [Calvin's] arrogant grip" (Oberman, "Pursuit of
Happiness," 255; with reference to a late-sixteenth century print "preserved in the Zwingli Museum in
Zürich, and reproduced as the frontispiece in Zwingliana 2, no. 10 [1909], unnumbered, before 290,
interpreted by Hermann Escher in that same issue, 309-316).
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