Lecture 16.docx

Plans for today, what I want to do, I won\'t get to Pascal, but one or two of you asked about Pascal, I would recommend, well I wouldn\'t recommend it, I hesitate to recommend my own stuff, but if you want to know what I think about Pascal, I think there is a lecture on iTunes U as part of the Re...

Plans for today, what I want to do, I won\'t get to Pascal, but one or two of you asked about Pascal, I would recommend, well I wouldn\'t recommend it, I hesitate to recommend my own stuff, but if you want to know what I think about Pascal, I think there is a lecture on iTunes U as part of the Reformation series that Westminster put up there that deals with Blaise Pascal, just sort of the 32nd version, I think what Pascal does is take certain themes and agust it and uses them to critique the culture of his day which was a very pleasure and entertainment oriented culture, the court of the French king in the middle of the 17th century was very preoccupied with entertainment and distraction and pleasure and I think that Pascal\'s critique of that in the 17th century and what that says about the spiritual underpinnings of the world in which he lived is very relevant to us today, partly because of the potent connection of two worlds where entertainment really is the driving force of much that goes on, so that\'s what I do with Pascal and you can find that lecture online if you wish. What I want to do today is round off Luther, the first lecture I want to talk a bit more about Luther and Zwingli, particularly looking at the issue of the Lord\'s Supper in Luther and Zwingli and then in the second lecture I want to look at, give a sort of overview of what happens to Lutheranism after Luther and I do that mainly because I think by and large in evangelical circles, wherever you sort of fall on the Baptist or Presbyterian spectrum I think we\'re more familiar with the history of reformed theology whereas Lutheranism really does go in its own direction so I want to sort of bring that back into play and there are some very talented Lutheran theologians operating today that just don\'t get any airplay in the evangelical world but who I think are really very well worth reading. I think of Carl Beckwith at Beeson Divinity School who\'s just written a very good book on the Trinity published by an obscure Lutheran publisher, you won\'t see it reviewed by T4G or the Gospel Coalition or any of the standard places people go to find what\'s happening in the evangelical world but it\'s a very good contribution to, you know, the term I\'ve used a number of times in this course, you know, Catholic Christianity, small c Catholic Christianity in terms of the basic elements of theology proper and orthodoxy so just want to give you a little bit of background on Lutheranism after Luther and then finally I want to look at Luther on the Jews because that is an issue I think you\'ll find it\'s not only is it an interesting historical issue and I think exploring the issue of Luther on the Jews allows us to reflect upon how to do history but it\'s also a pressing pastoral question as well. I\'m pretty sure that if you do a Sunday school on Luther somebody in your congregation is gonna say well wasn\'t he a racist or why should we take him seriously because he said this so it\'s I think it\'s very helpful as an elder or pastor or Sunday school teacher to have in your back pocket if you like a few ways of answering that question in order to take the concern seriously but also to offer a response that allows us to take the good from Luther without having to follow him every step of the way. So first then I want to look at Luther and Zwingli we got to the point I think yesterday where the sausage had been eaten and this leads very quickly to demands within the city of Zurich for some basic reformation elements of Reformation this is 1522 so when you think about that it\'s it\'s it\'s often useful to connect what\'s going on in one place with what\'s going on in another you know the English Reformation in some way starts earlier than anywhere else when starts with John Wycliffe in the the late for the 14th century but doesn\'t really you know England doesn\'t start to make real progress on the Reformation rapidly until the late 1540s. Luther is dead before England starts to really grapple at a high level with Protestantism. Zurich 1522 think about that Luther has already gone through the most dangerous points of his career. 1522 Luther has really consolidated his power and the Reformation is set on an irreversible course in Wittenberg so we can definitely say that Zurich you know and the grand scheme of things is kind of lagging behind Luther at this point. Demands come for clerical marriage, for a debate on the intercession of the Saints, and the town council after a debate in July 1522 the town council decrees that all teaching within the bounds of the city and its territories is to be done in accordance with Scripture. Now notice the role of a town council here this is a Swiss city it\'s not a democracy in the way you know it\'s not like Philadelphia or Los Angeles it\'s not with a universal franchise by any stretch of the imagination it\'s a small select group of the wealthier property owning citizens men who would have the vote but it is different to the situation Luther\'s in. Luther\'s in a situation where there is a prince who sits at the top and can pretty much rule by decree of course it\'s always a little more complicated than that because a prince needs the support of the lower nobles in order to implement his policies but by and large the prince is the single most important person in in electoral Saxony. In Zurich you have a town council and Zwingli is going to work in alliance with the town council very closely in order to pilot this reformation and on November the 10th 1522 Zwingli actually resigns his pastorate he resigns from the great minster in Zurich and is appointed a preacher at large by the town council. So Zwingli becomes effectively the the religious arm of the town council at that point and the stage is being set for a reformation that will be much more dramatic both in what it looks like and in the the way it plays out politically. Now again let\'s take a sidebar one of the questions that I often throw out to students relates to how did Luther and Zwingli think of their times? What did they think was going on at the reformation? We all have our views on that when we look back to the reformation I might say to you know what was the reformation and you know one person might say it was a great recovery of the gospel or somebody else might say well it\'s breaking of the monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church. Somebody else you know if you\'re a sociologist of a sort of Weber type might say well it\'s it started the rise of capitalism there are a whole host of ways we can look at the 16th century but it was interesting to ask the question of what are the guys who are actually involved at the time? What did they think was going on? What do they think they were doing? How did they understand the significance of their times? And we\'ve sort of answered that in a number of occasions with Luther and I\'ve said you know Luther was a late medieval man and certainly early in the Reformation let\'s say 1518 through to 1525 Luther is expecting Jesus to come back and for Luther the Reformation is above all the recovery of the gospel. The gospel has been buried under a whole heap of garbage as far as Luther\'s concerned in the Middle Ages and for him it\'s the recovery of justification by grace through faith that is the theological significance of the Reformation. And in some ways that makes Luther\'s Reformation very radical it\'s a it\'s a fundamental break with the past. On another level it makes it less radical because actually Luther sees the Reformation in some ways as having a fairly narrow kind of focus. Mentioned before if you go to a fairly conservative Lutheran Church you might actually think you\'re in a Roman Catholic Church in terms of the aesthetics. Certainly if you visit a Scandinavian country and you go to a local Lutheran parish church in a Scandinavian country you wouldn\'t necessarily know you\'re in a Lutheran church when you walk through the door. Last year I was the the token schwamer at a meeting of the Missouri Synod Lutherans they had a conference in at Concordia Seminary in Fort Wayne in Indiana and in the evening I went to the Evensong the the Evensong Chapel service that they had and the the priest the minister was in a white robe and the liturgy was sung. It was aesthetically I was very beautiful I have to say maybe think wow you know why would you go for guitars and drums when when you could you know you can do it like this. But it was aesthetically quite conservative. How did Zwingli understand the Reformation? I think this is this is a real dividing line in some ways between Lutherans and Reformed. For Zwingli and for other Reformed theologians Calvin and Knox for example. The Reformation is about the recovery of true worship. Now let I don\'t want to overplay this to say you know that the the Reformed didn\'t believe in justification by grace through faith they absolutely did. But they did understand the significance of the times in a slightly different way. And one of the things you can see is by looking at at how the you know they read their history back into the Bible. We mentioned a number of occasions for Luther it\'s the book you know the book of Revelation. He\'s living through the times of the book of Revelation. The Reformed on the other hand tend to look back to the kingdom narratives of the Old Testament. The most extreme example of this would be John Knox. You know everybody you know every woman he comes across is a Jezebel. It\'s Ahab, it\'s Jezebel. The struggles that of his day he refracts them through the narratives of the Old Testament. By the way with John Knox his famous treatise first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women. It\'s been the first of three blasts but the reception was so negative that he never got to the second two. Calvin caused so much trouble for Calvin. It was basically the argument that women shouldn\'t hold a civil office. It was written under Mary the first of England and it was published under Elizabeth the first. It was a terrible maybe the most ill-timed publication in religious history. Calvin caused so much trouble for Calvin he actually writes to Knox\'s publisher in Geneva and says don\'t publish anything else by this man. I can\'t vouch for its orthodoxy. But I do say to students you know be a bit sympathetic to Knox because every woman in power he ever come across had wanted to have him executed and that would somewhat shape one\'s attitude to women in authority. And also remember monstrous regiments. I remember teaching the class at Aberdeen University and one of the sort of the feminist ladies in the class. So women in the class are sitting on regiment. How many of these women were there? It\'s not regiment of course as in an army of these women marching over the horizon. It\'s regiment as in rule. The old-fashioned word for rule. So it monstrous means strange or unnatural rule of women. But Knox is a great example of seeing and understanding the Reformation as primarily concerned by recovery of true worship. It\'s a theme you get in Calvin a lot and you see it in Zwingli. And it actually has a profound aesthetic impact because the Reformed are more preoccupied with purifying the aesthetics of worship than the Lutherans would be. So the Reformed tended to be more iconoclastic. And if you\'d been in Zurich in the 1520s under you know the time when Zwingli is in his heyday and you had attended one of the the churches there, there would have been no stained-glass windows nor would there have been any singing. Even singing was regarded as potentially problematic. If you\'ve ever read Augustine\'s Confessions he makes a comment there about how if anything he would favor the the worship style of Athanasius the Great. He said who would have the just sing the Psalms and have them chanted in a monotone never speeding up or never slowing down because he was worried that the aesthetics of the music would carry the mind away from true contemplation. I actually think it\'s a very personal view is that\'s very I think he\'s right to spot the power of music but a very reductive view of music. But there would have been no music in a Zurich worship service. I was on this little panel yesterday afternoon for the DMin on worship and the question of music was asked and I made a comment about the fact that I like rock music but didn\'t want it in church and Dr. MacArthur answered the question after me and went out of his way to make sure that people knew that we weren\'t approving of rock music from the panel in any shape or form even in even in the service. But music is very powerful and the reform knew that and I think certainly in the case of a Zwingli not Calvin\'s music in Geneva but in the case of Zwingli there\'s a strong reaction against it so worship service in Zurich really would have been question of prayer reading the scriptures and hearing the scriptures expounded. Would not have been any music and it connects to how they understood the Reformation. Zwingli has a more radical understanding of the Reformation than Luther does. For Luther it\'s a recovery of the gospel. For Zwingli it\'s about the destruction of idolatry. It\'s not that the law gospel dialectic has got confused that\'s essentially what Luther sees as the problem. For Zwingli for Calvin and company it\'s that the church has become idolatrous in its worship. So Zwingli resigns as pastor November the 10th 1522 and becomes preacher at large. He will preside over the next couple of years over a number of disputations in Zurich which move the Reformation forward. One of the things that comes through very clearly in these disputations is that scripture is emerging as what we with some anachronism we we would say you know you would use the term these days of the regulative principle of scripture. Scripture is emerging as the regulative principle of all of life in Zurich and Zwingli as I\'ve mentioned doesn\'t have that Luther\'s you know let\'s do the minimum we have to. Zwingli is much more of a we need to get things changed now and he attracts numerous radical elements to Zurich because of this. Zwingli also he even dallies at one point with the idea of rejecting infant baptism and becoming an adult a cradle Baptist. He then swings viciously against that position and of course helps pilot legislation through the council which will lead to the execution of a number of Baptists. The break between Zwingli and the more radical elements in his entourage really comes when it becomes clear that Zwingli is willing to allow the council to set the pace of reform and not simply bring in Reformation overnight. That\'s really in sort of 1523 late 1523 it becomes clear that Zwingli and the council are going to work hand in glove and Zwingli is happy to work at the pace that the council is taking things. 1525 is the date of the legislation against Anabaptists. Trying to find the exact wording here. It\'s actually February 1526. 7th of March 1526 the town council passed an edict which contained the following statement, henceforth in our city territory neighborhood no man woman or maiden shall rebaptize another. Whoever shall do so should be arrested by authority and after proper judgments shall without appeal be put to death by drowning. And not many were executed this not to I\'m not trying to belittle it here not many were executed under this legislation. It was not a holocaust that took place but it was very harsh. Raises the question I touched on this yesterday why the the radical reaction the extreme reaction to to the idea of believers baptism in the Reformation. A couple of things I mean one it is a profound it would have been regarded as a profoundly strange practice. This is a church emerging out of the highly sacramental Middle Ages and secondly I think more significantly it shatters that link between the church and the state that I talked about yesterday the day before. It was the assumption that everybody who\'s a member of the state is a member of the church and everybody is a member of the church is a member of the state. Church and state worked hand in glove to govern Europe. Those who were baptized on profession of faith those who repudiated their infant baptism were therefore repudiating one of the unquestionable foundations of society at that point. One of the difficulties I think we have as 21st century people looking back to the 16th century is we don\'t really understand how theology and public life were so inseparable in the 16th century. Could you a less bloodthirsty example might be communion in Geneva. How many times a year did they have communion in Calvin\'s Geneva? Four. How many times did Calvin want communion in Geneva when he returns there in 1541 and presents his requests to the town council? How many times does he want communion in Geneva? 52\. He wants a weekly communion. Why is it that then that the Geneva authorities only grant him the right to have four communions? Well the reason is that four communions is the number of communion, annual communions that they have in the city of Bern. And Geneva is a small relatively weak city. It was ruled by the House of Savoy until a Protestant coup ejected the local bishop and the House of Savoy. But it is very very vulnerable militarily. It is absolutely dependent upon the military protection of the Protestant city of Bern for its own safety. And you cannot have a, what we would see as a sort of a foreign policy treaty in the 16th century that takes no account of the liturgical practice of the two parties subscribing the treaty. So as weird as it seems to us, Calvin can only have communion four times a year because they need a military treaty, a political agreement for protection from the city of Bern. Why do I cite that? Because it reminds us that this is not our world. The idea that we would have foreign policy decisions made relative to some sort of point of liturgical practice is utterly bizarre to us. But that was the world they lived in. When you challenge infant baptism, you\'re not simply challenging a, you know, does, his church membership confined merely to those, you know, to only to those who profess faith and are baptized, does include believers and their children? That\'s sort of where the question comes down today. But that\'s not the question in the 16th century. What you\'re really doing is you\'re challenging whether somebody is a member of society, whether society really is what you think it is. I think I used the example yesterday of Anabaptists, they\'re like the Manson family. They\'re like the hippies heading up into the hills outside of LA in the 60s to form their alternative communities. Well that\'s how they were perceived. It\'s not to say everyone, there were some scary Anabaptists out there. Not all of them were scary. But the common perception of them was that they were people out to destroy society, to tear society apart. Hence the brutal punishments. It\'s not to excuse those punishments, what I\'m trying to say is those punishments were not simply motivated by disagreements over the amount of water or what age you should be when you\'re baptized. Actually what was at stake was something deeply sociological and political as well. Other things Zwingli does in Zurich. Zwingli is one of the early theorists of pastoral care in the Reformation. When you think about what the Reformation does by shifting the emphasis from sacrament to word and also by placing assurance at the heart of the Christian faith, the faith is being dramatically changed and the practices of pastoral ministry undergo a change as well. And there are a number of the early reformers right on this topic as they\'re rethinking how to do pastoral ministry given the theological breakthroughs that are being made. You should get hold of one of the books I get the students at Westminster to read in the Reformation course is Martin Butz\'s On The True Care of Souls. It\'s translated and available as a nice little hardback from Banner of Truth. So it\'s a good example of a reformer thinking through pastoral ministry given the ecclesiological, theological changes that have been made. Those were the days when you could refer to your congregants as a pack of dogs when you wrote about them. They didn\'t have any choice but to be there of course on a Sunday which kind of helps and strengthens your hand. But Zwingli writes a work called The Ministry which is interesting in that he advocates both rigorous academic training for ministers and therefore he\'s a part of the, you know, that early generation of majesty or reformers who really establish as basic to the ideal of, you know, reform or reformation ministry education. And secondly, he\'s very critical in that work of itinerant preaching and the ill-educated nature of much radical itinerant preaching that goes on. So you can see the kind of pressures that the Reformation is coming under not only from the Catholic Church but he\'s also having to respond to the sort of self-appointed preacher turning up on the scene. He also establishes in Zurich a practice that will later take root in England, the prophesy. The prophesy was a gathering of ministers where one of the things that would be done is that a passage of scripture would be expounded, typically starting with the most junior minister present and ending with the most senior minister present. And it was an opportunity for the ministers to discuss how to preach and to critique each other preaching. I don\'t know if the master seminary does preaching labs. One of the things that never having gone to seminary myself, you know, missing out on preaching labs is something that I\'m very, very grateful for. I can\'t imagine anything worse than having to preach to a couple of students, be videoed, and then have to sit and watch myself. Gosh, you know, I imagine you guys enter the preaching lab as boys and you leave as men. That\'s the kind of feeling I have in that kind of circumstance. But this is a little bit like a preaching lab situation. It reflects the fact that preaching is centrally important to what\'s going on in Zurich and also indicates that these men cared. They cared about improving their preaching. One of the striking things I think about the underlying philosophy of the prophesy is that one should never be content with where you preached. I preached a couple of weeks ago. My associate pastor was just exhausted and couldn\'t get, and wanted a full week off at Christmas. I said, well, I\'ll preach Christmas morning and I\'ll preach New Year as well. But I said, if the session will give me the chance to preach a text, I preached a few years ago so that I too can have some time off over Christmas. I preached on Job 28 and one of my elders came up to me and he said, wow, it was much better than last time you preached it. And I thought, well, that\'s, it\'s an interesting compliment, I suppose. But I also thought, well, that\'s good. The worst thing that could be is he said, man, you were a much better preacher three or four years ago than you are today. That would really send me away to think, man, I got to do some work here. But that idea that preaching should always be being improved, I think it\'s implicit in the prophesying idea. And it\'s ultimately transplanted to England. If you think about England as an interesting reformation history, because the government swings backwards and forwards on the reformation a number of times, which means that you get periodic waves of exile and return. So what happens in the English reformation is you get men of Protestant sympathies going to the continent and living and studying at continental centers during times of persecution at home. When the persecution is lifted, they go back to England and they bring the continental practices with them. And one of the things that the Puritan, the party that we later dubbed the Puritans does is it takes the prophesy back to England and the gathering of ministers to preach to each other and to critically reflect upon their preaching becomes a staple, a backbone of Puritan practice in the latter part of the 16th and the 17th centuries. So the prophesy is really quite significant. All along, of course, there is this rivalry developing with Luther. I put my own cards on the table. I\'m really a big Luther man on the whole. And even in the Eucharistic debate, I find myself, I\'m not a Lutheran, but I don\'t like Zwingli either. I would say about Zwingli, he thought Hercules was going to be in heaven in his work on Providence. He belongs to that sort of tradition that we go, you go back to the Greek apologist. There\'s this platonic strand in the Greek apologists where they see some of the great Greek figures getting into heaven. Socrates is going to be there and Hercules is going to be there. Hercules, one of the coolest heroes from ancient Greece. What he did with the Orgian stables and killing the hydra, magnificent. But he\'s probably not going to be in heaven. And I have a real problem with any theologian who thinks that he will be there. And that was one of the things that Luther mocked Zwingli for. That this sort of platonic, we would now call it the wider hope idea. It\'s not particularly significant in Zwingli\'s theology, but it is there. I think one might say it\'s where his philosophy and his heart get the better of his head, one might say. But all along, there\'s a rivalry developing between these two. I mean in Luther and Zwingli, you have two extremely talented men accomplishing remarkable things in their own contexts. There\'s a sense in which sooner or later they are going to come into conflict. It\'s worth reflecting before we go to the directly to the conflict with them, what might be some of the reasons for these two men not necessarily connecting. First of all, I think political context. We noted before, you know, both men we could say with a little bit of anachronism, because I think this is a really a 19th century phenomenon. But we could say both men are nationalists to some extent. Maybe patriots would be a better way of putting it, less loaded way of putting it. They certainly have a concern for their local ethnic group, if you like, over against the claims of Rome. So both Luther and Zwingli fit into the strains and the stresses that are emerging in Europe at this particular moment in time. Something\'s going to blow in Europe. Is it going to be a religious thing? Well, who knows? But certainly what we would now call national interests are reaching a point where the old way of doing Europe simply isn\'t going to work anymore. The difference though, there is a different political context. Luther, as I said, is working under a prince. He\'s a man of the Middle Ages and his political context is in many ways the last gasp of the medieval structures of Europe, rather than the first blossom of the new political structures. Luther is subject to the politics of the Holy Roman Empire in a rather direct way. Frederick the Wise and the Emperor, they\'re always sort of circling each other and wondering what move is going to be made. Switzerland, under the terms of the Peace of Basel in 1499, the Swiss Confederation, the Great Cities and Cantons, the states or the counties of Switzerland, had gained their independence from the Holy Roman Empire. That didn\'t mean they could ignore the Holy Roman Empire any more than say, for example, Britain can ignore America when it goes about foreign policy. Bottom line is, the Swiss Cantons were much smaller and less powerful than the Empire and therefore the Empire was going to shape Canton policy to some extent. But they were much more independent of the Holy Roman Empire than the Elector of Saxony was and things that went on in, you know, what stay, what happens in Zurich stays in Zurich as far as the Holy Roman Empire goes. It\'s not of direct relevance to the Emperor either. Zurich, as we\'ve noted, was also a self-governing city with a town council. There was an element of popular governance in a very, very highly qualified way, but there was an element of popular, formal popular governance in Zurich that we don\'t find in in Wittenberg. So there\'s a different political context that shapes the possibilities for Reformation. Secondly, I think there are two that they differ, Luther and Zwingli, in their theological and their intellectual, sorry, in their intellectual context. Luther is virtually unique among the Reformers in being pretty much the only reformer who doesn\'t come to Reformation after having first been a humanist. Pretty much every other reformer you can name started off as one of these aspirational intellectual men of letters who thought that society could be transformed through the recovery of a certain kind of classical learning. That\'s not Luther. Luther is the medieval monk who comes to Reformation because of an existential crisis. The other reformers, Zwingli, Calvin, these are all men who seem to come to the Reformation once they realize that humanism isn\'t going to deliver on its promise, that humanism alone isn\'t going to be enough to bring about the Reformation they\'re looking for. That\'s when they become more theologically radical. When was Calvin converted? Bottom line is nobody knows. Beza gives us a date, but then when you look at Calvin\'s life story you find, well, Calvin\'s counseling novice nuns after this date of his conversion. So it can\'t quite have happened as Beza said. There\'s no hint in Calvin\'s writings of quite the same existential crisis we get in Luther. His move to Reformation is more gradual. All these guys, with the exception of Luther, moved to Reformation after first being grounded in humanism. Yeah? Just to be clear, humanism then again was the drawing back to the classics. Drawing back to the classics. It\'s not a philosophical or theological position at all to the extent that Calvin is a humanist the day he dies. He writes Latin in a humanist style. He\'s part of that humanist culture. It\'s a category that does not, it is, you know, it\'s not the same kind of category of saying somebody\'s a reformer. For us today, I\'m trying to think of an example. It might be, you know, saying that somebody is a writer doesn\'t tell you where they stand theologically at all. It\'s that kind of category. The problem with humanism is we tend now to read modern humanism. Julian Huxley, Richard Dawkins, you know, it\'s difficult to get rid of all of the connotations of that language. And really, we need to do so. These men are not humanists in the modern sense. They are men of what you might say, humane letters. They\'re the literary elite of their world. Zwingli comes to reformation then from a humanist background. And one of the things we can say about those who come from a humanist background is they typically have more of an interest in the practical reformation of society. Luther\'s just not really interested in that. For Luther, it\'s where can I find a gracious God? For Zwingli, it\'s well how can we reform Zurich in accordance with God\'s Word? How do we bring social and cultural practices into line with God\'s Word? The usual way you can spot the difference between Luther and everybody else is, you know, if we were sitting here in this room and there was Luther and there was Zwingli and there\'s Bullinger and there\'s Calvin, the way to immediately tell the difference would be to say, okay, let\'s talk about Erasmus. And Luther would start foaming at the mouth and banging his fist on the table. And the other guys to varying degrees would say, well, we appreciate Erasmus. He gave, not only did he give us the Greek New Testament, but wow, he helped revive languages. His vision for learning was one that we really appreciate. He would be that kind of figure. And Erasmus is the sort of the litmus test of where these guys come down. And all of them, they see the, you know, Calvin sees the problems in Erasmus. But Calvin\'s also an elitist, and he respects a stellar intellect when he sees it. Theological relation between Luther and Zwingli then. First of all, go back to something I said yesterday, it\'s actually quite problematic untangling this one because there\'s so much national pride involved in scholarship. There really is. For all of the fact that, you know, I\'ve critiqued hagiography early in the class, scholars are not invulnerable to hagiography themselves. And there\'s a lot at stake, there\'s a lot nationally invested in Luther, and a lot nationally invested in Zwingli, to the point that Lutheran scholars generally have a vested interest in making Zwingli look like a sort of cheap sweatshop knockoff, you know, a pirate version, if you like, of the genuine Reformation. Whereas the Swiss scholars have a genuine interest in making Zwingli look as independent as possible from Luther. We know that Zwingli was impressed by what he heard of Luther at the Leipzig dispute, Leipzig debate in 1590. We do know that their theology is quite different in its emphasis. Justification, for example, is not a significant thing for Zwingli. He doesn\'t talk much about justification. It doesn\'t have the central, constructive, and constitutive role in his thinking that it does for Luther. For Zwingli, he\'s much more interested in Providence, partly shaped by that devastating plague of 1519, 1520, in Zurich, and by the scripture principle. He also has, as I\'ve said, a much broader vision of reform. You know, Luther, in some ways, Luther is the Protestant monk. It\'s one man wrestling with himself. It\'s one man standing before God. Zwingli thinks much more in terms of society. And this plays over into their understanding of the Lord\'s Supper. For Luther, the Lord\'s Supper is primarily a vertical thing. For Zwingli, the Lord\'s Supper is primarily a horizontal thing. Just think about Luther then, Luther on the Lord\'s Supper. There are three phases, I think, in Luther\'s understanding of the Lord\'s Supper in the 1520s. The first phase is his initial break with Rome, his initial break with the Roman theology of the mass. We get that in the Treatise of 1520. His Treatise on the New Testament, that is the Holy Mass, and the Babylonian captivity of the church. And the key, the key for Luther there is to focus on the words of institution relative to God\'s promise in Christ. This is my body, this is my blood. We\'re to make sure that we understand what Christ is doing there relative to the promise that is embodied in the Lord Jesus Christ. Now Luther\'s emerging from generations of theology where a realist view of the Lord\'s Supper has been part of the dogma of the church. The idea that Christ is present, the whole Christ, humanity and divinity is present in the bread and wine, deeply embedded, deeply embedded in the theology of the Catholic Church. And so, you know, it\'s one of those things, it\'s hard to think outside the box. And remember, Luther\'s major criticism of transubstantiation is that the bread vanishes, even 1520. The problem with transubstantiation is there\'s no bread there. He affirms what transubstantiation affirms relative to presence of Christ. He also wants to affirm the presence of the body and blood. His major interest though is not the metaphysics of presence in 1520. I think because it\'s not being questioned. The metaphysics of Christ\'s presence is not an issue between him and the Roman Catholic Church. What he\'s trying to do is correct, we might say, the significance of that presence by moving it away from notion of sacrifice to the notion of promise given in Christ. So the accident in 1520 really falls upon promise. That\'s the polemical point. Is the mass a sacrifice, something that we do and offer to God, or is it a promise? Is it something that God gives to us? And so relaxed and confident is Luther about the presence, the justification of the presence of Christ in 1520 that he will do something that he\'ll change his mind on. He\'ll say in 1520 that John 6 is not a Eucharistic reference. And for the record, I think John 6 is absolutely critical for your view of the Lord\'s Supper. I think whether you think John 6 is a Eucharistic reference or not will have a profound effect on how you understand the Lord\'s Supper. The other text, of course, is the seriousness that Paul gives to the Lord\'s Supper in 1 Corinthians 11. And we\'ll even go as far as to say some people who\'ve inappropriately eaten the Lord\'s Supper, they\'ve died. I don\'t think we generally think about that, you know, when we do the Lord\'s Supper today in our churches, but for Paul, this is, you know, a matter of literal life and death, and therefore there\'s something serious going on here. But I think John 6 is the real crux passage. If you don\'t think John 6 is a reference to the Lord\'s Supper, then you will naturally move in a Zwinglian direction, I think, or you will at least have taken away a massive part of your support for a Calvinistic Lutheran or a Roman Catholic understanding of the Lord\'s Supper. Luther doesn\'t need, he doesn\'t feel he needs John 6 in 1520. It\'s interesting because it\'s not an issue. Nobody\'s questioning that. So I don\'t need John 6. The watershed moment for Luther, I think the moment when it all changes, is the conflict with Carstadt. Carstadt is a more important figure on the Lord\'s Supper for Luther in some ways than Zwingli. Zwingli will become the epitome of everything Luther fears and hates on the Lord\'s Supper. He will become, you know, the demonic presence. But Luther\'s emphases shift because of the conflict with Carstadt. Remember, Carstadt, he\'s a radical reformer. He\'s sympathetic to the Zwickau prophets. Luther will write a treatise against Carstadt, against the rebellious spirit. He sees Carstadt ultimately as a crazy person who talks about Geist, Geist, Geist, spirit, spirit, spirit all the time. Carstadt was really a spiritualizer, strong spiritualizing tendency in Carstadt. And he develops an understanding of the Lord\'s Supper, in which the objective, the power of the Lord\'s Supper lies not in its objective reality. The power of the Lord\'s Supper is that it is an outward sign of an inward reality. It\'s a memorial. For Carstadt, it\'s the do this in memory of me. It\'s the accent on remembering that\'s critical. And it leads him to an exegesis of this is my body, which was not unprecedented but might strike us as a slightly odd these days. And that Carstadt thinks that when Christ is administering the Lord\'s Supper and says this is my body, he\'s actually at that point pointing to his own physical body. This is my body, do this in remembrance of me. So what Carstadt does is he really removes the idea of Christ\'s human presence from the elements of the Lord\'s Supper and focuses very much upon the Lord\'s Supper as symbolic. This I think has a twofold impact on Luther\'s thinking. First of all, we\'ve got to remember theology is always thought by people. Theology never, you know, it doesn\'t operate in some kind of platonic sphere untouched by the material world. It\'s always thought by real people. And our experience of real people who hold certain doctrines will shape how we think about things. I was asked yesterday, Austin was asking me, now when did you become a Presbyterian? I said, well my initial moves towards Presbyterianism were actually ecclesiological in that I had such a terrible experience of Congregationalism at some point. And I\'d be lying if I just read the Bible and became a Presbyterian. No, I was made vulnerable, if you like, to a Presbyterian takeover by some particularly bad experiences of Congregationalism I\'d had. Human being. In Luther\'s mind, the conflict with Carstadt fixes in his brain forevermore the idea that when you talk, when you find people who talk about a symbolic view of the of the Lord\'s Supper, they\'re crazy people. These are the ones who caused the peasants rebellion in 1525. These are the ones who nearly brought the whole Reformation down in 1521, 1522. These are loony people. Well Zwingli may be well, he may be a graduate of Basel, he may dress nicely, he may know his languages, he may be highly educated, but he\'s just the polite face for craziness. Example I used the other day was, you know, you know, Sinn Fein, they may wear their Armani suits, but you know, put a balaclava on them and give them an armor light rifle and it\'s the IRA. It\'s the same guys. That\'s the background. So when Zwingli comes along, Luther doesn\'t read Zwingli in a neutral way. For Luther, this is, we\'ve heard all this before and we know where it ends. It ends in 1522, it ends in 1525. So that\'s the first thing that this does to Luther. I think it makes a connection, an organic connection in Luther\'s mind between crazy extremism and symbolic views of the Lord\'s Supper. The other thing it does, I think it brings to the forefront of Luther\'s sacramental thinking on the Lord\'s Supper, the issue of presence. That which has really been, yeah it\'s been there, but it\'s not been a major focus for his discussion. I think after the conflict with Karstatt, we see a shift in Luther\'s writings on the Lord\'s Supper to an increasing preoccupation with presence because he thinks that\'s where the battle\'s got to be engaged. And in Against the Heavenly Prophets, 15, 12, treatise of 25, Luther argues that removing, removing the objective presence of Christ from the sacrament and making human faith the decisive element. Karstatt has turned the Lord\'s Supper from a gift of grace into another piece of works righteousness. If the efficacy of the Lord\'s Supper is dependent upon what you do at the Lord\'s Supper, then that\'s a confusion of law and gospel. Now think of how serious that is for Luther because in 1529, Luther will ultimately turn his mind as Wingly and say, you are of a different spirit. And what he\'s saying there is, you\'re not a Christian. I have the Holy Spirit and you don\'t. In my Luther on the Christian life book for Crossway, I sort of, I pressed that point. One of the things I wanted to do in that book was, I knew that most readers would be evangelicals and I wanted them to feel the heat of Luther at that point to know that no, he\'s not really one of us. And we can, you know, welcome him as a hero, but he may not actually have recognized us as Christians at all. Crossway got very, they kept, can you tone this down, you know, did he really mean that? Is there another way of expressing this? And I sort of, I stood there, here I stand, I can do no other kind of thing. I kept, I kept the pressure because I wanted, I really did want to bring out the, if you want a word, the strangeness of Luther in terms of modern sensibilities on that point. We think that Luther is splitting the church on a trivial point, but not from Luther\'s perspective. From Luther\'s perspective, the gospel really is at stake here. Where do I find the gospel? Where do I find God gracious to me? I find God gracious to me for Luther in the Word and in the sacraments. What Zwingli is doing is taking the gracious God out of the sacraments. So what\'s he doing? He\'s turning the sacraments into a means of damnation, not a means of salvation. Now I don\'t agree with Luther there, but I\'m trying to think it through from his perspective. Before we critique him, we have to understand where he\'s coming from. And it takes me, there\'s that wonderful statement in J. Gresser Matron\'s Christianity and Liberalism book where he talks about the, it\'s a tragedy that Luther and Zwingli split Protestantism at the colloquy of Marburg in 1525, he said, over the Lord\'s Supper. But it would have been a greater tragedy if they had agreed because they didn\'t realize how important the issue was. And that\'s why, you know, give me a Baptist who knows baptism is important. I actually have, I go back and forth on this, but I have a lot of sympathy with Baptist churches that don\'t allow people like me to take communion. Actually I was baptized by myself, so I could take communion. But I have sympathy with Baptist churches that don\'t allow people who are only baptized as infants to take communion. Because although I disagree with that position, it tells me that they take baptism seriously. And it seems to me that whatever else you do with baptism, as with the Lord\'s Supper, it\'s clearly an important thing. The language that Paul uses about baptism means it isn\'t one of those things that we can just pretend it\'s peripheral. It is important. Same with the Lord\'s Supper. If you can die because you\'ve been taking the Lord\'s Supper in an inappropriate way, that\'s a pretty serious thing. And it is not for us to decide that this is trivial because it just doesn\'t happen to fit in with our contemporary evangelical tastes. So I don\'t agree with Luther, but I can see where he\'s coming from. This is an important, an important issue. For Luther, yes, again go back to, Luther would say, you know, when we receive the Lord\'s Supper, what do we do? We receive forgiveness. You might turn around, but does that mean I\'m not forgiven, you know, just by grasping the word by faith? Yes, you are forgiven that, but you are forgiven again when you eat the Lord\'s Supper in faith. Think of Paul, as in 2 Corinthians 5, be reconciled to God. The language he uses there, he\'s addressing that to Christians who are already reconciled, and he\'s telling them to be being reconciled. Goes back to what I said about preaching, Luther and preaching, every time the word is preached, Christ is presented and people are reconciled. Even if they were already reconciled, they are being reconciled in the preaching of the word, and Luther sees that analogous to what\'s going on in the Lord\'s Supper. When people receive the Lord\'s Supper, once again they receive forgiveness.